Greene’s own inner life was conflicted and obscure. A stint in MI6, the British intelligence service, during World War II further complicated an already mysterious private world. Kim Philby, Greene’s supervisor for part of the war would defect to the Soviet Union fifteen years later, and Greene spent much of his life offering limp apologies for his friend and the cause for which he betrayed his country. When Greene wrote an introduction to the English edition of Philby’s autobiography, he basically excused the treason as the result of idealism. In his later years Greene flirted (and more than flirted) with the Soviets, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and the Sandinistas, up to the very moment that communism was on its last legs. The same writer who had written a moving account of Communist atrocities against the Catholic Church in Mexico during the 1930s became an advocate of the slack Christian-Marxist “dialogue” of the 1980s. . . . [And] the man remains an enigma, wrapped inside a mystery.
Greene was born in 1904 in Berkhamsted. His father was headmaster of the private school Greene attended, setting up a classic Greene conflict: loyalty to his father versus the impossible desire to be one of the boys. In his stunning travel book on Mexico, The Lawless Roads , Greene reveals that he asked for faith at Berkhamsted and got it with a characteristic twist: “I began to believe in Heaven because I believed in Hell.”
Some kind of breakdown occurred at sixteen, perhaps the result of tension at school. He lived for six months with self-proclaimed Jungian analyst Kenneth Richmond and his attractive wife, Zoe. Richmond was a quack with no formal training. And something happened between Greene and Zoe. Rumors circulated that one of the Richmond children was Greene’s—an unpromising start for a man prone to impossible romantic longings.
Seemingly as a defense against depression, Greene became filled—as he would be throughout his life—with wanderlust. While an Oxford undergraduate, Greene got himself hired to do espionage in Ireland and in French-occupied Germany in exchange for free travel. He briefly joined the Communist party, partly in the hope of a free trip to Moscow (though he may well have been working, West believes, for British intelligence as a double agent).
Greene had always been interested in Catholicism, and when he married Vivienne Dayrell Browning, a Catholic convert, he converted as well. Yet nothing—love, religion, foreign travel, intrigue—could ever quiet some deep restlessness within Greene. It was not mere youthful bravado that made him write to Vivienne during their courtship: “The only thing worth doing at the moment seems to be to go and get killed somehow in an exciting manner.” He had played Russian roulette at home after his psychoanalysis and perhaps later at Oxford.
Nonetheless, he was beginning to make his way. After a couple of flops, Greene deliberately courted success with Stamboul Train (1932), a book aimed at moviegoers. But he hit his full stride with The Power and the Glory (1940), the story of a whiskey priest during the Mexican Revolution, tormented by his own cowardice and weakness, who eventually dies, after one act of religious heroism, in front of a Communist firing squad. – from “The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene,” First Things (November 1999)
