The years from 1939-1955 proved to be the most prolific of Graham Greene's life. This volume presents a portrait of the author at the height of both his spying and literary careers. Greene produced some of his best novels during this time - "The Heart of the Matter", "The End of the Affair", "The Quiet American" - and saw the filming of "The Fallen Idol" and "The Third Man". The same period encompasses his passionate affair with the beautiful American, Catherine Walston, who was married to a British peer, the disintegration of his marriage to Vivien and his long relationship with Dorothy Glover, his activities as a secret agent, and his forays into the conflicts in Kenya, Malaya, and French Indo-China.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Sherry's first volume, covering the years 1904-1939, gave ample promise of launching one of the finest literary biographies of a contemporary writer, and his second volume amply fulfills it. Again, he has enjoyed extraordinary access to Greene himself before his death in 1991, to his much-abused wife, Vivien, and even to Greene's spy buddy Kim Philby in Moscow. He journeyed to many of the exotic places Greene wandered in his peripatetic life, and he has emerged with a riveting picture of a man profoundly at odds with life, but one whose anxieties and obsessions came to reflect those of his violent century. This volume covers the most dramatic period of Greene's life, in which we see him as a fireman in the London blitz, a wartime agent in West Africa, briefly a publisher (where he had wonderful taste but became so bored with office life that he invented a horrendous author who tormented the entire staff) and finally as a brilliantly successful novelist and screenwriter. These are the years of The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man and The Quiet American-all works that, as Sherry painstakingly shows, were closely woven from experience and belief as Greene-ever a would-be suicide-sought potential death in postwar Europe, Malaya, Vietnam and Kenya. Then, as Greene said, "I do seem to muck up everyone I love." Here, in sometimes numbing detail, are his failing marriage and his affairs, first with the plucky but unglamorous Dorothy Glover, later with the gorgeous but determinedly married Catherine Walston, whom Greene pined after, fed on occasional crumbs of nights together, for years. The life of a man so bent on danger, moral and physical, who created from his pain a number of novels supremely emblematic of our times, can hardly help but be vivid. But Sherry himself writes so well, and he so skillfully integrates Greene's own words, published and unpublished, that he turns his biography into something truly special. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
This second volume of Sherry's authorized biography of Greene-the most prolific and critically and financially successful of writers-should receive the strong acclaim of the first volume (LJ 5/15/89). Before he died, Greene granted Sherry, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, access to his papers as well as many interviews. This resulting portrait reveals a man who is suicidal, promiscuous, a professional spy, and so obsessively secret that he would write two versions of a single diary entry. It also reveals a writer at his creative zenith, revealing not only the lives of the characters in his books but by implication his own life and the political times of the 20th century. Sherry manages to bring all the above elements into a cohesive whole. In The End of the Affair, Greene wrote, "pain goes into his writing: you can hear the nerves twitch through his sentences." Biographer Sherry has found that pain and a lot more in Greene's remarkable life.
Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Comm. Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Comm. Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great biography-if you like literature don't miss this.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Life of Graham Greene: Volume II: 1939-1955 (Life of Graham Greene, 1939-1955) (Paperback)
I have read very little of Graham Greene and I have not read Vol 1 of this biography. However I found this Vol 2 (1939-55) an enthralling read. It covers his life during the second world war and then later in Vietnam and Africa. There is a bit too much about his lovesick affair with Mrs Walston (a peculiar arrangment and a bit uninteresting at times) The record of his war service and his time in publishing is fascinating.I guess if you have read the books and are already a fan then this biography is even more valuable. The life of G.G. is a novel in itself,full of colour,sadness and bravery.These biographies can be turgid in the wrong hands but Sherry only uses the details necessary to tell a vivid story.His prose is excellent and flows along. A very enjoyable read and it made want to get reading the novels-and Vol3 which is due in 2000 I believe.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If unsure about a 3-volume biography, start with the 2nd volume first...,
By
This review is from: The Life of Graham Greene: Volume II: 1939-1955 (Life of Graham Greene, 1939-1955) (Paperback)
If you grew up in the fifties reading blockbuster novels and watching hit movies based on Graham Greene's books, you will be fascinated reading about the man behind the stories.
If a three-volume biography is more than you want to read about anyone, you will be more than satisfied reading the second volume of this trilogy. It covers the most productive years of Graham Greene, the man who wrote "The Power and The Glory," "The Third Man," "Our Man In Cuba," and "The Quiet American" to name just a very few; these years (1939 - 1955) are also the most interesting and challenging years for the western world in modern history. The second volume does contain an introduction which encapsulates the first volume. Norman Sherry's writing is a bit uneven, some quite good, but much fairly mediocre. The good news is that Sherry tends to devote chapters to one of three facets of Greene's life: his literature; his relationships; and, his public/private world of adventures in Africa and spying for the British. If one does not particularly care to read about his relationships, it is easy to skim a particular chapter. If one is interested in additional background to the British double spy Kim Philby, one can read slowly a chapter devoted to the relationship between Greene and Philby. It is hard to believe that Graham worked directly for Philby and may have remained in the service of her royal majesty even after Philby fled the country. It is even more difficult to believe that one man could pack so much into one lifetime: trekking across Africa because of his fascination with Joseph Conrad; seeing his house destroyed during the German blitz of London; converting to Catholicism for the sake of his first wife; hobnobbing with the major authors and film stars of the era (everyone from Truman Capote to Ingrid Bergman). At the end of the second volume, after you have read about a man who packed more into one lifetime than seems humanly possible, Norman Sherry tells the reader that Graham has "thirty-six more years wheeling obsessively round the world, compelled it would seem to wander the earth until death." I knew nothing about Graham Greene before I randomly picked up this book (I was not reading novels in the 1950's) and I was barely aware of something called "The Power and the Glory," which, by the way, resulted in a private audience with the pope for Graham Greene. I am so fascinated by him after reading this second volume, I will now read at least one of his novels. Deeply discounted soft cover copies are readily available. Try the second volume; if you enjoy it you may want to have the three-volume hardcover trilogy in your library.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Partial Life Brought to Near Ruin By Messed Up Loves,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Life of Graham Greene: Volume II: 1939-1955 (Life of Graham Greene, 1939-1955) (Paperback)
Sadly, even in death Greene, the master at secrecy, again succeeds at keeping his official, authorized biography at a much distance from himself and his life. Coming in at a bit over 500 pages of primary text, Vol. II is thankfully about 225 pages shorter than the much-too-long Vol. I. But since it covers only about 16 years as opposed to 35 years in Vol. I, each year averages nearly 30 pages. As with Vol. I, this edition needs to be pruned. The middle portion of Vol. II, covering Greene's problems in love (with his wife, first major mistress, and mistress #2) from about 1944-1950, is a jumbled, boring mess. This approximately 150 page section is filled with far too many excerpts from Greene's pathetically repetitive letters to his long-suffering wife and first mistress, and to the new love (who will be replaced in Vol. III). Instead of covering this period chronologically, Sherry separates out portions of Greene's life based on what he was doing (e.g., the period in the 1940s when he was a publisher) and then goes back in time for the next major life activity. This ensures that both Greene's work on two of his major novels (The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair) and even his messed up love life are not addressed in a coherent section. Sherry again relies far too heavily on using Greene's fictional works as primary sources to substantiate his suppositions about Greene's life, as well as Greene's not-to-be-trusted autobiographical works. Fortunately Sherry admits early on that Greene went out of his way to make any biography difficult. For example, Greene sometimes kept two sets of diary entries (one edited, one truthful) and often destroyed the truthful entries. So the reader is warned that the biographer's task was not one of cooperation with the subject, but attempting to cut through the subject's distortions and attempts to keep everything revealing hidden. Unfortunately, since Sherry still had Vol. III to go, it seems like he deliberately chooses not to probe too deeply about far too many interesting issues (e.g., What was Greene talking about when describing a hospitalization tied to his genitals bleeding? And the issue of cigarette-burning sado-masochism?). The best and easily most readible portions of the work are those addressing WWII, especially the various bombings of London, and Greene's travels in Malaya, Vietnam, and Kenya. Thankfully that means the first and last 200 or so pages are most readible, if not always as revealing as such a massive work implies!
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