A Literary Battle That May Hang by a Comma

March 16, 2002

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, March 15 - In 1991, gravely ill and under siege

from would-be biographers, Graham Greene signed a

one-sentence document making it clear that he had

authorized one writer, Norman Sherry, to be his official

biographer. But before he signed, he pointedly inserted a

single comma that may - or may not - have drastically

changed the document's meaning.

Greene died two days after, on April 3, 1991. But the final

comma in his deathbed document has become an issue in a

strange battle being waged between his literary estate and

the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, which owns a

large collection of his papers. The fight concerns who

should be granted access to an important portion of the

library's Greene archive: Norman Sherry alone, as the

library argues, or researchers in general, as Greene's

family, which controls his estate, contends.

The issues in such disputes are murky, involving

conversations that go back many years and the often fraught

relationships between biographers, their subjects and the

literary executors who look after their estates. What makes

this dispute even more complicated is the addition of a

number of angry researchers who contend that Georgetown and

Mr. Sherry - now working on what is to be the third and

final volume of his exhaustive, well-received Greene

biography - are keeping such a tight rein on the archive

that other projects have been postponed or abandoned.

Among the books that have been affected by the restrictions

at Georgetown are a biography of Edith Sitwell, a volume of

correspondence between Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and a

chronology of Greene's life for a series on writers,

published by St. Martin's Press.

"What am I supposed to tell St. Martin's Press?" asked

Firdaus J. Gandavia, a Greene expert in Calcutta, whose

chronology is now several years late, stopped dead, he

said, by lack of cooperation from the library and

stonewalling by Mr. Sherry. In 1999, Mr. Gandavia, who had

been given permission by the estate, as the copyright

holder, to quote from the archive, got an e-mail message

from Mr. Sherry saying, in effect, that Mr. Sherry was

denying his request to look at the Georgetown archives.

"Until my book comes out, I do not want to allow unlimited

access to anyone, because I don't want to allow it to

everyone," Mr. Sherry wrote. "I simply haven't the time to

vet such requests."

Mr. Gandavia, who has received similar notes from Mr.

Sherry at regular intervals since then, is now thoroughly

fed up. "Surely there should be some sort of time limit for

this," he said. "Otherwise this will go on, with Sherry

having a monopoly over this material."

Mr. Sherry, a professor at Trinity University in San

Antonio, declined to be interviewed, saying he was working

too hard on his final volume. But he did say in an e-mail

message that he had nothing to do with the agreement

between Georgetown and Greene and had learned about it only

after the fact.

Georgetown began acquiring its extensive Greene collection

in 1979. It did so, the university says, with the

understanding that Mr. Sherry, as Mr. Greene's anointed

biographer, would have first crack at much of the material,

including a large selection of highly detailed travel

diaries that Greene kept for more than 30 years. Also

restricted for Mr. Sherry's use was a trove of

correspondence to Greene from John Hayward, Violet Hunt,

Edith Sitwell, Antonia White and Waugh.

The library says it has no choice but to abide by Greene's

wishes, expressed both in conversations with its staff and

in correspondence with Greene in the 1980's.

"We take our role as stewards of collections and gifts very

seriously and therefore are careful to balance open access

with the responsibilities incumbent upon us," Artemis G.

Kirk, the university librarian, said. Asked for an example

of the correspondence, Julie G. Battaile, a spokeswoman for

Georgetown, faxed a copy of a letter written by Greene in

December 1981 to Joseph E. Jeffs, then the university

librarian. "You can show anything he wishes to Norman

Sherry," Greene wrote. "I would prefer that you confined

material for the time being to Sherry as he is doing the

authorized biography. Of course after that has appeared -

if it ever does! - other researchers could be allowed

access."

Like many things having to do with the elusive Greene,

however, the note seems to make this less, rather than

more, clear. On the one hand, there's the phrase "after

that has appeared," indicating that other researchers would

have to wait until Mr. Sherry was finished with his work.

But then there's the phrase "for the time being," which

indicates that Greene believed the restrictions should

stand for a relatively short time.

The same problems come in when one looks at the deathbed

document and its added comma. Greene's statement, as typed

by his daughter, read: "I Graham Greene grant permission to

Norman Sherry, my Authorized Biographer, excluding any

other to quote from my copyright material published or

unpublished." But Greene added a comma between the words

"other" and "to" seemingly shifting the meaning to make

clear that Mr. Sherry was his sole authorized biographer,

but leaving open the question of whether he intended to

allow other researchers, working on peripheral projects, to

quote from his papers.

To Francis Greene, Graham Greene's son and literary

executor, the change indicates that his father wanted to

ensure that Mr. Sherry would write the first biography, but

also that he was not the only person who would ever be

allowed to quote from Greene's papers. "Graham gave his

papers for the good of the scholarship of the readers of

the world, and they have been withheld from everybody," he

said.

Greene's niece Amanda Saunders agreed. "He meant for the

restrictions to apply only to other biographers of him who

would be competing with Sherry," she said. "Graham fought

for freedom of speech and access to information, and these

restrictions are contrary to Graham's own spirit of sharing

information with fellow researchers and writers."

It is unusual for universities to put such constraints on

their collections. What restrictions do exist tend to

protect living people mentioned in a writer's archive -

say, friends who have written personal letters, or lovers

whose names turn up in diaries. Oddly enough, the

restrictions at Georgetown do not apply to other

institutions with collections of Graham Greene's documents,

like the Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the

University of Texas at Austin.

"We allow anyone who comes to the center access to the

collection," said Tara Wenger, the research librarian at

the center, which owns some 100 boxes of Greene material,

including manuscripts, journals and letters. "We require

permission from the estate for researchers to make

photocopies, because the estate owns the copyright - we

only have the physical material, not the intellectual

rights."

Complicating matters between Mr. Sherry and the Greene

family is that the family - like many families of famous

people written about posthumously - has grown increasingly

unhappy with Mr. Sherry's work. Among other things, the

family says, Greene was distressed by Mr. Sherry's first

volume, feeling that it delved too far into intimate

matters of psychology rather than focusing on the facts of

his life and work. But by then, they say, Greene had

invested much time in Mr. Sherry and felt it would be

unfair to remove him as his biographer.

Not true, Mr. Sherry said by e- mail. "Graham and I had an

excellent relationship," he said.

But after Greene's death, relations between Mr. Sherry and

Greene's longtime companion, Yvonne Cloetta, soured

rapidly. In 1997, Mrs. Cloetta wrote to Mr. Sherry: "You

have betrayed Graham. You have betrayed me. You have

betrayed your craft. We have nothing more to say to each

other."

Then there is the passage of time. Mr. Sherry has been

working on his biography for more than 25 years and

published more than 1,300 pages on his subject in his first

two volumes. He says he has nearly finished the final

volume, but it is unclear when it will be published.

"This was all certainly reasonable while Sherry was taking

a reasonable time to write it," said Bruce Hunter, the

agent for Greene's literary estate. "But I don't think

anyone, least of all Graham Greene, imagined this dragging

on for this long."

Another biographer unhappy with the situation is Richard

Greene (no relation to Graham or Francis Greene), a

professor of English at the University of Toronto, whose

latest book, a biography of Edith Sitwell, is proceeding

even though he has not been allowed access to crucial

correspondence between Sitwell and Greene that details her

conversion to Roman Catholicism.

"It's a major gap, and a really important episode in her

life is going to remain more or less unexplained because of

this absence," Richard Greene said.

"If you really want to devote your whole life to a

particular project, then go do it and bless you," he

continued, speaking of Mr. Sherry. "But my concern is that

his taking an enormous amount of time should not prevent

other work being done by other people."