The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene Jake Grefenstette The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene BY RICHARD GREENE New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021. Paperback: $20.00. xvi + 591 pages. ISBN: 9781324020264. Richard Greene’s The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene is a welcome addition to a recent surge in Greene scholarship—a surge made possible in large part by the biographer’s own prior research into his subject’s life and letters. I first read and enjoyed Richard Greene’s Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (Abacus, 2008) in 2015 for an undergraduate tutorial, which was set (appropriately enough) in the chaplain’s rooms at Oriel College, Oxford. After the tutorial, I recommended Richard Greene’s scholarship to friends both inside and outside the academy. I would do so (and indeed have done) again with this follow-up text, which offers a more narrative-driven and comprehensive account of Greene’s varied literary, romantic, and spiritual life. Two passages in The Unquiet Englishman will be of special interest to Newman scholars. The first comprises a nuanced interpretation of Graham Greene’s recurrent and challenging self-description as “not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be Catholic” (105). This formulation, which has just as often been understood as an ironic affirmation as it has a dismissal of (or even abdication from) his Catholic faith, is read by the biographer in light of Greene’s (equally recurrent, and equally challenging) appeals to The Idea of a University. Richard Greene points us to this seminal passage, which Graham would “trot out” ostensibly in order “to shut down discussion of the Catholic content of his work”: I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man. You may gather something very great and very high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all (105).1 [End Page 83] The biographer here raises a classic problem: by framing himself in negative terms as “not a Catholic writer,” and by invoking Newman’s line (perilously out of context) that one “cannot have a Christian Literature,” has Graham Greene—wittingly or unwittingly—subordinated his Christianity to his craft? Richard Greene’s initial response to this problem is to endorse Ian Ker’s thesis: Graham Greene “has badly misread Newman”—for, properly understood, “Newman was merely arguing against the notion that one could study Catholic writers and exclude pagans” (105–106).2 But in the discussion that follows, Richard Greene admits a deeper sense of irony (and, by extension, understanding of Newman) than is usually allowed.3 Drawing on his (probably unparalleled) knowledge of the development of Greene’s thought and faith, the biographer locates this claim in a period of his life in which “Greene himself was explicitly struggling with the problem of how a Catholic sense of the soul and of providence altered the craft of fiction” (106). “Providence” is the key word here. Catholicism, for Graham Greene, is not merely a jersey that one sports; it is a totalizing description of the universe. To claim that he is “not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be Catholic” is only to ironize, since the nature of providence (as Graham understands it) is such that it extends to every corner of facticity and fiction.4 Such a view is intended to dismantle any clean distinction between “Christian” and “secular” writing. And indeed, this is the very theological drive underpinning Greene’s famous themes of grace and mercy, themes afforded often to his most helpless and hapless protagonists. Richard Greene’s key insight, I take it, is this: that “Greene’s sense of craft” is something finally “shaped by his faith—the faith and the craft are not separate” (106). The second passage for our consideration represents a remarkable development of Richard Greene’s own understanding of the Newman-Greene relationship. In his earlier Life in...