Books, Arts & Manners: Malice in Greeneland

Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man, published from a manuscript recently discovered in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, presents an occasion to scan the whole shelf of his works and perhaps to venture a prediction as to which of them will still be read a generation hence. Although fairly slight even for one of Greene’s “entertainments,” The Tenth Man, written shortly after World War II and long forgotten by both MGM and Greene himself, still serves to take us back to a time when the British novelist was more or less at the top of his form.

In the Seventies, Greene was given the Jamesian privilege of writing introductions to the separate volumes in both the British and French editions of his Collected Works. Though he is certainly a writer good enough to have been taken that seriously, it is almost equally certain that the more than thirty volumes of this edition will not enjoy anything close to immortality from one end of the shelf to the other. Leaving aside the travel books and a few of the better entertainments—Travels with My Aunt (1969); Our Man in Havana (1958)—the question must at last come down to which of the serious novels will survive.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man, published from a manuscript recently discovered in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, presents an occasion to scan the whole shelf of his works and perhaps to venture a prediction as to which of them will still be read a generation hence. Although fairly slight even for one of Greene’s “entertainments,” The Tenth Man, written shortly after World War II and long forgotten by both MGM and Greene himself, still serves to take us back to a time when the British novelist was more or less at the top of his form.

In the Seventies, Greene was given the Jamesian privilege of writing introductions to the separate volumes in both the British and French editions of his Collected Works. Though he is certainly a writer good enough to have been taken that seriously, it is almost equally certain that the more than thirty volumes of this edition will not enjoy anything close to immortality from one end of the shelf to the other. Leaving aside the travel books and a few of the better entertainments—Travels with My Aunt (1969); Our Man in Havana (1958)—the question must at last come down to which of the serious novels will survive.