GRAHAM GREENE
Graham Greene was born in 1904. His father was a teacher in a boarding school, and he attended his father’s lessons. In his family we find people related to letters, for example his brother was a BBC director and his mother was an R. L. Stevenson’s cousin. He had a difficult adolescence and, because of that, he had to attend psychoanalysis sessions, a very unusual treatment at the time. In his diaries, he said he attempted to commit suicide by the system of the Russian roulette.
He studied History in Oxford. There he fell in love with a catholic woman and converted to Catholicism and got married.
After the university, he got a job as a subeditor for The Times. While working as a journalist, he wrote a novel The Man Within, an espionage story round Europe. He was 25. It was a success, and he decided to become a full-time writer, although his two following novels didn’t sell well. His next hit was The Stamboul Train, also a thriller, published when he was 28.
From that moment on, he divided his works into two classes: “entertainment”, that is thrillers and spy stories; and “novels”, or literary works, where he would deal with more philosophical problems, as, for instance, religion and the relation between goodness and badness. In this sense, he is considered a catholic writer, not only because he was a convert, but because in this literary works, the heroes are religious catholic people who want to atone for their sins. An example of these literary works is The Power and the Glory, where a Mexican priest, drunkard, father of a daughter, flying from the Mexican Revolution, debates between doing his clerical obligations or saving his life.
During the Second World War, he worked for the Foreign Office in Sierra Leone: that is, he worked for the British Secret Service, the MI6. There he was under the orders of Kim Philby, the famous double agent who had to run away to the USSR. He was his inspiration for his novel The Human Factor.
When he was 42 he got divorced and got married again, this time with a very rich woman. He travelled a lot, and thus he got a lot of material for his novels. During the last part of his life, he lived a life of luxury in Paris, the French Riviera, Capri and the Ritz in London. He died aged 86 of leukaemia.
A lot of his novels were adapted for the cinema: The Third Man, The Quiet American, The Burn-out Case, The Comedians, The End of the Affair…
SUMMARY
The story is very simple. The narrator, a couple, and eight Japanese men are having lunch in an expensive restaurant in the centre of London. The Japanese are eating and talking, but the narrator cannot hear them clearly, much less understand their language.
Between the Japanese and the narrator, the couple are having an argument. They are talking about getting married in a week, and they have different plans about the way of earning their living. The boy has been offered a place in a wine merchant business belonging to his uncle. But the girl has written a book, and her publisher is very hopeful about her work: she’s going to have an advance of 500 pounds, and then, the royalties. But the young man doesn’t trust very much in his fiancée’s literary career, although she has a project for another novel.
The narrator is a bit jealous of the girl, because he’s a writer himself, but much older. He meditates about the girl’s childish illusions, that is, about her excessive trust in her publisher; he thinks inexperienced writers (or even experienced, as the narrator is) are publishers’ instruments to get money, and when a writer doesn’t sell (so he or she isn’t useful any more), the publisher goes and looks for another one.
The girl claims she has a big power of observation; this talent is a good skill for a writer, but the fact is she hasn’t ever been aware of the conspicuous eight Japanese gentlemen sitting, talking and eating near her.
QUESTIONS
-Look for information about:
Bentley’s
Regency Way
Roedean College
Cheltenham Ladies’ College
Chablis
Nelson
Mrs Humphrey Ward
-What do you think / How do you feel when you hear a
conversation in a language you don’t understand?
-Is it possible to write a good book being very young?
What very young authors do you know?
-Can you write about something you haven’t
experienced?
-Do you think the girl had powers of observation? What
kind of powers of observation do you have, that is, what things attract your
attention?
-Don you think they’ll get married in the end? What
are they going to do (occupations)?
-DEBATE: What kind of job would you recommend to your
children? Likes versus profits.
VOCABULARY
crutch, blurb, jacket