Graham Greene has already been there. Dreaming of Havana with a strawberry daiquiri alongside cobblestone roads? Having a margarita outside of Monterrey, Mexico while freshly considering the city’s links to Aztec spirituality? Perhaps you’re bumming around on a train car from Ostend to Istanbul, ordering gin and tonic as you look at the Mediterranean? Or maybe you’re lost on the streets of Paris or London or Prague, looking for the last pub to close? Or maybe you find yourself in Congo hiking through the jungles near Belgian, looking for a route home (and for any booze, of course)?
Or maybe you have never been close to even one of these places. Or maybe you’ve never had the desire to drink that much. That’s perfectly fine, because Graham Greene has already been there, and there will never be a better visitor to any of those places — and there certainly will never be a better person to tell us about them — than him.
Greene was born today in 1904 and is, for my money, the greatest English travel writer and novelist of the 20th century. Every place listed above (and many, many more) were visited by Greene during a time that we can never have back: an early industrial, pre-or-post world war Europe and Asia and South America and Africa — he literally went every where during a time where so few could. The stories he wrote from their (fictional and not) are fossils from a rare and beautiful time in human life when the promise of technology had not yet eclipsed our happiness, even though we knew it would. His books are filled with telegraphs, missed connections, trains, broken down Model-T cars and horses, hotels for $1, and booze for less. All the places he went he usually paid his way by writing short reviews (film, books, food, etc.) as he globe-trotted in and out of danger as he, of course, drank his weight in liquor.
His main purpose for travel was to drum up story ideas, which always came. His diaries in Mexico, Lawless Roads, where he wrote about sideways horse salesmen and glorious architecture and food poisoning and the tenderness of the Catholic clergymen, turned into his masterpiece novel, The Power and the Glory. His travel notes in Africa, In Search of a Character, brought us two fantastic African novels of his: A Burnt-Out Case and The Heart of the Matter, both some of the finest of their time.
But he also had a terrible time traveling. Near the end of his six month excursion through 1930s Mexico, he wrote:
“I loathed Mexico — but there were times when it seemed as if there were worse places. ‘In a book once…’ Here were idolatry and oppression, starvation and casual violence, but you lived under the shadow of religion — of God or the Devil…it wasn’t evil, it wasn’t anything at all, it was just the drugstore and the Coca-Cola, the hamburger, the sinless graceless chromium world”
-Lawless Roads, pg. 180
It was that loathing that gave us the infamous whiskey priest from his magnum opus with lines like,
“We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us — God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”
-The Power and the Glory, pg. 200
One wonders if such characters can be invented by a generation who sees the various locations of Greene’s novels as backdrops for their own presentation of sincerity. It seems impossible. If all we see while we travel is ourselves (or some possible version of ourselves) we will never see any characters, not to mention invent them.
This is what Greene did for better or for worse (and there is much worse from him, believe me). He was able to draw from the places of his travels and illuminate them into one of his three specialties: memoirs (personal/biographical writing like Ways of Escape), novels (literary narratives like The Power and the Glory), and what he called “entertainments” or “comedies” (the fast-paced adventures of espionage, journalism, or both, like Our Man in Havana or The Comedians). His range was impressive. One gets a much different (albeit just as beautiful) picture of Havana in his memoir, Ways of Escape, as in his novel on the subject. Here are two juxtaposing delicious entires:
“[In Havana] where every vice was permissible and every trade possible, lay the true background for my comedy.”
-Graham Greene, Ways of Escape
And then this:
“He walked home…The pink, grey , yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colors to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea.”
-Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, pg. 53
You might think you have an original thought about Havana, and then you read Graham Greene. He has already been there — and he hasn’t just been there once for the singular purpose of digital social affirmation. He’s been on the inside and on the out. And he went there to create something he wasn’t sure would sell (and sometimes didn’t). He went there to unearth something that was bothering him about the human condition, about God, or about land. And he also went there to drink.
Graham Greene never came back from anywhere empty handed (this is, of course, a triple entendre). And he gave us shelves of beautiful writing about a world none of us will fully see. He gave us stunning sentences and absurd premises and hilarious one-liners and unforgettable characters. And after you read him, you’ll be at peace if it takes you a decade to get to Africa or Havana or London or Istanbul, because you’ll have already been there in some way. You’ll have been there with him.
