Introduction

Abstract

Literary influence comes easily and dies hard. Graham Greene seems, at least from his undergraduate years, to have experienced an almost fatal attraction for Joseph Conrad. At Balliol, for example, Greene wrote a poem which asserted that ‘no Browne brings me such pleasure, / As my loved Barrie, Conrad, Bernard Shaw’ (129), and in a letter to his fiancée in 1925, he told her ‘I love you more than John Donne … and Joseph Conrad and wet laurels’ (219).1 While it remains unclear if the eventual failure of their marriage can be attributed to Greene’s penchant for such comparisons, his own testimony in the travel journal In Search of a Character (1962) blames Conrad’s ‘too great and too disastrous’ influence (31) for the failure of his second novel, Rumour at Nightfall (1931). In the autobiographical work, A Sort of Life (1972), Greene reflects that ‘There is no spark in The Name of Action or Rumour at Nightfall because there was nothing of myself in them…. All that was left in the heavy pages of the second was the distorted ghost of Conrad’ (A Sort of Life 206). He castigates Rumour at Nightfall as ‘romantic and derivative’ (211), describing its prose in Ways of Escape (1982) as ‘flat and stilted and pretentious’ and its characterisation as ‘non-existent’, explaining that ‘the young writer had obviously been reading again and alas! admiring Conrad’s worst novel, The Arrow of Gold’ (Ways 16–17).KeywordsNarrative ModeReligious DoubtYoung WriterNarrative OpusLiterary InfluenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.