Biography/The Life of Graham Greene Volume Three: 1955-1991 By Norman Sherry: Norman Sherry may sometimes get too close to his subject for comfort, but his final volume on the life of Graham Greene is a detailed and intriguing read writes Douglas Kennedy
God, it's long. And God, it's detailed. Deeply detailed. Then again, this is, without question, "A Big Book"; the final instalment of a near-30-year obsession with the life and times of a writer who (for me, anyway) stands as one of the central figures of post-war literature. Now, whether you buy into the idea that Graham Greene was the great English novelist of the second half of the last century will also determine whether you'll buy into this, the third instalment of Norman Sherry's massive life of Greene.
For me, Greene was a remarkable literary hybrid who wrote hugely readable novels that also grappled with such fundamental human complexities as the obsessive nature of guilt, the impossibility of self-redemption (and of escaping one's self-imposed destiny), and the search for forgiveness in a pitiless world. As such, his central works - The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory (to name just a few of the key novels in his hugely prolific career) - managed that remarkable trick of being simultaneously serious and popular . . . a fact which made him a shady figure in the eyes of certain über-literary types.
After all, there is a school of modern critical thought which equates narrative accessibility and the use of popular genres (like the thriller or the adventure yarn) with commercialism, and which also believes that a writer who gets you to turn the page cannot really be the purveyor of consequential literature. As Greene was guilty of Accessibility and Popularity in the First Degree, the Nobel Prize committee constantly passed him over for what John O'Hara once ruefully called "the dynamite money" (their sniffy commentaries on Greene appear in one of the appendices - alongside a list of Greene's 47 Favourite Prostitutes). And, of course, he was the subject of jeering derision by lesser writers, such as Anthony Burgess.
Still, what comes across so clearly in the sweeping narrative of Sherry's third volume is that Greene truly bore witness to the convolutions of the last century. Consider his geographic meanderings during the final third of his life. Besides his constant peregrinations within Europe (France claimed him as her own during his near-30 years of residence there, even though he denounced French corruption in J'Accuse, his Jeremiad against le milieu Niçois), there were travels to China, the Congo, Cuba, Dakar, Haiti, Israel, Jamaica, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the US and the USSR . . . not bad for a man edging into his twilight years. The cast of characters that entered his life during this time also reads like an international who's who - from Castro to Daniel Ortega to General Omar Torrijos, to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, to Evelyn Waugh, to John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, to Charlie Chaplin . . .
Well, you get the idea. And yet, what's most intriguing about Greene (a fact that Sherry constantly points up) is that he was someone who never embraced the cult of literary celebrity, who remained intensely closed-off and adverse to public scrutiny, and who led a private life of considerable complexity and frequent self-loathing.
Indeed, having never divorced his wife, Vivian, and having jettisoned his long-term mistress, Dorothy, the great object of desire for Greene in his middle years was the very beautiful and very married Catherine Walston. This downwardly spiralling affair forms a central emotional spine to this volume.
So too does Greene's involvement with his new mistress, Yvonne Cloetta - who, like Catherine, remained very much living with her husband while also being passionately entangled with Greene.
Though married women were certainly a Greene speciality, Sherry makes it abundantly clear that, when it came to la vie sexuelle, Greene had a voracious appetite - and one which was fuelled both by neediness and insecurity. Just as Sherry also repeatedly points up the depression and abrupt mood swings which shadowed so much of his life.
In short, Greene's wildly tangled emotional landscape, his restlessness, his fear of ennui, his ongoing peregrinations, and his ferociously disciplined work habits (his galvanising need to put pen to paper every day and grind out his quota of words) are great copy. And though Sherry has been widely attacked in many quarters for letting this final biographical volume drift into discursiveness and also for imposing his own personality on the narrative proceedings, the life itself is so damn interesting (and Sherry's research so comprehensive) that the biography manages to transcend such lapses in judgment.
Indeed, Sherry can be slapped on the wrist for using the personal pronoun "I" a bit too often. Just as I was a little dubious about his decision to include a photograph of himself on a donkey in Mexico, where he followed the same route that Greene traversed while researching The Power and the Glory.
And yes, he is sometimes guilty of over-embellishment and dragging out a story, for example, the storm-in-a-teacup tale of Greene judging the GPA Award in Dublin, wherein all the assorted backstage machinations (largely caused by Greene himself) are endlessly detailed, for little ultimate gain (though I did have to smile when Sherry recounts that, some months after the event, Greene told him: "Dublin killed me").
And yes, throughout this hefty tome, you sense that Sherry considers himself almost an integrated part of Greene's life - no doubt, an understandably obsessive point of view, considering that the gentleman has spent nearly 30 years following Greene's footsteps everywhere.
The tricky convolutions of the Sherry/Greene inter-relationship - coupled with the biographer's innate understanding of his subject's Chinese Box-like personality (riddled with hidden compartments and vast ambiguities) - lend this third instalment an intriguing drive. Then again, Greene lived a life of such emotional density, such professional achievement and such personal despair that it cannot but be the stuff of a compulsive narrative. This final volume might have its self-seeking idiosyncrasies, but it is still a great account of the final years of a great 20th-century life.
Douglas Kennedy's novel, A Special Relationship, is out in paperback (£6.99, Arrow). His new novel, State of the Union, will be published in 2005 by Hutchinson
The Life of Graham Greene Volume Three: 1955-1991 By Norman Sherry Jonathan Cape, 906pp. £25