Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

I have always been a great admirer of Graham Greene. I have read all his novels and seen the films that were made of some of them, including The Third Man, which he wrote originally as a film treatment. Despite the excellent quality of all his work, some novels will inevitably stand out. My own favourite masterpiece is The Quiet American, which proved prophetic beyond belief. It was like drawing up a blueprint for America's disastrous role in Vietnam. Another novel I cherish is Brighton Rock, not so much for its literary merit as for the fact that it gave me a chance to meet Greene in person. That was in 1956, during a PEN conference that convened in London. I participated in the conference as both secretary of the Egyptian PEN Centre and as a member of the English Centre.

It was announced in the programme that the great writer was to take a group of participants on a tour of Brighton. Naturally I joined that group, and spent a very pleasant half day in his company -- listening to him give a run- through of his novel and indicate the places mentioned in it. This memory came back to me while I was reading an interview with Greene's biographer, Norman Sherry, a distinguished professor at Trinity University, Texas, published in the Independent Review on 22 September. It is worth noting in this context that Sherry's third volume of Greene's biography, covering the years 1955-1991, is to be published today.

The interview shows Sherry's complex relationship with Greene. I don't think biographers normally do what Sherry has done for the last 27 years, which he spent in search of the reality of an "enigmatic writer". Apart from his meetings with the writer, Sherry visited, to great personal risk, the countries which form the backdrop to the novels: Liberia, Zaire, Vietnam, Panama, Haiti and others. What is interesting is that Sherry had already retraced Joseph Conrad's journeys before producing the two- volume biography of the writer that was to make his name.

In the interview the biographer recounts how Greene would sometimes refuse to give him any clues as to the explanation of certain incidents in his life. When he read the first volume of his biography, in fact, Greene reportedly exclaimed, "How did you make these discoveries?" Sherry's work rests on the belief that one could find out anything provided one digs deep enough and gazes long and hard enough. He found clues, he said, through a close reading of Greene's novels, which he cross-referenced with other, disparate sources -- letters, friends' testimonies, medical and psychological records, and a whole wide range of material besides.

Greene was a man of many secrets, and his life contained as many multitudes as his person -- love affairs, psychic and religious experiences, breakdowns, an unquenchable thirst for dangerous, experimental behaviour. In the interview, prompted by journalist Andrew Gumbel, Sherry recalls asking Greene about his suicide attempts as a teenager: when it became apparent that he would not say a word, Sherry remarked, "Mr Greene, you just put five more years on this book." Sherry found the answers he was looking for by tracking down 36 of Greene's schoolmates, two of whom had kept a diary. Until his death in 1991 Greene was friends with Sherry, casting aside potential disagreements about his failure to provide information by pointing out that, while he would not always answer questions, he would never lie; he expected the same honesty of Sherry: "If you write for me, fine; if you write against me, fine. The truth, Norman, the truth, else I'll haunt you." And such, indeed, is the principal virtue of Sherry's biography: truth. His way of working may indeed be a maxim for biographers, some of whom tend to speculate about events in the lives of their subjects. Yet Sherry also had to abandon the biographer's ideal of detachment. "I spent seven years wandering and getting sick," he says at the end of the interview, "and 20 years writing. Do I think I've got him exactly? No, of course not... But I got to know him better than I know myself. Better than the wrinkles on my own brow."