Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant.

Leopoldo Duran HarperCollins, $24, 352 pp.

In the last few months, an army of biographers has laid siege to Greeneland, but whether that paradoxical terrain has been conquered or even reliably mapped is open to question. In the books under review here, one portrays Greene as an inveterate sinner, another makes him out to be a cynical sexual predator if not a pervert, while a third celebrates Greene's irreverent piety in a fashion that all but calls for canonization. How is the reader to make sense of such contradictory readings?

Not easily. Norman Sherry, Greene's authorized biographer, and Michael Shelden, the author of a well-received biography of George Orwell who has pursued Greene very much on his own, present complementary but decidedly different pictures of Greene. In both books, the image we may have had of Greene as the one-time atheist who flirted with suicide and communism, who worked for the British Secret Service, was courted in his last years by Central American revolutionaries, and simultaneously became a great Catholic novelist is shaken in important respects. Both authors subject Greene's persona and literary stature to a kind of malevolent deconstruction. In the process, they often conflate the seedy and shadowy world of Greeneland, where good and evil share equal footing, with the actual life of the man. A good example of their method is the short shrift both give to Greene's political interests, something he took rather seriously. But that is not their worst failing.

Both Sherry and Shelden demonstrate a penchant for prurience that distorts their investigation. Their exaggerated interest in Greene's peccadilloes as a philanderer with London prostitutes too often reduces Greene to little more than a kind of unrepressed hormone on the verge of constant eruption. This prurience provokes questions about motives. Undoubtedly, if Greene were alive today, he would vigorously combat the pseudo-Freudian conjectures of both biographers.

In that light, it is important to remember certain constants in Graham Greene's life, lest these biographies undermine completely our faith in him and his work. Those who lived and worked with Greene knew him as a very private person, basically shy and mild-mannered, an unpretentious post-Victorian gentleman. Despite Shelden's extravagant charges, Greene was quite loyal in his own way to those he cared about. When he separated from his wife Vivien, he continued to support her until his death. He remained a friend to the women he loved, often helping them long after the affair had ended. It is also important to remember that Greene was a perpetual prankster. He mocked everything, from the strict regulations governing the Secret Intelligence Service to the dogmas of his church and Vatican bureaucrats. For him, the profane and sacred were open territory. Despite this irreverent side, Euan Cameron, who worked with Greene for fifteen years at the publishing house Bodley Head, described him as "one always concerned for others, always kind and sweet, and constantly doing what he could for others." And in my own ten years of exchanging letters with Greene, we explored ways to financially help his distraught priest friend and now memoirist, Leopoldo Duran, once a professor of English literature at the University of Madrid.

Authorized biographer Sherry has to be admired for his tenacity in digging up every tree in Greeneland, in order to find every buried artifact. But accumulating a mass of material does not guarantee that one will interpret that material well. Indeed, shortly before his death in 1991, Greene wrote to me of his concern about setting Sherry straight on a number of questions. He was particularly distressed at Sherry's interpretation of his stint in Vietnam in the 1950s and with how Sherry would handle new information on Greene's friend, the notorious British spy Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963.

From 1941-42, Greene served in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) as agent 59200 in West Africa, and later in London under Philby at M16. They became friends. In May 1944, just before the Normandy invasion, Greene resigned from SIS. He later explained his sudden departure as a way to avoid playing into Philby's power struggle at SIS. However, in 1968 Greene, ever loyal to what he termed the virtue of disloyalty, wrote the introduction to Philby's My Silent War, an attack on SIS. That naturally raises the question of whether Greene knew more about Philby's traitorous actions than he let on. Shelden, for one, suggests as much.

Greene had other doubts about Sherry's multivolume biography. He expressed some of those to me in a letter in August 1989. "Reviewers have been rather kind to Sherry's first volume [The Life of Graham Greene, Volume 1: 1904-39], but I found it far too long and full of unnecessary details. Anyway, I hate being written about...." Greene dispelled rumors concerning his allegiance to the Catholic church in the same letter. Like the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), whom he greatly admired, Greene stated the paradoxical nature of his faith: "Your rumor [that I have left the church] is not quite correct. I usually go to Mass on a Sunday but sometimes I have too many people to see or too much work to do. I disagree with a good deal that the pope has said and done but that doesn't mean that I have left the church. I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic!"

Sherry's second volume suffers from many of the same problems as the first. He cannot see the forest for the trees. He has done his research well: spent years in libraries in Europe and in America; interviewing almost everyone who spoke, knew, or slept with Greene; retracing Greene's steps, weathering the elements and suffering the maladies of travel. But he has failed to harness the material into an ordered, balanced form.

Sherry seems fearful that if he does not put all the information down first, someone one else might, and he would lose his claim as Green's authorized biographer. But selection is important. Without it, a book loses its coherence. For example, Sherry discovered a cache of more than 1,000 letters in Georgetown University's library by Catherine Walston, the great love of Green's life. This was great scholarly sleuthing, but the material subsequently overwhelms the book. Walston was obviously a central figure in Green's life, but in trying to tell her story Sherry unduly neglects other important relationships. He also mixes reality and fiction. For example, Walston's letters are used interchangeably with a passage from The End of the Affir, the novel Green wrote about his affair with Walston. But whatever one may think about Walston's unconventional marriage and sexual behavior, relying on the novel to discuss Walston's actual behavior is unacceptable. Fiction is never the best proof for establishing the facts. At best, it is a hypothesis.

In the end, Sherry's biography is not hijacked by either Catherine Walston or his obsession with Greene's sexual prowess and alleged sadomasochistic tendencies, but by the CIA. According to Sherry, Greene didn't hesitate to work for the Western intelligence services, including the CIA. Sherry relies on an unidentified former CIA senior officer, who asserts "Greene was doing a short-term operational assignment [in Vietnam] because Trevor [British consul in Hanoi] was gone...." But why does Sherry trust such a questionable source to substantiate his theory that Greene remained an active spy?

Michael Shelden's biography is more tightly written, with excellent summaries of Greene's works. However, his assumptions and conclusions are even more unconvincing than Sherry's. If one believes Shelden, Greene was anti-Semitic, a depraved sadomasochistic and closet homosexual, vindictive and consumed by hate, forever a deceptive and misanthropic spy, and a very cruel man--Joseph's Conrad's Kurtz incarnate. Quite a bill of indictment.

Shelden disavows any malign intent, saying that he just happened to stumble on Greene's fraudulent and subversive nature in the course of his research, an excuse that gives him license to castigate Greene. Shelden's method of documentation is too general, and he is prone to exaggerated readings. He never met Greene, and seems resentful that he has not been granted the same access to Greene's material as Sheffy. He has little sense of humor, and does not appreciate Greene's nature as a prankster. His tone is often sophomoric and sarcastic.

For Shelden, there seems to be no border between fiction and fact, speculation and reasoned deduction. He freely conjectures about nearly every aspect of Greene's life, especially the writer's alleged appetite for violence, betrayal, and sexual indulgence.

Leopoldo Duran, a close friend of Greene's for many years, writes about the conversations the two had on trips through northern Spain. But Duran's book is disorganized and repetitive. It is more about how well Duran knew Greene than about anything else. The best pages discuss the origins of Greene's hilarious novel, Monsignor Quixote (1982), a subject that itself might have made for a wonderful book. But obsession drives Duran over the edge. He plays a game of hide-and-seek with the reader, claiming he was a priest Greene could trust, and that the two had many conversations, some up to fourteen hours, where secrets were exchanged. The reader waits for some revelation, or at least some insight into Greene. But nothing is forthcoming. Instead, one experiences the innocent, but fanciful imaginings of secretive Duran trying to be funny, which he is not. The one virtue the book has is that it proves Greene was more Catholic than Sherry and Shelden concede. Greene made an annual retreat at the Osera monastery, and preferred the company of the humble to that of the pompous and pretentious. Greene may have become a wealthy man from his writings, but in his later years, he was modest in his personal living habits. Duran captures this side of him well.

Greene once said, "I am my books." But to read anthologies of commentary written by those who knew Greene personally is another way to understand and appreciate him. A.F. Cassis takes that tack in his volume, Graham Greene: Man of Paradox. As a self-styled "Catholic agonostic," Graham Greene indeed remains a man of paradox, very much like Miguel de Unamuno. To watch closely the present invasion of Greeneland by friend and foe alike can be depressing. But I imagine the spectacle would not have surprised Greene. He was, after all, a master at depicting the fallen state of the human condition.