The Life of Graham Greene, vol 2: 1939-1955.

THERE has been a race on in the British biography market. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene's official chronicler, discovered he had two competitors: Michael Sheldon and Anthony Mockler. Mockler's threat was initially scotched by Greene's lawyers, with only brief sections of the book appealing in the Sunday Telegraph. But both battled on and, encouraged by Greene's death in 1992, threatened to beat Sherry to the post. Sheldon was offering the complete life, Mockler the first of two volumes, stopping at 1945. Given that Sherry was only taking us up to 1955, and that many of the revealing documents were in public hands, something of a panic was on. Release dates got ratcheted back, typesetters performed amazing feats, and all three books rushed breathlessly onto the market, neck and neck.

They offer conflicting public images. Sherry, a meticulous scholar, is respectful and defensive of his subject. Mockler, still anxious that he might be sued, appears unwilling or unable to say what he really thinks. Sheldon's gatecrashing line is that, since no one holds a copyright on his own life, any public figure is fair game. Where Sherry struggles to explain the agony of Greene's divided nature, Sheldon sees Greene as a hypocrite: a professional liar who was an agent for the British secret service until the end of his life. The most serious charge, which Sherry fails to confront, is that Greene's spying undermines his "socialist" credentials. The man who built his reputation upon a defense of the weak is presented as a calculating double agent for the establishment. American readers must wait to evaluate this iconoclasm. In the meantime, they have Professor Sherry's more dignified, and better researched, book to digest.

Sherry's first tome was cumbersome and his second displays many of the same faults: repetition, verbosity, quagmires of "background" history, and a low level of literary-critical engagement. In both books his biographical method is irritating, centering on the pursuit of "models" for Greene's characters and dovetailing slabs of fictional dialogue or reflection into documentary material as if they were taperecorded interviews. It might seem odd, then, to say that this book is compelling, much better than Volume One. Why? Partly because Mr. Sherry has abandoned his dogged "And then ... and then" approach and replaced it with a more "Proustian" indirection, but mainly because the material on which he draws is so much richer.

Sherry's period here is that of Greene's greatest work: The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), and The Quiet American (1955). In addition, there were two "entertainments"--The Confidential Agent (1939) and The Ministry of Fear (1943) --a book of short stories, two volumes of essays, children's books, a critical work on British dramatists, a play--The Living Room (1953)-which took London by storm, and collaboration on five screenplays, two of which contributed to classics of British cinema:

The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1950). This astonishing creative energy was matched by Greene's sexual drive. During these 16 years he separated from his wife and children, had two passionate affairs (with Dorothy Glover and Catherine Walston) and several other flirtations, and made countless visits to prostitutes. As if this weren't enough, he first worked for the Ministry of Information during the war, then as literary editor for The Spectator, then for MI-6 in Sierra Leone and the UK, then for the Political lntelligence Department. In the mornings he wrote. In the evenings he fire-watched. His secret-service work was often under the aegis of Kim Philby, who became a close friend and remained one even after his defection to Moscow. Post-bellum, Greene put in four years as a publisher and sought legitimate suicide by actively inviting death in the war zones of Malaya, Vietnam, and Kenya. Couple all this with images of his penis hemorrhaging in a New York hotel after he had downed the best part of a bottle of whisky, Benzedrine-popping to meet crazy deadlines, and "white nights" in opium dens, and it is easy to see why Mr. Sherry has a hell of a story to tell.

"Hell" is the operative word. A consistent image emerges of the man as a tormented dual personality, a loyal traitor to all he loved best, with the striking exception of Catherine Walston. Vivien Greene and Dorothy Glover appear as the walking wounded of his pity. For some time he was visiting his family in Oxford on weekends, living with Dorothy in London, and conducting another affair with Catherine. The only way he could tell Dorothy that their relationship must end was to write her a letter and hand it to her during a holiday. Unable to crush his wife's hope that he would one day return, he cruelly kept her at a distance by explaining the attractions of other women. Once, he even brought Catherine Walston to his wife's house. Vivien Greene--devout, domesticated, anxious, repressed--was struggling with rationing to budget for the children's shoes. And there was Catherine also married with children and equally devout, but younger, rich, glamorous, reckless with her reputation, clearly besotted by Greene, and, worst of all, in a perfectly cut peach-colored coat. Greene fought against the sentimentality that led him to desire others' happiness while ruthlessly seeking his own pleasures. Inevitably, however, his masochistic "feeling for physical anarchy" and his "adolescent urge to shock" led him to realize that he had "little nerve for peace." In his writings, pity and piety are vilified. In his life, as he admitted, he was a moral coward.

Faced with this, we might resist Sherry's claim that Greene was "always sensitive to another's pain." It is part of the subtlety of this portrait that we don't. Greene was both the man in the mackintosh leering at girls in the Windmill Theatre and the agonized, devoted lover, able only to imitate the actions of the macho male. Everyone agrees that he was shy, a deeply private man who couldn't understand why anyone should love him or revere his work. At the height of his fame his manic depression overwhelmed him with a sense of his worthlessness, the terror of a loveless future. For it was love that he sought. When asked what he most wanted, he replied simply: "To be married to someone." That someone was Catherine Walston, and she wouldn't leave her husband. The paradox on which his longing for peace was wrecked he explained to his wife as an aspect of mental "disease." His was "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one's material. Cure the disease and I doubt whether a writer would remain."

An artistic parasite on his own misery, Greene craved the drug of his art to deflect melancholy. But there was another paradox which drove him to savor the "odor of decay," to covet failure, death, and empathy with the world's "undesirables." His "sin" with Catherine, he felt, made him a better Catholic. Despite his wealth, his study on Capri "was extremely small with only a skylight and a wooden trestle table of rough unplaned wood." Vivien once offered him an ornate antique desk. No, he said, it would be impossible for him to work on such a thing. For all his wealth, there was something of the ascetic about him. His view of the world was not cynical but deeply imbued with the concept of original sin. Enraged at the 1943 dramatization of Brighton Rock (1939), he wrote: "the idea is that Pinkie and Rose belong to the real world in which good & evil exist, but that the interfering Ida belongs to a kind of artificial surface world in which there is no such thing as good & evil but only right & wrong." This is surely the heart of the matter. The path to sanctity lay through sin. Allegiance to the terrestrial rules of right and wrong was irrelevant. The egotistical sublime? The last defense of a traitor? I doubt it. Douglas Jerrold once described Greene as a "dangerous excited child": "The child who, playing with the revolver, wanted sin without the guilt and now, in his maturity, wants the guilt without the sin." Mr. Sherry's book suggests this, too. Perhaps it is the closest we shall approach to Greene's masked and self-destructive personality.