The Greene Baize Door

Every creative writer worth our consideration, every writer who can be called, in the wide eighteenth-century use of the term, a poet, is a victim: a man given over to an obsession. . . . The obsession is perhaps most easily detected in the symbols a writer uses.' These words written by Graham Greene in a review of Walter De la Mare's short stories are illuminating in a study of Mr Greene's own work, and in this brief paper I want to use them as a central point of reference, in attempting to show what is meant by calling Mr Greene's work 'poetic'. In a sense, my purpose is pre-critical since its emphasis falls on description rather than appraisal. Obviously, these are simply terms of convenience, and can never be exclusive of each other, but they serve to indicate an emphasis. Where Mr Greene's work has been concerned, critical arrows have so easily felt the gravitational pull of moral and theological forces that the intended target has remained strangely untouched. This paper, flighted with a literary observation, tries to maintain direction by continually keeping in sight the idea that Graham Greene is a novelist and therefore the target primarily of the literary critic

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