"Graham (Greene) loved to write and talk of brothels, paid companions, and it was one of the habits that put off many an otherwise sympathetic reader, or convinced friends that they were dealing with an adolescent. But underneath the wished-for bravado there always seemed to lie something quieter and more sincere than simply a wish to shock. He really did appear to hold that kindness is more important than conventional morality and the things you do more telling than merely the things we claim to believe.
In one play he barely acknowledged - it was never published in his lifetime - he portrays the girls in a whorehouse as earthly angels of a kind, listening to men's confessions and offering a form of absolution, as elsewhere priests might do.
The only crime in such a place, he suggests - the play is called A House of Reputation - is to feel shame about one's presence there (as a dentist does) or to complicate the exchange with the talk of love (as one "sentimental ignorant fool" does, falling for a hardheaded girl as if he's confusing the woman with her office). When the boy in love gets the brothel closed down, in a fit of too-simple righteousness, he strips the girl he loves of her home and her living and deprives the world of a much-needed hospital of the heart. The only sins in the Greene universe are hypocrisy and putting a theory - even a religion - before a human being."
Page 33, 'The Man Within My Head', Pico Iyer
Remember Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday? Is kindness the common denominator of all great writers?
In one play he barely acknowledged - it was never published in his lifetime - he portrays the girls in a whorehouse as earthly angels of a kind, listening to men's confessions and offering a form of absolution, as elsewhere priests might do.
The only crime in such a place, he suggests - the play is called A House of Reputation - is to feel shame about one's presence there (as a dentist does) or to complicate the exchange with the talk of love (as one "sentimental ignorant fool" does, falling for a hardheaded girl as if he's confusing the woman with her office). When the boy in love gets the brothel closed down, in a fit of too-simple righteousness, he strips the girl he loves of her home and her living and deprives the world of a much-needed hospital of the heart. The only sins in the Greene universe are hypocrisy and putting a theory - even a religion - before a human being."
Page 33, 'The Man Within My Head', Pico Iyer
Remember Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday? Is kindness the common denominator of all great writers?
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