The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

by Richard Greene

Overview

A Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award
A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

A vivid, deeply researched account of the tumultuous life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists, the author of The End of the Affair.

One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A journalist and MI6 officer, Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself.

The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and yet found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies. Above all, The Unquiet Englishman shows us a brilliant novelist mastering his craft.

A work of wit, insight, and compassion, this new biography of Graham Greene, the first undertaken in a generation, responds to the many thousands of pages of letters that have recently come to light and to new memoirs by those who knew him best. It deals sensitively with questions of private life, sex, and mental illness, and sheds new light on one of the foremost modern writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393084320
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	608
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Richard Greene is a professor of English, and the director of the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Toronto. Editor of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, he lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

1 The Dog in the Pram 1

2 Flight 13

3 Backwards Day 23

4 The Revolver 30

5 Casual Corpses 36

6 Marriage 46

7 Rats in the Thatch 52

8 The Devil Looks After His Own 63

9 Minty Stepped on Board 73

10 In Zigi's Town 80

11 Raven 91

12 My Worst Film 97

13 Shirley Temple 101

14 Real Brighton 104

15 The Lawless Roads 111

16 Doll 124

17 Bombs and Books 132

18 The House in the Swamp 137

19 The Ministry of Fear 146

20 Canaries and Defectors 149

21 Mrs Montgomery 158

22 Hot Irons 163

23 Mother of Six 167

24 Banned in the Republic of Ireland 173

25 Lime 179

26 A Piece of Grit 187

27 Points of Departure 190

28 Malaya 200

29 Shoulder Flash 204

30 The Cards in his Wallet 209

31 'C' 211

32 The Bell Tower 214

33 Visas 224

34 The Splinter 228

35 Mau Mau 235

36 Dien Bien Phu 241

37 No One Expects the Inquisition 248

38 A Reformed Character 252

39 Accidents Can Always Happen 256

40 Anita 263

41 Our Man on the Potomac 269

42 The Filthiest Book I Have Ever Read 272

43 6½ Raves 277

44 A Mixture of Petrol and Vodka 284

45 Handshakes and Contracts 288

46 Bombs and Daiquiris 291

47 The Whole Trouble 297

48 Taxidermy Everywhere 301

49 The Separating Sickness 306

50 Alone in a Lift 319

51 Changes 322

52 Death and Taxes 328

53 The End of a Long Rope 335

54 Plastiques 341

55 Masks 343

56 The Real End of the World 351

57 Statues and Pigeons 361

58 The New Life 368

59 Fidel at Night 373

60 Papa Doc Honoured Me 378

61 Morse Code on the Water Pipes 381

62 Behind the Sand Dune 388

63 A House Surrounded by Orange Trees 394

64 No One's Poodle 404

65 Light Bulbs 413

66 About my Best 419

67 Long Spoons 422

68 Effervescence and Vibration 428

69 The Diplomatic Passport 436

70 Storming the Palace 450

71 The Bomb Party 457

72 Three Hostages 462

73 J'Accuse 472

74 I Am the Message 477

75 Better a Bad Man 483

76 Two Faces 488

77 The Late Rounds 497

78 A Sense of Movement 501

Notes 509

Acknowledgements 559

Index 561

Editorial Reviews

10/05/2020

Greene (Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius) presents an exhaustive account of the life of Graham Greene (1904–1991). The writer (no relation to his biographer) grew up in middle-class comfort in idyllic Berkhamsted but struggled with what was eventually diagnosed as bipolar depression starting in his early teens, which worsened as he entered Oxford, where he later claimed to have played Russian roulette six times. The biography creates a vivid impression of how, despite these mental health struggles, Greene kept up an impressive pace as a writer, producing film reviews, screenplays, and such classic novels as The End of the Affair, Brighton Rock, and The Heart of the Matter. His exploits as a world traveler were also prodigious; most fascinating are his experiences in Africa, namely his journey through Liberia on foot in the 1930s to research modern slavery for a humanitarian group, and later, his work as a British intelligence agent in Sierra Leone and South Africa. It’s awe-inspiring that Greene fit so much into a single life, and it’s no small feat that his latest biographer has so skillfully captured that life in a single work that can sit confidently next to Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Greene. Agent: Jill Bialosky, Shipman Agency. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Richard Greene] writes briskly and engagingly, with a wry wit and an endearing fondness for trivia and puns…[Graham] Greene emerges from these pages in three dimensions, as a uniquely fascinating man…We badly needed a sympathetic but clearheaded life of Greene, and this book fills the gap admirably."

Sunday Telegraph - Jake Kerridge

"Authoritative and thoroughly researched, while being superbly readable... [The Unquiet Englishman] should long serve as the standard biography [of Graham Greene]."

Boston Globe - Dan Cryer

"[Richard Greene] displays an authoritative grasp of his subject. In a brisk and transparent style, he covers every chapter of Graham Greens' tumultuous life."

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Mary Ann Gwinn

"Cause for celebration…[Richard Greene] gives us a nicely written and well-judged cradle-to-grave portrait that needed to be conventional and unshowy, and is all the better for it…[He] has mastered a tremendous amount of material."

Spectator - Nicholas Shakespeare

★ 01/01/2021

British author Graham Greene (1904–1991) traveled for much of his life, and his writings often reflected his travels, as biographer Greene (English, Univ. of Toronto; Graham Greene: A Life in Letters), no relation to his subject, makes clear in this detailed study of the influential and widely read writer. Greene wrote about the places he visited not just in the commissioned magazine articles that paid for his travel but also in novels such as The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, and Our Man in Havana. The biographer draws on information unavailable to previous biographers and, in contrast to Norman Sherry's three-volume study, doesn't preoccupy himself with his subject's repeated infidelities. Instead, he writes of a man steady in his work though unsteady in most else, including his mental health. In his travels, Greene often ended up in unusual or unsafe situations, but he remembered all that he witnessed, repurposing it for characters, settings, and situations in subsequent writings. Above all, there was Greene's strict adherence to Catholicism, and his preoccupation with loss of faith and love. VERDICT Greene's life story is both interesting and fascinating, and this balanced account offers the best reading of how his personal life infused and enriched his work.—David Keymer, Cleveland

Library Journal

2020-08-25
A new biography takes an in-depth look at one of English literature’s most peripatetic figures.

Anyone interested in learning about the most violent conflicts of the previous century would get a good start by reading the works of Graham Greene (1904-1991). Born in Berkhamsted, England, he would become one of the literary world’s bravest adventurers, with travels to such hotspots as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Vietnam, Cuba, and Haiti. The clashes he witnessed enliven such novels as The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana, Monsignor Quixote, and many more. Richard Greene (no relation), a professor of English and editor of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, uses recently discovered papers and letters (some were found in a “hollow book”) to offer “an account of his engagement with the political, literary, intellectual, and religious currents of his time.” While many of those papers are revelatory, readers are likely to be frustrated by the author’s habit of seguing from one topic to another without fully developing each one. For example, in 1960, “accidental defector” Guy Burgess asked to meet with Graham in Moscow. But the author gives only cursory details of the meeting before moving on to an account of Graham returning to London with a bout of pneumonia and then moving to France as a tax exile. When the author fleshes out events of his subject’s life, the narrative is more compelling. The book is at its strongest in passages that document Graham’s eventful travels, such as his trip to Indochina for research on The Quiet American, the atrocities he witnessed in Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier and used as the basis for The Comedians, and the many chapters on his travels to Panama and his friendship with military leader Omar Torrijos during the country’s struggles for sovereignty.

A comprehensive but scattershot biography of one of the most spirited writers of the 20th century.

Kirkus Reviews

"Insightful... Though the narrative never loses its focus on Greene as an artist, readers will learn much about the daunting ideological barriers that Greene pushed through to craft his art... A complete portrait of a many-faceted titan."

Booklist (starred review)

"Diligently researched... [A]n astute and sympathetic biography."

Wall Street Journal - D.J. Taylor

"As [Graham] Greene’s rate of book and film production increases, the narrative becomes a dizzying merry-go-round of travel, publication, sex, alcohol, religion, money, adultery, self-loathing, intrigue and betrayal…[The Unquiet Englishman] bounds along with fluency, clarity and wry humour."

Sunday Times - John Walsh

"Thank goodness for Richard Greene, whose splendid one-volume biography…conjures [Graham Greene] in all his perplexing variety…Cogently argued and happily free of jargon, [The Unquiet Englishman] offers a long-needed antidote to ‘dirty linen’ biographers who have sought to expose a darker shade of Greene and, in consequence, lost sight of the books. At last Graham Greene has the biographer he deserves."

Evening Standard - Ian Thomson