The end of the chase

National Review, May 27, 1991 by Peter Glenville

The Graham Greene I grew to know while working closely with him in the Fifties (on his first play and on a film) was in many ways different from his public image, and very different indeed from the figure suggested by NR's grudging obituary ["The Week," April 29]. His opinions and beliefs were often controversial and unnerving--which he certainly meanth them to be. Of course, he realized that he was perhaps second only to Evelyn Waugh as the pre-eminent novelist of style and originality in the England of his day. As an individual, however, he was a modest man who liked to guard his privacy. Unlike Waugh he was irretrievably on the side of the underdog. Even at a social gathering he would always notice the person who seemed ill at ease of ignored, and at once would seek him or her out to chat with.

Graham always distrusted the exercise of power and even the acquisition of undue wealth. He quoted with approval Henry James's reference (through one of his characters) to "the black and merciless things that are behind great possessions." For instance, although he was personally quite fond of Sir Alexander Korda, he had a strong distaste for his yacht and all its fine appurtenances. This attitude led to a great suspicion of America as a dangerous colossus.

Once when two investigative figures arrived from America to assess any sympathetic tendencies toward Communism which some of England's leading figures might have entertained, they requested an interview with Graham. Instead of contemptuously refusing he invited them to his apartment in London. Before their arrival he removed his large collection of literature and filled his bookshelves instead with classic Communist manifestoes and tomes by Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. I don't know how the interview went but it was surely a highly mischievous encounter and very misleading for the unfortunate and eager young men. For Graham it was not so much a gesture as an exercise in enjoyable black comedy. But he was in no way a Party man or an ideologue. He was a bohemian artist who instinctively supported the weak and opposed the strong. He played David to any figure, the Soviet Union included, who could possibly be taken for a Goliath--although that giant often, for him, took on surprising guises.

In fact, he fundamentally distrusted success and all that it stood for. "For a writer as much as for a priest there is no such thing as success."

As a Roman Catholic convert he was, of course, vitally concerned with his religion and with the actuality of sin. Without a sense of sin, he suggested, life had no ethical tension or even understandable explanation. His cool but merciful eye detached sin and treachery everywhere. He sensed the soft touch of its antennae with alarming sensitivity, and the rumblings of Lucifer's baleful drums were never entirely out of his hearing. And yet he was far from being a puritan. Surely he loved wine, women, and song--his song, of course, was fine writing, of which he was a magnificent judge. In conversation he seldom denigrated other people's work except very occasionally to laugh at something preposterous.

As a writer he was not perhaps known primarily as a humorist, and yet, as a companion, humor was one of his most engaging traits. This comic sense covered every modality except the loud and the raucous. It could be sharp, sly, cynical, grotesque, doomladen, or even convivial. When no injustice or strident vulgarity was involved he was greatly tolerant. He even genuinely loved people for their very faults--and especially for their absurdities--though never if they showed the slightest sign of cruelty.

His sentiments were pulsatingly strong but he abominated sentimentality. For a man of his eminence he was astonishingly lacking in self-importance and even in the normal sense of automatic authority which was his due. I found it positively intimidating when I was working with him (as a director on his first play) that he would listen patiently to suggestions and proceed to amend or alter with simple interest and enthusiasm. Of course when he did not agree (which invariably meant that you were, in fact, wrong) he would gently point out your mistake with a quiet smile.

It is interesting to learn that one of his closest friends in his last years was a Catholic priest. If ever a man was indefatigably chased by the Hound of Heaven, it was Graham. At times he appeared to give the Hound a very good run for its money; but the chase went on. He could even smile at this suggestion, although the fluctuations, currents, and tides of his personal faith remained constant. In 1967 he wrote, "Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there."

He was ferociously loyal to his friends. However, he considered a virtue the disloyalty a man commits in the service of a greater allegiance. The novelist, he wrote, should beware of too great a consistency. "He stands for the victims and the victims change. Loyalty confines you to accepted opinions. Loyalty forbids you to comprehend sympathetically your dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages you to roam through any human mind: it gives the novelist an extra dimension of understanding."