“You must kneel, compañero”: The Making of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote
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Carlos Villar Flor
Abstract
In the 1970 s and 1980s Graham Greene took up the habit of travelling around Spain to holiday in the company of his Spanish friend, the priest and professor Leopoldo Durán. The most outstanding fruit of these trips, almost always in summer, was the inspiration for Monsignor Quixote (1982), which Greene came to regard as his most accomplished novel (Cloetta 2004: 77). Centred around an idealistic, innocent, and somewhat foolish priest who establishes an intimate friendship with a communist ex-mayor, with whom he travels around Spain and talks about the divine and the human, the novel was initially conceived as a kind of friendly caricature of Father Durán, but it soon served as a vehicle to express various concerns that haunted the writer’s mind. The opening of the “Durán papers” collection at Georgetown University enables scholars to delve into unpublished material kept by Durán over the years, which may cast insights into the genesis of Monsignor Quixote from both textual and biographical perspectives. Taking as a major source Durán’s diaries, 16 notebooks recording his meetings and telephone conversations with Greene from 1976 to 1991, this paper aims to clarify some of the relevant background to the book’s inception, complementing the diaries with other accounts such as Greene’s letters to Durán and other friends, Durán’s letters to Greene, and testimonies by witnesses present at the events described.1
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Prof. Jeremy Hawthorn for reading this paper and providing insightful comments, and David Stephen for his stylistic assistance.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
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- Friedrich Lindenbrog’s Old English Glossaries Rediscovered
- Mind, Body, and Race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun
- “You must kneel, compañero”: The Making of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote
- Iconographies of ‘Childness’ and the Contemporary British Novel: Book Covers, Discourses, and Cultural Models
- Queer Masculinities: Gender Roles, the Abject and Bottomhood in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
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- Manfred Markus. 2021. English Dialect Dictionary Online: A New Departure in English Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xix + 183 pp., 92 figures, 2 tables, £ 85.00.
- Claudia Di Sciacca, Concetta Giliberto, Carmela Rizzo and Loredana Teresi (eds). 2018. Studies on Late Antique and Medieval Germanic Glossography and Lexicography in Honour of Patrizia Lendinara. 2 vols. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, xix + xiii + 924 pp, 13 figures, € 90.00.
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- Lissette Lopez Szwydky. 2020. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 256 pp., 40 illustr., $ 69.95.
- Martin Riedelsheimer. 2020. Fictions of Infinity: Levinasian Ethics in 21st-Century Novels. Anglia Book Series 71. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, x + 246 pp., € 99.95.
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