Regarded by many as one of the great writers of the 20th century Graham Greene was a prolific and popular English novelist. Born in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire on the 2nd of October 1904 into a large and influential family that owned the prestigious (at the time) Greene King Brewery he lived a life of excesses and sadness.
An unhappy child Greene would attempt suicide on several occasions during his time boarding at Berkhamsted School but fortunately summers spent with his uncle, Sir William, at Harston House seemed to be more enjoyable and in describing his childhood he spoke of learning to read there: “It was at Harston I found quite suddenly I could read — the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. I didn’t want anyone to know of my discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne’s The Coral Island for the train journey home — always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley…”
He would publish his first work (a book of poetry) called Babbling April to very poor reviews in 1925 while still studying History at Oxford but undeterred and after graduating and becoming a journalist for The Times he would go on to publish his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929 which proved to be so popular that Greene was able to become a full time writer.
Often referred to as a Roman Catholic novelist Greene objected strongly to the term preferring to be simply a novelist who happened to be Catholic. Unfortunately, with Catholic religious themes at the root of many of his works especially the four novels Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair which are collectively known as The Catholic Novels which are regarded as “the gold standard” of the Catholic novel the label stuck leaving Greene’s faith inextricably intertwined with his literature.
“Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.”
“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.”
“I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organisations…I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
“Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil — or else an absolute ignorance.”
“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”
“One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books.”
“We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.”
“People who like quotes love meaningless generalisations.”
Suffering from depression for much of his life Greene once wrote to his wife telling her that he had “a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life,” and that “unfortunately, the disease is also one’s material.” and it is true that his depression had a profound effect on his writing. A serial philanderer and eventually estranged from his family Greene died in 1991 at the age of 86 from leukaemia and is buried in the Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland
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