Anglo-English Attitudes by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857863348
Publisher: Canongate Books

The Life of Graham Greene

These days literary biography is not just a form but an institution whose high standards of literariness are so assured that they can sometimes be waived with impunity. The first volume of Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene was hailed as exemplary – and so it was. Here were infelicities of style and forays into critical and psychological analysis that would be inadmissable in a less venerable context. It is as if the high reputation of the subject grants his appointed biographer immunity from critical attack.

In a sense the biographer does not have to be a writer in that the final product is not expected to be a work of art in itself so much as confirmation and proof of the art – of which Sherry is a master – of doggedly pursuing letters, lovers and lost contacts. ‘Risking disease and death as [Greene] had done,’ Sherry goes to the places Greene went, in pursuit of the people Greene met.

This time11 his travels take him to Sierre Leone (where Greene worked for MI6 during the war), Malaya, Kenya and Vietnam, where Greene again fell under suspicion of spying. Greene was back in England for the last two years of the war, still working for MI6 (under Kim Philby), before doing a brief stint in publishing. Physically, his marriage to first wife Vivien had all but ended before the war (their house in Clapham was conveniently trashed by the Luftwaffe) and he was spending most of his time with his lover, Dorothy Glover. Both women were sidelined in 1946 when he fell in love with Catherine Walston: rich, Catholic, beautiful – and married. Within two years Greene became world famous for The Heart of the Matter and The Third Man but he could never persuade Catherine to leave her husband for him. Hence the passionate, anguished letters that punctuate Greene’s peregrinations in the remaining years recounted here.

Recounted, it has to be said, in the kind of style that emerges when concerted editorial attention irons badly wrinkled prose into something presentably bland. Taken off guard on one occasion, Sherry tells us, Greene ‘fell back on cliché’. His biographer reaches for clichés at moments of high drama – ‘there is a serpent wriggling in the love nest’ – and makes do, much of the time, with the sloppily workaday: ‘he sought ways of getting his family from under his feet. His mother took them off his hands for a holiday . . .’

Issues of style are less distracting when dealing with event-intensive periods abroad. Sherry is at his best when Greene is on the move, jogging along after him and providing useful historical-political context for the novels. He is at his worst when the trail of evidence dies out and he has to hack a speculative path through the conditional thickets of the possible: ‘it seems likely that [Greene] wrote to Vivien . . . just as Fowler [in The Quiet American] wrote to Helen. If Greene did write to Vivien she would have responded by letter .

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