Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reality borders on fantasy. Many Americans still find it difficult to fully believe that their nation harbors an evil entity capable of stealing billions while destroying the honor of public officials, the honesty of businessmen and sometimes the lives of ordinary citizens. The evidence that it does these things and more has become all too credible. The image persists of the colorful gambler who speaks quaint Runyonesque, or the romantic loner ? Jay Gatsby, say ? who has his own somehow justifiable morality, or of the paternalistic despot who challenges society by his own peculiar code...
...Greene's view, conditions do not improve as man grows up. As the most famous of the trio of British literary converts (the others: Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark), Greene is a Catholic of Augustinian severity, more conscious of evil than of grace. "Human nature," he asserts, here as in his novels, "is not black and white but black and grey...
...attracts Greene, of course, but the underlying anguish, the "hidden books" behind "the façade of his public life." In an essay that no one else could have written, Greene claims James as a literary brother because, as Greene sees it, James also believed in the victory of evil in this world. Greene, in fact, almost succeeds in a posthumous conversion of the Old Master to Rome...
...favorites. The shape of villainy, the sense of impending doom soon intrude. Captain Gilson's book was dominated by a bad "Yankee pirate with an aeroplane like a box kite and bombs the size of tennis balls." The Viper, he admits, gave him a permanent vision of "perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done." It was Miss Bowen too, apparently, who seduced him into writing. "One could not read her," he remembers, "without believing that to write was to live...
Your very soul was revealed to me a stretch of wild and secret country, with eerie chasms and abysses neighbored by sunlit, smiling meadows, haunts of idyllic repose...I saw good and evil wrestling with each other. I saw a man in torment struggling towards inward harmony; I divined a personality, a drama, and "truthfulness," the most uncompromising truthfulness...