Madly Excited

John Bayley

• The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. I: 1904-1939 by Norman Sherry
  Cape, 783 pp, £16.95, April 1989, ISBN 0 224 02654 2

A best-seller is a classic that can only be read once. All best-selling novelists create their own version of romance, which must have the authority of seeming to be the real thing. In the cleverest ones the real thing usually does come in somewhere: a phrase describing a street, a scrap of dialogue, a character’s sudden gesture. The scrap of authenticity validates the whole. Male novelists are more disingenuous about their romance than women, dividing and dramatising it, pretending to discredit by exaggeration. Ever since Jane Eyre, the female best-seller has usually been honest enough to be Little Me. There is, nonetheless, a remarkable similarity in technique between, say, Margaret Drabble and Graham Greene. Both create an entirely coherent romance world, powered by variations on self-satisfaction, in Greene’s case masquerading as self-disgust. In both cases this is highly transmissible to the reader.