And something happened between Greene and Zoe. Richmond was a quack with no formal training. He lived for six months with self-proclaimed Jungian analyst Kenneth Richmond and his attractive wife, Zoe. Some kind of breakdown occurred at sixteen, perhaps the result of tension at school. In his stunning travel book on Mexico, The Lawless Roads, Greene reveals that he asked for faith at Berkhamsted and got it with a characteristic twist: “I began to believe in Heaven because I believed in Hell.” His father was headmaster of the private school Greene attended, setting up a classic Greene conflict: loyalty to his father versus the impossible desire to be one of the boys. West, the man remains an enigma, wrapped inside a mystery. Despite the impressive labors of Norman Sherry, Greene’s authorized biographer, and most recently W. The same writer who had written a moving account of Communist atrocities against the Catholic Church in Mexico during the 1930s became an advocate of the slack Christian-Marxist “dialogue” of the 1980s. 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.

Monsieur quixote