Ways of Escape makes one feel, yet again, how much a writer of the Thirties Greene is. The work he did in that decade, from Stamboul Train (1932), England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936) to Brighton Rock (1938), The Lawless Roads (1939), and The Power and the Glory (1940), is not his best; much of it is overwritten, besotted with a rhetorical extravagance taken over from Conrad's The Arrow of Gold. But if not his best work, it is his most typical, producing his major themes, situations, and images.

Greene's mind, like Auden's during the same decade, was appeased mainly by lurid occasions. The imagery common to Greene, Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice, and Spender is of frontiers, maps, passports, an atmosphere not of death, Juliet's tomb, but of terror, mostly sought for its frisson…. The enjoyment of insecurity, fear, and terror, sought as an escape from boredom and depression, is one of Greene's themes in Ways of Escape. When we accept the force of it in him, we find ourselves revising our sense of Auden and his friends; reading Look, Stranger! and Letters from Iceland as rituals against boredom, not merely against the public nightmare, dread, and war.

Greene's themes in Ways of Escape are also retained from the Thirties. Betrayal, it is true, is perennial, but Greene's sense of it issues from a set of circumstances, conventions, and assumptions peculiar to the English Thirties; and shared by many bright young men who entered upon their careers with a view of life largely provided by their experience in such institutions as Berkhamsted and Balliol. Such men had their first experience of betrayal in school; a friendship spurned, a secret disclosed…. [As] Dr. Plarr says in The Honorary Consul, "caring is the only dangerous thing."…

My argument is that Greene, coming of age in the Thirties, defined his art mainly in melodramatic terms, with corresponding themes of betrayal and equivocation. After The Power and the Glory, he put his talent on a thin diet, got rid of Conrad, and took his themes more casually. The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951) are just as serious as the earlier novels, but they don't proceed upon an assumption of universal menace. And they have moments in which the ironies of The Comedians (1966) and Travels with My Aunt (1969) are anticipated. But they are still derived from gestures which were already habitual to Greene in the Thirties. It has always been the habit of Greene's intelligence to seek menacing occasions; of his morality to lure temptation; of his body to seek danger; and of his convictions to long to be undermined. Even in his later years, his exploits have often retained a trace of adolescence. In Ways of Escape his account of being deported from Puerto Rico has every sign of being a prank on his part, and, worse still, a Balliol prank. (p. 15)

One of the many interests of Ways of Escape is the question of character. Greene has always been more concerned with character than with action or plot. He has referred to "the abiding temptation to tell a good story," and has often yielded to it, but only to give a character room to move…. (pp. 15-16)

In all his novels, Greene's procedure, he tells us, is to begin with a hunch, an intuition of a person, a character. The book then goes in search of him. The object is to achieve virtually complete knowledge of this character. Greene explains in Ways of Escape that few of his characters were based upon people he knew; the reason being that, even in the case of an old friend, he knew him only well enough to realize that complete knowledge of him was impossible. With an invented character, complete knowledge is, at least in theory, possible….

Greene's assumption of complete knowledge of his invented characters may explain, incidentally, one irritating feature of his novels, his relation to a character called God. Greene has often written as if he had complete knowledge of God, knew what he would forgive, and so forth; since God is by definition an invented or imaginary character, the assumption doesn't seem preposterous, though its reiteration is tiresome. Anyway, when the novelist has achieved complete knowledge of his character, he is in a position to lavish his sympathy upon him, even if to more disinterested eyes he seems, like Kim Philby, a liar and a scoundrel….

Complete knowledge makes possible complete compassion. The purpose of the novel, I infer from Greene's account of more immediate issues, is to enable the novelist and his readers to practice complete compassion, an impossible task in real life, since we can never know enough….

But even if a novelist knows the worst and the best and everything in between, he is not obliged to make his disclosures as full as his compassion. There is more to Colonel Daintry than sardines. Greene's way is to seek complete knowledge of a character, and then to disclose enough about him to keep his secret, while convincing the reader that the character has one. Opening a tin of sardines implies all the other things Greene knows of Colonel Daintry: it is the novelist's privilege to keep most of them to himself. (p. 16)

A character begins to form when the novelist senses that he is being solicited by a person, a figment as yet, a phantasm. For the reader of Ways of Escape and A Sort of Life, the character is one Graham Greene. There is reason to suppose that the novelist Greene was solicited by the character eventually named Greene. The novelist has a novelist's interest in this person. He seeks complete knowledge of him, and sends him into several remote corners of the world partly to try him out, make him disclose himself: more exploits, more knowledge. The process is one by which a something vague becomes a something more definite, comes from mere potentiality into being. Or comes from one phase or mode of existence into another. A type becomes a character.

It seems feasible to think that the novelist Graham Greene saw himself as a type, to begin with, and that the particular type was the spy, the confidential agent so congenial to the English Thirties. (pp. 16-17)

The purpose of Ways of Escape, as of A Sort of Life, is to transform a type, the spy, into a character continuous with the type, the novelist as spy. Greene's travels become secret missions, carried out ostensibly for The Sunday Times but in truth for himself, to acquire complete knowledge of himself….

Ways of Escape ends with a bizarre Epilogue called "The Other," about another man called Graham Greene, or at least a man who has been using various names, including John Skinner, Meredith de Varg, and Graham Greene. Our man in Antibes, our Graham Greene, proposed to Picture Post that they send him to find and interview the other joker, then in jail, apparently, in Assam. The plan didn't work out, because the Other had by then jumped bail, and there was a risk that our man might be arrested in his place. The story has more plot than novels by Graham Greene tend to have; and the characterization is thinner than usual. I take "The Other" as Greene's version of Conrad's "The Secret Sharer." And I do in part believe it.

The book, then, is interesting, enjoyable, and informative. But it does little to remove one's misgivings about Greene's entire work, misgivings which I have suggested by describing him as very much a novelist of the English Thirties. My implication is that he settled for themes all too congenial to that decade, and for a melodramatic assumption of their significance. The later novels toned down the portentousness and assimilated their style to a more accomplished urbanity, but they did not question, in any radical way, the melodramatic privilege. Greene's fiction is, at the very least, memorable: to advert to the novels is to recall scenes, characters, atmospheres, and to renew one's sense of having felt their force, mostly as incrimination and conspiracy. But I find a residual feeling in myself of dissatisfaction, reflecting an achievement on Greene's part limited to the possibilities indicated by my reference to melodrama. His novels have always had an insecure sense of how seriously they should take themselves; an insecurity not at all stablilized by Greene's tactical division of his fiction into "novels" and "entertainments."

A case in point: several pages of Ways of Escape deal with Greene's experience of smoking opium in Hanoi. These pages are related to Fowler's opium-smoking in The Quiet American. But neither in the novel nor in the memoir is there an indication of what the experience comes to, or what value the reader is invited to give it. Does it stand for the "huxe et volupte" to which Greene refers in Ways of Escape, with a claim for significance lodged by further reference to Baudelaire's "L'Invitation au Voyage"? Or is it to be read as merely exotic, part of the wisdom of the Orient which the reader is not required to receive? In the novel, as in the memoir, it seems to veer between triviality and ominousness. In the memoir, these pages have an air of significance, but only the air is conveyed, not the significance. Greene's novels, too, leave it open to question whether, in his relation to his perceptions, he is a native or a tourist. (p. 17)