| 1 | 1 | | It is often said that polities is a rough old trade, but in my experience politicians are |
| 2 | | pussycats compared with novelists. If an eminent politician dies, even his or her most |
| 3 | | bitter enemy will generally find some worthy cliché to mumble. Not so a novelist. Death - |
| 4 | | more particularly, the accompanying 'personal tribute' - is the ultimate opportunity to |
| 5 | | insert the knife, with the added attraction that the victim cannot answer back. |
| 2 | 6 | | The death last week of Graham Greene was naturally the occasion for some discreet |
| 7 | | hatchet-work. Thus, Joho Fowles: 'I am not sure he was a great writer.' Or Anthony |
| 8 | | Powell: 'We did not like each other's books.' But the best illustration was provided by |
| 9 | | Anthony Burgess in The Daily Telegraph. Some years ago Burgess published an interview |
| 10 | | with Greene, of which Greene said publicly: 'He put words into my mouth which I had to |
| 11 | | look up in the dictionary.' On Thursday, with Greene's body not yet cold, Burgess struck |
| 12 | | back with his 'personal memoir'. |
| 3 | 13 | | 'He was a convert to Catholicism, like his friend Evelyn Waugh, and he was |
| 14 | | undoubtedly conscious of the gulf that separates a convert from a born Catholic like |
| 15 | | myself,' wrote Burgess smugly. 'I belonged to a different culture and had neither Waugh's |
| 16 | | rigidity nor Greene's obsession with formalities.' This is a masterpiece of the memorialist's |
| 17 | | art: note how Burgess discreetly inserts himself between the two greatest English novelists |
| 18 | | since the war, and then - oh, the beauty of it! - puts them both down. |
| 4 | 19 | | But this is only the beginning. Greene, according to Burgess, was 'touchy'. His morals |
| 20 | | were dubious: 'I was unhappy about the fact that he lived with another man's wife.' As for |
| 21 | | his criticism: 'His literary judgments were not trustworthy.' The fact that Greene did not |
| 22 | | care much for Burgess is put down simply to senility: 'Our relationship collapsed because |
| 23 | | of the prickliness that seemed, at the time, unworthy, but was merely a symptom of old |
| 24 | | age.' Finally, Greene's work was not quite of the first rank: 'His novels were popular (...) |
| 25 | | They sold many copies and were made into mostly second-rate films.' |
| 5 | 26 | | In fact, sales do provide a fair indication of a writer's worth. That is not to say, of |
| 27 | | course, that merely because an author is a best-seller, his or her work will live for |
| 28 | | generations. But, contrary to romantic myth, there are few writers read widely today who |
| 29 | | did not enjoy commercial success in their lifetimes. Charles Dickens is a famous example, |
| 30 | | as is Jane Austen. |
| 6 | 31 | | According to Greene's publisher, a typical Greene novel of the 1950s or 1960swould |
| 32 | | have sold 75,000 to 100,000 copies in hardback, and maybe 250,000 in paperback, in this |
| 33 | | country alone. Penguin Books has had every novel in print since 1940 and last year sold |
| 34 | | 230,000. This impressive turnover, month after month, year after year, indicates how |
| 35 | | enduring Greene's appeal is likely to prove. How does the Nobel Prize, which Greene |
| 36 | | never obtained, weigh against such statistics? Can you name the winner last year? Or the |
| 37 | | year before? |
| 7 | 38 | | Back in 1987, reading The Bonfire of the Vanities by the American writer Tom Wolfe - |
| 39 | | another author whose commercial success always causes intellectuals to sneer - I was |
| 40 | | struck, like many others, by the extent to which it captured a slice of our times. Wolfe had |
| 41 | | effectively caught 1980s New York. And from this thought, I fell to wondering which |
| 42 | | writers would one day be held to have done the same in post-war Britain. |
| 8 | 43 | | Two of the likeliest candidates, I submit, are Greene and John le Carré. Both are |
| 44 | | writers engaged with their times. Both identify passionately with the underdogs of the |
| 45 | | world. Both have created their own, instantly recognisable worlds. Both have faced head- |
| 46 | | on the shock of Britain's decline; what it is like to belong to a nation abruptly left without |
| 47 | | empire, suspended between the two superpowers. |
| 9 | 48 | | Above all, both have written accessible, non-experimental books, which have sold in |
| 49 | | vast quantities and been made into films - a vulgarity for which sections of the literary |
| 50 | | establishment have never forgiven them. But who cares? Le Carré is at the height of his |
| 51 | | powers. As for Greene, he will be remembered long after Burgess's criticism - and, quite |
| 52 | | possibly, Burgess himself - is forgotten. |
| | | |
| | | from 'The Sunday Times', April 7, 1991 |
