Greene wrote. I used to have that typed on a yellowing piece of paper, taped to my desk lamp, long before I understood how true it was. Something I understood sooner â as soon as I began to write â is this cutting I also made from
The End of the Affair:
âSo much of a novelistâs writing ⦠takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.â
The End of the Affair
is the first novel that shocked me. I read it at a time when most of my contemporaries (those who read at all) were being shocked by
The Catcher in the Rye
, which I thought was as perfunctory as masturbation. Salingerâs familiar creation, that troubled boy, knew nothing that could compare to Bendrixâs frightening knowledge that âthere is no safety anywhere: a humpback, a cripple â they all have the trigger that sets love off.â
Later, to think of Greene making the disclaimers he made â or describing some of his work, as he did, as mere âentertainmentsâ â was confounding to me. Greeneâs manipulations of popular though âlesserâ forms (the thriller, the detective story) obviously cost him the critical appreciation that is withdrawn from writers with too many readers.
I am reminded of Maurice Bendrix thinking of one of his critics. âPatronizingly in the end he would place me: probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime, not yet; but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.â Greene wrote this about Bendrix in 1951; Greene himself was already becoming popular â he would soon commit âthat crimeâ â and the âwise detectivesâ would sniff at his success and bestow their praise on far less perfect craftsmen than Greene.
If, in the beginning â when I first read him in prep school â Graham Greene showed me that exquisitely developed characters and heartbreaking stories were the obligations of any novel worth remembering, it was also Greene, later, who taught me to loathe literary criticism; to see how the critics would dismiss him made me hate critics. Until his death, in 1991, Graham Greene was the most accomplished living novelist in the English language; in any language, he was the most meticulous.
As Greene was always keen to observe: coincidence is everywhere. Greeneâs niece, Louise Dennys, is my Canadian publisher. The man who introduced me to Greene, the Reverend Frederick Buechner â no longer the school minister at Exeter â is my old friend and neighbor in Vermont. (Small world.) And it is only mildly astonishing to me that by the time I left Exeter I had already read most of the writers who would matter to me in my life as a writer; it is also true that the hours I spent reading them contributed (in combination with my dyslexia) to the necessity of my spending a fifth year at a four-year school.
It hardly matters now. And itâs a good lesson for a novelist: keep going, move forward â but slowly. Why be in a hurry to finish school,
or
a book?
A Backup
While the intelligentsia of my Exeter classmates moved on to various Ivy League colleges, or to their elite equivalents â George Trow moved slightly south to Harvard, where Larry Palmer would go the following year, and Chuck Krulak was accepted at the Naval Academy (Krulak had left Exeter for Annapolis the previous year) â I attended the University of Pittsburgh because I wanted to wrestle with the best.
I would have been happier at Wisconsin, where I was wait-listed for admission because I wasnât in the top quarter of my graduating class. (Itâs questionable that, if Iâd gone to Exeter High School instead of the academy, I
would
have been, although this was my feeling at the