Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today, we are
not just looking at a biography. We're trying
to get inside the head of a living, breathing
paradox. That's a great way to put it. We're
unpacking a life that, honestly, it feels less
like one man's journey and more like a collision
of four or five completely different people all
inhabiting the same skin. Yeah, all fighting
for control at the same time. It's a fascinating
mess of a life, isn't it? I mean, if you tried
to write a character like this in fiction, an
editor would probably tell you it's too unbelievable.
Right. Pick a lane. Yeah. This character isn't
coherent. Exactly. It's too crowded. Too many
contradictions. Mess is definitely the right
word. We were talking about the literary giant,
Graham Greene. And I was reading through the
source material you sent over, which, by the
way, is a mountain of paper. It is a lot, I know.
And I found this description from The Nation
that just stopped me cold. They described him
as a stranger with no shortage of calling cards.
And when you look at what those cards actually
say, I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
The math doesn't add up. No, the pieces don't
fit the puzzle. Not at first glance, anyway.
It's like you have a jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces
are from three different boxes. Exactly. Just
look at the resume we're dealing with today.
He was a devout Catholic. Or at least wrestled
profoundly with Catholicism. Right. A devout
Catholic, yet a lifelong serial adulterer who
seemed completely incapable of faithfulness.
He was a spy for MI6, literally working for the
British government. Yet he was a close personal
friend to communist revolutionaries. Like Fidel
Castro, of all people. Fidel Castro. And then
there's the writing. He wrote these highbrow,
serious literary novels that scholars obsess
over and dissect in universities. But he also
churned out what he himself called. Pulpy thrillers.
The entertainments, yeah. The kind of book you'd
buy at an airport newsstand just to kill a few
hours on a flight. It makes no sense. He was
a man of masks. And I think the key to understanding
Greene and what we're going to try to do today
is to realize that for him, these weren't actually
contradictions. I don't think he saw them that
way. What do you mean? I don't think he switched
masks because he was fake. He wore them all at
once because he lived in the gray areas. He was
comfortable, maybe even thrived. In the kind
of ambiguity that drives most people crazy. The
gray areas. Yeah. That's interesting. Critics
actually have a name for this. specific vibe
he created, right? This sort of universe he built.
They do. They call it Greenland. Greenland. It
sounds like a theme park. It does, but I'm guessing
the rides are terrible. Oh, the rides are terrifying
and the safety inspections are completely non
-existent. That's a perfect description. Greenland
isn't a physical place on a map, though it's
usually set in these poor, hot, tropical countries.
It's a psychological landscape. It's seedy. It's
violent. It's usually hot, humid, and dusty.
And the people People in Greenland are always,
always grappling with a world that is falling
apart both outside on the streets, usually due
to some coup or war, and more importantly inside
their own souls. So definitely not a vacation
spot. Definitely not. But it's where he did his
best work. And that's really our mission for
this deep dive. We want to explore how a man...
plagued by bipolar disorder and a just crushing
sense of boredom became, as the writer William
Golding put it, the ultimate chronicler of 20th
century man's consciousness and anxiety. I love
that quote, the ultimate chronicler of anxiety.
I mean, that feels so relevant even now, maybe
more than ever. Absolutely. Just to set the table
for you, the listener, we are pulling from a
massive stack of sources today. We've got biographical
records, critical essays, summaries of his bibliography,
historical context on the many, many wars he
covered. We're going to travel from his traumatic
childhood in Berkhamstead to the jungles of Vietnam
and Sierra Leone. And along the way, we'll have
to unpack his very complicated faith, his time
of espionage, and the controversies that, and
this is a big one, that kept him from winning
the Nobel Prize. There is a lot to get through.
There really is. So let's unpack this. Because
to understand the spy and the writer and the
Catholic, we have to start with the boy. And
honestly... His childhood sounds less like a
happy memory and more like the origin story of
a supervillain. Or at least a very, very damaged
antihero. That's a better way to put it. It certainly
wasn't an idyllic English upbringing, despite
how it might have looked on paper. He was born
in 1904 in Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire. His father,
Charles Green, was the housemaster of Berkhamstead
School. And then later he became the headmaster.
And this, for me, is where it gets really, really
interesting. Graham Green, the boy. attended
the school where his father was the boss. That
is the absolute crux of the early conflict. Imagine
the split loyalty. If you are a young boy, your
entire world is school. And in the British public
school system of the early 20th century, there's
this really strict divide. It's tribal. It's
completely tribal. It's us versus them, the students
versus the authority, the boys versus the masters.
And Green is physically the embodiment of the
authority. He's the headmaster's son. He sleeps
on the wrong side of the line. Exactly. He described
it as living behind the Green Bay's door. On
one side of that door was his family, the rulers,
the establishment. On the other side were the
boys. The ruled, the anarchists, the ones he
had to live with every day. So every time he
walks through that door, he's crossing enemy
lines. He becomes a double agent. It's his first
taste of espionage. If he sided with the boys,
he was betraying his father. If he sided with
his father, he was a traitor and a spy to his
peers. He couldn't win. So before he ever joined
MI6, before he ever wrote a single word about
espionage, he was living it. At, what, 12, 13
years old, he was already living a double life.
That has to mess with your head. Oh, it did.
profoundly. The psychological toll was immense.
The sources described severe, relentless bullying.
Because he was the headmaster's son, the other
boys didn't trust him an inch. They were convinced
he was a snitch. He was a mole. He was a mole.
So he was completely isolated. The sources used
the term profoundly depressed. But it's interesting.
In his own autobiography, Green didn't just describe
it as sadness. He described it as a deep existential
boredom, a gray fog that just settled over everything
and wouldn't lift. Boredom seems like such a
mild word for what he describes later, though.
I mean, it got dangerous, didn't it? You have
to talk about the suicide attempts. It got very,
very dark. And we aren't talking about, you know,
what some might dismiss as cries for help. We
are talking about actual calculated brushes with
death. What kind of things are we talking about?
He wrote about taking a huge number of aspirin
tablets before going swimming in the school pool,
hoping he'd get a cramp and drown. He tried drinking
hay fever drops to poison himself. He tried eating
a bunch of deadly nightshade. But the most famous
image, and it's one that haunts his biography
and his fiction, is the Russian roulette. This
is in his autobiography, right? A sort of life.
That's the one. He claims that as a teenager,
he found his older brother's service revolver.
And he would take it, load a single bullet, spin
the cylinder, put the gun to his head, and pull
the trigger. That is, I mean, why? What was the
goal? Was he actively trying to die? That's the
complex part. And it's so revealing about his
psychology. He said he wasn't necessarily trying
to die. He was trying to feel something. Anything.
He was trying to break through the boredom. Exactly.
He was trying to shock his system out of that
crushing gray fog. He described the moment the
hammer clicked on an empty chamber as this incredible
rush of adrenaline, a moment where the world
suddenly came into sharp focus and he felt, for
the first time all day, truly alive. It's an
addiction to the brink of death. He needed the
threat of annihilation just to feel normal. Precisely.
It's a terrifying coping mechanism, and it's
a theme that never leaves him, this idea of finding
life on the dangerous edge. Thankfully, his parents
actually noticed something was seriously wrong.
In 1920, when he was 16, they did something that
was, for that time and for that social class,
almost unheard of. Completely radical. They sent
him to London for psychoanalysis. Yeah. You have
to remember, this is 1920. Freud is still this.
This scary, controversial new idea for the British
establishment. Sending your kid to an analyst
back then is like sending your kid to a wizard
today. This is a radical step. Absolutely radical.
He spent six months living in his analyst's home
in Kensington. And it's important to note, it
didn't cure him. He battled what we now call
bipolar disorder his whole life. But it gave
him a vocabulary. It taught him to analyze his
own mind, to look at his dreams, to understand
his subconscious. It gave him the tools. to become
the writer he would be. Did it change his school
life when he went back? It changed the logistics,
which was key. He returned to Berkhamsted as
a day student, not a boarder, so he could escape
the dormitories, which took him out of the immediate
line of fire for the bullying. But the damage
was done. He was an outsider. He had seen the
world from a different angle than everyone else.
And that sense of isolation, it seems to have
followed him to university. He goes to Oxford
Balliol College. to study history and this is
the roaring 20s you know this is the great gatsby
era parties flappers jazz you'd think this would
be the time he'd break out of his shell you would
think but no not green His contemporary, Evelyn
Waugh, who was a bit of a party animal at the
time and later became a famous writer himself,
noted that Green looked down on us. He said Green
didn't share in their revelry at all. He was
just the guy in the corner. He was the guy in
the corner watching, judging, feeling miserable
while everyone else drank champagne. The sources
say he suffered from periodic bouts of depression
even there. The gray fog followed him. He was
also flirting with politics in a way that seems...
Pretty confusing, given his background. I mean,
he's an upper middle class boy at Oxford, but
he's looking left. Way left. He was searching
for something to believe in, for a structure.
In 1922, he briefly joined the Communist Party
of Great Britain. Really? I didn't know that.
For a very short time. He even tried to get an
invitation to visit the new Soviet Union. It
didn't happen, but it shows you how he was looking
for a cause. any cause to impose on the chaos
of his own mind. He needed a system. It's funny.
He published a book of poetry at Oxford called
Babbling April. Which was very poorly received,
we should note. Right. Not a success. So he's
a failed poet, a depressed student, a communist
sympathizer, and a social outcast. It's hard
to see the literary giant forming here yet. If
you met him at a party in 1924, you probably
wouldn't think, this guy's going to define the
century. You would probably think this guy needs
a drink and a hug, or maybe just a drink. But
the formation happens in the next phase. And
it happens, as it so often does in literature,
because of a woman. Ah, yes, the unlikely convert.
Let's get into section two here. Faith, love,
and the Catholic agnostic. Because Green is so
famous for being a Catholic writer, but he didn't
grow up with any of that. No, not at all. He
was an agnostic, bordering on atheist. But while
he was at Oxford, he started corresponding with
a woman named Vivian Daryl Browning. And the
way they met is so perfect. She had written to
him to correct a point he'd made about Catholic
doctrine in something he'd published. I love
that. The first interaction is her telling him,
you're wrong about my religion, here's why. And
he falls for her. Head over heels. He was intrigued
by her certainty, her passion. he met her and
he decided he wanted to marry her but she was
a devout catholic so in a very green -like move
he decided he needed to understand her beliefs
if he was going to be with her so it wasn't a
spiritual lightning bolt it was an intellectual
exercise completely it was homework he actually
set up debates with the priest, Father George
Trollope. And he went in there to argue against
the faith. Yes. Green argued on the grounds of
dogmatic atheism. He wanted to be convinced.
He went in there thinking he could dismantle
the priest's arguments one by one. And interestingly,
the argument that finally won him over wasn't
some proof that God definitely existed. What
was it then? It was that the if surrounding God's
existence became, in his words, less improbable.
That is such a guarded way to find faith. The
if became less improbable. It's not I saw the
light. It's statistically I can no longer rule
this out. It fits him perfectly, doesn't it?
It's a conversion of the intellect lived in the
shadows and the doubt. He was baptized in 1926
and he married Vivian in 1927. But later in life,
he would refer to himself not as a Catholic,
but as a Catholic agnostic. A Catholic agnostic.
What does that even mean? It means he lived in
the doubt. He believed that doubt was an essential
part of faith. If you are absolutely certain
about God, 100%, you don't need faith. Faith
is the leap you take despite the doubt. And he
was always doubting. And speaking of living in
doubt. His marriage to Vivian wasn't exactly
a fairy tale, was it? No, not even close. They
had two children, Lucy and Francis, but Green
was, by his own admission, just not cut out for
domestic life. The routine, the stability, the
quiet, it triggered that old boredom. That gray
fog came back. He said something absolutely brutal
to her in a letter, didn't he? He did. He wrote
that he had a character profoundly antagonistic
to ordinary domestic life. That's a brutal thing
to tell your spouse. It's not you. It's my fundamental
nature that can't stand being here. And then
he added the line that explains everything about
him as a writer. Unfortunately, the disease is
also one's material. Wow. He viewed his restlessness,
his infidelity, his misery as essential to his
writing. He believed that if he settled down
and became a happy suburban dad, the art would
stop. He needed the edge. He needed the sin.
So he left the family in 1947. But they never
divorced. Never. In accordance with Catholic
teaching, Vivian refused to grant a divorce.
So they remained married on paper until he died
in 1991, despite him living a completely separate
life for over 40 years. And he didn't just live
a separate life. He had some very, very significant
other relationships. We have to talk about Catherine
Walston. Katherine Walston was the great muse.
Their affair began in 1946. She was the American
wife of a very wealthy British landowner and
future peer, Harry Walston. This wasn't a casual
fling. This was a deep, passionate, obsessive,
soul -tearing relationship that lasted for years.
And this relationship is... widely considered
the direct inspiration for one of his greatest
and most heart -wrenching novels, The End of
the Affair. Oh, that book is intense. If you
haven't read it, it's not your typical romance
novel. It's about a writer, Maurice Bendrix,
who has an affair with a married woman, Sarah,
and he becomes intensely jealous. But he's not
just jealous of her husband. He becomes jealous
of God. Exactly. That's the twist. During the
Blitz in London, a bomb hits the building they're
in, and Bendrix is seemingly killed. Sarah, in
that moment, makes a bargain with... god she
prays let him be alive and i'll give him up bendrick
stirs he's alive and she feels bound by this
vow she ends the affair so bendrix feels that
god is the rival who stole her away It's a love
triangle where one of the participants is God.
It's incredibly personal. It explores this idea
that human love and divine love are somehow these
competing, warring forces. It's raw. And you
can feel the real pain from his affair with Catherine
Walston on every single page. And that book really
solidifies what critics call his gold standard
of Catholic novels. We're talking about books
like Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory,
The Heart of the Matter, and of course, The End
of the Affair. These aren't nice Sunday. school
stories. They are gritty and dark. Right. And
he hated being called a Catholic novelist. He
really resisted that. He felt it pigeonholed
him. So what did he prefer? He preferred to be
called a novelist who happened to be Catholic.
His characters are not saints. They're sinners.
They are whiskey priests, adulterers, teenage
gangsters. In the heart of the matter, the protagonist,
Scobie, is a colonial police officer in West
Africa who is so overwhelmed by pity and responsibility
that he commits suicide. A mortal sin in the
church. But he does it out of a warped sense
of love, trying to spare his wife and his mistress
pain. He explores the sin that comes from a good
place. The damnation that comes from trying to
do the right thing. Precisely. And the church
wasn't exactly thrilled with this kind of depiction,
were they? No, not at all. Ah. The power and
the glory. which is about a drunk, rogue priest
on the run in Mexico who has an illegitimate
child, was actually condemned by the Holy Office
at the Vatican. They felt it was scandalous,
it was too messy, too human. They wanted their
priests to be paragons of virtue and fiction,
not broken men. But here is this surprising twist.
Years later, in the 1960s, Greene had a private
audience with Pope Paul VI. Yes. By this time,
Greene was a literary celebrity, and the Pope
told him that he had read some of his novels.
Greene, being Greene, immediately brought up
the condemnation of the power and the glory.
What did the Pope say? I can't imagine. The Pope
told him, essentially, Mr. Greene, some parts
of your novels will always offend some Catholics.
And then he said, but you should ignore the criticism.
Wow. That's basically papal permission to keep
being edgy. Keep doing what you're doing, Graham.
Don't worry about the guys in the back office.
In a way, yes, it validated Green's entire perspective
that the church is a hospital for sinners, not
a museum for saints. But it is interesting that
as Green got older, his focus did shift. The
explicit theological battles faded a bit and
his work became more humanistic, more political.
But that underlying sense of the struggle of
the soul never really left. Okay, so we have
the struggle of the soul. Now let's talk about
the struggle of nations, section three. The Spy
Who Wrote. Because while he was writing these
heavy theological novels, he was also working
for British intelligence. And this isn't just
he knew a guy, he was in it. Yes, and this wasn't
just research for a book, not at first. In 1941,
during World War II, his sister Elizabeth recruited
him into MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
That's always the family connections with the
British upper class, isn't it? Oh, my sister
just popped by and got me a job as a spy. It
was an old boys network, absolutely. He was posted
to Sierra Leone in West Africa. And again, this
feeds directly into the Greenland aesthetic.
Sierra Leone in the early 40s wasn't some high
-tech spy center like you see in the movies.
It was hot, humid, and mostly defined by boredom.
What was he actually doing there? What was his
mission? Officially, he was monitoring shipping,
looking out for diamond smuggling that might
be aiding the Axis powers, and keeping an eye
on the neighboring Vichy French territories.
But mostly, he was just sitting in a tin shack,
sweating. That sounds miserable. He said he relieved
the boredom by hunting for cockroaches. Hunting
cockroaches? Literally. He would keep a running
tally of how many he killed in a certain time
frame. It just speaks to that theme of crushing
boredom again. But the most significant part
of his MI6 career wasn't what he did in Africa
it was who his supervisor was back in London.
And this is where it gets really interesting.
Kim Philby. Kim Philby. For those who don't know
the name, Philby is perhaps the most famous or
infamous Soviet double agent in history. He was
a core member of the Cambridge Five, a high ranking
British intelligence officer on track to run
the whole service, who was secretly funneling
everything to Moscow the entire time. And Green
wasn't just his subordinate. He was his friend.
They were close friends. They drank together.
They talked shop. Green admired Philby's intellect
and his charm. So when Philby was finally unmasked
as a traitor and defected to the Soviet Union
in 1963, that must have completely crushed Green.
A total betrayal. You would think so. That was
the reaction of almost everyone else in the intelligence
community. They were furious. They wanted Philby's
head on a platter. But Green didn't denounce
him. He didn't. He defended him. It's more complex
than that. Green had resigned from MI6 in 1944,
long before the big reveal, but he remained loyal
to Philby personally. He even wrote the introduction
to Philby's memoir, My Silent War, which was
published in 1968 from Moscow. That is wild.
I mean, why would he support a man who committed
high treason, who betrayed his country and sent
agents to their deaths? It goes back to Green's
core philosophy. He believed in the primacy of
personal relationships over abstract ideologies
or loyalties to the state. There's a famous line
often attributed to him. In human relationships,
kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Kindness and lies are worth more than truth.
For him, personal loyalty was the ultimate virtue.
He felt that if you betray a friend for a cause,
even a cause like your country, you've lost your
humanity. He chose the man over the flag. That
is so complicated. It's almost the gangster's
code. Yeah. Never rat on your friends no matter
what. It is, but it certainly informed his fiction.
His spy novels are not James Bond. James Bond
is a patriotic fantasy. Green's world is one
of deep cynicism. Right. James Bond saves the
world. Green's characters just try to survive
the bureaucracy and their own mistakes. Look
at the Ministry of Fear, the human factor, and
especially Our Man in Havana. Our Man in Havana
is hilarious. It's one of my favorites. It's
about a struggling vacuum cleaner salesman, a
guy named Wormald, who gets recruited as a spy
in pre -revolution Cuba. Right. And Wormald has
no sources. He knows nothing. about anything
but he desperately needs the money for his daughter
so he just starts making up reports and the drawings
the drawings are the best part he draws diagrams
of giant futuristic looking vacuum cleaner parts
and tells mi6 they are secret weapon installations
hidden in the mountains and mi6 believes him
They swallow it whole. They are so desperate
for information, so convinced of their own importance
that they believe these ridiculous drawings.
Green is mercilessly mocking the seriousness
of the spy game. He's exposing the absurdity
of it all, this idea that intelligence agencies
are all knowing, when often they're just chasing
ghosts created by people who want a paycheck.
That cynicism had to come directly from his time
in MI6. He saw the incompetence firsthand. Absolutely.
He knew the game was often ridiculous. So we've
got the spy, we've got... the Catholic. Now let's
talk about the traveler. Section four, travels
in Greenland. We touched on this idea of Greenland
earlier, the seedy, tropical, morally ambiguous
setting. But Green actually hated that term,
didn't he? He detested it. He argued that he
wasn't inventing some seedy nightmare world.
He was just reporting accurately as a journalist.
He'd say things like, this is Indochina. This
is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described.
He felt that if critics thought it was a nightmare
world, maybe the critics were just too sheltered
to see reality. That's exactly it. He thought
the West was asleep, living in a comfortable
bubble, and he was trying to wake them up to
how the rest of the world actually lived and
suffered. And he certainly wasn't sheltered.
He went to some of the most dangerous, unstable
places on Earth. He was a disaster tourist before
that was even a thing. He actively sought out
the dangerous edge. In 1935, he went to Liberia.
This was his first major trip outside Europe.
And he didn't just stay in the capital. He trekked
350 miles through the interior on foot. It resulted
in his first great travel book, Journey Without
Maps. He almost died of a fever. He had no real
map, barely any supplies. It was a test of endurance,
a way to face down that boredom again. And then
Mexico in 1938. This was a crucial trip. He went
specifically to observe the Mexican government's
brutal anti -Catholic secularization campaign
under President Callas and later Cardenas. They
were hunting down priests, closing churches,
executing believers. It was a full blown persecution.
And this trip gave him the raw material for his
masterpiece. It did. It resulted in the nonfiction
book The Lawless Roads. But more importantly,
it provided the setting. the characters and the
whole atmosphere for the power and the glory.
It's amazing how he would go to a place as a
journalist, just soak up the atmosphere and then
metabolize that experience into a classic novel.
He did it again and again. He treated his life
as research. In the early 1950s, he went to Vietnam,
what was then French Indochina. He spent his
winters there between 1951 and 1955. What was
he doing? He was a war correspondent. He met
with generals. He went on patrols with the French
army. He smoked opium. He saw the colonial war
collapsing from the inside. And he wrote The
Quiet American. The Quiet American is... frighteningly
prophetic. I mean, if you want to understand
why the Vietnam War happened, you don't read
a history book. You read this novel. It really
is. And it was published in 1955, years before
the full scale U .S. involvement. But the main
American character, Alden Pyle, he represents
this dangerous American innocence. He's young.
He's from Harvard. He's full of theories about
democracy and third force. He wants to save Vietnam.
But he doesn't understand Vietnam at all. Not
in the slightest. And because of his And the
list of dangerous places just goes on. He also
went to Haiti during the reign of Papa Doc Duvalier.
A truly terrifying time. The Tonton's Makuts
militia was terrorizing the population. These
guys in dark sunglasses, wielding machetes, using
voodoo folklore to scare people into submission.
Green wrote the novel the comedians set there,
and he also wrote a scathing article called Nightmare
Republic, exposing the brutality of the regime.
Did Duvalier respond? Oh, yes. Papa Doc was so
angry, he had his government -issue pamphlets
attacking Greene personally. That's when you
know you've made it as a raider, when a dictator
writes a hit piece on you. I guess so. And he
went to leper colonies in the Congo. For a burnt
-out case. He traveled the Congo Basin in 1959.
He was obsessed with the fringes of human experience.
He wanted to see where society and the human
spirit broke down. We have to talk about his
politics here because his travels often aligned
with his very strong anti -Americanism. He was
deeply critical of the U .S. Greene was a fierce
critic of American imperialism. He saw the U
.S. as a clumsy, often destructive force that
frequently propped up brutal dictators in the
name of anti -communism. He thought the U .S.
was profoundly hypocritical. And this led him
to some... Well, some very controversial friendships.
Like Fidel Castro. Yes. In 1957, before the revolution,
Green actually acted as a secret courier for
Castro's rebels. This is a crazy story. Wait,
what? He was visiting Cuba, and he used his status
as this famous, slightly... bumbling British
writer to get past government checkpoints. He
transported warm clothing for Castro's rebels
who were hiding out in the Sierra Maestra Mountains.
So the famous British novelist was running supplies
for the Cuban Revolution. He was. He literally
smuggled supplies to the revolution. And after
Castro succeeded in 1959, he and Castro remained
friends. He visited Cuba frequently. Castro gave
him a painting that Green hung in his home until
he died. So was he just a blind follower? Did
he ever criticize Castro once he was in power?
Oh, he did. He wasn't a blind ideologue. Despite
their friendship, he questioned Castro's increasing
authoritarianism. He had this famously cynical,
but probably accurate, quote, All successful
revolutions, however idealistic, probably betray
themselves in time. That is such a nuanced view.
All revolutions betray themselves. It's the view
of a man who has read a lot of history and seen
a lot of human nature. He always supported the
underdog, but he knew that once the underdog
won, they could easily become the new oppressor.
He was always on the side of the victim, whoever
that victim happened to be at the moment. Okay,
so let's pivot to how he actually got all this
down on paper. Section 5. The writer's craft
and career. He was so prolific. But he had this
really weird way of categorizing his own books,
right? He did. At least initially, he divided
his books into two categories, novels and entertainments.
What's the difference? What did that mean to
him? In his mind, the novels were the serious
literary works like The Power and the Glory or
The End of the Affair. These were the books that
dealt with the heavy themes. God, sin, redemption,
the big stuff. The entertainments were the thrillers,
the mysteries like The Ministry of Fear or Our
Man in Havana. He wanted to signal to the reader
what they were getting. This one is for serious
thinking. This one is for fun on a train. But
the lines got really blurry over time. Very blurry.
For example, Travels With My Aunt is technically
a novel, but it is extremely funny and light.
On the other hand, The Confidential Agent was
an entertainment, but it deals with heavy moral
themes of loyalty and betrayal. Eventually, the
publishers just started putting them all together
because, frankly, the quality was consistently
high. He couldn't write a bad sentence, even
when he was just trying to write a simple thriller.
And his style was so... Viewable. I mean, it's
no surprise so many of his books became movies.
He was incredibly cinematic. You have to remember,
he started his career as a film critic. He understood
the language of the camera. Between 1933 and
2013, the sources say there were 62 film and
TV titles based on his work. And then, of course,
there is the ultimate example, The Third Man.
The classic film noir. The zither music. Orson
Welles as Harry Lyme. It's such a unique case.
He didn't write the book and then sell the film
rights, which is the normal way. He wrote the
novella specifically as raw material so that
he could then write the screenplay for the film.
That's completely backwards. It is. He worked
hand in glove with the director, Carol Reed.
He knew exactly what he was doing with the medium
of film. He wasn't just a novelist who was dabbling.
Speaking of film, we have to touch on the Shirley
Temple lawsuit. This is one of the weirdest and
frankly. Funniest anecdotes in his entire biography.
It is truly bizarre. So in 1937, Green was writing
film reviews for a magazine called Night and
Day. He reviewed the new film Wee Willie Winky,
starring the biggest child star in the world,
Shirley Temple. She was nine years old at the
time. Okay. Sounds innocent enough. Well, Green
wrote in his review that her performance displayed
a dubious coquetry, which appealed to middle
-aged men and clergymen. He was... not so subtly,
accusing the studio of marketing a nine -year
-old child in a sexualized way. Oh boy. That
is a very heavy accusation to make in 1937. 20th
Century Fox was, shall we say, not amused. They
sued him and the magazine for libel, and Green
lost. The magazine went bankrupt because of the
massive legal fees, and Green actually had to
flee to Mexico to avoid the fallout and the payment.
So wait a minute. Are you telling me the reason
he went to Mexico, the trip that directly led
to his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory,
was because he got sued by Shirley Temple Studio?
Indirectly, yes. It was the catalyst that pushed
him out of the UK at that exact moment. Fate
works in strange ways. If Shirley Temple hadn't
been in that movie, we might not have the greatest
Catholic novel of the 20th century. That is absolutely
incredible. Now, what about his actual writing
process? Was he the type to wait for inspiration
to strike? Was he a chaotic genius writing in
bursts? Absolutely not. He was disciplined to
a fault. It was almost monastic. He wrote every
day in a small black letter notebook with a black
fountain pen. And he had a very strict quota.
500 words a day. Just 500? That seems surprisingly
manageable. It is manageable, but he did it every
single day no matter what. And here is the kicker.
Once he hit 500 words, he stopped. Even if he
was on a roll? Even if he was in the middle of
a scene. Some sources say even if he was in the
middle of a sentence, he would put the notebook
away and not look at it again for the rest of
the day. But why? That seems counterintuitive.
His friend and publisher Michael Korda described
it as a daily penance. It wasn't about creative
flow, it was about control. It was a way for
him to manage his bipolar disorder. If he wrote
too much, he might trigger a manic episode. If
he wrote too little, he might sink into a depression.
500 words was the exact dose of medicine he needed
to stay sane and productive. Penance. That's
such a Catholic way to view your own writing.
It's not a joy, it's a difficult duty you have
to perform every day to clear your conscience.
And it worked. Over a long career, that daily
penance produced over 25 novels, plus plays,
essays, and screenplays. So with all this incredible
output, all this critical acclaim, all these
movie deals, Why didn't he win the Nobel Prize
for Literature? Let's get into Section 6, the
final acts. He was shortlisted so many times.
He was a perennial candidate. The sources list
1961, 1966, 1967, 1974, 1975. Pretty much every
year in the 60s and 70s, the press would gather
outside his house in October waiting for the
announcement. He was always on the list. So what
happened? Was he just unlucky? Did they just
prefer other writers? Well... There appears to
be a specific villain in this particular story,
a man named Arthur Lundqvist. And who was he?
He was a very influential member of the Swedish
Academy, the small group that decides the winner.
And Lundqvist reportedly said that the prize
would be awarded to Graham Greene over My Dead
Body. Whoa. Why did he hate him so much? What
was the issue? It's up for debate. Some speculate
it was because Green was too commercial. He was
too popular. The Academy often prefers more obscure,
pure literary figures. And Green was selling
millions of paperbacks at the airport. That was
seen as a bit vulgar. They were literary snobs.
That's one theory. Others say it was his politics.
Lundqvist, a leftist, didn't like his weirdly
Catholic anti -communism or maybe his cynical
worldview. But whatever the reason, it seems
to have been a very personal vendetta by this
one powerful member that blocked him year after
year. That is just tragic, to be blocked from
the highest honor in your field by one guy's
personal taste. But Green didn't seem to let
it stop him. He kept writing right up until the
end. He did. He spent his later life in Switzerland
in a small town called Corso, overlooking Lake
Geneva. He left Britain partly for tax reasons,
but also just to escape the fame and find some
peace. And he had a very famous neighbor there.
Charlie Chaplin. They became good friends in
their old age. Can you just imagine the conversations?
The master of silent comedy and the chronicler
of 20th century anxiety just hanging out by the
lake. I would pay an obscene amount of money
to be a fly on the wall for that. But even in
his late 70s, Green wasn't just resting on his
laurels. He got involved in a real -life fight
against the mafia. He did. It's incredible. In
1982, when he was around 78 years old, he wrote
and published a pamphlet called J 'Cuse. The
dark side of Nice. Accused. Very dramatic. Borrowing
from Emile Zola. Exactly. He was attacking organized
crime and deep -seated corruption in the local
government of Nice in the south of France. His
daughter lived there, and she was having trouble
with her ex -husband who allegedly had criminal
connections. Green started investigating it like
an old journalist. He claimed the mayor and the
police were in bed with the mob. Did it work?
Or did he just get himself in trouble? Well,
he lost a libel lawsuit initially. The establishment
closed ranks. But he was vindicated in the 1990s
after he died. The very mayor he had accused
ended up being imprisoned for corruption, just
as Green had alleged. So even as an old man,
he was still fighting, still speaking truth to
power. He never lost that edge. He died in 1991
at age 86 of leukemia. A quiet end to a very,
very loud and restless life. So as we wrap up
here, what does this all mean? We have to look
at his legacy. William Golding called him the
ultimate chronicler of 20th century anxiety.
After everything we've talked about, that feels
right. I think that stands up completely. Green
had this unique ability to make evil palpable.
He didn't write about abstract bad guys or monsters.
He wrote about the evil inside us, the weakness,
the betrayal, the doubt, the sin that comes from
trying to do good. But, and this is key, he also
always wrote about the possibility of redemption,
however slight. He believed that even the worst
sinner could find grace, often because of their
sin, not in spite of it. And he did it all while
being this walking, talking contradiction himself.
That, for me, is the aha moment of his life.
He proves that you don't have to be just one
thing. You can be a sinner and a saint. You can
be a patriot and a critic. You can be a cynic
and a believer. He validates the complexity of
the human experience. He gives all of us permission
to be complicated. There's a quote from him that
I think is a perfect final provocative thought
for our listeners. He said, the other side of
the problem is that I really don't want to survive
myself. which has nothing to do with nukes, but
with the body hanging around while the mind departs.
He was terrified of losing that sharp, critical
mind. He was afraid of becoming a vegetable.
Thankfully for us, he left that mind on the page.
It's still there, alive and kicking in every
single one of his books. So here's the question
for you listening right now. In our world today,
a world of social media, where everyone is forced
to pick a side, to be black or white, left or
right. Cancel just celebrated. Is there still
room for a Green -esque figure? Someone who can
hold two opposing thoughts in their head at the
same time and still function? Or have we lost
the capacity for that kind of nuance? It's a
question worth asking for sure. If you've never
read him, I really encourage you to go pick up
The Quiet American or watch the film of The Third
Man. You will not regret it. Step into Greenland
for a while. It's dark, but the view is absolutely
incredible. Thanks for joining us on this deep
dive.