Collected Essays

COLLECTED ESSAYS

Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on
The Times
. He established his reputation with his fourth novel,
Stamboul Train
. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in
Journey Without Maps
, and on his return was appointed film critic of the
Spectator
. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote
The Lawless Roads
and, later, his famous novel
The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock
was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the
Spectator
. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel,
The Heart of the Matter
, set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography –
A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape
and
A World of My Own
(published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections
Reflections
and
Mornings in the Dark
. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and
The Third Man
was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. Graham Greene died in April 1991.

ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE

Novels

The Man Within

It’s a Battlefield

A Gun for Sale

The Confidential Agent

The Ministry of Fear

The Third Man

The End of the Affair

The Quiet American

A Burnt-Out Case

Travels with my Aunt

Dr Fischer of Geneva
or

The Bomb Party

The Tenth Man

Stamboul Train

England Made Me

Brighton Rock

The Power and the Glory

The Heart of the Matter

The Fallen Idol

Loser Takes All

Our Man in Havana

The Comedians

The Honorary Consul

Monsignor Quixote

The Captain and the Enemy

The Human Factor

Short Stories

Collected Stories

The Last Word and Other Stories

Travel

Journey Without Maps

The Lawless Roads

In Search of a Character

Getting to Know the General

Essays

Yours etc.

Reflections

Mornings in the Dark

Plays

Collected Plays

Autobiography

A Sort of Life

Ways of Escape

Fragments of an Autobiography

A World of my Own

Biography

Lord Rochester’s Monkey

An Impossible Woman

Children’s Books

The Little Train

The Little Horse-Bus

The Little Steamroller

The Little Fire Engine

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Epub ISBN: 9781409040323

Version 1.0

  

Published by Vintage 1999

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Graham Greene, 1951, 1966, 1968, 1969

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by

The Bodley Head 1969

First published in the United States of America by

The Viking Press 1969

Published by Penguin Books 1970

Vintage

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London SW1V 2SA

Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

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Random House (Pty) Limited

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The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 09 928267 4

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In selecting what essays to reprint over a period of more than thirty years I have made it a principle to include nothing of which I can say that, if I were writing today, I would write in a different sense. The principle applies as much to my hatreds as to my loves. Some of these attacks, reprinted after so many years, are directed at what might seem now rather diminished objects, but I would feel a serious lack in the book if they were omitted. A man should be judged by his enmities as well as by his friendships.

Acknowledgements

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
are due to the following publishers for permission to reprint essays contained in this volume :

Chatto & Windus for ‘Henry James : The Private Universe’; Elkin Matthews for ‘Henry James : The Religious Aspect’; Oxford University Press for the introduction to
The Portrait of a Lady;
Hamish Hamilton for ‘The Young Dickens’ and for ‘Edgar Wallace’; Casselle for ‘Fielding and Sterne’; The Bodley Head for ‘The Burden of Childhood’; Faber & Faber for ‘Walter de la Mare’s Short Stories’; Librairie Plon for ‘Bernanos, the Beginner’; Methuen for ‘The Town of Malgudi’; Heinemann for ‘Norman Douglas’; and McGibbon & Kee for ‘The Spy’.

Acknowledgements are also made to editors of the following periodicals.

New Statesman, Spectator, Time & Tide
, the
London Mercury, Night and Day, France Libre, Horizon
, the
Month
, the
Tablet
, the
Listener
, the
Observer
, the
Sunday Times, London Magazine, Life
, and the
Daily Telegraph Magazine.

‘The Spy’ was first published in
Esquire
under the title ‘Reflections on the Character of Kim Philby’.

PART I

Personal Prologue

THE LOST CHILDHOOD

P
ERHAPS
it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already: as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back.

But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years? Of course I should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr E. M. Forster was going to appear this spring, but I could never compare that mild expectation of civilized pleasure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Captain Brereton or Stanley Weyman which I had not read before. It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.