Judas in Greeneland
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing JUDAS IN GREENELAND BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL READERS of Graham Greene immediately recognize that crucial moment common to all his tales when the seedy Judas figure enters to...
...We only require that they briefly purge our anxieties...
...Both were perilous because of disease and unstable political conditions...
...A distinguished scholarly biographer of Jane Austen, the Brontes and Joseph Conrad, Sherry was chosen by Greene to chronicle his life...
...The severity of his misery was finally acknowledged and he was allowed to live at home...
...In writing The Life of Graham Greene: Volume I:19041939 (Viking, 783 pp., $29.95), Norman Sherry has fashioned a story that is the perfect complement to his subject's novels...
...what is not simple to explain is this writer's ability to work his magic, time after time...
...His malaise was temporarily dispelled when he grew besotted with a pretty Roman Catholic convert, Vivien Dayrell-Browning...
...Greene's pen could also pursue dangerous paths...
...The highstrung child, always a loner, found the bullying and lack of privacy unbearable...
...Sherry's dedication is such that he has gamely retraced the author-adventurer's peripatetic steps on those "journeys without maps" that provided the settings for so many novels...
...This biography has A subplot that revolves around Greene's developing senseof the world's treachery, his ripening perception of the innate human tendency to play Judas to oneself as well as others...
...Eventually the couple wed—celibacy abandoned—and for a short while lived quite happily...
...We meet many originals of the characters who populate Greene's pages...
...He once persuaded a dentist to pull a perfectly good tooth for the thrill, and on several occasions he was led by a numbing adolescent boredom and depression to play Russian roulette...
...Set in the 19th century, it has a pure heroine (an idealized Vivien) and compassionate hero, a fallen woman, smugglers, broken promises, and lovers finallyunited by death...
...From the time Greene hit his stride with Brighton Rock (1938), the plots of both his " serious" and his "entertainment" novels (his own distinction) have followed a predictable course...
...We see the stock ingredients of boys' literature gradually combined in his work with a Catholicism that supplied the perfect metaphoric vehicle for an obsession with the cycle of sin, redemption and further sin which plagued Greene even before his conversion...
...By age 15 Greene had made numerous attempts at suicide (including eating a tin of hair pomade...
...Throughout his youth Greene continued to be disturbed...
...and he made his narrators speak in the jaded ironic tones of l'homme moyen sensuel, who assumes anyone would turn traitor to advance self-interest...
...Sure, we guess how it will all come out within the first few chapters...
...Or, in Greene's theological terms, Christ's role is to lose to Judas...
...In contrast to fairy tales, innocence never triumphs in Greeneland...
...Not that Greene would have been shocked had he been betrayed...
...His Judases, after all, merely allow God's work to be fulfilled...
...Yet read them and illusion suspends disbelief...
...He went on to modernize the fairy-tale struggle between good and evil: He moved the faraway once-upon-a-time to a dirty port in the Third World or a ruthless jungle war...
...He can even almost convince us that revelation lies in the list of wedding presents that were given to Greene and his bride (incidentally, the sole lapse of this kind...
...The novelist has in fact explained how, as a youth, he first discovered the archetypal plot for his theme in The Viper of Milan, a novel written by the 16-year-old Marjorie Bowen...
...Most biographers have a bit of Judas in them, whether they violate their subjects' rightful privacy and reveal secrets, or gloss over their lives with lies...
...Thenovelist himself has made light of his ordeal in his factual writings (it looms large in the fiction), but Sherry has unearthed a letter written by Greene's mother that proves its harmful nature...
...Their rather effusive letters will come as a surprise to those who know only the hard-boiled novelist with a "splinter of ice" in his heart, as Greene once described what he believed was a writer's essential quality...
...The Jansenist world of guilt, espionage and treason that still preoccupies Greene's imagination was really brewed in the atmosphere the headmaster fostered...
...Sherry shows how the suspicious Charles Greene's policy of relentless sexual surveillance blinded him to the mental pain being inflicted on his son, and helped create an environment of cruelty and distrust...
...An olderpupil named Carter, who particularly tormented him, became the model for those prankish sadists in the novels...
...The actor's air of murdered purity would have done justice to both types...
...It is a pity Humphrey Bogart never got the chance to play the tragic colonial policeman Scobie (The Heart of the Matter) or the embittered killer Raven (This Gun for Hire...
...He even proposed a celibate relationship upon learning about her fear of sex...
...Despite the prodigious length of Volume I—we only get up to the point where the author's career begins in earnest—it is a page turner...
...As Sherry's book ends, on the eve of World War II, his bitter protagonist is bored with England and remarks, "Perhaps we need a little violence...
...Of course, Greene's favorite motif of goodness destroyed by corruption lends itself well to parody as an adolescent fetish...
...Caught up in the spell, you surrender to the cardboard humility of a whiskey priest, are taken in by the childlike cleverness of Wormold, the Hoover vacuum cleaner salesman, as he outrageously outwits international spies at their own paranoid games...
...No doubt it was partly Sherry's storytelling powers that aided him in capturing the trust of this hitherto elusive man...
...The first significant episode in young Graham's life was his expulsion to boarding school from an Edwardian nursery of four brothers and two sisters...
...The reader is left rooting for those characters whose quixotic innocence dooms them...
...Toward the end of his trip he received a cable informing him that Twentieth Century Fox was suing him and his weekly for libel...
...Before his Mexican pilgrimage he had written a movie review for Night and Day, a magazine he was editing, that referred to Shirley Temple as "a complete totsy" and suggested she was as sexually provocative as Marlene Dietrich...
...As a struggling reporter, living in cold-water flats and sordid rooming houses, he honed his observer's eye by keeping her posted on every detail of his day, often sending three letters at a time...
...But we don't go to seey Antigone—or Casablanca, forthat matter—to be surprised...
...When these failed to attract attention to his unhappiness, he ran away and suffered a nervous breakdown...
...Sherry deploys his clues to the novelist's personality so skillfully you feel you are discovering them yourself...
...In the process, he dug out sources that neither exist in a library nor answer written appeals for information...
...Paraphrase his stories and the stage machinery starts to creak...
...Writers & Writing JUDAS IN GREENELAND BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL READERS of Graham Greene immediately recognize that crucial moment common to all his tales when the seedy Judas figure enters to befriend the romantically noble—though often criminal—hero...
...It is ironic that the boy's father misunderstood his son's distress and thought he had beenmolested...
...But Greene's search for adventure and new material impelled him to scorn traveled roads and set of f to places where no maps availed, no consular protection existed...
...Hedidnotadjust...
...Restlessness soon overtook him yet again...
...Emotionally, though, the event proved traumatic...
...The successful formula is easily spelled out...
...One puts down Sherry's biography with a heightened sense of the authenticity of its subject's work...
...Another "friend" played Judas to his trust...
...This book contains numerous illuminations of dark spots in Greene's own elliptical autobiographies—some highly important...
...Sherry's triumph is that he has shown a profounder and more vulnerable character—a man who, like his all-too-human "saviors," sins along with his fellows...
...Greene lost the suit and the New Yorkerish Night and Day subsequently collapsed...
...His command of theology rarely fails to weave insight out of an adventure yarn...
...Unlike many British schools of the time, where homoerotic romances were ignored by the staff and institutionalized by the students, this one morbidly feared such behavior...
...Since his father was headmaster, the physical distance was slight—Greene simply had to pass through the baize-covered door of his father's study that separated the family living quarters from the dormitories...
...His more mature works, including the latest fables Monsignor Quixote(l982) and The Captain and the Enemy (1988), represent Good as unworldly, trusting innocence, Evil as grown-up comfort and smugness—his Judases always opt for security...
...Greene's laconic autobiographies, A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1981), modestly depict a sufferer from acedia, always in need of fresh adrenaline for a flagging imagination...
...Hoping to win Vivien, Greene enthusiastically gave up his callow agnosticism and became a fervent Catholic...
...Sherry winds up his volume with accounts of Greene's first two grueling journeys to exotic locales—to Liberia (in the company of his debutante cousin) and to Mexico...
...Indeed, one might call their simplicity "classical," except that the better analogy would be with classic Hollywood, not Sophocles...
...Like Greene, he watched rats climbing the walls of his hut in Mexico, and caught an almost fatal fever in Liberia...
...However, the protracted engagement had aroused an interest in prostitutes in the young man, a taste for low entertainments...
...His first published novel, The Man Within (1929), showed influences from Treasure Island to Kim...
...Sherry has conscientiously avoided these pitfalls by concentrating on the mystery of how Greene works as a novelist...
...The result is no whitewash...
...His experiences in Mexico inspired his most affecting novel, The Power and the Glory (1940...
...instead, the child's reward of a happy ending is replaced by an older child's cynical conviction that nice guys finish last...
Vol. 72 • October 1989 • No. 16
