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Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
There have been a number of Graham Greene biographies, but none has captured his voice, his loves, hates, family and friends–intimate and writerly–or his deep understanding of the world, like this astonishing collection of letters.
Graham Greene is one of the few modern novelists who can be called great. In the course of his long and eventful life (1904—1991), he wrote tens of thousands of letters to family, friends, writers, publishers and others involved in his various interests and causes. A Life in Letters presents a fresh and engrossing account of his life, career and mind in his own words. Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of letters–many of them seen here for the first time–gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, exotic travel and romantic entanglement.
In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby. Some of these letters dispute previous assessments of his character, such as his alleged anti-Semitism or obscenity, and he emerges as a man of deep integrity, decency and courage. Others reveal the agonies of his romantic life, especially his relations with his wife, Vivien Greene, and with one of his mistresses, Catherine Walston. The letters can be poignant, despairing, amorous, furious or amusing, but the sheer range of experience contained in them will astound everyone who reads this book.
From the Hardcover edition.
Graham Greene is one of the few modern novelists who can be called great. In the course of his long and eventful life (1904—1991), he wrote tens of thousands of letters to family, friends, writers, publishers and others involved in his various interests and causes. A Life in Letters presents a fresh and engrossing account of his life, career and mind in his own words. Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of letters–many of them seen here for the first time–gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, exotic travel and romantic entanglement.
In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby. Some of these letters dispute previous assessments of his character, such as his alleged anti-Semitism or obscenity, and he emerges as a man of deep integrity, decency and courage. Others reveal the agonies of his romantic life, especially his relations with his wife, Vivien Greene, and with one of his mistresses, Catherine Walston. The letters can be poignant, despairing, amorous, furious or amusing, but the sheer range of experience contained in them will astound everyone who reads this book.
From the Hardcover edition.
481 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2007
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About the author
Richard Greene
113 books14 followersRichard Thomas Greene is a Canadian poet and biographer whose book Boxing the Compass won the Governor General's Award for English language poetry at the 2010 Governor General's Awards. Greene received his BA in English at Memorial University in 1983, and took his doctorate as a Rothermere Fellow at Oxford University in 1991. He returned to Memorial University to teach English before joining the University Of Toronto at Mississauga in 1995, as a member of the English and Drama department. Married to pianist Marianne Marusic and father to four children, he resides in Cobourg, Ontario.
Greene first distinguished himself as a teacher and a critic with his book Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry, published in 1993. In addition to 18th-century poetry, it was with scholarly works on Dame Edith Sitwell and Graham Greene that Greene broke through to greater renown and a wide general readership. He enjoyed international success in 2007 with Graham Greene: A Life in Letters - a biography constructed out of the novelist's own words. His recent biography, Edith Sitwell: Avant-garde Poet, English Genius is an attempt to revive the reputation of a neglected writer.
Greene is primarily known in Canada as a poet. His first collection, Republic of Solitude: Poems 1984-1994 drew little attention from reviewers when published in Newfoundland in 1994. However, it contains poems such as "Utopia" that have been often anthologized. His second collection, Crossing the Straits, was published by the St. Thomas Poetry Series of Toronto in 2004. Richard Greene's third collection of poems, Boxing the Compass, describes the journeys Greene made by Greyhound and Amtrak while visiting archives of Graham Greene's letters. It eventually won him the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry.
Richard Greene currently teaches Creative Writing and British literature at the University of Toronto.
Greene first distinguished himself as a teacher and a critic with his book Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry, published in 1993. In addition to 18th-century poetry, it was with scholarly works on Dame Edith Sitwell and Graham Greene that Greene broke through to greater renown and a wide general readership. He enjoyed international success in 2007 with Graham Greene: A Life in Letters - a biography constructed out of the novelist's own words. His recent biography, Edith Sitwell: Avant-garde Poet, English Genius is an attempt to revive the reputation of a neglected writer.
Greene is primarily known in Canada as a poet. His first collection, Republic of Solitude: Poems 1984-1994 drew little attention from reviewers when published in Newfoundland in 1994. However, it contains poems such as "Utopia" that have been often anthologized. His second collection, Crossing the Straits, was published by the St. Thomas Poetry Series of Toronto in 2004. Richard Greene's third collection of poems, Boxing the Compass, describes the journeys Greene made by Greyhound and Amtrak while visiting archives of Graham Greene's letters. It eventually won him the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry.
Richard Greene currently teaches Creative Writing and British literature at the University of Toronto.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
November 17, 2019
Q:
Shortly after this letter he wrote a public protest against the treatment of Charlie Chaplin, who had lived for forty years in the United States. The Attorney General ordered that Chaplin be detained when he tried to re-enter the United States because of speeches he had given in support of Russia when it was invaded by Germany. Doubtless as a result of the publicity, Graham was himself granted a visa for only eight weeks. (c)
Q:
Finally separated from Vivien, who refused, on religious grounds, to allow a divorce, he found that Catherine, though willing to conduct an affair, would not marry him for fear of losing her children, and that Dorothy simply would not let him go. On several occasions he came near to suicide... (c) Poor guy. All the gals did him in. Almost.
Q:
Around 1958, Greene also started a novel about school life, but found the subject so grim that he abandoned it in favour of leprosy. (c) I'm sorry but it's really hilarious that it's implicated that school is worse than leprosy. And it's even more hilarious that I agree with this point, to some extent.
Q:
Restless by temperament, he yearned for excitement, but he also believed that something essential about life is revealed in privation, and his travels did not serve merely as a painted backdrop to the stories but were necessary to the work of imagining human reality... (c)
Q:
... he wrote of Sierra Leone: ‘Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst’. (c)
Q:
It is hard to imagine that the greater part of what Graham Greene wrote in his life remains unpublished. Greene once guessed that he wrote about two thousand letters each year. Some have simply vanished, but many thousands have recently come to light, some in dusty filing cabinets, others in out-of-the-way archives. One extremely important collection of letters to his son, wife and mother was recently discovered inside a hollow book. …(c) Seriously??
Q:
I met a farmer at lunch the other day who was employing two lunatics; what fine workers they were, he said; and how loyal. (c)
Q:
In the midst of a simmering dispute over money, the Viking Press proposed that Greene change the title of Travels with My Aunt to something more saleable. He cabled his agent: ‘Would rather change publisher than title. Graham Greene’. (c)
Q:
Although an admirer of Dubliners, Greene, like Roddy Doyle, thought Joyce’s Ulysses one of the most overrated classics and a ‘big bore’. (c)
Q:
I believe I’ve got a book coming. I feel so excited that I spell out your name in full carefully sticking my tongue between my teeth to pronounce it right. The act of creation’s awfully odd & inexplicable like falling in love. (c)
Q:
Some of Greene’s biographers have imputed to him, without other evidence, all the moral flaws to be found in his characters. Indeed, his situation has been like that of Dame Muriel Spark, who observed: ‘There’s a lot of people think they can take my books and analyse me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer. (c)
Q:
One can’t believe 365 days a year, but my faith tells me that my reasoning is wrong. (c)
Q:
‘I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.’ (c)
Q:
His daughter recalls that he looked on his own death with great curiosity as to what, if anything, lay ahead. It was, for him, another journey without maps. (c)
Q:
The Abbey itself lighted up brilliantly, but outside the door nothing but a great bank of mist, with now and again a vague steel helmeted figure appearing, only to disappear again. (c)
Q:
There’s a most marvellous fog here to-day, my love. It makes walking a thrilling adventure. I’ve never been in such a fog before in my life. If I stretch out my walking stick in front of me, the ferrule is half lost in obscurity. Coming back I twice lost my way, & ran into a cyclist, to our mutual surprise. Stepping off a pavement to cross to the other side becomes a wild & fantastic adventure, like sailing into the Atlantic to find New York, with no chart or compass. Once where the breadth of the road was greater than the normal, I found myself back on the same pavement, as I started, having slowly swerved in my course across the road. I’ve got to sally out now & find my little Editor to give him some tea. If you never hear from me again, you will know that somewhere I am moving round in little plaintive circles, looking for a pavement. (c)
Q:
Do you know anyone in England who owns a revolver? The consensus of opinion seems to be that one must have a revolver. My own feeling is that it would be more dangerous to me than to anyone else, and I certainly can’t afford to buy one. An amusing result of this trip seems to be that one is likely to be offered the most amazing variety of jobs, varying from the most august to the most farcical, adoption by old Harris as his successor as Parliamentary Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society. But this in confidence. I have to be stared at and my private life examined by a committee of philanthropists; I’m afraid I shan’t get by this. (c)
Q:
Scandinavians are terribly Scandinavian. (c)
Q:
I had a painful purgatorial lunch yday with Grigson, Spender & Rosamond Lehmann, my mind clouded with aspirins. I hadn’t met S. before: he struck me as having too much human kindness. A little soft. (c)
Q:
The baby is crying, & I have ten books accumulated for review & this damned thriller to write. (с)
Q:
The other fly in the ointment is a libel action. I don’t know whether you remember the drunk party at Freetown in Journey Without Maps. I called the drunk, whose real name was quite different, Pa Oakley. It now turns out that there is a Dr P. D. Oakley, head of the Sierra Leone Medical Service. The book’s been withdrawn (luckily all but 200 copies have been sold), writs have been served, and he’s out for damages! Anxious days. (c) Wow. Who would have gussed that an author's life is so rife with strife. Ridiculous.
Q:
Casting is proving very different. Menzies finds lovely people with appallingly tough faces, but when they open their mouths they all have Oxford accents. (c)
Q:
I was driven distracted by rats when I discovered in the house of a Norwegian, the widow of an American coffee planter, a copy of The Hotel, the only book of yours I hadn’t read. ...
Your book was so infinitely more actual than the absurd situation. (c)
Q:
I see things rather as follows: immediate conscription is certain. Therefore a. one may find oneself in the army with or without a commission. This means small earning power and only a small allowance. In that case one must make one’s savings go as far and as long as possible. Under those circumstances I should feel very grateful if my family were boarded out either with Eleanor or you on some sharing basis: we’d contribute of course to rates, labour etc as well as board. And this house would be shut up or let.
b. one would find oneself in some ministry – of information or propaganda at a reasonable salary. In that case I should take as cheap lodging as possible in town or get someone to share expenses of this house, and find a cottage, perhaps at Campden for the children. (c)
Q:
In confidence, life at the moment is devilishly involved, psychologically. War offers the only possible solution. Glad you liked The Lawless Roads. Considering it was written in six months. I don’t think it’s bad. (c)
Q:
I have always found too that Americans – I have noticed it in proof readers – resent any departure from the usual practice. How often have I had an adjective queried and some banal cliché suggested in its place. (c)
Q:
You are missing nothing here. Only the faint susurrus of the intellectuals dashing for ministry posts. (c)
Q:
To send the sympathy of strangers at such a cruel time seems like a mockery. (c)
Q:
I like the conscienceless savoir faire. (c)
Q:
I was thinking out an idea yday of an organisation of war authors parallel to the war artists. They would be given acting rank & assigned to the various fronts, to do an objective, non-newsy & unpropaganda [?] picture of the war – for publication in England & America – composite books probably. I can’t help feeling there’s something here: they should be people who are published in America anyway on their name [?]. Of course the idea behind it is to avoid being sent for six weary months of training to Catterick or some other hole. (c)
Q:
I must stop & read an incredibly funny & indecent Hugh Walpole (I am doing Spectator fiction to earn some money).
‘Standing up they embraced until they were indeed one flesh, one heart, one soul. But it hurts to make love standing, so Joe said: “Let’s not bother about lunch.”’ …
Another gem: ‘For weeks they had been constantly together, & during the last week had been without a break in one another’s arms, spiritually when it had been too public to be so physically.’ (c)
Q:
In fact you are objecting to him on the same grounds as people who object to a book because it has no nice characters. The answer is: they are not meant to be nice. (c)Q:
You certainly live now in a stranger world than that priest’s. (c)
Q:
… I feel over-awed without my books. (c)
Q:
I am now literary editing this rag … which isn’t quite as I pictured war.(c)
Q:
The whole war is good for someone like me who has always suffered from an anxiety neurosis: I turn down work right and left just for the fun of not caring. (c)
Q:
the pay being good but with a sinister absence of competition. (c)
Q:
Then for reasons only known to themselves the C.O. thought it would do me good to get a military background, so I was sent for four weeks to a college here & taught how to salute with a little stick under my arm on the march (a thing I shall never have to do.) They also tried without success to teach me to motorcycle on Shotover – this always ended in disaster. As I seemed to be surviving better than the bicycles they gave it up, & gave me flu instead. This was definitely the military background – the hideous little M.O. with dirty yellow fingers, the no heating, the lavatories on the other side of a cold quad, the struggle for water to drink, the dreadful cold soggy steak & kidney pudding on iron trays … I packed a suitcase and fled here, but they’d already added bronchitis to the flu. (c)
Q:
... yesterday on the way to the lavatory I caught sight of myself in a glass huddled in an old yellow overcoat like a humble character in Dostoievsky pursuing the scent of a samovar into somebody else’s flat … (c)
Q:
It’s sad because it was a pretty house, but oddly enough it leaves one very carefree. (c)
Q:
Well this has been a moan. I hadn’t meant it to be. ... I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring. (c)
Q:
Dearest Mumma,...
Only people in Victorian novels do seem to behave so oddly whenever sex rears its ugly head! Tremors and horrors and indignations. (c)
Q:
And at night there are far too many objects flying and crawling for my liking. Wherever one wants to put one’s hand suddenly, to turn on a switch or what not, there always seems to be a gigantic spider. (c)
Q:
... the prizewinner always looks a little silly. And it’s odd that one feels pleased – apart from the hundred pounds which is always useful. ... I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one’s own pleasure. (c)
Q:
A thief got into my living room and stole a loaf of bread, a table cloth... and my sole remaining pair of glasses. (I cabled for more). So I got wire put up over all the windows which gives the impression that one is either living in a prison, a nursery, or a loony bin. (c)
Q:
I heard of your commando activity. It must have been fun. I wish they would take me on as a kind of war historian-observer. With honorary rank and no dull regimental duties. These are the idle dreams of an exile. (c)
Q:
Do write again and let me know more about your nurses’ constipation. (c)
Q:
Then make head office give you over-lapping leaves. Not leaves at the same time, that’s too purposeful like making a date to sleep with a new lech on a certain day. (c)
Q:
I’m assuming for the sake of argument that you are just engaged. In which case, for God’s sake, remember that it’s a distinct possibility to fall badly in love after sleeping with a man, and that’s the kind that goes on. A man improves enormously too under that treatment in the way of nerves, thin-skinnedness, sociability and the like. Only, of course, it mustn’t be done as an ‘experiment’, but because one’s feeling cheerful and a little drunk perhaps and in the mood... (c)
Q:
… actually the prospect of peace now would fill me with utter gloom. War has not yet touched enough people of ours to alter the world. Here the complacency, ignorance and well-being is incredible. (c)
Q:
God bless you, dear. God bless you, dear. I’ve told a lot of lies in 38 years – or I suppose in 35 years, one couldn’t lie from the cradle – but this is true. I hate life & I hate myself & I love you. Never forget that. I don’t hate life ever, when I’m with you and you are happy, but if I ever made you unhappy really badly & hopelessly or saw life make you that, I’d want to die quickly. There’s a cat moving outside the door. If it were you how quickly I’d let you in. (с)
Q:
No, our life is too organized already. Let us leave literature alone. We needn’t worry too much. Man will always find a means to gratify a passion. He will write, as he will commit adultery, in spite of taxation. (c)
Q:
But, mainly through my fault, we have lived for years too far from reality, & the fact that has to be faced, dear, is that by my nature, my selfishness, even in some degree by my profession, I should always, & with anyone, have been a bad husband. I think, you see, my restlessness, moods, melancholia, even my outside relationships, are symptoms of a disease & not the disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one’s material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. I daresay that would be all to the good. … So you see I really feel the hopelessness of sharing a life with anyone without causing them unhappiness & disillusion – if they have any illusions. (c)
Q:
I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you. You’re my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here (c)
Q:
How it applies to people of our kind – ‘of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.’ (c)
Shortly after this letter he wrote a public protest against the treatment of Charlie Chaplin, who had lived for forty years in the United States. The Attorney General ordered that Chaplin be detained when he tried to re-enter the United States because of speeches he had given in support of Russia when it was invaded by Germany. Doubtless as a result of the publicity, Graham was himself granted a visa for only eight weeks. (c)
Q:
Finally separated from Vivien, who refused, on religious grounds, to allow a divorce, he found that Catherine, though willing to conduct an affair, would not marry him for fear of losing her children, and that Dorothy simply would not let him go. On several occasions he came near to suicide... (c) Poor guy. All the gals did him in. Almost.
Q:
Around 1958, Greene also started a novel about school life, but found the subject so grim that he abandoned it in favour of leprosy. (c) I'm sorry but it's really hilarious that it's implicated that school is worse than leprosy. And it's even more hilarious that I agree with this point, to some extent.
Q:
Restless by temperament, he yearned for excitement, but he also believed that something essential about life is revealed in privation, and his travels did not serve merely as a painted backdrop to the stories but were necessary to the work of imagining human reality... (c)
Q:
... he wrote of Sierra Leone: ‘Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst’. (c)
Q:
It is hard to imagine that the greater part of what Graham Greene wrote in his life remains unpublished. Greene once guessed that he wrote about two thousand letters each year. Some have simply vanished, but many thousands have recently come to light, some in dusty filing cabinets, others in out-of-the-way archives. One extremely important collection of letters to his son, wife and mother was recently discovered inside a hollow book. …(c) Seriously??
Q:
I met a farmer at lunch the other day who was employing two lunatics; what fine workers they were, he said; and how loyal. (c)
Q:
In the midst of a simmering dispute over money, the Viking Press proposed that Greene change the title of Travels with My Aunt to something more saleable. He cabled his agent: ‘Would rather change publisher than title. Graham Greene’. (c)
Q:
Although an admirer of Dubliners, Greene, like Roddy Doyle, thought Joyce’s Ulysses one of the most overrated classics and a ‘big bore’. (c)
Q:
I believe I’ve got a book coming. I feel so excited that I spell out your name in full carefully sticking my tongue between my teeth to pronounce it right. The act of creation’s awfully odd & inexplicable like falling in love. (c)
Q:
Some of Greene’s biographers have imputed to him, without other evidence, all the moral flaws to be found in his characters. Indeed, his situation has been like that of Dame Muriel Spark, who observed: ‘There’s a lot of people think they can take my books and analyse me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer. (c)
Q:
One can’t believe 365 days a year, but my faith tells me that my reasoning is wrong. (c)
Q:
‘I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.’ (c)
Q:
His daughter recalls that he looked on his own death with great curiosity as to what, if anything, lay ahead. It was, for him, another journey without maps. (c)
Q:
The Abbey itself lighted up brilliantly, but outside the door nothing but a great bank of mist, with now and again a vague steel helmeted figure appearing, only to disappear again. (c)
Q:
There’s a most marvellous fog here to-day, my love. It makes walking a thrilling adventure. I’ve never been in such a fog before in my life. If I stretch out my walking stick in front of me, the ferrule is half lost in obscurity. Coming back I twice lost my way, & ran into a cyclist, to our mutual surprise. Stepping off a pavement to cross to the other side becomes a wild & fantastic adventure, like sailing into the Atlantic to find New York, with no chart or compass. Once where the breadth of the road was greater than the normal, I found myself back on the same pavement, as I started, having slowly swerved in my course across the road. I’ve got to sally out now & find my little Editor to give him some tea. If you never hear from me again, you will know that somewhere I am moving round in little plaintive circles, looking for a pavement. (c)
Q:
Do you know anyone in England who owns a revolver? The consensus of opinion seems to be that one must have a revolver. My own feeling is that it would be more dangerous to me than to anyone else, and I certainly can’t afford to buy one. An amusing result of this trip seems to be that one is likely to be offered the most amazing variety of jobs, varying from the most august to the most farcical, adoption by old Harris as his successor as Parliamentary Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society. But this in confidence. I have to be stared at and my private life examined by a committee of philanthropists; I’m afraid I shan’t get by this. (c)
Q:
Scandinavians are terribly Scandinavian. (c)
Q:
I had a painful purgatorial lunch yday with Grigson, Spender & Rosamond Lehmann, my mind clouded with aspirins. I hadn’t met S. before: he struck me as having too much human kindness. A little soft. (c)
Q:
The baby is crying, & I have ten books accumulated for review & this damned thriller to write. (с)
Q:
The other fly in the ointment is a libel action. I don’t know whether you remember the drunk party at Freetown in Journey Without Maps. I called the drunk, whose real name was quite different, Pa Oakley. It now turns out that there is a Dr P. D. Oakley, head of the Sierra Leone Medical Service. The book’s been withdrawn (luckily all but 200 copies have been sold), writs have been served, and he’s out for damages! Anxious days. (c) Wow. Who would have gussed that an author's life is so rife with strife. Ridiculous.
Q:
Casting is proving very different. Menzies finds lovely people with appallingly tough faces, but when they open their mouths they all have Oxford accents. (c)
Q:
I was driven distracted by rats when I discovered in the house of a Norwegian, the widow of an American coffee planter, a copy of The Hotel, the only book of yours I hadn’t read. ...
Your book was so infinitely more actual than the absurd situation. (c)
Q:
I see things rather as follows: immediate conscription is certain. Therefore a. one may find oneself in the army with or without a commission. This means small earning power and only a small allowance. In that case one must make one’s savings go as far and as long as possible. Under those circumstances I should feel very grateful if my family were boarded out either with Eleanor or you on some sharing basis: we’d contribute of course to rates, labour etc as well as board. And this house would be shut up or let.
b. one would find oneself in some ministry – of information or propaganda at a reasonable salary. In that case I should take as cheap lodging as possible in town or get someone to share expenses of this house, and find a cottage, perhaps at Campden for the children. (c)
Q:
In confidence, life at the moment is devilishly involved, psychologically. War offers the only possible solution. Glad you liked The Lawless Roads. Considering it was written in six months. I don’t think it’s bad. (c)
Q:
I have always found too that Americans – I have noticed it in proof readers – resent any departure from the usual practice. How often have I had an adjective queried and some banal cliché suggested in its place. (c)
Q:
You are missing nothing here. Only the faint susurrus of the intellectuals dashing for ministry posts. (c)
Q:
To send the sympathy of strangers at such a cruel time seems like a mockery. (c)
Q:
I like the conscienceless savoir faire. (c)
Q:
I was thinking out an idea yday of an organisation of war authors parallel to the war artists. They would be given acting rank & assigned to the various fronts, to do an objective, non-newsy & unpropaganda [?] picture of the war – for publication in England & America – composite books probably. I can’t help feeling there’s something here: they should be people who are published in America anyway on their name [?]. Of course the idea behind it is to avoid being sent for six weary months of training to Catterick or some other hole. (c)
Q:
I must stop & read an incredibly funny & indecent Hugh Walpole (I am doing Spectator fiction to earn some money).
‘Standing up they embraced until they were indeed one flesh, one heart, one soul. But it hurts to make love standing, so Joe said: “Let’s not bother about lunch.”’ …
Another gem: ‘For weeks they had been constantly together, & during the last week had been without a break in one another’s arms, spiritually when it had been too public to be so physically.’ (c)
Q:
In fact you are objecting to him on the same grounds as people who object to a book because it has no nice characters. The answer is: they are not meant to be nice. (c)Q:
You certainly live now in a stranger world than that priest’s. (c)
Q:
… I feel over-awed without my books. (c)
Q:
I am now literary editing this rag … which isn’t quite as I pictured war.(c)
Q:
The whole war is good for someone like me who has always suffered from an anxiety neurosis: I turn down work right and left just for the fun of not caring. (c)
Q:
the pay being good but with a sinister absence of competition. (c)
Q:
Then for reasons only known to themselves the C.O. thought it would do me good to get a military background, so I was sent for four weeks to a college here & taught how to salute with a little stick under my arm on the march (a thing I shall never have to do.) They also tried without success to teach me to motorcycle on Shotover – this always ended in disaster. As I seemed to be surviving better than the bicycles they gave it up, & gave me flu instead. This was definitely the military background – the hideous little M.O. with dirty yellow fingers, the no heating, the lavatories on the other side of a cold quad, the struggle for water to drink, the dreadful cold soggy steak & kidney pudding on iron trays … I packed a suitcase and fled here, but they’d already added bronchitis to the flu. (c)
Q:
... yesterday on the way to the lavatory I caught sight of myself in a glass huddled in an old yellow overcoat like a humble character in Dostoievsky pursuing the scent of a samovar into somebody else’s flat … (c)
Q:
It’s sad because it was a pretty house, but oddly enough it leaves one very carefree. (c)
Q:
Well this has been a moan. I hadn’t meant it to be. ... I’ve had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring. (c)
Q:
Dearest Mumma,...
Only people in Victorian novels do seem to behave so oddly whenever sex rears its ugly head! Tremors and horrors and indignations. (c)
Q:
And at night there are far too many objects flying and crawling for my liking. Wherever one wants to put one’s hand suddenly, to turn on a switch or what not, there always seems to be a gigantic spider. (c)
Q:
... the prizewinner always looks a little silly. And it’s odd that one feels pleased – apart from the hundred pounds which is always useful. ... I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one’s own pleasure. (c)
Q:
A thief got into my living room and stole a loaf of bread, a table cloth... and my sole remaining pair of glasses. (I cabled for more). So I got wire put up over all the windows which gives the impression that one is either living in a prison, a nursery, or a loony bin. (c)
Q:
I heard of your commando activity. It must have been fun. I wish they would take me on as a kind of war historian-observer. With honorary rank and no dull regimental duties. These are the idle dreams of an exile. (c)
Q:
Do write again and let me know more about your nurses’ constipation. (c)
Q:
Then make head office give you over-lapping leaves. Not leaves at the same time, that’s too purposeful like making a date to sleep with a new lech on a certain day. (c)
Q:
I’m assuming for the sake of argument that you are just engaged. In which case, for God’s sake, remember that it’s a distinct possibility to fall badly in love after sleeping with a man, and that’s the kind that goes on. A man improves enormously too under that treatment in the way of nerves, thin-skinnedness, sociability and the like. Only, of course, it mustn’t be done as an ‘experiment’, but because one’s feeling cheerful and a little drunk perhaps and in the mood... (c)
Q:
… actually the prospect of peace now would fill me with utter gloom. War has not yet touched enough people of ours to alter the world. Here the complacency, ignorance and well-being is incredible. (c)
Q:
God bless you, dear. God bless you, dear. I’ve told a lot of lies in 38 years – or I suppose in 35 years, one couldn’t lie from the cradle – but this is true. I hate life & I hate myself & I love you. Never forget that. I don’t hate life ever, when I’m with you and you are happy, but if I ever made you unhappy really badly & hopelessly or saw life make you that, I’d want to die quickly. There’s a cat moving outside the door. If it were you how quickly I’d let you in. (с)
Q:
No, our life is too organized already. Let us leave literature alone. We needn’t worry too much. Man will always find a means to gratify a passion. He will write, as he will commit adultery, in spite of taxation. (c)
Q:
But, mainly through my fault, we have lived for years too far from reality, & the fact that has to be faced, dear, is that by my nature, my selfishness, even in some degree by my profession, I should always, & with anyone, have been a bad husband. I think, you see, my restlessness, moods, melancholia, even my outside relationships, are symptoms of a disease & not the disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one’s material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. I daresay that would be all to the good. … So you see I really feel the hopelessness of sharing a life with anyone without causing them unhappiness & disillusion – if they have any illusions. (c)
Q:
I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you. You’re my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here (c)
Q:
How it applies to people of our kind – ‘of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.’ (c)
December 2, 2019
Graham Greene was a master stylist. It's a shame he got labeled "a Catholic novelist" by the ill-informed. Greene himself disdained the label and I think it's kept some readers away from reading him and may have cost him a Nobel Prize, as the head of the Swedish Academy himself admitted in an interview.
I don't agree that 10,000 hours alone is enough to master something. There's the need for some innate talent to build on, as was the case with Greene.
On that note, what I immediately noticed in starting in on this selection of his letters is that at the age of 16 he was already a good writer. He had excellent powers of observation and a real knack for rendering descriptive prose that revealed people inside and out.
This volume inspired me to read the rest of Greene I had not got to yet.
---------
Just read an intro to one of Greene's books. The writer didn't get it. It's well known by Greene followers that he converted to Catholicism in his 20's to marry a young Catholic woman. The marriage was a mistake, but so was his conversion. As seen in some of his novels, Greene was heavily afflicted by doubt and Catholic guilt, at least through the writing of The End of the Affair.
By the time he wrote the "Burnt-Out Case," almost a decade later, he was done with all that and was flagging the hypocrisy of many who were professing the faith.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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His writing discipline enabled him to publish a novel a year.
https://www.williamlanday.com/2009/07...
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Among Greene's 24 novels, many of which were adapted into films, were "The Power and the Glory," "The Heart of the Matter," "The Third Man," "The Quiet American," "Our Man in Havana," "The Comedians," "The Honorary Consul" and "The Human Factor." 27 Languages, 20 Million Copies.
An excellent recap of his life and work.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
I don't agree that 10,000 hours alone is enough to master something. There's the need for some innate talent to build on, as was the case with Greene.
On that note, what I immediately noticed in starting in on this selection of his letters is that at the age of 16 he was already a good writer. He had excellent powers of observation and a real knack for rendering descriptive prose that revealed people inside and out.
This volume inspired me to read the rest of Greene I had not got to yet.
---------
Just read an intro to one of Greene's books. The writer didn't get it. It's well known by Greene followers that he converted to Catholicism in his 20's to marry a young Catholic woman. The marriage was a mistake, but so was his conversion. As seen in some of his novels, Greene was heavily afflicted by doubt and Catholic guilt, at least through the writing of The End of the Affair.
By the time he wrote the "Burnt-Out Case," almost a decade later, he was done with all that and was flagging the hypocrisy of many who were professing the faith.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
-----------
His writing discipline enabled him to publish a novel a year.
https://www.williamlanday.com/2009/07...
------
Among Greene's 24 novels, many of which were adapted into films, were "The Power and the Glory," "The Heart of the Matter," "The Third Man," "The Quiet American," "Our Man in Havana," "The Comedians," "The Honorary Consul" and "The Human Factor." 27 Languages, 20 Million Copies.
An excellent recap of his life and work.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
December 3, 2014
I enjoyed reading this, much of it I found fascinating. Greene's correspondence with family members and love relationships like Catherine Walston weren't interesting to me. The letters to other writers and various public figures were very interesting. I discovered a lot, mostly from the background information by the editor Richard Greene (no relation), preceding a letter, which I found was some of the most enlightening sections of the book.
January 23, 2009
http://miamisunpost.com/archives/2009...
Bound - Miami SunPost Jan. 22, 2009
An Envied Life
Rifling Through the Letters of Graham Greene
By John Hood
There might be more debauching ways to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon (drunk amid the bikinis at the Shore Club, smashed in the afternoon at News Lounge, bombed on a boat in the middle of Biscayne Bay), but there are hardly more edifying ways to spend the day than by backtracking through the life and work of the late, great Graham Greene.
Which was why I was so keen this week to get my mitts on Richard Greene’s Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (Norton, $35), an extraordinarily comprehensive overview of what is to me a very envied life.
First some background:
Novelist, screenwriter and erstwhile foreign correspondent, Greene was responsible for some of the 20th century’s most remarkable works of fiction — and of film. Of his 25 novels and novellas (two of which he repudiated and never republished), at least 15 were made into movies, including Stamboul Train (as Orient Express), A Gun for Sale (as This Gun for Hire), The Power and the Glory (as The Fugitive), Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians and The Human Factor.
But these weren’t just any ol’ adaptations. Of the 15, the majority were directed by some of cinema’s most keen-eyed lensmen, among them Fritz Lang, John Ford, Edward Dmytryk and Otto Preminger. Hell, The Quiet American alone was directed by both Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1958) and Philip Noyce (2002). Yet as remarkable as was each of the aforementioned, none made his way from page to screen with as much legend and longevity as The Third Man.
Written and shot in 1949 (Greene wrote the novella as background for the film), director Carol Reed’s classic film noir starred Joseph Cotten as an out-of-work writer of pulp Westerns and Orson Welles as the elusive Harry Lime, whose character was based on double agent Kim Philby, Greene’s superior in the British Secret Service during World War II and a man to whom Greene remained allegiant throughout. Welles, famously, was incredibly difficult, showing up to the set weeks late and refusing, among other things, to shoot in the labyrinthine sewers of Vienna, which forced the producers — Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, who feuded throughout and refused to be credited — to build separate sets on a London soundstage.
Reed and Greene, though, were old hands at making movie magic. Both had received Oscar nominations for their work in 1948’s The Fallen Idol, and each had by then developed a steely British resolve, especially when it came to the temperaments of Hollywood. So it was no surprise that The Third Man would go on to win the Grand Prize at Cannes and earn Reed another nod from The Academy (and a win for cinematographer Robert Krasker).
But I digress. Not a difficult thing to do when it concerns a figure as formidable as Graham Greene. But it’s just such a digression that makes thumbing through Richard Greene’s edit of Graham Greene’s letters so enjoyable.
Arranged by the books (which, after all, were what truly defined the man), A Life really begins with Doubleday, Doran’s acceptance of 1929’s The Man Within and doesn’t let up till 1978’s spy-tingling The Human Factor. And while there’s no correspondence between Greene and Otto Preminger (who’d shoot the ’79 film) or Tom Stoppard (who would write the screenplay), letters to the likes of journalist Bernard Diederich (who set up Greene’s visit with Panamanian strongman Omar Torrijos), novelist Auberon Waugh (whose diaries Greene dug), writer Shirley Hazzard (who’d go on to pen Greene on Capri) and British media-personality Malcolm Muggeridge (who’d converted to Catholicism and was keen to get Greene on TV) more than make up for any lapse you may feel. There’s even a short note to Fidel Castro — whom Greene had met 16 years earlier — on behalf of two poets then imprisoned in Cuba.
Greene was a bit of a rake. Till his death he carried on numerous affairs, including one with Swedish screen sensation Anita Bjork, and correspondence with all his women runs throughout A Life. A former spy, there are tidbits of secret doings between Philby and Muggeridge and other of his war-time contemporaries. There are famous literary friendships, both as peer (Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh) and as advocate (R.K. Narayan, Muriel Spark). Mostly though there’s the trajectory of a man who sought out and made for worlds on edge (Mexico, Haiti, the Congo) and always had time enough write it all down — and to write back.
If you’re not already a fan of Graham Greene, best you first read the books and see the films. But if you’re at all familiar with Greene’s formidable body of great, good work (and there are many among us), then this deftly edited collection of letters will provide an uncommon joy, and an inside look into what only can be described as — yes, I’ll say it again — an envied life.
Bound - Miami SunPost Jan. 22, 2009
An Envied Life
Rifling Through the Letters of Graham Greene
By John Hood
There might be more debauching ways to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon (drunk amid the bikinis at the Shore Club, smashed in the afternoon at News Lounge, bombed on a boat in the middle of Biscayne Bay), but there are hardly more edifying ways to spend the day than by backtracking through the life and work of the late, great Graham Greene.
Which was why I was so keen this week to get my mitts on Richard Greene’s Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (Norton, $35), an extraordinarily comprehensive overview of what is to me a very envied life.
First some background:
Novelist, screenwriter and erstwhile foreign correspondent, Greene was responsible for some of the 20th century’s most remarkable works of fiction — and of film. Of his 25 novels and novellas (two of which he repudiated and never republished), at least 15 were made into movies, including Stamboul Train (as Orient Express), A Gun for Sale (as This Gun for Hire), The Power and the Glory (as The Fugitive), Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians and The Human Factor.
But these weren’t just any ol’ adaptations. Of the 15, the majority were directed by some of cinema’s most keen-eyed lensmen, among them Fritz Lang, John Ford, Edward Dmytryk and Otto Preminger. Hell, The Quiet American alone was directed by both Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1958) and Philip Noyce (2002). Yet as remarkable as was each of the aforementioned, none made his way from page to screen with as much legend and longevity as The Third Man.
Written and shot in 1949 (Greene wrote the novella as background for the film), director Carol Reed’s classic film noir starred Joseph Cotten as an out-of-work writer of pulp Westerns and Orson Welles as the elusive Harry Lime, whose character was based on double agent Kim Philby, Greene’s superior in the British Secret Service during World War II and a man to whom Greene remained allegiant throughout. Welles, famously, was incredibly difficult, showing up to the set weeks late and refusing, among other things, to shoot in the labyrinthine sewers of Vienna, which forced the producers — Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, who feuded throughout and refused to be credited — to build separate sets on a London soundstage.
Reed and Greene, though, were old hands at making movie magic. Both had received Oscar nominations for their work in 1948’s The Fallen Idol, and each had by then developed a steely British resolve, especially when it came to the temperaments of Hollywood. So it was no surprise that The Third Man would go on to win the Grand Prize at Cannes and earn Reed another nod from The Academy (and a win for cinematographer Robert Krasker).
But I digress. Not a difficult thing to do when it concerns a figure as formidable as Graham Greene. But it’s just such a digression that makes thumbing through Richard Greene’s edit of Graham Greene’s letters so enjoyable.
Arranged by the books (which, after all, were what truly defined the man), A Life really begins with Doubleday, Doran’s acceptance of 1929’s The Man Within and doesn’t let up till 1978’s spy-tingling The Human Factor. And while there’s no correspondence between Greene and Otto Preminger (who’d shoot the ’79 film) or Tom Stoppard (who would write the screenplay), letters to the likes of journalist Bernard Diederich (who set up Greene’s visit with Panamanian strongman Omar Torrijos), novelist Auberon Waugh (whose diaries Greene dug), writer Shirley Hazzard (who’d go on to pen Greene on Capri) and British media-personality Malcolm Muggeridge (who’d converted to Catholicism and was keen to get Greene on TV) more than make up for any lapse you may feel. There’s even a short note to Fidel Castro — whom Greene had met 16 years earlier — on behalf of two poets then imprisoned in Cuba.
Greene was a bit of a rake. Till his death he carried on numerous affairs, including one with Swedish screen sensation Anita Bjork, and correspondence with all his women runs throughout A Life. A former spy, there are tidbits of secret doings between Philby and Muggeridge and other of his war-time contemporaries. There are famous literary friendships, both as peer (Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh) and as advocate (R.K. Narayan, Muriel Spark). Mostly though there’s the trajectory of a man who sought out and made for worlds on edge (Mexico, Haiti, the Congo) and always had time enough write it all down — and to write back.
If you’re not already a fan of Graham Greene, best you first read the books and see the films. But if you’re at all familiar with Greene’s formidable body of great, good work (and there are many among us), then this deftly edited collection of letters will provide an uncommon joy, and an inside look into what only can be described as — yes, I’ll say it again — an envied life.
March 8, 2021
Sometimes people give you a book and you say thanks! and then mutter under your breath "I am NEVER going to read this." I love Graham Greene's novels, but his non-fiction is highly uneven and his memoirs are terrible, so I wasn't exactly champing at the bit to read his letters. But after an extra-long wait to pick up some hold books from the library I decided to give this collection a chance, and as you've already guessed, I loved it! His letters are funny, human, and of all things, warm! He was a loyal friend and fierce champion of other writers. He knew and corresponded with everyone, from Evelyn Waugh to Muriel Spark to Fidel Castro to the Pope, but he also took the time to respond to average readers with niggling queries about his books (there's a long letter about whether it was believable that a character would eat maltesers in a movie theater in the 4os). Greene's memoirs are disappointing because they are so guarded, so these letters gave me a much better feel of who he was. I also want to praise the editing by Richard Greene (no relation), whose footnotes are explanatory and witty without ever being intrusive.
August 13, 2020
If you are fan of Graham Greene then this is essential reading. If you are not a fan this is still a good read if you like reading letters of varying lengths and emotions.
Just like Greene' life his letters are truly global and even though I have been a long life fan of his writings I still learnt new bits about his life, especially on his time in Africa and the Caribbean.
Just like Greene' life his letters are truly global and even though I have been a long life fan of his writings I still learnt new bits about his life, especially on his time in Africa and the Caribbean.
October 28, 2021
An approach to the biography that is appreciated, allowing the reader to see the heights of Greene's humor and compassion, as well as the depths of his depression. His honesty can be refreshing at times, at other times uncomfortable. After a while, though, reading this feels less like a biography and more like obsessively poring through somebody's mail.
March 28, 2020
Essential reading for GG aficionados.
February 19, 2021
A fascinating insight into the man behind the words. Surprising how many famous people he knew. The Philby letters are without a doubt the most interesting.
June 29, 2021
4.5, slightly more balanced portrait of the man and the writer than the biographies
Good adjunct to Russian Roulette, the new biography from the same author who edited this collection of letters
Good adjunct to Russian Roulette, the new biography from the same author who edited this collection of letters
February 2, 2009
I think a selected-letters is the best form of biography for a writer, for whom (I’m projecting here) the distinction between prose-as-art and prose-as-communication is whisker-thin. This collection, edited by Richard Greene (no relation, he’s hasty to clarify), spans nearly seventy years, from Graham’s letters to his mother to notes to his grandchildren, through his pleading courtship with his wife Vivien (for whom, sadly, with the hindsight of objectivity, he was spectaculary ill-suited) and love letters to mistresses major and minor, with restless return addresses ranging from Mexico City to Sierra Leone to Saigon, Buenos Aires, Haiti and Antibes (a city in the south of France where he spent decades as a tax exile).
The reader can trace the intellectual, idiosyncratic fluidity of Greene’s politics—during the Cold War, he was dissatisfied both with what he saw as the inflexible jingoism of the U.S. (at the height of McCarthyism, he famously dared the State Department to deny him a visa based on his having been a Communist for six weeks at Oxford. Some non-literary-minded diplomat complied) and the USSR’s brutal suppression of artistic dissent. Religion, too, was essential to Greene; though he wavered in belief and was never particularly pious (see mistresses, above), Catholic notions of sin and redemption were never far from his fiction. He’s obviously tickled when, in 1965, Pope Paul VI invites him for an informal audience and reveals he’s read several of his books, even “The Power and the Glory,” which a previous Vatican administration had found troubling in its bleakness; Greene writes his daughter Lucy, “He said there would be always things in my books which offended some Catholics, but not to bother about that!”
My favorite missives are Greene's correspondence with Evelyn Waugh--no surprise they knew each other, being English Catholic novelists born in the early 1900s, but I hadn't known they were such fierce and affectionate friends. I'll have to hunt up a selected of Waugh's to read the responses. Particularly vindicating was his letter regarding David O. Selznick’s plan in the late 40s to film “Brideshead Revisited” (Greene was tapped for the screenplay): “I would rather it had been any other man almost than Selznick behind this, because he is an extraordinarily stupid and conventionally-minded man.” Waugh took his advice and dropped the project, and “Brideshead” didn’t make it to the big screen until last year, with a rather lesser scribe at the helm.
The reader can trace the intellectual, idiosyncratic fluidity of Greene’s politics—during the Cold War, he was dissatisfied both with what he saw as the inflexible jingoism of the U.S. (at the height of McCarthyism, he famously dared the State Department to deny him a visa based on his having been a Communist for six weeks at Oxford. Some non-literary-minded diplomat complied) and the USSR’s brutal suppression of artistic dissent. Religion, too, was essential to Greene; though he wavered in belief and was never particularly pious (see mistresses, above), Catholic notions of sin and redemption were never far from his fiction. He’s obviously tickled when, in 1965, Pope Paul VI invites him for an informal audience and reveals he’s read several of his books, even “The Power and the Glory,” which a previous Vatican administration had found troubling in its bleakness; Greene writes his daughter Lucy, “He said there would be always things in my books which offended some Catholics, but not to bother about that!”
My favorite missives are Greene's correspondence with Evelyn Waugh--no surprise they knew each other, being English Catholic novelists born in the early 1900s, but I hadn't known they were such fierce and affectionate friends. I'll have to hunt up a selected of Waugh's to read the responses. Particularly vindicating was his letter regarding David O. Selznick’s plan in the late 40s to film “Brideshead Revisited” (Greene was tapped for the screenplay): “I would rather it had been any other man almost than Selznick behind this, because he is an extraordinarily stupid and conventionally-minded man.” Waugh took his advice and dropped the project, and “Brideshead” didn’t make it to the big screen until last year, with a rather lesser scribe at the helm.
could-not-finish
September 25, 2011This book is prrof that some men are not only in touch with their feelings, but able to communicte them to others, and that was a very refreshing revelation, as none of the men I know can do that.
But I shall not continue with the book. I have only read a sample of the letters, and find that I do not know the majority of the people they are written to, or the majority of the events that they are written about. I should imagine that for more educated readers this book is a delight, but for me it is a bit of a drag.
But I shall not continue with the book. I have only read a sample of the letters, and find that I do not know the majority of the people they are written to, or the majority of the events that they are written about. I should imagine that for more educated readers this book is a delight, but for me it is a bit of a drag.
March 10, 2014
I read this book because Mr. Greene's name appears so often in other books I've read. He is not an author I'd care for but he seems to have accomplished much for what he believed in. I realize the terrific work editing letters can be--but for those of us not having read Mr. Greene's works (except Travels with my Aunt) just a little more background information would have helped.
June 26, 2009
I enjoyed it, though maybe not as much as one of Graham Greene's novels. It was full of interesting insights about the role of Catholicism in his life and his personal relationships, which gave me a little insight, perhaps, into some of his novels that I love, like the End of the Affair.
April 3, 2017
I am only half way done and this is a powerful insight into Greene. One forgets that before the internet, one wrote personal thoughts in letters and after one is dead, many truths, ambiguities and perhaps some lies come out. This is the case for Greene.
October 27, 2012
Greene is one of the best prose stylists of the twentieth century, and he had an amazing life, and yes these letters make it all seem a tad dull. Nowhere near as interesting as the letters of William Burroughs or Raymond Chandler. Greene rarely discusses the writing process either.
May 29, 2017
An unfriendly and revealing biography of Greene that puts practically all of his writing in a different light.
Want to read
December 20, 2008He said Ulysses was overrated! Gotta check this out.
Read
April 15, 2019Everyone loves to receive a letter.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews