Lovers, brothels and modern hypocrisy

It was odd to invite a sex maniac on a family show on Radio 2, but to apologise was pathetic

It is 100 years this week since the birth of Graham Greene, and the anniversary of that great chronicler of 20th century guilt, betrayal and moral ambivalence is being celebrated in true 21st century style. There has been excited news coverage concerning his sex life: specifically, his penchant for visiting prostitutes. Meanwhile, as a well-timed corrective for those who think such behaviour belongs to a vanished age, a man who claims to have spent £100,000 in brothels appeared on Radio Two's Jeremy Vine Show and caused a tremendous fuss.

It is 100 years this week since the birth of Graham Greene, and the anniversary of that great chronicler of 20th century guilt, betrayal and moral ambivalence is being celebrated in true 21st century style. There has been excited news coverage concerning his sex life: specifically, his penchant for visiting prostitutes. Meanwhile, as a well-timed corrective for those who think such behaviour belongs to a vanished age, a man who claims to have spent £100,000 in brothels appeared on Radio Two's Jeremy Vine Show and caused a tremendous fuss.

Whereas Greene's biographer, Norman Sherry, dismisses his subject's enthusiasm for paid sex as a minor misdeed, part of a complex sense of personal sin, Radio Two listeners were apparently shocked to the core by the confessions of the contemporary punter, Sebastian Horsley. In a sombre apology to those who had been offended, Jeremy Vine told his audience that "we have had scores of callers saying this man is a pervert who stands for everything that is wrong with British society today".

It is through these occasional accidents of timing that a flash of illumination can light up the murkier corners of our world. If Horsley represents everything that is wrong with Britain today, then where does leave that his fellow pervert, Greene? Radio Two listeners, if they think of such things, would probably argue that the world conjured up by Greene's greatest novels - one in which faith and desire, virtue and weakness, torment the soul - belong to a lost age. Guilt, they would say, no longer plays such an unwholesome part in our lives. As for the revelation that the writer liked to slip into brothels, or pay for a quick knee-trembler; that is also indicative of the furtive, shame-filled times in which he lived.

In fact, the latest volume of Sherry's biography suggests that the truth was more complicated. Greene's erotic restlessness and curiosity were entirely open, not only recorded in his journals and discussed with his male friends, but also no particular secret from his non-mercenary lovers. When asked about rumours to this effect by Catherine Walston, the woman who was one of the great loves of his life and who inspired The End of the Affair, Greene answered the whispers by jotting down a quick top 50 for her.

The list, which, rather peculiarly, one of them must have kept for posterity, is grimly evocative: very few names, and some brisk, coded descriptions: "Russian boots", "Beautiful bottom in S Kensington", "Welsh". But it is interesting that he confessed so openly and that his affair survived the list, just as that, years later, his other great love, Yvonne Cloetta, was prepared to put down as a mere misjudgment an ill-considered offer by Greene to take her to a brothel.

To complicate matters still further, Catherine Walston's husband knew of her affair, allowed it to continue rather than end the marriage and even remained friends with his wife's lover. Sixty years ago, at a time when society, we smugly assume, was repressed and embarrassed about such things, it seems that at least some people recognised that love, desire and companionship are a complex business, that one should try to muddle through, without too much open sleaziness on the one hand or prim self-righteousness on the other.

We do, and see, things differently now. Sebastian Horsley is no Graham Greene - he is a journalist and artist who describes his weird, kinky life with a breezy wit - and one should not draw too close a parallel between the two writers. It is true that Horsley's most famous exploit, being crucified in the Philippines, might be thought to have echoes of Greene's religious agonies but, according to the man on the cross, this painful stunt was more a career move than an expression of spiritual torment.

Preferring paid sex to the real thing may be unsavoury, and, in retrospect, it was an odd decision to invite a proud, self-declared sex maniac to chat about his private life on a daytime family show on Radio Two. But, having done it, to apologise so abjectly to sanctimonious listeners was pathetic.

If one is looking for what represents everything that is wrong with British society, one could find far stronger candidates than someone boasting about his personal predilections. Every day of the week, particularly on a Sunday, we are reminded that we live in a harsh, money-driven, prurient society, obsessed by a commodified, public form of sex and intimacy, where a moderately well-known married couple with children can be paid to attack one another in the press and detail the misery of their divorce, where sleeping with the right famous person is richly rewarded by newspapers and TV stations, ever eager to serve up fresh sleaze for the market.

It is perhaps not surprising that prostitution not only continues to exist in a world like this, but thrives; whore-mongering of one kind or another is all around us. To do justice to a society in which the radio appearance of someone speaking openly about such things can cause such outrage and embarrassment would require the pen of a new Graham Greene.

Even he would probably be distrusted. As Julian Evans put it in a Prospect essay, published before the fuss over the novelist's sex life, Greene still "carries with him the odour of a moral ambiguity unpalatable to our piously moralising, hypocritical times".