In flight

The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Three: 1955-1991
By Norman Sherry, Cape, £ 25

This volume brings to an end Sherry?s pursuit of Graham Greene which began in 1976. Sherry informs us on the last page of this book, as he takes leave of his subject and his readers, that Greene once said he would live to read the first volume but not the second, and Sherry would not live to complete the third. This was quite a prophecy since two parts of it stand fulfilled. Sherry has finished the biography but has not completed it since the ending is an unfinished sentence.

Like any book that takes nearly thirty years to complete and runs into three volumes, this book flags in its concluding part. The first volume was a voyage of discovery for the writer and the reader. The second maintained that, and the two of them revealed many things about Greene and his craft. These were important since he was compulsively secretive, loved mysteries about himself and often misled those who wanted to know too much. He may have learnt to do all this as an officer in MI6, and it is not without significance that he counted Kim Philby among his closest friends and, in fact, wrote an introduction to Philby?s autobiography, My Silent War, a book which was a masterpiece of misinformation.

Greene once remarked that the ?trouble about life is that it goes on far too long?. Much the same thing could be said about Sherry?s biography about a very long life. Greene had a lifelong fascination with death. When he was twenty, he had tempted death by playing Russian roulette. As a Catholic he had a horror of suicide, but as Sherry notes, ?he invited suicide by proxy? ? in Malaya during the War of the Running Dogs, in Vietnam, in Kenya during the Mau Mau insurrection, in Papa Doc?s Haiti, during the Communist revolution in Czechoslovakia and in the leper colony of the Congo. Yet, death came to him in his bed, in old age and after a long and debilitating illness which affected his prodigious memory. He had wanted to die peacefully and quickly. This did not happen and his recorded last words were ?Oh why does it take so long to come?? Greene was not quite prepared for what his illness did to him. Only once in his adult life he broke down, in the winter of 1990 when he burst into tears with death staring him in the face.

Sherry, over many years, has stalked Greene ? with his permission, of course. This has produced such pieces of useless information as the names of the prostitutes that Greene visited as a young man. What was it that made Greene keep such a list? There is no adequate answer attempted. In a bizarre footnote, the biographer sees his subject as his doppelganger, albeit passingly. This comes to Sherry because one night in Anacapri, he had woken up to see someone stepping out of his room. He had suspected it had been Greene but could get the confirmation that it had indeed been Greene only at his funeral. The friend who provided the confirmation said, ?Graham felt if you had the right to be a detective following him ? even into the brothels he?d visited, then he had the right to follow you.?

Embedded in this anecdote is a profound question about the art of biography as practised by Sherry. How far is the biographer justified in following his subject around like a detective? Sherry has visited every single place that Greene went to. Greene loved to travel and to wander, he was perpetually in flight, but never away from something, always to something, to discover new places, new people. These then became the raw material for his novels. This part of Sherry?s research, together with his mining of Greene?s private papers ? letters, journals and even dream-diaries ? is laudable, and forms the backbone of the three volumes. Similarly, Greene?s intense relationship with Catherine Walston is worth retrieving since it served as the basis of one of Greene?s best novels, The End of the Affair. But what of the narration of endless details of Greene?s personal life ? his visits to prostitutes being one example ? which neither help in understanding Greene nor provide any insight into his novels? Some of the illustrations are equally irrelevant. There is one picture of the filariasis of the scrotum which is too horrible and repulsive, and adds nothing to what Greene had to say about the affliction in A Burnt Out Case. Of what use is this kind of knowledge, one feels like asking.

Sherry?s third volume nowhere fulfils the promise of the first. The project began as an outstanding biography of one of the great writers of the 20th century and of the human condition, but it ends with little light albeit with an enormous amount of information. Greene continues to be elusive.