Graham Greene Studies

Graham Greene Studies is an academic, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the life and work of Graham Greene (1904 – 1991). It welcomes research articles, book reviews, interviews, and responses to previously published articles. University academics, independent researchers, and post-graduate, doctoral, undergraduate, and graduate students are invited to submit papers.

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Graham Greene Studies: Volume 2 (2021)

Graham Greene’s fictional women have increasingly been recognized in the field of Graham Greene scholarship as significant members of the author’s body of complex characters. This paper participates in that interest and engages with Greene’s nuanced treatment of his characters: there is a want for a more robust understanding of Rose found in Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938), his first ‘Catholic novel,’ whose character is frequently obscured in both the literary narrative and the scholarship by Ida’s and Pinkie’s more dominant personalities. Should we approach Rose with a particular sensitivity towards Greene’s dovetailing religious and literary impulses, it becomes clear that she supplies the novel with its metaphysical ground. Mark Bosco’s concept of the “religious sense” in Greene’s novels (Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination [2005]) and his work on Greene’s modernism (“Shades of Greene in Catholic Literary Modernism” [2017]) inform this paper’s argument that Rose’s innocence and subsequent fall into mortal sin reveal God’s presence through individual and freely-chosen human acts of love and faith. Rose’s love is a powerful redemptive force and its expression through charitable feeling towards the sinful is an example of a spiritual ideal as it appears amidst humanity’s moral failings. Her sustained faith as she willingly commits herself to sin and damnation for Pinkie’s sake not only captures the paradoxical nature of human experience, but suggests that her practice of love is as close as one can get to a positive affirmation of the divine. By the novel’s conclusion, it falls to Rose to explore the role of the self-aware individual against a world at once governed by and broken from its faith-based principles, through which, this paper argues, she represents one of Greene’s earliest attempts to view that world through a female perspective.

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Rose and the Modern “Religious Sense” in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock

During his two-decade film career, Academy Award-winning writer/director Neil Jordan has transcended conventions and crossed national boundaries to create an oeuvre of critically acclaimed films in a variety of genres. However, despite his reputation as an internationally recognized author and filmmaker whose projects have received financing from both American and European production companies, Jordan has remained, first and foremost, an Irish artist, injecting his interpretations of the struggle for Irish identity into both his film and fiction work. In a body of films so concerned with formulating a coherent Irish identity, Jordan’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1951 novel The End of the Affair (1999) initially appears as an anomaly. Detailing a four-year long affair between author Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles, the wife of a British civil servant, against the backdrops of pre- and post-World War II London, the novel never deviates from its English setting, eschewing direct references to Britain’s relationship with the Irish and the other colonial holdings over which the waning British Empire was losing its dominion.
Yet, while Jordan’s film appears to maintain an overarching fidelity to Greene’s novel, its differential reconstruction of the source text’s London narrative serves as a strategy to interrogate the complex web of relationships between colonial discourse, Irish independence, and the global film industry. In the adaptation, Jordan cultivates a through line of imperial force from the British Empire to contemporary Hollywood, subtly altering the last two books of the novel by reframing the narrative’s preoccupations with the Catholic faith and the state of the British Empire after World War II through the lens of an Irish perspective that not only criticizes Britain’s suppression of Irish-Catholicism but also refracts literary and cinematic stereotypes of the Irish in its construction of mid-century London.

Catholic Adaptation, Irish Conversion: The Postcolonial Graham Greene in Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair

Graham Greene’s lifelong obsession with the theme of man’s innate duality is well known, but his short story, A Day Saved, never seems to have been read with this central preoccupation in mind. Originally written for radio, the narrative purports to be a detective or spy story – the tale of one man shadowing another, waiting for an opportunity to steal something from him. But the mystery of what this man seeks and why is never solved. Our article argues that the solution is very simple: the two characters of the story are not two separate people, but two parts of one and the same man, a social persona and his shadow. We further suggest that in this portrayal of a split consciousness, Greene is providing us with an insight into his own divided nature.
The evidence for our thesis comes from a close textual analysis of the story itself which reveals the narrator’s very close resemblance to Carl Jung’s concept of a shadow (the dark and hidden side of every psyche). This is supported by an examination of the developmental arc of Greene’s first three novels, the epigraphs to which reveal his fascination with ‘the man within’ and the idea of the shadow, as well as his reading of the metaphysical poets and T.S. Eliot. We trace the origins of The Day Saved to events in Greene’s own life evidenced in his journalism and letters, and suggest that our thesis also provides an explanation for how Greene could successfully compartmentalise his own life and avoid being torn apart by the conflicts that so often beset the characters in his novels.

The Shadow Within: Solving the Mystery of 'A Day Saved.'

Infused as it is with spiritual and moral tensions, Graham Greene’s writing resonates heavily with medieval religious literature. His narratives are defined by complex dilemmas, by characters whose psyches are battlegrounds (often between their own divided loyalties) and by the looming threat of damnation and the notable absence of God. This influence of medieval writing seems nowhere more obvious than in “The Hint of an Explanation,” a 1948 short story where the motif of the soul as battleground is vividly drawn and where faith is deepened through moral crisis. Greene takes as a source for this text Host desecration myths in order to create a type of moral fable that rejects the stark contours typical of the genre. Here, he complicates interpretation to explore the nature of faith, morality, and redemption.

A Hint of the Eucharist: Desecration, Morality, and Faith in “The Hint of an Explanation”

The article probes Graham Greene’s world-wide activities as a “gentleman spy” working under cover for MI6 during the Cold War. It presents new information and gives original historical and personal context for understanding his activities. There is a comprehensive discussion of Greene’s visit to Israel which has not heretofore been seen as a locale of his espionage,based on new historical research and an interview by the author with one of Greene’s contacts. The text regarding Poland presents newly discovered material found by Greene’s bibliographers in the archives.

“Quite a Good Spy”: The Emergent Graham Greene

"The Comedians" is Chapter 8 from Bernard Diederich's Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954-1983.

Chapter 8 The Comedians

Lucius, Prologue

Acknowledgements

Call for Papers

Cover

This article examines the extraordinary—but regrettably brief—friendship between Graham Greene and the Norwegian novelist, poet, dramatist, political activist, and war correspondent Nordahl Grieg.
In his diary Greene detailed his first encounter with Grieg in 1932, describing the Norwegian writer as “charming with his accent, his courtliness, his unexpectedness, which I could not follow closely enough.” Although Greene and Greig corresponded for several years, they didn’t meet again until after the German occupation of Norway in April 1940. Grieg fled to London, smuggling the gold from the Norwegian Bank out of his occupied home country. Immediately following his dangerous adventure, Grieg phoned Greene from the hotel and invited him over. During his London exile Greig was eventually allowed to join RAF bomber fighters as a correspondent. His plane was shot down by German bomber planes on a raid over Berlin, and three of the squadron’s four war correspondents were reported missing—among them Nordahl Grieg.
“Nordahl Grieg was an omen or a myth, and he remained a myth,” Greene later wrote of his Norwegian friend. “Even his death was to prove legendary, so that none will be able to say with any certainty, ‘In this place he died.’”

Nordahl Grieg’s Friendship with Graham Greene

Before writing A Burnt-Out Case, Greene went—as usual—on location to find inspiration for a dramatic plot and characters and to collect contextual and technical information to compose its background. During the five weeks Greene spent in the Belgian Congo he kept a diary, which was published eleven months after the novel.
This widely available published version of his “Congo Journal” however, differs strongly from the original manuscript of Greene’s diary. In fact, Greene subjected the manuscript not to one, but to at least five revisions before allowing it to go to print. The revisions involved, among other things: the addition of a whole set of footnotes providing explanations and knowledge Greene gathered after returning from the Congo; deletion of passages of an erotic nature; omission of references to his extramarital affairs in Europe; modification of originally depreciative portrayals of persons he had met in the Congo (some of these portrayals he turned into squarely opposite, positive ones); putting his host Dr. Lechat less in the foreground; and other types of significant alterations.
Using an easy-to-follow chart, this article compares the original manuscript (column 1) with
Josephine Reid’s typescript and Greene’s revision of Reid’s typescript (column 2), the galley proofs, Greene’s revision of the galley proofs, and final publication (column 3) with a focus that includes only modifications pertinent to the content of Greene’s perceptions and experiences with persons, places, events, and himself.

Graham Greene’s Congo Journal: A Critical Edition

The account of Graham Greene telling Max Reinhardt that he missed publishing and was looking for something to do after he had written his five hundred words a day is deeply entrenched. But there is more to the story. Like most writers, Greene wanted a publisher who would do what he said, and perhaps this was what he thought he would find when he eventually accepted Ian Parsons’s offer of a literary editorship. “Graham Greene as Publisher” traces Greene’s journey through the publishing world from 1926, when he followed his five hundred words a day sorting grammar, redundancies, and clichés at The Times, through 1987 when—having worn many different hats during his years a full-blown publisher—he was touted for his part in the protest against the commercial pressures on editors and authors based on the principle that the author should call the tune.

Graham Greene as Publisher

Quentin Falk explores the relationship--or non-relationship--between Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock.

Greene & Hitchcock: A Marriage Made in Hell? Or, the What-ifs & the Why-nots

Review of Richard Greene's Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene.

Greene on Greene: Richard Greene: Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene

Christopher Hull: Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel

Sarah Rainsford: Our Woman Down in Havana: Reporting Castro's Cuba

Graham Greene's The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Dedication

The unbridgeable gaps between cultures is for Graham Greene an obvious, indelible, and consequential fact of life, although one often camouflaged by platitudes and ignorance. Greene’s interest lies less with individual characters than with the cultural types they represent. In each novel examined in this paper, the cultural gap exists at two levels: between two prototypical Westerners; and between the Westerners and their rather exotic environment. The Quiet American pits the culture of the naïve, can-do American (Pyle) against that of the seen-it-all, cynical Brit (Fowler), with each misunderstanding that of inscrutable Vietnam (Phoung). The Comedians features two Brits representing differing cultures, one world weary (Brown) and the other bogus blow-hard-turned-hero (Jones); they also are set off from the corrupt and idealistic Haitians they encounter living under the brutal and lawless rule of Papa Doc Duvalier. Finally, The Third Man sees one American (Lime) representing the culture of amoral greed and another (Martins) that of common decency; the setting, bombed out, postwar Vienna, provides opportunities for both. Each pair of Westerners, though superficially friendly, at least at first, embodies clashing cultures that inhibit mutual understanding and empathy. Eventually, after a great deal of suffering, nearly all by third parties, the Westerners begin to grasp this, as the beliefs and opinions that barricaded them against reality and gave them a sense of intellectual security crumble before the onslaught of events.

Graham Greene and Bridges across Cultures

We examine the process by which Greene produced the memoir Getting to Know the General and The Captain and the Enemy out of his trips to Panama from 1976 to 1983. We argue that in both the process was ‘fuliginous’, that is complex and opaque, resulting in works that defy generic expectations. We explore why he failed to write the novel to be set in Panama that he had entitled On the Way Back. Citing extracts from the diaries in which he began to plan the novel, we consider the reasons for his failure, using Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise to illustrate the precariousness of the creative process.
Finally we conclude that out of the fuliginous processes emerged Greene the man with a clear and simple status as a supporter of the weak against the strong.

Making Sense of Greene's Panama: A Fuliginous Process

In researching the second volume of The Works of Graham Greene: A Guide to the Graham Greene Archives, Jon Wise and Mike Hill came across a Greene story called Lucius in a file containing around fifty foolscap sheets in Greene’s mature handwriting—clearly an unfinished novel of about 23,000 words. The story covers the first term of a boy named Lucius Darling, in a setting quite similar to Greene’s own experience at boarding school. The story finishes, incomplete, at the end of Lucius’s first, unhappy term at school.
This story of Lucius has a prologue that acts as a framing device for the school story. Here, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Luke Winter, returns to his old school for the first time since leaving there as a boy to give a speech at prize-giving. Sir Luke is Lucius Darling, thirty-six years on, with a changed name. The timid boy has, in the interim, learned to project confidence and authority, but his return to the school reignites memories of his unhappy schooldays. The extract that follows is that prologue to Lucius. It is significant as a hitherto-unpublished piece of mature writing by Greene. While it was never polished to his own exacting standards, it is recognizably his style and voice, deals with the very Greeneian theme of betrayal, and written in a decade when he was still at the height of his powers.

Introduction to Lucius

Mike Hill discusses Cedric Watts't book on covert plots, particularly where Graham Greene is mentioned.

Professor Cedric Watts's Book

Table of Contents for Volume 2 of Graham Greene Studies.

Graham Greene Studies (Vol. 2)

Items in this collection

Graham Greene Studies: Volume 2 (2021)

Rose and the Modern “Religious Sense” in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock

Catholic Adaptation, Irish Conversion: The Postcolonial Graham Greene in Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair

The Shadow Within: Solving the Mystery of 'A Day Saved.'

A Hint of the Eucharist: Desecration, Morality, and Faith in “The Hint of an Explanation”

“Quite a Good Spy”: The Emergent Graham Greene

Chapter 8 The Comedians

Lucius, Prologue

Acknowledgements

Call for Papers

Cover

Nordahl Grieg’s Friendship with Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s Congo Journal: A Critical Edition

Graham Greene as Publisher

Greene & Hitchcock: A Marriage Made in Hell? Or, the What-ifs & the Why-nots

Greene on Greene: Richard Greene: Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene

Christopher Hull: Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel

Sarah Rainsford: Our Woman Down in Havana: Reporting Castro's Cuba

Graham Greene's The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Dedication

Graham Greene and Bridges across Cultures

Making Sense of Greene's Panama: A Fuliginous Process

Introduction to Lucius

Professor Cedric Watts's Book

Table of Contents

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Items in this collection

Graham Greene Studies: Volume 2 (2021)