E3W Literature | University of Texas

The Henry Graham Greene Papers
The Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin

Reviewed by Ousseynou Sy

The archival collection of Graham Greene at The Harry Ransom Center (HRC) gives students and scholars a unique opportunity to learn more about Greene’s personal experience as a traveler, explorer and writer, and consequently to deepen their understanding of how Africa and Latin America—much of the third world—functioned as raw materials of Greene’s art.

Over the years, the HRC has purchased four separate Graham Greene collections from four disparate regions. The first collection arrived from Helsinki, Finland, the home of Rolando Pieraccini, an Italian writer who published limited editions of several of Greene’s books. This collection includes 215 letters from Greene to Pieraccini and other correspondents dating from 1930 to 1991, the year of Greene’s death, as well as three rare manuscripts, among them the original manuscripts of J’accuse (1982) and An Impossible Woman (1976), the only books by Greene for which manuscripts were not previously housed in research libraries. The third manuscript is that of Greene’s essay “Freedom of Information,” which he wrote in reaction to the US government’s intelligence files on him. A second collection arrived at the HRC from Haiti, via Miami, containing more than 120 letters written by Greene to the journalist Bernard Diedrich, who worked for Time Magazine in Haiti during the reign of dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier. These letters reveal Greene’s involvement and deep interest in the political revolutions occurring throughout Central and South America. Additionally, the HRC acquired a collection of materials from Dr. Michel Lechat of Brussels, the leprosy specialist to whom Greene dedicated his novel, A Burnt-Out Case (1961). Finally, besides these three main groups of Greene papers that the HRC houses, there is another part of Greene’s estate that has found a home at the HRC. This collection, comprising holographs, typescript manuscripts, diaries and publisher’s correspondence, is called “The Laurence Pollinger correspondence files.” Purchased in 1994, this collection contains “The Autobiographical Fragment,” a journal in which Greene describes the progress of the novels he was working on, the development of his characters and so forth. At the same time, “The Autobiographical Fragment” includes letters that Greene sent to both his editor Laurence Pollinger and to his fiancé Vivianne Dayrell.

Henry Graham Greene, an English novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenplay writer, travel writer and critic, was born in Berkhhamstead, England, in 1904. He was the fourth of six children born to Charles Henry and Marian Raymond Greene. Greene led a fairly typical childhood for the time, raised largely by nurses and nannies in the nursery and spending relatively little time with his parents. His father held a position as a headmaster at the Berkhamstead School giving Graham an early taste of divided loyalties when he entered the school in 1915. In 1925, Greene took a second class degree at Oxford and published a book of poetry, Babbling April. He took a position as a literary journalist with the Times where he worked his way up to an editorship. But the most outstanding aspect of Greene’s biography that appears in his archives is his desire for travel, and consequently how his travel experience shapes his crafts. Though Greene’s handwriting is so small and spidery that I could hardly read it when exploring his manuscripts, the correlation that exists between the autobiographical evidence found in Greene’s journals and his fiction could not have stood out more boldly to me.

Over the course of his life, Greene traveled extensively, often to political hotspots such as Vietnam, Kenya, Liberia and Cuba. He served in the British Intelligence Service during World War II, operating in Sierra Leone. These travels satisfied his taste for adventure while providing background for his works. For example, through his correspondence with Lechat, we can see how some episodes in his novel, A Burnt-Out Case and some autobiographical evidence overlap. Greene visited Lechat’s leper colony in the Belgian Congo in preparation for the aforementioned novel, and he consulted the doctor throughout his writing. Some of the incidents he describes in the book are real events that he witnessed in his stay in Lechat’s leper colony. This overlapping of episodes between diaries, journals and prose fiction makes distinguishing between Greene’s prose fiction, memoir and diaries problematic. Many critics identified this intertwining of genres as a “fictional travelogue,” a genre that provides space for the telling of experienced events in foreign places. As his editor Pollinger puts it, “As a novelist, he [Greene] wove the characters he met and the places he lived into the fabric of his novels.” For example, he confesses in his correspondence with Pollinger that his trip to Liberia in 1935 enabled him to produce the travel book, Journey Without Maps (1936). In the same vein, his 1938 trip to Mexico produced two books, the factual The Lawless Roads (1939), published as Another Mexico in the U.S, and The Power and Glory (1940).

As a graduate student from Africa, I was particularly impressed by the documentation provided by Greene’s African journals. Two of these journals, “A Convey to West Africa” and the “Congo Journal,” published by Greene under the title In Search of A Character, recount his laconic experiences in Sierra Leone and Congo. He sheds light on the current issues of fragmentation and disintegration that many African nations are confronted with because of political unrest and ethnic division. But, after gleaning information from Greene’s archives, I realized that Greene’s African journals capture, to a great extent, the western imagination’s obsession with Africa. In other words, his portrait of Africa fits into the western writing and imagining of Africa that Christopher Miller defined as the “colonialist inscription” of Africa. Greene’s African journals, then, expand the levels of interpretative and analytical paradigms involved in reading Africa. Exploring the ways in which African history and culture intersect in Greene’s construction (both in his journals and fiction) of (post)colonial identities is one dissertation topic that may come out of his archives.

Greene followed Joseph Conrad in writing about the non-European, “other” and the HRC houses evidence of some of Greene’s debt to Conrad, classified in the Joseph Conrad collection. Greene confesses in this correspondence that he is not only influenced by Conrad, but considers himself the extension of Conrad in the middle of the twentieth century. Greene’s exploration of the human condition and his obsession with good and evil are Conradian themes that permeate Greene’s texts. His narratives, A Burnt-Out Case and The Human Factor (1978) are in dialogue with Conrad’s respective novels Nostromo (1904), Lord Jim (1900) and Under Western Eyes (1911). But though Greene went to Africa many times, there is no correspondence between him and any African writer. I cannot explain this lack of correspondence between Greene and the African writers, in particular Chinua Achebe and Wolé Soyinka whose respective texts Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964), and Ake (1981) and Death and the King’s Horseman (1976), are responses to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Joyce Carry’s Mister Johnson (1939). I mention these texts because, as an heir of Conrad, Greene’s narrative A Burnt-Out Case participates in the “colonialist inscription” of Africa we encounter in Conrad’s fiction. Maybe there is a correspondence between Greene and these African writers, but that archive resides in another library somewhere in the world.

Greene’s papers at the HRC offer a significant resource for (post)colonial studies and creative writing. Greene teaches how to incorporate memoirs and autobiographies into fiction. Greene lived a full, intellectually and politically rich, life, and his archives reflect the vast scope of his creative and political interests.