One of the problems with reading the literature of the 20th Century is that you need to spread it out. I suppose I should say it is a problem for me because when I find some author I like, I like to stick to that author and read things up. I have no problem doing this with the literature of the 19th Century since it does not interest me anywhere as much as the literature of the 20th Century. I can put the 19th Century down and it does not trouble me that I have a very sketchy understanding of the 19th Century novel. That is something a person who wants to understand English literature needs to repair, certainly, but not all at once.

But when it comes to the irresistible literature of the 20th Century, you need to spread it out because it can really suck you in and there is a lot of it. The guy who got me started on Kurt Vonnegut used to have a policy of making himself wait between Kurt Vonnegut novels in order to have the joy of the experience of one of these books still ahead of him for the forseeable future. That is really the joy and boon of literature: devoted readers who enjoy and are serious about the enjoyment which is the peculiar realm of literature. I may listlessly look into something from the 19th Century every once in a while, but only for the sake of the stuff I enjoy: the stuff of the 20th Century. There is no time like the present, I say.

The Modern Age ends with the 20th Century, according to John Lukacs around 1989 or whenever it was they managed to tear down this wall in Berlin (and I accept his designations, he ought to know) and so there is no time like the present for that literature, as, after all, ripeness is all. Many that are first shall be last and some that are last shall be first, but the great ferment of it will be in our times or I do not know a thing of what I am saying—and I have no assurances I can give you in that regard.

When it comes to Graham Greene I cannot say that I have been sucked in or that my understanding of him is as complete as perhaps it might be, but then, of how many authors can I say that my understanding of their work is as complete as perhaps it might be? Probably not a single one. Be that as it may, I still am persuaded that I know what I know, mostly, and I know that there is something interesting and even satisfying about a Graham Greene novel, even, and perhaps especially, his ‘entertainments.’

I have only read two of these dark little entertainments. They seem to take place without sunlight, not much in homes but in trains, ferries, hotels, stations, restaurants and such places: places of travel. There is in them confusion, people thrown together, irony like a fog, and fog, for that matter, narration and dialogue that is often not altogether unlike fog, and they both end in a puff of futility. They are done skillfully, intelligently, and that is why they intrigue me.

Greene is famous for his futile, persevering priests; at least, were I to pick anything of his opus I would think he might be famous for, it would be his futile, persevering priests: chaps like the chap in The Power and the Glory and Monsignor Quixote. My sense of having an incomplete understanding of the works of Graham Greene comes mostly from my inability to put together the futile, persevering priests with the curiosities of the dark little entertainments in a way that achieves a lasting insight. No insight, after all, no cigar. So I wonder, and every once in a while I read another of his works with pleasure, and think about it, and so on.

There are some authors whose work is such that to read the one work they are mostly famous for is enough. They probably wrote other things but all the rest of their things were either living of the glory of the one thing, or else they were leading up to the one thing in ways that were biographically significant but inconsequential for literary purposes. William Golding, I suspect, is that kind of author. I have not read his other works, but then, one does not hear about them all that much. Everybody, however, has heard of Lord of the Flies and it is to be hoped that some people actually know it is not just a movie. With Graham Greene, however, one feels a wider acquaintance with his works is necessary.

But what can one say? One can say Greene had his wild dreams. At one point in Stamboul Train he brings together all the characters—some of whom are and just remain snatches—into a crowded place and he follows the tumult of conversation in a way that is so skillful you are left thinking that is something you had better never try no matter how good you get; it is the sort of thing the gods of literature do and not mere mortals. Then out of this amazing whirl he picks a phrase that strikes like a clear bell and all the rest of the crowd is paralyzed and only the speaker and the one spoken to exist; at that point you can help thinking the book you hold is magical. Can what just happened be happening in plain letters on paper?

I do not exaggerate. Greene has a magical touch.

Greene is nothing if not sardonic, and the Stamboul Train is about the excesses of unanchored cosmopolitans, of indecent businessmen with a keenness only for the mundane, of people with their sights only on what is visible. It is a long and subtle—subtle seems the right word for it, but not the right concept, somehow—mockery of many modern types. Like Waugh, and Hemingway for that matter, when it comes to mockery, Greene is relentless—which is how I like it to be. If you want to become bored with the way most adults are living in this world, without actually living it, and become bored of it in an interesting way, read Stamboul Train. It is a bit of the opposite of Hemingway: in Hemingway you find him telling about a guy out camping preparing a can of beans in such detail that you are left wanting nothing so much as to warm a can of beans up at a fire and then wait for it to cool down to the right temperature and then to eat it because once Hemingway has described it, you are sure that is LIFE (at least you do if you just read the description and do not worry about the end of the work). With Greene you have the description of modern life with travel, other places, well appointed trains, good restaurants and the effect is rather not to induce you to it but rather to bore you.

There is quite a skill in rendering something boring in an interesting way: it has to do with the perspective into which the person reading enters. Being sardonic, oblique, detached, ironic all works into what Greene is trying to do just as Hemingway’s stark, simple and sophisticatedly—oh yes! as Gordon Brown is fond of saying—straightforward style accomplishes his ends with the skill of one rightly recognized by sensible people everywhere as a literary master. Both were, though both were different men.