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Some of his friends insist that he has written his spiritual autobiography into his books. When they try to describe him, they usually fall back on such words as restless, troubled, intense, obsessed. But Greene is not the kind of man who makes a vivid first impression. Tall (6 ft. 3 in.), frail and lanky, he dresses like a careless Oxford undergraduate, walks with a combination roll and lope that emphasizes a slight hump between his shoulders. Physically, he is an easy man to forget (one old acquaintance remembers him simply as "badly made"), except for the face with its wrinkled skin that looks as if it had shaken loose from the flesh, and the startled, startlingly washed-out blue eyes, slightly bulging. He looks—and the phrase applies to any number of his characters—slightly seedy.
When he is in England, he lives alone in a London flat. His wife, with whom he is friendly but not on close terms, lives with their son (15) and daughter (17) in Oxford. His friends, who are few but intense, think he is the kindest and one of the cleverest of men. His acquaintances consider him reserved, with a somewhat faded charm, a subacid wit, and a ruthless curiosity about his fellow sinners.
Almost every morning he turns out 500 words on lined paper, writing in pencil—a slogging schedule that produces one of his beautifully turned books in about a year. Like most professionals, he doesn't wait to be struck by inspiration; unlike most of them, he seldom worries about his critics, especially the unbelievers: "They're so far from Christian thinking that they cannot enter into my world."
. . . and Dostoevsky? How much fuss will posterity make about Graham Greene? Will it rate him as high as Hemingway or Faulkner? Will he outlast Evelyn Waugh? Will he be mentioned in the same breath as Dostoevsky? Only posterity can answer. But with these three contemporaries, at any rate, Greene can hold up his head. He is as accomplished a craftsman as they, and without the mannerisms with which the two Americans have begun to burlesque their own styles. He has neither the snigger nor the snobbery that are Waugh's trademarks. But when Greene is compared with Dostoevsky, the great shocker of the 19th Century, all his books together would not match one Brothers Karamazov. That the comparison should even come to mind, however, suggests its inevitability. Graham Greene, like Dostoevsky, is primarily and passionately concerned with Good & Evil. There are not many competitors in that field.