Lives in Writing Read Online Free Page A

world of book tours, literary festivals and gladiatorial prize competitions, and in later years, apart from giving an increasing number of press interviews, he generally kept clear of it. Towards the end of his life, however, he did get involved in one very typical manifestation of this new literary culture. In 1989 the Guinness Peat Aviation Company founded a prize worth a record 50,000 Irish punts for the best book written by an Irishman or established resident in Ireland in the last three years, and invited Greene to choose the winner from a shortlist to be drawn up by a panel of distinguished judges, who laboured for many months sifting the works submitted. Greene, however, sought to overrule the judges and award the prize to a book not on the shortlist,
The Broken Commandment
by Vincent McDonnell, which he himself had helped to get published after it had been sent to him in manuscript by McDonnell’s wife. This caused huge consternation, anger and embarrassment, and the crisis was only resolved by giving a special prize (in fact funded out of Greene’s pocket) of 20,000 punts to McDonnell, while John Banville received the main prize for
The Book of Evidence
, but the controversy and recriminations continued for some time. It was a tragi-comic episode which took its toll on Greene and may have hastened his death (which like Catherine’s was caused by leukaemia). ‘Dublin killed me,’ he said to Sherry later. Sherry argues plausibly that Greene adopted McDonnell as a kind of literary son and channelled into his cause some of the emotion generated by his own failure to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was denied this accolade year after year, partly because of the implacable hostility of one Swedish Academician, Arthur Lundkvist, but also because other members of the academy thought he was more of an ‘entertainer’ than a ‘serious’ writer. That was a grave misjudgement. It is true that Greene used throughout his career the structures of the adventure stories he read in his childhood and youth, which accounted in part for his wide readership. But he combined his page-turning narrative technique with a unique and unsettling vision of the world which subverted and transformed the stereotypes of popular fiction. He was also a master of English prose (something which Scandinavian readers are perhaps not able fully to appreciate).
    The same, alas, cannot be said for his biographer. Sherry’s third volume is self-indulgently and often eccentrically written. The discourse is frequently broken up into short sections consisting of a paragraph or two, separated by asterisks, which disrupt the cohesion of the narrative and afford the biographer too much freedom for digression and superfluous comment. Mixed metaphors run amok (e.g., ‘When Greene writes a letter to the press, it’s a lightning rod for shoals of letters to be poured out in answer, swords drawn.’). Similes often baffle (e.g., ‘Had he failed this couple [the McDonnells], he’d have been as ashamed as a nudist caught with his clothes on.’). Sometimes, like Nabokov’s Kinbote in
Pale Fire
, Sherry addresses the startled reader directly: ‘Don’t you feel that at times, writing a novel was for him a disease?’ Towards the end of the book there are lurid disquisitions on the horror of death which seem to tell us more about the biographer than his subject. Either Sherry was poorly served by his editors or he ignored their advice. This is a great pity, because his dedication to his task is manifest, and the research that has gone into the book is awe-inspiring. With all its faults the completed biography is an indispensable companion to the work of a major modern writer, and a fascinating account of an extraordinary life.
     
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    1
The Life of Graham Greene, Volume One 1904–1939
(1989);
Volume Two 1939–1955
(1994);
Volume Three
1955
–
1991
(2004).
    2 Yvonne Cloetta,
In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene
, as told to