How Greene Was My Island

Tomorrow’s New York Times carries an excellent travel story (written by Adam Begley) about novelist Graham Greene’s comfortable, but somewhat unlikely, association with the Italian island of Capri. As Begley writes:

Let’s free associate. If I say Capri, what comes to mind? Glamour, gorgeous views, ritzy shopping--the uninterrupted leisure of la dolce vita. And what if I say Graham Greene? Troubled faith, espionage, unforgiving, “cinematic” realism, seedy characters in sordid places. “Greeneland” can be thrilling on the page, but not many of us would want to go there on vacation.

In other words, there’s good reason to assume that the 20th-century British novelist and the sparkling island in the Bay of Naples are mutually incompatible, that the two should never be linked in the same sentence. Greene, typically succinct, had this to say about Capri: “It isn’t really my kind of place.”

Once a second home to Roman emperors, it’s now a tourist destination, and Greene, one of the most traveled writers of all time, was temperamentally unsuited to tourism: The notion of traveling for fun wouldn’t have occurred to him.

And yet he bought a small house on Capri in 1948 and kept it for more than 40 years, returning for short visits, mostly in the spring and fall, until the very end of his life, when he became too ill to travel. The house, Il Rosaio, was a rare constant in Greene’s restless existence (“one of nature’s displaced persons,” Malcolm Muggeridge called him). In 1978, Greene was made an honorary citizen of the town of Anacapri, and in a brief speech on the occasion, he gave the obvious explanation for his biannual pilgrimage to an island that wasn’t at all to his taste: On Capri, he said, “in four weeks I do the work of six months elsewhere.”

You can read the whole piece here.