RICHARD COCKETT

Rattling the skeletons in Greene's moral closet
LAST WEEK THE Sunday Telegraph chose to devote a substantial amount of column inches to some extraordinary new revelations about the private life of the great Catholic novelist Graham Greene.
His latest biographer, Michael Shelden, has unearthed the story of his adulterous affair with Catherine Walston, the "vivacious" and younger American wife of Lord Walston, one of Britain's richest men.
Catherine Walston was also a Catholic, and, according to Shelden, her and Greene were thus able to conduct an affair of "Sex, pain and religion" which satisfied their wildest ideas of sin and guilt in an intoxicating cocktail of adultery, physical self-abuse and religious communion. Greene's novel The End of the Affair was written at the height of his own affair.
I suppose none of this will come as any great surprise to serious students of Greeneland, the striking and idiosyncratic imaginative landscape of his novels.
What clearly fascinated both Greene and Catherine Walston was the prospect of sin, and for the latter especially the anticipation of committing ever greater sacrilege with the great Catholic writer.
Greene was an intellectual convert to Catholicism, and it is perhaps bizarre for a man to become a Catholic, or to join an organised religion of any sort, only for the pleasure of breaking his vows.
For Greene, was the attraction of
Catholicism the ability to sin? It is surely easier to understand a man who struggles with his religious vows in the face of temptation both secular and carnal, but what is noticeable from Shelden's account of Greene's private life published so far is the very absence of that struggle which is at the heart of trying to live a religious or just a moral life.
It is ever the more surprising for Greene, because his books are so much concerned with the finer nuances of that same struggle.
Will the revelations contained in Shelden's biography tarnish Greene's reputation as a writer, let alone as a Catholic writer, in the same way that the publication of Philip Larkin's letters damaged his reputation as a poet?
Some may well feel inclined to view Greene rather less sympathetically, and to be less able to empathise with the moral dilemmas that constantly confront his characters in his books if we know now that the author apparently absolved himself from the inconvenience of such self-questioning himself.
Could we not just dismiss Greene as just another old moralising hypocrite, or can we retain the separation between the man and his work?
Or can we now see his writing as a sort of cathartic working-out of problems which he was not prepared to face himself?
Either way, Greeneland will never be the same again.