THESE FASCINATING letters can hardly fail to give Graham Greene a better name than he has had recently.

He has been condemned as a false and manipulating lover, and as a pretence Roman Catholic interested in religion only as a provider of plots for his novels. No one could read these letters and believe those things.

He fell in love with a Catholic girl, Vivien, when he was 21 and still at Oxford. His letters pleading with her to marry him are utterly extraordinary. He tells her that he will accept a wholly celibate marriage if only she will have him. They marry — and it wasn't that, of course. It lasted for 20 years, producing two children, and his letters to them have a wonderful fatherly tenderness.

He was undoubtedly a man of strong sexual curiosity and energy, and these letters reveal many liaisons. Yet they co-existed with other long, devoted relationships — nine years with the stage designer Dorothy Glover, whom he met in wartime London, years of stormy happiness with the married Catherine Walston, and, finally, 32 years living in Antibes with the Frenchwoman Yvonne Cloetta.

The letters to Catherine, passionate, witty and erotic, are among the most remarkable here. Writing to her from West Africa, where he had been a spy in the war, he says: “I have loved no part of the world like this & have loved no woman as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here...”

As for his Catholicism (he was converted when he married Vivien), the letters reflect a constant and unmistakably sincere brooding on what he can believe and what he cannot. Evelyn Waugh, with whom he had a close friendship, scolded him over his most doubting novel, A Burnt-Out Case — and Greene was relieved when Pope Paul VI told him that he had enjoyed four of his novels, and said “there would be always things in my books which offended some Catholics, but not to bother about that!”

Above all, this is a record of a full-time writer's life. Greene constantly travelled to dangerous places and listened to the views of dissidents and rebels, whether in the communist world or South American dictatorships, and wrote about them as vividly in his letters as in his novels.

As a writer, he knew what he cared about. He gave his French literary agent a car — he felt tht he had given her enough “classic shirts from the Faubourg”. He hated the novels of Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch. When Viking Press wanted him to change the title of Travels With My Aunt, he cabled: “Would rather change publisher than title” — and he did.

To know something of Greene's writings will, of course, increase the interest of this book, very well edited by Richard Greene (no relation). But anyone would find it a sparkling picture of a sparkling man.

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene

Little Brown, £20; 480pp

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