A 20-year friendship with Graham Greene is the subject of My Man in Antibes, a memoir by Michael Mewshaw (Sympathy for the Devil; Between Terror and Tourism). Long before Mewshaw, a peripatetic writer who spent many years living in Italy with his family, met the 68-year-old Greene in 1972, he'd become fascinated by the elder author. "Greene's deceptively simple style and straightforward storytelling are as hard-worked and finely wrought as hammered silver," writes Mewshaw. These are qualities he loves so much that he and wife Linda honeymooned in Haiti, the setting of Greene's The Comedians. When Mewshaw learned that Greene lived close to the French villa where he and Linda were living, he wrote to him. Greene responded by inviting them over for drinks, and a long friendship began.
This memoir chronicles Mewshaw's sometimes cordial, sometimes rocky relationship with Greene, which lasted until Greene's death in 1991. The cordial bits included frequent dinners together and Greene's encouragement of Mewshaw's writing. Relations briefly cooled after Greene took umbrage over a 1977 profile Mewshaw wrote that appeared in the Nation and the London Magazine. Mewshaw reprints the piece in its entirety, along with the letters he and Greene exchanged, with the latter expressing "horror" at perceived inaccuracies, and Mewshaw trying to make amends. What emerges is an up-close portrait of Greene, with many juicy details. Among them: Greene was so technically inept he couldn't change a light bulb. This is a rare, firsthand look at the one of the 20th century's greatest authors. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer