In Graham Greene’s case, it seemed that only the artist himself should be trusted to paint his self-portrait.
Popularity Breeds Contempt
Except for a few times very early in his career, Greene was rarely a starving author. But the painful memories of those starving days made him anxious to keep the dough rolling in.
His eagerness to make a living, sometimes before considering literary merits of his novellas, meant that Greene was comfortable writing both weighty literature and popular escapist fare like Stamboul Train, which he himself acknowledged he wrote purely for entertainment.
As a result of his entertainment novels and popular readership, Greene’s well-known love of traveling to seek out the world’s victims degenerated to a process that was simply performed to keep pace with his growing reputation. He was now expected to go on these political trips.
Woods confirms that Greene underwent a transformation once his work began to gain a wide reputation. “Greene was a popular writer. In the early part of his writing, Greene began to divide his own fiction and label some of his writing [as entertainment].”
Interestingly, Greene sometimes removed the “entertainment” label in later reprintings. “But as soon as a writer associates himself with a [light] genre, a problem is created,” Wood says. Light fare on a writer’s repertoire is not necessarily a problem for the readers, but rather for the academy of literature, because it supposedly impugns the idea that “fiction is this grandly, canonical crested suit as poetry.”
After penning his most famous best sellers in the 1940s (including The Power and the Glory and the Heart of the Matter), Greene began to show signs that he was aware of the burden to write according to what the public expected of him.
This self-consciousness due to his popular reputation affected Graham’s work and meant that there would always be a tension between Graham Green’s pop-cultural appeal and his appeal for a respectable literary reputation.
At the pinnacle of his career, it indeed became truly difficult for Greene to disentangle his genuine man from his public persona. He became dangerously accustomed to having not only his works but his image commercialized and marketed. In fact, The End of the Affair put him on the cover of Time.
Greene was consistently a writer on the edge. Although in his public writing he claimed to be committed to remaining aloof of political persuasions, he was no stranger to stirring up political controversy.
Greene relished the opportunity to champion the victim’s voice. In fact, Greene’s penchant for taking up the cross of the troubled more than once earned the ire of critics. But for someone who so frequently stirred the pot of conventions, Greene was sensitive to critics’ barbs.
Greene responded defensively to criticism of his coverage of the Vietnam War in his 1955 novel The Quiet American, claiming, “the New Yorker reviewer condemned me for accusing my ‘best friends’ [the Americans] of murder since I had attributed to them the responsibility for the great [bomb]…But [the facts] are the facts…[and] perhaps there is more direct rapportage in The Quiet American than in any other [of my] novels.”
It was a response characteristic of Greene, who always looked to give the victimized a voice, and 100 years later, modern readers still appreciate his perspective. -
—Staff writer Vinita M. Alexander can be reached at valexand@fas.harvard.edu.