Graham Greene, from St Pancras to revolutionary Mexico

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author Matthew J Butler is a 2026 Eccles Institute Visting Fellow and is based at the University of Texas, Austin; he is also editor of the journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Graham Greene visited Mexico in 1938 to research a novel on religious persecution as well as to escape a libel suit brought by child star Shirley Temple (Greene had alleged that her screen performances were designed to titilate men of a certain age or ecclesiastical occupation). Given these wide-ranging (!) motives, it is perhaps not surprising that Greene’s Mexico writings are also scattered far and wide. Most are in the U.S.. Yet the British Library also has unique and fascinating Greeneiana—so let me start by thanking the Eccles Institute for the Visiting Fellowship that gave me the time and resources to pore over them.

For starters, in the Library’s newspaper holdings we find scattered reports of Greene’s travels and reviews of his two Mexico books: 1939’s travelogue, The Lawless Roads, and his celebrated novel about a drunken martyr priest, The Power and the Glory, published in 1940. Many of the earliest reviews are a joy to read and were written by other heavy hitters: critic V. S. Pritchett (who reviewed both books in The Bystander), Margery Allingham (one of the four ‘Queens of Crime’, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh), L. P. Hartley, François Mauriac, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh.

The biggest treasure is Western Loan Manuscript 107, a collection of correspondence in which one finds Greene’s letters and postcards to his mother, Marion (‘Mumma’), and wife, Vivienne, whom he addressed formally as ‘Mrs. Graham Greene’. The Mexican bishops were going to open their archives for him, he promised his mother. It was Vivienne, however, who occasioned Greene’s conversion to Catholicism, so for her were reserved devout tidbits such as the long time he spent queuing outside Monterrey Cathedral for Ash Wednesday ashes.

Just as fortuitously, the Library also has first editions and many later British and European editions of Greene’s Mexico books. They interest a historian like me because they carry different epigrams, author’s notes, and artwork, making it possible to track Greene’s changing public thoughts about his time in Mexico – a country he professed to hate.

It was not until the 1947 edition of Lawless Roads, for instance, that Greene told readers where they might discover (on page 118) the origin story of the protagonist of The Power and the Glory: a ‘whisky priest’ Greene claimed to have heard about from an expat Scottish doctor living in Villahermosa, capital of the tropical state of Tabasco. And it was not until the 1971 Complete Works edition of The Power and the Glory that Greene stated that he had based his story on a historical figure who may still have been alive at time of writing (not executed by firing squad, as in the novel).

What to make of the fact that Greene’s public commentary on his canonical novel was itself a literary construction, filled with half truths, selective revelations, and artistic licence? Do such minutiae matter? I think they do. By deconstructing Greene’s narrative record and corroborating with the historical archives in Mexico, a very different story of Greene’s 1938 odyssey and its relevance to Mexican religious politics emerges. Far from the hapless tourist of The Lawless Roads, Greene was guided by a particular faction of Mexican political Catholics, who were trying to get the Church to pivot away from open conflict with Mexicos’ revolutionary government. In The Power and the Glory, Greene created a beleagured but passive saint in their image. It may even be that Greene met his ecclesiastical muse—the real life ‘whisky priest’—one sweltering day in Villahermosa in 1938.

Thanks in part to the British Library’s collections, we can see that The Power and the Glory is not just a universal novel about religious faltering and redemption, accidentally set in Mexico. It’s also a politically engaged, Mexico-facing, historical novel.