My Man in Antibes: Getting to Know Graham Greene

My Man in Antibes is a memoir by Michael Mewshaw that details his friendship with Graham Greene, the renowned author of novels such as The Power and the Glory and The Comedians. Mewshaw, a young journalist and novelist, met Greene in 1972 and the two corresponded for twenty years. The book provides an intimate portrait of their time together, including their discussions of literature, travel, and political figures such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Despite their age difference, Mewshaw and Greene had a complex relationship that was marked by misunderstandings, arguments, and Mewshaw's desire to understand the enigmatic author.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 20 July 2023
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Inc

“One of the Years Best,” Times Literary Supplement

When a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he's famous for.

While living in southern France in 1972, Michael Mewshaw engineered a meeting with Graham Greene. Mewshaw was an ambitious young journalist and novelist, Greene was an internationally revered elder statesman of letters. The pair became fast friends and corresponded for the next twenty years.

My Man in Antibes is an intimate portrait of what it was like to eat, drink, and gossip with one of the most revered—and complicated—authors of the twentieth century.

Growing up Catholic with literary aspirations, Mewshaw believed Greene was the author to emulate. Not only did Greene demonstrate how religious belief and church dogma could be subjects for fiction, he also wrote murder mysteries and political thrillers where his characters' inner conflicts played out dramatically in exotic settings. Under Greene's sway, Mewshaw traveled through Mexico like the whiskey priest in Greene's The Power and the Glory and honeymooned at the Hotel Oloffson in Haiti, the setting of The Comedians.

When Mewshaw tracked down Greene in Antibes, he found the author was far from a reclusive, close-mouthed figure: Greene garrulously recounted tales about the many women in his life—and husbands of those women—as well as his extraordinary interviews with political figures such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Over the next two decades, Mewshaw and Greene ate meals together, discussed their travels, and talked about writers they knew in common, such as Anthony Burgess, Shirley Hazzard, and Gore Vidal.

While young Mewshaw looked up to the older man, he also recognized that Greene was a flawed human being with his own set of contradictions and weaknesses. Mewshaw's memoir is a tribute to the power of literature to connect people across generations and cultures, and to the enduring influence of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

Dimension: 203 x 133 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781567927191