The Last Word

He lived, and thrived, in an age when writers were powerful, priestlike, remote and elusive. They were risk takers and romantics, lovably disreputable, seldom interviewed but often whispered about. You did not see them at your local bookstore, you did not pluck their sleeves, you had no opportunity to hand them manuscripts, or to ask for tips on travel or to observe, "What is your problem?"

It is impossible now for any American under the age of 60 or so to comprehend the literary world that existed in the two decades after World War II, and especially the magic that fiction writers exerted upon the public. Hemingway was an occasional item in a gossip column, or a photo in Life. Henry Miller was regarded as an outlaw. Faulkner was an occasional visitor to a college campus but was otherwise invisible; the same went for Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor.

Greene was spared. Until about 30 years ago, writers like Greene were not at all accessible to the reading public; they did not turn up for signings at bookstores or allow themselves to be pimped by publicists or buttonholed by TV producers who promised fame and better sales. They existed in their work, in their biographical notes and in the usually outdated photos on their book jackets. Invisible, they were the more powerful for seeming forever elsewhere.

Greene was a restless traveler, a committed writer, a terrible husband, an appalling father and an admitted manic-depressive; he was relentlessly sexual, ardently priapic. He often complained of writer's block, but where women were concerned he was hypergraphic.

At the end of what is called "the sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love that has accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

His last words as he lay in pain: "Oh why does it take so long to come?"

Paul Theroux's most recent book was "The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro." His novel "Blinding Light" followed.