Graham Greene: A Life in Letters

Graham Greene (1904-1991) was committed to yet another genre: he was among the 20th century’s most obsessive letter writers. He dashed off or dictated some 2,000 letters or postcards each year, posting them to family, friends, lovers, editors, agents and a galaxy of fellow writers, including Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, R. K. Narayan, Vaclav Havel, Kurt Vonnegut and Shirley Hazzard. The to-and-fro of these letters, a kind of intellectual tennis, seemed to keep his color and spirits high.

In “Graham Greene: A Life in Letters,” tens of thousands of his letters have been pared down to a tidy 400 or so by Richard Greene (not related), an associate professor at the University of Toronto. As good as these letters can be — Graham Greene is, by turns, fond, cranky, depressive, mischievous — one trusts this book’s editor when he suggests that a complete edition of them would be overkill, “valuable for scholars but otherwise forbidding and essentially unreadable.”

Like the best books of literary letters, this volume reads like brisk, epistolary biography. We follow Greene from when he leaves home (he grew up near London, the son of a public-school headmaster) to attend Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history. We watch him woo and wed Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, and try to settle into family life and a writing career.

The family life aspect never took hold. Greene had, in every sense, a wandering eye. He needed constant travel (there are letters here from Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, the Congo and every place in between) and constant sexual companionship, whether from long-term lovers, transient female admirers or prostitutes. Many other letters deal with politics — Greene’s were leftist but unpredictable — and his tortured Roman Catholicism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/books/10garn.html

I love to read correspondence.