Babbling April, 1925

"And beauty will return again to common things,

And firmness to the heart's resolvings.

No fear will haunt the drift of fancyings."

And here I pay a tribute to the man who died this day today, 25 years ago in 1991, Graham Greene.

I have not read his novels but I have read his poetry and his poems have made a great impact on me as a sensitive person. I am not into reading fiction and this is why I never read Greene's works. The local library I frequent has shelves stocked with Greene's novels and yet I have managed to go past them without ever casting a glance over the titles. Some of my friends are huge fans of Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, John Grisham but I have never heard any of them speaking of Greene. It's strange but perhaps Greene demands the kind of serious attention that these other mentioned authors don't. Let's not be judgemental but Greene wrote on a serious Catholic perspective in his novels. The moral and immoral fight against each other in his stories as they do in real life. I remember reading somewhere that his 1955 book, The Quiet American mentioned the possibility of a war between America and Vietnam and the Vietnam War as we all know lasted for twenty years since it began in '55. He also worked for MI6 during Second World War and perhaps that is where he picked up characters for his novels.

Since I am in no position to comment on his literature, I will not go on about it. I was greatly surprised once when I read about his friendship with R.K. Narayan and that he encouraged Narayan to sought for bigger publishing houses for his debut novel, Swami & his friends. This one detail about him made me admire him so much. In today's day and age of fast technology, it is indeed a good feeling to see that novelists like Greene are still popular and widely read. To read his political and detective thrillers each with their plots unveiling in countries with unrest such as Liberia, Haiti, South Africa, then Soviet Union needs a fair bit of interest in history and politics. These are not cheap fiction that one reads in a flight and forgets about them. I quite like the fact that he was a communist in his heydey but distanced himself from Russia too when he got disillusioned with communism. So much so that he refused to let his works be translated into Russian. I don't see authors today taking such a strong political stance and maintaining their convictions too. It's a dubious world now. One ought to be careful about what they read, write, and speak about and against. To question is a great luxury none of us can afford today in the increasingly fundamentalist regimes across the world. I know though that as long as literature thrives and survives, the free thought will live too.