Graham Greene (61 page)

Greene signed this document on the day before he died, carefully adding the comma that appears after the word ‘other’, thus restricting the permission that was granted. Without the comma, Sherry was the only person permitted to quote from the works. With the addition of the comma, he was given permission to quote but could not prevent anyone else from doing so.

Undeterred by niceties of punctuation, Sherry persevered in the belief that he alone was permitted to quote from Greene’s works, and he construed this letter as granting something more than quotation rights.
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In his public statements Sherry, who in 1975 had suggested that Greene could ‘censor’ his work, has held up the letter as the
guarantee of his intellectual freedom. However, he has also used it in an effort to silence another scholar. William Cash obtained the permission of Greene’s literary estate to quote from copyright materials in
The Third Woman
, a book on Greene’s relationship with Catherine Walston. Sherry’s lawyer, Robert M. Callagy, wrote to the publisher on 13 December 1999: ‘The purpose of this letter is to put Little Brown and its author, Cash, on notice that it has no right to quote or closely paraphrase any of Graham Greene’s unpublished letters, diaries or other materials.’

Francis Greene, the novelist’s son and literary executor, objected to this lawyer’s letter on the grounds that it attempted to wrest control of Greene’s copyrights from his heirs and give it to the biographer, a situation made more complicated by Sherry’s plans to edit and publish copyright materials from various archives. A legal opinion obtained by Little, Brown made short work of Sherry’s position. In addition to the comma, Martin Soames, a copyright specialist, noted another problem with the letter which addressed the use of published and unpublished material in the same way: ‘Such an agreement is on the face of it invalid. At that date [2 April 1991] all Greene’s published works were already under various exclusive licences to major publishers around the world and it would have been impossible to grant exclusive rights in them again, separately, to Norman Sherry, so it seems highly unlikely that this is what Greene’s letter means. If it did have the meaning which Sherry has adopted it would be legally unenforceable.
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The episode of the deathbed letter has provided an interesting object lesson on the uses of the comma in Lynn Truss’s bestseller
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
(2003), 101–2. For a full discussion of the context and significance of the deathbed letter, see Richard Greene, ‘Owning Graham Greene: The Norman Sherry Project’,
University of Toronto Quarterly
75:4 (Fall 2006), 957–70.