THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507200499
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BERNICE H. GROHSKOPF
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
GRAHAM GREENE
The Enemy Within
MICHAEL SHELDON
Random House. 454 pp. $27.50.
GRAHAM GREENE, one of the most widely read of England's 20th-century writers, died in 1991 at age 87. The publication of Michael Sheldon's biography comes almost simultaneously with that of Volume 2 of Norman Sherry's monumental one that concludes in 1955; there are 36 remaining years. One might feel relieved, therefore, that Sheldon has managed to condense Greene's fascinating life into one volume.
But the reader soon realizes that Sheldon, who claims early on in Graham Greene: The Enemy Within that he came to praise Greene, was disillusioned by the less admirable aspects of Greene's tormented life, which he carefully documents. Greene was a man so filled with hatred that he enjoyed making others suffer. He was disloyal, duplicitous, a habitually unfaithful husband; he had male lovers as well, frequented houses of prostitution, was a heavy drinker and was subject to depressions. He was also an uncaring father and an anti-Semite who worked as a spy for the Secret Intelligence Service during the war and after.
Greene learned to spy at an early age at Berkhamstead, the boys' school of which his father was headmaster. Greene senior expected his son to report any misconduct of his fellow students, giving the boy a painful choice of disobeying his father or betraying his schoolmates.
He fell in love with Vivien Dayrell-Browning and was converted to Catholicism, in part to win her love; they married soon after. Many critics consider him to be a Catholic writer whose religious themes dominate much of his work. But Greene himself admitted to an interviewer that he was not a religious man, a truth that David Lodge amplified when he wrote that the value of Catholicism for Greene was literary rather than religious.
In detailing all the more sordid aspects of Greene's social, political and sexual lives, Sheldon provides plot summaries of every major novel to demonstrate the ways in which the novelist's unsavory traits are revealed in his fictional characters. Sheldon, who has written biographies of George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, maintains that biography is ``an art that must subject private lives to intense scrutiny.'' But in scrutinizing Greene, a man ``who made deception a way of life,'' he emphasizes just one side of the man.
Greene's genius, according to Sheldon, was ``marred by a wide streak of malice,'' a comment that again raises the question whether we can condemn the actions and opinions of a person and respect his art. A biography that dwells almost exclusively on the subject's seedier psychological problems is as unbalanced a view as the two-volume encomiums written during the Victorian period.
Sheldon permits his own disillusionment and anger to come through on sarcastic asides and sweeping statements such as: ``No major novelist has shown as much ingenuity in abusing the God of Christianity.'' Readers in search of a brief, balanced version of Greene's life and work will not find it in Sheldon's book. MEMO: Bernice H. Grohskopf is a Charlottesville writer and book reviewer who
specializes in 19th-century British literature. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Graham Greene
by CNB