The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene
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The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene
By Richard Greene
W.W. Norton, 2021
Graham Greene published more than two dozen novels, including The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American. The author was twice shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and several of his books were made into popular films. “Greeneland,” the appellation for the author’s typical kind of setting, is seedy or war-torn--a place where love and faith are often crushed by despair, cruelty, and doubt. Contemporary readers sometimes disparage his novels as misogynistic or “dudebro” literature full of male-dominated adventures and flat female characters. Biographers often focus on Greene’s self-aggrandizing style, his arguments with his friends and acquaintances, and his womanizing and repeated infidelity.
The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene, the new biography of the novelist written by Richard Greene (no relation), paints a much more generous picture. “There is no understanding Graham Greene except in the political and cultural contexts of dozens of countries,” writes the biographer. “And in an odd sense the reverse is also true: we fail to understand something about modern times if we ignore Graham Greene. Here is a single life on which much of the history of a century is written.” Richard Greene combines this focus on context with a thoughtful and respectful discussion of the novelist’s emotional life.
Early in his life, Graham Greene first experienced symptoms of bipolar disorder. He claims in his memoir that when he was sixteen years old, he began to play Russian roulette by loading a pistol’s six-bullet chamber randomly with a single charge and then holding the gun to his temple, not knowing if he would die or be spared when he pulled the trigger. He was not suicidal at those moments. Instead, as his biographer explains, Greene was trying to escape “the terrible boredom that would afflict him all his life and that he would do almost anything to relieve.”
Graham Greene claims he tried the pistol game on several occasions, but Richard Greene questions whether the story is completely true—suggesting that the novelist might have played with blanks instead of live bullets. Soon, Greene found another way to alleviate his bipolar symptoms: substance abuse. His biographer suggests that the author had “a Homeric tolerance for liquor,” but liquor was only one of the intoxicants he used. Sometimes Greene relied on “dry Martinis, Scotch, and Benzedrine” as the novelist told a friend, but at other times he ingested everything from marijuana to opium.
Graham Greene himself realized that his extensive travel in troubled areas throughout Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia was also an attempt to avoid the boredom that was a result of his bipolar disorder. Sometimes working with England’s Secret Intelligence Service and sometimes working as a journalist, Greene visited locations such as Vietnam, Haiti, Liberia, and Nicaragua to investigate human rights abuses as well as the effects of poverty and disease. The Unquiet Englishman not only tracks Greene’s travels but also provides detailed context for the political situations and atrocities in all the countries he visited. Because the novelist traveled so widely, much of the biography is taken up with contextual information almost unrelated to Greene’s interior life or his books. Richard Greene does point out when specific events from Graham Greene’s travels are reflected in his novels, but he is very careful not to overdraw links he sees between contexts and texts. Rather than simply discussing these travels as the novelist’s attempt to escape from his personal demons, Richard Greene shows subtly but repeatedly that the author was deeply committed to his work in support of dissidents, of oppressed people, and of people living in horrific conditions.
In addition to discussing Greene’s work for the advancement of human rights around the world, Richard Greene explores two other facets of the novelist. First is Graham Greene’s fraught relationship to Catholicism. Although he wanted to believe, he struggled with his faith. What he was sure of is that there was “doubt in [his] disbelief.” By the end of his life, he identified as a “Catholic agnostic.” Nevertheless, he loved what he saw as the magic of Catholic practice--a magic that he felt was missing from Protestant faith but not always absent from the spiritual beliefs and practices of the indigenous communities he visited. Their faith was an “authentic religious consciousness…comprehensible from a Catholic viewpoint,” as Richard Greene writes, “a spiritual intensity expressed in rituals akin to sacraments.” He argues that Graham Greene felt that “the only possible basis for faith is trauma, or at least an intimacy with suffering.” He travelled to these countries because “for him, the most authentic believers had always been in the trouble spots, the ones who had no comfort to deceive them.”
Finally, Richard Greene recognizes that despite Graham Greene’s mental health struggles, and despite his frequent portrayals of himself as cynical and hardboiled, “there is a core of nostalgia, even sentimentality, in him that he worked to conceal and discipline.” That sentimentality and nostalgia can be seen in his love for the writing of R.K. Narayan. It can also help us understand why Greene was committed to his travels: he had “a desire to see human beings in a state of innocence,” linked to his own “yearning for childhood happiness.” With this argument, Richard Greene’s sparkling biography will allow readers to appreciate the novels of Graham Greene in a fresh way.
—Hannah Joyner is an independent scholar living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (with Susan Burch) and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.