Volume 38, Number 10 · May 30, 1991
On Graham Greene
By J.M. Cameron
As one grows older one notes the deaths of great figures with a mixture of pleasure and complacency. But Graham Greene's death is more like the death of a member of one's family or the loss of a rooted expectation, even like the loss of a skill or a habit. On the day I heard of his death the thought of him rarely left me, and this feeling of loss persists and hasn't yet taken its place in the established order of the past. I was born in 1910 and was thus almost Greene's contemporary. He was a member of my college at Oxford. I was like him in being a convert to Catholicism; and my recollections of treacherous and cruel schoolboys, prefiguring in character the men who ran the death camps, and of adults, schoolmasters and others, who seemed habitually beside themselves, are like his. Like him I admired and was haunted by such novels as The Viper of Milan, King Solomon's Mines, the Conan Doyle stories (not just Sherlock Holmes); and I came to admire Conrad and Henry James and learned more than I can remember from Greene's comments on these masters.
Feature, 914 words
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