Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 12, 1991 TAG: 9104120928
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A/7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
His subject matter was "modern" and his manner was swift and fluent in the modern way; but he was remarkably productive for the entire length of his adult life, and he wrote so ably in so many forms - novel, short story, critical essay, personal essay, autobiography, verse, stage play and screenplay - that his literary career is as reminiscent of Dickens and Trollope as it is of, say, Evelyn Waugh or Elizabeth Bowen.
When he died last week at the ripe age of 86, I went immediately to the bookshelves to run a finger, as one sometimes does, along the spines of his books. I am an accumulator rather than a collector, so I knew only that I had a lot of Greene's books, not how many precisely. All told, I found I owned 27 Greene titles. That is productivity indeed, and I own far from all the books Greene wrote.
He was, it may be argued, the finest English writer of his time, not only prolific and always readable but profound as well. His conversion to Roman Catholicism while in his 20s gave his books, from beginning to end, a moral vision and a psychological solidity. To those attributes he added immense verbal fluency, a firm grasp of plot, a taste for landscape in all its variety and a great feeling for diverse human characters.
His books had such a strong sense of place - both moral and topographical - that years ago a wag called his fictional world "Greeneland." The joke was apt: A Greene book or story emanated a palpable and immediately recognizable atmosphere unique to its author's mind and style.
He divided his fiction into "entertainments" and "novels," but the distinction was both arbitrary and misleading: His early thrillers, often tales of espionage or intrigue, boast sinewy plots, but so do his later "Catholic" novels, and the early thrillers are as much about the vagaries of human love and loyalty as the later ones.
Many knew him best by his thrillers, nonetheless, and books like "This Gun for Hire" and "The Third Man" made Greene a household name among people who rarely read "serious" books. The fact is, however, that both dealas stringently with moral issues, and with moral isolation, as any of the later, weightier novels.
Greene was, to be sure, a Christian novelist in the same sense as Mauriac or Chesterton; but anyone looking to his books for uplift or messages of comfort will be disappointed. He dealt always with men and women separated from God, not wholly confident of their faith and doomed, it seemed, to perpetual anxiety because of it.
Greene despised authority and made his hatred of it the fuel of his novels, but his heroes and heroines never wholly escaped the authority of belief and fled it "down the labyrinthine ways," as Francis Thompson put it and Greene echoed in a title.
This makes him sound pious, but the opposite is true. Greene had too little piety to satisfy his own need, and that tension lies at the heart of most of his work.
He was perhaps the greatest modern example of the writer who most deserves the Nobel Prize but never wins it. His cantankerous unwillingness to mouth the platitudes of the time probably is responsible. He remained, to the end, skeptical, ironic, pursued by the Hound of Heaven while he restlessly wandered a world as barren as his own "Greeneland."
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB