Books: Studies in Black and Grey

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Meaningful Deterioration. There is never any doubt about the geography of Greene's imagination. It is in the tropics, inimical to man, where decisive and meaningful deterioration occurs or is resisted. Greene rather blames Ronald Knox, famous convert and translator of the Bible, for having spent a cloistered life rather than dying like his obscure Anglican grandfather in "the dirty upper room of a Goanese grog shop." Fidel Castro, as jungle hero, he finds sympathetic: "This man, so Pauline in his labours and in his escapes from suffering and death."

Anything offensive to complacent bourgeois morality and materialism has a claim on Greene's highly singular sympathies—a strong contributing cause to Greene's distaste for the U.S. character, which is liable to pop up petulantly on any occasion. America, after all, is a place where leprosy, torture, martyrdoms, squalor and fear are not thought to be the common lot of man, and Americans, in their base way, are content that this should be so.

Like many an ultrasophisticated man, Greene is at his most persuasive when evoking the provocative memories of youth, particularly in a famous essay, "The Lost Childhood," which dwells on the numerous delights of childhood reading. H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Captain Gilson's The Pirate Aeroplane, Anthony (The Prisoner of Zenda] Hope's Sophy of Kravonia and Marjorie Bowen's The Viper of Milan were among Greene's favorites. The shape of villainy, the sense of impending doom soon intrude. Captain Gilson's book was dominated by a bad "Yankee pirate with an aeroplane like a box kite and bombs the size of tennis balls." The Viper, he admits, gave him a permanent vision of "perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done." It was Miss Bowen too, apparently, who seduced him into writing. "One could not read her," he remembers, "without believing that to write was to live and to enjoy, and before one had discovered one's mistake it was too late."