The Greene Man

Abstract Greene liked putting the word ‘man’ in his titles: The Man Within, The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Tenth Man, No Man’s Land. In this spirit Marie-Françoise Allain called her collection of inter- views with him The Other Man and the first chapter ‘The Secret Man’. I continue the tradition in the title of this chapter, which gestures towards Greene’s interest in things that are green, and in persons named Green or Greene. Specifically, it recalls the Green Man, the pub in It’s a Battlefield where Conder meets the policeman Patmore. Maurice Bendrix is the first of the clearly identifiable Greene Men, though there are hints of them in D. and Arthur Rowe and Henry Scobie. Indeed, Norman Sherry, who loses no opportunity to identify Greene and his characters, remarks exaggeratedly that Scobie ‘is almost a clone of Greene himself ‘. Like many of Greene’s characters, Scobie is deeply weary and longs for peace; but he lacks the world-weariness, the cynicism, the experience with women, and the sexual jealousy that belongs to the fully-formed Greene Man. I am indebted to Sherry for pointing me towards this concept, even though I deplore his readiness to reduce novels to the raw material of biography.