Divided Loyaltiesnby Katherine DaltonnReflectionsnby Graham GreenenEdited by Judith AdamsonnLondon: Reinhart Books;n325 pp., $19.95nGraham Greene died this year at 86, anripe old age that was no small accomplishmentnfor a man who at 19 playednRussian roulette on the Berkhamstedncommon until he grew bored with evennthe possibility of his own death. As an”semilapsed” Catholic who professednbelief (though not certainty) in purgatorynbut not hell, perhaps his passingnwas an easy one. One wishes at least sonmuch for one of the great writers innEnglish of this century.nCelebrated authors no longer ceasenpublishing on their deaths and it seemsnlikely that Judith Adamson’s volume ofnGreene’s previously uncollected newspapernwork, reviews, and addresses willnnot be his final book. But—some stillbornnnovels aside—with his major essaysnand travel pieces having been collectednelsewhere, and now this book ofnmiscellany, there cannot be much left.nIt is testimony to Greene’s talent thatnthis volume is valuable in itself, and notnjust to round out a famous literary life.nReflections begins with a short “Impressionsnof Ireland,” done whennGreene was 19 and on vacation innDublin and Waterford; what is strikingnis how nicely the piece is written andnhow little in Ireland’s politics has beennresolved. The book ends, almost, andnfittingly enough, with an addressnGreene made in Moscow in 1987,nexpressing his wish for an alliancenbetween Roman Catholicism andncommunism. His was a political life,nwhat with his friendship for ClaudnCockburn and Kim Philby, his championshipnof revolutionary Latin America,nand his hatred for American commercialismnand imperialism that lednhim, among other actions, to resignnfrom the American Academy of Artsnand Letters in the early 60’s shortlynafter his election in order to protest Mr.nJohnson’s war.nHere are a number of articles donenin the 50’s on Vietnam, echoes fromnwhich show up in The Quiet American,nthat wonderful book whose twoncentral characters are metaphors fornthe old British and new Americannempires. “The Worm Inside the LotusnBlossom,” about Paraguay, has detailsnthat were incorporated into TravelsnWith My Aunt. For those more interestednin Greene the novelist thannGreene the activist the sources fornmuch of his fiction can be found innseveral of these journalistic accounts.nGreene said that what he foundnmost interesting in people was theirndivided loyalties — to one woman andnanother, to one’s country and one’sncause, to heaven and hell — and henfocused his books on the conflict thatnarises from those divisions. But if all hisnbooks had done was to trace man’s fall,nhe would have been one among manyn20th-century nihilists; it is in his worknthose quick moments of redemption,nexpressed sometimes in nothing morenthan a murderer’s wish to confess, ornan atheist’s doubt, that make him anChristian writer.nIn some of the pieces here he isnexplicitly so, as in “The Last Pope,” an1948 address in which Greene gives anmore charitable definition of the termn”Christian civilization” that would includenour own, fairly dark age. Therenare other good pieces that are neithernreligious nor political—a defense ofnthe popular appeal of the movies andnsome gratitude for the censors in “Subjectsnand Stories,” and a vivid accountnfrom 1939 of a bombing raid he flewnon. There are some surprises, too. Inn”Indo-China: France’s Crown ofnThorns” we see for a fleeting momentnGreene the imperialist, and are just asnstarded by an excellent piece on thenmovies (“Ideas in the Cinema,” 1937)nin which this citizen of the world showsna localist streak, in the midst of annargument against the “international”ncinema: “For art has never really leftnthe cave where it began, and youncannot live, as an English ace producerndoes, between Denham and Hollywood,nwith a break in New York fornbusiness conferences, and betweenwhilesnmake a picture which is thenproduct of saturation, saturation in anparticular environment. . . . Shakespearenis English first, and only afternthat the world’s.”nOnly a few pieces ring false — onenCatholic address, in which Greene is anmore self-assured and even mawkishnCatholic than he is typically elsewhere.nnnand “Return to Cuba” (1963) andn”Shadow and Sunlight in Cuba”n(1966). Sentences such as “The warnagainst illiteracy is a genuine crusadenwith a heroic quality of its own” are thensentences of a propagandist. But therenare very few of these.nThe only other jarring note in thisnbook, to an American ear at least, is hisnrecurring anti-Americanism, thoughnmost of this is in asides (“I was standingnjust behind the retiring American Ambassador,nremarkable for the size andnfatness of his earlobes …”). In hisn1980 conversations with interviewernMarie-Frangoise Allain, Greene mentionednthat “Some time ago there wasnan article in The Spectator about ThenQuiet American, which said that itnmade little difference whether I inclinednto the Right or the Left, sincenwhat I truly detested was Americannliberalism. That wasn’t far wrong.” Hisnfeelings toward America colored manynof his opinions and spurred a lot of hisnactivism, though some of that concernnfor the world’s underdogs originatednwith his Catholicism; indeed many ofnthe peoples he fought for or wrotenabout were Catholics—the Goans, thenLatin American left, the Haitians, evennsome of the Vietnamese. If he was, asnhe described himself, a Protestant withinnthe Catholic Church, he was anCatholic everywhere else. Perhapsnanother factor in his dislike for thisncountry—which after all is far morenreligious than his own — was its Protestantism.nBut in the end his belittling criticismnof America is unimportant, and itnwould be unimportant even if Americannforeign policy were unimpeachable.n”If only writers could maintainnthat one virtue of disloyalty — so muchnmore important than chastity — un-nFor Immediate ServicenChroniclesnNEW SUBSCRIBERSnTOLL FREE NUMBERn1-800-435-0715nAUGUST 1991/33n