Reflections

Published 1990

This book is a collection of articles that Greene wrote from 1923 to 1987 and fills one of the main holes in my reading of Greene’s œuvre, which is his journalism. Greene started his writing career as a journalist and, early on, began visiting and writing about places of the world that were experiencing conflict. His travel books from the 30s, Journey without Maps and The Lawless Roads take place in Sierra Leone and Mexico, both sites of recent violence. After the war his journalism took him to Kenya, British Malaya, French Indo-China (now the countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), the Belgian Congo, Haiti, Cuba, East Germany, and Argentina and Paraguay, among other places. His own interests and friendships saw him alight in Panama and Nicaragua.

He recognized in Ways of Escape that his trips to these places, particularly French Indo-China, were due to a slight world-weariness that affected him in middle age. He found himself a witness to the end of European empires and a process of decolonization that was often more complex than many westerners believed (and the ramifications of which we are stilling dealing with). His experiences in these places often found their way into his fiction, with Vietnam, Congo, Haiti, Cuba, Paraguay, and Argentina all serving as settings for novels.

When I read The Quiet American, some of the experiences of the journalist-protagonist and the dialogue of French soldiers sounded so realistic that I assumed that Greene experienced and heard those things while in Vietnam. I was right. In the articles included in this collection we hear the original versions of those stories, which he copied almost verbatim in the novel. I think his coverage of Vietnam is the highlight of this book, just as I think The Quiet American is his greatest novel.

The earliest works in this collection are the most difficult to read. In fact, reading journalism from 90 years ago is akin to reading accounts of an alien world. So many references to what the reader would know if they’d been following the news of that time. All references that I cannot get; context that I do not have. It makes the modern reading of it dreamlike. Two other factors make the later works in this collection, as in his œuvre overall, better than his earlier works: His skill as a writer improved with age and his increasing success allowed him to have broader experiences that provided more interesting material for writing.

Not all of his journalism explores conflict abroad. He also took up literary or cultural issues that interested him. The collection includes essays on Conan Doyle, Henry James, Borges, among other writers, as well as several pieces about the cinema. This collection also includes several introductions to books by authors with whom Greene was friends. Among these latter were R.K. Narayan, for whom Greene had helped find a publisher in the 30s and of whose works he was always a champion. More off the beaten path, you will also find introductions in this collection to a book about bookstores in London and a book about hotel kitchens.

But most of the works in this collection do involve politics, whether through his politically-charged journalism from abroad or his writing on current events. He wrote an open letter in defense of Charlie Chaplin when Joseph McCarthy was persecuting the latter in the early 50s. He wrote a brief article describing the hits and misses in the dossier that the FBI kept on him and which he got ahold of through a Freedom of Information Act request. There is even poem about the death of Adlai Stevenson.

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More than his autobiographies, this collection shows us what interested Greene and motivated him to write. He once said that writing fiction was the way he stayed sane. In this book we read about his experiences before he fictionalized them – experiences that are raw, before they’re composted into fiction. This is the most personal of his books so far.