Graham Greene had a habit of playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver.

Biography task 2: Look up some opinions about Greene held by other famous (or no necesserily so) people. Do some of them coincide?

WRITING STYLE

Task 1: Read the text and do the assignments following it.

Graham Greene (1904—1991)

Few writers have provoked such contradictory as­sessments during their lifetime as Graham Greene. A broad sweep of literary ancestors have been summoned up to explain his style and thought, from those ac­knowledged by Greene himself, such as Conrad and James, to Dostoevsky, Kafka, the 19th century Dec­adents, the French Catholic novelists and more re­cently even the French Existentialists. This mesh of literary cross-judgements has been woven out of Greene's peculiar contradictory development, for he is a Catholic whose books, and particularly his religious novels have earned him an international reputation rare among contemporary English writers.

Born in 1904, the son of G.H. Greene, the Head­master of an English public school, Greene was giv­en a conventional middle-class upbringing. Later in Balliol College, Oxford, he read history for three years. It was at the end of his Oxford career, in 1925, that he published a collection of poems Babbling April. For the most part these are imitative of the Oxford aestheticism of the 1920s.

After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a journal­ist for four years, first in Nottingham and later as a subeditor of The Times in London. So he reached maturity and independence as a writer at the start of the 1930s. He first came to the notice of the literary world with such a novel as Brighton Rock (1938).With his books Greene introduced his characteristic genre, the thriller with theological and moral significane. At this period his attention was focused on English life and English types, as in England Made Me (1935), one of his outstanding novels, though now rather neglected by critics. But after The Power and the Glory (1940), set in Mexico, which many think his best novel, Greene rarely returns to the English scene. His stories are usually set in some foreign political storm centre.

Green has roamed the world from Vietnam to West Africa, Latin America and Haiti. Using these places as setting for his stories, he shows protagonists caught up in malignant circumstances. For example, in A Burnt-Out Case (1961) an architect, repelled by modern life, attempts to lose himself in a leper colony deep in Africa and to purge all human desires and contacts.

Graham Greene himself divides his novels into two main groups: "serious" novels and novels of "enter­tainment". As "serious" he himself considers the fol­lowing: The Man Within (1929), It's a Battlefield (1934), England Made Me, The Heart Of the Matter (1948); these books are marked with pes­simism and disillusion. For instance, England Made Me is a deep pessimistic novel and The Heart of the Matter is a novel about the fate of a well-meaning man who commits suicide to get out of the blind alley of the moral problems he had been trying to solve.

An exciting and violent plot is characteristic for the second kind of novel. The novels of "entertainment" are Stamboul Train (1932), The Confidential Agent (1939), Our Man in Havana (1958) and others. But these novels of "entertainment" are quite different from ordinary detective "thrillers". There is one trait always present in his books, which singles Greene out of com­monplace detective story writers – his humanism, the deep psychological analysis of his heroes and a very thoughtful attitude to the burning political problems of the day. Our Man in Havana is a social and political satire. In both serious and adventure detective stories we see the ambiguities of moral judgment and intensely human crises of faith. In "The Quiet American" (1955) Green unfolds a theme in which stupidity, hypocrisy and ambition play their sorry parts. It is suggested that on this occasion Greene, turning from his favourite theme of religion and sacrifice, has substituted certain prob­lems of morality. But it would be unfair to describe the purpose of the book as a problem novel. It is full of prob­lems, but they emerge as part of the life which is so energetically, vividly, frankly offered for our inspection. It is Graham Green at his best. That he has not been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can only be due to political reasons…

Task 2: Translate the following word combinations into Russian and use them in sentences of your own:

to provoke contradictory assessments, literary an­cestors, literary cross-judgements, peculiar contra­dictory development, religious novels, to earn smb an international reputation, to give a conventional mid­dle-class upbringing, to reach maturity and indepen­dence as a writer, to roam, a protagonist, to repel, to purge, entertainment, to be marked with pessimism, an exciting and violent plot, de­tective thrillers, a deep psychological analysis, ambi­guity, to unfold a theme, to substitute.

Task 3: Answer the following questions:

1. Why has Graham Greene provoked such a con­tradictory assessment?

2. What earned him an international reputation?

3. What education did Gr. Greene get?

4. When and how did he reach maturity as a writer?

5. How does he show his main heroes?

6. Into what two groups does he divide his novels?

7. The novels of "entertainment" are different from ordinary detective "thrillers," aren't they?

8. What are both genres characteristic of?

Task 4: Translate the following text into Russian in writ­ing.

Greene would characterize himself as a realist and a religious writer, not in the sense of a Francois Mauriac, the French Catholic novelist who admired him and who has been often cited as a major influence, but in a Jamesian sense. "After the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel," Greene wrote in a 1945 essay on Mauriac. "For with the death of James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as the world of fiction had lost a dimension." That dimension was something that Greene, much more recently, called a "ruling passion" that gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system. No matter how extraordinary, he adds, talent cannot alone sustain an achievement.

From his journeys to Liberia and Mexico early in his career, when he missed that "terrible aboriginal calam­ity" to his present elder literary statesman's retreat at Antibes on the French Riviera (where he recently spoke without irony of failure, boredom, loneliness, and emp­tiness as the writer's most dependable allies), Greene has exhibited a world-weariness that he offsets – and then, only temporarily – by another voyage, the next book.

As a novelist, Greene's ruling passion has been an awareness of man's aboriginal corruption. His charac­ters cannot dismiss that sense at the heart of things that life has no meaning, that life cheats when origi­nal sin is blurred. And this endless burrowing, for the corruption within testifies to Greene's battle as a nov­elist for the survival of consciousness. As a kind of English Dostoevsky, Greene directs his characters to relentless probes within themselves for that deepest level of corruption known to the underground man, that aspect that he can only with the most agonizing difficulty acknowledge to himself.

THE END OF THE AFFAIR BY GRAHAM GREENE

The novel The End of the Affair was written in 1951 and probably based on Greene's own extramarital relationship with Lady Catherine Walston. It as many other Greene’s works is concerned with religious matters.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1097