A Useful Application of Faith

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE, VOLUME I: 1904-1939 by Norman Sherry

Viking; 783 pages; $29.95

If you have been waiting 40 years to learn the name of the obscure Mexican clerk who was the model for the Judas figure in The Power and the Glory, or if you lie awake wondering who originally owned the revolver that Graham Greene used when he played Russian roulette in 1923, this is the book for you.

* Volume I of Norman Sherry's meticulously protracted biography takes the English novelist step by step, from his birth in 1904 to 1939. Readers of Greene's memoir A Sort of Life may experience a mild paramnesia as they again hear of the novelist's neurotic childhood, his crush on his psychoanalyst's wife, his dissolute years at Oxford, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his beginnings as a journalist, and the physical and spiritual wanderings that led to the writing of his popular moral thrillers.

The proposed Volume II remains open-ended. Greene is 84 and still active (The Captain and the Enemy, his 24th novel, was published last year). Sherry, a professor of literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, has yet to tackle Greene's Africa service with British intelligence, his marital breakup, love affairs, involvements with the movie business, anti-Americanism and friendships with left-wing Latin American leaders Fidel Castro and Omar Torrijos of Panama. One should also expect deep penetration of the privacy that surrounds Greene's life in the south of France, where he has lived since the '60s. A genuine coup would be the identity of the Swedish Academy member who, as rumor has it, blocks Greene's path to a Nobel Prize.

So the best is yet to come, and Sherry, who has had Greene's sort-of approval and cooperation, should be in the best position to get it. Of all the big fish still swimming in the shrinking pond of English letters, Greene is one of the most elusive. As Sherry told the British press this spring, "He will not give you anything. If you don't ask, you won't get, and if you do ask, you might well get a no."

The novelist selected Sherry for the job after reading his 1971 book on Joseph Conrad, Conrad's Western World. Greene was taken with the scholar's unbiased approach and willingness to travel to the remote and hazardous regions that inspired the author of The Heart of Darkness. And indeed, Sherry makes a fuss about his field investigations for this book: "Risking disease and death as he had done, I went to those places and in most cases found people Greene had met and put into his novels." He tells us that he developed gangrene in South America and got dysentery in the same Mexican boardinghouse where Greene was stricken. In Liberia, locale of Greene's first safari, officials he interviewed had their throats cut a week later, when the government abruptly changed hands.

Macho scholarship may satisfy a personal need, but Sherry's tribulations do not yield much about Greene's nature. For that, the biographer hits the conventional paper trail: books, journals, diaries, letters and periodicals. His impressive accumulation supports what readers of Greene's writings have already had reason to suspect: his morbid childhood fears ripened into the themes of his art.

Sherry's dossier reveals a physically awkward and emotionally withdrawn boy who became the scapegoat of his playmates. Neither Greene's autobiography nor his chronicler's researches fully convey the depths of shame and humiliation that must have marked the early years. Young Greene seems to have felt these emotions as a profound boredom that required dramatic action. His suicide attempts by dull knife, hay-fever drops and aspirin foreshadow the lengths to which he would later go in the name of love and literature. He changed religions to win the hand of Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a devout Roman Catholic. When she said that she would rather live with him as a sister, he suggested a celibate marriage. "Greene was in deadly earnest," Sherry concludes, "but as a practical ploy it could not be bettered." Nature took its course; a daughter, Lucy, was born in 1933.

Greene made a useful application of his faith in Brighton Rock (1938). The novel began his reputation as a Catholic writer, although he has usually described himself as a writer who has merely employed Catholic ideas. Sherry takes the broader position that, in Brighton Rock at least, "it is certain that the new dimension his conversion brought to his view of man and God brought also a new dimension to his fiction."

What readers got, and would later get in The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, was tightly plotted melodramas about evil and divine grace as a means of escape. Many critics have admired the craft of these books but have not been convinced of the quality of Greene's mercy. Sherry should have something to say about that quality when he sums up in Volume II. The current opus concentrates mostly on quantity.