Greeneland

...And that, he says, is the "region of LaMancha where I expect to stay...

...Greene's "entertainments" are a way of escaping that pitfall, for they allow him to express the farcical and tragic-comical aspects of life...

...Greene's winning recipe is to take art seriously ("It is for the act of creation that one lives...

...With the imaginary character I am sure—I know that Doctor Percival in The Human Factor admires the painting of Ben Nicholson, I know that Colonel Daintry will open a tin of sardines when he returns from the funeral of his colleague...

...but also to leave enough safety valves to make existence bearable...

...he admits: "Writing is a form of therapy...

...They are an important literary strategy which also provide a clue to the function of Catholicism in Greene's work...

...His films, plays, and thrillers are the main forms these entertainments take...

...It's rather light, anecdotal reading, but we also get a fascinating formulation of his attitudes toward his vocation and the opportunities it has provided for escaping from the deadening impact of everyday life...

...Yet he also understands the advantages of imagination over reality...

...Greene has always argued that he is only a writer who happens to be Catholic (rather than a Catholic writer...

...His main model is Henry James and, like his master, Greene has tried to be "one of those people on whom nothing is lost...

...He explains that "the material of a novel accumulates without the author's knowledge, not always easily, not always without fatigue or pain or even fear...

...Ways of Escape is actually a survey of the books Greene has written in the latter part of his career...

...Greene confesses that "writing has its own curious forms of hell" and that "the strain of writing a novel, which keeps the author confined for a period of years with his depressive self, is extreme, and I have always sought relief in entertainments—melodrama and farce are both expressions of a manic mood...

...Perhaps a trick of speech, a physical trait, may be used, but I can write no more than a few pages before realizing that I simply don't know enough about the character to use him, even if he is an old friend...

...Each switch in genre provides an escape from the others, but all are subject to his basic theories about how writers control their craft...

...Greene points out that his friend and co-religionist, Evelyn Waugh, had "too-great expectations: too-great expectations of his fellow creatures, and too-great expectations even of his church...

...But in denning his religious beliefs, he seems to have discovered the best way of escaping from the destructive tendencies of his own psyche...

...Negre" means "ghost" and also "ghostwriter...

...he needs to be where the action is so that his work will be authenticated by the experience behind it...

...Real people and places, he says, can be used only sparingly as literary sources: "A real person stands in the way of the imagination...

...When I wake the obstacle has nearly always been removed: the solution is there and obvious—perhaps it came in a dream which I have forgotten...

...We begin in our youthful days, he says, with romantic and melodramatic fantasies, which soon prove illusory...

...That wasn't exactly what James had in mind...

...These exercises of the imagination (Greene likes to call them voyages to "Greeneland") are worth more to him than his real travels to Malaysia, Africa, Cuba, Haiti, and Vietnam...

...The unconscious collaborates in all our work: it is the negre we keep in the cellar to aid us...

...When he talks about his traveling, he sounds more like Hemingway...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches English literature at California State University, Fresno...

...It's an important issue, and if Greene has no absolute answers, his book provides him ample opportunity to explore some basic relationships between art and life...

...Greene distinguishes-between his serious novels and what he calls "entertainments...

...Greene's major social concerns appear in his novels, but he has also written films, short stories, and plays...

...When an obstacle seems insurmountable, I read the day's work before sleep and leave the negre to labor in my place...

...Often the main ideas for his books have come to him in dreams: "I imagine all authors have found the same aid from the unconscious...

...Waugh, Greene believes, was disillusioned, and his inability to accept the limitations of humanity was the source of his vicious satire...

...In his depressed moods, Greene admits, he has more than once thought of suicide...

...sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation...

...In explaining his experience with opium, Greene quips that "one must try every drink once...

...Greene is more Freudian than has been noticed...

...Although most of the materials in Ways of Escape have been published before, it's useful to have Greene's views organized in one narrative...

...Dismissing much of the dogma and discipline of Roman Catholic tradition, Greene accentuates the church's ability to accept the obsessive characteristics of humanity and still hold out the promise of love and absolution...

...yet we return to them later as a buffer from the "sad reality" of our lives...

...He even argues that "farce and tragedy are more closely allied than comedy and tragedy...

...Greene recalls that political as well as religious critics have often been "too concerned with faith or no faith to notice that in the course of the blackest book I have written I have discovered comedy...