Wherever Norman Sherry goes, to Malaysia, Africa, Paraguay or other foreign places, Graham Greene is sure to go along. The British novelist does not accompany Sherry in person, but he is there in spirit, as surely as Harvey, the giant invisible rabbit, was the constant companion of Elwood P. Dowd.
For 15 years, Sherry has been working on Greene`s ”authorized”
biography. Because Greene is such a peripatetic novelist, Sherry felt that it was essential to retrace the restless author`s footsteps, whether to Sierra Leone, which was the setting for ”The Heart of the Matter,” or to Mexico, the location of another Greene masterwork, ”The Power and the Glory.”
”I`m an obsessed Irishman,” explained Sherry, who teaches literature at Trinity University in San Antonio. ”I have an extraordinary Englishman to deal with, so I have to spread my nets wide. I`ve never left it to Graham to tell me the truth, not that he`d deliberately lie. But it seems inevitable that a man who deals in myths will provide me with a mythological version of his own life.”
As far as Sherry knows, Greene, who lives in Cap d` Antibes, France, has never been to Chicago, but Sherry detoured here last week, promoting the first volume of his biography, ”The Life of Graham Greene” (Viking, $29.95). To judge by the book`s size and scope, Sherry must be the most indefatigable biographer since Leon Edel, who alloted five volumes to Henry James.
So far, Sherry has finished only one volume. But at almost 800 pages, the book is merely the first installment in Greene`s life, covering the author`s first 35 years, with at least 50 still to come.
Before their collaboration, Greene had been notoriously stingy with details of his past, even in his autobiographies, ”A Sort of Life” and
”Ways of Escape.” But Sherry, who is as effusive in person as he is in print, said he was personally chosen by Greene as his biographer, his doppelganger, partly because they were such opposites. ”I`m a small, warm, embraceable chap,” he said, ”where Graham is tall, cool and aloof.”
Far more crucial, Sherry said, was his biography of Joseph Conrad, whose life and work were so influential for Greene. ”Loath as Graham was to have a biography written, I think he realized that sooner or later the facts of his life-like murder-will out. He felt he`d better have someone who`d get it right, and I`d shown in my Conrad biography the endless lengths I`d go to find out the truth.”
In the years he spent endlessly pursuing the truth, Sherry exposed himself to many of the same physical hazards that Greene had, a half a century earlier, in his almost suicidal search for ways of escape. Work on the biography was delayed for a year after Sherry contracted intestinal gangrene in Paraguay. While recovering in England, he was struck down by a car and temporarily blinded. Then there were bouts of dysentery and tropical diabetes. From his many lengthy interviews with Greene, Sherry described a cooperative but elusive and deliberative author, with a ”natural human fear that once I`d finished his biography, he`d be finished too. He has this carapace to cover his incredible sensitivity, like a true public school Englishman. ”He`s a cunning old fox, watchful and cagey.”
Despite his track record so far, Sherry hopes to have the concluding half done by 1992. ”I`ve still got to go to a leper colony in Zaire,” he said,
”for `A Burn-Out Case,` and if I survive that, I`ll give it a good shot.”
