Greene on Capri

When friends die, one’s own credentials one becomes a survivor.

Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him – not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well – on an island that was “not his kind of place,” but where he came season after season, year after year & where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.’

For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers & refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus & Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke & Lenin, plus hosts of artists, eccentrics & outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard & her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller; their friendship lasted until Greene’s death in 1991.

In GREENE ON CAPRI, Hazzard uses their ever volatile intimacy as a prism through which to illuminate Greene’s mercurial character, his work & talk & the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on this ravishing, enchanted island.