postcards from Greeneland

05 January 2009

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things



The New York Times finds the Russian Roulette-playing spectre in the letters of Graham Greene:

Greene became... a travel writer specializing in the pre-modern world. He went to Liberia in 1935, drawn there by a map of the region boldly marked “cannibals.” Mexico in 1938 seems to have refined his taste for seediness and misery. Soon af­ter­ward, German bombs made the streets of London appear as thrillingly full of the dangers Greene had sought in the African bush and the Mexican plains. “The whole war,” he writes in one of the few revealing letters collected in “Graham Greene: A Life in Letters,” “is good for someone like me who has always suffered from an anxiety neurosis.” “The prospect of peace now,” he worries in 1943 from Sierra Leone, “would fill me with utter gloom.”

[..]

In the decades after the war, Greene took his distrust of such deceptions to some of the dingiest corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Though apparently weary of civilization, he sought no Rimbaud-style derangement of the senses. Neither the Orient’s supposed voluptuousness nor its spirituality beckoned. Stints at opium dens, brothels and blue movies seem to have been followed rather quickly by gin and tonics at the local British consulate.

Further: Adventures in Greeneland / The Wily American / The Uneasy Catholic / Shades of Greene.