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considers that almost everybody in the country of even mildly progressive views voted Labour on that occasion. In the third volume we learn that Greene confessed to Catherine, whose husband was a Labour parliamentary candidate, that he celebrated the defeat of that party under Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 with a slug of whisky while in a plane over Canada. Yvonne Cloetta recalls that he was delighted by Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1979, explaining, when she expressed surprise, ‘It doesn’t make a great difference with us, Labour or Conservative, in day-to-day life, or even in politics, but I’m pleased mainly because, for once, it’s a woman.’ It’s difficult to reconcile these laid-back attitudes to British politics with those Greene struck on the international stage. I have not changed the opinion I expressed in an earlier essay about Greene, that his interventions in politics, both public and secret, were not driven by any coherent ideological conviction, but were essentially personal, emotional, and opportunistic in motivation.
     
    Greene’s religious views are just as difficult to determine. He ‘was ever in a confused state about the condition of his faith’, Sherry remarks, but this was perhaps more forgivable than his political inconsistencies. Few of us, whether we define ourselves as religious believers, ex-believers, or non-believers, are completely consistent in our answers to the ultimate questions about life and death. Even convinced atheists have been known to light a candle in a church on occasion. (Tony Harrison has a fine poem on the subject.) It was Greene’s fate, however, to have to act out his uncertainty on the stage of his celebrity.
A Burnt-Out Case
was an oblique announcement that he no longer believed in the letter of Catholic dogma; in due course he was more explicit in interviews, notably one with John Cornwell in the Catholic weekly,
The Tablet
, in September 1989, where he described himself as a ‘Catholic agnostic’. In another interview he described himself more oxymoronically as a ‘Catholic atheist’. He drew a distinction between ‘belief’ which he had lost, and ‘faith’ which he retained, though the latter always seemed to me more like a wistful kind of hope that the whole Christian myth might improbably turn out to be true.
    Sherry, who describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, suggests that in his later years Greene was edging back towards the fold. ‘Greene was concerned about his promiscuity, wanted forgiveness to escape punishment in hell and be received in the arms of God.’ The main evidence for this bold assertion is Greene’s curious relationship with the Spanish priest Fr Leopoldo Duran, which inspired the whimsical fable
Monsignor Quixote
(1982) and which Duran himself described in his memoir,
Graham Greene: Friend and Brother
(1994). For many years Greene would spend a week or two with him in the summer, being driven about the Spanish countryside, always ending up at the monastery of Osera. On Sundays during these trips, or when staying in the flat in Antibes, Duran would say mass for the two of them, Greene told Cornwell – adding ambiguously: ‘And to please Fr Duran I make a confession now.’ In his memoir, Duran describes how he was summoned by Greene to his deathbed and administered the last sacraments, and asserts that Greene died a fully reconciled member of the Church. Yvonne Cloetta, however, gives a rather different spin to the episode: ‘I had indeed suggested summoning his friend, the Spanish priest, Leopoldo Duran. He raised his hand casually and said, “Oh, if you want to . . .” That implied he was indifferent.’ Sherry himself did not arrive on the scene until after Greene’s death, and the details of the writer’s last days and hours are incomplete. In this respect as in so many others, this enigmatic man carried his secrets to the grave.
     
    Graham Greene’s career as an author mostly predated our modern publicity-driven literary