Graham Greene-The Man Within

...Perhaps it does not take much to write: "There is so much falsity in Brighton Rock we find ourselves marveling during the first hundred pages at the impression it has made on the reading public...

...Here we have entered into the personal with a Hitchcockian bang...

...In all such findings Atkins is startlingly forthright, considering the fact that he is dealing with a person who is very much alive and not prone to bear with ill-advised probings...

...Whether these opinions were or were not read by John Atkins, they are his too...

...But it is something else again, when speaking of the conflict between sexual impulse and inhibition, to add: "And this conflict was to be the central one in Greene's life and literary career, bringing forth his most tortured work, his most passionate intensities and his most reprehensible falsities...

...The implication is, it would seem, that subject to duty a biographer must not hesitate even if he has to stoop to subornation of decency...

...He has acted upon them to such purpose that though he discusses his subject's works seriatim (he begins with the slim volume of verse, Babbling April, and ends with the novel, The Quiet American), notes changes in some of them from romance to sordidism (he prefers this term to the more common reality), refers to matters of technique (he deplores "the desire to bully reality into unnaturally stark forms" and praises "the building up of a succession of climaxes" for achieving suspense), his primary interest is in analyzing Greene's nature...

...And she continues: "A writer is a writer from his cradle, in his dealings with the world, in his affections, in his attitude to the thousand small things that happen between dawn and sunset, he shows the same point of view as that which he elaborates afterward with a pen in his hand...

...It is lively, thorough, enjoyable...

...Such concept of ethics brings up the whole question of biocriticism, Atkins' designation for the weaving of work and life in the manner of, as he lists them, Lytton Strachey, Hugh Kingsmill, Peter Quennell and, by inference, himself...

...In this pursuit-to those not biographically-minded, indulgence perhaps might be the term-he is indefatigable...

...For it can orient what is otherwise a routine melodrama, and tune up undertones which, not heard, are lost in space...

...Tasteless or not, it has not prevented him from combining what is generally known of Greene with that which comes from his own acute insights into the material...

...If The Art of Graham Greene by Kenneth Allott and Miriam Faris may be said to be a study of craftsmanship and Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter by Marie-Beatrice Mesnet an exercise in religious interpretation, then Graham Greene by Atkins must be called a popular but significant course in instruction on a writer as seen behind his books...

...Of course it can do something else too, and that is make Greene the writer the most important character in what he pleases to call an entertainment...

...And useful (too, as those who intend to read Greene's latest assault on our cockeyed world, Our Man in Havana, will find...

...This is an opinion of effect and there are no laws against how one may be affected by a work of art...

...Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, "Commonweal," New York "Herald Tribune" IN ONE of her essays recently republished, Virginia Woolf has occasion to say, "It is the custom to draw a distinction between a man and his works and to add that, although the world has a claim to read every line of his writing, it must not ask questions about the author...

...As a matter of record, it is part of a corpus of connclusions long built up about Greene by a host of critics on both sides of the Atlantic...

...He is quite ready to subject himself to it as well...

...Though the process is revealing and probably essential for a full understanding when applied to authors safely dead, comments Atkins melancholically, it is "a tasteless practice, to say the least," when applied to living writers...

...He certainly makes as startling a statement as you can find in a scholarly work when he states that he tried to persuade someone to break into Greene's flat to get hold of some personal publication...

...Before he is through, we know a great deal about Greene: his emotional acceptance of Catholicism, his preoccupation with failure, his acceptance of the loyalty of love in a hollow world, his idiosyncratic outlook on matters like innocence, pain and cruelty...

...It is to Atkins's credit, however, that his forthrightness does not limit itself to others...

...It is even still within one's province to say: "The secret of Greene's personality lies in his childhood, as he would be the first to admit " For such comment, too, carries no onus...

...The point that Greene's talent is imaginative, not inventive, comes readily to mind, and also that his success in portrayal, oddly enough, is limited to that of common women...

...Nor are the reverberations lessened by repetitions of the charge on other pages, to wit: "Greene gives Pinkie [a character in one of the novels] an attitude to sex that he may have skirted himself by that time " and "The most superficial reader cannot help noticing that Greene has an obsession, ranging from mild to fierce, on sex...