The Life of Graham Greene:
Hosmer, Robert E
BOOKS Sherry pursues Greene: Greene stays ahead Though deconstructionists and others have sought to deny, even eliminate, any consideration of the author from the study of texts, they've not...
...without that, chapters, even whole texts, run the risk of becoming strings of quotation with commentary...
...we find ourselves in an era of literary lives of strong resonance and great mass, works where no stone seems to be left unturned, no oral source unspoken to, no postcard wandering through the mails left un-retrieved...
...he was in seventh heaven...
...No wonder we're left with a more-than-vague sense of discomfort as well as unanswered questions, for we have come away without knowing the subject of this biography...
...Or a three-line description of the press that printed the baby book in which his mother recorded details of his infancy...
...As Victoria Glen-dinning wrote in an essay on biography: "we have learnt to beware of those biographies that are cluttered with sentences like 'Miss Muffet must have felt...' or 'The spider probably wondered...
...had dashed the cup of success from his lips...
...The biographer must do what the subject often cannot do: achieve sufficient distance from the life to grasp the design of an individual's existence...
...How disappointing and distressing it is to conclude that Sherry's Life does not give the reader a palpable sense of the texture of this great writer's experience...
...In 1977 Greene himself selected Sherry, an expert on Conrad, as his official biographer...
...his spirituality, his sense of his vocation as man and artist, and his life as husband and father remain vague and uncomfortably mysterious...
...A good biography cannot be but a gathering of details...
...That is sometimes true here, as in the case of "The Pleasure Dome," a seventeen-page chapter that consists of excerpts from Greene's film reviews with a few summary comments...
...In his discussions of Greene's work, Sherry attempts to answer more questions than anyone, even Greene, might ask or even want answered...
...Sherry's prose, with its passive constructions, repetitive syntax, and cliches, is often less than fresh and graceful...
...He might well have been describing Norman Sherry's life of Graham Greene...
...But of what possible relevance is the date of Greene's cutting his first tooth...
...Despite prodigious labor, Sherry has not revealed Graham Greene as artist or soul.ne as artist or soul...
...For The Power and the Glory, arguably Greene's masterpiece, Sherry offers this stunning critical judgment: "The basic theme of the novel, the examination of the nature of goodness and evil and the conclusion that there can be no clear definition of either, is one of Greene's strongest convictions...
...Sherry's scholarship pays off in recounting Greene's libelous review of Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie and in his convincing account of ho w Greene's reading of Henry James suggested innovations in his own writing that led to the success of Greene's first bestseller, Stam-boul Train (1932...
...fate...
...Details need to be chosen according to some principle(s) of selection...
...BOOKS Sherry pursues Greene: Greene stays ahead Though deconstructionists and others have sought to deny, even eliminate, any consideration of the author from the study of texts, they've not succeeded, to judge from the reading public's voracious appetite for literary biographies...
...Sherry's elaborate source hunting and obsession with details do irreparable damage to this Life, for he has not crafted a taut narrative line on which to string all his information...
...Moreover, Sherry offers some curious conclusions without explanation or convincing evidence, for example: "he [Greene] turned to Catholicism for the wrong reasons" (what exactly are "wrong reasons" for religious conversion...
...Or Greene's theft of a book from W. H. Smith...
...Indeed, Sherry's literary criticism is pedestrian: his consideration of the novels lumps plot summary, quotation, and trite commentary...
...an example or two, not unfairly chosen: "The green baize door was to become the division between heaven and hell, the gate that separated Eden from the wilderness of the world...
...And we eagerly await contributions like Holroyd's second volume on Shaw and Sally Fitzgerald's biography of Flannery O'Connor...
...In another context, we read this about Brighton Rock: "the strangest aspect of the novel, however, is the development of the religious theme which changed it from a story about gang warfare into a struggle between good and evil set against a representative background of human society...
...If Sherry has perceived a figure in the carpet of Greene's life, he has not permitted himself "the imagination of form and structure," which Leon Edel has called "the only imagination a biographer can be allowed...
...Thirteen years' research and literary sleuthing have yielded Volume I, the text of which originally ran to 1500 pages...
...To be sure, Sherry's labors have yielded some substantial results...
...how do we know...
...Certainly the reader who finishes a published text of 783 pages needs to ask whether or not it has been worth the time and effort-for both author and reader...
...did Greene have them...
...In the second half of this century we have witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of compendious literary biographies: Edel's five-volume study of James, Ellmann's lives of Joyce and Wilde, Atlas's life of Delmore Schwartz, and Michael Holroyd's volumes on Strachey and Shaw spring to mind-and these but represent a host of other lives...
...This is indisputably an age of literary biography, some of it even first-rate...
...His interviews with Vivien Greene, the writer's wife, with members of the Greene family, with "old boys" from Berkhamsted, Greene's public school, and Balliol, his Oxford college, with Zoe Richmond, the wife of the psychologist who treated the adolescent Greene, and with others who played roles both major and minor in Greene's life contribute to our knowledge of his life and times...
...This Life of Graham Greene lacks a coherent, sustained, and articulated design: the sheer accumulation of information lumped into roughly, though not uniformly observed, chronological categories, does not exert the necessary pressures of form or structure on this biography...
...each of these narrative set-pieces is particularly vivid and immediate because of the detail...
...Or his diary entry on copulating dogs and cats...
...Sherry's penchant for wondering, his persistent use of formulas like "perhaps," "must have," "could well have," "probably," "might," and similar terms creates the convincing force of an unexpressed and unsupported logic...
...Recently we've seen lives of Faulkner, Plath, Townsend-Warner- even Irwin Shaw...
...But the most disturbing weaknesses of the Life fall under the category of "literary...
...As Malcolm Bradbury has noted...
...It is more satisfactory to acknowledge gaps in one's understanding, to face up to the silences, rather than to fill them in with white noise...
...Sherry's consistent concern to explain fiction by reference to the artist's life reduces the work to little more than a transcription of experience and drastically restricts the role of the imaginative invention...
...THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE Volume I: 1904-1939 Norman Sherry Viking, $29.95, 783 pp...
...it "is itself a kind of novel" (Cynthia Ozick), with the shape, dynamic structure, plot, and tension we expect from well-crafted fiction...
...The wealth of detail included by Sherry, clearly the result of painstaking and meticulous scholarship, enhances the text in places-the accounts of Greene's youth and adolescence, his African trek in 1935, and his excursion into Mexico in 1938...
...Biography becomes a mere proof text...
...Robert E. Hosmer This study fails to bring us closer to the greater realities of Greene's life...
...Sherry has pored over archival material-letters to and from Greene, diaries, radio/television transcripts and tapes, newspaper accounts, drafts and manuscripts of Greene's work-and incorporated the results, sometimes to effect, in the biography...
...Likewise the observations and reflections of individuals like Harold Acton, Peter Quennell, and Evelyn Waugh lend vital authenticity to this book...
...Why "strangest...
...Or his notes on a film about coition among earthworms...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 17
