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.

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

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Items in this collection

Graham Greene Studies: Volume 2 (2021)