Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(9)
On the table a tray of ice cubes is slowly melting. There is a drink in Greene’s hand. He’s had this apartment for ten years; before that he always lived in hotels. He likes the neighborhood, it has rather a village atmosphere. There’s a very good butcher, a good boulangerie. He is fond of food and wine. “If I eat, I must drink,” he explains, and also it is a great help in getting people to talk.
Every real writer creates a world. Greene’s is a relentless one of sinning and divided men that is made bearable only through God and His mercy. In book after book there is forgiveness for the repentant sinner at the final hour. In the course of writing them all Greene has become, following his conversion at the age of twenty-two, the most important Catholic novelist alive. He has a dazzling sense of story, fine dialogue, and an eye for detail. He doesn’t joke. He is too involved in his obsessions. Irony, yes, there is often that, and even a kind of comedy, but beneath it is a schoolmaster’s firm will. Above all, his characters live. Scobie, the doomed policeman in The Heart of the Matter. The whiskey priest and his pursuer in The Power and the Glory. Pinkie in Brighton Rock. Coral Musker. Dr. Czinner. They are people one never forgets.
The writing table at which Greene works is almost bare. There is a TV on a set of library steps, three or four chairs, some paintings on the wall, but the principal decoration is books. The shelves hold Boswell, Ibsen, and H. G. Wells, as well as Greene’s great favorites, Henry James and Conrad. Of James, he has said that he “is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.” And as for Joseph Conrad, the Polish sea captain who carved out an immortal niche in the literature of a country not his own, Greene stopped reading him in 1932 because he was simply too influential a force.
The mystery writers Edgar Wallace and John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps) must also be counted as influences. Wallace was a phenomenally popular writer. There was a time when one of every five books sold in England was his. From him Greene learned a great deal: the restrained voice, the variety of characters, the technique of advancing a narrative, and, perhaps most of all, the mysterious ability to create a legend.
Greene still reads a lot, three or four books a week, and notes them in his diary, putting down a little tick or cross in judgment. Among the Americans, he likes Kurt Vonnegut. Gore Vidal: “I like his essays.” Alison Lurie. Philip Roth, not much. Bellow, he finds rather difficult. As for his own work, even coming from a long-lived family it is not easy, he admits, to think of starting on a book these days. “The fears,” he says simply, “not knowing whether one will live to see the end of it.”
He has been a published writer since 1929 with his first novel, The Man Within. There have been novels, travel books, thrillers, films, plays, short stories, and autobiography as well as essays and reviews. His output has been protean and the breadth of his travel and experience, vast. Many of his settings are foreign. The Honorary Consul, for instance, resulted from a three months’ trip to South America. Though his command of Spanish covers only the present tense, he was visiting in Argentina and saw the town of Corrientes one day while going up the river to Asunción. Corrientes became the scene of the book. He has been in Africa, Mexico, Russia, and China (“I found it depressing”), served as an intelligence officer in Sierra Leone during the war, smoked opium in Indochina where he went as a correspondent regularly beginning in 1951, and flew in French bombers between Saigon and Hanoi. He has been an editor in a publishing house, a film reviewer, a critic, a life as varied and glamorous as that of André Malraux, another great literary and political figure. Like Malraux, he asks to be read as a political writer and has set his fiction firmly in that world. The lesson in the books of Graham Greene is the great lesson of the times: one must take sides.
He has been extremely generous towards other writers. He was Nabokov’s champion in England when Nabokov was little known. Those he admires, he praises freely, Jean Rhys, for instance. “Yes, I like her very much. She’s a writer’s writer.” Or Evelyn Waugh, the best stylist of their generation, he says. “In the Mediterranean you can see a pebble fifteen feet down. His style was like that.”
A voyager in every sense of the word, laureate of the downtrodden and betrayed, Greene is a writer concerned with serious human problems who has lashed out fiercely against escapist fiction. “Life is violent and art has to reflect that violence,” he says. At the same time, only a warm human touch together with a deep knowledge of how the world works could have won for him such immense popularity. In his books one feels the breath of a great belief that is enough to justify life, that will not protect one but that ties one to an order and meaning never to be extinguished.
He sits now in the twilight, both of work and of dreams. “With the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation or darkness . . .” The great moral and political question during his lifetime has been that of socialism. He has shared the hope of many sincere men that the cruel Communist dictatorships will pass and a more or less democratic form take their place, the end that Marx promised but that has remained ever distant.
He admired Allende. He was a man trying, as Czechoslovakia’s Dubcek had tried, to bring forth a humane socialism. “Allende was a man with a sense of humor, a man who liked women, who liked practical jokes. He had the support of the cardinal. He had the support of a great body of the priests. He was not so histrionic as Castro. There was complete freedom of the press.”