Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge: Where Art and Politics Meet

225 Pages·1990·22.718 MB·English

by  Judith Adamson (auth.)

GRAHAM GREENE: THE DANGEROUS EDGE
Also by Judith Adamson
GRAHAM GREENE AND CINEMA
Graham Greene:
The Dangerous Edge
Where Art and Politics Meet
Judith Adamson
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20772-5 ISBN 978-1-349-20770-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20770-1
©Judith Adamson 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-04621-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adamson, Judith.
Graham Greene, the dangerous edge: where art and politics meet I
Judith Adamson
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references (p.
ISBN 978-0-312-04621-7
1. Greene, Graham, 1904- -Political and social views.
2. Political fiction, English-History and criticism. 3. World
politics-20th century. I. Title.
PR6013.R44Z594 1990
823'.912--dc20 89-70350
CIP
For A. H. A.
This book was written with assistance from The Social Sciences
And Humanities Research Council of Canada. I wish to thank
Graham Greene for discussing his political concerns with me
and for allowing me to quote liberally from his work, and Alan
Adamson and Philip Stratford for their critical comments.
vi
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: The Dangerous Edge 1
1 Between Wars 13
2 Greene's Mexico 43
3 Scobie's War 70
4 A Detached Point of View 91
5 Vietnam 117
6 Our Man in Cuba and Haiti 139
7 The Novelist and the General 162
8 A Knight Errant 184
Notes 199
Index 214
vii
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demirep
That loves and saves her soul in new French books -
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway.
Robert Browning
'The dangerous edge of things' remains what it always
has been - the narrow boundary between loyalty and
disloyalty, between fidelity and infidelity, the mind's
contradictions, the paradox one carries within oneself.
This is what men are made of.
Graham Greene
Introduction:
The Dangerous Edge
In 1934 Graham Greene edited The Old School, a collection of
essays by divers hands about the educational experiences of his
generation of British writers. He got the book together because
he thought it almost certain that during the next few years class
distinctions in England would be altered and the public schools,
as they existed then, would disappear. The book would be a
'premature memorial, like a family photograph album' to 'so odd
a system of education'1 that Greene pronounced it doomed.
Not everyone who contributed to the volume agreed with
its editor's prediction though all took to task a system which,
William Plomer said, had taught them to believe in ideals that
had destroyed the generation slightly older than their own,
the generation of Wilfred Owen. Harold Nicholson was more
encompassing, calling it a system designed 'to provide a large
number of standardised young men fitted for the conquest,
administration and retention of a vast ... Empire' already in the
process of disintegration. W. H. Auden went so far as to say:
'the best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I
lived in a Fascist state.'2 Clearly these writers were discussing
more than their education. Like the Oxford Union which had
decided the year before in no circumstances to fight for King
and country, the contributors to The Old School were expressing
their disgust at the way affairs had been conducted in the past
and were being conducted then. They were, in short, questioning
the very civilisation that had left them such enormous problems to
face in their early maturity. For Greene himself the book may have
been as well a personal response to being a headmaster's son, for
though he praised his father as admirably progressive, his sense
of having 'left civilisation behind and entered a savage country of
strange customs and inexplicable cruelties'3 while a schoolboy at
Berkhamsted was his strongest memory.
Perhaps it was Greene's final charge against the educational
system that told the most about his generation's disillusionment
with its fathers' values. 'Why ... [a boy] should feel more loyal
1