Russian Roulette by Richard Greene, review — the dizzying life of Graham Greene (original) (raw)

Michael Korda was 15 when he sailed down the coast of Italy in 1948 on his uncle Victor’s yacht, Elsewhere. Beside him were many famous faces — Vivien Leigh, Randolph Churchill, Carol Reed — and he felt overwhelmed until a stranger handed him a pre-lunch cocktail. “It’s a martini,” the man said. “It can do you no possible harm. I’m Graham Greene by the way.” As they listened to Churchill’s drunken ramblings, Greene confided: “The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people — everything is useful to a writer you see — every scrap.” Later he offered Korda advice about sex, and took him to a brothel in Nice and a bar where American sailors in drag sang Sophie Tucker numbers.

It’s easy to see why Greene’s wicked-uncle sophistication, his familiarity with both yachting film stars and hookers on shore, persuaded the awestruck Korda to become a writer. But it’s puzzling to read, eight pages later in this new biography, Evelyn Waugh’s diary entry that describes a quite different figure. “Mass at 12 at Farm Street where I met the shambling, unshaven and … penniless figure of Graham Greene. He had been suddenly moved by love of Africa and emptied the contents of his pockets into the box for African missions.”

Many of Greene’s books, including The Third Man, feature the betrayal of a friend

Many of Greene’s books, including The Third Man, feature the betrayal of a friend

ALAMY

Greene was a mass of contradictions: the devoutly Catholic promiscuous adulterer, the seedy confidant of popes and presidents, the danger-seeker racked with fear, the connoisseur of combat zones who disliked party politics. His new biographer, Richard Greene (a professor of English at Toronto and no relation), diagnoses in Greene a bipolar disorder that ran in the family. At school his unpopularity in being the headmaster’s son was worsened by two friends-turned-bullies. It explains why many later books (and films such as The Third Man and The Fallen Idol) feature the betrayal of a friend or one-time object of admiration.

A loner at 13, he explored ways of killing himself by self-harming. At 19 he found a revolver and bullets in a bedroom cupboard and played Russian roulette: he put one bullet in the chambers, held the gun to his head and squeezed the trigger. There was only a click. Narrowly avoiding death brought the visual world, for which he’d been hitherto indifferent, into focus. Richard Greene says this story (told in A Sort of Life) wasn’t strictly true. But Greene used the game as a metaphor, claiming he fought off terminal boredom by going on “absurd and reckless” trips to war zones, where “the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver”.

In the early chapters what’s startling is the speed at which life happened to Greene. His first journalistic assignment, while he was at Oxford, was visiting Ireland, aged 19, to report on the Civil War for the Daily Express; hearing his English accent, the locals threw stones at him. Weeks later he was enlisted by the German embassy to report on France’s interference in postwar German affairs.

As a novice writer he was also quick off the mark. At 21 he produced a poetry collection, Babbling April. He published his first novel, The Man Within, at 25. Two more novels were trounced by critics, but he bounced back with Stamboul Train, which sold 16,000 copies and was filmed as Orient Express.

His romantic life was also pretty mouvementé. In 1925 he met Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, a high-minded Catholic virgin with a distrust of sex and marriage. Indulging her unpromising ideals, he offered her a “monastic marriage” and swore he would become a Catholic. This won her hand, and Greene celebrated by losing his virginity to a Soho prostitute. He and Vivienne married in 1927, had two children and stayed married when he moved in with Dorothy Glover, a set designer and children’s author, in 1939. In 1946 he fell for Catherine Walston, his most enduring inamorata. She was American, married to an academic-turned-farmer and had six children and a pilot’s licence. Greene fell for her as she flew him to Kidlington aerodrome. “A lock of hair touches one’s eyes on a plane with East Anglia under snow,” he wrote, “and one is in love.”

His life of restless travelling to hazardous regions, for the Foreign Office or Life magazine, began in 1935 when he visited Liberia to see if the American Firestone company was using slaves. It was a crazy trip, menaced by life-threatening insects, fevers and wild animals. In 1938 he went to Mexico to report on the persecution of Catholics in Tabasco state, where priests were compelled to marry on pain of death, exile or prison. Boredom drove him to a leper colony in the Congo, to Sierra Leone as a spy, and to Vietnam under postwar French rule.

Richard Greene skilfully teases out the political backgrounds of these dismal locations, and the real-life people whom he transformed into fictions. He shows Greene’s amazing knack of turning up when trouble is rumbling. He arrives in Haiti just as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier seizes power with his scary Tonton Macoute paramilitaries (who frisked the writer under his testicles).

Less successful is his treatment of the knotty religious cruxes that hover over Greene’s key novels. Is Sarah, in The End of the Affair, to be taken for a saint? Is Scobie, in The Heart of the Matter, destined for hell or heaven? The trouble isn’t Richard Greene’s grasp of metaphysics; it’s that, to 21st-century readers, discussions of damnation and God’s mercy sound redundant.

As Greene’s rate of book and film production increases, the narrative becomes a dizzying merry-go-round of travel, publication, sex, alcohol, religion, money, adultery, self-loathing, intrigue and betrayal. Sometimes these elements overlap so dramatically, you feel you’re reading a parody. In one chapter Greene and Alexander Korda sail around the Croatian coastline spying for British intelligence. Also aboard is Thomas Gilby, a troubled Dominican priest, who confesses to Greene that he has been having an affair with a married woman. Greene consoles him with pills and whisky. Then Greene learns from another priest that the woman for whom Gilby is unbuttoning his cassock is Catherine Walston.

The book, elegantly sliced into 78 chapters, bounds along with fluency, clarity and wry humour. It doesn’t deliver startling revelations to eclipse Norman Sherry’s three-volume authorised life, but its agenda is clear. Greene concentrates on his namesake’s emotional involvement with victims of oppression in the world’s poorest countries and the Cold War, celebrating his vigorous defence of dissidents, from his old boss Kim Philby to his friend Chuchu Martinez, who ran arms to Nicaraguan rebels. He rescues Greene from seediness and coldness. And he lets you hear an echo of the character in The Quiet American who says: “Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene by Richard Greene
Little, Brown £25, ebook £16.99 pp591