Graham Greene. Unknown photographer, public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have the luxury of having no known biography. Greene, having written about his life and having had his life extensively written about by others, remains near when one reads his work—not insistently dominating or distracting, as some writers may prove to be, but as a presence often felt and at times caught by a side glance.

The first moment appears in Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape. In a chapter about Brighton Rock, which Greene called a labour of love, he explains the original inspiration for the novel with a reminiscence about the first film he saw at age six—a silent film about a kitchen maid turned queen, with live music played offscreen—he writes, “Her march was accompanied by an old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded … That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality.”

The second moment appears in Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant by Leopoldo Duran. In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel Monsignor Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. “I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, learning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing … With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.”

To say that these two moments encapsulate Greene’s work for me is an irresponsible cliche: the point of literature is not to be put into capsules, a trick good only for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Rather, the two moments provide a home key whenever I read Greene’s work. There are multiple pairings of twos in both scenes: a duel or a duet; who can say which is the more apt noun here?

In the first, the heroine, a kitchen maid and a queen within one being, offers a fairytale setting for some confrontations: reality versus fantasy, past versus future, entrapment versus freedom—variations of these appear in many of Greene’s novels. But a more interesting pairing is the beautiful image of a silent woman on the screen and the old lady plinking-plonking off stage: which of them is more dramatic, more romantic, more illusory and yet more permanent? And of course, in that same passage, there is also Greene the author (in his mid-seventies, going by the publication date of the book) and Greene the six-year-old boy. The mature man feels the young boy’s emotions—in Greene’s own words, “to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony.” The younger self, in carving into his memory feelings he’s not yet capable of articulating or even understanding, is nevertheless an equal partner: here is the source of a writer’s sense and sensibility, like the initial vibration that makes the sound; what comes after are echoes and reverberations.

In the second moment, again the illusory cinematic art appears. Father Juan, with his seventy years of Trappist history, must never have watched a film, and there he stands, witnessing what would remain a mysterious process to most audiences in the cinema. The clash and the harmony between the holy and the secular, believing and make-believing, faith and entertainment, the pending death of Monsignor Quixote—a fictional character, whose Sancho in the novel is an ex-mayor, a communist—and the pending death of Father Juan in the not too distant future: one has a sense that one enters, at that moment, the quintessential Greene land.

There is defiance that comes only with youth and inexperience, the refusal to accept life as it is: no one says a kitchen maid cannot also be a warrior queen; no one says a child cannot have the emotions that would put the world, which is often indifferent, to shame. There is also a defiance that comes with old age when the world seems no longer new: surely there is still something more to ponder, even if you’ve lived close to God in a Trappist cell for seventy years. And those who understand both kinds of defiance, one suspects, will be the right readers for Greene.

***

There are different ways to talk about Greene’s work. We can focus on the amphitheater of history, where wars, revolutions and colonial intrigues play impersonal gods to the mortals. We can scrutinize the mundane settings waiting for major and minor human dramas to happen—the streets and alleyways of Brighton and Saigon, the unaired offices of London ministry buildings, the manicured suburban gardens, the well-lit casinos and much-visited seaside resorts, the jungles and rivers of Africa and South America. We can also step away from those external settings and enter the interior landscapes of many of his characters, some of them with God on their side, others without; some have time on their side, others not; some with friends or loves or even enemies on their side, others not. But all of them have memories and dreams on their side—a blessing, even if it sometimes masks itself as a curse. And all of them, it seems to me, are only half of a duel or half of a duet, their partners sometimes visible and other times invisible.

In “A Day Saved,” an unnamed narrator follows an unnamed man, with a detailed plan to kill him and yet with the horror that he knows nothing about the man, not even his name. This seems a classic Greene dilemma, where one man’s despair and (partial) knowledge and another man’s innocence and faith in the ordinary (if he takes a flight instead of a train, he will save a day) constitute the quicksand for the reader: surely we are in a worse situation than the two characters; there is no choice for us but to be both of them at the same time. “A day saved … Save it from what, for what?” We may as well ask ourselves every day, for the rest of our lives, without knowing the answer.

In “The Basement Room,” a child—temporarily orphaned (his parents are out of town)—and the butler of the house, whom the child loves genuinely, are set on a course from page one to betray each other in the most fatal manner, and nothing will help them or save them. All the same, for as long as they go on being gentle and tender towards each other, we readers hold on to wishful thinking: of course, life will not take their sides, but perhaps—just perhaps—because of that, they will end up on the same side, two partners in a perpetual duet rather than being pitched against each other in a duel. But wishful thinking neither saves the butler nor the child nor us.

***

Is there any fundamental difference between a duel and a duet? In each, a connection predates the actual event. What comes­ after—understanding or misunderstanding, agreement or disagreement, harmony or dissonance, conversation or argument, life or death—may surprise us, but it is because human relationships are by nature surprising; what comes after may feel inevitable, and that too is what human relationships are about.

I started to read Greene when I was a young writer; twenty years later, he remains among a handful of writers I reread. His work keeps one’s mind on tiptoe. Illusions beget disillusions but also hopes; hopes beget illusions but also clarities.

As I was writing this, I looked for Ways of Escape on my bookshelf, wanting to revisit the cinema scene with the six-year-old Greene. It would be like a return to the home key, I thought, but among over twenty books by Greene (a few in duplicates) and still more about him, the one book I was looking for was absent! So much for the wish to see my previous annotations in the book and to have a duet with my younger self. And that missed connection, I must admit, is surprising and inevitable, like a tree standing inconspicuously and yet meaningfully in Greene-land.

This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new selection of Graham Greene’s stories, Duel Duet, to be published by Vintage Classics this month.

Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books, including the story collection Wednesday’s Child, which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, and the memoir Things In Nature Merely Grow. Her honors include fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations, and a Windham Campbell Prize, among others.