Writers: Thinking About Graham Greene

 I guess my relationship with Graham Greene is a bit odd. I read The Honorary Consul when I was a teen without it having great effect on me. Yet, his name kept popping into my life. When I found myself in prison, I also found the prison's leisure library had some of his books. No, he did not shake me to the core like Cormac McCarthy or Gabriel Garcia did. Graham was English, and the English do not write to shock anyone to the core. Instead, his morality — his widely-touted Catholicism — haunts me.

I wonder if when I was a teen, he might have had a greater influence if I had any idea of his background.

The Paris Review recently published Yiyun Li's A Duel or a Duet: On Graham Greene. Consider these notes being for my younger self.

There is defiance that comes only with youth and inexperience, the refusal to accept life as it is: no one says a kitchen maid cannot also be a warrior queen; no one says a child cannot have the emotions that would put the world, which is often indifferent, to shame. There is also a defiance that comes with old age when the world seems no longer new: surely there is still something more to ponder, even if you’ve lived close to God in a Trappist cell for seventy years. And those who understand both kinds of defiance, one suspects, will be the right readers for Greene.

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 I started to read Greene when I was a young writer; twenty years later, he remains among a handful of writers I reread. His work keeps one’s mind on tiptoe. Illusions beget disillusions but also hopes; hopes beget illusions but also clarities.

sch 8/12