Mood Spectrum in Graham Greene by Brian Edwards (review)

Mood Spectrum in Graham Greene examines Greene’s early novels in terms of the pathology of bipolar disorder and, in particular, the many detailed symptoms of this disorder that are contained in those novels. It explains how mutated genes endowed him with artistic genius, but also caused in him a mental illness that can often, if untreated, result in a life barren of intimacy, psychosis, and even suicide. The author argues that literary critics have generally ignored the illness in his novels and ascribed agency to characters’ behavior in ways that are based on false psychological models. This is so despite the novels containing many characters who share his condition. Greene’s work provides the reader, therefore, with a virtual case study of manic depression.

Taking the case study of Graham Greene to illustrate the fruitful relationship between mental illness and creativity certainly works. It seems clear from the evidence marshaled here that Greene had manic depression and this condition had a profound influence, in various ways, on his work. Edwards considers in this study the novels that Greene wrote between 1929 and 1949 during what Edwards calls his “London” or “domestic” period. These are the novels that were written before his separation from Vivien Greene, his wife for more than 20 years. (The later novels will, we are told, be the subject of a separate study.)

In a series of highly illuminating chapters, Edwards shows how the characters in those novels project his dominant moods and their fluctuations across the wide range of the whole mood spectrum. Edwards throughout the book draws on parallels between the behavior of the main male characters in the novels and the behavior of Greene himself with his various lovers. “No matter how engaged Greene might be in the external events he creates, the sources of the psychic expression in his novels are not particularly those of the characters alone; they tend to be Greene’s as well” (17). Edwards demonstrates in great detail and with complete conviction how Greene wrote his psychic pain and the emotional turbulence of his own life into his novels.

He argues specifically that Greene’s manic-depressive behavior can be traced back to various sorts of triggers that switch his moods and that these triggers can also be tracked through the moods of the main characters in the novels. Because he projects the feelings that are characteristic of manic depression onto the characters, this process of authorial involvement fundamentally characterizes their emotional development. Edwards discusses aspects of the early domestic novels as follows: dysphoria in The Man Within and It’s a Battlefield; agitated depression in England Made Me; mania and psychosis in Brighton Rock; mania, seduction, and obsession in The Confidential Agent and Ministry of Fear; manic depression in The Power and the Glory; and delirious melancholia in The Heart of the Matter.

The key to the book is Edwards’ contention that Greene’s novels provide fruitful and rewarding insights for readers into what he calls the “disequilibrium of an unquiet mind.” Greene’s involuntary mood switches as described in detail in the book were clearly indicative of mood-affected mental illness. The symptoms included irritable mania, paranoia, agitation, negative self-imaging, and neurotic guilt. Edwards mentions that the term “bipolar” is misleading in the sense that it is a spectrum illness. He marshals a great deal of evidence to place Greene at various times in his life on different points on the manic-depressive spectrum. As Edwards points out, certain kinds of stress tend to trigger certain moods. For Greene, international travel, although intended as a way of escape, generally triggered a manic mood. The resulting mania then tended to switch from euphoria to dysphoria because the internal stressors from which he tried to escape always remained in place. Excessive risk-taking is a major symptom of manic depression and it has obvious relevance to the attraction that Greene felt to trips to dangerous and politically unsettled places. Hypersexuality is another symptom that also applied to Greene...