GREENE, Graham

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation"

Henry Graham Greene  was an English novelist, playwright, and travel writer. He was educated at Berkhamsted School and studied history at Balliol College, Oxford.  After graduating he spent time as a journalist, before having his first novel,The Man Within, published in 1929 to favourable reviews.  Unfortunately his following two novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, were both critical and commercial failures.  Indeed he disliked Rumour at Nightfall so much that he forbade it ever being re-printed, an edict which has been laid on his estate, preventing it being reprinted until 2061.  Fortunately in 1932 he published Stamboul Train which was a great success, and was later adapted as the film “Orient Express”. 

His conversion to Catholicism in 1926 was primarily instigated by his love for his later wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning.  However his conversion from a position of  dogmatic atheism was sincere and permanent, and marked his subsequent literary works.  Unlike his direct contemporary and fellow Catholic, Evelyn Waugh, Greene chose to set his works amongst the under-dogs and down trodden of society, amongst those who sweated in the back allies of life, in fear of sin and failure and imbuing many of his central characters with a sense of hopelessness and guilt.  He also shared with Waugh an inner sense of desolation and in The Heart of the Matter wrote "Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance."   In Brighton Rock, published in 1938, Greene embodied his anti-hero, Pinky, with a guilt-saturated Catholicism which became the central theme of the book.

Greene wrote prolifically for six decades:  his oeuvre contains literary novels, “entertainments” (his term for his thrillers and spy stories),  short stories, and plays, a great many of which were adapted for film or television.  He left Britain for Antibes in 1966 to be close to  his long term lover Yvonne Cloette, and spent the last few years of his life in Switzerland, dying of Leukemia in 1991, aged 86. 

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