Graham Greene

On April 3rd Graham Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland at 86. In a moving obituary in the Independent his biographer, Norman Sherry, wrote of the novelist's greatness:

Greene's achievement is reflected in the variety of his professional life-publisher, editor, film and book reviewer, intelligence agent, travel writer, critic, essayist, biographer, playwright, poet, compulsive writer of letters to the newspapers. But these activities were ancillary to his prodigious work as a novelist.

In that field he created seedy, sometimes pathetic, often tenuous survivors in a hostile world. What was it that led him to write of those deeply divided creatures who never seem to be rescued except on the wrong side of the grave? . . . Raven (A Gun for Sale), Pinkie (Brighton Rock), the whiskey priest (The Power and the Glory), Scobie (The Heart of the Matter), Harry Lime (The Third Man), Sarah (The End of the Affair) . . . Their creation is a wonderful accomplishment, never likely to be matched in our time.

Greene could also be a good friend. Indeed for the last years of his life he was a very good friend to the library. This came about in 1979 when Joseph E. Jeffs, then university librarian, approached him about the possibility of his archives coming to Georgetown. He was intrigued, and through correspondence and meetings with Jeffs, and over a period of years, the library acquired such literary treasures as his travel diaries; lengthy series of letters from Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Antonia White; the manuscripts of Monsignor Quixote, Getting to Know the General, The Tenth Man and The Captain and the Enemy; and a wide variety of manuscript plays, short stories, and other correspondence.

Perhaps the greatest mark of Greene's affection for Joe Jeffs and the library was when he agreed to a rare public appearance at Georgetown. One of the most memorable events ever sponsored by the Library Associates, this question-and-answer program took place on October 7, 1985 in a crowded Gaston Hall. On the same occasion, and with characteristic generosity, he donated to the library his diary and commonplace book for 1936, together with the manuscript of "Waiting for a War."

He also encouraged his family and friends to consider Georgetown a repository for their own Greene material. From his brother Sir Hugh Greene came an important correspondence of 250 letters; his nephew James Greene sent some 50 letters; and Mrs. Helen Redway contributed the valuable papers of the late Alan Redway, the Greene bibliographer. More recently he suggested to Lord Walston that Georgetown would be an appropriate institution for his own unrivaled Greene collection. In 1990 that too arrived: more than a thousand letters; manuscripts of scores of works, published and unpublished, including the original of The End of the Affair; his Mexico diary of 1938; and a vast array of printed ephemera and photographs. Lord Walston, alas, died the month following Graham Greene on May 29th. Both will be remembered, each in his own way, by their friends at Georgetown.