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