Customer Reviews

The Life of Graham Greene: Volume I: 1904-1939 (Life of Graham Greene, 1904-1939)

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Norman Sherry's thoughtful biography perfectly captures the early years of an honest,lonely,sensitive Englishman with privileged opportunities who becomes a successful novelist. As Sherry pointed out Greene's keen power of observation produced a cynical and realistic view of life. Burdened by anxieties but guided by his Catholic faith Greene was attracted to the epic struggles of flawed underdogs trying to cope with their transitory lives. Sherry ties all this together neatly. Its a book for leisurely reading. You will never regret its purchase.

This is an inspiring, detailed look at a fascinating writer, by an equally fascinating writer. The images of Norman Sherry traipsing through the jungles and Mexico, etc., give one pause and confidence. If his work on Conrad is as detailed and careful, I would suspect he could give the composition of bilge water in the hold of each ship for each trip for each book. If one ever wondered about writers and sources and inspiration and biography and art, start with volume I. You could have no finer introduction.

Here is a case where an official biographer's love of his highly private subject and his desire to make more of his subject than is warranted overrides the editor's need to ensure a biography is interesting, revealing, and readable. This book is about 300 or 400 pages too long. Covering a mere 35 years of Greene's life in over 720 pages of text works out to about 20 pages for each year of his life, and Greene did little of interest for the first 20 years of his life. Almost as bad, Sherry spends too much time going through each book and regurgitates large sections of Greene's works throughout. Anyone who has read the works will be bored. This is especially true when discussing Greene's travels in Liberia and Mexico. Anyone who has read Greene's two travel books will find over 100 pages of this biography mostly a chore, since Sherry spends so much time quoting the travel books. Sherry does clearly discuss how Greene tried to be private during the creation of this biogrpaphy, not revealing what he didn't want to say and forcing Sherry to try to find the real Greene. Sherry is only moderately successful, but it doesn't appear as if he tried too hard. First, Sherry relies far too heavily on Greene's two autobiographical books--even though Sherry constantly points out the serious mistakes and evasions in each. Second, he acknowledges that Greene's diaries have certain pages missing at most interesting times, but then doesn't discuss if he ever even asked Greene to provide the answers to the missing pages. It appears Sherry chose not to dig too deeply for fear of offending Greene or his close circle of equally protective family and friends, who, given Greene's reticence, are critically necessary sources of information. Sherry's lack of objectivity and a desire not to offend seems most in evidence when Sherry spends so little time discussing what a horrible father and husband Greene was, attempting throughout to show that the constantly philandering and absent Greene still somehow truly loved his suffering wife and neglected children. One example of the frustration of this biography: Sherry discusses Greene's sex drive at some length, including his adulterous behavior, with and without prostitutes; however, Sherry doesn't even pinpoint the time, date, place, or person with whom Greene lost his virginity, and the reader had to wait until page 374, the year 1927, before Sherry gives some short shrift to the 23-year-old "young and highly-sexed Greene".

Sherry has certainly done a thorough job of "tracking" Greene, with the result that one gets a rather full picture of this writer. It's easy to throw around words like "great" and so on when talking about Greene, especially if you like him, but in the end I see him as a very entertaining writer who never achieved greatness. (Compare him to Joyce or Tolstoy and you'll see what I mean.) Sherry is a bit of a busy-body and gets into some strange "politically correct" judgments, criticizing Greene for not being properly appreciative of the 'natives' about whom he said many condescending, but possibly accurate things. Sherry seems not to be able to understand why Greene couldn't say nice things about everybody in the same way opportunistic journalists seem able to manage. Well, I don't have the answer to that, except to say that Greene's generation (see Waugh and Orwell) didn't have much patience for propaganda.

This enormously well written and deeply researched biography of over seven hundred pages is just the first tome of a triptych portrait of Graham Greene and covers the period from his birth to the birth of The Power and the Glory. I am already looking forward to long sessions of reading the following two volumes of the series that took Professor Norman Sherry over 29 years to create. So dedicated to his task - and to his loved subject - is Norman Sherry, an English author and University Lecturer, that he moved to the USA in 1983 to have easier access to the vast collection of papers and material of "Greeneland held in American archives.

As well as a completely realized `life' of the author, the book draws fascinating `portraits' of each of Graham Greene's books, from a germ of an idea extracted from a noted experience of a snatch of overheard conversation through the often arduous `birthing' and early days of readership and critical reaction to the author's own reviewing, recollections and opinions of each work in later life. We are offered a structure of each work that truly advances our understanding of each book and character and Sherry details a series of firm references and sources as a foundation to each of the stories.

By the 1940's Greene was recognized as an important author, particularly of the so-called catholic novel. It is strange to read of how this proclaimed atheist become a Catholic in order to win the wooing of his wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning whom Greene awards the title of `soul collector', the last being "the undergraduate versifier" - himself. But the lady was not for easy wooing let alone winning and the only truly tedious reading in Norman Sherry's work is the extensive, repetitious detailing of Grahams long, patient struggle to win his love. Vivien fought to the last deploying every block she could; other suitors, her parents own failed marriage, her faith, and even to the engagement was insisting on a celibate marriage! Not until later in the life-long marriage, after the children are born does she become a warmer character in this book and I still wonder if he would not have been better suited with his brave and vivacious cousin Barbara Greene (later Countess Strachwitz) who tramped with him through Journey Without Maps and was credited with actually helping to save her cousin's fever-threatened life.

Graham's life, as laid out by Norman Sherry in this first volume, proves as fascinating, thrilling and absorbing as his literature.