The Alienated Englishman

Abstract

After returning to England from Liberia, Greene sought a London base to broaden his career opportunities and in April 1935 moved his young family from Oxford to rent 14 North Side, a Queen Anne mansion on Clapham Common. This elegant home, set within luxuriant urban greenery, provided a sharp contrast to the depressing city landscapes of his fictions during the next three years. The house, later damaged during the London Blitz, was the last home in which the Greenes lived together as a family and it exerted a strong psychological hold over his imagination. It appeared in The End of the Affair (1951), receiving a direct hit from a V-1 flying bomb, and in his short story ‘The Destructors’ (1954) about the malicious demolition of a Queen Anne house. From 1935 onwards Greene’s fictional works — whether set in Nottingham, Brighton, Mexico or Sierra Leone — adopt the perspectives of an alienated left-wing outsider, ill at ease with conventional English bourgeois life and questioning, even destroying, the social fabric which had once nurtured the young writer.

The world has caught up with Greene, for better or worse. The best artist has always been prophetic.

Sharrock, Saints, Sinners and Comedians, 14