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Home , George Orwell, The Heart of the Matter, The Name of Action, Why I Write

Sinyard: Links and Contrasts Between and Graham Greene Studies Volume 1 122

totally untrue. Everyone has the material “All Are in his memories for many books, but that is not the same thing at all.” Secondly, at Equal but Some the end of “Fielding and Sterne,” Greene Writers Are quotes T.S. Eliot: “At the moment when one writes . . . one is what one is, and the More Equal Than damage of a lifetime . . . cannot be repaired at the moment of composition.” Others:” Some In Speaking to Each Other, Volume Two (1970), Richard Hoggart said of Orwell that Reflections On “he was one of those writers who are what they write,” and I think Greene was the Links and same. He and Orwell did not just write for a Contrasts Between living; they lived to write. I think one of the reasons that both of them were resistant for Graham Greene a long time to the idea of a biography—and it is curious that they should share one biog- and George Orwell rapher, —was that both felt that their books told more about them Neil Sinyard than an account of their lives would. And what made them “more equal” than most The 2011 Graham Greene other writers of the last century was their International Festival ability to cross the cultural divide: to write in a manner that commanded the attention The title of this paper is somewhat friv- and study of the academic community—for olous and of course indebted to, and a I would guess that collectively, the number variation on, one of Orwell’s immortal slo- of books written about Greene and Orwell gans in . Yet all writers are would total well over one hundred—but to equal in the sense that all of us are potential write also in a manner that was accessible writers with stories to tell and, at the point to a mass readership and has entered the of entry, i.e. the blank page or blank screen public consciousness. Think only of Orwel- staring at you, are all equal. It is at that lian phrases and concepts like “Big Brother” point, though, that equality ends and qual- and “Room 101” from Nineteen Eighty-Four ity starts. There are two relevant quotations and how they have been used and abused I would like to cite here. and what they now portend. In Greene’s Firstly, from Greene’s introduction to case, hardly a week goes by without coming a book by the brother of the actor Charles across some reference to a Greene-like Laughton, Tom Laughton, called Pavilions phrase–“Our Man in somewhere-or-other,” by the Sea: The Memoirs of a Hotel-Keeper or “a quiet American.” Even Peter Mandel- (1977), where Greene writes “Rashly I son lifted the title of “” for encouraged him to write a book—rashly, his political memoirs, presumably in the because that hackneyed phrase everyone full knowledge that the central theme of has one book inside him is deceptive and Greene’s screenplay is betrayal.

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They were born within a year or so of why: he had an unfair advantage. More fun- each other—Orwell in 1903 and Greene in damentally, piercing perception into the 1904—which meant that, when they came dark recesses of the human psyche was to be to artistic maturity more or less at the a prime characteristic of his writing. same time, the mid 1930s, they were essen- They also share biographical coincidences. tially reacting to the same set of social and Their professional names differed from their political circumstances in what was a vital birth names. George Orwell’s “real” name decade for both men personally, politically, was Eric Blair and the change of name was a and aesthetically. Orwell, of course, died at conscious determination to take on a change a much younger age than Greene, but one of identity and, as it were, reject his heri- of the reasons that their work transcends tage and upbringing. He disliked the name their times is that both were unusually pro- “Blair” and chose “Orwell” after the name of phetic writers, not simply in the sense that a river in . He chose “George” as his they anticipated the future but that they first name because it sounded very English, were /prophets: they wrote books he thought, and also he hated the name with a strong moral sense, they wrote “Eric”: he said he always had the feeling that of warning. people grew into their names, and, as he did I find that there are links both trivial and not want to grow into an “Eric,” he decided significant between the two writers. They to do something about it. were both very tall. Greene was well over Graham Greene was born Henry Graham six feet and Orwell was six foot three inches Greene. I am not sure at what point he with size twelve feet. How significant that became “Graham” but I have always is to their personalities as writers would thought that “Graham Greene” is a won- be difficult to say, though Orwell did actu- derful name for a novelist, because it is so ally comment that one of its consequences strong and alliterative. Intriguingly, Greene for him was that to see what was in front once slipped back into his original iden- of his nose was a constant struggle. I would tity calling himself “Henry Graham” in his say that the essence of his writing credo is cameo as an insurance executive in Fran- there: to look beyond the obvious. cois Truffaut’s film,Day for Night (1973), a They both had blue eyes. Orwell had sort of practical joke on Truffaut who didn’t sea-blue eyes; Greene’s blue eyes were, to immediately recognize him. a lot of people, his most striking physical Another odd coincidence: on different feature. Apparently they struck terror into occasions they were both treated by the Norman Sherry; they fascinated Stravinsky, same physician, Dr. Andrew Morland, a when the two men met; and in Paul Ther- consultant at University College, , oux’s Picture Palace (1978), in which who was a specialist in and Greene makes an appearance, Greene’s eyes who had treated D.H. Lawrence in his final are said to give the impression “of a creature illness as he was also to do with George who can see in the dark . . . they gave away Orwell. Morland was a very cultured and nothing but this warning of indestructible highly respected man. When he died in 1957 certainty.” In his autobiography, Greene it was said of him in the British Medical says one of his favorite childhood games was Journal: “He had a strange power to unify hide-and-seek in the dark, and now we know antagonisms, to reconcile contradiction

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and to merge thought into action . . . . He with Greene. In his 1939 “Man Made was a good physician and a good man.” Angry,” Greene quotes with approval that Substitute “” for “physician” and that statement of Paul Gauguin, “Life being could almost serve as an obituary for both what it is, one dreams of revenge.” Some of Orwell and Greene. his fiction serves as a means of paying off On a more serious note, one finds similar- old scores—what the psychiatrist Edmund ities of literary motivation. In 1947 George Bergler, in his book The Writer and Psycho- Orwell wrote an essay entitled “Why I analysis (1950), called “injustice collecting.” Write,” and in 1948 Graham Greene partic- Bergler’s definition of a writer was “a person ipated in a published work entitled Why Do who tries to solve an inner conflict through I Write? An Exchange of Views Between the sublimatory medium of writing.” That Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. seems suggestive of what both Greene and Pritchett. There are certain passages in the Orwell were seeking to achieve. Orwell essay about his literary motivation Connected with this are two matters that reveal striking parallels between his that Orwell mentions and again which and Greene’s writing inspiration and per- might also apply to Greene: his childhood sonality. Early on in the essay Orwell wrote feeling of being, as Orwell put it, “isolated of his “lonely child’s habit of making up sto- and undervalued” and his reference to his ries” and sensed that his “literary ambitions unpopularity at school. In Greene’s case were mixed up with the feeling of being iso- this similarly perceived “unpopularity” lated . . . . I knew I had a facility with words at school arose from being the son of the and . . . I felt this created a sort of private headmaster and the bullying he received world in which I could get my own back for at the hands of two fellow pupils whom he my failure in everyday life.” referred to in his autobiography as Carter There are two more things relevant to and Watson. As part of Greene’s avenger Greene’s motivation for writing than any- strategy when he became a writer—and thing he himself says in Why Do I Write?, he had a particular interest in Jacobean which give his thoughts on the relationship Revenge tragedy—Carter would turn up between writer and society. The writer, he in various unsavory guises: he is explic- says, “should accept no special privileges itly referred to in Greene’s introduction from the State” and about the relationship to Marjorie Bowen’s novel, The Viper of between and morality, “Litera- Milan, as having the same “genius for ture has nothing to do with edification . . . a evil” as the novel’s villain, Visconti; it is novelist must tell the truth as he sees it . . . the name of the intended assassin in Our literature presents the personal morality of Man in Havana whom the hero will kill. an individual and that is seldom identical Yet there is an extraordinary moment in A to the morality of the group.” He begins to Sort of Life when Greene recalls running go deeper into his literary motivation in A into Watson by chance in Kuala Lumpa Sort of Life, which turns out to be remark- in 1951 and being quite disarmed by Wat- ably similar to Orwell’s view. son’s recollection of their school days and When Orwell refers to writing as a way how inseparable the three of them had of “getting my own back,” that phrase been. Like Gauguin, he had been dreaming would undoubtedly have struck a chord of revenge all these years and planning to

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humiliate them in public, only to find the is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long reunion a total anti-climax because Watson bout of some painful illness. One would is nostalgic and Carter is apparently now never undertake such a thing if one were dead. Actually, Norman Sherry was to dis- not driven on by a demon whom one can cover that Carter was not dead at all and neither resist nor understand.” Orwell and did not die until 1971, the year A Sort of Greene wrote not out of pleasure, but out of Life was published. necessity: it was in their veins. When asked The key is Greene’s reflection on this by a television interviewer in Moscow in encounter and its meaning in relation to 1987 what made him write, Greene replied: his writing: “I don’t know. It’s like an illness. It’s like a boil on one’s cheek and at a certain moment I wondered all the way back to the hotel you feel you have to scratch it off. Life would if I would ever have written a book had be impossible for me if I knew that I would it not been for Watson and the dead never write another book.” Carter, if those years of humiliation had There are two career similarities. Both of not given me an excessive [my emphasis] them, at different stages in their life and for desire to prove I was good at something, different lengths of service, were policemen, however long the effort might prove. which, given the instinctive anti-author- itarianism of both men, is remarkable. I have always been struck by the use of Of course, Orwell’s anti- the word “excessive” there, as if Greene actually stemmed from his experience as a knew that this might be an over-reaction to policeman for six years in the Indian Impe- this childhood trauma, as if it provided the rial Service in Burma, and his growing spur for writing rather than the reason, that hostility to in all its forms. the trauma served a particular need. I do This is memorably expressed in “Shoot- think it signals Greene’s hypersensitivity at ing an Elephant,” which is an incident that this stage of his life, and how writing came comes to symbolize for him the futility of to his rescue in the way it did for Orwell too. Empire, when the man turns tyrant it is his In both cases, writing became inextricably own freedom he destroys and ends with his bound up with their self-esteem: in both typically honest reflection that he had only cases it was when they were writing that done it to avoid looking a fool. Greene had they felt completely themselves. A mutual become a Special Constable for a few months friend, Michael Meyer wrote: “Every good in 1926 during the General Strike, which was writer I know hates the actual process of completely out of character in terms of his writing . . . Orwell did, so does Greene. I later political sympathies, but I have some- know one or two bad ones who enjoy it.” times wondered whether the experience fed That greatest of all Hollywood screenwrit- into his later work, as it did with Orwell, ers, Billy Wilder, said the same thing: “Show and gave him a different slant, for example, me a writer who enjoys writing and I will on his portrayal of the Lieutenant in The show you a bad writer. This does not mean Power and the Glory, who is a very inter- that every writer who doesn’t enjoy writ- esting character and quite sympathetically ing is a good writer . . .” Towards the end of observed, as if Greene saw in him something “,” Orwell says: “Writing a book of his own younger, more conservative, self.

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I will pass over the fact that they were animals are wiser than men.” Perhaps the both members of the Independent Labour germ of the idea for Animal Farm starts Party in the 1930s and were both employed there. In the Chaplin film, Hinkel becomes in the Ministry of Information in the , Hitler and Napolini/Mussolini; in Orwell, and they were both film for a while. /Trotsky, /Stalin, etc. On the surface, this highlights their differ- Confusion of identity closes both works. ences. Although both of them were ahead Chaplin’s ferocious attack on of their time in writing seriously about and the cult of The Great Leader anticipates popular , Orwell’s approach was Nineteen Eighty-Four, as do numerous essentially sociological whereas Greene’s details of the film: countries called Tomania was more aesthetic. Orwell much preferred and Bacteria in Chaplin are re-named Oce- book reviewing to film reviewing: he hated ania and in Orwell; Chaplin’s state having to tramp to a preview theatre to ordered “Happy Hour” in The Great Dic- see the film and then attend a reception tator, which is transformed into Orwell’s afterwards with the makers or distributors “” in Nineteen Eighty-Four. where, as he put it, “you are expected to I think what confirms this connection for sell your soul for a glass of inferior sherry.” me finally is the most contentious aspect of Greene would never sell his soul for an the film, which then and now divided the inferior sherry, and he quite liked getting critics but which Orwell deeply admired: out of the house and postponing the prob- namely, the film’s final speech, when Chap- lems he was having with his current novel. lin departs from the Tramp persona for the He really appreciated the cinema, delighted last time and for the first time speaks to us in its mass appeal, and wrote about it better in his own voice, urging the common people than any other film of the time. to unite in the name of democracy, “to fight Interestingly, though, their tastes coin- for a new world—a decent world that will cided in one particular area: they both liked give men a chance to work—that will give . During his twenty-six- youth a future–and old age a security.” The week stint as a film critic forTime and Tide, speech is quoted in full in Chaplin’s autobi- Orwell raved about The Great Dictator, ography. The Chaplin uses is very the film in which Chaplin satirized Hitler similar to the kind of language Orwell uses and which was controversial at the time in his essay “Looking Back on the Span- because America was not yet in the war. In ish War,” written in 1943, in which he asks 1940, filmmakers in Hollywood were under “Shall people be allowed to live the decent, great pressure to refrain from attacking fully human life which is now technically the threat in Europe. Chaplin also achievable, or shan’t they?” Orwell was exerted a great influence on Orwell: indeed deeply moved by this film, and its style, both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty- tone, and ideas were profoundly influential, Four owe a great deal to the example set by I believe, in shaping Orwell’s approach to Chaplin in The Great Dictator. The satiri- Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. cal vein that Orwell adopts for the first time So, even though their approaches to cinema in Animal Farm has definite similarities were miles apart, Greene and Orwell both with The Great Dictator. Chaplin is wiser found something in Chaplin to which they than the intellectuals, Orwell said, “just as could respond in the enrichment of their art.

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About half-way through his essay “Why significant social themes in an advanced I Write,” Orwell becomes more specific experimental style, but he sold out to the about his writing intentions, which in turn commercial blandishments of the thriller, clarifies for him where he had previously which could be turned profitably into been going wrong and the essential ingre- movies, and which Greene coated with dient his work had lacked; and Greene had Catholicism, “for sensational effect.” “He a similar revelation that would change the could have been a great novelist,” Burgess direction of his writing in a significant way. said, “but opted to be a good one—and this For Orwell, the turning-point was the Span- was a sin,” which, Burgess implied, might ish Civil War. “Every line of serious work have been the attraction. that I have written since 1936,” he writes, My own view is more or less the diamet- “has been written, directly or indirectly, rical opposite of Burgess’s. Works like It’s a against totalitarianism and for democratic Battlefield and Made Me demon- , as I understand it . . . What I strate to me that Greene had not yet found have most wanted to do throughout the past his voice. He dabbles with modernist effects ten years is to make political writing into an in more out of a sense art.” And at the end of the essay, he under- of literary duty than with any great enthu- lines the point: “Looking back through siasm. If he had continued along the path my work, I see that it is invariably where I that Burgess prescribed, he would have lacked a political purpose that I wrote life- remained a good writer in an accomplished less books and was betrayed into purple but relatively impersonal vein. He became passages, sentences without meaning, dec- an exceptional writer when he came upon orative adjectives, and humbug generally.” the moral, emotional and narrative ter- Just as Greene was to suppress his early rain that was his alone—Greeneland, if you novels, and Rumour will, though he hated the term—and when at Nightfall, it is possible that Orwell, if he he found the style that could unlock all his had lived long enough to supervise a col- gifts as a novelist. The cinema vitalized his lected edition, would have done the same style and Catholicism deepened his themes; and omitted The Clergyman’s Daughter the turning-point came roughly fifty pages and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. into in which a crime story Just as came to Orwell’s rescue about right and wrong moves into a spir- and helped to define his distinctiveness as itual about Good and Evil and a a writer, in Greene’s case it was the cinema hoodlum’s struggle against the law and and Catholicism. In the Arena documen- rival gangs turns into the story of a lost soul tary on Greene in 1993, Anthony Burgess wrestling with God and the Devil. claimed that Greene had it in him to be a What did they think of each other? A great writer but that he had sold out and mutual friend, Michael Meyer had intro- become merely a good one; that he had duced them and they had all met at made a Faustian pact with commerce Rules restaurant some time in 1947, and and betrayed his talent. In earlier works apparently had got on well; Meyer’s only like It’s A Battlefield and England Made disappointment was that they talked more Me, Burgess argued, Greene was reach- about politics than literature. It led to fur- ing for greatness through wrestling with ther meetings which were conducted on

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friendly terms. They were very different is unclear; and it is likely that Greene was personalities, though, and it would be fair to unconcerned because adverse criticism say that they were not unconditional admir- seemed not to bother him and because the ers of each other’s work. Greene did like book had been a huge seller and made him Animal Farm and wrote a favorable review financially secure as a writer for the first of it in the , and indeed time. Coincidentally the same thing was to recommend it as a possible film subject for happen to Orwell the following year with Walt Disney—“But is it perhaps a little too Nineteen Eighty- Four, so at least he had real for him?” he wondered. Greene not only a taste of success before his death in 1950: liked it but stood up for it when the Ministry it is astonishing to think that even a clas- of Information, which had received a copy, sic like Homage to had only sold took a dim view of the . Apparently 800 copies by the time Orwell died. one leading official complained to Orwell, Orwell’s review is witty, well written, “Couldn’t you have made the leaders some combative, and defiantly prejudiced but other animal than ?” That did not with some acute observations. His main bother Greene, because he had a soft spot objection seems to be basically that it is not for pigs, but his championing of the book , i.e., that it does not square is interesting because it is a reminder that, with Orwell’s own experience of serving as incredible as it might seem today, Animal a policeman in a colonialist situation and Farm had a great deal of trouble getting community. Consequently, he finds the plot published. T.S Eliot had turned it down “ridiculous,” and because Greene does not on behalf of Faber, essentially for political really address racial tensions, which would reasons. Greene also thought that Nineteen have been a dominant emotion in that com- Eighty-Four was very good, “except the sex munity, the setting becomes irrelevant: “the part,” he said. “That’s ham.” whole thing might as well be happening in Orwell’s most extended critique of a London suburb,” he writes. Orwell also Greene came in a rather notorious review cannot understand the hero Scobie because he wrote of for he seldom seems to think about his work . It is a fascinating piece and hardly ever about the war, even though because it really does highlight funda- it is 1942. “All he is interested in,” writes mental differences of outlook between the Orwell, “is his own progress towards dam- two men, however many other things they nation.” Given that this is the main focus of might have agreed on. In fairness, it is the novel, it seems fairly reasonable; and as worth noting that Orwell might have felt a Henry James might say, one must surely bit guilty about the review because he said allow the author his basic idea—one’s only to a mutual acquaintance, , criticism should be directed towards what “If you happen to see Graham Greene, he has done with it. could you break the news to him that I have Orwell was a marvelous critic when he written a very bad review of his novel for was on a writer’s wavelength, as in his The New Yorker?” Whether the advance magnificent essay on Dickens. But in The warning was a sign of regret, or to cush- Heart of the Matter he underestimates the ion the blow, or to encourage Greene to skill and importance of Greene’s evocation cancel his subscription to The New Yorker, of the setting; he also underestimates the

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colonialist theme; it is not emphasized but interesting character conflict and contrast is nevertheless there. In The Art of Fiction between the priest and the Lieutenant. But (1994), David Lodge has written a mas- he finds Brighton Rock incredible because, terly analysis of the opening of the novel, he says, “it presupposes that the most bru- in which he teases out some of the under- tishly stupid person can, merely by being currents of colonialist prejudice embedded brought up a Catholic, be capable of great in the style; he suggests that even the title intellectual subtlety.” I would not have of the novel might be a conscious allusion thought Pinkie’s upbringing was a partic- to one of the most devastating critiques of ularly good advertisement for Catholicism. European colonialist exploitation in litera- Orwell sometimes does have a somewhat ture, ’s Heart of Darkness. prescriptive, monolithic view of charac- Probably the most provocative part of ter. Greene never found contradictions in the review, though, is his commentary character at all surprising, drawn as he was on the novel’s Catholicism. Orwell was to ‘the honest thief’ and “the tender mur- brought up in a Catholic school, which derer” that Robert Browning wrote about. does not seem to have been a happy experi- But for Orwell, those kinds of char- ence and no doubt colors his response. He acter ambivalences do not seem to dislikes what he calls a “sort of snobbish- register. “Scobie is incredible,” he con- ness” in Greene’s attitude, that, as Orwell cludes, “because the two halves of him interprets it, “it’s spiritually higher to be don’t fit together. If he were capable of get- an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan” ting into the kind of mess that is described, and that, as he puts it, “ordinary human he would have got into it years ago.” One decency is of no value.” It is intriguing that asks why? Orwell continues, “If he believed the word “decent” or “decency”—which in Hell, he would not risk going there the Oxford English Dictionary defines as merely to spare the feelings of a couple of “generally accepted standards of behavior neurotic women.” Surely it is more compli- and morality or propriety”—is a word that cated than that. “And one might add that Orwell returns to again and again, whereas if he were the kind of man we are told he the word seems to be completely absent in isthat is a man whose chief characteristic Greene—I cannot recall an occasion when is—a horror of causing pain—he would not he ever uses it. be an officer in a colonial police force.” Now Individual morality interested Greene there he might have a point; and it was the more than general morality and confor- one point that Greene responded to in his mity to accepted standards of behavior “Congo Journal,” when he said that he had interested him not at all. Orwell goes on: known a Commissioner in Freetown who “Hell is a sort of high-class night-club, was humane and sensitive. Still, it is nota- entry to which is reserved for Catholics ble that, for all its success, Greene always only, since the non-Catholics are too igno- thought The Heart of the Matter was one of rant to be held guilty.” The Power and his weaker novels, good on description, but the Glory excepted because at least the exaggerated in its portrayal of the hero’s struggle “between the worldly and the dilemma. I sometimes wonder whether unworldly values,” as Orwell puts it, is split Orwell’s critique affected him in some way between two characters, and makes for an and influenced him against the novel.

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To conclude, the importance of the impact When Muggeridge wrote those words, of their childhoods and their public and Greene was actually about to embark private school experiences on their artistic on the novel that, more than any other, development cannot be overstated. Greene’s expressed an intense romantic longing, experience at Berkhamsted School had pro- The End of the Affair. “Romantic longing” found ramifications; Orwell always said seems less obvious in Orwell, but I think that his experience at his boarding school, Muggeridge was using the idea of Roman- St. Cyprian’s, which he immortalized in his ticism in the way that T.S. Eliot used it of essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” gave him Henry James: not in the sense of romantic an insight into what living in a totalitarian love but in the sense of a romantic view of state must be like, which became invaluable life’s potential, to convey the intensity of when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. his idealism, the capacity to see the pos- Their artistic characters were formed in sibility of an ideal society, and to cling to the 1930s; Greene and Orwell can provide that possibility however many times he is a sense of the whole decade, particularly in made aware of the disparity between hope terms of its social and political upheavals. and fact. An attitude of cynicism was alien Both wrote their books: to both men. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia; Greene The Richard Hoggart referred to Orwell as Confidential Agent and, almost by default, “the of a generation;” William , which, although Golding described Greene as the ultimate not set in Spain, addresses religious perse- “chronicler of twentieth century man.” cution and dictatorship, which dominated When they sat down to write, they were Greene’s perception of the conflict. Their afraid of nothing and no one. They relished respective novels of 1936, Orwell’s Keep their freedom in belonging to no literary the Aspidistra Flying and Greene’s A Gun clique or party line or artistic movement or for Sale, although ostensibly about other anything that might inhibit their capacity things, are peppered with prophecies of to speak the truth as they saw it. They saw war and foreboding for the future. Greene through and cant and occasion- even uses the word “holocaust” at one ally had enormous fun in satirizing their moment in his novel. Greene and Orwell absurdities. Their consistent theme was are also the least insular of writers—Greene sympathy for the underdog: standing up for travelled to Liberia, Sweden, Mexico etc., the poor against the rich, the weak against during the decade for the material of his the powerful, the outsider against the books, and Orwell was down and out in Establishment, the oppressed against the Paris as well as London, fought in Spain, dictatorial, the individual against the State. and found to be a foreign coun- It would be hard to think of two more try. Ironically, this makes them peculiarly coruscating yet compassionate chroni- aware of English insularity. clers of the last century nor two voices When Orwell died in 1950, Malcolm more urgently needed in our present Muggeridge, who knew both men well, time, to speak out with eloquence and wrote in his obituary that “Orwell’s writ- moral authority against injustice, hypoc- ing, like Graham Greene, expressed in risy, and the abuse of power. When Orwell an intense form some romantic longing.” reviewed Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, he

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concluded: “the allure of power politics will be a fraction weaker for every human being who sees this film.” He linked Chaplin with what he called “one of the basic folk-tales of the English-speaking people, Jack the Giant Killer—the little man against the big man.” There is something of that in both Greene and Orwell. There are Big Brothers at large and they take many forms–social, political, bureaucratic, governmental–but an individ- ual can still nibble away at the base, can still be a piece of grit in the State machinery, to use Greene’s phrase; and, in so doing, give hope to those who are downtrodden or simply tired of being lied to. And occasion- ally—just occasionally—the Giant falls.

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Neil Sinyard is Emeritus Professor of Film studies at the University of Hull, UK. He is the author of 25 books on film and over 100 articles on film, a number of which relate either to film adaptations of literature in general or screen adap- tations of Greene in particular. He is the author of Graham Greene: A Literary Life (Macmillan 2003); contributed a chapter to Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene (Continuum, 2011); is the Literary Editor of the Graham Greene Newsletter; is a former Director of the Graham Greene International Festival; and has been an invited lecturer on Greene at a number of international universities, including the Sorbonne in Paris.

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