|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Graham Greene's Two Conversions
| Article
# : |
13603 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
4,362 Words |
| Author
: |
Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh D'Souza is Senior Domestic Policy Analyst at the White
House. Research assistance for this article was provided by
Angela Grimm, director of the Catholic Center at the Free
Congress Foundation. |
Asked if he was disappointed recently at not winning the Nobel Prize, Graham Greene said no, he was waiting for an even bigger prize. Asked what that was, he replied, "Death."
The notion of death as a reward is strange to most modern literature, which confines itself to the area between the womb and grave, paying no attention to what comes before of after. It is this sense of moral claustrophobia that is largely responsible for the tedious pessimism of the modern novel. How many more books are we going to have to endure about bourgeois infidelities in the Hamptons or squinty New York novelists with writers' block? A point has been reached where boredom overwhelms the natural passions. The reader's sense of rebellion and iconoclasm propels him to react, "Nuclear war? Racism? Apartheid? Who the hell cares? Blow up the world. Shut down the rape crisis centers. Give the Nobel Prize to Abu Nidal. Let's have a goodwill treaty with P.W. Botha."
Graham Greene is different. He spares the reader the need for a perverted response. The reason is that he engages. He writes about things that matter. It's not just the fact that Greene, by including the afterlife, paints on a larger literary canvas. It's also that his characters, most of them sordid underworld types, by being conscious of the otherworldly consequences of their actions, take on a richness and depth that is rare. They are not the morally anesthetized killers of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. They are conscious moral agents, acting out free will.
A writer's life
Graham Greene is now in his eighties. He lives as a recluse in a drab two-room apartment overlooking Antibes harbor, ten miles from Nice. Novelist Anthony Burgess visited him there recently and found that he resembled many of his characters. He looked unkempt, lonesome, psychologically tortured. He said he hoped he didn't live much longer, yet he was unsure what eternal fate awaited him.
Greene was born in 1904 in England. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he published his first book of verse. He won critical accolades in 1929 for The Man Within. In 1932 he wrote Stamboul Train, a tale of murder and a Balkan uprising, whose popular success propelled him to produce a string of mystery thrillers. In 1938, a decade after his conversion to Catholicism, he was sent to Mexico to write about religious persecution. As a result, he produced The Lawless Roads and later, a book that some consider his masterpiece, The
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
