Reading Graham Greene

All these people reading Hayek and Rand (well at least they're reading) and imposing the ideas of these writers, as if they have any ideas that wouldn't have been better had they stayed inside their books, on our social and political institutions, would do well to read another dead writer whose writing puts a far greater light on our time, Graham Greene.

Greene is the great historian of our age, and in Technicolor. As a publisher I wish I could reach out to him and say, "Mr. Greene, give me something to publish, anything, the note you wrote to yourself on the back of an envelope, the unfinished essay, the beginning of the novel you abandoned..." but I can't reach out to him: Greene reportedly wrote nothing he couldn't sell for good hard cash and I don't believe in mixing publishing with money, and Mr. Greene's dead.

Greene's an outstanding political tragedian. Two books, read cover-to-cover, back-to-back, The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American, reveal more than any reader can actually bear about the nature of political power and the inadequacy of religious faith, though faith, some sort of a raw belief in something other than ourselves, is all we have. If you wish to understand The Catholic Church and its part in the colonialism in the 19th & 20th centuries read The Power and the Glory; if you wish to understand America's predicament--that of becoming the world's greatest military power in the most innocent, surreptitious way imaginable--read The Quiet American. 

Having finally, after reading his three novels (some call them a trilogy) once again last year, established Samuel Beckett as the Shakespeare of the Purely Personal, I establish Graham Greene as the Supreme Leader of Comprehending Our Age. Both writers have a poetic conception of the self; Beckett as if the self doesn't exist and Greene as if the self is all there is. Reading Graham Greene, as I am now, at a time when our social and political situation is as disappointing as it's ever been, provides the kind of insight that acts as solace, seeing through Greene that we have inherited the consequences of a way of life that become a system which, because it is so human, was corrupt from the very beginning.

If he were alive, I'd ask Graham Greene to send me something, anything, to publish.