GRAHAM GREENE

This week's Times Literary Supplement has a marvelous account of Graham Greene's tenure at the TABLET. Long one of Xerxes' favorites, Greene continues to perplex...and delight.

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25338-2323675,00.html

For all its vinegary humour, Greene’s Tablet journalism imparts a lively sense of involvement in the politics and literature of the time. During the mid-1930s Greene made trips to the Estonian capital of Tallinn; there he got to know a British diplomat, Peter Leslie, who was a Catholic and apparently involved in espionage. (See “Our Man in Tallinn”, TLS, March 3, 2006.) An habitué of shadowy places, Greene was the only Catholic writer in Britain to recommend Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine. As the title suggests, the novel is fraught with the symbols of the Eucharist, and moreover carries a Christian socialist message of redemption for Italy’s poor. By the time Bread and Wine reached its first readers in 1937, Mussolini had conquered Abyssinia and further allied the Fascist State to the Catholic Church. To many Catholic conservatives, Silone was a left-wing propagandist, but Greene defended Silone’s attempts to reconcile Catholicism with socialism: “His criticism is not hasty, shallow or partisan”, but “profoundly Christian”. On the whole, Greene was at pains to champion anti-Fascist writers like Silone who advocated “social justice”. (It is unlikely, however, that he knew of Silone’s alleged espionage activities, which involved Greenean elements of treachery and double-dealing.) Many other authors who came under Greene’s review are now forgotten. John Masefield, a former Poet Laureate, is scarcely read today. Arthur Calder-Marshall is also unfortunately neglected. Other literary aspirants whom Greene praised in the Tablet, though, have endured. R. K. Narayan, the South Indian novelist, benefited greatly from Greene’s advocacy of his work in the Tablet and elsewhere. (Greene even advised the author on what pen-name to use and moreover saw to his financial security.)