Writers, if any good, should lead boring lives. Interventions on the great issues of the day can only be justified as a bit of light relief in order to escape the daily wrestle with words and meanings. It was a very bad moment when Johnson declared that the poet should write as “the legislator of mankind”. That is the road that leads to the dull decency of the writers’ conference.
But there are some great authors who make such a fuss about their views and their actions that their work needs to be judged in relation to their lives. This is especially true of the, largely class-privileged, generation that grew up in the inter-war period and came to delight in the solemnity of commitment and the signing of the manifesto. This was only partly a question of responding to the Janus-headed rise of fascism and communism. This was the first literary generation to capitalise on the death of Christianity and seize the chance to ascend into a secular pulpit in order to instruct. Hence such wonderfully un-selfconscious moments of comedy as Wystan Auden’s judgment that “About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters”. Auden intimates that, after some pretty rough experiences in that department of life, he can offer a judgment. But the literary master, once away from his desk, mostly concentrated on how to mix the best dry martini in Manhattan. His was a voyeur’s view of suffering.
The division between life and work is not so easily made in the case of Graham Greene, who was born a century ago last Saturday. He never tired of quoting Browning on how “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things” - the pretext for a lifetime’s thrill in empathetic experiences, often on newspaper expenses, from Mexico in the 30s to south-east Asia in the 60s. And that easy embrace of us all into his, and Browning’s, first person plural showed a very interwar prejudice in favour of collective action. Greene is the literary exploiter of the collapse of liberal individualism.
Browning’s “honest thief, the tender murderer,/ The superstitious atheist” populate Greene-land. It is a place that obeys the first rule of great art: the need to create a terrain that is faithful to its own imperatives and is wholly unlike any other possible place. And that world’s population of the squalid, the crooked and the fugitive live on because they question all the boring old simplicities about reason, virtue and progress. The 19th-century liberalism that Greene helped to kick into touch had said that reform was obvious: have a cute thought, persuade others of its truth, and then implement it. But in literary terms, he showed how motives are always mixed, how the good can be damned and the wicked end up blessed. Life, happily, sucks.
Behind all this joy in the defeat of good intent lay Catholicism - or rather Greene’s attraction to an antinomian theology that claims that the more you sin the greater your consequent, repentant bliss. It’s unlikely that his acidulated self ever believed in God - but the Catholic doctrine of grace became for Greene a useful bag of literary tricks and explains his use of the ambiguous motive in fiction.
Not since Dickens had such a distinctive series of characters leaped from the pages of the English novel. Greene’s contemporary Evelyn Waugh was the more fastidious stylist. Behind both writers there is the hand of God used as a literary device, manipulating and undercutting human assumptions to its own purpose. But Waugh’s exquisite aestheticism also meant that his characters are often puppets who are merely incidental to the patterning of words and plot. Which is why they so often end up dead or discarded, having been sacrificed to the imposition of an aesthetic order. But Greene’s Scobie and Pinkie, like Mrs Gamp and Pecksniff, have that authentic quality of cross-grained humanity that escapes a book’s confines.