5/29/2023 0 Comments Monsieur quixote![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In his later years Greene flirted (and more than flirted) with the Soviets, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and the Sandinistas, up to the very moment that communism was on its last legs. ![]() When Greene wrote an introduction to the English edition of Philby’s autobiography, he basically excused the treason as the result of idealism. Kim Philby, Greene’s supervisor for part of the war would defect to the Soviet Union fifteen years later, and Greene spent much of his life offering limp apologies for his friend and the cause for which he betrayed his country. A stint in MI6, the British intelligence service, during World War II further complicated an already mysterious private world. Greene’s own inner life was conflicted and obscure. He simply used the powerful imagination that led him to speak of his work as a “guided dream.” That imagination-fired, at least during the great middle years, by intense moral and religious perception-made Greene’s fiction the best-realized portrayal in its time of the drama of the human soul. Unlike many literary practitioners in this century, he did not experiment with language, subvert traditional narrative, or choose exotic subjects. Graham Greene was a great novelist of a special kind. ![]()
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