The Life of Graham Greene - Volume 3: 1955-1991
by Norman Sherry
Jonathan Cape £25, pp906
When Graham Greene died in 1991, at 86, his reputation as a great 'Catholic' writer was assured. His books reflected an awareness of sin and confronted discomfiting themes with a sombre eye. Brighton Rock imagined a betrayal of loyalties in gangland Britain. After 66 years, it remains a disturbing parable of conscience. In his three subsequent theological works - The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair - Greene's gift was to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder.
With Greene's centenary upon us, what else can be said of this great writer? First, his fallible, deeply ambivalent characters are unlike any in British fiction. Pinkie, the child hoodlum of Brighton Rock, murders without a qualm, yet, as a Catholic, he fears damnation, and Greene was able to establish our empathy for him. Over the 60 years of his writing career, he created a gallery of other shabby creatures who try to hide their weaknesses from the world and themselves. In Catholic terms, he was a moralist troubled by human turpitude and evil in our time.
Not surprisingly, the unsparing bleakness of Greene's vision has influenced a number of contemporary writers, among them John le Carré and the Irish novelists Brian Moore and Ronan Bennett. However, Greene remains inimitable; when Philip Larkin tried to parody the author of The Heart of the Matter in a weekly magazine, the result was memorably awful: 'Hatred moved in him like fatigue as, unsurprised, he recognised betrayal.' With more than 30 novels to his name, Greene was our most singular and prolific chronicler of damaged faith and human wretchedness.
A writer of this stature would need a very good biographer and, at first, it looked as though Greene had found him in Norman Sherry, a Joseph Conrad expert based in Texas. A quarter of a century has passed since Greene appointed Sherry his official biographer in 1976. Flattered, Sherry set to work immediately, digging and hustling for information like a locker-room snoop. His first 800-page volume emerged in 1989. While Sherry had much to say about Greene's fiction and inner life, he examined his every depression, love affair and alcoholic spree in excessive detail. 'Oh why does Sherry waste so much time talking about me?' Greene grumbled. During his researches, Sherry had gone temporarily blind in Africa and endured gangrene in Panama. 'I do hope I am not going to be the death of him,' Greene said darkly.
Secretly, perhaps, Greene delighted in Sherry's tribulations and spaniel-like devotion to the task. He may even have enjoyed the vinous associations of his biographer's surname. ('Let's go to Sherry's,' says Pinkie of a Brighton drinking club, quickly adding: 'I can't stand the place.') During the 28 years of his sleuthing, Sherry appeared to identify strongly with his subject, and this has been his undoing. The third and final volume of his biography, covering the years 1955-1991, sees Sherry visiting Greene's haunts in Cuba, Haiti, the Congo and, finally, the Swiss hospital where the writer died. Unfortunately, the volume contains many more flights of vulgar hagiography and plain bad writing than either of the two previous volumes.
The author's descriptions of Greene are Boy's Own in tone and suggest an adolescent crush. 'I see his eyes so clearly,' Sherry writes, 'with their light fiery blue of a Siberian husky's.' (Elsewhere, Greene's eyes are merely 'sea blue'.)
In the final chapter, when Greene is dead, Sherry indulges in some truly awful writing. 'Worms breed, and the handsome man with stunning blue eyes is host to a thousand sliding lascivious creatures, eating our flesh, turning us gradually into a sort of human jam.' Just why this passage - and many others like it - was allowed to stay in is a mystery. Didn't Sherry have a proper editor?
The biography is also repetitive and ludicrously self-aggrandising (at one point, Sherry compares his work to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony). It is also critically dim, with endless summaries of Greene's novels that recall Brodie's Notes for students. ('There are four major characters in the novel,' Sherry says in schoolma'mish fashion of The Honorary Consul.)
Occasionally, too, the author is vindictive. He unkindly upbraids Greene's French lover of 30 years, Yvonne Cloetta, for believing that Greene ever truly loved her. Cloetta had 'insufficient nous', Sherry gripes, adding: 'Lying to oneself is not unknown.' Cloetta died in 2001, so she cannot respond; it may be a mercy that she did not see this galumphing, ill-disciplined tome.
Sherry is crass about Greene's love affairs, and has an old-fashioned view of women that some will find insulting. 'Unlike the weaker gender [physically, at least], Greene had a great advantage: he was a man, and a big one.' Is that it? But there is worse. Greene's philandering was apparently 'slowly devouring him - tortuously slow like a boa eating a goat'. This sort of exaggeration is especially ill-suited to Greene, whose books are so concisely written.
At times, it seems that Sherry may have learnt psychology from Oprah Winfrey. ('Love is never stationary,' he informs us. 'It is in flux, as the movement of the tides.') And only Sherry, one feels, could compare the Papa Doc of Greene's hot-house entertainment, The Comedians, to Emily Brontë's Heathcliffe. ('What bastards fill the world,' he interjects typically.)
Thankfully, Sherry has a good chapter on Greene's troubled sense of religion, and argues convincingly that he retained his faith, if not his belief, in Catholicism all his life. During 1938, Greene's religion was bolstered decisively in revolutionary Mexico, where he found evidence of murdered priests and burned churches. The fear-ridden priest of the The Power and the Glory, the novel that resulted from Greene's five weeks in Mexico, has become part of human experience.
To his dying day, according to Sherry, Greene kept a photograph in his wallet of the Italian stigmatic Padre Pio who displayed the wounds of Christ on his hands and feet. Whether these lesions were of neurotic origin - psychological rather than supernatural - Greene did not care to know: he wanted there to be a mystery at the heart of life.
Few novelists have fathomed with such intensity the suffering and dark places of this earth. Sadly, though, the man Evelyn Waugh nicknamed 'Grisjambon Vert' (French for 'grey ham green') has been singularly ill-served by this book. Sherry's three-volume Life of Graham Greene, running to a combined total of almost 2,500 pages, stands as a warning to biographers: keep a proper distance from your subject. And for Norman Sherry to have begun so promisingly and ended so badly is a personal tragedy.
