The Greene scene

The Man Within, by Michael Shelden, Heinemann, £20 Graham Greene Three Lives by Anthony Mockler Hunter Mackay, £14.95 IN A 1981 INTERVIEW Graham Greene admitted that he did not like himself. In Michael Shelden he has found a biographer of very similar temper. The juicier bits of this expose may already have reached you in newspaper extracts.
The resulting shenanigans have inspired Heinemann (Greene's own publishers before he had a row with them in the 1960s) to release the biography a month or two earlier than planned. There has also been pressure to pip official Greene biographer Norman Sherry to the post. The second volume of his projected three-decker labour of love is published next month.
Professor Shelden presents us with a horripilant catalogue of Greene's selfishness, evasions and vice. Sodomite, paedophile, jetsetting voluptuary at other people's expense on this showing, you begin to understand why he never won the Nobel Prize. At one stage the book even appears to be preparing us for the revelation that Greene was the 1934 Brighton Trunk Murderer.
Mercifully it stops short of that contenting itself with a demonstration of the prominence of violence against women in his books as evidence of a diseased imagination.
There are dark hints at what went on "behind the high walls of his villa" in Capri. Those walls are like a metaphor for Greene's careful protection of his privacy. This biography covers them with speculative graffiti. Shelden promises us the "occasional wild surmise and 'gratuitous indecency'". There are plenty.
It's the "conspiracy theory" approach to biography. Shelden's Greene is a m a n obsessed with planting false leads and traps for the unwary. The Catholicism, for example, was all a big confidence trick allowing him to blaspheme on the grand scale as he laughed up his sleeve at his readers. The political radicalism depended on who was buying the drinks and airline tickets. Even the Russian Roulette was Scotch Mist.
For all its bristling hostility, the book contains impressive spadework. There's good stuff on the origins of The Third Man, Greene's spying activities and amours. Sheldon's readings of the novels are challenging and articulate invariably slanted at supporting his view of Greene as monster. Greene cnce wrote that the best biographies were the result of conflict and not of surrende .. The Man Within certainly scores on that scale.
There's plenty of conflict evident in the genesis of Anthony Mockler's rival biography Graham Greene Three Lives. Its ?lanned appearance in 1989 w a s prevented by legal threats following the publication of sensational newspaper extracts.
As a result it's hard not LO feel that the book has missed its moment. It's the fir t of a projected two volumes It reaches 1945 (that's s' years further than Norman herry's first volume, which di., of course, make it to the sh ves in 1989).
Howev r, Mockler floats a couple of teresting theories. Was Gre ne the Sixth Man? Ws 1920 flirtation with the Commu ist Party might not have end d there.
Towar the end of the war, when the were being frozen out of All ed intelligence, the Russians till got information from Ph by (Greene's boss) and the 'Fifth Man" John Cairncro They justified the leaks on e grounds that the
Russians were locked in a bloody struggle with the Nazis and desperately needed help. Perhaps, Mockler argues, Greene might have felt and done likewise. It would explain his sudden withdrawal from SIS, things having got too hcit for comfort.
Mockler also suggests that The Power and the GlorY, Greene's most famous "Catholic" novel, might not have featured a priest at all, had it not been for Evelyn Waugh. Greene had been overdoing the benzedrine and the book ground to a halt after the first section.
During his writer's block Greene read Evelyn Waugh's review of his Mexic'an travel book The Lawless Roads. Waugh's point that the persecutors of the Church in Mexico "are the people for whom the martyrs died", may have led him to change the story from being a thriller about an American gangster on the run in Mexico, to being a much more serious novel about the fugitive whisky priest.
Mockler writes with gusto, but his book could have done with firmer editing.
The first four pages are wasted on an open letter to Greene's literary executors, he's over fond of lapsing into French and Latin, and the labyrinthine ways of his footnotes and references need sorting out.
But for all its patchiness, it's the book of an enthusiast.
TERRY O'SULLIVAN