October 03, 2004
Greene Centenary Saturday, October 2nd, marked the 100th anniversary of Graham Greene's birth. I have been wanting to post about Greene for a while, but I am afraid that I couldn't do better than Matteo's excellent, excellent post on metafilter. Please do check it out.
I was "turned on" to Greene by a former professor and I have been hooked ever since. I just read "The Comedians," and, as with all his books when just finished them, I think it was his best.
We mustn't complain too much of being comedians - it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed - that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.
"What would he make of it?
Americans once again caught up in a bloody adventure in a country on the other side of the globe. Decent people made blind to their humanity by a call to duty. Moral compasses spinning madly; intrigue lurking all around.
It would have been as if he had never left, as if his novels were written last year rather than decades ago, which is, of course, a grand testament to his work.
Graham Greene, on his 100th birthday today, could have honestly said,
"Nothing has changed" -- exactly as he would have expected."
Earth changes, time changes, things and people come and go.
But does human nature change?
Which reminds me of an old joke:
Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Just one. But the lightbulb has to want to change.
Sometijmes we laugh so we won't cry.
Greene's film reviews are a fun, if extremely savage, little read -- they're collected in Graham Greene on Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), although the one criticising the way Shirley Temple was used (that is, the one he was sued over) is not in there for fairly obvious reasons.
Tinfoil Sorting Hat, thank you, thank you. I dearly love Graham Greene and am looking forward to perusing this post.
Thank you, shinything. I hope you enjoy it.
And while I'm commenting, I want to add the anyone who is a fan of Greene's "Catholic" novels, especially The Power and the Glory, should have a look at Shusaku Endo's Silence. It is a truly amazing novel about the persecution of Christians in feudal Japan.
AND, it looks like Martin Scorsese is making it into a movie.
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