Review: Graham Greene - A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene

Terry Eagleton finds an extraordinary career and peripatetic life revealed in Richard Greene's collection of Graham Greene's letters

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
edited by Richard Greene
384pp, Little, Brown, £20

The British establishment has produced its fair share of turncoats. From Bloomsbury to Guy Burgess, an exotic array of pacifists, gays, dissidents and double agents have revolted against the stuffiness of their upper-class parents. They have formed a spiritual (and sometimes literal) fifth column in the world of Oxbridge and Whitehall. Yet their relationship to the establishment has betrayed more than a touch of what Freud might have called Oedipal ambivalence. EM Forster, Virginia Woolf, WH Auden, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby were in revolt against an England with which they also had deep bonds. The same might even be said of George Orwell. Most of them were able to turn the qualities they had acquired from their privileged upbringing - grit, self-assurance, sangfroid, a sense of duty - against the system that bred them.

Continue reading...