ABSTRACT
In Another Life (1999), Michael Korda, an editor at Simon and Schuster, remembers Graham Greene as obsessed with his difficult relationship with the United States. Because he had as an Oxford undergraduate briefly joined the Communist Party, Greene was once denied entry into the United States and often had trouble acquiring a visa. Convinced ‘the FBI [. . .] had a dossier on him, and were adding to it at every opportunity’, Greene ‘had no doubt that his telephone calls and mail were being monitored’.1 Finally obtained through freedom of information, the dossier, in Korda’s account (324), was ‘a slim envelope’ containing a few clippings and a report on Greene’s attendance at a 1948 ‘International Congress of Intellectuals’ held in Warsaw.2 Greene ‘brooded darkly on the possibility that the FBI file was a fake, that somewhere they had concealed the real file’ (325), of which Korda found no evidence. The extent to which the matter preoccupied Greene ‘as if it were the Holy Grail’ (323) reveals a number of things about the author in the Cold War period. Obviously, he considered himself antagonistic to the United States, but, as an examination of his Cold War writing shows, his hostility to the United States and its foreign interventions did not make him a Soviet supporter. Indeed, Greene found the Cold War’s insistent and pervasive binarism particularly disturbing. Stalinism and Soviet tyranny were abhorrent, but so was a Western ‘freedom’ that documented an individual’s activities in secret files. In this context, Greene struggled to find a middle ground.
