Why Do I Write?

Abstract

In the preface to his classic satirical novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), Henry Fielding refers ironically to the then Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber, who had recently published his autobiography and who, Fielding wrote, ‘lived the life he recorded and is by many thought to have lived such a life only in order to write it’.² Greene sometimes felt that there was too much of a critical tendency to see his career in the same way: that is, that he lived the life he did — amorously, adventurously — to provide the material substance of his novels. To which he would always retort: if only writing were that easy. Certainly he would visit the places that he knew were to provide the settings of his novels, but that was simply for the sake of accuracy of physical detail and perhaps as compensation for what he called his short memory and his lack of visual imagination. So, when researching the Swedish setting of England Made Me, he took a camera as if he were scouting a location; and, to describe the Assistant Commissioner’s journey from Piccadilly in It’s A Battlefield (1934), he paced out the journey himself street by street. But this is background filling, not creative inspiration.

Isn’t our attitude to all our characters more or less — There, and may God forgive me, goes myself?

— Graham Greene¹