Graham Greene
From Philosopedia
Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904—1991)
Graham, a famed English novelist and playwright, joined the Catholic Church in 1927. His Brighton Rock (1938) contains a Catholic message, introducing as it does the concept of “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
He wrote about personal, religion, and political dilemmas as well as visited Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Africa, and elsewhere in order to understand what matters in life. Haitians, for example, were angry at Greene’s depiction in The Comedians (1966) of their dictator François (Papa Doc) Duvalier rule. In one scene the hotel-owner narrator speaks to a Haitian Communist, during which Greene contrasts the dedicated Communist with the faithless “comedians” of the world. The two speak of the corpse of a Haitian victim:
- “So he’s gone,” I said.
- “He died.”
- “A natural death?”
- “Violent deaths are natural deaths here. He died of his environment.”
Biographers Norman Sherry and Michael Sheldon in 1995 painted a picture of the author’s mysterious life. He may, or may not, have been a liar, a whoremaster, a masochist, a quasi-pedophile, a racist, a snob, an anti-Semite, a spy, an adulterer. They write of his pleasure in receiving pain - cigarette burns, for example - during lovemaking, and they note his written records of befriending prostitutes in his various underworld explorations.
Greene once called Mexicans “hideous,” described a victim during the Blitz as a “large fat foreign Jew” (which was later edited to a “large fat foreigner’), and openly betrayed not just Vivien, his wife and mother of his two children, but also Dorothy Glover, his mistress for nearly a decade: he took on as mistress Catherine Walston, twelve years his junior and a rich American.
Meanwhile, he took tea with Ho Chi Minh, was friendly with Kim Philby, the spy, and took comfort in Charles Péguy’s maxim that “The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity.”
Was Greene the great Catholic mystery writer? According to Alexander Cockburn [Nation, 19 April 1991), Greene and Cockburn’s father spoke with John Cornwell on the subject of Greene’s beliefs.
- Do you believe in Satan, Greene was asked.
- “No, I don’t think so.”
- Do you believe in Hell?
- “I don’t believe in Hell.”
- Do you contemplate God in a pure, disembodied way?
- “I’m afraid I don’t,” replied Greene.
Cockburn then quotes from his father’s description of Greene’s conversion to Catholicism, tape-recorded by Greene’s biographer Norman Sherry in 1977. The elder Cockburn says that Graham quite early on “said to me that he had fallen madly in love with this girl, but she wouldn’t go to bed with him unless he married her.” So marry her, he was advised. “The trouble is that she won’t marry me unless I become a Catholic.” So, become a Catholic. “You of all people, a noted atheist!” responded Greene to his friend. “Go right ahead,” said Cockburn, “take instruction or whatever balderdash they want you to go through, if you need this for your fuck, go ahead and do it.” And Greene did, leading Cockburn later to observe, “So then I felt perhaps I’d done the wrong thing.”
Meanwhile, the plot of Heart of the Matter (1948) had almost gotten Greene excommunicated because of his treatment of the subject of suicide - its epigraph was from Péguy: Le Pécheur est au coeur même de chrétienté . . .” (“The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity”).
End of the Affair (1951) is told by an agnostic in love with a religious woman. And his complex and tortured relationship with the church is exemplified by words he penned on the endpapers of Frei Betto’s Fidel and Religion: “I am for Doubt and against Dogma. A doubting catholic [sic] can work easily with a doubting communist.”
As for his personal life, Greene allegedly slept with forty-seven prostitutes and wrote some titillating descriptions of his affair with Catherine Walston, who was half-English by birth but American by nationality and upbringing. In one letter he wrote of wanting to lie in bed with her, reading Saint John of the Cross. In another, he told her he wanted to bugger her. In another, he wrote, “My dear, the important cigarette burn has completely gone. It must be renewed,” a sadomasochistic reference.
Catholics, denying his weaknesses and downplaying his alleged anti-Semitism and suicide attempts and cocaine use, insistently claim him as one of their own.
