Rejecting Greatness

...Though he has always been haunted by the obsessive theme of guilt and its harrowing destruc-tiveness, his characters inevitably become subordinate to the plot, rather than the other way around...

...Greene persists in a noncommittally offhand narration of episodes that promise to shed some light on the making of a novelist, but never do...

...Greene once wrote of Henry James' later novels that "They retain their beautiful symmetry at a price, the price which Turgenev paid and Dostoevsky refused to pay, the price of refraining from adding to the novelist's distinction that of a philosopher or religious teacher of the second rank...

...Being the headmaster's son made school worse, not better, and by the time Greene was 16 his neurotic boredom with the place that was both home and classroom had become so acute that he suffered a breakdown...

...Except for a cursory reference here and there, we learn nothing of his life after the 1930s, of the travels in Mexico that led to The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory, of his work for the British Secret Service during the War, or of the time in the Far East and Africa that spawned The Quiet American and A Burnt-Out Case...

...His early years are indistinguishable from the life recorded in many similar memoirs of upper-middle-class Edwardian life, that extended family album filled with omnipresent nannies, remote parents, jolly uncles, and gossipy aunts...

...Even when they probe the stormiest reaches of human despair, his novels are too carefully controlled...

...Only he would have a priest say of a suicide, as Father Rank remarks at the end of The Heart of the Matter, "The Church knows all the rules...

...He writes both tragedies and thrillers, yet in his most serious and ambitious fiction there is no change of tone, no significant difference in narrative momentum, from the brilliantly engineered spy and underworld tales he dryly calls "entertainments...

...the account of his early childhood particularly is familiar stuff...

...From then on, no matter what job he took to pay the rent (for several years he worked the evening shift as a subeditor on the London Times) he wrote 500 words a day, every day in a lifetime of habit...

...Though one hopes to learn from Greene's account of his youthful conversion why he is so fascinating a blend of devotion and ambivalence, the answer just isn't there...

...Before I read his most recent novel, Travels with My Aunt, I thought Greene was incapable of writing a dull sentence, but at least that inconsequential trifle had some funny moments...

...everything moves symmetrically toward a prearranged end, as if one step or scene left to chance could signal a return to the early years of failure...

...Greene blames himself for some of the failure, because he pursued the ghost of Conrad instead of writing out of his own experience...

...In addition to biting wit at the expense of his Church, Greene has been capable of courageous moral concentration on the gulf between Catholic dogma and practice...

...We are given undigested lists of favorite foods, games and toys, and nostalgically remembered childhood books...

...The only patches of darkness staining this sunny life came from the grandfathers Greene never knew, who were more than eccentric even by English standards...

...Greene's distinct literary personality, however, is more than a matter of eloquence...

...At Oxford he spent some grim months playing Russian roulette with his brother's revolver, stayed drunk for one entire term, became casually involved in espionage for the Germans?at that age I was ready to be a mercenary in any cause so long as I was repaid with excitement and a little risk"—and wrote a puerile romantic novel that every publisher in London turned down...

...Greene tells us in the beginning that his motive for recording the past is "a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order," yet he seldom bothers to do more than let the crumbs of memory lie where they fall...

...Still, it was not until long after he shook off the dead hand of the master that those dogged stints of 500 words a day began to pay off...

...One of six children of a public-school headmaster, Graham Greene was born in 1905 in the Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted...

...A Sort of Life is rarely amusing, and mainly tedious and tired, as if patched together to fulfill a rather distasteful obligation...

...Why does the tragic aridity of Querry in A Burnt-Out Case seem in the end more a gimmick than a persuasive rendering of genuine pain...

...If one cannot close a book of memories on the deathbed, any conclusion must be arbitrary, and I have preferred to finish this essay with the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel...

...apparently Conrad's ultramundane settings demanded an intellectual effort—the ability to follow a difficult moral crisis in a wholly unfamiliar context—that Edwardian readers preferred to avoid...

...If one turns to his surprisingly flaccid autobiography, A Sort of Life (Simon & Schuster, 220 pp., $6.95), in anticipation of some explanation for the oddly insufficient achievement of Graham Greene—insufficient in that while elements of greatness are unquestionably present, he has inexplicably held back from writing the major work that seems always about to be done—one is doomed to disappointment...

...Even the exoticism of his landscapes—Mexico, Saigon, Sierra Leone, Central Africa—seems to enhance his superb readability...

...Why has he remained content to turn out one beautifully contrived but minor novel after another...

...His father's father abandoned a wife and eight children in a pathetic attempt to recapture his golden boyhood on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean...

...In a remarkable step for his schoolmaster father to take in 1920, Greene was packed off to London to live with a psychoanalyst for "perhaps the happiest six months of my life," but even this singular experience fails to relieve the monotony of his autobiography...

...In the last 25 years, Graham Greene has had no such trouble...

...In 1930 his first published work, The Man Within, sold unexpectedly well, but the nine books of the next decade were such commercial flops that "with my tenth novel, The Power and the Glory, the publisher could risk printing only 3,500 copies, one thousand copies more than he had printed of my first novel...

...A convert, he is a Catholic writer of dubious piety but iron belief, free of the denominational arrogance that made the Catholicism of another convert, Evelyn Waugh, often look more like an upper-class attitude than an expression of faith...

...Greene has consistently drawn back from the kind of risk that says the hell with superbly constructed scenes and perfectly understated dialogue and neat denouement...

...Only toward the end of A Sort oj Life does Greene allow himself at last to write with the personal intensity that distinguishes autobiography from bookkeeping...

...This formidable diligence is surely one reason for the supple, lucid, classically graceful prose of all his fiction, travel books and criticism...

...And though it is obviously untrue that complexity in fiction is a criterion of greatness and effortless fluency a sign of shallowness, I have always felt that none of Greene's novels, fascinating as they are, can be ranked with the paramount work of our time...

...Perhaps the arbitrariness of his ending, his inability to carry the story further, does provide some hint of explanation for Graham Greene's rejection of greatness...

...One is accustomed to thinking of Graham Greene's novels as automatic best sellers which always find a taker in the movie world, yet the facts are very different...

...He might almost be talking about an inoculation against the smallpox of disbelief...

...ODDLY, GREENE chooses to end this autobiography just as he was entering on the lean decade...

...But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart...

...Better the safe rewards of competence than the hazardous plunge of a Dostoevsky or a Kafka that can carry a writer treacherously beyond his depth...

...To Conrad, whom Greene frustratingly took as the model for his very early novels, the strangeness of Africa and South America never guaranteed readers for Heart of Darkness and Nostromo...

...How does he manage to write about such enigmatic and disorderly human problems as guilt, despair, and the terrifying loss of religious faith, in prose that is so consistentiy urbane, so irresistibly pleasurable...

...But what Greene finds "second rank" may be more crucial to a novelist's distinction than he has permitted himself to know...

...His mother's father was an Anglican clergyman possessed of such a pathological sense of guilt that "when his Bishop refused his request to be defrocked, [he] proceeded to put the matter into effect himself in a field...

...As Greene tells it, in almost exactly the same bland voice he uses to describe his colleagues on the Times, he began instruction merely out of curiosity when he became engaged to marry a Catholic, and somehow it took...

...Failure too is a kind of death...

...Greene's finest novels—The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair?present few formal, emotional, or metaphysical stumbling blocks to his vast audience...