The Failed Novelist

Abstract

Graham Greene helped launch his lengthy career as ‘the most distinguished English novelist writing today’ by writing several novels that the public did not like, and to which numerous reviewers responded with pronounced ambivalence.¹ The early novels—The Man Within, TheNameofAction, and Rumour at Nightfall—nonetheless had the effect of communicating an idea of Greene’s vocation and techniques that a generation of intellectuals enthralled by Leavisite and New Critical principles might not have found objectionable. These novels furnished critics with texts vague enough to require the application of institutionally sanctioned rules of coherence. With several impeccably intellectual novels under his belt, however, Greene then produced Stamboul Train, a novel that won enough popular acclaim to prompt Twentieth Century-Fox to purchase the rights and adapt into a film. In terms of contemporary critical discourse, Greene’s popular success suggested that the writer himself had in some way curtailed his talent as an artist in order to exploit ‘stock responses’, although both the technical innovations he deployed and the themes his work suggested muddied the critical waters. How could an intellectual conceptualize Greene’s achievement, which was at once both popular and intellectual?