Graham Greene: Political Writer Also by Michael G

Graham Greene: Political Writer Also by Michael G. Brennan EVELYN WAUGH: Fictions, Faith and Family GRAHAM GREENE: Fictions, Faith and Authorship THE SIDNEYS OF PENSHURST AND THE MONARCHY, 1500–1700 THE ORIGINS OF THE GRAND TOUR: The Travels of Robert Montagu, Lord Mandeville (1649–1654), William Hammond (1655–1658) and Banaster Maynard (1660–1663) THE TRAVEL DIARY OF ROBERT BARGRAVE, LEVANT MERCHANT 1647–1656 THE TRAVEL DIARY (1611–1612) OF AN ENGLISH CATHOLIC, SIR CHARLES SOMERSET LADY MARY WROTH’S LOVE’S VICTORY, THE PENSHURST MANUSCRIPT LITERARY PATRONAGE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE: The Pembroke Family THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO THE SIDNEYS: 1500–1700 (ed.) THE LETTERS (1595–1608) OF ROWLAND WHYTE AND ROBERT SIDNEY, FIRST EARL OF LEICESTER (ed.) THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DOROTHY PERCY SIDNEY [1598–1659], COUNTESS OF LEICESTER (ed.) THE SIDNEY PSALTER: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (ed.) DOMESTIC POLITICS AND FAMILY ABSENCE: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney (ed.) THE SELECTED WORKS OF MARY SIDNEY HERBERT, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE, MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE TEXTS AND STUDIES (ed.) A SIDNEY CHRONOLOGY: 1554–1654 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MARY SIDNEY HERBERT, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE (ed.) Graham Greene: Political Writer Michael G. Brennan Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Leeds, UK PalgravePalgrave macmillanmacmillan © Michael G. Brennan 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-34395-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-67432-9 ISBN 978-1-137-34396-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137343963 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For Geraldine, Christina and Alice Brennan This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction: Political Writer ix Acknowledgements xxiv 1 Fictionalized Politics 1 2 National and International Politics 21 3 The Alienated Englishman 40 4 South America and the Outbreak of War 56 5 War Recollected and the 1950s 78 6 A Global Commentator and British Intelligence 96 7 The Alienated Writer 113 8 An International Commentator and Occasional Novelist 131 9 Looking for an Ending 153 Postscript 173 Notes 177 Bibliography 192 Index 197 vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Political Writer All things merge into one another – good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics. Thomas Hardy: epigraph, Honorary Consul, 1973 The merging of ‘religion into politics’, as Hardy proposes, is a distinc- tive characteristic of Greene’s writings.1 The formulating presence of religious issues within his fictions, journalism and correspondence has long been a subject of critical attention. For over 65 years, Greene’s literary creativity and intellectual scepticism frequently depended upon his knowledge of religious matters to fashion dominant narrative and thematic concerns as he insistently wove theological elements into the fabric of his fictions. But his constantly shifting political perspectives, often closely linked with his religious affiliations, have proved much more difficult to categorize. Greene’s writings have been interpreted as offering evidence of earnest political convictions or profound cynicism. Equally, they have been viewed as the expression of a journalist’s dispas- sionate reportage or a novelist’s creative opportunism in utilizing world events as raw materials to stimulate his imagination. Greene admitted that he rarely committed himself absolutely to any specific cause because he was afraid of having the restrictive label ‘political author’ attached to his work. He supposed, however, that whenever he tackled political subjects, he would still be deemed a political writer, admitting that such a designation was perhaps inevitable since ‘politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God’.2 Nevertheless, broad agreement over the importance of politics to Greene’s literary imagination and creativity remains elusive. This study proposes that an awareness of Greene’s eclectic political perspectives from the mid-1920s until the late 1980s is crucial to an informed understanding of his literary productivity. For over six decades Greene’s writings, both fictional and factual, were inspired and under- pinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal. In September 1990, six months before his death, Judith Adamson concluded that Greene’s politics had never been associated with any ‘particular ideology’ since he firmly believed ix x Introduction: Political Writer that writers should be ‘free of fixed affiliations’. He did, however, readily espouse some specific causes: He has been vehemently opposed to American intervention in the affairs of smaller nations and has taken up the causes of Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, Chile, Panama and Nicaragua in particular. At the same time his has been one of the major voices raised in defence of human rights in countries like the Soviet Union. Of late he has allowed that he is something of an old-fashioned social democrat, which is consonant with his quick attachment to Omar Torrijos (described in Getting to Know the General) and his vision of what was then a moderately socialist Panama. But just as often he has talked about the ‘virtue of disloyalty’ and the ‘price of faith’, about disinterested observation and the importance of doubt.3 As an internationally acclaimed writer, Greene habitually linked politics and religion within his fictions and public pronouncements. But his political concerns – whether expressed implicitly in his writings or explicitly in lectures, journalism and letters to newspapers – have tended to be utilized by critics primarily as a means of interpreting the morality of his narratives or his choice of geographical contexts. This book, however, will trace how his diverse and often complex political perspectives provided a foundational source of imaginative creativity for a remarkably productive literary career. Also, as Maria Couto notes, our critical understanding of Greene’s moral perspectives as a writer remains incomplete without recognizing the interdependence of his political and religious sensibilities to his creative impulses: ‘Graham Greene’s novels illuminate the moral sense by structuring the narrative within a framework of political consciousness and the religious sense. They illustrate that religion and politics, traditionally seen as antago- nistic forces, Church and State, sacred and secular, God and Caesar, are elements of the same reality.’4 This is not to say that Greene’s fictional political contexts should necessarily be associated with his beliefs as a private individual or that the latter can be traced into a coherently developing set of personal adherences. Greene never regarded himself as a political activist or factional polemicist and he rarely offered his total commitment to any cause for fear of being publicly labelled a ‘political’ writer. In The Other Man, his 1979 conversations with Marie-Françoise Allain, he insisted (not entirely accurately) that political action was for him ‘writing and nothing else’ (84) and he admitted that he had only ever voted once Introduction: Political Writer xi in a general election. He defined himself as a writer and not a political thinker and, asked whether he believed in the power of political literature, he responded that while some books could exert significant political influence, his own did not belong in this category. He only wrote to defend ideas and did not wish to utilize literature for political purposes, insisting that even if his novels incidentally happened to be ‘political books’, they were never written to ‘provoke changes’ (80), just as his so-called ‘Catholic’ novels were not written to convert anyone. Nevertheless, even though Greene did not

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