The novelist Graham Greene was born on this day. His colossally popular, more downmarket books—and their cinematic adaptations—made him rich. Apparently, they also embarrassed him, Joan Acochella writes.
Greene did not, of course, feel like sticking around to dry Vivien’s tears or help raise the son and daughter they had had together. So he took an apartment of his own, and Vivien stayed home, carving doll-house furniture. In time, she became a great expert on doll houses, and established a private museum for her collection.
Finally, and crucially, this tedium is what made him spend much of his life outside England, not just away from home—from roasts and Bovril and damp woollens—but in the distant, hot, poor, war-torn countries whose efforts to throw off colonial rule formed so large and painful a part of twentieth-century history. He went to West Africa , Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Mexico. He spent years, on and off, in Central America.
Leaving a note in the collection box at a nearby Catholic church, he asked for religious instruction, and was assigned to one Father George Trollope, whom he liked, as he wrote to Vivien, for “his careful avoidance of the slightest emotion or sentiment in his instruction.
Although Greene may have turned religion down to a low simmer in his life, in his novels he raised it to a rolling boil. In “” , his first big hit, the hero is a seventeen-year-old hoodlum named Pinkie. Pinkie would be an ordinary little sociopath were it not for the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and obsessed by sin. Again and again, he recalls the noise that, as a child, he heard across the room every Saturday night, when his parents engaged in their weekly sex act.
Some of Greene’s colleagues, not to speak of the Church, began to find his combining of religion and sex unseemly. George Orwell delivered a more withering critique. Greene, he wrote, seemed to believein being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish.
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