Taking what you get

Walter Kendrick

• Getting to know the General: The Story of an Involvement by Graham Greene
  Bodley Head, 224 pp, £8.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 370 30808 5
• Saints, Sinners and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene by Roger Sharrock
  Burns and Oates, 298 pp, £15.00, September 1984, ISBN 0 86012 134 8
• Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene by Quentin Falk
  Quartet, 229 pp, £14.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 7043 2425 3
• The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene by Marie-Françoise Allain
  Bodley Head, 187 pp, £7.50, April 1983, ISBN 0 370 30468 3

The longevity of artists creates special difficulties for their critics. Ideally, from a critical point of view, artists ought to follow Keats’s example and die young, leaving behind a tidy oeuvre about which coherent generalisations can be made. Too often, however, artists survive to an unreasonable age, passing through phase after phase, advancing and regressing with no steady rhythm, every year or so tossing a new stumbling-block into the path of those who would like to understand them. Thomas Hardy was England’s worst offender in this regard: but Graham Greene, now 80, bids fair to give Hardy a run for his money.