In the early 1970s, Pierre Joannon and Graham Greene were both living in the same apartment building overlooking the harbour in Antibes in the south of France and it was here that their warm friendship began, a friendship that lasted until Greene’s death 1991.
Many interested in the life of Graham Greene will be familiar with that long and revealing interview with the famous author by Joannon published as Graham Greene’s Other Island in Études Irlandaises in 1981 when he was asked why Ireland did not figure in his work. Greene thought perhaps he had not spent enough time here but whatever the reason his interest in this country was an abiding one since he first came as a teenager in 1923.
His encounter with post-Civil War Dublin, recounted here, paints a sombre picture. He writes: “Grafton Street and Sackville Street would disgrace an English country town, and beggars are as numerous as in a continental port. Every space of blank wall is painted in scarlet or red, ‘The Republic Lives’, ‘Up the IRA’ ...”.
Greene’s involvement with Ireland was much more than a literary one. True, he greatly admired Yeats, Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Brian Moore, Flann O’Brien, John Banville and Seamus Heaney among many but had a keen interest in politics too. In 1971 he publicly criticised the torture or “deep interrogation” employed by the British in Northern Ireland and visited Belfast some years later — a place he thought more full of tension than London during the Blitz.
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Joannon, who for many years has served as Ireland’s Honorary Consul in the south of France and has written extensively on Irish history and literature, has now penned something that is much more than a sequel to that 1981 interview. This is a charming and insightful account of many aspects of Greene’s life, personal, literary and political, over a long time span, his sojourn in Achill and his engagement with many well-known Irish figures such as Paddy Campbell, Seán Ó Faoláin and Ernie O’Malley.
It is the 23rd publication in Eamon Maher’s excellent series, Studies in Franco-Irish Relations, that explores the many facets of the enduring links between these two countries. Both author and editor deserve much appreciation for this latest contribution.
- Jane Conroy is Emerita Professor of French at University of Galway
