Fictionalized Politics

Abstract

Greene’s political perspectives as a novelist and commentator on world affairs were partly defined by an insistent psychological need to distance himself from a comfortable Edwardian provincial background. (Henry) Graham Greene was born into an upper-middle class Hertfordshire family on 2 October 1904 at St John’s House, Berkhamsted School, where his father was then housemaster. He was the fourth child of Charles H. Greene and Marion Raymond Greene (1872–1959), who were first cousins once removed and members of an extensive, close-knit family circle based at Berkhamsted.¹ During the 1920s Greene prided himself upon his egalitarian socialism but the (largely unacknowledged) memory of some of his ancestors remained problematic because of their prominence as pro-slavery and anti-Catholic Emancipation capitalists.

Not even Greene’s critics doubt that there is a political dimension to all writing; few of them, however, have considered the political implications of reading his work.

Thomson, Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction, 7