(Original Review, 2007-05-15)
There some odd little insights: about how
people used to travel by sea and get horribly ill, but then air travel came
along and changed all that; Greene's very Catholic attitude to extramarital sex
- screw your brains out, go to Confession, go to Mass, go to Communion, come
home, screw your brains out with partner not your wife, go to Confession ...
(I'm Catholic so I think I can say these things); [2018 EDIT: “The Power and
the Glory” was nearly put on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, but saved
by intervention of Cardinal who later became Pope Paul VI]. I’ve always been
fascinated by Greene's “strangeness”: long and curious friendship with Kim
Philby, who he visited in Russia several times, Greene's visa problems with US
in the McCarthy era, Greene's amazing journeys of research for his novels - I
suspect he would have put most of his contemporaries to shame - would I be
right or wrong here, Greene's long friendship with Evelyn Waugh, which has
caused me to reconsider the bad press Waugh usually gets as a nasty personality,
and Greene's failure to win the Nobel Prize because he was Catholic, etc., etc.
As with all “Life in Letters” brought out by
Penguin I've read so far, this is a collection of great richness, and I would
suggest, a must for all Greene admirers.
I remember reading, I think in a Colin Wilson
book, that Greene once played Russian roulette. I was wondering whether this
was true or some sort of fake story. Also weren’t Greene and Waugh both
Catholic converts?
More stuff on Greene from “A Life in Letters.”
The Greene family was quite remarkable - diplomats, spies, explorers - all
sorts of interconnections with Britain's ruling elite. Greene himself became
very influential in the publishing industry. Greene almost financed Muriel
Spark in her early career, regularly sending her 20 pounds when 20 pounds meant
something. She repaid him by sending him copies of her books right up to when
he died. He persuaded Mervyn Peake to edit Titus Groan, thus he helped bring the
world the Gormenghast Trilogy. When Peake was wheel-chair bound and virtually
paralysed he tried to make arrangements to get his expensive care paid for, but
sadly didn't succeed.
He was always doing those sort of things for fellow
writers. Though he wouldn't have a bar of J. B. Priestley, who claimed he was
in one of Greene's early novels and tried to have the novel pulped.
