Graham Greene, The Art of Fiction
Graham Greene , The Art of Fiction No. 3 Interviewed by Simon Raven & Martin Shuttleworth Issue 3, Autumn 1953 The eighteenth century succeeds to the twentieth on the ground floors at the bottom of St. James’s Street. The gloss and the cellophane of oyster bars and travel agencies are wrapped incongruously round the legs of the dignified houses. Graham Greene lives here at the commercial end of this thoroughfare in a flat on the first floor of a narrow house sandwiched between the clubs of the aristocracy and St. James’s Palace. Above him, General Auchinleck, the soldier who was beaten by Rommel; below him, the smartest oyster bar in Europe; opposite, the second smartest. Readers of Cakes and Ale will remember that it was near here that Maugham met Hugh Walpole, but it is not the sort of area in which one expects to find a novelist, even a successful novelist. It’s an area black with smartness; the Rolls-Royces and the bowler hats of the men are ...
