The Man Who Shot W. H. Auden

The works of most writers close with their lifetimes; but some continue mysteriously and posthumously on. Few modern writers wrote as much, over so long a writing life, as Graham Greene. He started telling his stories in the 1920's, and he was still writing right up to his death in 1991. His tales became a haunted record of the haunted and guilty century, every decade taking on a different flavor, each new political era and climate finding its place in his books. Greene was a remarkable religious and metaphysical writer, but he was always the sound working journalist and foreign correspondent. Ever an enigmatic man, who always held on to his secrets, he was nonetheless a world traveler, who added his presence to most of the major crisis spots and crossed with many of the makers of modern history.

Being a private man with plenty of secrets, sexual and political, to hide, he never wrote a full autobiography. Nothing more provokes the biographers, and now we are faced with the works of several, above all the indefatigable Norman Sherry, who has been dangerously living large parts of Greene's wandering life over again. But Greene was always a man who liked to preserve a world of his own. And he found an ideal place to preserve it in: a dream diary. His early psychoanalysis had encouraged him in the practice; from 1965 on he began to set down his dreams in detail in notebooks. Dreams, as he explains in the introduction to this wonderful and quirky little book, are the perfect other world. They have no witnesses, can provoke no libel actions. They are not bound by the rules of truth and falsehood; they provide a crypto-biography that no biographer can ever properly use.

Greene had always believed in other worlds. Behind what he calls "the Common World" lay further ones: in the bathroom cupboard, in secret tunnels under the ground, in the labyrinthine world of espionage, in the realm of sexual deceit. There was always a second self, or a missing third man; Greene worked for the British secret service, and specialized in deception and disguise; the world itself was filled with various other people calling themselves, or really named, Graham Greene, who sometimes pretended to be him and whose activities he let pass for his own. So "A World of My Own," the world of his dreams this book opens up to us, is an entirely recognizable realm of Greene's imagination: a hidden part of the place we have learned to call Greeneland, which has its own rules, atmospherics, guilts, confessions and redemptions.

What's in Greene's "World of My Own"? The dreams here recorded have a peculiar, disorienting intimacy with his real life. Writers and political leaders appear regularly. W. H. Auden leads a band of guerrillas and is shot by Evelyn Waugh. Greene meets Henry James on a river trip to Bogota; in spite of serious discomforts, James is ever polite. T. S. Eliot criticizes Greene's verse. He has several meals with Nikita Khrushchev, who justifiably questions his un-Catholic habit of eating meat on a Friday. On one occasion he is appointed the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, though his personal history makes it doubtful that he can really accept the office.

War, bombardment and espionage feature frequently, and there are many hair-raising escapes -- from the Gestapo, the K.G.B., M.I.5 and the American forces. Perhaps for reasons of discretion, love, in these selected dream episodes, plays a smaller part, though there is generally a mistress in the background when Greene eludes the armies arrayed against him or travels elsewhere, sometimes to lands he had never visited in the Common World. Religion also features frequently; he meets and advises several different popes, including the present one, for whom he has little regard.

In several different senses, these are highly literary dreams. They are, quite obviously, written and worked; the writer's gossiping day-self has added an extra layer of interpretation. Thus the powerful, arbitrary, ever-shifting fantasies of the night-world acquire the splendor of Borgesian fictions, and belong in the serious literature of dreams -- which are, strictly speaking, never transcribable at all. But, as Greene tells us, dreams are an essential part of the literary imagination. They have to do with its ideas, the images and motifs, and with his entire notion of the nature of creativity itself. This, of course, is deeply convincing. Many writers not only turn to dreams for material, but they also let dream-work push through the blocks and uncertainties of their stories, advancing their fiction by night as by day.

It's not surprising that the strange tales told here -- and they do emerge as tales, not as random notes on disconnected, chaotic events -- are as powerful as his fiction, and interweave with it. Greene's "World of My Own" -- a carefully organized and edited selection from his dream diaries, which he made and introduced himself, just before his death -- is equally the world of his novels, his distinctive, adventurous life as an author, his enigmatic character as a man. It opens us to inner layers of his playful, guilty imagination; it follows the curve of his feelings and fantasies, through happiness and war and love to death. There are stories enough to make another 30 novels, if he were here to write them. This is a glorious short book: an absurdist glimpse into the inner world of a capacious modern imagination, a fine addition to the literature of fantasy. It amuses, it delights, and it reminds us where all the greatest writing comes from: out of a world of one's own.

Malcolm Bradbury, a novelist and playwright, teaches American studies at the University of East Anglia in England. His next book, "Dangerous Pilgrimages," is about how European writers imagine America, and American writers Europe.

DON'T LAUGH

Quite by chance, I found myself sitting beside the Queen during a service in Windsor Chapel. The officiating clergyman preached an absurd sermon and I found myself in danger of laughing. So, I could see, was the Queen, and she held the Order of Service in front of my mouth to hide my smile. Then Prince Philip entered. I was not surprised at all that he was wearing a scoutmaster's uniform, but I resented having to surrender my chair to him. As I moved away the Queen confided to me, "I can't bear the way he smiles."

-- From "A World of My Own."

WHY FRED ASTAIRE IS LIKE MICKEY MOUSE

"The idea of reviewing films came to me at a cocktail party after the dangerous third martini," Graham Greene recalls in his essay "Memories of a Film Critic." That dangerous notion led him to become a fearless, witty reviewer -- as a regular critic from 1935 to 1940 and an occasional essayist and screenwriter for the rest of his life. Reviewing was a happy escape from more serious matters, like "that hellish problem of construction in Chapter 6," so he wrote with no eye toward posterity. Yet his opinions, always trenchant, seem fresh even now.

Published in January 8, 1995

By Malcolm Bradbury

On The New York Times On The Web

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-own.html

Other interesting articles written by Bradbury: [Next] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

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