Graham Greene: An Approach to the Novels

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Author: Robert Hoskins

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GRAHAM GREENE

GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF THE HUMANITIES VOLUME 1684

GRAHAM GREENE AN APPROACH TO THE NOVELS

ROBERT HOSKINS

GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC. A MEMBER OF THE TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP NEW YORK AND LONDON 1999

Published in 1999 by Garland Publishing Inc. A Member of the Taylor & Francis Group 19 Union Square West New York, NY 10003 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 1999 by Robert Hoskins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here after invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoskins, Robert. Graham Greene : an approach to the novels/by Robert Hoskins. p. cm.— (Garland reference of the humanities ; vol. 1684) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-1265-2 (alk. paper) 1. Greene, Graham, 1904–—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PR6013.R44Z633478 1998 823'.912—dc21 98–39990 CIP

ISBN 0-203-00963-0 Master e-book ISBN

For my mother, and in memory of my father

Contents

Introduction Acknowledgements

vii xvii

Chapter One:

Protagonists of the First Phase

Chapter Two:

Letters and Diaries

31

Chapter Three:

A Gun for Sale

51

Chapter Four:

Brighton Rock

77

Chapter Five:

Protagonists of the Second Phase

99

Chapter Six: Chapter Seven:

1

The Strategy of Allusion in the Second Phase

119

Portraits of the Artist

135

The End of the Affair

135

The Quiet American

154

A Burnt-Out Case

163

The Comedians

176

Chapter Eight:

Travels with My Aunt

189

Chapter Nine:

The Honorary Consul

215

The Human Factor

231

Chapter Eleven:

Dr. Fischer of Geneva

245

Chapter Twelve:

Monsignor Quixtoe

259

The Captain and the Enemy

287

Selected Bibliography

311

Chapter Ten:

Chapter Thirteen:

vi

Index

317

Permissions Acknowledgements

321

Introduction

As an unapologetic admirer of Graham Greene’s writing, I feel a certain awkwardness in introducing a book about him that he probably would have disliked. He admired Philip Stratford’s Faith and Fiction and Father Leopoldo Duran’s La Crisis del Sacerdote in Graham Greene—these, he said, were the best critical books about him—but he was impatient with a great deal of the critical writing about his work. “Save me from these American academics,” he wrote in a friend’s copy of the volume of essays edited by R.W.B.Lewis and Peter Conn in the Viking Critical Library edition of The Power and the Glory—a collection that I have always regarded as first-rate. His attitude toward critics appears to have been linked with his determination to avoid repetition in his work: he was sensitive to the charge that he was a “one-book man”—a charge he rightly denied—and he feared that too keen an awareness of the “patterns” in his work would stifle his own creativity and make patterns harder rather than easier to avoid. As he explains in Ways of Escape, the fear became acute midway through his career, when his growing reputation as a Catholic novelist threatened to limit the range in which he was expected to work: Writing a novel does not become easier with practice. The slow discovery by a novelist of his individual method can be exciting, but a moment comes in middle age when he feels that he no longer controls his method; he has become its prisoner. Then a long period of ennui sets in: it seems to him he has done everything before. He is more afraid to read his favorable critics than his unfavorable, for with terrible patience they unroll before his eyes the

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unchanging pattern of the carpet. If he has depended a great deal on his unconscious, on his ability to forget even his own books when they are once on the public shelves, the critics remind him—this theme originated ten years ago, that simile which came so unthinkingly to his pen a few weeks back was used nearly twenty years ago in a passage where…. (140–41) A foray into film writing had provided Greene with a way of escape from entrapment in his own pattern, or so he had thought, but “The Third Man only beckoned me into another and more luxurious prison.” At this time he was inspired to pursue another escape—the use of first person narration—by his reading of Dickens’s Great Expectations (141). Greene reiterated his concern over critics and “patterns” in an interview with Marie-Françoise Allain. Asked whether there existed somewhere a “true image” of him, he replied: That’s for others to discover, not me. I expect you’re familiar with Henry James’s words about “the pattern in the carpet.” In any body of work there’s always a pattern to be found. Well, I don’t want to see it. When a critic discovers certain keynotes, that’s fine and may be of interest, but I don’t want to be steeped in his discoveries, I want to remain unaware of them. Otherwise I think my imagination would dry up. For the same reason I never reread my books; I know I would come across all too many repetitions due quite simply to forgetting what I had written before. I’ve not the slightest wish to have my nose rubbed onto “the pattern in the carpet.” (23) It was characteristic of Greene to allude to Henry James in commenting on his own life and work as a writer and equally characteristic for him to be modestly evasive with regard to his own figure. At the same time it is not hard to imagine why Greene, or any writer, would need to regard the beginning of each new book as an entry into uncharted territory. His character Maurice Bendrix, himself a novelist and the first protagonist-narrator in the novels, describes himself somewhat miserably early in The End of the Affair as a traveler in a strange

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land, a traveler without a map. For better or worse, the literary traveler who sets out to negotiate the territory of Greene’s works will experience nothing of the sort, for there have long been many maps and signposts, some of them extremely helpful. Brief introductions to Greene as well as more comprehensive surveys of his work are sufficiently numerous that to survey all of them would be beyond the scope of this introductory chapter. A description of a few of the key critical works—especially those that have attempted to identify patterns in the course of Greene’s career—may serve to place my own study in a useful context. The early work by Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris, The Art of Graham Greene (1951), though limited now in that it extends only through The Heart of the Matter, remains interesting and important as the first book-length study of Greene in English and an intelligent, lucid account of his obsessional themes and his emerging craftsmanship influenced by his admiration for James, Stevenson, and Conrad. My own indebtedness to Allott and Farris’s discussion of Greene’s interest in “the divided mind” will be obvious to anyone familiar with their work; although the topic has long been familiar in Greene studies, it could not be overlooked at the outset of the approach I have taken in chapter one. Among the briefer early studies, David Lodge’s Graham Greene (1966) is exemplary. Lodge sees the Catholicism in Greene’s fiction as not a body of belief requiring exposition and demanding categorical assent or dissent, but a system of concepts, a source of situation, and a reservoir of symbols with which he can order and dramatize certain intuitions about the nature of human experience—intuitions which were gained prior to and independently of his formal adoption of the Catholic faith. (6) In the novels that followed The End of the Affair, Lodge observes a weakening of the “challenge” by divine order to the “secular and cynical view of life,” and in The Comedians he finds evidence of “Greene’s progress from a fiction based upon a ‘tragic’ conflict between human and divine values, to fiction conceived in terms of comedy and irony in which the possibility

x

of religious faith has all but retreated out of sight in the anarchic confusion of human behavior” (44). John Atkins’s Graham Greene (1957; rev. 1966), A.A.DeVitis’s Graham Greene (1964; rev. 1986), Gwenn Boardman’s The Aesthetics of Exploration (1971), Roger Sharrock’s Saints, Sinners and Comedians (1984), Grahame Smith’s The Achievement of Graham Greene (1986), Brian Thomas’s An Underground Fate (1988), and V.V.B.Rama Rao’s Graham Greene’s Comic Vision (1990) are especially noteworthy. Atkins’s personal style of criticism is informal and often eccentric—he is antagonized to the point of distraction by Greene’s treatment of Catholicism, so that in one chapter he quotes statistics on crime to show that Catholics in fact behave rather worse than Protestants. Nevertheless, he demonstrates an intuitive grasp of connections between Graham Greene’s fiction and his personality and private life. Atkins describes Scobie, protagonist of The Heart of the Matter, as “a distorted reflection of his creator, a man who cannot disguise or hide his feelings. He can always be seen through” (159). This view of his work was not congenial to Greene, but after four decades and the appearance of several biographical studies, the evidence is in Atkins’s favor. DeVitis’s chief interest is in explaining “what use Graham Greene makes of religious subject matter and religious belief.” By “analyzing the place of religion in the overall pattern of his novels,” DeVitis traces “as far as possible—the development of his thought as it affects his art” (ii). The author’s works prior to 1938 are of interest to DeVitis “not only as fictions but frequently as preliminary sketches and as tentative efforts for those more serious works that beguile and enchant Greene’s readers” (iii). The “grand theme” of Greene is expressed in the three Catholic novels following Brighton Rock, concluding with The End of the Affair (1951), in which Greene progresses from melodrama into a greater psychological realism. In later books, Greene’s artistic maturity is evidenced by his greater dependence upon character rather than plot devices and his blending of “religious theme” and “overall pattern” so effectively that theme and plot become inseparable. In this way, DeVitis argues, Greene “developed the scope of the novel in England” (106) and became “the finest living writer in our language” (195).

xi

Gwenn Boardman, in The Aesthetics of Exploration (1971), adopts Bendrix’s metaphor and interprets Greene’s fiction as expressing his “artistic quest” through the “central metaphor of the map.” The author’s journeys to Liberia, Mexico, Indo-China, and the Congo mark stages of his artistic growth, Boardman says, and his writing records “his own explorations in terms of psychological as well as aesthetic exploration” (2). Thus, his journey to Liberia in the mid-1930s involved an exploration of the “region of the imagination” and contributed to Brighton Rock. Mexico, by intensifying his awareness of the emerging secular “civilization of hate” and the need to learn the lesson of God’s love, stimulated the remaining Catholic novels through The End of the Affair; Indo-China provided the occasion for Greene’s variation of the Jamesian conflict between old and new worlds, American innocence and European experience and, as his “Indo-China Journal” (1954) suggests, it moved him in the direction of comedy and an expression of the idea that “under the shadow of the Cross it is better to be gay” (3). Finally, his journey to the Congo “in search of a character” led to his acceptance of absurdity as a condition of contemporary life and his creation of a mature protagonist who confronts that absurdity, Querry in A Burnt-Out Case. Roger Sharrock, in Saints and Sinners and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene (1984), acknowledges the movement into comedy but asserts that “the novelist of spiritual dryness and despair has never been a novelist of the absurd” (25). Sharrock sees Greene’s novelistic career as consisting of two phases, with A Burnt-Out Case as the novel that inaugurates the second phase. The first phase was characterized by Greene’s treatment of Catholic themes of fallen humanity and the mysterious working of God’s grace, and—especially in the pre-World War II novels—a scope sufficiently narrow that its “personal obsessiveness” defined Greeneland, the fictive world in which “The hunted figure in a shabby mackintosh against a shabby urban background conveyed an impressive personal vision of a world evil and corrupt” (13). Sharrock does not undervalue this phase of Greene’s work; on the contrary, he sees Greene’s “great technical achievement” as the “elevation of the form of the thriller into a medium for serious fiction” (12). Nevertheless, Sharrock feels that this fertile but narrow field was insufficient to establish Greene as a “world writer” or to

xii

earn him “major status.” It remained unclear whether the world he depicted was an actual world or merely “the product of personal trauma” (14). The Greene of the later phase was, according to Sharrock, a superior artist whose scope broadened as he turned outward from himself and from England, entering “into his full maturity as a realistic writer drawing people and scenes in Asia, Africa, South America, and Hertfordshire which make the backgrounds of his earlier thrillers seem sketchy” (24). Greene, like his character Querry, turned away from “religious practice” in order to follow “his soul’s authenticity”; his novels drift steadily toward comedy and secularization. “We can define the later phase,” Sharrock contends, “by calling it not sectarianly Catholic, not dealing in the miraculous; less negatively we could see it as a body of fiction celebrating each meeting and departure of human beings in the world of nature as not casual but meaningful, therefore miraculous” (25). Sharrock defines the two phases stylistically and rhetorically as well as thematically. In the earlier “morality” phase, best represented by Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, Greene is able to control the tone of his novels by means of a rhetoric based on expressionist images, while his narrative scenes and transitions are sustained by the forms of the cinema (274). In the later, secularized phase, the “flowering” of which can be found in The Comedians and The Honorary Consul, a true realism is achieved, and the role of trains of poetic imagery subdued but not abandoned…. But all the time, quite apart from the use of similes or the exchange of melodrama for the believably quotidian, an urging of language has continued to eliminate self-consciousness by utterly bare and natural statement. (274) The function of this bareness of style is “to point to experience of which language cannot speak directly” (274). In The Achievement of Graham Greene (1985), Grahame Smith discusses a complex of related themes in Greene’s work— for example, the sadness of “personal relations permeated by the fear of betrayal, self-knowledge too long delayed, the missed opportunity” (216); the “terror of life’s unpredictability” counterpointed against a longing for “peace” (215); the “fusion of love and responsibility” (89)—in order to show that Greene’s

xiii

political, social, and religious themes interact in varying degrees throughout the novels. Smith is also concerned with the roots of Greene’s enormous popularity, which he attributes in part to Greene’s avoidance of the experimental techniques of the great modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, and to Greene’s interest in and borrowing from the popular art of film. Smith finds a likely influence upon Greene in Dickens, one of several writers who achieved, as the Western and the thriller have done in film, the ability to “turn reality into myths of good and evil” (41). Greene’s major achievement in this vein is The Ministry of Fear, “where the ministry itself is transfigured by the intensity of Greene’s vision from an institution concerned with espionage to a mythic recreation of aspects of twentiethcentury life.” This finest of entertainments flawlessly blends the “excitement of the thriller with the insight of the novels” (41). The organization or pattern Smith sees in Greene’s novels may be summarized briefly: the first three novels, 1929–31, are romances; these apprentice works are followed first by a period of entertainments and early political novels (1932–36), then by a period of entertainments and Catholic novels (1939–1951) ushered in by the transitional Brighton Rock, and finally—after several works that are not classified by period—by the “later Greene,” beginning with The Honorary Consul (1970). More broadly, Smith sees Greene’s career as consisting of two major phases: [W]e might say that Greene’s first outstandingly creative period was marked by a visionary inwardness, a turning in on the self in order to make a fictional examination of spiritual issues. His second phase involved a move outwards to the public world of international politics. (181)

Consul thus marks, in Smith’s view, the fulfillment of artistic maturity which for DeVitis had occurred in earlier works like The End of the Affair. In Consul Greene “moves on to a plane of achievement which develops and combines the interests of earlier work in a fusion that is both a summation and a new departure. Distinctions such as entertainment, faith, politics or allegory…lose their separate identity in becoming the seamless web of a subtly blended whole” (176). The best book on Greene,

xiv

Allott and Farris’s, goes much deeper to discover that “the terror of life, a terror of what experience can do to the individual, a terror at a predetermined corruption, is the motive force that drives Greene as a novelist.” Smith agrees, “with the sole qualification that a writer as interesting as Greene is capable of being motivated by more than a single obsession.” Smith defines his own emphasis as “the effect of this terror, the emotion it generates within the books and for the reader” (215). Brian Thomas’s An Underground Fate (1988) sees a major transition in Greene’s fiction occurring around 1950, a shift from the tragic vision, especially in the Catholic novels prior to The End of the Affair, to a comic mode—not the comedy of existential absurdity but that of comic romance as defined by Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture. The narrative pattern is that of the quest that moves from a journey into the underground toward a rebirth. V.V.Rama Rao finds a similar movement from tragic to comic in Graham Greene’s Comic Vision (1990), though Rao’s model comes not from Frye but from Susanne Langer’s theory of “tragic rhythm” (the “deathward advance” through unrecoverable stages of “growth, maturity, and decline”) and “comic rhythm” (the “vital rhythm of selfpreservation”). Greene’s novels evolve in three phases, Rao contends, which “may be analysed in terms of the artistic exploration of modes of experience; tragic, comic and tragicomic” (1). The tragic phase ends with Brighton Rock; A Burnt-Out Case marks the transition between tragicomedy and comedy. Rao’s assertion that Greene was able to mix comic and tragic rhythms in his work as great writers like Dante and Shakespeare had done is plausible, and in pointing to a drift toward the comic he shares the views of several other critics. At times, however, his argument is strained, as when he suggests that, as a grotesque figure, Pinkie in Brighton Rock “inevitably belongs to the world of farce” (51), or that Sarah’s death in The End of the Affair (a novel he says “soars high” with comedy) “makes for comedy” (96). (Robert Pendleton’s Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot (1996), a study of the pervasive influence of Conrad on Greene’s fiction, has not been considered here because it appeared after my own work was virtually complete.) It would probably be unwise to attribute exclusive validity to any single “pattern.” The movement toward comedy, the broadening of perspective toward “international” themes, the

xv

seeming displacement of religious concerns by political ones— such patterns in Greene’s work have been discussed plausibly and at considerable length and have become familiar in the way the “Catholic” readings of his works once were. In my own work I have tried to build upon these earlier discussions of Greene in order to emphasize qualities in his work which have been inadequately discussed or, in some cases, ignored altogether. I have adopted for convenience the predictable term phases because I believe that a revealing and important pattern in Greene’s work has gone unnoticed, and I have taken up the familiar subject of intertextuality in his novels because I believe that even though a great deal has been said about the topic, much remains that is both interesting and instructive. The study that follows, then, will be directed toward three primary concerns: First, I will examine the evolution of Greene’s career in terms of significant changes in the relationship between the novelist and his protagonists, from those first-phase protagonists, culminating in James Raven and Pinkie Brown, whose warped perspectives and complete alienation from life place them, ostensibly at least, at the greatest imaginable distance from their creator; to the second-phase protagonists whose increasing age, experience, education, and culture make them closer to the novelist himself. This second phase originates with D. in The Confidential Agent (1939) and culminates in a series of what I will call “portraits of the artist” through which Greene confronts more directly and personally the tensions and conflicts of his private life and also examines the role of the novelist as one who explores and exploits those tensions. I will suggest, second, that the letters and diaries written by Greene during his years as a fledgling novelist reveal not only the lifelong habit of allusion and borrowing but also the tendency to see both his own experience and that of his characters in what might be called a “literary frame” consisting of literary analogues or parallels invoked to shape and interpret experience. An examination of the letters, especially, reveals Greene in the dual role as author, one who persistently projects literary experience into his own view of life, and who subsequently projects both his experience and its “literary” interpretation into his created fiction.

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Finally, I will suggest ways in which the later fiction (from Travels with My Aunt onward) moves toward a resolution, or at least a philosophical acceptance, of those tensions and conflicts that have plagued the real and figurative novelist in Greene’s portraits. In this period the fiction becomes increasingly reflexive as Greene revisits and examines old characters, themes, and settings. Monsignor Quixote treats the subject of religious faith with a spirit of affirmation unseen in Greene’s novels for at least three decades. In The Captain and the Enemy, the final novel, Greene returns once more to the subject of writing and the figure of the artist. It should perhaps be pointed out that the space devoted to individual works does not reflect a judgment of their relative merit. I regard The Power and the Glory and The Honorary Consul, for example, as considerably superior to A Gun for Sale and Travels with My Aunt, although the latter books demand much more attention in the approach to the novels I have developed here. My approach to each of the two phases of Greene’s novels begins with a description of the qualities of the protagonists in that phase and progresses to a discussion of individual works.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the College of Arts and Letters of James Madison University for the Edna Shaeffer Humanist Award which enabled me to complete this work far more easily than I could have done otherwise; to the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, for allowing me to examine the superb collection of Greene’s letters and manuscripts, and to Catherine Henderson and other members of the staff there for their efficient and friendly assistance; to Kristi Long, literary editor at Garland Publishing, and to Phyllis Korper, formerly of Garland, for advice and encouragement; to Father Leopoldo Duran, for permission to quote from his book Graham Greene: Friend and Brother; to South Atlantic Review and College Literature, for permission to reprint substantial portions of articles which appeared in those journals in 1983 and 1985, respectively; to Penguin-Putnam, for permission to quote from The Man Within, Stamboul Train, England Made Me, A Gun for Sale, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Ministry of Fear, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, The End of the Affair, Loser Takes All, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, A Burnt-Out Case, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Captain and the Enemy, the Collected Stories and the Collected Essays of Graham Greene, and Norman Sherry’s Life of Graham Greene; to Simon and Schuster, for permission to quote from The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape, Dr. Fischer of Geneva, The Tenth Man, Monsignor Quixote, and Marie-Françoise Allain’s The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene; and especially to my wife, Betty, for her tireless support and wise counsel in every stage of the preparation of this work.

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GRAHAM GREENE

CHAPTER ONE Protagonists of the First Phase

YOUTH

Stamboul Train (1932) and It’s a Battlefield (1934) do not have single protagonists, but certain of their central characters, together with all of the protagonists of the other novels from Greene’s first-published novel The Man Within (1929) through Brighton Rock (1938) have several qualities which taken collectively distinguish them from those of the later works. First and most obviously, they are young men. Pinkie Brown, at seventeen, is the youngest, and Anthony Farrant, at thirtytwo, seems oldest and most experienced and the only one whose character is more or less fully formed. All of the others undergo experiences that change them or at least have the potential to do so in some significant way, and even Anthony is brought to a crisis in which a single moment of the clearsightedness that characterizes his sister Kate could radically alter the course of his future. Anthony maintains wistfully and, it turns out, prophetically that he does not have a future, and the same can be said about many of the young protagonists to be discussed in these pages: Andrews, Crane, Conrad, Raven, Pinkie. The sense of doom hangs so heavily over their youth that to imagine them maturing into old or even middle age is impossible for the reader, as it seems to have been for the author. In later works Greene’s characters will age as he does (though not as much), but the first-phase novels are centered around youthful protagonists.

2 GRAHAM GREENE: AN APPROACH TO THE NOVELS

DIVIDED SELVES

The youthful first-phase protagonists are further characterized by the self-division that afflicts them. Most sharply defined in these terms is Francis Andrews of The Man Within, whose story is a soul-struggle between the lustful, cowardly self shaped by his previous actions and the courageous man of integrity, the “man within” longing to emerge. Andrews’s selfdivision seems traceable in part to the parents whose qualities he has inherited—a harsh, brutal father and a quiet, gentle, affectionate mother whom the father mistreated—and it extends to his own perception of other characters. Carlyon, regarded by Andrews as both friend and enemy, is also a divided self, an apelike man with a romantic soul, a brute and a poet. The saintly Elizabeth, whom Andrews loves, and the sluttish Lucy, who seduces him away from his briefly-discovered virtue and courage, are perhaps less convincing as dramatic characters than as projections of Andrews’s immature understanding of human nature, although the text does not imply that Greene intended an irony of that sort. As variations of the familiar dichotomy of woman as madonna and whore, these characters participate in the duel of angels for Andrews’s soul. Andrews’s fatal cowardice may be usefully compared with that of another Francis and a contemporary in Greene’s fiction, the boy Francis Morton who dies of fright in “The End of the Party,” also published in 1929. Indeed, the kinship among the earliest protagonists is more conspicuous as a result of Greene’s use of similar names: the first names of Francis Andrews, Francis Morton, and Francis Chase (in Rumour at Nightfall); the last names Chant, Chase, Crane. In Oliver Chant, hero of Greene’s next novel The Name of Action (1930), the condition of self-division is less critical than in Andrews, as befits a novel in which romantic adventure is more important than psychology. Nevertheless, it is present in his mixed motives for his journey to Trier: he wants to be involved in the overthrow of a repressive dictatorship, but he also seeks to escape from boredom and to pursue his infatuation with the dictator’s wife, Anne-Marie, whom he has seen in a photograph; eventually his desire for Anne-Marie will jeopardize the very cause he has vowed to support. The duel of angels carried on through the characters of Elizabeth and Lucy in The Man Within is located more plausibly in this novel in the

PROTAGONISTS OF THE FIRST PHASE

3

mind of the protagonist, who at first imagines Anne-Marie Demassener as a paragon of virtue as surely as she is of womanly beauty. His later repulsion at the discovery of her lustfulness and her infidelity to her husband is symptomatic of his own immaturity and divided aims, since on some level of consciousness these must have been the very qualities he wanted to inspire in her. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris suggest plausibly in their study of Greene that Chant’s dual nature is represented in the novel by two sharply contrasted figures, the libertine revolutionary poet Kapper, and the puritanical dictator Demassener (67). Closer in spirit to The Man Within than to The Name of Action and less successful than either, Rumour at Nightfall (1931) is an almost allegorical treatment of the theme of selfdivision. The dual protagonists Chase and Crane are clearly two halves of a single personality: Crane, like Andrews, is cowardly and uncertain, temperamentally romantic and spiritual; his friend Chase is brave, rational, skeptical, secular. Chase has the ability to endure and to change; Crane must die, perhaps tragically and no doubt, in terms of the symbolic relationship between these incomplete personalities, necessarily: he is figuratively the imprisoned “man within” Chase who must die in order to be released. The duality of these characters extends to Eulelia Monti, the object of first Crane’s and then Chase’s affection. Known first (like AnneMarie) through a photograph, Eulelia is initially perceived as saintly and then suspected of sluttishness; in fact, she is a complex character who is deeply religious (Catholic) and in the main virtuous, although she once gave herself to the guerrilla leader Caveda in defiance of her mercenary mother, who had expected to profit from the marriage of the beautiful and virginal daughter. Like Francis Andrews, Eulelia traces the divided qualities of her own nature to her parents, but with the qualities reversed: a good, spiritual, intellectual father; an evil, sensual, greedy mother. Stamboul Train, the novel that followed Rumour at Nightfall, is so different from it in character, setting, pace, and narrative skill that it seems the work of another author altogether. Whereas the action of the earlier work was so internalized as to become virtually unintelligible at times, that of Stamboul Train is vivid, fast-paced, and sharply defined. The book is probably


the least psychological of the first-phase novels, but it contains nevertheless an echo of the divided self in the character of Carleton Myatt, whose impulse to kindness (he gives his sleeping compartment to Coral Musker, who is ill) is at odds with his willingness to accept sexual favors in return. Myatt is genuinely charitable to Coral, yet sees her selfishly as the means of satisfying the indiscriminate lust expressed through his dream of furtive sexual encounters with women on London’s Hampstead Heath. Further acquaintance with Coral only reveals his inability to reconcile spontaneous affection with calculated self-interest. His proposal to keep her as his mistress demonstrates the former, but his eventual decision to enter a marriage of expediency with Janet Pardoe shows that the latter will determine his actions. A sense of class and propriety prevents him from proposing marriage to Coral, yet his stated desire to make her a well-kept mistress has at least a foundation in real affection. Myatt is easily dissuaded from this ambition, however, and his calculating acceptance of a marriage with Janet Pardoe, arranged as part of a business deal that will further his financial interests, testifies to his willingness to value money over human feeling. It’s a Battlefield, with its multiple centers of interest, is closer in technique to Stamboul Train but closer in spirit to the earlier works, and it carries forward Greene’s concern with selfdivision in individuals and with paired or contrasted characters who represent opposite poles of personality. The pitiable Conder, who carries on during the day an elaborate charade of life as the father of a large family, only to return to his solitary room at night, is an example of the former. Conder’s double selfhood extends to his dual role as journalist and Communist party member; his apparent commitment to the party’s agenda masks his more important interest in getting a story, and his sense of his true identity falters in the presence of so many selves: “His personalities flickered so quickly that he was himself confused, uncertain whether he was the revolutionary, the intimate of Scotland Yard, or, a new part this, the master spy” (49). Mr. Surrogate, the Communist intellectual who is unable to unite his professed principles with his lifestyle (he writes leftist tomes and makes bold speeches but lives the life of a wealthy man of leisure and is unable to sympathize with or understand authentic working-class people), is a further


5

example of self-division. Similarly, the young and uncertain Jules Briton recalls both Andrews and Eulelia in tracing his opposed qualities to his parents (a puritanical English mother and a supposedly libertine French father) and resembles Myatt in his subordination of his love of a woman to his love of money: Jules wants, indeed plans, to marry Kay Rimmer but changes his mind upon realizing how quickly he is spending his small legacy from his father on her. More interesting than these single characters in Battlefield are the pairs whose contrasting qualities strongly suggest the halves of a complete individual. Jim Drover and his brother Conrad are most prominent in this regard. Jim is simple, brave, untroubled, and happily married—until his arrest for the murder of a policeman destroys his life and home. Conrad is complex, troubled, insecure, jealous; his intelligence and his hypersensitivity (connected with his name, for which schoolmates mocked him) have left him lonely and unhappy. Jim’s wife, Milly, and her sister, Kay Rimmer, form a similarly contrasted pair: Kay, a factory worker, is independent, single, untroubled, reckless in her pursuit of sexual pleasure to offset the numbing round of her work; Milly is domestic, shy, cautious, sensitive, and although she has been faithful and happy in her marriage, she eventually gives herself to Conrad out of sadness and physical desire. Kay is happily amoral and able to enjoy sexual pleasure because she dissociates it from love; Milly cannot do so and cannot take pleasure in her brief affair with Conrad, nor can he—although he loves Milly—escape sufficiently from guilt to experience pleasure. An impossible longing for union by two incomplete characters is at the heart of Greene’s next novel, England Made Me (1935). The central figures here, the twins Anthony and Kate Farrant, are doomed to failure and unhappiness by their incestuous love which only Kate is willing to acknowledge and accept. The failure is that of Anthony, a prodigal son who in his feckless, wandering life has been unable to achieve success or stability; in spite of his failure and his incurable dishonesty, however, he retains an antiquated idealism, a shadow of Victorian morality, that makes him far less able than Kate to compete in the modern world of the novel. Anthony’s dilemma is further expressed in the symbolic opposition of the two women with whom he is involved: the worldly Kate and the provincial “Loo”


Davidge, who is hopelessly innocent in spite of her willful assumption of sophisticated attitudes toward sexuality. Kate is the stronger, surer twin: steady, hard-working, with greater confidence and self-understanding, much more honest than Tony because she does not rely on fakery (the tall stories, the Harrow tie) in personal relations, and much more willing to accept the modern world on its own terms. In this last regard she resembles Anne-Marie Demassener as seen by Oliver Chant —someone who belongs to the modern age. James Raven, protagonist of the fast-paced entertainment A Gun for Sale (1936), is more memorable as the icy assassin to whom murder “didn’t mean much” than as a serious variation on Greene’s theme of self-division. For the most part he is drawn with very broad strokes that emphasize the connection between his impoverished, brutalized childhood and his life of crime. Yet Raven is also a preliminary sketch for one of Greene’s most psychologically complex characters—Pinkie of Brighton Rock—and Raven himself calls attention to his own dim awareness of the deep conflicts of his inner life. “I was reading once…something about psicko, psicko”—he tells Anne Crowder (124), and the reader senses that within his murderous heart there is, if not the “man within” of Greene’s earlier writing, certainly a “child within” whose memory gives depth and poignancy to Raven’s situation. For Raven’s character encompasses, as will Pinkie’s in Greene’s next novel, the division between the cold-blooded murderer and the suffering child; that is why the two books incorporate Greene’s earliest ironic allusions in the novels to Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and its recollection of the paradise from which the child emerges “trailing clouds of glory”; and it is why Raven’s death, arguably the bitterest and most painful in all of Greene’s writing, is described through an elaborate simile of childbirth: Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation. (170)


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The “child within” Raven is one who loves kittens, responds with pitiful eagerness to the prospect of friendship and affection, demonstrates intense loyalty to the one person (Anne Crowder) who has been kind to him, and dreams of a quasifilial relationship with the kindly old man he has murdered: “Shoot, dear child” the victim says to him in the dream. “We’ll go home together. Shoot” (123; italics added.) While it would be easy to exaggerate the extent to which this brisk narrative reveals the potential for goodness in him, it seems true nevertheless that Raven, who was an orphaned child, occupies a symbolic middle ground between the book’s two other prominent orphans, both of whom represent, as old men, the fulfillment of their opposed natures: the Liberal humanitarian Minister whom Raven assassinates and the wicked capitalist Sir Marcus who has plotted the event in order to further his company’s interests and satisfy his own greed. It is significant that the two were friends as children and that Sir Marcus, in turning toward evil, had symbolically betrayed his childhood friend long before plotting the literal betrayal. (A similar form of betrayal will be seen later in The Third Man in the remembered pasts of Rollo Martins and Harry Lime, who were close childhood friends. Harry has betrayed his friend’s ideal, but in this case it is the virtuous Rollo who kills his old companion.) The form of division seen in Raven—inside him is not the “man within who is angry with me” but the wounded, suffering child whose anguish has made adult acceptance of the world impossible—is given its fullest expression in Pinkie Brown of Brighton Rock, Greene’s first Catholic protagonist and his first of many characters who are failed priests. As a former choir boy who once wanted to become a priest in order to protect himself from the horror of life (especially sexual life) he fears, Pinkie has rejected the divine, heavenly Father for a criminal, earthly one, the mobster Kite. At seventeen Pinkie is a child-man, a believer who trusts no one, not even God; more than any of Greene’s characters since Andrews and Crane, Pinkie longs for peace, but he is fatally determined to attain it on his own terms before accepting the peace of God. What distinguishes Brighton Rock as the culmination of Greene’s treatment of divided selves in the first-phase novels is the way in which various rhetorical and structural elements in the work express, develop, and parallel the polarities within the


protagonist. Those polarities are expressed rhetorically by the often-discussed oxymorons that both describe Pinkie and link him symbolically with the world-view that pervades the novel: his “young-old” face, the “annihilating eternity” of his grey eyes, his “scared lust” and the “fear” that “straightened in him like lust”—all give shape to his complex and troubled inner life. When a gull sweeps through the “iron nave of the Palace Pier… half-vulture and half-dove” (131) as Pinkie thinks of his marriage, the submerged metaphor (Pier as cathedral) subtly links Pinkie’s duality (child, priest-child, dove vs. murderer, vulture) with that of the larger world of Brighton Rock. Structurally and thematically a corresponding duality is expressed in the novel in two primary ways: by the crosscutting between the world of Pinkie (Catholic, figuratively subterranean, joyless, irrational, permeated by evil) and that of his nemesis Ida Arnold (pagan and superstitious, sunny, pleasurable or fun-loving, insistent upon rational concepts of right and wrong, justice and/or revenge); and by the almost schizophrenic ordering of images, symbols, and ideas into the sacred and the profane—the lost world that was informed by the religious sense, and the modern world of secular values. Greene establishes the pattern by setting the opening action of Hale’s murder on the religious holiday Whitmonday, the bank holiday after Whitsun, or Pentecost. From this occasion and its reminder of the way in which the modern “holiday” has betrayed the “holy day” from which it was derived, Greene develops a story in which his familiar conception of self-division within the protagonist extends into a view of the world at large, a world whose outlines may be signified in a brief listing of the stated and implied contrasts through which it is revealed: Sacred

Secular

Holy Day (Whitsun) Cathedral Pinkie as choir-boy, child, priest Dove Holy Ghost Rose Oil of extreme unction Good and evil

Holiday (Bank Holiday) Palace Pier Pinkie as gangster, murderer Vulture Ida’s “ghosts” Ida Pinkie’s bottle of vitriol Right and wrong


Sacred

Secular

Mercy The old priest

Revenge or justice The old lawyer Prewitt

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The youthful Pinkie and his even younger bride Rose continue Greene’s use of “two children” figures (Francis and Peter Morton, the young Anthony and Kate Farrant) and of characters who in their closeness and unique correspondence seem halves of one incomplete self. Jack Biles has commented on this aspect of doubling in Brighton Rock: Rose and Pinkie make up the principal double [in the novel]…. Despite their having thoroughgoing antitheses of character and outlook, Greene fuses Rose and Pinkie into a modern instance of “the Platonic, or epipsychean, longing for the unification of the severed halves of man.” Rose and Pinkie are man and wife; hence, both church and state see them as one flesh. Her name-color suggests to many people pink rather than red or white, as in rosé, a pinkish table wine; the inference seems warranted, for Rose and Pinkie then have identical given names as well as the surname Brown, a condition underscoring the oneflesh conception. They even look alike in their meagerness, boniness, and shabbiness. And in the pub where they go for a drink after the wedding, Pinkie sees Rose and himself as a “double image in the mirror” behind the bar. Like all symbolic twins (doubles), they “are both divine and mortal, black and white,” positive and negative, an inversion-symbol of the alternation of light and darkness, life and death, appearance and disappearance. (34–35) Biles further points out, as numerous commentators have done before him, the importance of Pinkie’s discovery that Rose’s goodness is somehow essential to the fulfillment of his own evil nature. Rose’s identical slum origins and her comparably miserable family life have not weakened her obedient faith or soured her essentially hopeful view of life; in that sense she creates a


counterweight to the strong pull of naturalism in the conception of Pinkie’s character; moreover, as will be discussed later, she seems capable of bringing about change in him. Her potential for doing so, and the care with which that potential is linked through the novel’s imagery with the religious themes that appear full-blown here for the first time in Greene’s work, suggest another way in which Brighton Rock represents the culmination of development of the first-phase protagonists. WOMEN AND REDEMPTION All but one of the first-phase novels offer the prospect that the male protagonist’s crises and/or conflicts may be escaped or resolved through his relationship with a woman. Greene establishes this pattern in The Man Within, where the beautiful and saintly Elizabeth not only cares for Andrews, hides him, and shelters him but responds to his higher, inner self by trusting in his capacity for courage and integrity. Elizabeth moves Andrews toward a redemption of his own cowardly and dishonest past by persuading him to testify in court against the smugglers who were his comrades. Because she demonstrates the innocence, faith, and courage that Andrews so miserably lacks, he sees her as “so clear, so terribly sane,” while he is “twisted” (182). “I envy you,” he says to her; “You seem so certain, so sane, at peace” (188). She tries to convince him of the reality of his own better nature (“Why do you always make so little of the good you do, and so much of the bad?” [188]), and he recognizes the change in himself under her influence: “You are filling me with yourself. That means courage, peace, holiness” (189). The attribute of “holiness” is one of many indicators of the extent to which the primarily secular redemptions of Greene’s first two novels acquire religious overtones. Elizabeth, who appears early in the novel as “a saint surrounded by white birds,” and who explains to Andrews that her determination to remain chaste before marriage involves “a belief in God” which she “can’t alter” even for him (196), is so emphatically a religious figure that the prospect of his change begins to seem like a religious conversion, which it is not. Clearly it is through Elizabeth that Andrews has real hope of directing his life onto its proper course, but in Lewes, without the strengthening influence of her presence, he reverts to his


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lustful and cowardly ways, sleeping with the trollop Lucy and abandoning Elizabeth to the menace of the gang of smugglers. Andrews, then, is not redeemed, yet much of the plot’s interest turns upon our ability (and his and Elizabeth’s) to believe that he could have been. Oliver Chant, in The Name of Action, is if anything even more insistent upon the idea that through a woman—in this case Anne-Marie Demassener—he will be able to give meaning and validation to the life he has believed to be worthless. Chant’s problem is not a ruined past of which he is ashamed but rather the boredom and meaninglessness of life as he has experienced it in the dull round of London drawing rooms. From such a life and the spiritual nullity of modern existence—“a life of which he had grown inexpressibly tired, a life without meaning, without risk and without beauty” (72)—he hopes, albeit in an adolescent romantic fashion, that Anne-Marie will save him: [H]e had not himself known for what he had hoped. Some undefined desire to make her depend on him for safety, to show her that he was at least something to be regarded with interest by the most uninterested eyes, was all that he could grasp. Now every second those hopes were deserting him with a measurable speed. If there were twelve hours more of silence he must return to London, to Mrs. Meadmore’s and a succession of incurious friends who would not have noticed his absence…. (168) Contrasting Anne-Marie with the devout Catholic and domestic Frau Weber, Chant reflects: “They were born in an age of doubt and to a class which wished to know too much. She would never make ‘a good wife and a good Catholic’ in that calm, tender, and unquestioning way, nor he a ‘good husband’” (257). Any redemption which Chant might hope to attain through AnneMarie, then, is secular and is offered as the only possible one in the secular age in which they live. Indeed, what he longs for becomes almost a substitute religion, for his emotions are consistently felt in terms suggestive of religious devotion. We see it, for example, in the pivotal garden scene:


“You have come,” he said in such a voice of wonder, almost fear, as might belong to an unbeliever whose mechanical prayer had been completely granted. (84) and in Chant’s willed effort to elevate his love to the level of actual worship: “I love you,” he was saying. “I swear to you that I will never question what you do. I will never ask what you mean. I will never try to know you more than you want to be known. I love you as men have loved God.” He meant that he would never try to bring a light into the mystery of who and what she was, and he forgot that men have always tried to solve the mystery of God, whether by mathematics or by prayers, by astronomy or by fastings. (259) and again in his conviction of the holiness of his purpose as he awaits her in a church near the end of the novel: “O God, O God,” he murmured, not praying to the figure before him, but still conversing with himself, “I wish that I could believe in Your infinity…. They talk of marriage as a sacrament, and I want to marry her. I am here for that. There is something holy in my purpose.” (264–65) The romantic Michael Crane in Rumour at Nightfall discovers a similarly holy purpose in his relationship with the mysterious heroine, Eulelia Monti. As Allott and Farris have pointed out, Crane most resembles Francis Andrews among Greene’s protagonists for his mingling of fear with an intense longing for “peace.” “What do I always fear?” he says to his friend and alterego Chase early in the novel (69). Crane’s answer to his own question—“Danger, pain… Death”—emphasizes physical cowardice, but the further unfolding of his character reveals at the center of his unhappiness a more abstract and generalized terror of life, of the “dark vigil of the future” (138) and the anxieties and uncertainties inseparable from human experience. The escape, even momentary, from this complex fear defines for Crane the meaning of “peace.” In the past he has pursued peace through flight and evasion, or through sexual


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pleasure—“the nullity of a satiated body”—ways of escape that are always temporary. The novel traces his discovery, in Eulelia, of the prospect of an enduring peace. The uneven course of the brief relationship between these lovers, conveyed unfortunately in some of the worst writing in all of Greene’s novels, bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Chant and Anne-Marie. Crane, attracted to Eulelia by her photograph (as Chant was drawn to Anne-Marie), experiences in his first meeting alone with her a fleeting moment of the “peace” he has long desired. He links this experience and his admiration for her with a sense of her virtue and “rectitude” as well as her beauty, only to undergo a painful disillusionment upon learning that she has been the lover of the outlaw Caveda. Yet his pain causes him to consider the possibility that his cowardice, his fear of life, may in fact be paradoxically a measure of his humanity: I have had truth, he said to himself, and it has brought me pain. I am not yet ready for truth. We live all our life with evasions…. He wondered: If I had felt no pain when I heard that she had lain with Caveda, should I have been happy? And the question robbed him of passivity. No, no, he almost cried aloud, this pain is precious; if I had felt no pain, I should have been damned indeed. There would have been nothing human left in me…. And for the first time it occurred to him: Because I am a coward, am I fortunate? Are these terrors that I know await me to-day, to-morrow and every future day until I die, not my good fortune, the blessing of my birth, because I enjoy perhaps more keenly than others the alleviations? I am on the borders now of that cold inhuman land; I have only to relinquish pain, to know the truth and not to care, and I need never fear again. (155) From this realization he progresses to the critical moment in which he must choose between the two forms of escape he has always known and the chance to attain a lasting peace through Eulelia: I’ve been offered a woman, he thought, and I’ve been offered flight. Is the one any better than the other? Will


one last longer? and he remembered with a sense of homesickness the peace he had found that morning. That peace had lasted for seconds only, but he could recognize in it a quality of timelessness, which flight could not possess. Those seconds might have never ended; they might have become eternity…he had become conscious of the existence of peace, but the peace had been there always, not bounded by the walls of the room, which was tagged down by every nail, by every board, by every picture to space and time, not enclosed even in the body of Eulelia Monti, a body which belonged to San Juan and the man who caressed it, but bounded only, if the infinite can be a boundary, by the belief in the mind of the woman. But if I leave, he thought, I belong to time…. (174) At Chase’s urging he chooses flight, only to turn back after meeting Eulelia once more and accepting the fact that her love has altered him, that he has no “home” apart from her. Crane’s apprehension of this change within himself is presented in an elaborate simile linking Eulelia with a figure much admired by Greene, St. Joan of Arc: He had the sense that she was driving him back upon his final defenses. He had built up so many barricades of cowardice, fears, evasions, that he had thought the citadel impregnable. The citadel, he supposed, was truth, sincerity, self-knowledge. Now his defenses crumbled before the very simplicity of her assault. He had been prepared for any degree of guile or of the treachery of friends, but he had not been ready for a woman who came like St. Joan, where the wall was thickest, to touch it with the tip of her banner. (210–11) For the now-defenseless Crane the redemptive love of this St. Joan figure makes religious faith possible. As Greene had done with Chant in Action, he locates the critical moment of intersection between belief and love in a church, where Crane, like Chant, voices his urgent desire to marry his beloved. Unlike Chant, however, Crane reaches a stage of belief well beyond Chant’s vague sense of “holy purpose.” The difference is


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apparent in Crane’s response when the priest is reluctant to marry them immediately: “We are both old enough to know our minds. Is it that I am not a Catholic? Tell him I will become that or anything. I believe now, in this moment. Isn’t that enough? If I lose you, I lose faith. I can believe in mystery with you here, in God upon the altar, in God upon the tongue. Let him marry us while I believe.” (217) In The Man Within and The Name of Action Greene had presented secular concepts of redemption that acquire the aura of religious experience through the setting (the scene in church in Name) or the saintliness of the women in question (real in the case of Elizabeth, imagined in the case of Anne-Marie). In Rumour at Nightfall, however, he moves his protagonist toward a more authentic religious conversion that anticipates the Catholic novels just as it bears strong and obvious resemblance to the experience of the author who embraced Catholicism because of his passionate love for a woman. Even so brief an initiation into the mysteries of Catholic faith alienates Crane from Chase, his alter-ego or double as discussed earlier. In Chase’s view Crane is now in league with priests, crucifixes, ecstasies, flames, and damnation, and as a result the two friends will no longer be able to communicate. Chase’s attitude may well be correct, but Crane’s death on the night of his wedding not only obviates the need for that form of “communication” but transfers to the worldly Chase the dual legacy of both the beautiful Eulelia (whom Chase will marry) and the greater mystery of the faith (Chase wants to “share the pain” of his dead friend, implying that he has been united with Eulelia and a more profound experience of life through the suffering of his friend). Crane’s death therefore performs implicitly the imitation of Christ. The similarity of theme and the disheartening progression represented by Greene’s second and third novels—each less successful artistically and commercially than its predecessor— may account in part for the diminished power of women as redeemers in the next three novels, and it is not merely coincidental that in two of these works (Stamboul Train and England Made Me) the link between Catholic belief and the


protagonist’s redemption is missing entirely. Yet these three works also hold out the prospect that the protagonist’s crises and/or conflicts may be escaped or resolved through his relationship with a woman. Carleton Myatt, the insecure Jewish currant merchant in Stamboul Train, discovers in the chorus girl Coral Musker someone who satisfies both his sexual longing and his need for self-esteem. Inexperienced and unconfident with women, Myatt is attracted by the superficial charms of Janet Pardoe, the beautiful but shallow lover of Mabel Warren, yet Coral’s simple friendliness and vulnerability give him confidence: “…I should be dumb before [Janet], he thought. I could not talk to her easily as I can to Coral; I should be conscious of my hands, of my race; and with a wave of gratitude he turned to Coral, ‘You’re good to me’” (99). Coral is ill (an affliction of the heart, appropriate to the unhappy outcome of her relationship with Myatt), and after Myatt gives her his sleeping compartment for the night she repays his generosity by yielding up her virginity to him out of a naive sense of worldly propriety. Myatt’s anticipation of their first night together brings into focus several conflicting elements in his own nature: he weighs the idea of romantic intrigue and seduction acquired from his reading with the mundane reality of his existence (he is not handsome, he is growing fat, and he travels “in currants and not with a portfolio of sealed papers” [120]); in addition he vacillates between his belief that she is “common” (“you can find her any night on the Spaniards road”) and his awareness that she has brought a freshness and pleasant unfamiliarity to his life: He began to think of her as he had never thought before of any woman who was attainable: she is dear and sweet, I should like to do things for her. It did not occur to him for several moments that she had already reason for gratitude. (121) Nothing about their relationship is idealized or spiritualized, yet the genuine affection between the two suggests that Coral could bring to Myatt a form of happiness and security he is unlikely to find elsewhere. Coral accepts Myatt’s offer to support her as his mistress in a London flat, but their


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prospective happiness is thwarted when Coral is captured along with Dr. Czinner by the police in Subotica. Myatt attempts to rescue her but fails, and he is able to forget her altogether when the seemingly inaccessible Janet is offered to him through a marriage to be arranged by Stein, her uncle and Myatt’s business partner. Loneliness similar to Myatt’s can been seen in Battlefield in the person of Jules Briton, who in private moments feels the alienation of “one abandoned by his mother’s death to fight his way in a land which was his only by the accident of birth” (47). Alone, Jules is “lost,” melancholy, frightened of his own loneliness: “Only a woman, only a noise, only a gramophone playing or people talking could save him then from sinking back, back into himself…” (46). Oliver Chant’s linking of the religious impulse and the love of a woman arises from his own imagination rather than from any religious qualities in the woman herself. Jules makes a similar error: his sense of the saving power of a woman who could protect him from his own melancholy is focused somewhat ironically on the promiscuous Kay Rimmer. With Kay in the car beside him, he is distracted by the thought that he will “never be alone again” and has difficulty keeping his eyes on the road (144). Unlike Oliver Chant, Jules is a religious person who does not misunderstand the character of the woman he loves: “He felt no bitterness that he was not the first man she had known; one did not expect as much when wages were so low, employment so precarious, everything which made life worth living, the cinema, the dance hall, powder and scent and rouge and stockings, so dear” (149). Jules longs to set Kay free from the drudgery of the factory work that has led her to pursue pleasure as a form of escape. In the alien world of the Soho cafe where he works, he is distracted from his best and deepest longings; he wants to redeem his life through action, to find “something he could follow with passion…to be saved from the counter and the tea urn, the ‘Weights’, and the heartless flippancy of the café” (40– 41). Only in the church—“the only France he knew”—does he feel sufficiently “at home” to concentrate his thoughts upon serious purpose: In the café the day before he had been uninterested, all his mind absorbed with the need of remembering things,


but in the church while the wine was made blood, the most unlikely things seemed possible, emotion came easily, the desire for sacrifice, the desire for love, the desire for tenderness. (140) Thus it is in the church that Jules, in meditation, unites his ideals of political action (to free Jim Drover from jail) and of love (to “free” Kay Rimmer from an oppressive life): “Jules, praying for Drover, thought of Kay. He joined her life to his (the tea urn and the counter and the cigarettes), her life of eight to five tending a machine, in a mutual dissatisfaction. He wanted to release her, to release Drover” (140). In the context of the novel’s concern for social and economic justice, the joining of these two ideals is appropriate, for Greene presents Drover’s literal imprisonment and Kay’s figurative imprisonment as consequences of the same unjust organization of society. In England Made Me the protagonist’s longing to escape the crises toward which his life is moving is linked with his romantic interest in a young woman he identifies with the England that made him. Anthony Farrant, working in Stockholm as bodyguard to his sister’s lover Erik Krogh, is both geographically and temporally displaced in the emphatically modern world of international finance. He forms a brief relationship with “Loo” Davidge, a Coventry girl traveling with her parents. When Anthony’s tenuous links with England and his identification with the past there are further threatened by the pressure of Kate’s passion and his own discovery of largescale corruption in Krogh’s affairs, he promises to return to England to meet Loo in Coventry—for him a symbolic return to security and a sense of moral order. Raven, in A Gun for Sale, is prevented by his ugliness and alienation from forming any genuinely romantic relationships, yet the novel suggests strongly that his radical disaffection could be altered by the ability to believe that one young woman —Anne Crowder, whom he abducts from the railway station in Nottwich—could be his sympathetic friend. Only the faintest shadow of the old sourness and isolation touched his spirits. She’s straight, he swore with almost perfect conviction, she wouldn’t grass, we are together in


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this, and he remembered with a sense of doubtful safety how she had said, “We are friends.” (150) The long confession scene in which Raven admits to Anne that he is a murderer and then recounts the worst horrors of his childhood illustrates precisely the impulse described contemptuously by Crane in Rumour: It was extraordinary…how men who denied religion still seemed to retain the crying need of absolution. They would pour out their sins, not to a priest, but to a woman, and thought themselves purified by her comfort, the vulgar comfort of pity and admiration. (146) Anne’s eventual betrayal of Raven destroys both his desire to live and his potential for change. It is a measure of the emotional power of the book that Greene is able to persuade us that such a change, however unlikely, is truly possible and only so through the agency of a woman. In this regard, as in several others, A Gun for Sale prefigures Brighton Rock, the novel in which once again the reader’s ability to believe in the possibility that a woman might bring about change in a young, murderous, alienated protagonist is essential to a grasp of the author’s themes. Brighton Rock fuses many of the most prominent features and concerns of Greene’s first-phase novels: social consciousness, murder and betrayal, alienation, lost children, the Catholic faith, the image of woman as redeemer. As might be expected in a work in which the religious theme is prominent, the possibility of change is specifically linked with confession, repentance, and the sacraments. The possibility of Pinkie Brown’s repentance generates much suspense in the second half of the novel; the important question becomes not whether Pinkie will be caught, but whether he will be saved. Thus, the drama of salvation which had appeared openly in The Man Within and Rumour at Nightfall, and, more tentatively, in both religious and secular contexts in the other works of the first phase, occupies the heart of the novel in Brighton Rock. Greene focuses attention on the question of salvation by setting the murder which opens the novel on the Bank Holiday Monday for Whitsun, or Pentecost, the day which


commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit to Christ’s apostles. Pinkie’s story thus becomes a spiritual conflict in which his possible salvation is revealed dramatically through his relationship with Rose and metaphorically through bird images suggestive, in this context, of the dove in whose likeness the Holy Spirit descended to Christ (Matthew 3:16). An early instance of this imagery occurs when Spicer walks beneath the Palace Pier, contemplating his remorse over the murder of Hale and his fear of being caught: A seagull flew straight towards him between the pillars like a scared bird caught in a cathedral, then swerved out into the sunlight from the dark iron nave…. He stumbled on an old boot and put his hand on the stones to save himself: they had all the cold of the sea and had never been warmed by sun under these pillars. (85) The comparison of Pier and cathedral adds another dimension to the pervasive ironic contrast between sacred and profane in Brighton Rock, for the Palace Pier is a modern shrine of the secular world that worships peep shows, shooting galleries, and other cheap amusements. Greene reinforces this contrast later when Pinkie and Dallow approach the pier. Dallow urges Pinkie to relax and join him in the pleasures of a nearby roadhouse; Pinkie, preoccupied by thoughts of his two murders as well as his impending marriage, pauses to contemplate the scene: An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half vulture and half dove. In the end one always had to learn. “All right, I’ll come,” the Boy said. (130–31; italics added) The ambivalence of the final image reflects strikingly the state of mind of a tortured youth who grew up an unloved child in a


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miserable slum ironically named “Paradise Piece,” and who is torn between the ministry of the Holy Spirit and the memory of Kite, his spiritual father in the Brighton underworld. Appropriately, Kite’s name is that of a predatory bird, the antithesis of the descending dove. Denied affection as a child, Pinkie is unable to give or receive love and is thus morally and spiritually crippled. At first he despises Rose and her seeming naiveté; yet it is through her love that he comes closest to repentance, to the receiving of the Holy Spirit and, thus, to the peace for which he longs. Against his will he is drawn to her by a kinship rooted in the Catholic heritage he cannot escape. It will be recalled that the Holy Spirit descended to Christ’s Apostles in part because they gathered “with one accord”—united in a shared belief that set them apart from the rest of the community. Rose and, ironically, the murderer Pinkie are similarly isolated by their Catholicism from the pagan world of Brighton: “They were two Romans together in the grey street. They understood each other” (166). Knowing that their “state-made ceremony” constitutes mortal sin, Pinkie is drawn closer to Rose because only she shares his feeling: “[H]e was touched by the sense of communion between himself and Rose—she too knew that this evening meant nothing at all, that there hadn’t been a wedding” (170). Rose’s moving confession that she has no worldly possessions, nothing to offer but her love, becomes a vain effort to penetrate his armor of pride and bitterness. And Greene’s use of bird imagery to describe Pinkie’s response implies once more that Pinkie is resisting the Holy Spirit: “Her words scratched tentatively at the barrier like a bird’s claws on a window pane. He could feel her all the time trying to get at him: even her humility seemed to him a trap” (172). Although Rose’s love never completely overcomes Pinkie’s resistance, his hatred of her clearly weakens. Indeed, his inner conflict becomes more complex as he confronts the necessity of murdering Rose even when his loathing has begun to give way to affection. To Dallow the beginning of this change in the Boy now that Pinkie has a “girl” is nothing more significant than “growing up—like your father.” Pinkie’s reaction to this idea is a measure of the considerable changes that have followed his marriage: “He couldn’t blame his father now…it was what you came to…you got mixed up, and then, he supposed, the habit


grew… You gave yourself away weakly. You couldn’t even blame the girl” (220). With this admission, Pinkie becomes vulnerable to the feelings of tenderness, pity, and affection that conflict strongly with the “poison” and the terrible pride that have determined his conduct in the past. Thus, in the hotel at Peacehaven where he and Rose stop for a drink before they are to carry out the double suicide plan, Pinkie is aware that he is not repulsed by memories of his dreaded wedding, and that being in a tavern with his girl could actually be a pleasant moment: This was the kind of moment one kept for memory—the wind at the pier end, Sherry’s and the men singing, lamplight on the harvest Burgundy, the crisis as Cubitt battered at the door. He found that he remembered it all without repulsion; he had a sense that somewhere, like a beggar outside a shuttered house, tenderness stirred, but he was bound in a habit of hate. (231) The same tenderness stirs again when Pinkie overhears two men at the bar speak insultingly of Rose, but the “habit of hate” is once again too strong; he leaves the tavern still determined to carry out his plan. The climax of Pinkie’s spiritual conflict comes as the two drive on in the rain at Peacehaven. For one last time he resists the human love that prepares the heart for divine love, and in so doing he renounces God’s peace and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Once more Greene uses the image of a bird to symbolize that great power against which Pinkie struggles: It was quite true—he hadn’t hated her; he hadn’t even hated the act. There had been a kind of pleasure, a kind of pride, a kind of—something else. The car lurched back on to the main road; he turned the bonnet to Brighton. An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in; the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St. Pancras waiting-room, Dallow’s and Judy’s secret lust, and the cold unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast—whatever it was—got in, God


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knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc— the confession, the penance and the sacrament—and awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain. (239– 40) Pinkie’s rejection of Rose and of the redemptive power that her love represents is a final manifestation of his pride—of the belief that he can attain through his own efforts and on his own terms that peace which in fact does not exist apart from God. At this crucial moment he might have begun the movement toward God that could change his eternal destiny, if not his earthly one. Instead he persists in his infernal plan to destroy the only person who loves him. When Ida and the police arrive in time to save Rose, Pinkie’s brief journey from Paradise Piece to Peacehaven ends not with the leap of faith but with the terrible, fatal leap into the sea. MARRIAGE IN THE FIRST PHASE The frequency with which Greene’s first-phase protagonists seek to resolve their deepest conflicts through relationships with women makes especially ironic a characteristic shared by all of them: they cannot marry successfully, or, as is more often the case, they cannot marry at all Francis Andrews’s dream of a marriage with Elizabeth is thwarted by his own cowardice. His weakness leads first to her death and then to his own, both suicides. And although Andrews is drawn with sufficient skill and subtlety to make convincing the prospect of his change under Elizabeth’s influence, one might ask seriously whether the reader should be expected, or was intended, to give credibility to the prospect of a future for this pair in the “enchanted cottage” setting the novel provides. Oliver Chant’s passion for Anne-Marie is curtailed not by his own but by her weakness and lust—qualities that are revealed to have compromised her failed marriage with the dictator Paul Demassener. The novel does indeed contain very briefly one of the few portraits of happy marriage in the first phase—that of the Webers—but as Allott and Farris have remarked, the good Frau is utterly devoid of sex appeal, and the early novels invariably separate romantic love from domestic marital happiness and fidelity (70–71).


In his ill-fated marriage to Eulelia Monti, Michael Crane expects to find the peace of mind he has long sought. In spite of the danger of the moment, the narrative holds out for a few pages the suggestion that such an ideal union is indeed possible, but in the end it is not: on the very night of his wedding Crane is shot by Caveda’s men, an indication that the peace he seeks can be found only in death. Chase inherits his friend’s bride, and their implied union provides a subdued but nominally happy ending, although their marriage will take place offstage, after the conclusion of the novel. As discussed earlier, Myatt never intends to marry Coral, the woman with whom he has at least a credible prospect of a stable and happy relationship. They are separated following the arrest of Dr. Czinner, and Myatt’s caution and his mercenary heart lead him to an arranged marriage with Janet Pardoe, the niece of a business partner. Myatt’s motives, together with Janet’s vacuous character and her recent lesbian relationship, leave no basis for the belief that a fruitful or meaningful relationship can develop through this marriage. Indeed, Myatt never imagines Janet as more than a suitable prop for the domestic establishment of a successful businessman. Stamboul Train, then, is not seriously concerned with marriage at all; It’s a Battlefield, however, is more remarkable than any of the earlier books for its failed, thwarted, or unhappy marriages. At the center of this novel is the marriage of Jim and Milly Drover, which once had every reason to be happy except for Milly’s inability to believe that happiness could last: Her happiness had always been shot through with touches of malice. Her husband contented with his job and his pay had been the Communist; not Milly, contented with nothing but his love, suspicious of the whole world outside. She had never believed that they would be left alone to enjoy each other. (65) It is a bitter irony that Jim’s crime in defense of Milly—he has killed a policeman he believed was going to hurt her—brings about the loss of her happiness and his. His imprisonment for eighteen years is a less happy outcome than his execution


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would have been; when he and Milly are rejoined, they will be middle-aged—a condition the author himself seems to have regarded as unthinkable at this time—and their potential for marital happiness will have been wasted. The prison chaplain explains this sense of loss to the Assistant Commissioner after Jim unsuccessfully attempts suicide: “Drover wasn’t afraid of death, but he’s very fond of his wife. She’ll be a middle-aged woman when he comes out of prison; do you think any woman can be faithful for eighteen years to a man she sees once a month? And they love each other” (200). In the meantime Conrad, the younger brother, is hopelessly in love with Milly, who in loneliness and sexual longing takes him into her bed one night in what may well be the least joyful scene of sexual love in all of Greene’s writing. Elsewhere in the novel, marriage seems either untenable or at best unenjoyable. Lady Caroline Bury appears to have been happy but is a widow; Mr. Surrogate preserves hypocritically the memory of his late wife, the one person who saw through the sham of his intellect and idealism; Jules Briton’s ambition to marry Kay Rimmer disappears abruptly as the cost of supporting her for even one weekend becomes clear to him. The Assistant Commissioner remains a confirmed bachelor, and the journalist Conder, whose stories of married life and fatherly responsibility are an elaborate charade, depicts married life as difficult and taxing. In England Made Me the incestuous love of Anthony and Kate Farrant has prevented either from forming a marriage or a permanent and genuine love relationship with another person. Anthony recalls nostalgically his cheap affairs with the prostitute Annette and an older woman named Mabel who paid him (in gifts, not cash) for companionship. Kate has used sex more pragmatically: her affair with Krogh, to whom she is both mistress and secretary, provides security and presumably sexual pleasure while it serves the long-term purpose of drawing Anthony to her; she does consent, late in the novel, to a marriage with Krogh, but that is purely a business arrangement and a legal strategy designed to prevent her from being required to testify against him in court if his fraudulent business deals should land him there. Anthony’s plan to rejoin Loo Davidge in Coventry may carry the wistful suggestion of possible marriage, but even before his death the sense of fatalism that hangs over his character, together with his own


conviction that he has no future, is a clear sign that no such marriage could ever take place. For James Raven, marriage is obviously unthinkable, since his hideous disfigurement precludes any romantic relationship with a woman. His brief friendship with Anne Crowder only accentuates the hopelessness of his condition in that regard. By contrast, Anne looks forward at the end of the novel to her marriage with the stolid police detective Mather, long-delayed but made possible at last by the reward money she receives for her role in the pursuit and killing of Raven. This marriage—or prospect—is the best in all of the books of the first phase, the youthfulness of the characters rendering it more appealing than that of Weber and his wife in The Name of Action. Even so, it is placed in ironic perspective by the repeated emphasis on Mather’s dullness and predictability and by the suggestion in the closing paragraphs that the “unshadowed happiness” of Anne’s return to the safety of London with Mather is a retreat into childish unreality. Anne becomes figuratively one of the children she sees from the train, and she is described as resembling a child “whose mother has died,” watching the family she must care for “without being aware that the responsibility is too great.” Moreover, her happiness is the final betrayal of Raven: “If his immortality was to be on the lips of living men, he was fighting now his last losing fight against extinction” (184). An even greater irony arises in A Gun for Sale from Greene’s treatment of the marriage of the mad defrocked clergyman Acky and his evil wife Tiny. They are in love, they are faithful and devoted, and their marriage has withstood the tests of time and adversity. (To find a comparably appalling portrait of domestic bliss between two despicable characters, readers would have to turn to the marriage of the comically loathsome Wackford Squeers in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.) Pinkie Brown, for whom marriage, sexuality, women generally, and all physical contact and domestic intimacy are repulsive (he says he would rather hang than submit to marriage), represents the most corrosive attack on the idea of marriage to be found anywhere in Greene’s writings. In his embittered outlook can be found a distillation of almost every conceivable doubt and misgiving about marriage. Subjected as a child to the regular witnessing of “Saturday night ritual”


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copulations of his parents, he has grown up—to age seventeen, at least—unloved, unhappy, and in fear and loathing of sexuality. And thus the complication of the plot, demanding that he marry Rose (as Kate had planned to marry Krogh) to protect himself from her testimony, provides an extremely bitter irony. Rose brings to their relationship a background almost as miserable as Pinkie’s: if his parents traumatized their son with the heat of lust, Rose’s parents (whom we actually see in the novel) exhibit such emotional coldness and deadness that we understand immediately how the starvation for affection has made her vulnerable to Pinkie’s false display of care. The marriage of these “lost childhood” characters is a most unlikely and clearly a doomed one, and yet ironically it may be the only one in the novels of this phase that is apparently not sterile. At the end of the novel Rose believes that she is pregnant, and the old priest’s words to her suggest strongly that the reader should believe her to be—a condition that caps off nicely her role as foil to the pleasure-seeking Ida (in her long-term promiscuity a seasoned version of Kay Rimmer), whose marriage to “Tom” failed and who has never had children of her own even though her many lovers have expected her to mother them. Marriage looks grim elsewhere in Brighton Rock: in the relationship of blind Billy and his wife Judy, who carries on an adulterous affair with Dallow; and in that of the wicked lawyer Prewitt, who calls his wife “the old mole” and insists that she has ruined his life. It is perhaps a predictable corollary of the persistent inability of the first-phase protagonists to marry successfully or at all, that we do not see in any of their lives an image of happy domestic life that can endure. Indeed, in most cases there is no familiar “home” life at all, since several of the protagonists (Tony, Pinkie, Raven) and numerous other important characters (Minty, Ida, Conder, Rose, Coral, and Anne) live in single rented rooms. And the others discussed here are similarly detached from ordinary domestic life: Andrews appears at Elizabeth’s cottage as a homeless fugitive whose life as a smuggler precluded home life; Chase, Crane, and Chant are involved in quests that take them away from domestic life altogether. Such images of home that remain are tinged with unhappiness or perversity: Elizabeth, now alone, has lived for years with the lodger who after her mother’s death tried to


seduce her; Mabel Warren recalls with drunken sentimentality the flat in which she kept her lover Janet Pardoe, and even that relationship falters at the end of the novel; Conrad Drover sleeps with his brother’s wife; Acky and Tiny prop up their domestic establishment by converting part of it to a bawdy house. THE LITERARY FRAME Conrad Drover, in It’s a Battlefield, recalls having been named after a sailor who once rented a room from his parents. Anthony Farrant, in England Made Me, hears lines from Baudelaire’s “Invitation au Voyage” over the radio. Pinkie, in Brighton Rock, listens to his lawyer Prewitt quote from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. All three incidents are typical of Greene’s method of enriching the texture and resonance of his fiction through the use of allusions and parallels drawn most frequently, though not exclusively, from literary sources, and all three point to another distinction of Greene’s first-phase protagonists: The protagonists have no significant knowledge or understanding of any structure of allusion or “literary frame” that envelops them and their stories. Conrad does not know that the sailor who was his namesake was the great Polish novelist whose works deeply affected the young Graham Greene and whose novel The Secret Agent had a direct influence on the novel in which Conrad appears. Of course, Conrad Drover could not be expected to know that he is in a fiction at all. The quasi-ancestral relationship between the character and the novelist may anticipate the metafictional qualities of Monsignor Quixote, in which the protagonist is a descendant of the fictional Quixote. Anthony is unaware that Baudelaire’s poem (“Aimer á loisir, / Aimer et mourir, /Au pays qui te ressemble”) (193) deals with the incestuous love of brother and sister, a condition central to Anthony’s experience in the novel. Raven hears lines from Tennyson’s “Maud” over the radio but has no sense of the poem’s subject or meaning apart from three or four isolated lines. Pinkie is unaware that Prewitt’s invocation of Mephistopheles (“This is hell, nor am I out of it”) reflects upon both the old man’s condition in life and more importantly Pinkie’s own, which as I will demonstrate later has a Faustian dimension. In these representative instances and in all


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significant cases of literary or historical allusion and parallels, the protagonists of the first phase are ignorant and uninformed. What passes is a communication exclusively between Greene’s narrator and the reader, who is by implication possessed of a literary sensibility much more like the author’s than the protagonist’s. THE FIRST-PHASE PROTAGONIST AND THE AUTHOR The protagonist’s ignorance of the allusive context of his story is entirely consistent with the last of the qualities of Greene’s first-phase protagonists to be discussed here: The protagonists become increasingly distant from the author. Andrews, Chant, and the dual protagonists Crane and Chase resemble their creator in several obvious ways: the latter three are all journalists, as Greene was, and they undertake travels to foreign lands in search of meaningful experience and in flight from boredom, as Greene had done in his youth and would continue to do throughout his life; and the same three are drawn, in spite of their natural proclivities and/or backgrounds, toward a fascination with the Catholic religion. For Crane and Chase this fascination is linked with the love of a young woman, as indeed it was for the author. A host of reasons, chief among which were the critical and commercial failures of the second and third books, led Greene away from heroes tied so clearly by age, education, experience, romantic temperament, and (with the exception of Andrews) social class to himself. As discussed earlier, he abandoned the focus on single or dual protagonists altogether in the next two books, Stamboul Train and It’s a Battlefield, populating those novels instead with multiple centers of interest—a Jewish merchant, a chorus girl, a policeman, an aging revolutionary, a waiter, an insurance clerk (the list is very long indeed)—most of whom are considerably beneath the author in class and education. Quinn Savoury, the novelist whom Greene satirizes; Dr. Czinner, the intellectual, displaced revolutionary; and Lady Caroline Bury are the only characters whose education and social standing are comparable to the author’s, and they appear only briefly. Anthony Farrant in England Made Me may be a partial exception because he is modeled after Greene’s irresponsible older brother Herbert and


because as a boy he, like the author, ran away from the boarding school he disliked. Yet even Anthony’s sensibility seems rather unlike the author’s, and in any case Greene’s letters indicate how strongly he disapproved of his brother’s behavior and how distant he felt toward him. The first phase culminates in two memorable protagonists whose slum-bred origins and monstrous crimes distance them from their creator as completely as might reasonably be imagined. In summary, this distinct drift of the characters farther and farther from the novelist himself might seem to have its causes in the broadening of Greene’s own experience and interests as well as in the pragmatic search for material more marketable than that which gave rise to The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall. But other factors may have come into play as well—factors suggestive of a personal as well as a professional need. The following chapter will discuss what seem to be important connections between the author’s life and the foregoing characteristics of his first-phase protagonists.

CHAPTER TWO Letters and Diaries

LETTERS TO VIVIEN While it is always necessary to be cautious in reading backwards from the works to the life of any author, it is impossible not to see powerful elements of Greene’s life and personality in the novels of the first phase. The obsessive themes of betrayal, divided loyalties, the terror of life have long been noted by critics who, with some encouragement from the author, have traced the roots of those themes to Greene’s childhood unhappiness and the Berkhamsted School. Yet the very frequency with which these elements have been observed and the ease with which Greene talked about them may have served as a kind of smokescreen behind which other details have passed unobserved. The familiar themes of self-division and the insistent dichotomy between sexual and spiritual love in the early works, for example, have roots not only in the literary sources emphasized by Allott and Farris in their excellent early study of Greene, and not only in what is in some respects a familiar quality of youthful experience, but also in the circumstances of the author’s own courtship and marriage. The sense of self-division was rooted in part in Greene’s own uncertainty, ambivalence, and lack of self-understanding. On the one hand he longed for marriage, even a highly spiritualized one, with intense coziness and the superaddition of Catholic mystery; on the other he desired travel, excitement, adventure, the ever-needful escape from boredom, and, of course, material for his books. He sometimes expressed the idea of marriage as an adventure, accompanied by images of seas, shores, and sunsets, but he knew just as well that such adventure was


incompatible with the restraints of modest income and the responsibility for children. Most likely there was no way to unite permanently these conflicting desires, and Greene in attempting to do so would initially make the wrong choices— wrong in the sense that as he matured he would discover his own unsuitedness for the very idea of marriage that he most wanted to achieve. As Norman Sherry’s biography reveals, Greene at times conceived of his own experience in terms of a divided selfhood. In letters to Vivien Dayrell-Browning during the two years prior to their marriage in 1927, he mentions the pseudonymous “Hilary Trench,” a name under which some of his writings appeared in the Oxford Outlook and elsewhere, as a dark side of his personality which with her help he wanted to repress. Trench is cynical, irreverent, disillusioned, unhappy; Greene under Vivien’s influence is happier, more trusting, optimistic, kind. Greene occasionally distinguished, in the letters, between the “Oxford Graham” and the “You-Graham” (Sherry 1:191), implying a favorable change under her influence. Like many of the first-phase protagonists, he saw himself as experiencing some form of redemption through his relationship with an idealized woman, and like them he experienced the frustrating difficulty of uniting the concepts of sexual and spiritual love. The young woman he courted and eventually married was deeply religious, shy, and so reluctant to accept the physical side of romantic love that she proposed on at least one occasion that her mother adopt Greene so that the two of them could be united as brother and sister. Understandably he was not attracted to such a proposition, yet his ardor was sufficiently strong that he did eventually propose to her the idea of a celibate marriage. However preposterous that notion might seem in retrospect, the fact that Greene proposed it at all suggests not just the strength of his ardor but also the obvious way in which conditions in his own life enforced upon him the serious consideration of the division between romantic love and sexuality found in his first-phase protagonists. He certainly idealized Vivien, saw himself as a man redeemed by her love and her beauty both physical and spiritual, and praised her transforming power in memorable and often extravagant language. Vivien was, by his own testimony, the “philosopher’s stone” whereby baser materials like himself could be purified.

LETTERS AND DIARIES 33

He attributes to her more than once a form of saintliness by comparing her with Shaw’s St. Joan, a character whose story was so important to him that he would later write the screenplay for the film based on Shaw’s play. (As mentioned in the preceding chapter, Crane compares Eulelia with St. Joan. And Greene’s later use of the St. Joan comparison in Travels with My Aunt will be a measure of his changing attitudes.) To see how such literary comparisons point toward correspondences between Greene’s life and works, it is necessary to look at two sources outside the novels: the courtship letters and the diaries. For scholars interested in the origins of Greene’s imaginative writing and his methods and habits of mind in that formative period when he emerged from promising but uneven apprentice work into the more enduring achievement of the novels from Stamboul Train through Brighton Rock, the sources housed in the manuscript collection of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, provide fascinating and indispensable reading: the letters to his future wife Vivien, written during the period of their courtship, and the diaries of 1932–33. Both are filled with revelations of Greene’s tastes and enthusiasms and inspirations, recorded privately as he endeavored, in the letters, to convey an impression of himself as he was and, perhaps, as he wanted to be; and as he recorded, in the diaries, his progress as a writer and his impressions of individuals, events, and writers and works. One records primarily the course of romance, the other of his struggle to write, beginning with Stamboul Train and proceeding through It’s a Battlefield and England Made Me. Both bear close examination especially in relation to Greene’s fiction of the thirties, and both reveal certain habits and tendencies that can be seen throughout much of the later work as well. My purpose here is to look first at these early sources in order to demonstrate how the specifically literary conception of experience in the letters and the extensive readings listed in the diaries provide insight into Greene’s creative method. To that end I will examine two novels that most easily reveal their genesis through Greene’s reading and his responses to it: A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock. The more than 700 letters written by Greene to Vivien during the period of his intense courtship of her and their subsequent


engagement (1925–27) testify to the energy and persistence as well as the urgency of Greene’s passion. Still unpublished but quoted extensively by Norman Sherry in volume one of the authorized biography, these courtship letters may surprise many of Greene’s readers with their fervent romanticism and, at times, their somewhat cloying sentimentality. The creator of grotesque, alienated characters like Pinkie and Raven, of weary, disillusioned middle-aged lovers like Fowler and Brown, seems enormously distant from the young author who sent his sweetheart the following “wanted” notice: Wanted—by Me. Miss Dayrell Alias Vivienne, Dear one, Darling, darling heart, marvellous wonderful, adorable one, Angel, Loveliest in the world, Sweetest Heart, Dear only love for ever, sweet one, old thing, dear desire. Description: Hair—dark & lovely & long; eyes, greygreen & more beautiful than any other eyes; figure, perfect; complexion, wonderful; skin in texture as a rose petal; feet: very small & very adorable; disposition: sleepy. Known to her companion in crime as My Love. May be infallibly recognised by her stars [Vivien’s code word for kisses]. (Sherry 1:184) Neither this youthful romantic ardor nor the marriage it led to would endure. Whether or not that fact explains the nearcomplete absence of the voice of youthful romanticism from the more mature fiction that begins with Stamboul Train is a matter of conjecture, but the voice can be heard often in the first three published novels. And it is possible to see a correspondence between the effusive sentiments of the courtship letters and the idealizing protagonists of those earlier works. We see it, for example, in Oliver Chant, hero of The Name of Action, who wants to love Anne-Marie Demassener “as men have loved God.” We see it even more obviously by comparing Francis Andrews’s reflections on the virtuous Elizabeth (in The Man Within) with Greene’s own feelings as recorded in the letters: Andrews, to Elizabeth:


“I don’t fear [death] any longer. You are filling me with yourself. That means courage, peace, holiness.” (189) Greene, in a letter to Vivien:

How God knows, for every corner of me is now filled with the love & the want of you. (Sherry 1:353; Greene speaks of his intention to love Vivien more every year.) Andrews, in meditation: He thought of seasons they would see together; of summer, blue sea, white cliffs, red poppies in the golden corn; winter, to wake in the morning to see Elizabeth’s hair across the pillow…. (196) Greene, in a letter to Vivien (24 April 1927):

All by ourselves in a foreign land—hundreds of miles from relations!! I think one will feel tempted to behave scandalously! No one who would recognize us anywhere near. One will be able to bathe and suddenly be affectionate in the middle of a breaker, go for a gentle stroll towards the Pyrenees and then sit down and rest and exchange thick clusters of stars [kisses] by the roadside and not have to think—“we ought to be getting back. They’ll be waiting dinner for us.” Linger until dusk and then go even slower back. O darling, it will be lovely tiptoeing into your room in the morning (will the sea be outside the window?) and waking you. (Sherry 1:348) Andrews, to Elizabeth: “Let’s pretend we have been married for years,” he said, “and do pleasant ordinary things, cook food, wash up, talk to each other as if we had seen each other yesterday and would see each other tomorrow.” (201) Greene, in a letter to Vivien (22 April 1927):


It will be such fun doing odd jobs for you, turning on your bath water, cutting your bread, helping you tidy up, ringing up the butcher and the greengrocer, tucking you up in bed! What fun arranging holidays too with maps and timetables, sitting on the floor with them spread out. O we are going to be so happy! (Sherry 1:353) Greene, in a letter to Vivien (9 August 1925):

And there’ll be winter evenings, when we can make hot buttered toast for each other…& there’ll be summer days with the sea sparkling blue…& days on the down, & night expresses, & evenings sometimes, when we are both sleepy and tired & we’ll just read, or I’ll write & you’ll put in a few touches to a design. (Sherry 1:202) Such passages suggest a direct transfer of the author’s own emotions into the lives of his characters. The result is not inevitably bad art, yet it comes as no surprise that Greene would later see as a major weakness in these early works his own inability to distance himself from his material: I realized later…that my two books Rumour at Nightfall and The Name of Action were bad because I had left too little distance between them and myself. The umbilical cord was left unbroken, you might say. (Allain 45) Greene would break that cord in time by discovering a mode that would place the very tenderest emotions and the ideals of bourgeois domestic coziness in an ironic perspective. The practice of doing so runs throughout the mature work, receiving its most memorable expression in the warped view of Pinkie, to whom the idea of marriage is repulsive, “like ordure on the hands.” Hiding from Colleoni’s men in the garage of a house in the “barren bourgeois road” near the racecourse, Pinkie views with scorn the decaying evidence of middle-class family life: Whoever the owner was, he had come a long way to land up here. The pram-wheelbarrow was covered with labels—the marks of innumerable train journeys…. You couldn’t have any doubt that this was the end, the mortgaged home in


the bottom; the untidy tidemark on a bench, the junk was piled up here and would never go farther. And the Boy hated him. (108) Such disillusionment is not to be found in the courtship letters, which are full of tenderness and humor as well as poignant expressions of loneliness and unhappiness. For the Greene whose notoriously troubled youth had left him disillusioned, manic-depressive, agnostic, and somewhat cynical, they give free play to a latent romanticism that he would eventually suppress. More importantly for my purpose here, the courtship letters reveal the workings of Greene’s imagination in ways that illuminate his strategies and habits as a novelist. In this last regard the letters demonstrate Greene’s persistent tendency to conceive his romance, his emotional state, his ideals of Vivien, and his own writing through references to literature—chiefly poetry—drawn from his current readings and interests as well as his capacious memory of older favorites (Browning, Tennyson). The courtship letters are filled, perhaps to an even greater degree than the generous selection published in Sherry’s biography suggests, with literary allusions, quotations, questions, judgments, analogies. In one sense this is unremarkable, since quoting poetry to woo one’s sweetheart is (or was, at least) a time-honored procedure. It is obvious, too, that Vivien’s literary interests—she worked for publisher Basil Blackwell and had published a small volume of poems at age fifteen—would have evoked literary comments from a suitor desperately eager to appeal to her interests. The strategy of quotation may have been calculated in other ways as well: as Norman Sherry points out, for example, Greene quotes from Donne’s “Extasy” as part of a seductive argument to persuade Vivien to accept the sexual side of love (1:292–93). Whether they arise from deliberate strategy or spontaneous enthusiasm, or from both, the various literary allusions and quotations are so extensive as to deserve examination both as measures of Greene’s tastes and as evidence of the creative process that grew out of his responses to literature. He uses literary allusion in the letters to express literary judgments and enthusiasms; to interpret Vivien’s character and her effect on him; to describe his own moods and emotions, largely through analogies; and finally to identify source material for his own


writings. In doing so he demonstrates a remarkable memory for specific passages, quoting long passages from Tennyson, for example, only to express exasperation at the end that he cannot remember more. Yet clearly the enterprise was serious enough to demand that he sometimes copy passages from current new readings (e.g. Edna St. Vincent Millay) and from new and old works by favorite authors (Hardy). It is clear, too, that Vivien often commented and quoted, but it is impossible to determine the extent to which her own comments inspired his. Greene’s judgments and enthusiasms are lively and entertaining. For example, in a letter of 21 September 1925, he responds to Vivien’s praise of a Drayton sonnet by ranking it alongside one of his own favorites, Brooke’s “Now God be thanked, who has watched with us this hour”; Greene quotes “the image in the fourth line, which has always peculiarly attracted me, ‘To turn as swimmers, into cleanness leaping’” and “the marvellous ending: ‘Naught broken save…is but Death.’” He admires Yeats generally but loathes the too-obvious music of “Innisfree.” Suggesting (12 January 1926) that Vivien has greater potential than other living writers even though not everything she does is marvelous, he sees an analogy in the uneven performance of Tennyson, the author of “Ulysses” and “The Lotos Eaters” and a rather bad poem with some good lines: “Maud.” A week later he mentions T.E.Brown as one of his “enthusiasms” on whom he could talk at great length if he had a copy of Brown’s work handy (Sherry 1:129). Later that year (June 1926) he praises minor poet E.C.Blunden extravagantly and, in the same letter, responds to a selection of Huxley’s poems that Vivien has given him by expressing surprise at the discovery that Huxley was influenced by Rupert Brooke. And he expresses other literary opinions of interest: Greene has a theory that Hamlet could be produced as a tragicomedy—a production he has thought of undertaking in order to make critics pay notice—a version that would heighten its poignancy. He praises the frightening reality of a death scene in Woolf’s The Voyage Out; he urges Vivien to read Joyce’s stories in Dubliners, especially “The Dead,” which he praises for its extraordinary beauty. Greene’s impressions of Vivien are frequently expressed through literary comparisons. He quotes from Verlaine and Brooke, for example, to say that both poets knew her—a


hyperbole that becomes less happy when Greene, in a mood of doubt about her affection in September 1925, quotes lines from Brooke’s “Peace” to suggest that Vivien is less fond of him than before: She’ll give me all I ask, kiss me & hold me, And open wide that holy air The gates of peace & take my tiredness home, Kinder than God. But, heart, she will not care. In a happier mood Greene invokes Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill, specifically the line “When the cord of monotony is stretched out tight, then it breaks with a sound like a song.” The song Vivien has been singing to him in recent days is beautiful, he adds (7 August 1925). Almost a year later (26 July 1926) he suggests that someone should invent a new name to describe Vivien, whom he then praises by quoting from Hardy’s sonnet “Her Definition”: As common chests encasing wares of price Are borne with tenderness through halls of state For what they cover, so the poor device Of homely wording I could tolerate, Knowing its unadornment held as freight The sweetest image outside Paradise. In November he quotes from Eliot’s “Preludes”—“The vision of an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing”—suggesting that he had tried to remember that poem the night before when thinking of her; now that he remembers, the lines— superficially, at least—no longer seem to apply. But when he reads, in March 1927, Donne’s “She, whose fair body no such prison was…,” he sees not Donne’s wife but Vivien. Greene interprets his own plight as lover with even more abundant use of literary sources. In a tender letter in September 1925 he quotes affectionately Yeats’s “No one has ever loved but you and I,” and less than a week later he says that while Yeats’s “Never give all the heart” is excellent advice, it comes too late for him, since he has given his heart completely to Vivien and no longer has room in it for poems, places, and other people. At times he is exuberant and


confident, as when he describes himself in November 1925 as wanting to chant Meredith’s “Love in a Valley” at his office. Such declarations often give the impression of a fine spontaneity, and the sheer volume of Greene’s writing in the courtship letters (he sometimes wrote more than once a day, and the letters often have a breathless quality) suggests that they were indeed spontaneous. And yet at times the selection of a particular passage or poem seems the result of deliberation. In a letter of apology following a quarrel, Greene quotes Rupert Brooke’s “Retrospect” to give an emotional resonance to his longing for forgiveness: I would come back, come back to you, Find you, as a pool unstirred, Kneel down by you, & never a word, Lay my head, & nothing said, In your hands, ungarlanded…. To explain his uneasy state of mind prior to meetings with Vivien, Greene uses two poems by Thomas Hardy. In the first of these (20 November 1925) he copies “The Minute Before Meeting,” an early sonnet he has just been reading, offering it to Vivien because it describes perfectly the slightly depressed feeling he sometimes experiences just prior to seeing her: The grey-gaunt hills dividing us in twain Seemed hopeless hills my strength must faint to climb, But they are gone; and now I would detain The few clock-beats that part us; rein back Time, And live in close expectance never closed In change for far expectance closed at last, So harshly has expectance been imposed On my long need while these slow blank months passed. And knowing that what is now about to be Will all have been in O, so short a space! I read beyond it my despondency When more dividing months shall take its place, Thereby denying to this hour of grace A full-up measure of felicity.


In the second letter (3 December 1925), his fear that she will not come to an appointed meeting in Nottingham—or that she will come but will feel uncomfortable there—is described by a quotation from Hardy’s “A Broken Appointment”: “You did not come/And marching Time drew on & wore me numb/Yet less for loss of your dear presence there….” Greene adds that his own unhappiness, his question of why they were brought together if they are not to be happy, reminds him of Hardy’s idea of Fate or God. Four days after the “Broken Appointment” letter Greene, in a mood of loneliness and dejection, indicates a profound sense of futility that is not ameliorated by his new interest in Vivien’s Catholicism: “Don’t you ever wonder, in moods, now and again what the use of going on is? Religion doesn’t answer it. One can believe in every point of the Catholic faith, and yet at times like this hate the initiator of it all, of life I mean” (qtd. in Sherry 1: 260). Even in such apparently painful frankness, he assesses his own condition through a literary comparison: his love of second-rate philosophical talk that never leads anywhere makes it easy to see why he is fond of Chekov. Five days later, Greene explains that a recent letter he sent to Vivien was the result of “ennui,” which, he further explains, finds its “most perfect expression” in Eliot’s “Prufrock,” from which he quotes several lines. A similar measure of Greene’s care in selecting works or passages that describe accurately his own state or their relationship can be seen in a letter from the following month in which he quotes lines from the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay he has read just that day: “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied/Who told me time would ease me of my pain….” He says that earlier, when Vivien had told him not to love her, this poem applied to their relationship, but now that her attitude has changed, it no longer does. Both the diaries and the letters show Greene as a writer who often conceived of his own work in response to other works— poems, novels, plays, films. In April 1926 he wrote to Vivien: I want to write a novel called The Gaudy Ship’. Do you know the Yeats poem called, I think, The [sic] Dream. A man dreams he’s steering a boat along the edge of the sea


with a dead man in it, & a crowd are running along the shore shouting & singing. Though I’d my finger on my lip, What could I but take up the song, And running crowd & gaudy ship Cried out the whole night long. I made a list about a month ago of plots for short stories, with their rough lengths, including one or two short sketches I’d got already done & it was enough for 30,000 words. Half a book. (qtd. in Sherry 1:310) Greene did not write “The Gaudy Ship,” but this would not be the last time when a poem was at the heart of his conception of a novel. After seeing the film The Merry Widow, he wrote again to Vivien of his inspiration to write a poem based upon lines from Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi”: “The breathless fellow at the altar foot, /Fresh from his murder, safe & sitting there” (Sherry 1:244). This inspiration seems also to have failed him, however, for it led—on the immediate occasion, at least—only to a rereading of the same poet’s “Andrea del Sarto.” If “His Dream” and “Fra Lippo Lippi” did not contribute significantly to Greene’s own work, other enthusiasms revealed in the letters and diaries certainly did. On the same date as the “Gaudy Ship” letter, for example, Greene responds to a letter from Vivien in which she quoted Tennyson’s Maud, a poem close to his own heart even though he was sometimes critical of it; the lines she chose are ones, he says, which have been running through his head for two months or so, but he has lacked the courage to put them on an envelope. Having introduced “Maud,” he goes on to say that anthologists regularly choose bad lines from the poem (“Come into the garden, Maud”) instead of the ones she quoted or the “excellent” ones he especially likes: Oh me—why have they not buried me deep enough? Was it kind to have made a grave so rough, Me that was never a quiet sleeper?


The copiousness of Greene’s memory is suggested by the fact that he initially misquoted the first of these lines but then crossed out the incorrect version; he very likely did not look up the correction, for afterward, in commenting on his fondness for lines about “Viziers nodding/In an Egyptian night,” he again misquotes, substituting virgins for viziers. He would get this quotation right when he used it later at the end of his 1969 essay “The Worm inside the Lotus Blossom,” and he would invoke Maud in the conclusion of Travels with My Aunt as the inspiration for a May-December romance between Henry Pulling and his child-fiancée, Maria. More important for this study, as I will explain in a later chapter, is that Greene would draw heavily upon Maud for characters, emotions, and themes in the second of his entertainments, A Gun for Sale. DIARIES Much briefer, and stripped of both the rhetorical purpose and the fervent emotion of the courtship letters, the diaries too provide fascinating reading. They reveal much about the author’s daily habits (morning for writing, afternoons and evenings for reading, visits, walks); his domestic life (including Vivien’s first pregnancy and a poignant account of the death of their dog Pekoe); his literary acquaintances (Elizabeth Bowen, David Higham, Elizabeth Sprigge, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and others). Greene records fascinating bits of literary gossip, some of which are accurate (Elizabeth Bowen tells him of the unhappiness of T.S.Eliot’s marriage), some inaccurate (someone has told Greene that writer Francis Ihles is really Aldous Huxley). He notes briefly a variety of travels—to Warwick Castle; to Bletchley and the cottage of prophetess Joanna Southwood; to Moreland’s Match factory in Gloucester and Wandsworth Prison in London, both for settings to be used in It’s a Battlefield; to London overnight with Vivien for dinner and theatre, or by himself to transact business and to sell review copies of books in Charing Cross Road. Greene also mentions his indiscretions with the London prostitute Annette, whose character and last message (“No milk today”) he later transcribed directly into England Made Me. The diaries are equally interesting as a record of Greene’s struggle—fairly desperate—to complete Stamboul Train, and


his reward at last in the encouragement of editor Charles Evans, who regarded it as the best book Greene had written. He tracks his progress from the early stages of the “cinematically” conceived “Opus V” through numerous decisions and revisions leading to its completion and his choice of a title—It’s a Battlefield. He comments at length on ideas for a novel based upon spiritualism and incest; the book was never written as intended, but the idea for it contributed significantly to the incest theme in England Made Me and the use of spiritualism in The Ministry of Fear. Greene continues to demonstrate, in the diaries as he had done in the letters, his fondness for allusions and quotations and his tendency to be stimulated to creativity by his responses to other writers. The diaries offer an abbreviated account of Greene’s tastes, enthusiasms, inspirations, and borrowings. Among the writers he reads and comments on are Virginia Woolf (he is critical of her essays which, he says, make her more important than the works); E.M.Forster (he enjoys Howards End but is suspicious of the feminine quality in Forster’s narrative); minor writer Elizabeth Sprigge (who moves him to most uncharitable generalizations about the distinctive qualities of women writers); and Flaubert (whose Madame Bovary he regards as one of the great achievements). The diaries frequently show Greene as a writer who delights in memorable phrasing and provocative ideas encountered in his reading and who is eager to learn from them or to store them in his lumber-room for later use in his own writing. He copies many passages, often quite lengthy ones, from a remarkable variety of writers: dramatists Lee and Shadwell; poets Keats and Gittings and Wigglesworth; the revolutionary Trotsky; essayist Samuel Rogers. He records comments on R.L.Stevenson, Ibsen, and Dumas from Henry James’s essays. From James’s Preface to Wings of the Dove he copies a passage that explains to him the failure of what is now recognized as perhaps the poorest of his novels, Rumour at Nightfall. James had written: There was the “fun,” to begin with, of establishing one’s successive centres—of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject commanded by them as by happy points of view, and accordingly treated from them would


constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and to provide for beauty. (xvi) Greene writes that he had tried to create Jamesian “solid blocks” in Rumour but had made the final block too thin. Moreover, he had shifted his point of view to the central figure Chase at the end of that novel, whereas James with greater subtlety had seen Milly, the central figure in Wings, from an angle. Greene also copies James’s description of that circuitous approach to his “unspotted princess”: “So, if we talk of princesses, do the balconies opposite the palace gates, do the coigns of vantage and respect enjoyed for a fee, rake from afar the mystic figure in the gilded coach as it comes forth into the great place” (xxx). This is the method, Greene adds, that he may attempt in his planned novel about spiritualism—a plan he never carried to fulfillment. Greene’s seriousness about learning from the Old Master is paralleled by the seriousness of his search for epigraphs. It is doubtful that any novelist chose epigraphs more carefully than Greene did. The diaries show how his tentative and final choices often grew out of current reading. His entry for 23 July 1932, for example, indicates that Greene had been reading Santayana without much pleasure, but he liked one passage well enough to copy it into the diary: “Everything is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate & comic in its existence.” If Greene intended at the time to make this an epigraph he did not mention it in the diary, but eventually he chose it for Stamboul Train. On March 13 of the following year Greene found in Adelphi a passage from Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses and copied it into his diary: This is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost —he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something toward which to cling, & that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas;


the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say he never finds himself, never covers up against his own reality. (157) Clearly this idea of the shipwrecked man lingered in Greene’s memory; the passage appears as the epigraph on the title page of the autograph manuscript of the novel England Made Me, and although Greene crossed it out and replaced it with an epigraph from Walt Disney’s The Grasshopper and the Ants, he chose The Shipwrecked as the title for the 1953 American edition of the book. Moreover, the novel retains a strong echo of Ortega y Gasset in an important passage in which the financier Krogh suddenly realizes that the key to his own freedom lies in his ability to break away from the past: “I’ve been thinking too much about the past. He had always despised people who thought too much about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything” (133; italics added). As he worked on “Opus V” Greene came across a quotation from Cymbeline (quoted by Ison Brean in The Observer) that he thought would make a perfect epigraph for that novel: “O for the charity of a penny coud.” But he discarded this impulse rather quickly, for in early July 1933 he writes that he has decided on the title It’s a Battlefield, with a quotation from Alexander Kinglake’s Crimea as the epigraph. The epigraph explains, and apparently inspired, the novel’s title: In so far as the battlefield presented itself to the bare eyesight of men, it had no entirety, no length, no breadth, no depth, no size, no shape, and was made up of nothing except small numberless circlets commensurate with such ranges of vision as the mist might allow at each spot…. In such conditions, each separate gathering of English soldiery went on fighting its own little battle in happy and advantageous ignorance of the general state of the action; nay, even very often in ignorance of the fact that any great conflict was raging.


Greene’s occasional references to film in the diaries suggest that the fiction of the period may have been influenced by film in ways beyond his often-discussed cinematic style. On 12 June 1932, for example, after seeing The Murder of Karamazov he recorded in the diary his ambition to use actress Anna Sten as a model for the heroine of his next book, of which he had already imagined sizable portions. His judgment of this film—that it interpreted only the worldly part of the novel and left out heaven and hell—may perhaps be taken as an early sign of the direction Greene would follow only a few years later in those novels that so emphatically do not leave out heaven and hell. (This was, after all, the Greene who had written to Vivien, in December 1925, that the appeal of Catholicism lay in its picture of hell.) Karamazov may also have piqued an interest in Dostoevsky: one week later the diary states that Greene’s reading of Carr’s Life of Dostoevsky has given him an idea for his next novel to follow “Opus V”; it is to be a story in which a medium alternates periodically between debauchery and nobility. On the following day, the diary notes, Greene went to the Oxford Union and read a book on spiritualism in preparation for writing the next novel, and a month later on July 11 he writes that he has received, read, and taken notes (for the next novel) on Confessions of a Medium, which he ordered from the Central Library. Greene, who had been diagnosed wrongly as epileptic and was believed by some to have mediumistic powers, copied into his diary on 19 July 1932 a passage from Carr’s biography a passage asserting that some victims of epilepsy experience, just before an attack, an elevated spirit and a sense of transcendent power. In March 1933, as Greene drew close to the completion of It’s a Battlefield and was already contemplating the next novel that would become England Made Me, he saw Howard Hawks’s popular film Scarface, one of the most famous crime films of the decade. Although he found it inferior to City Streets and The Front Page, Greene liked Scarface, and there is reason to believe that he gleaned ideas from it. The novel contains several references to the methods of American gangsters, and the autograph manuscript contains similar references that Greene deleted before publication. Doubtless the incest theme involving “Scarface” Camonte and his sister Cesca would have caught Greene’s attention, since he was already planning to deal with


an incestuous brother and sister relationship in the next novel. But Scarface has other qualities that invite comparison with Greene’s fiction of the period. As a fairly early sound film (1932) it was notable for its use of an operatic motif—“Che me freno?” (“Who restrains me?”)—from Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor—to accompany the scene in which Camonte murders a rival gang leader. Greene uses opera prominently in England Made Me, where Anthony (coincidentally, “Scarface” Camonte is also “Tony”) goes with Krogh to see Tristan (which Krogh confuses with Carmen) and eventually identifies his sweetheart Lucia (“Loo”) Davidge with the black sail from Wagner’s opera. The specific use of Tristan may have been inspired by The Waste Land, a poem whose effect on Greene has been demonstrated by several critics and will be discussed later here; but Lucia’s name, like that of her brother Roderick, is drawn from Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor, her father’s favorite novel and the original source for Donizetti’s libretto. In no other book does Greene show a comparable interest in opera, although later works such as Travels with My Aunt will evince an interest in Scott. The actual milieu of England Made Me has little in common with the criminal underworld depicted in Scarface, but that is not the case with Greene’s next two novels (A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock), and both of those works, especially the second, use music from a variety of sources (radios, gramophones, barroom singing, Pinkie’s memory as a choir boy) to comment ironically on the current action. Like Scarface (but unlike any of Greene’s earlier or later books), both Gun and Brighton Rock begin with a murder planned and executed by a completely remorseless underworld character. Moreover, the novels and the film all juxtapose murder with holiday cheer: Pinkie murders Hale on Whitmonday; Raven’s revenge murders are carried out during the Christmas holidays; and “Scarface” Tony Camonte machine-guns an entire rival gang on St. Valentine’s Day. Pinkie, of course, never musters the firepower to carry out a slaughter on the scale of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, but his imagination at least suggests that possibility (“Have I got to have a massacre?” he asks more than once); and the rise of Tony Camonte from punk hoodlum to an emperor of crime is precisely the course Pinkie, in Brighton Rock, would like to follow. Carlos Clarens, in his study Crime Movies, calls


attention to the “essential childishness which is Camonte’s most winning quality” in the film (87). Pinkie, much closer at seventeen to real childhood than Camonte is, has no winning qualities at all; his youthfulness is a source of horror rather than amusement. Brighton Rock remains, in spite of such recognizable similarities, a very different sort of work from Hawks’s film. Yet it seems fair to say that the decision to call the Boulting Brothers’ 1947 film version of the novel Young Scarface in its American release may have been more than a mere commercial expedient. The case of Scarface offers a minor variation on a major theme of my approach to Greene’s fiction. It will be apparent that any or all of these resemblances between Hawks’s film and the three novels might be the result of coincidence rather than conscious or unconscious influence. Yet, as I have tried to demonstrate, the letters and diaries offer such abundant evidence of Greene’s love of quotations, allusions, parallels, and a “literary” view of experience, together with his conscious borrowing and his testimony to the power of other writers’ works to inspire his own creativity, that attention to these elements is crucial to an understanding of the genesis of his own works. Greene was a speedy and prolific reader even during periods of intensive work at his own writing. The task of trying to examine all of his readings (or film viewings) for the purpose of tracing influences on the fiction is beyond the scope of this study, yet by looking selectively one can learn a great deal about his methods and about certain cases in which the intertextual relationships may serve as aids to interpretation and to an understanding of the genesis of Greene’s works. To that end the next two chapters will examine representative novels for which this method of investigation may be seen to yield especially instructive results.

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CHAPTER THREE A Gun for Sale

In his fascinating study Mixing Memory and Desire: The Waste Land and British Novels, Fred Crawford identifies Graham Greene as a writer profoundly influenced by T.S.Eliot. Asserting that “Greene’s development as a novelist paralleled his growing understanding of The Waste Land,” Crawford traces carefully the stages by which Greene learned to make novelistic capital out of the vast resources of Eliot’s poem: Greene’s early reading of Eliot’s criticism and poetry, which began when Greene was still at Oxford, provided an explanation of and memorable imagery for “the real world…full of lust, betrayal, violence, and exploitation” which dominates his work. Yet because he did not understand The Waste Land’s relation to his own ideas until he had read Eliot’s critical essays, Greene’s early attempts to profit from The Waste Land were less successful than in his later writing. Only when he placed Waste Land imagery into its proper context, could Greene create his own Waste Land. Once he had accomplished that, he was able to select particular aspects of Eliot’s poem to fit his purpose as a writer. (105) Having thus established Greene’s use of Eliot as a measure of artistic maturity, Crawford judges individual works accordingly. Brighton Rock (1938) becomes a watershed, Greene’s first successful rendering of characters who “confront the dilemmas of The Waste Land, struggling to find meaning in an empty world” (103). Among the earlier works, A Gun for Sale is noteworthy for having failed largely because of Greene’s unsuccessful use of Eliot’s poem in it:


Greene alludes to Eliot’s poems throughout, but he manages only to create a physical atmosphere similar to that of The Waste Land. The applications of Eliot’s Hanged Man and Death by Water motifs to the characterization of Greene’s figures fail because they are too obviously allusions, they occur too often, and they have no direct bearing on the characters of Anne Crowder or Mather. With Raven the motif becomes too pointed, although the memory of his hanged father, suicidal mother, and orphanage upbringing explains much of his bitterness. (108) Professor Crawford carefully limits the scope of his study to the question of such borrowing from Eliot, and within that limitation his findings are instructive. Nevertheless, a close examination of A Gun for Sale reveals that The Waste Land is only one of several literary sources, and not necessarily the most important one, that Greene drew upon in creating the novel. The children’s Christmas pantomimes Aladdin and especially Dick Whittington figured prominently in the author’s ironic treatment of Raven as a “lost childhood” figure, and Greene’s reading of Faulkner’s Light in August may have influenced aspects of several characters as well. On a more important level two Victorian poems—Browning’s “Childe Roland” and Tennyson’s Maud—contributed heavily to Greene’s handling of structure, character, and imagery. Just as Brighton Rock could be called a “Pentecost novel,” deriving as it does sustained irony from the juxtaposition of the religious holiday with violence and murder in Brighton, A Gun for Sale is a “Christmas novel” in which the familiar trappings of the holiday season lend poignancy to the situation of James Raven, the lonely, ugly, embittered protagonist for whom the Christmas story has no meaning: In a religious shop by the Catholic Cathedral he found himself facing again the images that angered him in the Soho café; the plaster mother and child, the wise men and the shepherds. They were arranged in a cavern of brown paper among the books of devotion, the little pious scraps of St Theresa. ‘The Holy Family’: he pressed his face

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against the glass with a kind of horrified anger that that tale still went on. (89) Greene recalls in A Sort of Life the pleasure of the family’s annual attendance at the most popular of all the Christmas pantomimes—Peter Pan—at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London. His interest in that story would surface many years later in his claim that both Raven and the character for whom he was “a first sketch”—Pinkie in Brighton Rock—are Peter Pan figures: “[Raven] is a Pinkie who has aged but not grown up. The Pinkies are the real Peter Pans—doomed to be juvenile for a lifetime. They have something of the fallen angel about them, a morality which once belonged to another place” (75). Before Pinkie’s character had been created, however, Greene clearly saw Raven’s experience in contrast to the familiar material of the children’s Christmas pantomimes. Greene’s comment appears to represent a retrospective discovery rather than something remembered about the process of writing, and the texts offer no evidence to suggest that Peter Pan was used consciously in the creation of either novel. It is clear, however, that two pantomimes of comparable popularity, Aladdin and Dick Whittington, were very much in Greene’s mind as he wrote Gun. As Anne Crowder, the novel’s perky showgirl heroine, prepares to leave London for a job in Nottwich, her landlady asks which pantomime she will perform in. “You said Dick Whittington, didn’t you?” “No, no,” Anne replies, “Aladdin” (21). If the novel owes more than this obvious element of plot to Aladdin, the indebtedness may lie in the fact that in the early scenes of the novel and the play two characters meet (Aladdin and the Magician, Raven and Davis/Cholmondeley) in circumstances with distinctive similarities: in both works the older man uses a large cache of money (the magician’s bag of gold, Davis’s stolen bank notes) to manipulate and ultimately to deceive the younger one whom he uses as a tool for his own greedy purposes; in both stories one of the characters (Aladdin, Davis) is excessively fond of sweets and offers sweets to the other, who refuses; and in both one of the characters is identified with a ring symbolic of power and control (the magician’s magic ring which calls forth the “slave of the ring”; Davis’s emerald ring, singled out for attention several times in


the novel as a sign of his power). In the fairy tale of Aladdin, of course, the boy triumphs over the evil magician and gains vast wealth, power, and happiness through his marriage to the Princess Baldroubador. Greene’s thriller derives irony through the deliberate subversion of such happy endings: although Raven does triumph in the sense that his killing of Davis satisfies part of his craving for revenge, his own life ends in great pain and bitterness. The happy-ending story which is deliberately counterpointed against Raven’s story is not Aladdin, however, but Dick Whittington. The pantomime is based on the legend of the real Richard Whittington, a poor boy who became first a wealthy merchant and then “thrice mayor of London.” In this story the poor, homeless Dick, whose only friend and companion is his cat Bow Bells which he rescued from certain death at the hands of a mob of witchhunters, is taken into the household of alderman Fitzwarren. When the alderman embarks upon a trading venture to the court of the sultans of Barbary, young Whittington sends along his cat, the only thing of value he has in the world, as an investment in his future. The cat rids the sultan’s palace of troublesome rats and thereby earns Dick an enormous fortune. Subsequently the wealthy young man marries Alice, Fitzwarren’s daughter, and becomes mayor. The experience of Greene’s antihero Raven parallels and/or inverts the Dick Whittington story at several points. Like Whittington, Raven is young, orphaned, homeless, and friendless; the only creature for whom Raven feels any affection at the outset of his story is his kitten. Obviously neither handsome nor lucky, Raven nevertheless also knows an Alice— not an alderman’s beautiful daughter, but the humpbacked maid who cleans his room, is abused by him, and hates him even though he buys her a dress for Christmas with the stolen money he receives from Davis. She betrays him to the London police. Later, when Raven meets Anne Crowder in Nottingham and finds to his surprise that she may become his friend, he wishes he could give her as a gift of friendship the kitten he left in London. And Greene emphasizes Anne’s role as a human counterpart to Raven’s cat. When the police visit the new cottage where Anne was last seen, Mather wants to know,

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“How did she get in?” “The lock of the door’s busted.” “Could a girl do that?” “A cat could do it. A determined cat.” (78) Later, when Anne and Raven are holed up in the railway yard shed overnight, they exchange stories. His tales are of dreams which thinly disguise the truth of his crimes; hers is a pointed fable about a cat which outsmarts a fox—suggestive of her own intent to outsmart Raven. And when she does escape from him, only to be shot at by the policeman Saunders who does not recognize her, she compares herself with a cat: “Well, I’ve got six lives left” (136). Greene’s evocation of Raven as a sinister Dick Whittington is one of his most striking variations on certain familiar themes in his works: corrupted innocence, ruined or traumatic childhood, the terrifying gap between childhood fantasy and adult reality. By juxtaposing the criminal underworld with the world of children’s pantomimes and fairy tales, he creates in A Gun for Sale a particularly dark irony suitable for the drama of a Europe slipping toward war. That irony will appear again in the best of the entertainments, a book set during the war itself: The Ministry of Fear. The pantomimes nevertheless form only a part of the literary background of this novel. Several memorable elements seen here for the first time in Greene’s work appear to have been inspired by a great American novel which Greene’s diary shows that he had read in February 1933, when he was still writing Battlefield and had only begun planning England Made Me. These elements include the murderous, alienated hero from an orphanage where he was treated cruelly in the name of charity; the mad clergyman cut off from his church; the use of the razor as a murder weapon (instead of the clubs actually used, according to contemporary accounts, by racecourse gangs); and the ironies associated with “Christmas”—all of which are equally prominent in William Faulkner’s Light in August. Now A Gun for Sale is so unlike Faulkner’s novel in most respects that an influence might at first seem unlikely, yet the striking parallels suggest the opposite. Moreover, such borrowing is typical of Greene’s method, especially in this period. He was still a young writer of modest success and more promise than


achievement; he was possessed of a sensibility that regularly conceived of plot events and ideas in a literary frame; and in his “entertainments” he was working quickly for money, drawing upon sources with a fresh and vigorous appetite which allowed a less complete digestion of them than can usually be found in the serious novels. For these reasons it is important to consider other sources which arguably are the most important of all in A Gun for Sale: Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” from which Greene adapted the structure of his novel as a failed heroic quest; and Tennyson’s Maud, from which he derived key elements of character, image, and theme. Readers of Greene’s autobiographical writings will recall that Browning’s poetry was a powerful influence on the young Greene long before The Waste Land was published. In A Sort of Life he describes his father’s “enthusiasm for Robert Browning” as “the bacillus of a recurring fever.” The elder Greene gave his son an edition of Browning as a gift for Confirmation, “but it was certainly not a belief in God that Browning confirmed. I had emerged from my psychoanalysis without any religious belief at all…and what I took from Browning my father might well have thought unhealthily selective” (117). Indeed, before assuming as Crawford does that Greene’s “explanation and imagery” for the lust, betrayal, and violence of the “real world” came from Eliot, we might do well to consider Greene’s own account of what he found in Browning: “With Robert Browning I lived in a region of adulteries, of assignations at dark street corners, of lascivious priests and hasty dagger thrusts, and of sexual passion far more heady than romantic love” (118). A curious resemblance between Greene’s career and Browning’s points up the way in which Browning’s poetry—and Tennyson’s—answered Greene’s specific needs at this juncture in his career. Browning’s early poetry was characterized by an intensely personal, confessional quality heavily influenced by Shelley’s Romantic lyrics. After being castigated severely in a famous review by John Stuart Mill, Browning turned away from such subjective poetry and toward the objectivity of the dramatic monologue. Greene’s career involves an analogous shift: his first three published novels were excessively personal works in which the foreign and/or historical settings failed to separate adequately the material from the personality and

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emotions of the author. As discussed earlier in these pages, Greene himself traced the failure of The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall to the insufficient distance between himself and his subject. And Greene’s break with his own excessively personal work was precipitated, as Browning’s had been, by unfavorable reviews. The New Republic, for example, had described the characters in Rumour as staggering “under the overwhelming weight of their own mental questionings and probings” (Sherry 1:395), and Frank Swinnerton, in an Evening News review on 20 November 1931, had criticized the same novel for its baffling dialogue and incomprehensible characters: “Not one of these people can give a plain answer to a plain question. Their tongues jump heavily into irrelevance. They are not so much evasive as gravely incomprehensible, even to one another” (qtd. in Sherry 1:396). Greene later cited Swinnerton’s judgment as most influential in bringing about the change of direction in his novels. The immediate result of the transition for Greene was his Buchanesque thriller Stamboul Train, which effectively substituted quick pacing and multiple centers of interest for the depth of characterization and psychological complexity he had attempted in the earlier three books. Yet neither in this work nor in the two that followed would Greene fully discover the voice that would sustain him in his major fiction. Certain of his limitations had become clear: he was unable to present convincingly the inner lives of lower class characters like Kay Rimmer or Milly Drover in It’s a Battlefield, or of wealthy capitalists like Erik Krogh in England Made Me. He could not reproduce Huxley’s ironic voice, although, as John Atkins has pointed out, he echoes it at times in It’s a Battlefield, and he was only partly successful in writing stream-of-consciousness narrative in England Made Me. What he needed was a mode that would enable him to combine his familiar habit of framing his subject in the context of literary parallels and allusions while simultaneously creating a point of view that gave release to the tensions and conflicts within himself—tensions arising, for example, from his latent romanticism, soured and tempered by experience; from his uneasiness in the marriage and family life, which he had sought obsessively and, it seems, betrayed compulsively; from his Catholic faith, accepted intellectually but not felt emotionally, and pursued from the beginning out of


questionable motives; and from his aspiration to rise in the literary establishment while harboring contempt for the bourgeois society that underpinned it. The mode Greene discovered reached its fullest expression in the final novels of the first phase, A Gun for Sale and especially Brighton Rock. Both are novels that create a great deal of tension by detaching the reader’s sympathy from the social norms upon which it is usually founded and forcing it toward radically alienated, sociopathic characters. Neville Braybrooke, in a perceptive early essay on Greene as a “pioneer novelist,” called attention to the personal element as well as the narrative device Greene used in these and later novels: Greene is a writer who constantly transposes sentiments and comments expressed in his autobiographical work to his fiction. It is a habit fraught with dangers for the novelist, but a method for which Greene has fashioned his own simple technique. It is the adaptation of the dramatic soliloquy to the confines of the novel; in the process, histrionics are abandoned, so that one has the impression not of somebody declaiming his thoughts to the world at large but of somebody whispering his inmost doubts and conflicts to one by telephone. (6) The description is not strictly precise; what Greene employs is a combination of vivid objective omniscient narration with free indirect discourse to plunge the reader directly into the world defined by his characters’ sensibility and experience, and he presents in each work a central, powerful, grotesque character whose world-view is inevitably the one readers identify with the novel even though other centers of interest are presented. Greene’s skill in such distorted world views led Wayne Booth to advance a caution in behalf of naive readers: Graham Greene’s Catholic readers have often reproached him for making his evil characters too sympathetic, for making evil itself attractive. Such readers, presumably, have not themselves been harmed; at least they always speak only of the potential harm to other readers. But we can infer that the really harmful misreading, the most tragic false identifications of the reader with the vicious

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centers of consciousness, never are discussed in print. Even the great satires, in which the moral issues would seem to be crystal clear, often lead naive students astray in this regard. How much more often must the naive reader be led into disastrous conclusions by overlooking the subtle condemnations embedded in the works of Greene? (389) It is not surprising that in creating A Gun for Sale Greene was drawn to the dramatic monologues of Browning and Tennyson. While a detailed discussion of the dramatic monologue as practiced by the Victorian poets is beyond the scope of this chapter, a few key points may serve to emphasize the connection with Greene’s late first-phase writing. First and most obvious is the way in which the dramatic monologue enables the writer to explore ideas removed from his own, or to present extreme versions of his own ideas from behind a mask. What Greene does in the two concluding works of the first phase had been hinted at in his treatment of Conrad Drover in It’s a Battlefield. He throws his already familiar themes—the problem of injustice, the misery and degradation of poverty, the sense of life as a perpetual battlefield in an undeclared war— into sharp relief by filtering them through the consciousness of sociopathic characters whose alienation from the world is complete and unalterable. A second point of connection is what Robert Langbaum describes as the tension between sympathy and judgment that the dramatic monologue generates in the reader; it does so by giving primacy to experience over idea (85). Many of Greene’s first-phase protagonists, but most clearly the last two (Raven and Pinkie), create in most readers the contradictory impulses to sympathize and to condemn. That explains in large measure why Greene himself, looking for an appropriate epigraph for all of his novels, turned to a dramatic monologue—Browning’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”: My interest’s in the dangerous edge of things, The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demi-rep That loves and saves her soul in new French books—


We watch while these in equilibrium keep The giddy line midway. A third connection is what Carol Christ identifies as the imprisoned self of the monologue’s speaker: Browning portrays character after character engaged in the Romantic project of asserting the center of the universe that is ‘I’ while being, seeing, knowing, tasting, feeling all. But these characters are typically so grotesque and eccentric that the poems emphasize not the discoveries but the limitations that self-consciousness involves. Browning’s dramatic monologues characteristically concern the prison of self which the speaker constructs in attempting to encompass and control his world. (18) Greene’s grotesque characters express such radically alienated and distorted views of life that in the end they cannot learn or change. Yet much of the interest in his plots derives from their focus on the seeming possibility of such illumination or change; both novels explore the possible conditions under which change might occur, and both turn away from that possibility in the end. His most grotesque protagonists appear at the end of the first phase where they are, by most measures, at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of subjectivity from those early figures whose resemblance to their creator was too transparent. In that regard they represent the end of one possible line of development after which Greene would undertake a new direction, creating characters who slowly begin to display unmasked qualities of the author himself.

A GUN FOR SALE AND BROWNING’S “CHILDE ROLAND” The influence of literature, Greene writes in A Sort of Life, can outlast that of religious teaching, and after fifty years he finds certain lines of Browning to have been more influential and memorable for him than the Beatitudes. To emphasize the point he quotes several passages from Browning’s verse. The

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second of these passages—“I never saw a brute I hated so; /He must be wicked to deserve such pain”—includes the line from “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” recalled by policeman Saunders as he watches outside the shed where James Raven is hiding in A Gun for Sale. For Saunders, who learned his Browning in night school, the suggestion that Raven or any other criminal “must be wicked to deserve such pain” is “comforting”: “[T]hose who followed his profession couldn’t be taught a better; that’s why he remembered it” (104). By offering a convenient rationalization that obviates the need for sympathy toward the hunted man, the line from Browning’s poem ironically increases the reader’s sympathy for the friendless Raven. And it establishes one brief but emphatic connection between Greene’s knowledge of “Childe Roland” and his conception of character and event in the novel. The kinship between the two works runs much deeper than this, however, and involves subtle but distinct similarities in structure, atmosphere, and theme. Both “Childe Roland” and A Gun for Sale are structured around a journey or quest in which a lonely protagonist must vindicate his life in some way by reaching a mysterious place of testing where he can demonstrate his courage and honor. In Browning’s poem this mysterious testing-place is the Dark Tower which the knight does not even recognize until he is already upon it; in Greene’s novel the place is also a tower—the Midland Steel Tower in Nottwich, headquarters of the evil industrialist Sir Marcus—which is revealed to Raven as his destination only at the end of his journey. For both characters the object of the quest is entirely personal. Browning’s knight does not explain what the Dark Tower is or why he pursues it; we know only that he attains some kind of fulfillment by reaching it and blowing his horn to send forth a challenge. The meaning of his act, apart from its obvious testament of courage and perseverance, is simply whatever it means to him. James Raven’s quest is similarly personal: he seeks revenge, and the fact that by achieving it he may prevent the outbreak of war in Europe is of no consequence to him. Within these larger structural and thematic similarities are parallel motifs, emotions, and images which further suggest Greene’s indebtedness to Browning’s poem. For example, both journeys are initiated by acts of betrayal that confirm the


protagonist’s sense of hopelessness and the certainty of death. Browning’s knight is directed toward the Dark Tower by a “hoary cripple, with malicious eye” who cannot suppress his “glee” at having ensnared another victim. The knight knows that if he accepts the old man’s “counsel” and turns “Into that ominous tract which, all agree, /Hides the Dark Tower,” the cripple will laugh and write his epitaph in the dust. Yet he does follow that counsel, not with hope but with hopelessness and “gladness that some end might be” (st. 3). Clearly his hopelessness is the expression of a life of suffering and failure, although the specific terms of that suffering are not revealed: For, what with my whole world-wide wandering, What with my search drawn out through years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope With that obstreperous joy success would bring— I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope. (st. 4) Raven is also betrayed, first by “Cholmondeley” (Davis), whose eyes “twinkle” with pleasure during the meeting in which he pays Raven with stolen money; and then by Alice, the maid who describes him to the police. Raven, too, is utterly hopeless, and the terms of his despair, unlike those of the knight’s, are abundantly clear. The death of his father, also a criminal, by hanging; the suicide of his mother; the ugliness of his harelip; and the cruelty and misery of his childhood in an orphanage— these are the representative conditions of the only life he has known or expects to know, and therefore his pursuit of Davis and Sir Marcus becomes an attempt to gain revenge against the whole of life. Raven’s hopelessness is an immediate practical matter as well, for he is guilty of a crime more serious than the one for which he has been framed, and both his deformity and his lack of money make it impossible for him to escape the police for long. The only question is whether he can escape long enough to gain revenge against his betrayers. He knows London well and is safest in its vast expanses, but he gambles even that questionable safety in order to pursue Davis to the unfamiliar Nottwich. On the train he stands at the window, his hare-lip pressed against the glass, “watching London recede from him…

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like a man watching something he loves slide back from him out of his reach” (34). In that backward glance is an attitude of fatalism comparable to that of Browning’s Roland as he turns “quiet as despair” into his new course toward the Dark Tower and, “pledged to the plain,” pauses “to throw backward a last view/O’er the safe road…naught else remained to do” (st. 4). The mood of despair is reflected in the landscapes through which the protagonists journey. Nottwich, when Raven’s train arrives, is like a city of eternal night: “There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. You had only to imagine that it was night” (40). This dark city, swept by icy winds and freezing rain, surrounded by “damaged fields” and “slag heaps” (51), images the hostility of the world as experienced by Raven. Nothing in it seems to affirm life or hope, and therefore he contemplates death—the murder of Anne, or the likelihood of his own death—with detachment: “He didn’t mind death; it was foolish to be scared of death in this bare, wintry world” (49). He does not murder Anne, however, but eventually makes her his hostage. Detective Mather pursues the two of them in the fog and darkness across a dreary railroad yard, “a dark desolate waste of cinders and points, a tangle of lines and sheds and piles of coal and coke. It was like a No Man’s Land full of torn iron across which one soldier picked his way with a wounded companion in his arms” (103). Professor Crawford finds in such imagery evidence of Greene’s reproduction of the physical world of The Waste Land, but it should be worth pointing out that “Childe Roland” depicts a waste land hardly less memorable than Eliot’s. The journey in Browning’s poem resembles a nightmare or dream vision of a phantasmagoric landscape, a “starved, ignoble nature,” a land of “Bog, clay, and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth,” where the few remnants of vegetation are suggestive of disease: “As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair/In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud, /Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood” (st. 13). Indeed, the landscape of “Childe Roland” not only mirrors the despair of the protagonist, as that of A Gun for Sale does, but offers two details that remind us, in this context, of Raven himself. The “great black bird” (st. 27) that sails past the knight may only coincidentally point toward Raven’s symbolic name and his association with the underworld, but the


ruined tree in the preceding stanza is strikingly suggestive of his deformity: “Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him/Like a distorted mouth that splits at its rim/Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils” (st. 26; italics added). Raven’s harelip is of course a symbolic deformity, the external sign of the deep psychological wound stemming from his brutal childhood, the death of his father, and the scene of his mother’s suicide which left him, figuratively at least, “gaping at death.” Indeed, the inability of Raven’s memories to evoke anything other than pain and unhappiness may be compared with the failure of memory to comfort and sustain Browning’s character, who closes his eyes in an effort to recall “earlier, happier sights” and “taste of the old time to set all to rights,” but is only saddened by memories—of Cuthbert, victim of some unspecified disgrace, and of Giles, hanged for treason, his body “spit upon and cursed” (st. 16–17). “Better this present,” the knight concludes, “than a past like that,” and he commits himself again to the “darkening path” (st. 18). Greene’s character proceeds in a similar mood of grim fatalism, his progress marked by other images suggestive not so much of striking parallels but of a more pervasive influence of the poem upon the young writer whose long familiarity with it is a matter of record. Thus, the knight’s sense of entrapment upon the sudden discovery that he has reached his destination —“Where, in the very nick/Of giving up, one time more, came a click/As when a trap shuts—you’re inside the den!” (st. 29)— may be echoed in Raven’s awareness, triggered by abrupt, severe pain, of what his father felt “when the trap sprang and his neck took the weight” (42). And the knight’s fear that in fording the river he may have thrust his spear into a man’s hair or beard—or worse, into a baby—has a curious resemblance to Greene’s depiction of the ancient, evil, bearded Sir Marcus as a helpless infant, too weak to clean or feed himself, subsisting on a diet of milk and biscuits. When Raven shoots him, he falls forward, upsetting his glass of warm milk. The ending of Raven’s quest, however, provides again specific parallels to the ending of “Childe Roland.” There is a rush of noise as Browning’s knight prepares for final combat: “Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled/Increasing like a bell” (st. 33). Noise, specifically the sound of bells, accompanies the final violence in A Gun for Sale: Sir Marcus sounds the

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alarm bell in the hope of being saved from Raven, and after both Sir Marcus and Davis have been shot, “a siren blew up over the town its message that the sham raid was over, and immediately the church bells broke into a noisy Christmas carol…” (168). That a Christmas caroling of bells would sound the death-knell for Raven is consistent with the ironies surrounding the Christmas setting. Browning’s character also hears a death knell at the end, the somber ringing not of actual bells but of the names of his dead comrades: Names in my ears. Of all the lost adventurers my peers— How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. (st. 33) The knight sees them all, “ranged along the hillsides, met/To view the last of me, a living frame for one more picture!” (st. 34). Raven, in the moment before his death, is similarly affected by memories of his former comrades: Even Kite would have been alive now if it hadn’t been for a skirt. They all went soft at one time or another: Penrith and Carter, Jossy and Ballard, Barker and the Great Dane. He took aim slowly, absentmindedly, with a curious humility, with almost a sense of companionship in his loneliness: the Trooper and Mayhew. (169–70) Nothing at the end of Raven’s life violates or alleviates the pattern of loneliness, betrayal, and suffering of which that life has consisted; instead, the manner of his death merely confirms his own experience of life. In that regard he is like the speakers of dramatic monologues who, according to Robert Langbaum, undergo not moral change but intensification as they understand and articulate what was already known to them. In creating Raven’s story, Graham Greene may well have been influenced by the mood and imagery of Eliot’s great poem; but it seems equally obvious that he took from “Childe Roland” the journey motif, the failed romantic quest, the disillusioned hero


who asserts himself defiantly in the face of betrayal, entrapment, and death.

A GUN FOR SALE AND TENNYSON’S MAUD In its darkly ironic quest motif that leads James Raven toward a sinister modern incarnation of the dark tower, A Gun for Sale is indebted to “Childe Roland,” and it generates a uniquely English irony by setting Raven’s grim fate against the mythical success of Dick Whittington. Yet in its psychology and emotional tone the novel seems even closer to another Victorian poem: Tennyson’s monodrama Maud. Greene’s fondness for Maud is well documented. He mentions it twice and quotes several lines from it in the courtship letters, and he alludes to it strategically in Travels With My Aunt. Moreover, in the early 1930s Greene had encountered skillful intertextual uses of Tennyson’s poetry in two novels. His diary indicates that in October 1932 he read Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse, in which Mr. Ramsay quotes from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in impassioned but absent-minded moods of self-absorption. The line “Someone had blundered,” which Ramsay imagines as an expression of his own misfortune, forms an ironic refrain that calls attention to his own thoughtless blunders in relationships with his family— especially his son James. Perhaps more important is that use of Tennyson’s verse—again, the “Light Brigade”—to reveal character and comment on the action is prominent in Light in August, which Greene read in January 1933. In that novel the Reverend Hightower withdraws from life into the imagined world of Tennyson’s poem, confusing the heroic moment of the poem with the antiheroic death of his grandfather in a raid on Grant’s stores in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Hightower finds in Tennyson a vision of life to which ordinary reality does not conform, and therefore he regards the reading of Tennyson as better than prayer. (And this Protestant version of the “failed priest,” the man whose name “Gail Hightower” symbolizes his choice of vocation as an attempt to escape the severe “gales” of life, may also have influenced Greene’s later conception of Pinkie, whose boyhood desire to become a priest was an attempt to escape from life.) Greene’s intention that Maud be involved in some way in the reader’s understanding of A Gun for Sale is made clear at the

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end of Part 2, where Raven, hiding in the garage of a semidetached house to escape the icy storm, hears a critic named Druce Winton reading a selection from the poem on the BBC National Programme: Raven couldn’t help but hear, standing in the cold garage by the baby’s pram, staring out at the black hail: ‘A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee; Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.’ He dug his nails into his hands, remembering his father who had been hanged and his mother who had killed herself in the basement kitchen, all the long parade of those who had done him down. The elderly cultured Civil Service voice read on: ‘And I loathe the squares and streets, and the faces that one meets, Hearts with no love for me…’ He thought: give her time and she too will go to the police. That’s what always happens in the end with a skirt, —‘My whole soul out to thee’— trying to freeze again, as hard and safe as ever, the icy fragment. (66–67) The scene gives additional poignancy to Raven’s circumstances not only by identifying him with a familiar literary figure but by articulating his misery in language more elegant and precise —and easier for readers to identify with—than any Raven himself could employ. Moreover, the doleful lament “Ah Christ, that it were possible” becomes a convenient shorthand suitable for the thriller’s pace and economy: by having Raven recall it on two later occasions Greene can evoke a powerful set of related emotions in the briefest time.


The effective but obvious parallel between Raven’s unhappiness and that of Tennyson’s speaker in the monodrama is a fairly mechanical piece of allusion, and Tennyson’s story, in its outline at least, seems entirely unlike Greene’s. In the first of the poem’s three parts, the speaker, a young man, declares his disillusionment and grief over the death of his father, a victim of betrayal by a friend, the old man who is lord of the neighboring Hall, with whom the father was involved in the failure of some “vast speculation.” In spite of his bitterness, the speaker finds himself falling in love with Maud, the beautiful daughter of his father’s enemy. Eventually they declare their mutual love, but in part two the speaker quarrels with Maud’s brother and kills him in a duel. The shock of his death is fatal to Maud. When she dies, the speaker leaves the country, falls into despair, and is placed in a mental institution. In part three he recovers somewhat, returns home, and finds a kind of salvation by immersing himself in a just war. None of this seems to have much in common with Greene’s story of hired political assassination, flight, and revenge murder. But in fact the resemblances run very deep and deserve careful study, for some of the imagery as well as thematic concerns and a good deal of the emotional rhythm of A Gun for Sale recall Maud. Like Tennyson, Greene uses the point of view of a tortured mind—lonely, alienated, disaffected—to point up weaknesses in the social fabric. Both characters are victims of profound injustice; both have been emotionally scarred in their youth and have lost their ability to believe in the goodness of life. The most powerful trauma in the life of Tennyson’s speaker has been the death of his father, apparently a suicide, followed by the decline and death of his mother: For my dark-dawning youth, Darken’d watching a mother decline And that dead man at her heart and mine; For who was left to watch her but I? Yet so did I let my freshness die. (1. 690–94) Stricken by grief and a deep sense of wrong, he acquires a gloomy, pessimistic view of the world as an evil place, a view that makes him feel, early in the poem, that Maud is inaccessible to him. In his own words he is

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…splenetic, personal, base, A wounded thing with a rancorous cry, At war with myself and a wretched race, Sick, sick to the heart of life, am I. (1. 362–65) He refers several times to his heart which has turned to stone. Such conditions are, if anything, typically intensified in Greene’s novel. Although Greene’s metaphor is not stone but a “chip of ice” in the heart (the image is from Anderson’s fairy tale, “The Snow Queen”), his character is similarly hardhearted, and for similar reasons: his father was hanged as a thief, and his despairing mother committed suicide by cutting her throat at the kitchen table, without troubling to prevent the child from discovering the grisly scene. Raven’s harelip is a visible symbol of this emotional scarring, and his trauma is doubled in effect by the revelation that the old Minister whom Raven assassinates in the opening scene of the novel was actually one of his own kind, an orphan whose father was a thief and whose mother committed suicide. At least two further qualities suggest a more than coincidental resemblance between the two characters: a complete mistrust of human actions, growing out of a deep cynicism toward life; and a willingness to suspend that cynicism —in other words, to undergo a fundamental change in outlook— in response to the affection and friendship of a woman. Both characters become involved in an implicit wager: they gamble their ability to believe in the goodness of life on the fidelity of the woman—Maud, obviously, in the poem, and Anne Crowder in the novel. The poem so familiar to the author of the courtship letters and prominent in the literary background of this novel presents in secular form the same drama of salvation seen in Greene’s depiction of many of his first-phase protagonists and, in those letters, of himself. Mistrust is so deeply ingrained in the speaker of Maud that he initially doubts the signs of friendliness in the girl, whom he suspects of being used by her brother for political gain—that she might feign “A face of tenderness” so that “A wretched vote may be gained.” His description of his fundamental guardedness and mistrust employs a metaphor that seems very likely the source for the name of Greene’s character: “For a


raven ever croaks, at my side, /Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward, /Or thou wilt prove their tool (1. 245–47; italics added) Raven’s experience in the novel begins with a lesson in mistrust: he carries out a political assassination in a coldly efficient manner and trusts his employer to pay him according to contract. The anonymous employer does not trust him, however; the payoff in stolen notes is intended to ensure that Raven will be put safely away by the police. He has, to borrow Tennyson’s phrase, “proved the tool” of powerful forces in a deadly political game. Minor but significant betrayals follow: his landlord and the maid, Alice, both betray him eagerly to the police, and the disreputable Dr. Yogel feigns a willingness to operate on Raven’s harelip while his nurse tries to telephone the police. Raven has no friends, no one to help him, nowhere to go. Only his kitten offers affection, and he must leave it behind in making his escape. It is Anne Crowder (whose symbolic identification with the kitten was discussed earlier in this chapter) who offers him the possibility of friendship, affection, and trust. Anne’s attitude toward Raven is ambivalent: she finds him repulsive but senses his need for sympathy, and she understands that her life may depend upon her ability to conceal her fear of him; moreover, she genuinely wants to help him as long as she believes that he is innocent of the murder of the Minister and is trying to prevent the outbreak of war. Raven in turn bases his entire belief in the possibility of goodness on the question of her friendship and fidelity. It is Anne who brings about a thawing of that symbolic “chip of ice” in his breast. Thinking “with astonishment” of Anne’s refusal to betray him to the police, of the possibility that she might actually believe him, he is suddenly aware of the change in himself and of the danger it represents: These thoughts were colder and more uncomfortable than the hail. He wasn’t used to any taste that wasn’t bitter on the tongue. He had been made by hatred; it had constructed him into this thin smoky murderous figure in the rain, hunted and ugly…. He had never felt the least tenderness for anyone; he was made in this image and he had his own odd pride in the result; he didn’t want to be unmade. (66)

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Raven voices the same mixture of affection and regret after he has begun his long confession to Anne: “I’d always said I wouldn’t go soft on a skirt. I always thought my lip’d save me. It’s not safe to go soft…. Now I’ve gone soft, as soft as all the rest” (125). In the novel’s violent climax Raven, having killed Sir Marcus and thereby accomplished his primary act of revenge, confronts the whining Davis as the man who tried to kill—Raven hesitates before using such an unfamiliar word—his “friend” Anne. When Davis reveals that Anne is “a policeman’s girl” who led the police to him, the despairing Raven shoots him, “for that and nothing else” (168), using two bullets when only one is necessary, “as if he were shooting the whole world in the person of stout moaning bleeding Mr Davis”: And so he was. For a man’s world is his life and he was shooting that: his mother’s suicide, the long years in the home, the race-course gangs, Kite’s death and the old man’s and the woman’s. There was no other way; he had tried the way of confession, and it had failed him for the usual reason. There was no one outside your own brain whom you could trust: not a doctor, not a priest, not a woman. (168) He has gambled his desire to live on Anne’s fidelity, and lost. Tennyson’s character makes a similar gamble. His speaker lives alone, harboring a “morbid hate and horror” of the world until the “strong new wine of love” affects his “heart of stone,” transforming his view of life. Repeatedly his emotion is expressed as an implied wager: Maud’s love and truthfulness against the bitterness of life. What will he be like at fifty, he asks, If I find the world so bitter When I am but twenty-five? Yet, if she were not a cheat, If Maud were all that she seem’d, And her smile had all that I dream’d, Then the world were not so bitter But a smile could make it sweet. (1. 277–85)


He will retain the desire to live “as long, O God, as she/Has a grain of love” for him. The speaker calls Maud “my only friend”; Raven (who is “about twenty-five”) calls Anne “my friend,” and clearly he has no other. Maud is faithful and true to her lover, but she dies before they can marry, leaving him in madness and despair. Anne’s betrayal of Raven leads to his death and deprives him forever of the hope expressed passionately by Tennyson’s speaker: Let the sweet heavens endure, Not close and darken above me Before I am quite quite sure That there is one to love me! Then let come what may To a life that has been so sad, I shall have had my day. (1. 405–11)

Maud continues to hold interest not only for its memorable portrait of personal grief, jealousy, and frustrated love but for its criticism of society at large. Tennyson was able to do what Greene would later do in several novels—Brighton Rock, A Gun for Sale, and The Ministry of Fear—to use the perceptions of a distorted mind to render in stark forms some of the authentic terrors of life as well as the failings of contemporary society. Tennyson’s speaker projects his own unhappiness against a background of greed, selfishness, and suffering in English society at large. He interprets the betrayal and death of his father as a consequence of murderous greed operative in that society. Without hope or trust prior to the reappearance of Maud in his life, he sees the world as sordid, full of “vitriol madness” and characterized by “filthy by-lanes” in which husbands beat their wives, “And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread, /And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life….” (1. 39–40). Lies, theft, violence, greed—these form a way of life that seems to grow out of the natural order of the world, in which “[N]ature is one with rapine,… And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey” (1. 123–25). Central to the irony in the hero’s embittered view of life is the contrast between the ostensible peace enjoyed by his country and the condition of war that exists beneath the peaceful surface. Peace is meaningless, he says, when men are dishonest

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—“unworthy,” he says—when “only the ledger lives” and “the poor are hovell’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine” (1. 34). There is “Peace in the vineyard—yes!—but a company forges the wine” (1. 36). Peace becomes not a blessing but a curse; the real condition of life is not peace at all but war: “Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind/The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword” (1. 27–28). The charge is reiterated on behalf of children who are victims of the age’s selling out to Mammon: When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee, And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children’s bones, Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea, War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones! (1. 45–48) It is perhaps in Tennyson’s link between suffering children and the “undeclared war” that Maud is closest in spirit to A Gun for Sale, the first of Greene’s novels to dramatize the “lost childhood” theme so often discussed in his work. The next five novels will depict prominent victims who are literal or figurative lost children: Brighton Rock (Pinkie and Rose); The Confidential Agent (Else Crowle and Rose Cullen); The Power and the Glory (the priest’s daughter Brigitta and Coral Fellows); The Ministry of Fear (a double effect through Rowe’s amnesia as well as the loss of his innocent past); and The Heart of the Matter (Scobie’s daughter and the little girl who dies after the shipwreck). (There are seven books in this sequence if one includes the multiple anonymous victims of Harry Lime’s penicillin racket in The Third Man.) The memories of Raven’s miserable childhood have been detailed earlier in this chapter. He is, in Gwen Boardman’s terms, “a lost child symbolic of all those wailing in England’s tenements” (34). The undeclared war that Tennyson’s hero recognizes as the true state of the society he lives in is felt by Raven in immediate, personal terms: “All this talk of war. It doesn’t mean a thing to me. Why should I care if there’s a war? There’s always been a war for me”(129). Samuel Hynes has written the best commentary on the role of war in A Gun for Sale. Describing the novel as “a war-novel


before the event” (232), Hynes notes that the book is “about the fear of war…a feeling that all Englishmen shared in 1936”: The threat of war fills the novel: characters discuss it, newspaper headlines and hoardings report it, it is uttered in radio broadcasts and written on moving news-signs. But there is another war, too, a war that is less public and newsworthy, but is already going on—the war of the powerful against the weak, the rich against the poor, the ‘big organized battalions’ against the loners and outsiders. (233) The “other war,” Hynes points out, helps to create the temporary alliance between the outlaw Raven and Anne, “a cheerful working-class girl, loyal to her class and against the big battalions” (233). Greene’s evocation of the industrial cityscape through battlefield images sustains the theme, seen earlier in It’s a Battlefield, that “a city is the scene of a continuous war for survival” (234). Hynes sees the “core of meaning” in A Gun for Sale as “the relationship between these two wars”: The poor, like Raven, have always had their war; but now the same antagonists—the men who control money and power—threaten to extend that conflict onto another, more destructive plane, to bring all of Europe into war. (234) On the question of possible outbreak of an actual war, Tennyson’s speaker is, prior to his experience of love for Maud, indifferent. He prefers a detached “philosopher’s life” remote from the “clamor of liars”: “Shall I weep if a Poland fall? shall I shriek if a Hungary fail? …/I have not made the world, and He that hath made it will guide” (1. 147–49). But later he seeks to overcome his grief over the death of Maud by losing himself in the larger cause of a just war. He sees war as a redemptive act, uniting a “loyal” people in worthy purpose; the thought of war in defense of “right” lightens his despair. Of such fervent declarations of public loyalties, and of the idea of war as an alternative to despair, A Gun for Sale forms

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an implicit criticism. In this novel, as in many of Greene’s works, only the private loyalties have validity. Certainly the impending war should be averted at all costs; there could be no glory, no meaning at all in a conflict arising from the machinations of a corrupted capitalist like Sir Marcus. War would be, as Hynes suggests, the “ultimate expression” of evil already incarnate in monstrous characters like Acky, Davis, and especially Sir Marcus. A Gun for Sale, though not one of Greene’s major achievements, remains provocative and highly entertaining and offers an excellent vantage point from which Greene’s evolution as a novelist may be seen. The courtship letters show how Greene as an ardent young lover regularly saw, and encouraged Vivien to see, their relationship in a kind of literary frame; the strategy accomplished the multiple functions of (1) allowing him to express emotions more elegantly and precisely than he might otherwise have been able to do; (2) elevating the courtship by linking his own feelings with those of great literary figures; (3) participating in the enterprise of literature in something like a vicarious way—i.e., by creating through the imagination a world in which life and literary art are interpenetrable, so that each performs a comment on the other. A Gun for Sale carries those habits of the writer-suitor into the realm of novel-writing; not only does Greene borrow strategies (as in the case of Eliot’s allusive technique and Faulkner’s characters), but he also creates a narrative that both sustains and comments on familiar Victorian poems that had helped to shape his own imagination since childhood. The allusive method (including Browning and Tennyson again, but drawing primarily upon earlier writers), the embittered, alienated protagonist, and the motif of war with its accompanying imagery would appear again soon in a book that in many respects is a distillation of Greene’s narrative art of the period and is a major turning-point in his work: Brighton Rock.

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CHAPTER FOUR Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock represents both a major achievement and a crucial turning point in Greene’s work. Richly allusive, superbly paced in a quick, nervous style, with plot and imagery drawing upon the cinematic devices of cross-cutting and montage, the novel is as entertaining and suspenseful as any of the “entertainments,” the category to which Greene originally assigned it. Brighton Rock carries on the study of a tormented criminal mind begun in A Gun for Sale; the novel centers around a character, Pinkie Brown, in whom Greene develops more fully, and with tragic overtones, the embittered, murderous antihero first presented in James Raven. Like Raven, Pinkie is young, vicious, alienated, unloved (until he meets Rose) and perhaps incapable of love; Pinkie similarly bears scars from a traumatic childhood, but unlike Raven’s harelip his scars are internal and are given a Freudian explanation. Brighton Rock also continues Greene’s presentation of a point of view through which the pieties and cheerful optimism of middle-class life are savagely attacked. In Greene’s practice the method serves a narrative voice which projects a distinctly literary and usually soured romanticism as a dim backdrop to the often lurid melodramatic surface of contemporary life. It is a voice which will persist in later works in spite of other changes in tone and the conspicuous paring down of Greene’s style, and in several second-phase books it will be identified with a narrator-protagonist. Brighton Rock also takes Greene into new territory as the first of the “Catholic novels” that would form the initial basis of his reputation as a major writer of his age. To do justice to the novel’s complexity as well as its important position among Greene’s works, I will discuss it under several headings in this chapter, with


emphasis first upon its continuities of theme, image, and allusive method with the earlier work, and second upon its literary background and its religious themes. PINKIE AS NAPOLEONIC STRATEGIST Greene’s depiction of his tormented protagonist is rich in literary associations and analogues, including carefully plotted links between Pinkie and a number of historical and literary figures remarkable not only for their ambitious plans but also for their attempts—finally unsuccessful—to translate those ambitions into reality through military force. Indeed, the allusions to battlefields, warships, military tactics, and real or would-be conquerors are so numerous in Brighton Rock as to suggest strong continuity between this work and the two earlier books similarly concerned with the condition of English society: It’s a Battlefield, in which Greene used the battlefield as metaphor for political and economic struggle in modern urban life; and A Gun for Sale, in which the prospect of war only threatens to make palpable to all the condition of life already experienced by many. Unlike the battlefield metaphor in the earlier work, however, the many allusions in Brighton Rock are frequently ironic and tinged, finally, with the mock-heroic, serving to depict not just the power and danger of Pinkie’s designs but their preposterousness and inevitable failure as well. Central to this aspect of Greene’s conception of Pinkie are the figures of Napoleon I and Napoleon III. Pinkie, whose youth and diminutive stature are in this context reminiscent of Napoleon I (the “little corporal” who received his first commission at age sixteen), conceives of life as “a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alignments at Waterloo.” He laments the lack of sufficient time for quasimilitary planning: “Tactics, tactics, there was never any time for strategy” (137). Consistent with this impression of Pinkie is his posture after he has been attacked by Colleoni’s men at the racetrack, an image which recalls the familiar pose of Bonaparte with one hand tucked inside his coat: “Pinkie limped along the sand with his bleeding hand hidden, a young dictator…” (133). Later, at the sight of Pinkie’s wounds, his

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lawyer Prewitt picks up the image of combat: “Oh dear, oh dear,” he says, “you’ve been in the wars” (143). Ida, the nemesis who defeats this would-be Bonaparte in the end, is associated with nautical imagery and naval battles. Determined to pursue Rose relentlessly until the girl reveals the truth about Pinkie’s murder of Fred Hale, Ida moves through Snow’s restaurant “like a warship going into action, a warship on the right side in a war to end wars, the signal flags proclaiming that every man would do his duty” (148). Yet her attempt to persuade Rose to betray Pinkie meets “militant” resistance both literally and figuratively when Rose refuses: The bony and determined face stared back at [Ida]: all the fight there was in the world lay there-warships cleared for action and bombing fleets took flight between the set eyes and the stubborn mouth. It was like the map of a campaign marked with flags. (248) Ida leaves the encounter looking “a little flushed, a little haughty sailing down the street” (249; italics added); and later, after her defeat of Pinkie is complete, she is described as resembling “a figurehead of Victory,” a comparison which not only confirms her triumph but also recalls the famous warship Victory, aboard which Lord Nelson led the defeat of Napoleon’s naval forces at the Battle of Trafalgar. (Even Greene’s choice of Nelson Place as the site of Rose’s miserable home would seem to echo the Napoleonic theme. Greene has written that a real Nelson Place did exist in Brighton, but even so the choice of one such location over another may have been influenced by—or may have influenced—his use of allusions to Napoleon.) Pinkie’s “Napoleonic” ambition links him also with Louis Napoleon, or Napoleon III, the “little Napoleon” whose dream of restoring his uncle’s empire led finally to humiliating defeat and capture. Largely successful as an administrator of France’s internal affairs, Napoleon III attempted to expand the power and influence of the Second Empire through a militant foreign policy. Successful at first against Russia (in the Crimean War) and Italy, he failed seriously in ventures against Mexico and Austria and, in 1870, against Prussia, who defeated the French soundly at the Battle of Sedan. While Napoleon remained in captivity after Sedan, his government at home was overthrown;


consequently, upon his release in 1871 he went into exile in England, where he stayed for a time in Brighton with wife Eugénie. In the novel Greene makes him a one-time resident of the fictional Cosmopolitan Hotel, now the home of Pinkie’s oily arch-rival, Colleoni. Pinkie, on his first visit there, is fascinated by the elegant arm-chairs and couches stamped with “Napoleonic crowns” and adorned with gold and silver thread. “Napoleon the Third used to have this room,” Colleoni tells him, “and Eugénie.” But Colleoni relishes no irony and knows little history in this case; when Pinkie asks who Eugénie was, Colleoni replies, “Oh, one of those foreign polonies” (77). Pinkie’s own dim perception of a connection between himself and Napoleon III turns not upon historical knowledge but upon ambition. He wants the luxurious trappings of power and authority, and these in turn he associates with heroic conquest. The pervasive imagery of conquest extends even to the boy’s attitude toward sexuality, an attitude vividly conveyed in the scene in which he contemplates with “scared lust” the prospect of a brief sexual encounter—for him, an initiation—with Spicer’s girlfriend, Sylvie. For Pinkie the occasion foreshadows his forthcoming marriage to Rose: He put his hand on her thigh with a kind of horror: Rose and he: forty-eight hours after Prewitt had arranged things: alone in God knows what apartment—what then, what then? He knew the traditional actions as a man may know the principles of gunnery in chalk on a blackboard, but to translate the knowledge to action, to the smashed village and the ravaged woman, one needed help from the nerves. (164–65) Pinkie knows that if he joins Sylvie in the back seat of the Lancia he will compound his own prior sins of murder and betrayal with the shared evil of Sylvie’s lust and infidelity; moreover, she represents the spoils of victory—of his murder of Spicer. Yet the ultimate victim of his strategy is of course Rose, and Pinkie senses, as he looks toward the secular marriage that will place both Rose and himself in mortal sin, that the power to corrupt her soul along with his own is greater and more profound than the power to murder:

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He was conscious for a moment of his enormous ambitions under the shadow of the hideous and commonplace act: the suite at the Cosmopolitan, the gold cigar-lighter, chairs stamped with crowns for a foreigner called Eugeen. Hale [his murder victim] dropped out of sight, like a stone thrown over a cliff; he was at the beginning of a long polished parquet walk, there were busts of great men and the sound of cheering, Mr. Colleoni bowed like a shopwalker, stepping backward, an army of razors was at his back: a conqueror. Hooves drummed along the straight and a loud-speaker announced the winner: music was playing. His breast ached with the effort to enclose the whole world. (166) The tone of the passage approaches the mock-heroic, for the reader knows that Pinkie’s ambition “to enclose the whole world” is both childish in its absurdity and tawdry in its few specific aims. Pinkie would most probably be quite content to take over the world of Napoleon III’s heir-apparent in Brighton, Colleoni. Furthermore, the scene concludes ironically with Pinkie’s turning away in fear and disgust from the prospect of the encounter: “Marry, he thought, hell, no; I’d rather hang” (167). Pinkie’s murder of Spicer, the loyal gang member he no longer trusts, is an act of desperation which grows out of his own earlier failure as “Napoleonic” strategist. His initial plan is to lead Spicer to the Brighton racetrack to be killed by Colleoni’s men. When, on that occasion, the unsuspecting Spicer places a bet on the four o’clock race, the result reveals still more of the author’s allusive technique. The winning horse, “Black Boy,” is Ida’s horse; her winnings will enable her to remain in Brighton long enough to pursue Pinkie to his death. The second horse, “Momento Mori,” is Spicer’s—unknown to him, an omen of death. The third horse, “General Burgoyne,” calls to mind the failed master plan of the British general who attempted to divide and conquer the American colonies with a three-pronged attack on Albany, N.Y. His object was to separate New England from the other colonies, and his initial success at Fort Ticonderoga made him confident of victory. The other “prongs” failed to materialize according to plan, however;


Burgoyne was consequently defeated at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, and his entire campaign was lost. The story of still another figure of enormous ambition and scheming is recalled, indirectly and humorously, in Brighton Rock through the presence of Ida’s friend Clarence, the “old ghost” who once seduced her by pretending to be fatally ill. Clarence appears only twice in the novel—once before Ida learns of Hale’s death, and once at the end after she has carried out her scheme of vengeance. On both occasions she addresses him as “ghost,” and both times he sits in Heneky’s next to a wine barrel—a humorous allusion to the Duke of Clarence, victim of the murderous schemes of Shakespeare’s Richard III and best known for his legendary death by drowning in a butt of Malmsey wine. The ghost of Clarence appears to Richard shortly before the latter’s death on Bosworth Field: “To-morrow in battle think on me,” says the ghost, “And fall thy edgeless sword: despair and die” (V. iii. 134–45). Richard III is another figure whose careful strategies lead to temporary victory and then ultimate defeat, specifically a military defeat. Greene’s protagonist shares with him his scheming, his lack of conscience regarding the act of murder, and notably his hypocritical wooing of a young woman (Anne in the play, Rose in the novel) he does not love but plans to murder. Greene’s use of the ironic allusions to the Napoleons and General Burgoyne, together with his wryly humorous placing of the “ghost” Clarence by the wine barrel early and late in Brighton Rock, suggests a narrative strategy in which texture is enriched and character deepened through the ironic humor shared by the narrator and his reader but not by any character except the lawyer Prewitt, whose literary bent expresses itself through allusions, primarily to Shakespeare and Marlowe, that are lost upon Pinkie. Although Prewitt does not speak of military campaigns except in the brief instance mentioned earlier, he nevertheless contributes to the allusive pattern whereby the failure of Pinkie’s strategies and ambitions is foreshadowed. Meeting Pinkie and Rose at the registry office where they will be married, Prewitt picks up a rose from the tiled floor and quotes—“promptly” and “inaccurately”—“Roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew” (207). Greene’s deliberateness, first in providing his character with this jumbled allusion, and second in labeling it inaccurate, speaks

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for itself. The first half of Prewitt’s line comes from Browning’s poem “The Patriot,” in which the speaker—a proud figure who, like Icarus, “leaped at the sun” and fell—recalls his lost glory as a political leader: a year earlier he had ridden down a rosestrewn pathway through cheering crowds, amid waving banners and ringing bells; today he rides to his execution. The second half of Prewitt’s line, from Arnold’s “Requiescat,” provides a note of funereal gloom and points to the death of a lover—a fitting note for the wedding that is to follow. Significantly, this allusion appears only a few lines after Pinkie, contemplating his and Rose’s “corruption” through the coming secular marriage, is “filled with awe at his own powers.” Pinkie’s confidence at the moment has been fed, of course, by the ease of his earlier triumph in persuading Rose to accept his offer of marriage: it is by this strategy that he intends to protect himself from the only possible testimony that could incriminate him in the murder of Fred Hale. Yet even the moment of his successful marriage proposal is undercut by the author’s technique of ironic allusion: in the brief proposal scene the narrator twice mentions a “badly foxed steel engraving of Van Tromp’s Victory” (127) that hangs in Rose’s room; she looks “from Van Tromp’s Victory to the two looking-glasses” (128) before accepting Pinkie’s offer. Greene’s allusion to the Dutch Admiral Tromp could concern any of several occasions celebrated by Dutch and English painters and engravers. The context of the allusion, however, suggests that he may have had in mind Tromp’s temporary victory over the English at the outset of the first Anglo-Dutch naval war in 1652. According to legend—almost certainly untrue—Tromp boasted of his victory by sailing the Channel with a broom at his masthead, thus signifying that he had swept the Channel clear of English forces. Tromp’s victory was short-lived, however; he lost the next battle and, a few months afterward, was killed in the battle of Terheijde in 1653. If indeed Greene had this occasion in mind, the connection between Tromp’s temporary victory and Pinkie’s seems clear enough. Pinkie believes he has saved himself by arranging a marriage that in fact will lead to his defeat and death. Greene emphasizes this ironic parallel by linking the figurative blindness of Rose—who awaits Pinkie’s kiss, after his proposal, “like a blind girl,” and who moves him to a rare moment of pity


at the sight of her “blind lost face” (128)—with the blind band Pinkie encounters in the streets of Brighton at the beginning of the next chapter (and on the very next page of the text). The band’s plaintive music is “like a voice prophesying sorrow at the moment of victory” (129). There remains at least one military figure in the allusive background of Brighton Rock whose name is associated with neither death nor defeat. Appropriately he is Bartolomeo Colleoni, the namesake of Pinkie’s arch-rival in the Brighton underworld. The historical Colleoni was an outstandingly successful Venetian general, a master of field artillery tactics who has been called the greatest military strategist of fifteenthcentury Italy. He retired, undefeated, to a prosperous life. For Greene’s Colleoni, the prospects are similarly good; he appears firmly ensconced in the luxuries of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where his feigned respectability is no longer threatened by Pinkie or the police. Colleoni, Tromp, Burgoyne, Richard III less directly, and the two Napoleons more directly—all of these historical and literary figures contribute to the ironic portrait of Pinkie, the Napoleonic strategist whose satanic determination to rule in the underworld rather than serve God is mocked by the novel’s allusive structure, which foreshadows his inevitable failure as it highlights the absurd disproportion between his vast ambition and the limited means and tawdry goals to which it is attached. Greene’s method in this regard could hardly be more fitting for the period of the late thirties, that troubled decade in which Europe saw the rise of a new dictator of such monstrous evil that even Pinkie quickly pales by comparison. Generations to come would compare this man with the anti-Christ, and he would persistently regard himself as a modern Napoleon. The menacing cloud of Nazism aside, Greene’s use of the Napoleonic theme can be traced to likely sources mentioned in the diaries. Napoleon III appears in a seance in Confessions of a Medium, one of the books Greene read in his investigation of spiritualism, and he is a subject of “Prince HohenstielSchwangau,” a dramatic monologue by Browning, whose importance for Greene has already been discussed. Of more importance is Napoleon Bonaparte. In this regard Pinkie Brown’s precursor is not Raven but Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, the youthful murderer who saw Napoleon as the personification

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of the superman and formed his own murderous ambitions as part of an attempt to become like Napoleon. Although neither the 1932–33 diaries nor the courtship letters mention Greene’s reading of Crime and Punishment, evidence exists to show that the great Russian author and the Napoleonic theme touched upon his imagination during the period. Greene saw the film The Murder of Karamazov in June 1932 (it was the film in which Anna Sten inspired him), and shortly afterward he read E.Carr’s Life of Dostoevsky. For The Spectator of 13 March 1936 (about six months before beginning the novel) he reviewed Crime et Châtiment, a French version of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, commenting that “the theme of the book” is stated in the film when the magistrate Porphyrius “suggested to Raskolnikov that by confessing he would renounce his crazy egotistic Napoleonic fetish, which had proved in the act of murder so bestial, and discover ‘the ordinary current of life’” (Pleasure Dome 58). One week later he reviewed an American film version of the same novel, damning it with a voice similar to that of the narrator in Brighton Rock when describing Ida Arnold: whereas the French film had “at least something of Dostoievsky’s religious and unhappy mind,” Greene writes, the American one “is vulgar as only the great new World can be vulgar, with the vulgarity of the completely unreligious, of sentimental idealism, of pitch-pine ethics, with the hollow optimism about human nature, of a salesman who has never failed to sell his canned beans” (61). Pinkie’s Napoleonic ambition, his story which begins with a first, calculated murder and then mingles suspense with salvation as the forces of justice (embodied in Ida Arnold rather than the police) draw near, and his potential for redemption through the love of a Catholic girl are strongly reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s great novel. CHARACTERS AND NAMES Greene’s own testimony shows repeatedly how his imagination responded to current or past reading, or to a film, as well as to observation. Passages from his favorite poems provided the vocabulary through which he interpreted his own feelings and his situation and declared his love. The diaries, as we have seen, recorded memorable passages from an amazing variety of


sources, germs of ideas that were stored up for future use— often as epigraphs, as in the case of Stamboul Train, England Made Me, and It’s a Battlefield. In the case of Brighton Rock, it appears that his interest in the Napoleons—both the historical figures and the Napoleon of Raskolnikov’s imagination—was also fermenting in Greene’s creative mind, waiting for a local habitation and a name. The habitation presented itself to Greene through the widely publicized racetrack wars in Brighton in the mid-thirties. His interest in these matters has been extensively documented by Norman Sherry, who points out that the kidnapping of Hale was based upon an actual kidnapping that occurred in Brighton in April 1928; the victim, Ernest Friend Smith, was beaten and robbed and later died of his injuries (1:634). More important, the idea of basing a novel on the race gang feud came from the Lewes Assize cases in the early 1930s, and the scene in Brighton Rock in which Pinkie and Spicer are attacked at the race course by Colleoni’s men was inspired by an incident, reported in the Brighton Argus on 29 July 1936, and in the London newspapers, in which a bookmaker and his clerk were attacked by sixteen men. As Sherry explains, this event certainly caught Greene’s eye. He went to Brighton only a few days later (August 4) to see the track and related low-life haunts at first hand. The leader of the attacking gang, Spinks, would provide inspiration for the occupation of Greene’s protagonist; in a fittingly ironic context, Greene would invest him with remnants of the kind of Christian tragedy familiar to readers of Dostoevsky. Sherry’s argument that Pinkie’s nemesis Ida Arnold is drawn from the popular Hollywood star Mae West (1:635) is convincing yet seem incomplete. The following paragraphs will suggest, first, why this is so, and second, why a careful examination of the literary background of Brighton Rock aids in the understanding of its genesis and meaning and is essential to a grasp of its richness and complexity. To establish the derivation of Ida from Mae West, Sherry points to the review of Klondike Annie in which Greene writes that West evokes in that film the atmosphere of smoky pubs complete with advertisements for Guinness, the beverage with which Ida is frequently associated (1:635). Compelling as this argument may be, I believe that at least part of Ida’s portrait

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was derived from an earlier source: Clifford Bax’s Pretty Witty Nell, a biography of Nell Gwyn reviewed by Greene for The Spectator in December 1932. Greene’s review criticizes Pretty Witty Nell as padded and sometimes inaccurate but credits Bax with “two contributions to our knowledge of Nell Gwyn.” One of these—the theory that she died from syphilis—Greene finds unsurprising and therefore negligible. The other, he writes, “is the horoscope one on which [Bax] bases her character, to the unbeliever with comic effect…” (898). What especially amused Greene was Bax’s elaborate use of Nell Gwyn’s horoscope (for 2 February 1650) to interpret her character as highly sexed but essentially goodhearted: Jupiter in Scorpio (a sexual sign) and in trine to Venus and the Moon would make her ardent, loving, and richly sexed, but the position of the Moon in Cancer (the sign of the mother and the home) supports another of my earliest impressions: namely, that Nell Gwyn, though destiny made her a courtesan, was by nature maternal. (242) As an orange-girl in the theatre, Nell was, according to Bax, “comparable to barmaids in the Victorian period” and was “not a natural wanton, but…so easy going as to be easily led.” She was a rare type which often misses marriage by giving too readily. It does so because, being fundamentally maternal, it looks upon men, not as would-be clever simpletons from whom money and marriage is to be extracted, but as wilful and lovable children who must be comforted at any cost. She might, therefore, have passed from man to man, adored and deserted by all of them and, finally, remembered by all of them with tenderness and gratitude. (43) Amusing as it may have been to Greene, this horoscopic view of Nell seems to have lingered in his mind long enough to make its way into the portrait of Ida, whose character displays many of the qualities Bax attributes to Nell. Ida is not a Victorian, of course, but she is a barmaid, and she certainly is “easily led”: she confesses to Hale that she was once seduced by a man who


pretended to be dying. Ida too has “missed marriage,” at least in the sense that her one marriage (to a man named Tom who does not appear in the novel) has failed. And she has passed “from man to man” and is remembered fondly by at least two of those men, as her conversation with Clarence in Chapter Three of Part One reveals: “Why, I don’t even know how you live or how many husbands you’ve had.” “Oh, there’s only been one Tom,” Ida said. “There’s been more than Tom in your life.” “You ought to know,” Ida said. “Give me a glass of Ruby,” the sombre man said. “I was just thinking when you came in, Ida, why shouldn’t we two come together again?” “You and Tom always want to start again,” Ida said. “Why don’t you keep tight hold when you’ve got a girl?” (29) Greene does not provide a horoscope to account for the abundant sexuality that leads Ida from man to man, but he does invest in her a comparable interest in the occult: Ida believes in ghosts, consults the ouija board in pursuit of the truth about Hale’s death, and offers a palmist’s explanation of her casual sexual morality: “‘I’m not a Puritan, mind. I’ve done a thing or two in my time—that’s natural. Why,’ she said, extending towards [Rose] her plump and patronising paw, ‘it’s in my hand: the girdle of Venus’” (122). One could say of Ida, as Bax does of Nell, that she “took the sexual relationship as a matter of course” (46). More important, however, is that Ida displays the “fundamentally maternal” quality which Bax sees as central to Nell Gwyn’s character (but which Greene, in his film review cited above, does not ascribe to Mae West). None of this is intended to suggest that Mae West was not an important source for the creation of Ida. To the contrary, Ida’s associations with “ribald luxury,” her appearance surrounded by men in saloon bars, and much of the humor derived from her character almost certainly owe a great deal to the Hollywood star. My point is rather that the earlier source is too important to be neglected.

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BRIGHTON ROCK AS A FAUSTIAN NOVEL When asked by Marie-Francoise Allain whether he did not consider his character Pinkie in Brighton Rock to be “the very incarnation of evil,” Graham Greene replied: I tried, as a sort of intellectual exercise, to present the reader with a character whom he could accept as worthy of hell. But in the end, you remember, I introduced the possibility that he might have been saved “between the stirrup and the ground.” I wanted to instill in the reader’s mind a fundamental doubt of hell. (148) Readers of the novel are likely to be surprised by this expression of doubt, for there is probably no work of Greene’s that suggests the reality of hell more forcefully than Brighton Rock does. Pinkie’s admission to Rose that he believes in hell but not in heaven establishes a kind of spiritual geography in the novel, and his defiant “Credo in unum Satanum,” together with his territorial ambitions in Brighton, aligns him with Milton’s Satan as a character who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Furthermore, the Catholic characters think and talk of hell a good deal: Rose speculates that Ida “couldn’t burn if she tried,” and Pinkie thinks just before his wedding day that to marry would be worse than to be hanged. The corrosive vitriol which Pinkie carries in his pocket and which explodes in his face and causes him to leap to his death seems to prefigure the tormenting flames of hell itself; yet Pinkie’s end was always implicit in his beginning—in the ruined slum whose ironic name “Paradise Piece” evokes the condition of man in the fallen world: “Hell lay about him in his infancy.” In short, the idea of hell is so powerful and vivid in Brighton Rock that one might seriously question whether the novel is successful in instilling that “fundamental doubt” which Greene wanted the reader to experience. My concern here, however, is not with the question of Greene’s personal belief but rather with what his idea of Brighton Rock as an “intellectual exercise” suggests about the method of its composition—specifically with Greene’s use of literary sources and allusions appropriate to his design of


presenting the reader “with a character whom he could accept as worthy of hell.” It is widely known that Greene began Brighton Rock as a detective story and changed direction during the writing. Although his conversion to Catholicism had taken place ten years earlier, his earlier novels, even those with serious themes, had subordinated religious ideas to other concerns. What was it that brought about the change in direction and led Greene into the creation of an “intellectual exercise” in which the themes of salvation and damnation are memorably fused with conventions of crime melodrama? Only Greene himself could have answered the question conclusively, and he was predictably reticent about the subject. But certain influences can be enumerated as partial explanation. That the novel, like the works of so many writers of the period, was strongly affected by The Waste Land has been demonstrated at length by other critics such as Fred Crawford, discussed in an earlier chapter here, and Robert O. Evans. And, as Philip Stratford has pointed out, Greene had come increasingly to believe that the serious writer needed a strong spiritual dimension, a “religious sense” to give depth and meaning to his work. He had found that dimension in the novels of Henry James and in Jacobean drama, and he had found in Eliot’s critical writings a confirmation of his own belief in its necessity (127–32). Henry James was the subject of essays Greene published in 1933 and 1936 that point rather directly toward Brighton Rock. Greene’s reading of James tends to be highly personal and idiosyncratic, perhaps because he found in the Old Master a world view that corresponded to his own. He said, again in the interview with Allain, that his experience of life in boarding school made him “ready to believe in the existence of evil,” and as most students of Greene are aware, he claimed to have found in Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan an image of evil that confirmed many of his own attitudes. But Bowen was not a great writer to be read and reread and imitated. James was, and Greene was an avid reader of James’s fiction and criticism throughout his life. In the 1936 essay on James, he argued that “the ruling fantasy which drove [James] to write” was “a sense of evil almost religious in intensity.” James’s greatness, according to Greene, lay in his determination to render even evil “the highest kind of justice”:

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[I]t is in the final justice of his pity, the completeness of an analysis which enabled him to pity the most shabby, the most corrupt, of his human actors, that he ranks with the greatest of creative writers. He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry. (34) Putting aside the question of the greatness of Brighton Rock, or even of Greene himself, it is clear, as Stratford has observed, that the novel is one of several in which Greene achieved that quality of pity which he attributed to James (217). Critical interpretations of Brighton Rock have often linked Pinkie Brown’s character with T.S.Eliot’s memorable lines from the essay on Baudelaire: It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. These lines were quoted by Greene in his 1933 essay “Henry James: The Religious Aspect,” where he adds that “This worst cannot be said of James’s characters: both Densher and the Prince have on their faces the flush of the flames” (41). Greene’s readers probably see that flush more clearly on the face of Pinkie in Brighton Rock than on that of any of Greene’s other characters. And there are numerous additional ways in which the essays on James seem to point toward Brighton Rock. The process by which the miserable experiences of slumbred childhood led Pinkie to believe in hell but not in heaven has a curious analogue in Greene’s comment, in 1933, on James’s religion: “His religion was always a mirror of his experience. Experience taught him to believe in supernatural evil, but not in supernatural good” (43). Finally, readers who are disturbed by the apparent bleakness of Brighton Rock might keep in mind Greene’s statement in 1936 that the novels of James “are only saved from the deepest cynicism by the religious sense…” (41). Greene contended that the “religious sense” disappeared from the English novel with the death of Henry James. It seems that in Brighton Rock—perhaps after he had already begun the novel—Greene set out to restore that loss through his own work.


If Greene’s view of Henry James contributed heavily to his sense of purpose in the “intellectual exercise” of Brighton Rock, there remained the immediate question of the concrete means by which that purpose could be achieved. Here again he made significant use of literary sources. Greene, of course, is a wonderfully inventive storyteller, and any discussion of his use of literary sources should stress that he is never slavishly imitative but is often cleverly allusive, using quotations, echoes, images, and parallels—often ironically—to create complex meanings. Brighton Rock is productive territory for source hunters, and many of the important allusions to Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Browning, Arnold, Marlowe, and most importantly T.S.Eliot have been noted elsewhere. The source which has often been mentioned but not discussed adequately is the Ford, Dekker, and Rowley play The Witch of Edmonton (1623), which provided the epigraph to Brighton Rock: “This were a fine reign, /To do ill and not hear of it again.” Critics have remarked that the epigraph announces the revenge motive common to both the play and Greene’s novel, and that the play involves a young man who marries a girl and then murders her, as Pinkie plans to do with Rose in Brighton Rock. Furthermore, the distich of The Witch of Edmonton could almost be taken as a brief description of the action of Brighton Rock: “Forc’d marriage, murder; murder blood requires, / Reproach, revenge; revenge hell’s help desires.” Graham Greene’s familiarity with The Witch of Edmonton may have had a long history; certainly his biography of Rochester and his brief study British Dramatists (1943) demonstrate his extensive knowledge of seventeenth century English literature. Nevertheless, it seems likely that his use of The Witch of Edmonton as a source for Brighton Rock, which he was planning in the fall of 1936, may have been influenced by the revival of that play at the Old Vic in London in December 1936. Greene was in London at the time, could hardly have been unaware of the revival, and may well have seen the play. The comments of the reviewer for The Times suggest interesting ways in which the play has important qualities in common with that earlier-mentioned ability of Henry James to render “the highest kind of justice” and pity to shabby and corrupt characters:

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It is stamped with sympathy for the outcast and suffering and is able to see always two sides of the human picture, even when the picture is of a villain or a witch…it is probably better to think of the play as a plainly melodramatic morality which here and there has given Dekker an opportunity to say that the wicked are not always as guilty as the fortunate suggest but are sometimes driven to a second wrong by the very remorse that arises from the first. (9 December 1936) Pinkie in Brighton Rock is driven to a “second wrong” (second murder) by expediency, not remorse; but in all other respects the reviewer’s comments could apply aptly enough to Greene’s treatment of character in the novel. The prominent revenge motive in The Witch of Edmonton arises from two rather different stories. One of these traces events in the life of Mother Sawyer, an old woman who is unjustly persecuted as a witch until she turns to real witchcraft in order to gain revenge against her tormentors. She conjures the devil, who appears, as in Goethe’s Faust, as a black dog. The Dog demands that she sell her soul to him and seal the pact with a blood covenant reminiscent of the one Mephistopheles demands of Marlowe’s Faustus. Once loose in the world, the Dog works evil not only against Mother Sawyer and her enemies but against others as well, providing the dramatic link between her story and that of Frank Thorney. Frank, who has tried to escape disinheritance by keeping his marriage to Winnifrede a secret from his father, finds himself trapped in an arranged marriage to Susan Carter, whom he does not love. He contemplates possible means of escape from his dilemma but takes no action until the black Dog rubs against him; then he murders Susan and subsequently tries to place the blame on the innocent Warbeck. The cycle of murder and revenge are thus clearly depicted as the devil’s work: Somerton, who loves Susan, is reported willing to sell his soul in order to get revenge against Warbeck. But the same black Dog that instigates the murder eventually points the way to the discovery of Frank’s guilt. Greene’s protagonist has characteristics in common with both Frank Thorney and Mother Sawyer. Like Frank, Pinkie marries a girl he does not love and then plots her death; also


like Frank, who is led into “deeper mischief” than he intended, Pinkie feels “as if he were being driven too far down a road he only wanted to travel a certain distance.” But Pinkie’s more important kinship is with Mother Sawyer, the Faustian character who sells her soul for revenge against her enemies. Pinkie commits his first murder to avenge the death of Kite, his gang-leader and spiritual father. Yet it is clear that Pinkie’s whole life—his turning to crime, his rejection of the church, his hatred of women and pleasure—is an act of revenge against the world that has afforded him nothing but misery and unhappiness: [A] prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape— anywhere—for anyone? It was worth murdering a world. (92) Ironically, these same emotions might have led Pinkie in a different direction. Once he was a choir boy who thought of becoming a priest—probably for the seclusion and privacy of the celibate life. Now he keeps life at bay with a razor blade. Even so, fragments of the liturgy intrude regularly into his thoughts, and beneath a vicious and violent exterior he preserves a paradoxical innocence, neither smoking nor drinking nor consorting with women. He never ceases to think of the possibility of repentance and the sacraments. “Corruptio optimi est pessimas” the old priest says to Rose after Pinkie’s death; the worst is corruption of the best. The same judgment could be made of Marlowe’s Faustus, and it seems clear that Pinkie’s decision to murder Fred Hale for revenge is a Faustian pursuit of power and knowledge. The power Pinkie pursues is “Napoleonic” power, as discussed earlier, to supplant Colleoni as ruler of the Brighton underworld, to be a conqueror. The Faustian knowledge Pinkie discovers is a metaphysical fusion of the spiritual and the sexual attained through his relationship with Rose. Greene emphasizes this double meaning by using know in its Biblical as well as its popular sense when Pinkie, Dallow, and Cubitt

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discuss Pinkie’s forthcoming marriage and Pinkie accidentally reveals that he has murdered Spicer: “You think you know things.” All the Boy’s hatred was in the word “know” and his repulsion: he knew—like Prewitt knew after twenty-five years at the game. “You don’t know everything.” He tried to inject himself with pride, but all the time his eyes went back to the humiliation…. You could know everything there was in the world and yet if you were ignorant of that one dirty scramble you knew nothing. (149) The marriage holds out the prospect of not only carnal knowledge but also the darker knowledge of the most profound corruption: the corruption of another soul. Pinkie and Rose plan to enter a permanent state of mortal sin through their secular marriage. Rose cannot make confession that morning, and Pinkie exults in the knowledge of his role as evil seducer: He had a sense now that the murders of Hale and Spicer were trivial acts, a boy’s game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led up to this—this corruption. He was filled with awe at his own powers. “We’d better be moving,” he said and touched her arm with next to tenderness. As once before he had a sense of needing her. (167) That “once before” is also part of Pinkie’s journey into knowledge, the discovery that evil needs goodness to corrupt: “What was most evil in him needed her; it couldn’t get along without her goodness…. She was good, he’d discovered that, and he was damned: they were made for each other” (126). Pinkie may be unlearned, but he understands intuitively both the consequences of this knowledge and the Faustian penalty it entails: “his temporal safety for two immortalities of pain.” His view of the wedding contract recalls the blood-sealed contracts of Faustus and Mother Sawyer and identifies Pinkie himself as at least potentially a tragic character: [I]n the good old days, it occurred to him, you signed covenants like this in your blood…. He had no doubt


whatever that this was mortal sin, and he was filled with a kind of gloomy hilarity and pride. He saw himself now as a full grown man for whom the angels wept. (169) Toward the end of the novel Pinkie’s evil counsellor, the lawyer Prewitt, affirms the boy’s Faustian role by quoting to him the appropriate lines of Marlowe’s Mephistopheles: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” The allusion is insistent, since Prewitt repeats it a few lines later. It offers no discovery, however, to Pinkie, who realizes as much shortly after the consummation of his marriage: “This was hell then; it wasn’t anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room” (182). Perhaps Pinkie has realized the truth discovered by Marlowe’s Faustus: that to cut oneself off from God is to be in hell. But Greene’s literary approach to hell extends beyond such similarities in plot, character, and theme and into the patterns of imagery in the novel as well. In Goethe’s Faust and in The Witch of Edmonton the reality of evil, indeed the very presence of Satan in the world, is embodied in the black dog. Greene alludes to that same presence by introducing the superstition about black dogs into the novel and by using repeated images of dogs to suggest the pervasiveness of that evil in the world. When Ida Arnold places her bet on Black Boy in the four o’clock at the Brighton racecourse, the bookie Tate records it incorrectly, as Ida points out: “You’ve written Black Dog.” “Black Dog…. What was I thinking of. Black Dog, indeed.” “That means Care,” Ida said. “Well,” he barked with unconvincing geniality, “we’ve always something to worry about.” (70) Greene’s introduction of the image of the black dog here seems casual, but a brief look at the pervasiveness of dog images in the novel suggests otherwise. Ida, for example, speaks of an engagement at the Dirty Dog (10), the gramophone plays a song about a watchdog which “talks of our love” (51), Dallow grins “like a large friendly dog” (53), and Colleoni, whose name sounds doggish, has “something a little doggish” in his eyes (65). When Pinkie enters the lobby of Colleoni’s hotel, a “little

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bitch sniff[s] at him and talk[s] him over with another little bitch on the settee,” but when Colleoni approaches they stop talking (61). Ida extends a “plump and patronizing paw” to Rose, then “barks” at her to be sensible and abandon Pinkie. Tate “barks” at Ida, and Dallow threatens to shut Judy up “if she barks” (122–23). Interviewed at the police station, Pinkie reads notices about “Dog Licenses,” and when Cubitt later discovers that Pinkie will need a marriage license he says, “You dog, you…. You’re a young one at the game” (116). Later, an unhappy Cubitt hears boats in the channel blowing their sirens “like dogs at night waking each other” (155), and when Ida offers him twenty pounds for information about Pinkie, he watches her indifferently, “as if he had lost his grip on thought as you loose a dog’s lead…” (162). On their wedding day Pinkie and Rose watch a romantic film in which the prelude to a sexual encounter foreshadows their own that night. The film’s music—“I know in my heart you’re divine”—makes love sound heavenly, but to Pinkie it is hellish: “It was the commonest game under the sun—why be scared at what dogs did in the streets?” (179). To marry, he thinks, is “like ordure on the hands” (101). And Dallow, hearing Pinkie’s explanation of how he once wanted to become a priest, laughs and steps into dog’s ordure. Near the end of the novel, when Pinkie and Rose stop at a Peacehaven hotel enroute to their rendezvous with death, Pinkie encounters an old schoolmate whose appearance brings back much of the bitterness and hostility of his boyhood. Greene writes: “[T]hey bristled like dogs at the sight of each other” (229). In the meantime, music in the lounge wails “upward like a dog over a grave” (231), and a moment later two men enter the lounge and shake “out their moisture like dogs,” then fall silent “scenting the girl in the lounge” (237). The satanic black dog of The Witch of Edmonton brings evil visibly into the world and leads fundamentally good but weak man like Frank Thorney to commit murder. If the play demonstrates how quickly and easily the devil enters the lives of men, that devil nevertheless remains a localized intruder. Greene’s images of dogs have the obvious function of reducing his characters’ motives and actions—particularly those involving love and sexual desire—to a bestial level, a process that


underscores the strong current of naturalism in the novel while it accounts for no small part of the seediness in this memorable version of the author’s ravaged world. Moreover, as allusions to the black dogs of Faust and The Witch of Edmonton these frequent references to dogs suggest not just the reality but the omnipresence of evil in the world. Greene’s literary approach to hell therefore succeeds in creating not only a character whom the reader can believe worthy of hell but also a visible world whose surfaces and textures as well as its spiritual dimension make hell credible.

CHAPTER FIVE Protagonists of the Second Phase

Brighton Rock is most often regarded, and understandably so, as a significant beginning for Greene, for it is his first novel centered around the Catholic themes on which his reputation as a major twentieth-century writer would be built. Yet in another sense Brighton Rock, with its extremes of alienation, cruelty, and blasphemy, its cinematic style and its profuse overlay of allusion and literary parallels, represents the end of a period, the full achievement of the direction in which Greene had taken his first-phase protagonists. No subsequent novel by the author would be quite so rich in simile or so stark in its juxtaposition of good and evil; no ending would be quite so bleak as that in which the widowed Rose goes to her room alone to confront offstage “the worst horror of all”; no protagonist would seem more completely unlike his creator or provide a voice from which such withering blasts against the sanctities of bourgeois existence could be delivered. Pinkie is the last of Greene’s first-phase protagonists; in D., hero of The Confidential Agent (1939), we can see the beginning of the second phase. AGE Jim Baxter, the young narrator of Greene’s final novel The Captain and the Enemy (1988), represents in several respects a return to the narrative of romantic adventure seen in Greene’s earliest novels. His story will be discussed in a later chapter, but he needs mention here as the sole exception to an obvious yet significant generalization about Greene’s second-phase novels: In contrast to the youthful Andrews, for example, or the sophomoric Chant, or the “lost child” figures of Raven, Pinkie,


and Rose, Greene’s protagonists of the second phase are mature men whose age is often close to that of the novelist himself at the time of writing. D., the literary scholar forced by war into the unfamiliar role of “confidential agent,” is the first of these; at forty-five he is older than any of the earlier protagonists and has a much wider experience of life. In his resigned belief that “wherever he was, there was a war” he is akin to Pinkie and especially to Raven, yet his attitude is not an expression of warped psychology but the embittered conclusion of a man who has seen his quiet, cultured life disintegrate in the face of years of civil war. From the outset the text calls attention to his age, as when he finds it difficult to explain to a customs officer why he looks so unlike his three-year-old passport photograph: He said: “It’s an old photograph.” It must have been taken before he went to prison, before his wife was killed, and before the air raid of December 23, when he was buried for fifty-six hours in a cellar. But he could hardly explain all that to the passport officer. (13) Greene usually provides a general rather than a specific indication of his protagonist’s age, but middle-aged weariness is a common denominator among D.’s successors. Maurice Bendrix, who describes himself in the last lines of The End of the Affair as “too old and tired to learn to love,” is a prime example. Eduardo Plarr of The Honorary Consul (1973) is the youngest (mid-thirties), although he shares the center of interest much of the time with the eponymous honorary consul Charlie Fortnum, who is sixty-one. Fortnum, Henry Pulling (about fifty-five) and Maurice Castle (in his sixties), Alfred Jones (thirty years older than his young wife), and Father Quixote are the oldest. Experience as well as age distinguishes the second-from the first-phase characters. One measure of the difference lies in the fact that all of these later characters have a significant past which is not childhood. Another is that the earlier books are about the experience of young people and therefore look toward the future. When their plots have a calamitous outcome, as in the deaths of Andrews, Crane, Anthony Farrant, Raven, and Pinkie, they convey a powerful sense of wasted youth, for the novels bring these young characters to a point where the reader

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can briefly imagine the possibility of a different future for them. But the second-phase novels (excepting the entertainments Loser Takes All and Our Man in Havana) are frequently and sometimes morbidly concerned with the past. Their protagonists contemplate from a middle-aged viewpoint the sadness of a ruined life (D., Rowe, Querry), a failed marriage (Fowler, Scobie), a failure in love (Bendrix, Brown), or a burden of guilt borne in consequence of some past crime or personal failure (Rowe, Fowler, the whisky priest). Just as many of the author’s early short stories centered around unhappy or traumatic childhood events (“I Spy,” “The End of the Party,” and “The Basement Room” are notable), the first-phase novels contain central figures whose inner lives betray effects of suffering in childhood. Raven, Pinkie, and Rose are the most familiar in this regard, but Andrews (brutalized by his father), Anthony Farrant (disciplined harshly by his father and forced to remain in a school he despised), and Conrad Drover (humiliated at school because of his odd name and his intelligence) are similar. In the second phase Arthur Rowe (The Ministry of Fear) represents a remarkable reversal: he, too, is troubled by memory of childhood experience but only because his Edwardian childhood was remarkably tranquil and happy, a sharp contrast to the horrors of present life in wartime London. CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD In many of the second-phase novels the youthful protagonist of the first phase, the protagonist who recalls the unhappiness or trauma of his own childhood is displaced by an older adult who loves and worries about and often loses a child. D., for example, displays this characteristic in two situations clearly representative of two different social levels. He is befriended and assisted by Else Crowle, the fourteen-year-old maid at his hotel, a child-figure emblematic to him of the suffering and deprivation of many young people forced by poverty into a premature involvement in the seedy and violent adult world. He sees her as “preposterously young to have such a complete theoretical knowledge of vice” (50) and realizes that “it was for her kind that he was fighting” (51). Else, in her capacity for affection and self-sacrifice, resembles Rose Wilson; her murder by Marie Mendrill is a catalyst in the plot, for it transforms D.


from a non-violent pacifist to a righteous avenger. Else’s death converts him to a man of action, and his involvement with Rose Cullen similarly changes him, restoring his humanity through her love and through his determination to save her from the disillusionment and cynicism that have characterized her young life. The happiness of their union is qualified, however, by their mutual awareness of the probable shortness of his life. In the emergence of the older protagonist who displays passionate concern for a child or a child-woman figure, the early second-phase novels display the flip-side of the novelist’s preoccupation seen in the last three works of the first phase. Anthony Farrant’s makeshift existence, his lack of a future, is traced wistfully to his childhood; Raven and Pinkie emerge from unspeakably brutal childhood into a terror of life unsurpassed in Greene’s writing. The Confidential Agent, as I have suggested, views comparably horrible conditions but does so from the point of view of a mature character whose perspective is therefore more directly identified with the author’s, or at least with that of the adult Greene who sympathizes rather than the child who suffered. In a comparable reversal, the saintly woman (Elizabeth, Rose, Eulelia) who might redeem the protagonist is replaced by the child-woman who needs to be saved by him. In The Power and the Glory (1940), which Greene was writing at the same time he worked on Agent, both perspectives may be seen. The lieutenant is like a first-phase protagonist moved slightly toward the periphery of the action. He is young, he is embittered over his own suffering as a child (attributed to poverty but not otherwise made specific), and he rebels against God by destroying the church and its priests. He is an avowed atheist, yet the reader suspects that the lieutenant’s disbelief is actually a hatred of God and a determination to gain revenge. In any case his action, however terrible, is unlike Pinkie’s an attempt to eliminate suffering, to change the world so that future children will not suffer as he did. The novel’s dominant perspective is that of its protagonist, the whisky priest, who belongs clearly to the second phase. The priest is older, more experienced than the lieutenant and is comparable to D. in that his years of comfortable service as a well-fed, prosperous priest have given way to a desperate struggle for survival in a dangerous and violent military state.


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Also like D., he focuses much of his attention on his love of children—his daughter Brigitta and the doomed Coral Fellows, who “ministers” to him as Else does to D. His fear for his own daughter is expressed in terms markedly similar to D.’s alarm over Else’s premature knowledge of vice: He was appalled again by her maturity, as she whipped up a smile from a large and varied stock…. The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit. She was without protection—she had no grace, no charm to plead for her; his heart was shaken by the conviction of loss. (81) The apparent corruption of Brigitta intensifies the priest’s longing to preserve the innocence of his figurative “good” daughter Coral, who lost her faith at age ten and seems to possess already an adult wisdom greatly superior to her mother’s. Greene gives a universal dimension to the priest’s sorrow over the disappearance of Coral (he rightly suspects, but does not know, that she is dead) by quoting lines from the poem he finds among the materials for her correspondence course— Thomas Campbell’s “Lord Ullin’s Daughter”: “Come back! Come back!” he cried in grief Across the stormy water: “And I’ll forgive your Highland chief— My daughter, O my daughter!” (147) A comparison of the priest’s attitude toward Brigitta with Raven’s toward Anne Crowder illustrates the reversal of perspectives mentioned above: whereas for Raven the world would be redeemed if he could believe that Anne genuinely cared for him, for the priest not even the risk of losing heaven can prevent his love for his daughter. The mature protagonist’s longing to protect a child-woman continues in The Ministry of Fear, where the Austrian immigrant Anna Hilfe satisfies Arthur Rowe’s need to link his characteristic emotion of pity with an object of romantic affection. Much of the novel is a sustained lament for the lost peaceful Edwardian childhood of Rowe himself, before war had changed life forever, before Rowe had become the murderer of his


own wife. In a dream he confesses this crime to his mother, who replies repeatedly that her son would never harm anyone. Not surprisingly, considering the element of self-pity in these persistent memories of his childhood, Rowe has consciously and habitually focused his pity upon familiar characters from Dickens, the preeminent English novelist of childhood. But the catastrophe of war has disrupted the normal channels through which pity is discharged: “He missed David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop; he could no longer direct his sense of pity towards the fictitious sufferings of little Nell—it roamed around and saw too many objects—too many rats that needed to be killed. And he was one of them” (87–88). The suicidal moment of this reflection is the nadir of Rowe’s emotional life in the novel. Shortly afterward he encounters Anna, whom he has met before but has not recognized as a union of the child with the woman to be loved. Now he sees differently: It was really his first opportunity to take her in. Very small and thin, she looked too young for all the things she must have seen, and now taken out of the office frame she no longer looked efficient—as though efficiency were an intuitive game she could only play with adult properties, a desk, a telephone, a black suit. Without them she looked just decorative and breakable, but he knew that life hadn’t been able to break her. All it had done was to put a few wrinkles round eyes as straightforward as a child’s. (97– 98) Their reunion on the last pages of the novel sustains this duality in Anna. Rowe regards her as an adult woman: The door was open as he had left it, and it occurred to him almost as a hope that perhaps she had run out into the raid and been lost for ever. If one loved a woman one couldn’t hope that she would be tied to a murderer for the rest of her days. (220) But the imagery and attendant emotion stress her childlike quality:


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She lay on the bed face downwards with her fists clenched. He said “Anna.” She turned her head on the pillow; she had been crying, and her face looked as despairing as a child’s. He felt an enormous love for her, enormous tenderness, the need to protect her at any cost…. He had got to give her what she wanted…. (220–21) The theme of the mature protagonist’s concern for a child or child-woman, expressed so powerfully in Agent, The Power and the Glory, and Ministry, is at work in many other second-phase novels. In The Heart of the Matter (1948), for example, Henry Scobie’s most profound emotions are deflected away from his wife and toward first a child or child-woman, a deflection expressed on three levels in the novel. The first is his protracted grief over the death a few years earlier of his daughter Catherine, a grief exacerbated by his feeling of guilt for having been away from home during her illness. The second is Scobie’s desperate attempt to relieve the suffering of a young girl who has survived shipwreck for forty days in an open boat. The child, who becomes a surrogate for Scobie’s daughter who died in his absence, is finally given the release of death, but only after Scobie, near the end of his bedside vigil, literally sacrifices his own “peace” by offering it to God as ransom for the child’s pain. Finally, Scobie mingles pity and passion in his relationship with another victim who is also a child-woman figure, the nineteen-year-old widow Helen Rolt. In The Third Man (1949), protagonist Rollo Martins, like Arthur Rowe, has essentially happy memories of childhood, memories that in Martins’s case are closely tied to his friendship with Harry Lime. When the British policeman Calloway confronts Martins with abundant evidence of Lime’s involvement in racketeering in post-war Vienna, Martins steadfastly refuses to believe it until the sight of suffering children in a hospital ward—victims of Lime’s trade in adulterated penicillin—arouses sympathy and anger and causes Martins to aid the police in their pursuit of his old friend. It is probably safe to say that no woman among Greene’s characters is more adult than Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair. A mature, beautiful woman and an experienced


adulteress as well, she is the object of the protagonist’s passion, lust, and hatred. Yet in her final encounter with Bendrix and again in the aftermath of her death, his depiction of her drifts curiously toward first her childlike aspect and then her actual childhood. In their last meeting Bendrix, having discovered through her diary that his doubt of her love was unfounded, pursues her into a church where she abandons her effort to escape him and, as they sit in a pew and talk, falls asleep against his shoulder. Bendrix responds by tenderly regarding her as a child: Children are supposed to be influenced by what you whisper to them in sleep, and I began to whisper to Sarah, not loud enough to wake her, hoping that the words would drop hypnotically into her unconscious mind. “I love you, Sarah,” I whispered. (130) After she awakens and they prepare to part, she promises to telephone him, as he insists, when she reaches home, but her crossed fingers—a child’s gesture for excusing oneself for lying— signals to Bendrix that she is deceiving him. When he uncrosses the fingers and demands reassurance, she begins to cry, “thrusting her fists into her eyes as a child does” (131). It is the last time he sees her alive. After Sarah’s death, the Bendrix who has pursued the living woman so relentlessly finds himself uncovering in a less compulsive manner the Sarah of childhood who resides in her mother’s memory (which reveals that as a child Sarah was given a Catholic baptism) and in various books that belonged to her in childhood. One of these books, a copy of Andrew Lang’s fairy tales in which the child Sarah had written that the book would be read by the sick, becomes the instrument whereby a miraculous healing is performed upon the boy Lance Parkis, the detective’s son who suffers a serious attack of appendicitis. In his searching through Sarah’s books, Bendrix bears a striking resemblance to the priest who rummages through Coral’s books and papers in The Power and the Glory; both cases point up Greene’s habit of drawing upon literary sources to sustain and complete his characterizations. In Loser Takes All, Our Man in Havana and Travels with My Aunt, the pattern of the protagonist’s concern for a child or


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child-woman figure is present but treated humorously as might be expected in these comic structures. In the first of these Bertram, happily free of his first wife (known only by the name “Dirty” in the story), marries the twenty-year-old Cary, whose attractiveness is linked with her childlike approach to experience. Cary, the narrator explains, would always until old age look at the world with the eyes of a child. She was never bored: every day was a new day: even grief was eternal and every joy would last forever. “Terrible” was her favorite adjective—it wasn’t in her mouth a cliché—there was terror in her pleasures, her fears, her anxieties, her laughter—the terror of surprise, of seeing something for the first time. (49) Wormold, in Our Man, becomes a sort of “confidential agent” not, like D., out of patriotism, but to earn much-needed money to support the outrageous spending habits of his daughter Milly, whose happiness he wants to preserve even though she bewilders him. Henry Pulling, in Travels, loses some of his stuffiness through his brief friendship with the bohemian American girl “Tooley” whom he meets on the Orient Express, and he is distressed by her fear, fortunately unjustified, that she is pregnant. In A Burnt-Out Case and The Comedians the relationship is treated ironically. In the former, Marie Rycker, the childwoman whose emotional immaturity and unhappy marital life lead her into an obsessive romantic infatuation with the protagonist Querry, unknowingly brings about his murder by her jealous husband when she claims falsely that Querry seduced her. In the latter Angel Pineda, the plump and pampered son of Brown’s mistress Martha, is Brown’s only.serious rival for her affection, and the jealous Brown dislikes the child with a fervor worthy of W.C.Fields. Finally, a more serious treatment of the theme emerges in two other novels. We see it in The Human Factor, briefly in Colonel Daintry’s unhappiness over his inability to attain any kind of closeness to his daughter Elizabeth and more fully in the protagonist Castle’s chronic worry over the future of his adopted son Sam. It is present also in The Tenth Man, where the protagonist, Chavel, sacrifices his own life (by revealing his


identity) in order to prevent the exploitation of Thérèse Mangeot by the wicked Carosse. Chavel’s mingling of love for Thérèse (“Fair and thin and very young”) and determination to save her from her own disillusionment so strongly resemble D.’s attitude toward both Else and Rose that it might be seen as internal evidence for the dating of the conception around 1940 as Greene claimed but some readers have doubted. Initially he interprets her plight—she is afflicted by grief over the death of her brother, and by bitter hatred of the man who paid the brother to die in his place—as an opportunity to combine mercy with self-interest: There was no reason in law, he told himself, why he should not love her, no reason except her hate why she should not love him. If he could substitute love for hate, he told himself with exquisite casuistry, he would be doing her a service which would compensate for anything. In her naive belief, after all, he would be giving her back the possibility of salvation. (99–100) Yet the threat from the unscrupulous Carosse makes Chavel aware of his proper feelings toward the girl: He realized then how young she was, and how old they both were. He no longer felt the desire at all: only an immeasurable tenderness. The light on the landing was dimming as daylight advanced and she looked in the gray tide like a plain child who had been kept from bed by a party that has gone on too long. (151) It is this protective tenderness that moves Chavel to reveal his identity, prompting Carosse to shoot him before fleeing. Chavel, aware that his wound is mortal but determined to protect the girl from the pain of watching him die, wants reassurance at the last that his confession and sacrifice have restored her. He asks: “You’re all right, now, aren’t you? All the hatred’s gone?” “Yes,” she replies (156). Assured of the girl’s recovery, he turns to his final task of writing the testament that will ensure her possession of his former property:


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“That’s good,” he said, “good.” There was nothing left of his love—desire had no importance: he felt simply a certain pity, gentleness, and the tenderness one can feel for a stranger’s misfortune. “You’ll be all right now,” he told her. “Just run along,” he said with slight impatience, as to a child. (156; italics added)

SELF-DIVISION The story of Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear illustrates another significant contrast between first-and second-phase characters. While it is true that in these later works Greene continues to create characters who are divided selves, the age and experience of his second-phase protagonists often throw more emphasis on the past than on the future, and a chronological division between past and present selves becomes more important than the psychic division between inner and outer or higher and lower selves. Rowe is most distinctive in this regard because he not only conceives of his life as divided into past (associated with childhood, innocence, love, peace) and present (associated with adulthood, guilt, murder and terror, war) but escapes his unhappiness altogether through the amnesia that gives him a completely new identity as “Digby,” a man with no past and therefore no guilt. War or warlike conditions similarly divide the past and present lives of D., the gentle scholar turned confidential agent, and the whisky priest, formerly a prosperous, complacent clergyman, now a hunted outlaw. Among the later characters, Querry of A Burnt-Out Case most resembles Rowe in his longing to put aside every memory of his past life and its burden of personal guilt. Denied the comfort of amnesia, he travels to a remote area of the Congo in an attempt to place as much distance as possible between his past and current selves. Henry Pulling’s journeys in Travels With My Aunt resemble a comic version of Querry’s. From a harmless, complacent, self-satisfied but thoroughly boring life, he is drawn against his will into travels with his Aunt Augusta that bring him not only excitement but quite literally a complete break with the past and a new identity.


For Rowe, D., and several other second-phase protagonists the division between past and present selves is underscored by a contrast of first and second marriages; that topic will be treated in a later chapter of this study, but two other aspects of Greene’s treatment of divided selves need to be mentioned at this point. First is that in the Catholic novels of the second phase (The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair) the divided selves are characters caught between the love of God and the love of individuals. The priest, Major Scobie, and Sarah Miles, respectively, are unable to resolve this conflict and can escape it only through death. Scobie kills himself; the priest and Sarah die as the result of actions that are motivated by love of God and men but are in effect suicidal: he, by recrossing the border to aid a dying criminal, ensures his own capture and execution; she, by walking in the rain even when she is already ill, in order to escape Bendrix’s determined effort to win her away from God, brings a fatal illness upon herself. (Similar dilemmas are experienced by Léon Rivas, the priest of The Honorary Consul who abandons his calling in order to become a political activist and is killed by soldiers who rescue the kidnapped consul; and by Rose Pemberton in Greene’s drama The Living Room, who commits suicide because she cannot reconcile her love affair with either her family’s Catholic belief or her own sympathy for her lover’s wife.) Unless we regard Pinkie’s death in Brighton Rock as a conscious act of suicide—a questionable assertion, considering that he has been blinded by the vitriol and is running in unbearable pain— Scobie is the first Greene protagonist after Andrews to commit suicide. And like Andrews he does it after having failed to sort out his relationships with two rather different women. In Louise the saintly aura of the earlier heroine Elizabeth has faded almost beyond recognition, and in Helen the bold carnality of Lucy has regressed toward childishness. Andrews does not want to go on soiling himself; Scobie does not want to injure God. A second point is that the quasi-allegorical separation of personality into two closely linked, sharply contrasted characters, seen in Rumour at Nightfall in the dual protagonists Chase (rational, secular, extroverted) and Crane (romantic, spiritual, introverted) is transmuted in the second phase into a device for dramatizing contradictory attitudes


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toward the meaning, purpose, and conduct of life. We see it very early in the opposition of the priest and the lieutenant in The Power and the Glory, and very late in the friendlier opposition of Father Quixote and the Mayor in Monsignor Quixote. The extended dialogues between these symbolic characters present the rival claims of Catholicism and Marxism, the supernatural and the natural orders, which the author struggled to reconcile in his own attitude toward life. The letter of Dr. Magiot, the wise Communist physician in The Comedians, to Brown, a lapsed Catholic and, figuratively, a failed priest, delineates succinctly the need to achieve just such a resolution: But Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism—remember I was born a Catholic too—is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique. We are humanists, you and I…if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask? (286) Finally, it should be pointed out that in the secular or nonCatholic novels of the second phase the divisive internal conflict of the protagonists who survive is directed toward a resolution in action. Maurice Castle, a career member of the Secret Service, responds to the conflict between public and private loyalties by becoming a double agent, betraying his country and his profession by giving government secrets to the Soviets. He does so out of love for his African wife Sarah and loyalty to the Russians who enabled her to escape from prison in South Africa. Other protagonists such as Fowler, Querry, and Brown affect a complete disinterest and a refusal to become engaged in the struggles, political or spiritual, of other people, yet in the end they are drawn into these struggles against their will. MARRIAGE IN THE SECOND PHASE

The Heart of the Matter occupies a unique place in the fiction of Graham Greene. Although certain readers (most memorably George Orwell) found the predicament and resulting suicide of the protagonist Scobie improbable, the novel has been highly praised on the whole and sometimes regarded as Greene’s


finest. Greene himself professed to have disliked the book, however, and claimed many years afterward that he had not reread it since its publication. (His concern for craftsmanship was nevertheless strong enough to lead him to revise the novel, restoring a chapter he had deleted earlier, for the Collected Edition.) His dislike of The Heart of the Matter may have had to do with the circumstances of its composition, for according to his own testimony he wrote the book during a period of distress: Work was not made easier because the booby traps I had heedlessly planted in my private life were blowing up in turn. I had always thought that war would bring death as a solution in one form or another…but here I was alive, the carrier of unhappiness to people I loved…. So perhaps what I really dislike of the book is the memory of personal anguish. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “A writer’s temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.” (Ways 124) Greene adds that like his character Scobie, he seriously considered suicide during this unhappy period. The causes of Greene’s unhappiness at this time are a major subject of the second volume of his authorized biography and can be described only in outline here. The Heart of the Matter was written and published during the period of the final dissolution of Greene’s marriage, a consequence of his affairs with two women. The first was Dorothy Glover, whom he met in 1939 when he took a room in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, for use as a studio. After sending his family away from London for safety at the beginning of the war, he lived with Dorothy more or less permanently until his departure for West Africa. Although he did not want a return to ordinary family life, he maintained a strong affection for Vivien and concern for her welfare and the children’s. Inevitably he felt guilt and a sense of weakness like his character Scobie, but he did not allow conscience—or the Church’s prohibition of adultery —to direct his actions. Sherry points out that the war contributed a sense of fatalism to the situation; Greene did not expect to survive, and his death would provide a solution to his dilemma. But he did survive, of course, only to enter into a


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period of greater difficulty when he fell in love and began an affair with Catherine Walston, the beautiful American-born wife of Harry Walston, a Cambridge scientist who was then working in the Foreign Office. This second relationship forced a crisis in the marriage and a permanent separation from Vivien, and it meant also the fading of his love for Dorothy, for whom he retained affection tinged with pity. Greene finished writing The Heart of the Matter—about onethird of the book—after the affair with Catherine had transformed an already difficult triangular relationship into an impossible quadrangular one. Whatever one thinks of his behavior in these matters, it seems clear that the novel’s powerful expression of its protagonist’s emotional anguish over his unwillingness to cause suffering and pain for either of two women, his religious crisis over his betrayal of the teaching of his faith, and his longing for death as a means of escape—all of these come from the heart. Sherry quotes the following passage as one of many in the novel that reveal directly the character and situation of the author: He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn’t need to speak. It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before. (2:233) Set during the Second World War in Sierra Leone, where Greene himself spent three years in the Secret Service, The Heart of the Matter offers the first picture in all of Greene’s novels of the domestic married life of the protagonist. (Firstphase characters, it will be recalled, could not have such a life.) The Heart of the Matter is also the first extended treatment of adultery in a Greene novel, and as such it introduces a major subject of his second-phase novels: five of the next seven books will deal with adultery, a circumstance that points to an inevitable and unhappy link between the writer and his characters, a link that may account for the problematic nature of his treatment of the theme of pity in The Heart of the Matter. Greene had touched upon the subject already in


Ministry, where pity led to the protagonist’s mercy-killing of his wife; and he described The Heart of the Matter as a criticism of the “virtue” of pity as displayed by Scobie, whose former love for his wife gives way to pity, and whose pity in turn grows in the narrative until Scobie takes on an excessive pity for the world’s sorrow and acts as if God cannot be relied upon to feel properly for suffering individuals. Yet this very criticism, plausible as it sounds in theory, is confounded by the undeniable power with which the narrative suggests that Scobie’s pity—certainly as it applies to the dying child for whom he gives up his own happiness, and possibly as it applies to his desire to prevent further suffering by Louise and Helen—may qualify him for sainthood. Scobie dies because he cannot reconcile the conduct of his life with his Catholic conscience. I have called attention to The Heart of the Matter in this context for two reasons. First, it represents by far the fullest presentation of marriage in Greene’s fiction up to this point and does so in a time of crisis for the author whose own marriage was breaking up. It would be simplistic to suggest that Greene merely depicted himself in Major Scobie or Vivien in the faded and whining “literary” Louise; and yet certain lines from the book, such as Louise’s charge, “You only became a Catholic to marry me,” must surely have had a painfully personal resonance for the author. Second, since Scobie dies at the end, leaving behind a bitter and scornful wife, this novel offers the sole exception to the following generalization about Greene’s second-phase protagonists: Whereas in the earlier work the protagonist cannot marry successfully or, more likely, cannot marry at all, the second-phase protagonist may have married before the action of the novel begins, but if he has done so he will experience, or will already have experienced, the loss of his first wife. The first wife “disappears” from the action and is replaced by a younger woman with whom (in the serious novels, not the entertainments) his happiness is either qualified in some important way or is eliminated altogether. This circumstance of the “disappearing wife” occurs so often in Greene’s second-phase work that it seems impossible not to infer a meaningful connection with the novelist’s own life. The conditions of Greene’s own marriage that, with hindsight, might be seen to have predicted its failure have been discussed in an earlier chapter. He was an ardent, romantic, obsessive,


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often sentimental lover who linked the attainment of his beloved inextricably, it would seem, with the discovery of Catholic faith and the prospect of personal renewal or redemption—as mentioned earlier in these pages, the triumph of the “You-Graham” over the “Oxford Graham” and “Hilary Trench.” Yet the ideal of a close, conventional domestic life was from the outset in conflict with his own craving for adventure and excitement; the wanderer was far closer to his artistic temperament than was the dutiful husband of his projected future as a married man. What can be seen plainly from the outside is the slow unraveling of the marriage he had wanted so passionately as a young man. His diary of 1932 shows that by that time he was carrying on a relationship with a prostitute, Annette, in London. It is not merely coincidental that when Greene separated from his family in 1939 in order to be able to work more efficiently in his studio, the first book he produced was The Confidential Agent, first of the second-phase novels and the first of many in which the protagonist’s wife has died. In a sort of private joke, Greene uses as a key setting in the novel a Bloomsbury flat belonging to an anonymous “Miss Glover.” There is no humor, however, in the protagonist’s recollection of his dead wife, whom “he could remember…only indistinctly. She had been a passion, and it is difficult to recall an emotion when it is dead” (14). Graham and Vivien Greene were never divorced, and Greene over the remainder of his long life guarded jealously the privacy of his wife and family. In his later years he formed the most stable and enduring of his many relationships with women, a thirty-year affair with Yvonne Cloetta, wife of a French businessman in Antibes. Accounts of that affair that surfaced after Greene’s death testified to its happiness and fidelity, though it is difficult to imagine that the aging writer could ever have completely lost sight of that younger one who had written of the transforming power of Vivien’s presence in his life and of his intention to love her eternally. The circumstances outlined briefly here suggest that in Greene’s writing about marriage in this phase of his work there is an especially close identification of the man who suffers with the artist who creates. Readers who saw in The Heart of the Matter a curious resemblance to The Man Within (a “divided” male protagonist, involvement with smugglers, a crisis over his


relationship with two women, and his escape by suicide that saves him from continued sinning) may have intuited what seems obvious now: that Greene, though now much more accomplished and capable of creating far less transparent fictions, is once again writing out of his own experience in an intensely personal mode. In any event the second-phase texts repeatedly link the protagonist’s movement into a new and critical stage of life with the death of his first wife. In The Confidential Agent, for example, D.’s wife of fifteen years has been killed in his country’s civil war three years before the novel opens. In The Power and the Glory the priest cannot marry, of course, and although the mother of his child is still living he is not close to her; his passion is for his daughter. Elsewhere in the same novel marriage appears singularly unattractive: the whining, hypochondriacal Trixie Fellows is a burden to her husband in a marriage that prefigures Scobie’s in The Heart of the Matter; Padre José’s wife calls him to bed with a nagging insistence that is mocked by the local children; Mr. Tench, stranded in Mexico for many years, finds it harder and harder to recall what his wife in England was like and assumes that she has remarried. The Ministry of Fear takes up the life of Arthur Rowe after his dismissal from a mental institution where he was treated following the mercy killing of his terminally-ill wife, Alice. Although Rowe genuinely loved his wife, he killed her less to alleviate her suffering than to relieve his own distress from witnessing it, and his knowledge of his own motive afflicts him with painful guilt. Toward the end of the narrative Rowe moves toward qualified happiness with the much younger Anna Hilfe. He loves Anna, and she him, but he can never be completely truthful with her because her happiness would be compromised if she knew that he had regained full memory of his past and therefore of his guilt. Other second-phase wives who have disappeared include Evelyn, the first wife of Charlie Fortnum in The Honorary Consul, mentioned as having died in Idaho some years ago, and Mary, first wife of protagonist Maurice Castle in The Human Factor, killed in the blitz long before the present action of the novel begins. Another Mary, the first wife of Alfred Jones in Dr. Fischer of Geneva, died in childbirth twenty years prior to the events of the story; the baby, a daughter, also died.


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The important marriage in The End of the Affair is not that of the protagonist Bendrix, who remains a bachelor, but of his lover, Sarah Miles. It is unsatisfying for her both emotionally and sexually, and in the end she leaves it through her death. The only authentic happiness Sarah or Bendrix has experienced comes from their adulterous love, and even there the relationship is flawed, poisoned by his jealousy and mistrust. Elsewhere in the novel marriages have failed or have been destroyed by death, or both. Sarah’s father, whom the mother calls a “brute,” left his wife and daughter when Sarah was a child. Parkis the detective was happily married, but his wife died. Bendrix’s father is a widower whose relationship with his wife is not discussed in the text, although the fact that he did not call Bendrix home from school when the boy’s mother died hints at an emotional coldness in the family that may have contributed to Bendrix’s own lack of warmth. In four of the remaining novels, the protagonists do not marry. Querry (A Burnt-Out Case) and, especially, Brown (The Comedians) have much in common with Bendrix; they are having or have had significant affairs with women but do not marry. Querry’s condition in this regard is underscored by his friendship with Dr. Colin, who has suffered the loss of a beloved wife. Father Quixote of Monsignor Quixote is, like the whisky priest, ineligible for marriage and is moreover too unworldly to be tempted to sins of the flesh. Jim Baxter in The Captain and the Enemy does not marry but puzzles over the meaning of love in a way that provides an appropriate coda, even in an inferior novel, to this theme in Greene’s fiction. The comic structures of Loser Takes All, Our Man in Havana, and Travels with My Aunt move toward resolutions in which the protagonist is or will be happily married. Bertram (Loser) and Wormold (Our Man) are divorced from their first wives. Both are middle-aged men who fall in love with and marry (or will marry) younger women, Cary and Beatrice, respectively. Henry Pulling (Travels) ordains the end of his stuffy bachelorhood by arranging a marriage with Maria, the young daughter of a Paraguayan customs officer, though the marriage must be delayed until she reaches the age of sixteen.

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CHAPTER SIX The Strategy of Allusion in the Second Phase

In an earlier chapter I suggested that the first-phase protagonists moved, in novels extending from The Man Within to Brighton Rock, from insufficient distance to enormous distance from the author; the reversal of that tendency can be seen early in the second phase. In addition to the similarities in age and in their lost wives or failed marriages, the secondphase protagonists are much more like the author in that most of them are better educated than those of the first phase and are therefore capable of sharing the author’s and reader’s awareness of the literary frame, the context of allusion in which the narrative is cast. Pinkie, Raven, Drover, even Kate and Tony, most of the protagonists and/or reflectors in the first-phase novels are limited by their intellect (education, if not native intelligence) and are inadequate to articulate Greene’s views with much subtlety. But D., who is a scholar, and the whisky priest, an educated man by definition even if dissolute, are capable of nuances and analyses the others cannot provide. Thus, there is no longer a need for radio voices like “Druce Winton” (Gun) or choral commentators like Prewitt (Brighton Rock) or the minister-poet and the Shakespeare scholar Professor Hammarsten (England Made Me): the literary sensibility is internalized. Rowe (a reader of Dickens), Martins (a writer of western novels), Bendrix (a more serious novelist), Fowler (a journalist), Querry (an architect), Brown (who acted in Romeo), Castle (who uses book codes in espionage), Father Quixote (a priest and a reader of theology)—all are capable of uniting the author’s literary view of experience with the consciousness of the principal character. D., for example, is a professor whose chief scholarly accomplishment—his discovery of the Berne manuscript of the


Song of Roland—provides the basis for his (and the novel’s) interpretation of heroism. In the Berne version, Oliver kills Roland deliberately in retribution for lives wasted through Roland’s pride in refusing to call for help. D.’s explanation to Rose, together with her response, indicates that they are to be identified with the people and Oliver, while her father Lord Benditch and the capitalist “barons” are identified with those earlier barons for whom Roland was falsified in rewriting: “The story, you see, has been tidied up, to suit…. But in the Berne version [Oliver] strikes his friend down with full knowledge—because of what he has done to his men: all the wasted lives. He dies hating the man he loves—the big boasting courageous fool who was more concerned with his own glory than with the victory of his faith. But you can see how that version didn’t appeal—in the castles—at the banquets, among the dogs and reeds and beakers; the jongleurs had to adapt it to meet the tastes of the medieval nobles, who were quite capable of being Rolands in a small way—it only needs conceit and a strong arm—but couldn’t understand what Oliver was at.” “Give me Oliver,” she said, “any day.” He looked at her with some surprise. She said: “My father, of course, would be like one of your barons—all for Roland.” (62) Greene’s literary epigraph for The Power and the Glory, taken from Dryden’s “The Hind and the Panther” (“Th’ inclosure narrow’d; the sagacious power/Of hounds and death drew nearer every hour”), calls the reader’s attention to the novel’s concern with the conflict of the state with the Catholic church; similarly, his title The Labyrinthine Ways for the American edition of the novel alludes briefly to Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” and its theme of God’s inexorable pursuit of the reluctant saint, the “man within” the wayward sinner: I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind….

THE STRATEGY OF ALLUSION IN THE SECOND PHASE

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The novel’s primary source for allusion and parallelism is not conventionally “literary,” however, but appropriately is the “story” known best by the priest and most influential in his life: the story of Christ’s passion. Critics, most notably Karl Patten and R.W.B. Lewis, have pointed out parallels so extensive as to make the novel seem almost allegorical: the priest practices humility and preaches and ministers to the poor; he undergoes trial and temptation in the wilderness; he is betrayed by a Judas-figure whose treachery he anticipates and forgives; he accepts passively his own capture, trial, and conviction; he is executed alongside a common criminal; and he is symbolically resurrected. These simple and striking parallels give enormous power to the role of the priest, in spite of his manifest weaknesses, as a Christlike man in a Godless land. Compared with the three novels that preceded it, The Power and the Glory has a constricted frame of literary reference. Greene may have felt that anything else would have been distracting; if so, the overwhelming critical as well as popular success of the novel has validated his method. The Ministry of Fear exceeds both of the two earlier firstphase works in combining an extensive use of literary allusion with a protagonist who shares the author’s literary sensibility and has, moreover, some specific qualities of memory and experience that resemble Greene’s. Norman Sherry suggests that Ministry may be the “most insistent” of all of Greene’s books in drawing upon memories of childhood, its intense nostalgia probably traceable to his having written it in 1942, when Greene was in West Africa, England lay under the threat of destruction, and Greene’s father died. Sherry adds, however, that the parent more important to the novel was Greene’s mother, whose afternoon teas in the School House garden, her scent of eau de cologne, and especially her inability to believe ill of her children inspired the primary attributes of Rowe’s mother (1:35–36). Arthur Rowe not only has poignant memories of his mother and prewar childhood that evoke comparisons with Greene’s own Edwardian childhood, but he has more than any of Greene’s earlier protagonists the habit of interpreting real experience through literary experience. The dream in which he explains to his mother that the world she knew has been


transformed into the world of the modern literary thriller is a striking example of this tendency: “It sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life—more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read—about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that’s real life: It’s what we’ve all made of the world since you died. I’m your little Arthur who wouldn’t hurt a beetle and I’m a murderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queux.” (65) Rowe responds to the horror of the war and of his personal life by returning to the books he loved as a boy—to Dickens, to stories of heroes like Commander Robert Scott. Greene underscores this tendency by appending to each chapter of the novel a quotation from Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Little Duke, a children’s book loved by both the character and his creator. Rowe purchases a copy of it at the fête in the first chapter. The persistent interpretation of modern experience through reference to literary experience prepares for the memorable line —which appears appropriately in a chapter entitled “A Load of Books”—in which the narrator asserts that “Rowe was a murderer—as other men are poets” (89). Rowe is obsessed not only with the act of murder (the mercy killing of his wife) by which he defines himself but also with the despairing realization that his act has forever negated the innocence of love and hope that characterized his past. Set in the nightmare of the blitz and the irrational terror created by a Nazi spy ring, Rowe’s story creates an effective correspondence between the protagonist’s inner life and the chaos and destruction in the external world in which the hope of the past is denied and the possibility of a future seems threatened. But the comparison of murderer and poet cited above is more than just a clever way of implying that such a world has too many murderers and too few poets, and it is more than just a striking way of revealing the power and depth of Rowe’s obsessive guilt; it is the clearest and most direct statement by which Greene points to his development of character and theme through a number of allusions to works of a particular poet: the poet is Wordsworth,


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and the poems are chiefly The Prelude, “Resolution and Independence,” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” In discussing this aspect of Greene’s method I will show, first, that his writings during the half-dozen or so years prior to the publication of The Ministry of Fear reveal a habitual use of Wordsworth as a point of reference by which Greene’s characters can be interpreted or his responses to the modern age measured. Second, and more importantly, I will suggest that an examination of the Wordsworthian allusions in The Ministry of Fear not only reveals a conscious strategy on the author’s part but is essential to a full understanding of the work. Greene acknowledged The Prelude as the source of the title The Ministry of Fear in his introduction to the novel in the Collected Edition, where he also mentions having included Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth in the small collection of books he took in 1941 to Freetown, West Africa, where the novel was written. Evidence of his interest in Wordsworth can be seen as early as Journey Without Maps (1936), where in Chapter One Greene compares his own time with that of the poet: Today our world seems peculiarly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these halfcastes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray. (21) If the analogy between gangsters and the rustics who for the poet of the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” preserved the “essential passions of the human heart” seems a bit forced, it nevertheless has the seriousness and subtlety to suggest more than a casual concern for Wordsworth’s ideas. And toward the end of Journey


Greene borrows again from the poet’s language (echoes from the “Intimations Ode” and “Lines Written in Early Spring”) to describe the effect of the African experience on his own sensibility: This journey, if it had done nothing else, had reinforced a sense of disappointment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made out of childhood. Oh, one wanted to protest, one doesn’t believe…in the “visionary gleam”, in the trailing glory, but there was something in that early terror and the bareness of one’s needs, a harp strumming behind a hut, a witch on the nursery landing, a handful of kola nuts, a masked dancer, the poisoned flowers. The sense of taste was finer, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense of terror deeper and purer. (224–25) The reader of Journey Without Maps will not be surprised to find in A Gun for Sale, also published in 1936, another allusion to the “Intimations Ode” : “What a joke it all was, ‘trailing clouds of glory…’” (140). Actually a sardonic comment on the foolish pranks of young medical students, the line inevitably strikes the reader with its more serious application to the miserable childhood and wasted youth of the protagonist, the harelipped murderer Raven. Greene confirms this interpretation by using the same allusion to comment on Pinkie in Brighton Rock: “He trailed the clouds of his own glory after him: hell lay about him in his infancy” (68). This demonic parody of Wordsworth’s “Ode” telescopes the misery and unhappiness of Pinkie and his childhood in a wretched slum ironically named “Paradise Piece.” It also points toward Greene’s use of Wordsworth—and especially of the great ode— in The Ministry of Fear as an ironic commentary that enforces his own dark vision of an anti-pastoral and un-Romantic world in which lost innocence can never be recaptured. The dark vision of The Ministry of Fear emerges through the story of Arthur Rowe, a man who murders his terminally ill wife out of pity, only to discover that the element of self-pity in his act makes him a true murderer even when the courts have ruled that he is not. Attracted by anything that reminds him of the peace and innocence of childhood, Rowe wanders into a charity bazaar where he wins a cake—containing hidden


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microfilm-that was supposed to have been won by a Nazi agent. When the Nazis attempt unsuccessfully to murder Rowe and reclaim the cake, their effort against his life ironically restores to it some of the value he had renounced. In the fast-paced plot that follows, Rowe loses his memory in a bomb blast, but regains it slowly as step by step his rediscovery of his recent past leads police to the discovery and destruction of the Nazi spy ring called “The Ministry of Fear.” When Rowe finally remembers all of the truth about himself, he is able to accept it largely because he has also rediscovered love in the person of Anna Hilfe, an Austrian girl who once worked for the Nazis. The title of The Ministry of Fear, appropriate enough as a sinister version of the familiar “Ministries” in the British government, is nevertheless more important as a deliberate echo of Book I of The Prelude, specifically of numerous passages in which Wordsworth delineates the formative influence of Nature as a beneficent teacher whose “ministries” of beauty and fear interact with the imagination to produce the poetic mind. Contemplating the “seed-time” of his soul “Fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” the poet expresses gratitude for both the “fearless visitings” and also those “Severer interventions, ministry/More palpable” employed by Nature to create “The calm existence that is mine when I am worthy of myself!” Ye presences of Nature in the sky And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places! Can I think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry ................................ and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With triumph and delight, with hope and fear, Work like a sea? (464–8, 472–75) The confidence in an external world admirably fitted to the mind of man; the deep sense of gratitude for the “ministry” of a wise nature; the joy of “calm existence” and the knowledge of selfworth that grows out of a universal harmony—all of these are evoked by Greene’s title, and all are ironic counterpoints to the situation of Rowe, whose hostile, disorderly, chaotic world is a


menace rivalled only by what he regards as the treachery of his own heart. The title is not essential to the plot, but the ironies it creates through its allusion to The Prelude are essential to the reader’s grasp of the full horror of Rowe’s life. Greene’s strategy of ironic inversion—employed here to evoke the tenor of life in a world at war as the lurid counterpart of Wordsworth’s sublime vision—is at work elsewhere in The Ministry of Fear in another circumstance that calls to mind one of Wordsworth’s poems. In Chapter Seven of Book One, Rowe contemplates suicide by the waters of the Thames. Although nothing in that fact alone suggests a resemblance to Wordsworth, a closer examination reveals that this episode is built upon a series of carefully constructed, ultimately ironic parallels between Rowe’s situation and that of the poet in “Resolution and Independence.” Wordsworth’s poem is one of the best-known Romantic “crisis lyrics” in which the poet is saved from despair and reassured of his future as a creative mind. It opens with the unhappiness of the poet whose gloom and self-pity are at odds with the surrounding beauty of the natural world; feeling guilt for his own unhappiness, he dreads a future which may bring “Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty.” This despairing mood leads to thoughts of the suicide of Chatterton, the untimely death of Burns, and miseries of poets who “in our youth begin in gladness; /But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” What Wordsworth fears is to a large extent what Rowe already suffers: “Solitude” (Rowe has lived without friends or family since the murder of his wife); “pain of heart” (his grief and obsessive guilt); and “poverty” (he has only thirty-five shillings). Moreover, on this occasion Rowe recalls once more the unbearable contrast between his happy childhood and the now-miserable adulthood wherein his act of murder has led him to the present state of despondency in which he leans over the Embankment “in the time-honoured attitude of would-be suicides” (88). Wordsworth’s despair in “Resolution” is overcome through a surprise encounter with the old leech-gatherer, whose stoic dignity leads the young poet away from self-pity and toward a new life of resolution and independence. Rowe’s suicide is prevented by the sudden appearance of an old bookseller whose need for help in carrying a large bag of books draws Rowe out of self-absorption and into concern for someone else. The old men


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and the patterns of events in each case have a striking correspondence. In each encounter the conversation begins with a cheerful greeting that contradicts the gloomy mood already established: the poet calls out, “This morning gives promise of a glorious day”; Rowe’s old man remarks, “They can’t spoil Whistler’s Thames.” The leech gatherer seems old (“The oldest man that ever wore grey hairs”) and weak (“His words came feebly, from a feeble chest”), and weighed down as if by “some dire constraint of pain, or rage/Of sickness felt by him in times long past”; he studies the water “As if he had been reading in a book.” The bookseller also seems old, weary, afflicted by a weak heart and carious teeth, and literally weighed down by the burden of books heavier than he can carry safely. Both men are homeless wanderers: the leech-gatherer finds housing “with God’s help, by choice or chance”; the bookseller spends his nights in air-raid shelters. To the poet the old man seems “Like one I had met with in a dream”; Rowe is certain that he has seen the old bookseller before. Wordsworth asks the leechgatherer what occupation he pursues and is told of “employment hazardous and wearisome” as the old man wanders from pond to pond in search of the dwindling supply of leeches: Once I would meet with them on every side; But they have dwindled long by slow decay; Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may. Similarly, Arthur Rowe, asking whether the old man buys books, hears an account of much hardship: “First bargain I’ve had for months. In the old days I’d have treasured them, treasured them. Waited till the Americans came in the summer. Now I’m glad of any chance of a turnover” (91). The foregoing parallels suggest strongly a conscious intent on the part of the author. Indeed, Greene appears concerned that we might overlook the resemblances; this is, after all, the chapter in which he writes that “Rowe was a murderer-as other men are poets” (89; italics added). But it is the differences beneath the superficial similarities that give the novel at this point its sinister and chilling irony. Greene signals the tilting of events toward the dark and absurd with a question that again points to the context of allusions to the Romantic poet: “You


don’t have a taste, sir,” asks the bookseller, “for the Sublime— or the Ridiculous?” (93). The sublime, it will be recalled, is usually taken as the proper origin of fear in Wordsworth’s aesthetic: a response to the grandeur of nature interacting with the power of the human imagination. But fear in The Ministry of Fear is closer to the ridiculous, to the absurd: it is the terror that arises when patriotic charities conceal spy rings, when ordinary men become murderers, when the world of organized destruction and murder on a massive scale begins to seem admirably fitted to the mind of man. Thus, whereas the old leech-gatherer who “rescues” the poet of “Resolution and Independence” merges with the landscape itself, like a “huge stone…/ Couched on the bald top of an eminence,” and seems as much a part of nature as a “sea-beast crawled forth” to sun itself on rock or sand, Arthur Rowe’s bookseller only appears to harmonize with the natural world; his feeding of the birds to whom he calls himself “uncle” is part of an elaborate disguise, and his real attitude toward nature is evident in his discussion of landscape gardening. What he values are not the flowers, but the machinery. His attitude not only inverts the familiar Wordsworthian view of natural beauty but sounds oddly menacing: “They had statues that spurted water at you when you passed, and the grottoes—the things they thought up for grottoes. Why, in a good garden you weren’t safe anywhere.” “I should have thought you were meant to feel safe in a garden.” “They didn’t think so, sir,” the bookseller said, blowing the stale smell of carious teeth enthusiastically in Rowe’s direction. (102) The menace is real. Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer seems to have been sent as the poet’s savior “by peculiar grace, /A leading from above, a something given”; the bookseller, who ironically calls himself “Fullove,” is by contrast no divine agent but a member of The Ministry of Fear itself, a man whose purpose is instead to lure Rowe to his death, manipulating Rowe’s pity to get him to carry the heavy suitcase full of “books”—actually a bomb—to a hotel room nearby. The blast that follows does not kill Rowe,


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but it serves the purpose of the Nazi agents just as well: it destroys his memory. Rowe’s loss of memory—he can recall none of his adult life— is thematically and structurally ironic: an attempt to murder him restores his happiness by completing the action he had begun in the opening pages of the novel when, hearing the words comfort and mother at the bazaar that “called him like innocence,” he “stepped joyfully back into adolescence, into childhood” (11–12). It is this development that becomes the most important of the allusions and inverted parallels to Wordsworth in The Ministry of Fear, for Greene clearly intends it to recall the myth of memory best represented in Wordsworth’s poetry by the “Intimations Ode.” In that poem Wordsworth suggests that in our recollection of earliest childhood there are intimations of the divine origin and immortality of the soul; the “clouds of glory” that trail behind us as we enter the world steadily recede in that normal process of growth into adulthood: our birth is “but a sleep and a forgetting”; the celestial radiance that in our childhood vision emanates from all creation declines in our mature life into “the light of common day.” The function of memory is therefore to preserve the precious link between our temporal and our eternal state-a connection evidenced for the poet by the perfect harmony between the child and the natural world. Greene states unequivocally the correspondence between Wordsworth’s view of childhood in the “Ode” and Arthur Rowe’s view: “In childhood,” says the narrator, “we live under the brightness of immortality-heaven is as near and actual as the seaside” (88). In both sentiment and imagery the passage echoes Wordsworth’s grand statement about the “intimations,” the “shadowy recollections” through which memory provides “the fountain light of all our day/…a master light of all our seeing”: Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore,


And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (163–69) Wordsworth’s poetry, of course, is not a nostalgic attempt to regain childhood, nor do Greene’s allusions imply that it is such. They call attention rather to the protagonist’s initial despair over the moral failure of his own life and his subsequent, more profound despair over the discovery that the failure is in the world at large. Obsessed with his own failure, Rowe longs to recover the brightness of his childhood; he would gladly forsake the London of adult life for the Trumpington of his boyhood if only the memories and places that tie him to the present could be eliminated. The idea is absurd, yet the greater absurdity of the blitz makes it seem just possible: [H]e was tied to London. Perhaps if every street with which he had associations were destroyed, he would be free to go—he would find a factory near Trumpington. After a raid he used to sally out and note with a kind of hope that this restaurant or that shop existed no longer— it was like loosening the bars of a prison cell one by one. (22) This destructive loosening of the prison bars, if it did occur, would reverse the normal process of maturing and forgetting described in Wordsworth’s “Ode,” where “Shades of the prison house begin to close/ Upon the growing Boy” as the heaven that lay about him in infancy recedes into the past. Seeking his own past, Rowe disregards the future; he purchases childhood books such as The Little Duke, and rereads The Old Curiosity Shop. Yet even the fête he attends nostalgically in the opening pages poses a threat, “as if the experience of childhood renewed had taken a strange turn, away from innocence” (18). The fuller experience of childhood renewed that is brought about by the bomb blast gives Rowe a literal sleep (unconsciousness) and a forgetting (amnesia); appropriately, he awakens in a mock-pastoral setting identified by the title of Book Two as “Arcady.” Even the daffodils on the table (reminiscent of those in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”?) seem to fit the theme of recaptured Wordsworthian innocence. It is Rowe’s brief moment of respite from the horror of his personal


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life and the greater horror of the war that rages over London. It cannot last, however, because the Nazis’ too-obvious determination to prevent Rowe from regaining his memory intensifies his curiosity, and more importantly because Rowe himself senses that “unqualified” happiness—the happiness that ignorance protects from the knowledge of misery—is ultimately undesirable because it is less than fully human. His attempt to reconstruct his memory is thus an act of courage and hope. Wordsworth wrote, in “My Heart Leaps Up,” of the hope for a life unified by reverence for the beauty of nature extending from childhood through old age: The child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. Greene echoes the poem in the passage in which Rowe discusses with Anna his possible identity before the blast. He could not have been a lawyer, he decides, because pity would have prevented his sending criminals to justice: “After all,” he says, “the child does make the man” (118). Rowe’s attempt to grow up for a second time, to reconstruct his adult life, is ironic. Before, he had despised the present, adulthood, and experience, and had yearned for the past, childhood, and innocence; yet when “reborn” into that past he is dissatisfied. The ultimate penalty for his dissatisfaction is the rediscovery of the truth that he is a murderer; the reward is the belief that through shared love with Anna he can atone for his own guilt: “It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough” (221). The bittersweet ending of The Ministry of Fear, typical of Greene’s entertainments but not of his serious novels, has an ambivalence that belies its neatness and apparent haste. Rowe, now the “complete man” in full possession of his memory, is committed by his declaration of love to a “lifetime of lies” in which, paradoxically, he will pretend not to know the very truth about himself that Anna will try to prevent him from learning. On this level, then, the plot suggests the patently obvious theme that childhood cannot be regained, that innocence cannot deal with evil in the world, that mature love is the compensation for loss of innocence. But on a deeper level the


book creates, through Greene’s careful use of allusions and inverted parallels to Wordsworth’s poetry, a haunting awareness of wartime terror not only as physical danger but as the loss of moral vision. In the serenity of the great “Intimations Ode” and the vision of a providential bond between man and nature in The Prelude, Greene found a perfect foil to the mechanized violence and inhumane terror of European civilization in his own time. TOWARD THE WRITER AS PROTAGONIST Far more extensively developed than the literary parallels in The Confidential Agent, the various allusions to Wordsworth, to Charlotte Yonge, and to twentieth-century thrillers as well as boys’ adventure stories create in The Ministry of Fear the most complete integration in Greene’s fiction heretofore of the protagonist’s sensibility with the novelist’s. Almost all of the protagonists who follow are, like their creator, educated, literate, and apt to see relationships between life and literature. In this, too, however, Scobie in The Heart of the Matter is something of a special case, since it is not he but his wife Louise and her ineffectual suitor Wilson who embody the literary awareness and sensibility; Wilson’s furtive enjoyment of poetry, even to the point of publishing a rather bad poem in his school’s alumni magazine, and Louise’s unfortunate nickname “literary Louise” readily point up the fact. Given the novel’s subject, Greene may have wanted specifically to avoid giving his protagonist qualities that might make him too obviously resemble the author (although there are numerous private clues which a reader can only detect with the help of a biographer—for example, that “Ticki,” the nickname given Scobie by Louise, was one of Vivien Greene’s names for her husband) (Sherry 2:237). Nevertheless, Scobie does demonstrate a flair for storytelling in his deft reconstruction of a dull saint’s life as an adventure story for a sick boy in the hospital. Scobie aside, the second-phase protagonists are a highly literary group on the whole. Rollo Martins, hero of Greene’s next entertainment The Third Man (written originally as a treatment for a film script), embodies the trait comically, since he is the resolutely anti-intellectual writer of pulp Westerns. Greene


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extracts delightful humor from the scene in which Martins, speaking to a British literary circle in Vienna, seems abysmally ignorant of Joyce and confuses poet Thomas Gray with his own idol, Zane Grey. But in characteristic form for a second-phase work, Martins sees a connection between one of his own plots and the highly suspicious “death” of Harry Lime, and to describe metaphorically his attempt to solve what he believes to have been a murder, he claims to be working on a new book which he will call “The Third Man.” Henry Pulling in Travels with My Aunt reads extensively in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and recalls at various points in the narrative many of Greene’s, and Greene’s father’s, favorite works. Maurice Castle in The Human Factor employs an elaborate book code based upon famous novelists (Tolstoy, Samuel Richardson) to conduct espionage. Jones in Dr. Fischer of Geneva pores over The Knapsack, the little anthology edited by Greene’s friend Herbert Read. And the eponymous Monsignor Quixote joins life to literature more emphatically, if paradoxically, than any other character in Greene’s works: he is a literal descendant of a fictional character, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and his adventures have obvious and extensive parallels with those of his illustrious ancestor. Maurice Bendrix, Thomas Fowler, Brown and Jim Baxter provide equally important cases, but because their relationship to literature is essential to the subject of Greene’s fictional treatment of writers and writing, they will be discussed at length in later chapters.

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CHAPTER SEVEN Portraits of the Artist

We, by a love so much refined We know not ourselves what it is, Care less eyes, hands, and lips to miss. —John Donne, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” “People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?” —Sarah, in The End of the Affair

THE END OF THE AFFAIR In the letter to his publisher A.S. Frere which serves as a preface to The Comedians, Graham Greene wrote: “I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene. Many readers assume—I know it from experience—that an ‘I’ is always the author. So in my time I have been considered the murderer of a friend, the jealous lover of a civil servant’s wife, and an obsessive player at roulette. I don’t wish to add to my chameleon-nature the characteristics belonging to the cuckolder of a South American diplomat, a possibly illegitimate birth and an education by the Jesuits” (5). Whether cautioning the reader that Brown is not Greene, or asserting that the “Greeneland” so often discussed by critics is an observed world and not a landscape of the mind, or insisting that he was not a “Catholic writer” but a writer who happened to be Catholic, Greene could hardly have been more emphatic


about the distinction between the writer’s own identity and that of his characters. Nevertheless, even Greene’s often-voiced objections may be suspected as a case of protesting too much; he was after all an extremely private person whose cultivation of a certain mystery about his own life (his self-revelations, even in autobiographical writings, tended to be guarded) was most probably a shrewd business strategy as well as a means of preserving his privacy. And he was afraid, as he stated in a Thames Television interview in 1988, of becoming a media “personality”: The reason [for my dislike of being filmed] is, if one’s bad why do it? And if one’s good, one ceases to be a writer and becomes a comedian. And I don’t think we’ve got any right to become comedians…. At any rate one starts acting, and directly you are playing a role, being a role of yourself. You’re becoming an actor. (Brighton Rock by Graham Greene) The dislike of being a public figure may have made it more desirable or even necessary to “perform” in the guise of his own characters. “I think he liked putting on his mask and being a fictional character,” wrote Paul Theroux shortly after Greene’s death in 1991: Just the other day I read The End of the Affair, and (his sense of place is so appreciative) I began to miss South London and to wonder, in a premonition of his death, what the world would be like without his gaze upon it. Temperamentally, he was much like the central character, Bendrix—a lonely man, capable of great sympathy but with a sliver of ice in his heart. I feel lucky to have been his friend, but I doubt that I knew him—I don’t think anyone really did. (NYTBR 21 Apr. 1991) It is clearer now than when Theroux wrote that we can know Greene through his books to a much greater extent than he cared to admit. The case of The Heart of the Matter cited earlier demonstrates both how this is true and why Greene would have preferred to deny it, perhaps even to himself. This view of the relationship between the author and his characters

PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST

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has often been regarded as a form of critical naivete, but other critics have taken it up from time to time—John Atkins, for example, who claimed that Greene “can always be seen through”; and Frank Kermode in his essay on A Burnt-Out Case. More recently Humphrey Carpenter has made the intriguing assertion that the unnamed whisky priest in The Power and the Glory is actually a picture of the author: Far from being a degraded wretch who is saved in spite of his failings, he is the only man in the story with integrity. His lapses do not amount to much when set against his capacity for fidelity, love and self-sacrifice, which the novel constantly emphasizes. In fact the lapses enhance him, for they keep him on the fleshly level and prevent him from becoming inaccessibly good. He is the kind of man whom reader and author would like to be; indeed, Greene seems to be hinting that he himself is the priest. This is how he first introduces the man: “He had protuberant eyes; he gave an impression of unstable hilarity, as if perhaps he had been celebrating a birthday alone.” This recalls descriptions of Greene himself. “Most of all,” writes A.L.Rowse, who knew him at Oxford, “one was struck by those staring china-blue eyes….” And Peter Quennell writes of Greene at school: “His contemplation of the horrors of human life appeared to cause him unaffected hilarity.” Even the fact the priest drinks brandy rather than whisky is another detail hinting at self-portrait. In The Lawless Roads, Greene describes how he frequently had to resort to “the brandy I had bought in Veracruz (poisonous stuff)” to ward off boredom and discomfort. The whisky priest, then, is Greene himself, confronted on one hand by the Catholic Church with its pieties and self-certainties, and on the other by the equally pious and self-certain socialist ideals of so many 1930s intellectuals. He feels drawn to both, and at the same time can see the limitations of each. As he has said of his “divided loyalties” in schooldays—son of the Headmaster and victim of the school—“I belonged to neither side.” (326–27)


A further justification for seeking the man in his own characters is the evidence I have suggested earlier of a steady if sometimes uneven drift in the novels toward more private and personal concerns—particularly in the treatment of marriage— revealed through protagonists who begin to resemble the author more closely than their late first-phase counterparts did. But that may be to beg the question. It might be best to say for the moment, then, that since there is clearly a public “Graham Greene,” the artist who defined himself and can be known and recognized through recurring themes, ideas, patterns, images, and characters in his works by those who never knew the private man, it is both reasonable and potentially enlightening to look for intersections between the “author” embodied in the works and the man whose personal life inevitably exerted a profound influence over those works. And it is important to identify the stage of a writer’s career when a self-conscious awareness or evaluation of his role as artist begins to appear as a primary feature of his work. The End of the Affair represents a culmination of several important tendencies of Greene’s second-phase narrative. The Confidential Agent and especially The Ministry of Fear had introduced mature protagonists whose sensibilities together with their framing of experience through literary allusion significantly decreased the distance between author and protagonist. The Heart of the Matter had transmuted the author’s painful experience of failed marriage, adultery, and the attendant pressures of guilt upon the Catholic conscience into a narrative in which the personal element seems more and more prominent with the passage of time. In the second phase Greene not only dealt more openly with personal concerns but displayed an increasing interest in writing about writers and artist figures. The Third Man introduced his initial use, in a work longer than a short story, of first-person narrative, and also his first protagonist who is a novelist. The story of novelist Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair, like that of Arthur Rowe, mingles personal guilt and unhappiness with a haunting sense of the contrast between contemporary alienation and anxiety and nineteenth-century stability and confidence. Confronted in the opening scene with the frightened and tearful Henry Miles, who has just begun to


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suspect his wife Sarah of adultery, Bendrix recalls having seen a photograph of Henry’s father: [L]ooking at it I thought how like the photograph was to Henry (it had been taken at about the same age, the middle forties) and how unlike. It wasn’t the moustache that made it different—it was the Victorian look of confidence, of being at home in the world and knowing the way around, and suddenly I felt again that friendly sense of companionship. (14) The “lack of confidence” which for Rowe had progressed from his inner life (the loss of belief in his own goodness) to his shocked awareness of the violence and treachery in the world around him, has in Bendrix’s first-person story invaded the conduct of the narrative itself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening paragraphs, which establish a condition of doubt and uncertainty that pervades the novel: A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say “one chooses” with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability; but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft, to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, “Speak to him; he hasn’t seen you yet.” For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry—I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias


because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate. (7; italics added) The questions, doubts, and uncertainties implied in the italicized phrases give credence to Bendrix’s memorable depiction of himself in a metaphor that has considerable resonance for the author of Journey Without Maps: “If this book of mine fails to take a straight course, it is because I am lost in a strange region; I have no map. I sometimes wonder whether anything that I am putting down here is true” (50). Such hesitation and doubtfulness implies that if The End of the Affair is a portrait of the artist, it is of an artist in crisis; it is full not only of details that correspond to Greene’s own life and habits as a writer, but also of numerous reflections on the craft and, it seems, the curse of his art. As the author of novels whose titles The Ambitious Host and The Crowned Image tease the reader with overtones suggestive of Greene’s own work, Bendrix has more in common with his creator than just age and occupation. Like Greene he has worked as an air-raid warden in Bloomsbury during the blitz, and he lives in South London on Clapham Common, where Greene lived for several years before the war. A less successful writer than Greene (even though the critic Waterbury will rate him “just a little above Maugham”), Bendrix occupies a room on the South Side of the common, whereas Greene, like Sarah in this novel, lived on the more fashionable North Side. (Like that of Bendrix’s landlady, Greene’s house was severely damaged by bombing.) Bendrix’s methodical routine for writing—five hundred words per day, with a careful tally of the number of words recorded at the end of each session—sounds like a description of Greene’s own procedures over many years. And Bendrix’s reflections on the relationship between the writer’s profession and his personal life touch upon concerns that must at times have been Greene’s own. Thinking, for example, of the unlikely chance that Henry might find one of his letters to Sarah, Bendrix writes: It was possible, I thought, that she had kept a letter, though I had written so few. It is a professional risk that authors run. Women are apt to exaggerate the importance of their lovers and they never foresee the disappointing


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day when an indiscreet letter will appear marked “Interesting” in an autograph catalogue, priced at five shillings. (14–15) The estimated price is surprisingly low, suggesting that Greene himself might not have foreseen the time when, for example, his letters to Jocelyn Rickards, a woman with whom he had an affair in the 1950s, would be described in a Times news article as “of enormous worth” and the subject of a dispute publicized when Ms. Rickards accused biographer Norman Sherry of failing to return the letters. The event is a minor but nonetheless telling reminder of ways, even unpredictable ones, in which The End of the Affair unites author and character more completely than any of Greene’s earlier novels had done. Of more importance than any of these resemblances between the real and the fictional novelist is the “affair” identified in the title as the novel’s subject. Bendrix writes of a passionate love affair with Sarah, wife of civil servant Henry Miles; Greene dedicated the novel describing that affair “To C. with love” (in the more forthright American edition “C.” was “Catherine”), an inscription that until a few years ago was understood by relatively few of his readers. The object of the dedication was Catherine Walston, mentioned earlier as the woman with whom Greene had a passionate relationship for twelve years. Mrs. Walston was wealthy and intelligent, beautiful, and by the account of Greene’s friend Evelyn Waugh remarkably charming and natural. Humphrey Carpenter summarizes Waugh’s response to her: Waugh was captivated by Mrs. Walston, who poured champagne into silver goblets and talked to him “barefooted and mostly squatting on the floor. Fine eyes and mouth, unaffected to the point of insanity, unvain, no ostentation—simple friendliness and generosity and childish curiosity.” (409) One suspects that if Waugh’s account is reliable, then the same unaffected “simple friendliness” may be found also in Bendrix’s initial response to Sarah: “I liked her at once because she said she had read my books and left the subject there—I found myself


treated at once as a human being rather than as an author” (25). The fact of Greene’s involvement in an ultimately failed relationship with the Catherine of the dedication is further evidence of the connection between author and character in The End of the Affair. We might expect such a “portrait” to resemble those earliest first-phase characters—Andrews, for example— who were so obviously derived from the author, and to the extent that the novel moves toward the moral and religious conversion of a protagonist in need of reform, it does. What may surprise some readers is the resemblance between Bendrix and the late first-phase characters. Bendrix’s bitterness, his professed hatred of Sarah and his rejection of God, together with his symbolic disfigurement, lameness resulting from “an accident in childhood,” link him with the protagonists at the end of the first phase. Yet the connection should not be surprising. Raven and Pinkie, in advancing essentially anarchic views of the world around them, served Greene in the way speakers in certain dramatic monologues served Browning and Tennyson. Greene, as Sherry has established, had a similar anarchic streak: he welcomed the destruction of the blitz as necessary to a “dog-toothed” civilization, and he set about the fictional destruction of his own beautiful Queen Anne house in one of his finest (if most perverse) short stories, “The Destructors” (1954). The soured view of life of which Bendrix is reminded when confronted with the obscene scrawl on the walls of the Pontefract Arms’s lavatory—“Damn you, landlord, and your breasty wife.” “To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.” (11–12)—carries such bitter misanthropy that we could easily imagine it to have been written by Pinkie Brown. But Bendrix suggests that it reflects a part of his own nature as well: “Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue” (12). (And indeed it does represent something that is part of Bendrix himself, since he will later call Henry a “pimp,” thereby implying that Sarah is a “whore.”) When he describes the graffiti to Henry a moment later, the latter’s response —“Jealousy’s an awful thing”—precisely if unconsciously traces the connection between Bendrix’s inner life and that of the anonymous author(s) of the scrawl. Henry’s comment triggers a


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characteristic movement of Bendrix’s mind: “It wasn’t what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there—in that phrase—the bitterness leaks again out of my pen” (12). The terms bitterness and hatred, together with related terms such as caustic (“Deliberately I would put the caustic soda of that word ‘affair’…upon my tongue” [57]), poison (“The poison was beginning to work in me again,” [67]), and venom (“The demon had done its work, I felt drained of venom,” [65]) express Bendrix’s emotional life with an insistence that makes plausible the comparison with Pinkie. (Prior to Greene’s revision of the novel for the Collected Edition, the comparison was even more apt, for Bendrix’s “venom” was linked metaphorically with sexuality: “The demon had done its work, the orgasm was over…,” [italics added].) Pinkie inflicts physical pain with razor blades, fingernails, and acid; he is the cruelest of Greene’s protagonists, though it should be worth mentioning that what is arguably the greatest act of cruelty in Brighton Rock—sending Rose back to her room to hear the gramophone recording of Pinkie’s vicious but now meaningless curse—is perpetrated by the author. Bendrix inflicts emotional pain with words. Both characters are motivated by the desire for revenge for being denied love, Pinkie against the world generally and Bendrix specifically against Sarah: “[I]t seemed to me that if I could have her once more—however quickly and crudely and unsatisfactorily—I would be at peace again: I would have washed her out of my system, and afterwards I would leave her, not she me” (28). His book, or at least the story of hatred he sets out to write, is itself an act of vengeance. Bendrix’s lame leg, though not grotesque, is like Raven’s harelip a physical sign of emotional injury, and Sarah, by loving him in spite of that emotional lameness, or even because of it (just as she “loves” his scar and brings love to Smythe by kissing his ugly, disfigured face), carries out the healing act of sympathy in a way that Anne Crowder was unable to do for Raven. Raven and Pinkie begin to question their own generalized hatred only toward the end of their stories, while Bendrix questions his from the outset. At one point in which he does so, Bendrix reminds the reader familiar with Greene’s other works of the unhappy children so common to the first phase:


Perhaps my hatred is really as deficient as my love. I looked up just now from writing and caught sight of my own face in a mirror close to my desk, and I thought, does hatred really look like that? For I was reminded of that face we have all of us seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop window, the features blurred with our breath, as we stare with such longing at the bright unobtainable objects within. (5657) Greene at different times linked both Pinkie and the villainous Harry Lime with the figure of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. Since both of these earlier characters are incapable of love, it is not surprising that Bendrix should link his realization that he is capable of loving with the experience of growing up. Having picked up a prostitute as if he knew that “the only way to hurt Sarah was to hurt myself” (57)—an adult action proceeding from childish motives—he discovers that he felt “no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly, after all the promiscuous years, I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever” (58). Because we see in The End of the Affair so many elements from earlier protagonists united in a character so much like the author, we begin to suspect a closer connection between author and other characters than before. The novel resonates with themes from the earlier work. The yearning for peace, for example, is insistent in the lives of Andrews, Crane, and Pinkie as it had been in Greene’s courtship letters, and it is expressed memorably by Scobie. “I’ve got nothing to give [Louise and Helen] that they can’t get elsewhere,” he thinks; “why can’t they leave me in peace?” (189). When he determines that suicide is the only way to escape his dilemma, Scobie makes the extraordinary gesture of offering peace to God: “I’m not pleading for mercy. I am going to damn myself, whatever that means. I’ve longed for peace and I’m never going to know peace again. But you’ll be at peace when I am out of your reach” (258). The theme of peace that runs through these and other works reaches its apogee in Greene’s fusion of the sexual and the mystical in The End of the Affair, where Bendrix defines it in his description of Sarah’s ability to give herself completely to him and to the moment:


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We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement— we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubts. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space. (50–51) Echoing the “still point of the turning world” from Eliot and ultimately from St. John of the Cross, the passage delineates that territory of peace and happiness into which Bendrix knows he cannot enter. As Greene had done, Bendrix also destroys his own peace in ways that reveal not just his personality but also his profession, especially as he reflects on the problem of the writer’s relationship to his subjects. The End of the Affair casts doubt on the moral status of the writer who must exploit the world around him—even the people he loves—in order to get material for his writing. It is a doubt expressed as early as 1932 in Stamboul Train, where the narrator comments on Mabel Warren: All the way down the Rhine was her province; there wasn’t a town of any size between Cologne and Mainz where she hadn’t sought out human interest, forcing dramatic phrases onto the lips of sullen men, pathos into the mouths of women too overcome with grief to speak at all. There wasn’t a suicide, a murdered woman, a raped child who had stirred her to the smallest emotion; she was an artist to examine critically, to watch, to listen; the tears were for paper. (35) Greene was sometimes capable of a similar coldness. Norman Sherry describes Greene’s detached experience of witnessing a death and a family’s grief in a London hospital where he was recovering from an appendectomy in 1926, an event which gave rise to the account of Conrad Drover’s death in It’s a Battlefield (1:324); and Barbara Greene, the writer’s cousin and his companion on his journey through Liberia in the 1935, wrote of his coolly detached observation of her and the others. Graham’s


mind, she said, was “sharp and clear and cruel”: “If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you” (qtd. in Carpenter 277). The difficulty of reconciling the roles of artist, observer, and recorder with those of friend, companion, or lover was made painfully clear to Greene at least as early as November 1925, in the aftermath of an incident in which the young writer, deeply discouraged by his current relationship with Vivien, incorporated parts of their situation and her intimate conversation into a scene in his (unpublished) novel The Episode. When Vivien discovered what he had done and was deeply hurt, Greene first denied anything more than a coincidental relationship between fact and fiction, but almost immediately afterward he wrote a moving letter of confession and apology. Bendrix, who initially befriends Sarah with the “cold-blooded intention of picking the brain of a civil servant’s wife” (10) in search of material for his current novel, only to fall in love with her, is tormented by his inability to trust in her love. Because his own duplicity understandably makes it difficult for him to believe in others’ sincerity, both must suffer. Bendrix uses his artist’s detachment as a shield for his own emotional vulnerability, with disastrous results. He recalls an occasion when Sarah spent an entire night with him and the demon of his jealousy and insecurity led him to spoil their happiness. Something he said provoked a quarrel, after which they slept until he woke Sarah with the intention of apologizing; yet the sight of her beauty and her forgiveness—she forgot quarrels quickly and, unlike Bendrix, was never vindictive— caused him to become the writer with the splinter of ice in his heart: I said to her, “I’ve lain awake thinking of Chapter Five. Does Henry ever eat coffee beans to clear his breath before an important conference?” She shook her head and began to cry silently, and I of course pretended not to understand the reason—a simple question, it had been worrying me about my character, this was not an attack on Henry, the nicest people sometimes ate coffee beans. (11) Resentful of her loyalty to “harmless” Henry, Bendrix sometimes releases the poison within him by using the novel to


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“invent episodes too crude to write” (11). Most of Bendrix’s malice is not so ineffective, however. He punishes Sarah directly and Henry indirectly by using his craft, and he gains revenge against both of them by hiring a detective to investigate Sarah’s suspected infidelity. In so doing he carries out Greene’s fullest development of a favorite idea, that of the novelist as detective. Bendrix is fully conscious of the comparison. “A detective,” he writes early in the narrative, must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But how difficult that picking out is—the release of the real subject. The enormous pressure of the outside world weighs on us like a peine forte et dure. Now that I come to write my own story the problem is still the same, but worse; there are so many more facts, now that I have not to invent them. Recalling his first meeting with Sarah, he contemplates it as might a detective poring over evidence: “I wondered whether, if I thought long enough, I could detect, at the party Henry had given, her future lover” (25; italics added). Bendrix’s role as detective is fraught with ironies. Like Rollo Martins, his immediate predecessor among Greene’s protagonists, he is a novelist-turned-detective in pursuit of a “third man,” and in the course of his investigation he stumbles onto something that alters his view of Sarah as radically as Martins’s view of Harry Lime is altered. Yet Bendrix’s “third man” is ironically not a man at all, but God. Another irony is that Parkis, the bumbling (but nevertheless successful) investigator whose innocence provides Bendrix with so much malicious pleasure, intuitively recognizes Sarah’s goodness and likes her immediately. Bendrix, in contrast, regularly misinterprets the most important evidence of all, viewing Sarah’s desire that he be happy—a desire so complete and unselfish that she would not mind his finding comfort in another woman—as evidence of its opposite, the lack of concern. He makes a comparable error in dismissing her movement toward Christian belief as mere self-justification: “I thought with hatred, she always has to show up well in her own


mirror: she mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble to herself. She won’t admit that now she prefers to go to bed with X” (74). Bendrix’s failure as a detective is inevitably linked with his shortcomings as an artist. In both of these dimensions of his character a moral implication can be found: his failure of perception and his missing of the truth as detective point the way to our understanding of why he is a second-rate novelist: “I hate the books I write with their trivial unimportant skill,” he says; “I hate the craftsman’s mind in me, so greedy for copy that I set out to seduce a woman I didn’t love for the information she could give me…” (181). His reputation as a good craftsman damns him with faint praise by implying that something is missing from his art—perhaps it is vision, or a deeper understanding of the nature of human experience, or a sufficient humanity. In any event, his “civil servant” novel fails when he cannot complete it, and the book we read in its place fails in its implied purpose of proving Bendrix’s hatred of Sarah and writing her out of his system. Indeed, The End of the Affair is emphatically about failure; in that regard it may be compared with such paradoxical works as Coleridge’s “Dejection” ode and Fellini’s film 8 1/2, works that rise to greatness by dealing with the artist’s inability to create. One key to Bendrix’s failure, of course, is that the doubt and uncertainty described earlier here (“I sometimes wonder whether anything I’m putting down here is true”) are justified by the end result. His entire account of events leading up to the discovery of the diary is a record of flawed perception; intended as a faithful documenting of facts by the author who voices at the outset his professional pride in truthfulness, it is essentially untruthful, revealing not that Sarah is faithless or that she is attempting to “show up well in her own mirror,” but rather that Bendrix’s mirror—the one the writer holds up to his world—is a distorting one far more harmful than that which Smythe accuses Christian believers of using to distort reality. In Bendrix’s own words, simply, “[M]y realism had been at fault…” (147). Bendrix may be said to suffer a curse like the figurative one which befalls the artist-figure in Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallott”; when he looks on life directly—falling in love the woman he merely intended to exploit in order to get copy—


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his art fails him and he is drawn into the world where his reality is defined by suffering. What traps Bendrix in the curse of his own art are his detachment and his compulsion to see his relationship with Sarah as merely an affair with a familiar plot, its end as well as its beginning implicit in the connotations of the word affair. When I began to realize how often we quarreled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour…. And all the time… I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly (35). We are not told whether Bendrix has seen love die before, but we know that Scobie did, and we know that their creator did. Bendrix’s failure, then, is complex; his book not only discloses his faulty understanding but fails in its intended purpose. He wishes to make it “a record of hate far more than of love,” sealing his relationship with Sarah in the past and thereby reassuring himself forever that the affair has ended. But the book is unmistakably a record of love, one which demonstrates that he cannot purge Sarah from his system. Sarah’s testimony two years earlier—“People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?” (74)—had promised him that their affair would not end; her diary proves that it has not ended, and so does Bendrix’s involuntary revelation that he still loves her— signs of Greene’s narrative skill, not his character’s. Sarah’s diary, obtained by Parkis and read by Bendrix midway through his own narrative, takes the reader more deeply into the point of view of an adult woman than anything Greene had written since Kate’s stream-of-consciousness reflections in England Made Me. The event is memorable not merely for its emotional intensity but for its use of intersecting or overlapping texts to expose the error of Bendrix’s point of view. In a curious way it heightens our sympathy for him by making clear to us how much he has lost through his doubt and


mistrust, for we learn as he does how completely wrong was his interpretation of Sarah and her affections, and how inadequate his love has been in comparison with hers. When the narratorwriter becomes a reader along with us, our relationship with him acquires a new dimension. The diary focuses attention on the novel’s central contrast between two kinds of human love: Bendrix’s is imperfect, marred by jealousy, mistrust, possessiveness, all signs of egotism and self-love; Sarah’s approaches perfection, through her complete unselfishness. She values his happiness more than her own; her prayer for him long after their separation —“Give him my peace—he needs it more” (123)—performs the imitation of Christ through the self-sacrifice of love, and in so doing reveals Sarah’s progress toward the saintliness the novel will attribute to her. Yet “progress” may be a misnomer, since this condition of Sarah’s life is implicit in her initial leap of faith, when she believes Bendrix to be dead and calls upon God, if He exists, to save Bendrix, to restore him to life and a chance of happiness. In return she will believe, and she will give Bendrix up—thereby destroying her own happiness, since her love for him is the only thing in her life she truly values. Sarah thus becomes like the poor widow of Luke 21:2–4; she has little to offer God, but she offers all that she has. God’s acceptance of her offer dooms her and Bendrix to unhappiness in this world. The thematic contrast of two kinds of love is enforced, if rather obliquely, at the end of the novel by Greene’s characteristic use of literary allusion. In this case the allusion seems minor but is so rich in its parallels to the love relationship between Bendrix and Sarah as to suggest that it may have been a source from which Greene drew in treating material so close to his own experience. The source is Robert Browning’s short poem “In a Year,” from the volume Men and Women; as Bendrix discovers when looking through Sarah’s girlhood books after her death, she had written a quotation from the poem in her copy of Scott’s Last Expedition. It seems as if Greene is tipping his hand, suggesting that the Browning poem means something to him. Bendrix, a literary man himself, shows no evidence of identifying it. “In a Year” has several qualities that remind us of Greene’s subtlety in choosing the allusion. First, it presents a woman’s point of view toward a relationship that has turned unhappy.


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Second, it distinguishes between a man’s and a woman’s love, the former jealous and possessive, the latter self-sacrificing. Third, it suggests remarkably the woman’s willingness to die for the man in order to secure his happiness; the speaker imagines her actually doing so, only to reflect that he would be surprised and would find her even harder to understand. Yet he would know that she did love him after all: Would he loved me yet, On and on, While I found some way undreamed —Paid my debt! Gave more life and more, Till, all gone, He should smile “She never seemed Mine before.” Finally, and most important, the poem is about the limits of human love. Browning’s speaker wants to know what happens when the warmth of affection disappears from the lover’s heart. Sarah wants to know what happens when people get to the end of love, or of passion, or find that their love is somehow used up and still does not bring peace and contentment but leaves them in the desert. What will happen then to fill the void? Or, to use the line she once copied from the end of Browning’s poem: “And what comes next? Is it God?” Sarah, whom Greene justly regarded as a successful creation, is arguably the most important female character in his writing. A measure of her importance may be gained by looking briefly at her role in the drama of salvation in this novel, a drama that recurs in secular as well as sacred variations in so many of Greene’s works. A comparable drama was implied in the artist’s own life, of course, in the courtship which in its broad outlines traced a pattern of salvation wherein an agnostic and somewhat cynical young man was converted by a beautiful, virtuous, and deeply religious young woman to love (even celibate love) and to Catholic belief. It goes without saying that such a description oversimplifies and omits hundreds of important particulars in the relationship of Greene and Vivien, but the pattern is clear and is supported by the emotional dynamics of the letters, especially those in which Greene


attributes to Vivien the qualities of a saint, like Shaw’s St. Joan, or identifies her with the “Philosopher’s Stone” by which such base materials as himself might be transformed into something of great worth. The first-phase novels often enacted versions of the drama in which the internal conflicts within a “divided” young male protagonist corresponded to his positioning in the plot between two women, one “saintly” or at least innocent and the other “loose”: Elizabeth and Lucy, Milly and Kay, Coral and Janet/ Mabel, Rose and Ida. As if Greene were now rewriting that first-phase drama which took shape from his own experience, Sarah unites the saintly and the loose woman in one character and becomes more convincingly adult, more complex, and more interesting than any of these earlier characters. She is frankly sexual, experienced rather than innocent, yet in the end deeply spiritual, and she has the power not only to bring about the protagonist’s salvation but to heal others such as Smythe and Parkis’s son Lance. Although Sarah castigates herself as “a bitch and a fake,” her actions and the moving account of her spiritual growth recorded in her diary provide Greene’s fullest attempt to reconcile human sexual love with the love of God. No brief excerpt can do justice to that record in the diary—it is one of Greene’s finest achievements—but the entry for 2 October 1945 perhaps best represents this aspect of the whole. The entry describes how Sarah, alone in a church in Park Road, contemplates “the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body,” and is reminded of how the only concept of God she wants to accept is that of a sort of cosmic “vapour,” vague and impersonal. She is troubled by the Catholic belief “in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed forever. I had done so much injury with this body” (109–10). But when her thinking turns to Bendrix’s body, to the lines on his face and the scar on his shoulder, she realizes that she does after all want the resurrection of the body: That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine, yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I


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hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails; we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve. (110) Through such reflection Sarah discovers the basis upon which she can begin to understand and accept the meaning of Christ’s passion: So today I looked at that material body on that material cross, and I wondered, how could the world have nailed a vapour there? A vapour, of course, felt no pain and no pleasure. It was only my superstition that imagined it could answer my prayers. Dear God, I had said; I should have said, Dear Vapour. I had said, I hate you; but can one hate a vapour?… Suppose God did exist, suppose he was a body like that. What’s wrong in believing that his body existed as much as mine? Could anybody love him or hate him if he hadn’t got a body? I can’t love a vapour that was Maurice. (111– 12) The language and the idea are reminiscent of the argument in Donne’s “The Ecstasy,” which Greene had quoted many years earlier in a courtship letter in which he attempted to persuade Vivien to accept the physical side of marriage. The union of spiritual and sexual love in the person of Sarah signals an end to Greene’s division of women into the two types described earlier in these pages. The division will not appear again in serious form in Greene’s novels, although it will be echoed comically in Travels with My Aunt. What emerges in The End of the Affair and several other “portraits” novels is the division of men into two contrasting types, with the female character located between the two as a source of conflict. The first appearance of this pattern can be seen in The Third Man, where the two lovers of Anna are the innocent Rollo Martins and the experienced, corrupt Harry Lime. In The End of the Affair, Sarah is positioned at first between the “innocent” husband Henry and the worldly, jealous, “twisted” and therefore implicitly corrupt Bendrix. The pattern will appear at


least five more times: in The Quiet American, where Phuong is alternately the mistress of the protagonist Fowler, the weary, guilt-ridden journalist, and of Pyle, the innocent young American who loves her; in The Comedians, where Martha Pineda’s betrayal of her lover Brown with the companionable but innocent Jones takes place only in Brown’s jealous imagination but is a powerful motivating force in the plot nevertheless; in The Honorary Consul, where the young Clara is positioned between Plarr, with whom she has an affair, and Fortnum, her kind and forgiving husband; in Dr. Fischer of Geneva, where the doctor’s late wife was caught between a cold, tyrannical, husband and the gentle music-loving clerk, Steiner; and finally it appears in The Captain and the Enemy, where the trusting Liza was once the mistress of Jim’s unfeeling father (“the devil”) but left him for the affectionate if unpredictable Captain. At the center of each of these stories except Dr. Fischer is the protagonist who discovers the inadequacy of his own love, which has failed through selfishness, infidelity, and/or misunderstanding. Plarr, in Consul, confesses his failure bluntly in interior monologue: he knows the mechanics of lovemaking but doesn’t “know how to love.” In the first-person narratives of the “portraits,” Bendrix, Fowler, and Brown incorporate extended confessions of inadequacy. The structure of The End of the Affair turns upon this discovery, as pointed out earlier, and ends with the protagonist’s confession to God that he is “too tired and old to learn to love” (192). Bendrix’s confession is bleak and momentarily despairing even though the novel’s structural irony suggests that he has already been drawn toward God and divine love against his will. Moreover, in the context of Greene’s novels Bendrix’s discovery appears to mark a necessary stage through which the artist-figures must pass before the fiction can move toward the conditions of acceptance and reconciliation that will characterize several of the later works from Travels onward.

THE QUIET AMERICAN The Quiet American carries on what The End of the Affair had begun by using first-person narrative conducted by a writerprotagonist whose experiences in many respects mirror those of


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the author. With its exotic setting and its overt political concern with colonial wars, American meddling in the Third World, and the individual’s decision whether to become engagé in such matters, the story is so remote from the English middle-class milieu of The End of the Affair that one might expect it to be altogether different from that earlier book. Yet in its tone, its narrative voice, and the character and outlook of its narratorprotagonist Thomas Fowler, it is remarkably similar and is a further development of Greene’s portrait of the artist. Structurally the two works are quite similar, perhaps because once the first-person narrative has been adopted and the story contained within the protagonist’s mind, the time sequence of the plot is altered. The cinematic presentations and linear plots of earlier works give way to structures determined by memory in The End of the Affair and The Quiet American. Evidence of similarity can be seen in the situations with which the books open: two members of a love triangle (Bendrix and Henry, Fowler and Phuong) discuss the third, who is doomed (Sarah will die later in the story; Pyle is already dead). In both cases the narrator is an agent of death although he is not legally guilty: Bendrix pursues Sarah until she runs away from him into the rain, with the result that her cold develops into pneumonia; Fowler knowingly directs Pyle to the place where Heng’s men will find him and probably kill him.) In both cases the narrator has lost a woman to another lover and is torn by jealousy, and a major function of the narrative structure is to define the current state of mind in the protagonist, to explain how he became what he is at the time of narration—in both cases weary, uneasy, dissatisfied, although The Quiet American has a qualified “happy” ending at least in the sense that Fowler does not lose Phuong as Bendrix loses Sarah. The more obvious similarities between Fowler and his creator will already be familiar to many of Greene’s readers. Fowler is an English journalist living in Saigon, covering the French Indochina war as Greene had done for Life magazine and The Sunday Times. (Since Greene was journalist as well as novelist, I will use “writer” here to describe both him and his character.) His first name is the one Greene took for his Catholic name at the time of his entry into the church, that of Thomas the doubter—appropriate for Fowler, an unbeliever. Like Greene, Fowler is hopelessly estranged from a devoutly religious wife


(though Helen Fowler is High Church Anglican rather than Catholic). And Fowler’s anti-Americanism gives full vent to the strain of anti-Americanism not typical of Greene’s earlier fiction but found elsewhere in his writing, most memorably in his film criticism of the 1930s. Less obvious but no less interesting are minor details suggestive of highly personal links between author and protagonist. For example, a “knacker’s yard…in the small town where [he] was born” (108) frightened Fowler as a child just as the one in Berkhamsted frightened the boy Greene. On the night he is wounded, Fowler explains how the perilous watch tower in which he and Pyle take refuge is so normalized by conversation that it might be a familiar street or bar or “a room off Gordon Square” (98), the last a recollection of the Bloomsbury flat in which Greene lived with Dorothy for a time during the war. There seems also a strong personal element in the letter Fowler receives from his wife Helen: “You say that it will be the end of life to lose this girl. Once you used exactly that phrase to me—I could show you the letter, I have it still—and I suppose you wrote in the same way to Anne” (119). Maurice Bendrix evinces concern over the future of a writer’s letters, and Vivien Greene eventually sold her husband’s letters at auction—letters that contained extravagant declarations of his unending love. This last point deserves emphasis as one of many details suggestive of a far greater likeness between Fowler, Bendrix, and Greene than even the more obvious comparisons cited earlier might indicate. Fowler so closely resembles Bendrix in his cynicism, lack of belief, occasional cruelty, and mingled guilt, love, and jealousy that at times it is difficult to distinguish between the two characters. Indeed, Greene seems to echo the earlier novel selfconsciously, as when Fowler receives a letter of promotion which will necessitate his departure, leaving Phuong to Pyle: “[A]nd there…was in fact his victory, the end of the affair” (67; italics added). Fowler’s response to the question of when he met Pyle—“Why should I explain to [Inspector Vigot] that it was Pyle who had met me? I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental….” (17)— bears a strong resemblance to Bendrix’s opening encounter with Henry: “[D]o I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry


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Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did those images choose me?” (7). The rhythm and imagery are similar, and so is the tone of uncertainty, a quality that characterizes Fowler’s narrative as surely as it does Bendrix’s. Fowler’s uncertainty, like that of his predecessor, centers around his perception of love: She must have loved him in her way: hadn’t she been fond of me, and hadn’t she left me for Pyle? (18–19) ................... Am I the only one who really cared for Pyle? (22) .................. Perhaps he [the attaché] had really loved Pyle. (31) .................. Oh, I was right about the facts, but wasn’t he right too to be young and mistaken, and wasn’t he perhaps a better man for a girl to spend her life with? (165) Fowler’s acute jealousy in his love for Phuong is revealed in his attention to Pyle’s recognition of her footfall: It was then I heard Phuong’s step. I had hoped against hope that he would have gone before she returned. He heard it too and recognized it. He said, ‘There she is,’ although he had had only one evening to learn her footfall. (75) The scene recalls one in The End of the Affair in which Bendrix displays a more intimate knowledge of Sarah than Henry does: “That was the door,” I said. “Sarah’s come in.” “Oh,” he said, “that will be the maid. She’s been to the pictures.” “No, it was Sarah’s step.” (17) Like Bendrix, who so fears the end of his affair that he actually pushes it toward an unhappy conclusion, Fowler is “afraid of losing happiness” and fears that Phuong will leave him “If not next year, in three years” (44). Bendrix’s anxiety is not traced to specific events in the past, but Fowler’s is, and his explanation of it to Pyle could serve as a description of Bendrix’s experience


with Sarah. Fowler left the unnamed “woman in a red dressing gown,” whom he loved, because, he says, “We are fools…when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing—I don’t know if she really was, but I couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran toward the finish just like a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.” (103) Sherry mentions that Greene told Vivien of the excitement he felt upon seeing a woman in a red dressing gown; it was Dorothy Glover. Fowler’s emotions here are precisely those of Bendrix cited in the preceding chapter: “And all the time I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy…. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly” (35). In his anxiety and unhappiness Fowler takes the same perverse pleasure in teasing the innocent that Bendrix does. Whether remarking to Pyle that he prefers to use the young man’s last name because of its “associations,” or commenting sardonically that “Congress wouldn’t like it”if a grenade “incident” involved one of the Americans, Fowler is conscious of a form of cruelty that he seems unable to resist. “Why does one want to tease the innocent?” he asks (18). In this regard, too, The Quiet American has unmistakable echoes of The End of the Affair that the identity of the protagonists seems almost to merge. Bendrix contradicts Parkis’s account of the naming of his son “After Sir Lancelot, sir. Of the Round Table”: “I’m surprised. That was a rather unpleasant episode, surely.” “He found the Holy Grail,” Mr. Parkis added. “That was Galahad. Lancelot was found in bed with Guinevere.” Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy? Mr. Parkis said sadly, looking across at his boy as though he had betrayed him, “I hadn’t heard.” (77; italics added)


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Fowler similarly interrupts Pyle’s account of the naming of his dog: “The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I called him after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who…” “Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.” “I don’t remember that.” (74) Directed toward innocents like Pyle and Parkis, this cruelty provides mild humor and thereby involves the reader briefly in a sharing of the perverse pleasure which is subsequently disclaimed by the narrator; yet in this regard the narrative point of view with which we identify remains ambivalent, for it also proclaims the inadequacy and even the danger of innocence. The ambivalence toward innocence displayed in so many of Greene’s works is further evidence that first-person narrators like Fowler and Bendrix, who confront directly the problem of their own ambivalence, are indeed very close to the artist himself. Certainly the novels present a gallery of characters loved and/or scorned for their innocence: Anthony Farrant, who according to Kate is “too innocent to live”; Rose, despised by Pinkie for her innocence (Pinkie’s rhetorical question “My God, have I got to have a massacre?” alludes to the Massacre of the Innocents); Ali, whom Scobie loved, and the similar Deo Gratias, admired by Querry, and finally the Smiths in The Comedians, with their fantastically improbable scheme of establishing a vegetarian center in Haiti. Cruelty toward the innocent is paralleled in Bendrix and Fowler by cruelty toward the women they love. In both men the behavior is that of what Greene once described in a letter to Vivien as the wounded animal that turns and bites. As Bendrix had mistreated Sarah, Fowler mistreats Phuong: I would ask her where she had been…and sometimes she would reply the market or the shops and produce her piece of evidence (even her readiness to confirm her story seemed at that period unnatural), and sometimes it was the cinema, and the stub of her ticket was there to prove it, and sometimes it was her sister’s—that was where I believed she met Pyle. I made love to her in those days savagely as though I hated her, but what I hated was the


future. Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night. (140) Bendrix says of himself that “Hate operates the same glands as love.” Fowler puts it more crudely: I remembered that first tormenting year when I had begged her to tell me what she thought and had scared her with my unreasoning anger at her silence. Even my desire had been a weapon, as though when one plunged one’s sword toward the victim’s womb, she would lose control and speak. (134) One consequence of the prolonged emotional contortions of the characters is a form of impotence: Bendrix, for whom passion for Sarah “had killed simple lust forever” (69), initiates a sexual encounter with a prostitute and, later, a seductive flirtation with Sylvia Black, a critic’s girlfriend, only to discover that he is without desire. After Phuong leaves Fowler, who claims to have made love to “forty-odd” women (Greene once told Norman Sherry that he had made love to forty-three women), he hires a prostitute but finds his body “frozen by memory”: “She used the same perfume, and suddenly at the moment of entry the ghost of what I’d lost proved more powerful than the body stretched at my disposal. I moved away and lay on my back and desire drained out of me” (153). Fowler’s judgment on the role of desire in this stage of his life ironically reads like a curiously prophetic comment on the experience of the author who, after a failed marriage and several affairs, spent three decades in a stable relationship with Yvonne Cloetta. “One starts promiscuous,” Fowler says to Pyle, “and ends like one’s grandfather, faithful to one woman” (103). A second consequence is that in their despair both Fowler and Bendrix address God as “You.” Bendrix grudgingly acknowledges God’s existence and begs to be left alone. Fowler’s rational skepticism remains resolute and inflexible throughout most of the novel, but in one brief desperate moment, when he has sent Pyle to meet his fate at the hands of Heng, he addresses God ambiguously in what can only be described as an attenuated version of Sarah’s promise: “I handed back the


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decision to that Somebody in whom I didn’t believe: You can intervene if You want to: a telegram on his desk: a message from the Minister. You cannot exist unless you have the power to alter the future” (180). I suggested earlier that in Bendrix’s emphasis on the “poisonous” and “caustic” quality of his own attitudes there was a distinct echo of Brighton Rock. Not surprisingly, given the resemblances between Bendrix and Fowler, The Quiet American also carries echoes of that first-phase novel and suggests that certain elements of the author’s own personality had to be vented in dramatic form through the voices of extremely alienated characters before Greene reached that stage in which he was ready—or felt compelled—to create once more personae who were more directly and obviously like himself. Pyle’s black dog is an ironic echo of the Faustian theme of Brighton Rock; for all of his innocence, Pyle is clearly up to the devil’s work in Saigon, at least as this novel sees it. A subtler and more revealing echo can be seen through a comparison of scenes in which Fowler and Pinkie comment sardonically on the misdirected affections of their naive admirers. Thus, the expression of Pinkie’s reaction to Rose just after his wedding —“The crude quick ceremony was a claim on him. She didn’t know the reason; she thought—God save the mark—he wanted her” (172; second italics added)—can be heard in Fowler’s response to Pyle’s affection: “His sad eyes would inquire with fervour after Phuong, while his lips expressed with even more fervour the strength of his affection and of his admiration—God save the mark—for me” (85; italics added). Likewise, Pinkie’s horror in the face of the most ordinary signs of bourgeois family life, seen in the garage where he hides from Colleoni’s men, resurfaces unmistakably in Fowler’s detailed imagining of the “merciless” home of his night-editor in London, who would take the “envious thought” of Fowler’s adultery back to his semi-detached villa in Streatham and climb into bed with it beside the faithful wife he had carried with him years back from Glasgow. I could see so well the kind of house that has no mercy—a broken tricycle stood in the hall and somebody had broken his favourite pipe;


and there was a child’s shirt in the living-room waiting for a button to be sewn on. (72–73) The rhythm and emotion seem unchanged in the seventeen years that separate the two novels, and the similarity of the events is all the more remarkable in that the later one arises entirely from Fowler’s imagination and has no objective reality at all. What we see is Greene’s artist-figure imagining a scene for the anonymous night-editor just as Greene himself imagined it for Pinkie years earlier. In both instances the source of horror —the “merciless” quality of the house—is not intrinsic to the scene described but derives entirely from the character’s and, in turn, the author’s point of view. I also suggested earlier the link between The End of the Affair and Brighton Rock as detective stories. The Quiet American is also a novel of detection, although in it Greene drops the comparison of novelist and detective and replaces it with a comparison of detective and priest. Again the echo of Affair seems self-conscious, since the name of the detective here, Monsieur Vigot, is almost identical to that of the London location—Vigo Street—of Mr. Savage’s detective agency, where Bendrix hires Parkis. More important is that Fowler is pursued by Vigot almost as relentlessly as Bendrix is pursued by God, and although the plot of the later novel is almost wholly secularized, the concern of M.Vigot seems to be as much Fowler’s spiritual condition as it is his legal status as guilty or not guilty. Near the end of the interrogation Fowler remarks, “[Y]ou would have made a good priest, Vigot. What is it about you that would make it so easy to confess—if there were anything to confess?” Has Vigot received confessions, Fowler asks, “because like a priest it’s [his] job not to be shocked, but to be sympathetic?” (168). Vigot in turn insists that Fowler is not a criminal and need not be concerned that a police detective, unlike a true priest, cannot preserve the secrecy of the confessional. “Secrecy,” he tells Fowler, “is seldom important to a man who confesses: even when it’s to a priest. He has other motives.” “To cleanse himself?” “Not always. Sometimes he only wants to see himself clearly as he is. Sometimes he is just weary of deception.


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You are not a criminal, Fowler, but I would like to know why you lied to me. You saw Pyle the night he died.” (168) Vigot appears to offer something most unlike the justice pursued by Ida Arnold and more like the mercy tendered by the old priest to Rose. He wants the record to be complete, and like Chesterton’s Father Brown, a favorite of Greene’s early reading, he seems concerned for the soul of the “accused.” When Vigot pauses reflectively at the end of the last interrogation, Fowler has “the feeling of some force immobile and profound. For all I knew, he might have been praying” (170). Fowler refuses to confess, however, and must therefore bear the burden of his guilt alone and more heavily. At Vigot’s departure Fowler’s comment links this priest-detective with the imaginative writer: It was strange how disturbed I had been by Vigot’s visit. It was as though a poet had brought me his work to criticize and through some careless action I had destroyed it. I was a man without a vocation—one cannot seriously consider journalism as a vocation, but I could recognize a vocation in another. Now that Vigot was gone to close his uncompleted file, I wished I had the courage to call him back and say, “You are right. I did see Pyle the night he died.” (171) And the need to confess, perhaps also to repent, is the thought that lingers in Fowler’s mind in the very last line of the narrative: “Everything had gone right with me since [Pyle] had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry” (189). What form penance might take in the future life of an unbeliever is perhaps anyone’s guess, but there can be no doubt that Fowler’s confession has been made at last: it is the novel we read.

A BURNT-OUT CASE The movement in Greene’s second-phase novels toward the merging of author and protagonist reached its fullest expression in Maurice Bendrix, the character who, as I have tried to show, seems to have been reworked in the person of Thomas Fowler. Substantial elements of the same personality appear in the


ironic artist-figures of Querry in A Burnt-Out Case (1961) and Brown in The Comedians (1966). The latter may be said, then, to mark the end of a sequence of four novels, beginning with The End of the Affair, in which Greene creates his most important portraits of the artist. Before turning to the last two books in that sequence, however, it is necessary to mention the entertainment Our Man in Havana (1958), which appears halfway between them and, though it does not seem to have serious elements of self-portraiture, is nevertheless a highly self-conscious reflection on the nature of fiction-making and the intersection of art and life. Drawn with delightful ironic humor from Greene’s travels in Havana and his experience in the British Secret Service, Our Man depicts the adventures of James Wormold, a mildmannered vacuum-cleaner salesman (English, divorced, middleaged) whose need for money to support the extravagant lifestyle of his daughter Milly leads him to accept the unlikely job of British spy. In a comic variation of Greene’s serious themes, Wormold places loyalty to an individual over loyalty to the state and its institutions. Unable to provide authentic information to his new employers, he transforms report-writing into fictionwriting, supplying them with names from the country-club and a fictitious organization of sub-agents whose espionage activities he then fabricates from events reported in newspapers and magazines. The ruse entertains Wormold, inspires his creative imagination, and provides useful income. But when his fiction begins to merge with fact, as when the imaginary pilot Raul Dominquez is discovered to have a reallife counterpart who has been killed by enemy agents, Wormold is drawn out of his imagined world and into the authentic world of espionage, populated by enemy agents and assassins. Wormold’s deception provides what Grahame Smith has called “perhaps the most brilliantly extended embodiment of Greene’s fictional preoccupation with the nature of fiction…” (“Postmodern Elements” 197). More serious and more explicitly personal reflections of the artist appear in A Burnt-Out Case, which may be the most formal and self-conscious of all of Greene’s portraits. The sense of the artist in crisis that emerges in The End of the Affair seems both more urgent and more fully articulated in this novel, and the very obviousness of that condition may account


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for Greene’s greater than normal willingness to acknowledge a kinship with his protagonist. Even then, he was characteristically evasive on the subject. In his dedicatory letter to Dr. Michel Lechat he wrote: “It would be a waste of time for anyone to try to identify Querry, the Ryckers, Parkinson, Father Thomas—they are formed from the flotsam of thirty years as a novelist. This is not a roman à clef, but an attempt to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half-belief and non-belief….” Yet to his friend Evelyn Waugh he would write: With a writer of your genius and insight I certainly would not attempt to hide behind the time-old gag that an author can never be identified with his characters. Of course in some of Querry’s reactions there are reactions of mine, just as in some of Fowler’s reactions in The Quiet American there are reactions of mine. I suppose the points where an author is in agreement with his character lend what force or warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say that a parallel must not be drawn all down the line and not necessarily to the conclusion of the line. (Ways 263) Waugh had seen in the book Greene’s exasperation with the reputation of “Catholic writer,” an exasperation to which Greene would often testify. After the success of The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair he was sought relentlessly by admirers, even priests, in need of counsel or confession, until he felt “used and exhausted by the victims of religion.” For a “better man,” Greene wrote, the situation might have offered “a life’s work,” but the shape of his own life left him unable to offer aid to others: I had no apostolic mission, and the cries for spiritual assistance maddened me because of my impotence. What was the Church for but to aid these sufferers? What was the priesthood for? I was like a man without medical knowledge in a village struck with plague. It was in those years, I think, that Querry was born, and Father Thomas too. He had often sat in that chair of mine, and he had worn many faces. (Ways 261)


Waugh also felt that the book justified a reading as a statement of the author’s recantation of faith, and although Greene’s reply —that writers must be allowed to create doubters and atheists as well as believers—is convincing on its own, Waugh’s view was at the very least prophetic of the later Greene who would describe himself as a “Catholic atheist.” Moreover, the separation of the character’s doubts from the author’s becomes more problematic in the context of a work so replete, as I will suggest, with evidence of self-conscious reflections of the author’s life and work. No surer sign of self-consciousness and reflexivity could be found than in Greene’s deliberate echoes of Joseph Conrad carried out long after Greene had acknowledged—and critics had discussed—Conrad’s influence on his work. It is after all one thing for a young writer still discovering his materials and methods to imitate an older one whom he admires as Greene admired Conrad; and it is another thing altogether for the mature and successful writer to allude to or imitate the same master in a highly visible manner. In his Congo Journal (1961) Greene mentions that after many years of deliberate abstention from Conrad he reread Heart of Darkness prior to the writing of A Burnt-Out Case. One suspects that the reading must have had an almost ceremonial quality, since Greene did it during the journey in which he was coincidentally retracing part of the real Conrad’s and the fictional Marlow’s trips up river in the Congo. But Greene was also implicitly imitating his own earlier personal journey into the geographical heart of darkness, his Liberian trek, recorded in Journey Without Maps (1936), in which he had sought primitive roots of humanity in an attempt “to discover…from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.” In this sense Greene “imitates” not only Conrad’s self and Conrad’s fiction but also himself imitating Conrad and those real and fictional explorers (like Stanley and Quatermain, respectively) whose adventures had stirred his own boyhood imagination. Given such layered relationships among real journeys, texts, and real and fictional selves, only a highly self-conscious result might have been expected. And it may be more than coincidental that on the same journey Greene was also rereading one of the great masterpieces of autobiographical fiction, David Copperfield.


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The presence of Heart of Darkness as an intertext in A BurntOut Case is noteworthy for the ironies and inverted parallels it creates. If Querry in his symbolic journey and name recalls the questing Marlow, he is also a Kurtz figure with reversed polarities, one who encounters the heart of darkness in himself prior to leaving the “civilized” world; his reputation, his intelligence, and his pan-European background resemble Kurtz’s, but in the African interior he finds moral and spiritual regeneration, not illness and madness, and his life ends not with a tragic or frightening exclamation of horror but with the beginning of psychic and spiritual regeneration. Querry’s recovery is initiated formally in his rescue of his servant Deo Gratias who wanders into the forest in search of Pendélé, the place of childhood where he was happy in the care of his mother. For readers of Graham Greene, Pendélé suggests both the recovery of the “lost childhood” familiar in many of the novels, and the embodiment of the biblical injunction that one must become as a little child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. In A Burnt-Out Case, then, the heart of darkness is never a geographical location but a state of mind. Dr. Colin’s remark to Querry that a strong man is needed “to survive an introspective and solitary vocation. I don’t think you were strong enough. I know I couldn’t have stood your life” (121) applies to Querry the test applied to Kurtz but as antecedent rather than subsequent to his arrival in Africa. Whether architecture is customarily regarded as an “introspective” and “solitary” vocation may be questioned, but in the architect’s guise as an artist-figure, which Querry clearly is in this novel, the qualities apply—as they certainly do in the familiar view of the serious writer. Parkinson, the vulgar and opportunistic journalist who hounds Querry mercilessly in pursuit of copy, offers an ironic inversion of Conrad’s Harlequin. Conrad’s character praises Kurtz extravagantly but sincerely; Parkinson views Querry with more contempt than admiration but praises him in articles, tempting him with mock-worship by making him a tabloid saint. It is Parkinson, too, who invokes Conrad and Heart of Darkness along with Stanley and other explorers in order to romanticize his own adventure; and it is consistent with Greene’s ironic treatment of the Conradian theme that


Parkinson’s frequent quotations from great works of literature are invariably attributed incorrectly. Such oblique and ironic correspondences may be taken as evidence that Heart of Darkness is only a nominal “source” for A Burnt-Out Case. The more important source is Greene himself, or more precisely Greene the novelist or artist-figure seen in the earlier portraits. Just as A Burnt-Out Case inverts elements of Heart of Darkness, it more systematically parodies, inverts, or in other ways questions elements of earlier works, especially The End of the Affair. By doing so it becomes a serious meditation upon the world of that earlier novel and many of the attitudes therein. “I’m not a writer,” says Querry to Dr. Colin early in their acquaintance (28). But elsewhere Greene offers many details that tempt the reader to see this world-famous Catholic architect as transparently a stand-in for the world famous Catholic novelist who created him. Such a reading is invited, for example, when Querry discusses with Dr. Colin the meaning of Querry’s profession. His work, Querry says, once “meant a lot” to him, as did women, but he built for his own pleasure and not for whatever use others found for the work: “I wasn’t concerned with the people who occupied my space—only with the space” (44). When Colin replies that he would not have trusted Querry’s plumbing, Querry invokes the art of the novelist to explain: “A writer doesn’t write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same to make them comfortable. My interest was in space, light, proportion. New materials interested me only in the effect they might have on those three. Wood, brick, steel, concrete, glass— space seems to alter with what you use to enclose it. Materials are the architect’s plot. They are not the motive for his work. Only the space and the light and the proportion. The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rubempré in the end?” (44–45) Querry’s unhappiness with responses to his work resembles that of a writer whose books have been misinterpreted. People hated his churches, he says:


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“They said they weren’t designed for prayer. They meant that they were not Roman or Gothic or Byzantine. And in a year they had cluttered them up with their cheap plaster saints; they took out my plain windows and put in stained glass dedicated to dead pork-packers who had contributed to diocesan funds, and when they had destroyed my space and my light, they were able to pray again, and they even became proud of what they had spoilt. I became what they called a great Catholic architect, but I built no more churches, doctor.” (45) Just as Greene claimed that his creative process went on unconsciously, working out artistic problems as he slept, Queny says that the problems of his work “which seemed insoluble would often solve themselves in sleep” (45). But his artistic selfexpression is ultimately destructive: “Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express” (46). Such is the failure of desire: “I don’t want to sleep with a woman nor design a building” (46). In other words, Querry reaches in his sexual and vocational exhaustion that stage or territory which Sarah in The End of the Affair called the desert—the void reached at the end of love. In the desert Sarah found God, but Querry still seeks. Like his character whose works were thus misunderstood and misused as part of the process by which he became a “great Catholic architect,” Greene felt constrained by the label “Catholic novelist” and by the misreading of his own works. The character Scobie had been created “to show that pity can be the expression of an almost monstrous pride. But I found the effect on the readers was quite different. To them Scobie was exonerated, Scobie was ‘a good man,’ he was hunted to his doom by the harshness of his wife” (Ways 125). Greene’s dissatisfaction clearly owed something to the determination of readers to make the novel a Catholic habitat: “Maybe I am too harsh to the book, wearied as I have been by reiterated arguments in Catholic journals on Scobie’s salvation or damnation. I was not so stupid as to believe that this could ever be an issue in a novel” (Ways 126). The distance between the man who suffers and the artist who creates seems likely to diminish when the character who is


created is himself a suffering artist. That is the situation with A Burnt-Out Case, as it was with the novel to which it is most directly linked through numerous parallels and inversions, The End of the Affair. Greene’s earlier novel, indeed, is much more evidently a source of A Burnt-Out Case than Conrad’s is. At times almost a parody of The End of the Affair, Case eventually becomes a questioning and rewriting of it. The earlier novel is familiar for its thematic premise that adultery can lead to sainthood; that is, the intensely carnal love affair of its central characters becomes the device whereby the characters are drawn toward God. Bendrix states the idea in Book One: I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? (59)

A Burnt-Out Case not only contradicts that premise but traces briefly the shift in the artist-protagonist’s attitude toward it. In the fable in which he describes his own life in the guise of a jeweller, Querry reveals that he once shared Bendrix’s view exactly: “He had believed quite sincerely that when he made a love to a woman he was at least imitating in a faulty way the King’s love for his people” (158). Graham Greene in fact did believe that his love relationship with Catherine was not truly adulterous or wrong in God’s eye. He prayed to St. Theresa, he wrote to Catherine, that God’s will would favor their love: Don’t be too sure that it may not be & who knows whether the peace we have so often got together has not been with him, instead of against him? I feel no wrong in this love for you, I feel so often as though I’m married to you, only desperately sad sometimes at being separated from my wife (you, I mean). (qtd. in Sherry 2:329) Querry interprets such attitudes as a form of self-deception, thus implicitly refuting the theme of The End of the Affair. By the end of the novel he concludes that sexual love, far from leading men upward toward divine love, may in fact be a sort of


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cosmic joke perpetrated by a God who “was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct” (191). The terms by which this broad reversal is achieved can be seen through an examination of the parodistic elements and various parallels, often inverted, in the central triangular relationship and alleged adultery through which A Burnt-Out Case reflects upon The End of the Affair. An artist-figure (Bendrix, Querry), an unhappy wife (Sarah, Marie), and her husband (Henry, Rycker) are prominent in both works, but the differences between them seem not merely unlikenesses but studied or deliberate opposites. Unlike Bendrix, who becomes passionately involved with Sarah through his attempt to get material for his art and then conceals the adultery from her husband for years, Querry tries to escape his work altogether and is drawn by a series of coincidences into the appearance of an adulterous relationship which Rycker “discovers” immediately. Sarah’s husband Henry is modest, humble, deficient in sexual desire, and atheistic; Marie’s husband Rycker is vain, domineering, lustful, and sanctimonious. Henry ignores abundant signs of his wife’s infidelity, becomes suspicious of her behavior long after the affair has ended, and then tells Bendrix, of all people, that he is worried about another man in her life. Querry senses Rycker’s unease in his marriage and asks, prophetically it would seem, whether Rycker is worried about another man; the result is a complex irony, first, because Rycker’s secret worry is about himself and his sexual prowess, and, second, because he will conclude on the basis of slender circumstantial evidence that his wife has betrayed him with Querry. Henry discovers the truth and weeps, though he will later forgive Bendrix. Rycker murders Querry out of baseless jealousy. Greene’s portrait of Marie is equally parodistic with reference to his own work. Unlike Sarah, who attracts Bendrix by treating him as an individual rather than an author, Marie is so awed by the presence of “the Querry,” as her husband insists on calling him, that she cannot easily separate the real man from the image on the ten-year-old cover of Time. Like Sarah she keeps a diary that figures prominently in the plot, but whereas Sarah’s was a profoundly moving account of her soulstruggle and spiritual growth, Marie’s diary is pedestrian and childish: “‘Letter from mother. Poor Maxime has had five


puppies’” (38). Moreover, her diary contains lies about her relationship with Querry. Sarah’s willed imitation of Christ’s suffering appears to qualify her for sainthood; Marie “tried to read, but the Imitation of Christ could not hold her attention” (138). Less like a saint and more like an Emma Bovary, Marie uses romantic fiction and daydreams to counter the dullness of her existence: “Once a month she received a copy of MarieChantal, but she had to read the serial in secret when Rycker was occupied, for he despised what he called women’s fiction and spoke critically of day-dreams. What other resources had she than dreams? They were a form of hope…” (138–39). Sarah’s infidelities are initially a response to her need for the sexual satisfaction Henry cannot or will not provide; Marie pretends to have been unfaithful in order to escape the lascivious embraces of her husband, who accuses her of refusing her marital duties. Finally, Sarah’s real love saves Bendrix in two ways: by giving him up as part of her bargain with God, she may have brought him back from death; and by convincing him of God’s existence she makes possible his future conversion and salvation. Marie, of course, does not love Querry at all, although her initial infatuation with him inspires her calculated, selfserving strategy for using him to escape from Rycker. In doing so, she destroys Querry. These inverse relationships between Marie and Sarah become even more interesting as they reveal the complex layering of relationships between life and art in Greene’s portraits of the artist. For example, Marie concludes her feigned adultery by imitating a “real” person—the former lover who signs her letters to Querry “toute a toi.” Sarah initiates her affair with Bendrix by imitating a character from one of his novels—the woman who signaled her availability by eating onions just after explaining to her would-be lover that her husband disliked the smell of onions. But the fictional event in Bendrix’s novel, which becomes a “real” event when Sarah imitates it in The End of the Affair, is, in fact, drawn from Greene’s own life and his affair with Catherine Walston, with whom he shared the “onions” code. Other details reveal the pattern of inversions in the later novel. Querry and Marie, like Bendrix and Sarah, see each other for the last time in a church. In the earlier book the church is emphatically empty, cold and dark: “There was


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nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles flapped around the Virgin, and there was nobody else there” (130). Bendrix, who is “cold and wet and very happy” (128), warns Sarah that she should leave: “You must go home now, Sarah. You’re cold.” “It isn’t home, Maurice,” she said. “I don’t want to go away from here.” “It’s cold.” “I don’t mind the cold. And it’s dark. I can believe anything in the dark.” (130) By contrast, the church in Case is so uncomfortably busy, hot, and bright that Marie must also be warned: It would be wiser to warn her. The doors were open for ventilation, and the hideous windows through which the hard light glared in red and blue made the sun more clamorous than outside. The boots of a priest going to the sacristy squealed on the tiled floor, and a mammy chinked her beads. It was not a church for meditation; it was as hot and public as a market-place, and in the side-chapels stood plaster stallholders, offering a baby or a bleeding heart. (170–71) Inside the London church, Bendrix confesses to Sarah that he has read her diary and has thus learned the most important truth—that she still loves him. Querry tells Marie that her husband is reading her diary and that she should not have written untruths in it. Her entry “Spent the night with Q.” (170) implies a sexual relationship with Querry that does not exist. The brief period within the church scene when Sarah falls asleep and rests her head upon Bendrix’s arm has no direct counterpart in A Burnt-Out Case, and yet his response to the pain it causes is echoed in the later work. “The slowly growing pain where her arm lay,” Bendrix says, “was the greatest pleasure I had ever known” (130). Pain becomes pleasure because it signals for Bendrix the rebirth of dead feelings; Sarah’s weight against him negates all of his hatred and distrust. Greene uses this connection between physical pain and spiritual deadness again in Case, and again the later book


presents a significant reversal of elements. When Querry is reluctant to meet Marie for the first time, the Father Superior is surprised by Querry’s apprehensiveness: “Forgive me for saying it, M.Querry, but you don’t strike me as a man who is afraid of women.” “Have you never come across a leper, father, who is afraid of striking his fingers because he knows they won’t hurt any more?” “I’ve known men rejoice when the feeling returns—even pain. But you have to give pain a chance.” (75) At least one further aspect of A Burnt-Out Case merits discussion for its apparent close connection with The End of the Affair: Querry’s fable of the jeweller. The allegorical fable, with which Querry entertains Marie Rycker late at night in her hotel room, has a bizarre metafictional quality. Querry’s narrative manner calls attention to the very fact he pretends to deny—that the fable is his own abbreviated life, told as a form of confession (given the relationship between the characters, it is as if a priest were confessing to his own parishioner). The effect of Querry’s fable is rendered far more complex, however, by the reader’s awareness that its resemblance to the author’s life is often unmistakable, as if Greene’s attitude toward the reader paralleled Querry’s toward Marie. “Were you the boy?” Marie asks as Querry begins the tale. “No,” he replies, “you mustn’t draw close parallels. They always say a novelist chooses from his general experience of life, not from special facts” (152). The plausible argument does not necessarily convince; even the ease with which Querry identifies with “the novelist” suggests a different conclusion. Briefly, the fable concerns a boy (read “Querry”) who grows up believing in a powerful and just King (God) who rewards goodness and punishes evil, though not always in visible ways. The boy becomes an ambitious young man who believes himself an artist and wants to do great work as a sculptor, but lack of success shrinks his ambition and he becomes a jeweller instead, one whose success and fame rest upon exquisite gold and enamel eggs with crosses on top (Querry’s churches) to demonstrate their seriousness of purpose. Eventually he becomes disillusioned with his art, loses interest in the many


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women who make themselves available to him, and loses belief in his King. “You mustn’t accuse a story-teller of introducing real characters,” Querry warns again (154), as if Greene were daring readers to believe their own eyes, but the temptation to believe is overwhelming. Even the foregoing inadequate summary points to several intersections between the fable and Greene’s life and certain of his earlier characters. The jeweller’s realization “that he was not born to be an artist at all: only a very clever jeweller” (155) who makes eggs with crosses on them recalls the emphasis on the novelist Bendrix as “craftsman” rather than artist, and in fact the very impulse to make Querry’s fabulous artist a jeweller seems to have been latent in The End of the Affair, in Bendrix’s dream after Sarah’s death: I was walking up Oxford Street and I was worried because I had to buy a present and all the shops were full of cheap jewellery, glittering under the concealed lighting. Now and then I thought I saw something beautiful and I would approach the glass, but when I saw the jewel close it was as factitious as all the others—perhaps a hideous green bird with scarlet eyes meant to give the effect of rubies. (140) At times the jeweller sounds rather like Scobie (“After his child’s death he quarrelled with his wife…”), and at times more like Greene, the successful Catholic novelist and long-term sufferer from boredom: “Lots of rewards began to come his way. Money too. From the King. Everyone agreed that it all came from the King. He left his wife and mistress, he left a lot of women…. He had, everyone agreed, a wonderful time. The only trouble was that he became bored, more and more bored.” (153) In its conclusion that the protagonist does not know how to love, Querry’s fable looks forward to a theme that will characterize several novels that follow A Burnt-Out Case. And in its treatment of the artist who became a mere jeweller even though he “had always wanted to carve statues, as large and important


as the Sphinx” (153), the fable may be said to point forward also toward Greene’s play Carving a Statue (1964), in which the artist-figure is indeed a sculptor, a man who struggles for twelve years trying to create a figure of God; in his obsession to create, he has lost his love for his son and his wife (a wife who has died, like so many of those in the second-phase novels). In the end the sculptor abandons the project, having realized that the subject is beyond his scope. The sculptor-artist introduced in Querry’s fable and developed in the play also looks backward, however, and once more to The End of the Affair— specifically to Sarah’s diary, which is so much closer in time and in the novelist’s life to the raw material out of which his work is shaped: “We are sometimes so happy,” she writes, “and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design” (112).

THE COMEDIANS The Comedians brings to a close the sequence of novels in which Greene reflects upon his own life and the life and work of the writer through portraits of an artist-figure who is the novel’s protagonist. Occasional references to Greene’s life will appear in subsequent books, and a serious concern with the writer’s art will surface in later works such as The Honorary Consul, which devotes considerable attention to a novelist (Saavedra) and his artistic creed, and Monsignor Quixote, which contemplates a blurring of the distinction between art and life; but only in The Captain and the Enemy, his final novel, will Greene return to the portrait of the artist as his central character. Querry’s memorable fable of the jeweler and the strong impression it gives that Greene stands in relation to Querry as Querry does to his jeweller may have marked the limit of how far Greene could go, or would go, at least, in encouraging an identification of author and character. If so, that may explain why The Comedians seems less obviously personal and less urgent than any of the earlier portraits but especially less so than A Burnt-Out Case or The End of the Affair. And yet The Comedians exceeds all of the others in the degree of its selfconscious literary artifice—both its rich allusiveness and its pointed reminders of the narrator’s tendency to substitute his


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own “fiction” for reality. In fact the novel’s structure derives from Brown’s inadequate perception of himself and the characters with whom he is most closely involved. Greene creates in The Comedians an atmosphere of menace so intense and images of violence so vivid that the reader may easily overlook the novel’s formal concern with fiction-making. And since Brown, the narrator-protagonist, is strictly speaking an hotelier and not a writer or an architect or a sculptor, one might reasonably ask how this book is to be considered a “portrait of the artist” at all. The answer is to be found in the novel’s rich allusive structure and in the revelations of deficiencies in Brown’s understanding—his point of view—that make him figuratively a failed novelist. Greene’s habit of framing his characters and themes in extended patterns of allusion has been examined at length in earlier chapters here. The poetry of Tennyson and Browning (A Gun for Sale), or of Wordsworth (The Ministry of Fear), Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (Brighton Rock), and Conrad’s fiction (It’s a Battlefield and The Third Man) are among the most important sources from which he drew. For The Comedians, a novel in which a major creative task was to combine his continuing interest in portraits of the artist with a study of political oppression, the question of individual commitment or detachment, and the nature of heroism, he turned to what, given his novel’s setting in Haiti, might at first seem unlikely sources: the great moderns Joyce, Woolf and, less directely, Yeats. Greene’s familiarity with Yeats’s poetry is a matter of record. His father gave him an edition of Yeats’s poems as a graduation present; he quoted Yeats numerous times in the courtship letters, and his library at the time of this death contained ten volumes of works by Yeats. More important, it will be recalled that he recorded in a letter to Vivien his intention to write a novel based upon lines from Yeats’s poem “His Dream.” The link between Yeats and The Comedians is not that poem, however, but two more familiar, closely related poems which together deal with heroism, involvement, revolution, death, and an interesting variation on the mingling of comic, heroic, and tragic in human life—all subjects that are treated in The Comedians. The poems are “September 1913” and “Easter 1916.” In the former Yeats views scornfully the mercenary,


hedonistic, despiritualized lives of the Irish people; the refrain that concludes each stanza—“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, /It’s with O’Leary in the grave”—invokes the heroic past as the standard by which the lifeless present is judged and found wanting. “Easter 1916” is a palinode, a retraction wherein the poet acknowledges the error of judgment in the earlier work. The failed Easter Rebellion had proved to him that if the heroic spirit had been dormant, it was certainly not dead. Individuals—Yeats names several of them, including some he had never admired—stepped forward in noble selfsacrifice, resigning their parts in Ireland’s “casual comedy” [italics added] and giving birth to “a terrible beauty.” They demonstrated, to paraphrase Greene’s epigraph from Thomas Hardy, that “aspects were within them,” aspects of heroism which the poet of “September 1913” had failed to see. The failure, the futility, even the possible absurdity of their effort did not diminish the quality of their heroism or the terrible beauty of their gesture. I believe that The Comedians can be seen as incorporating a palinode analogous to Yeats’s. Its narrative purpose is specifically to explain how Brown discovers the presence of the heroic where he had expected—indeed, had been determined— to see only the comic. The final conversation between Brown and Mr. Smith before the Smiths’ departure from Haiti illustrates succinctly the pattern of recantation in Brown’s narrative. Although Brown has liked the American couple from the first, he has clearly been amused by their absurd vegetarian scheme, their good-hearted innocence, and their appalling diet of barmene, yeastrel, and slippery-elm food. Brown’s narrative reconstructs for the reader his own apprehension of them as comic characters. Yet he also comes to recognize the Smiths’ considerable virtues: they believe in ideals, and they display courage, tenacity, fidelity. Thus, when Mr. Smith says to Brown, “Perhaps we seem rather comic figures to you, Mr. Brown,” Brown’s reply reveals his altered perspective: “‘Not comic,’ I said, with sincerity, ‘heroic’” (192). The change in Brown’s attitude toward “Major” Jones is even more remarkable. Having rightly detected Jones as a faker and a confidence man, Brown wrongly suspects him of an affair with Martha Pineda, Brown’s mistress. As intensely jealous as Maurice Bendrix, and with as little justification, Brown devises


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a trap that will expose Jones and get rid of him by forcing him to live up to his boasts (Jones claims to have been a commando in Burma) that he could successfully lead Haitian rebels against Duvalier’s forces. Brown’s plan works only to the point of forcing Jones’s hand. Brown believes that Jones wants only money and an easy life, that his heart is as mercenary and unromantic as the Irish people castigated in Yeats’s “September 1913.” But Jones confounds Brown’s expectations by seizing the opportunity to redeem the past by living heroically for one brief moment at the end of life. He leads the rag-tag rebel army and eventually sacrifices his own life to ensure his comrades’ escape from the advancing enemy. Jones’s comic aspect, like that of the Smiths, is transformed into something heroic; for all of its irony, Jones’s death gives rise to something analogous to Yeats’s “terrible beauty.” Brown is sufficiently affected by it that he begins his narrative with a quiet reflection on its meaning: When I think of all the grey memorials erected in London to equestrian generals, the heroes of old colonial wars, and to frock-coated politicians who are even more deeply forgotten, I can find no reason to mock the modest stone that commemorates Jones on the far side of the international road which he failed to cross in a country far from home, though I am not to this day absolutely sure of where, geographically speaking, Jones’s home lay. (9) The sincerity of Brown’s tribute is proved by his expression of pride in having helped to raise the memorial stone. It may go without saying that a well-read English novelist in the second half of the twentieth century cannot undertake to write a “portrait of the artist” without in some way being reminded of Joyce’s seminal work. Greene’s creation of Brown’s story indicates that he was indeed reminded, for the outlines of that story recall in obvious if sometimes ironic or oblique ways Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In A Sort of Life Greene mentions that Joyce’s Portrait stirred memories of his own misery as a schoolboy: “Years later when I read the sermon on hell in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist I recognized the land I had inhabited. I had left civilization behind and entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties…”


(74). Both Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus and Greene’s Brown are educated in Jesuit schools; both are believed by the fathers to have a vocation, but both turn away from the church. Both are initiated into sexual experience by an older woman who is a maternal figure, and both link their movement into adulthood with images of birds and flying: Joyce uses the Daedalus-myth to symbolize Stephen’s breaking free of the labyrinthine claims of family, church, and state; Greene, in a comic rather than an exalted mode, introduces a seagull into the bedroom of the Monte Carlo hotel to give the young Brown courage and sexual potency on the occasion of his initiation mentioned above. Joyce’s character rejects the claims of his Catholic religion, of Irish nationalism, and of his sinking and quarrelsome family in favor of a life in exile; his pursuit, in his aesthetic theories at least, of a “static aesthetic emotion” commits him to artistic detachment rather than involvement. He will produce art for art’s sake. In certain respects Brown’s life history is almost a parody of Stephen’s, for he is born into the condition of exile to which Stephen aspires. Brown has no family to escape from; his only known relative is the mother who deposited him at the Jesuit school when he was very young and whom he never sees again until shortly before her death decades later. And though Brown is an English citizen who has served the country as an intelligence officer (as Greene had done) during World War II, he has no strong sense of loyalty to any country and no sense of belonging to any place. He has been a homeless exile all of his life without any very clear place to be exiled from; that is what draws him back toward Haiti and the fateful events of the plot— his hotel is the closest thing to a home he has ever known. In a manner peculiarly appropriate to a novel about “comedians” who are actors, fakers, liars (Greene’s original title for this novel was The Dissemblers), Brown is also, in his fashion, an artist-figure. For years prior to his move to Haiti he supported himself by hiring a hack painter to create fake “masterpieces,” signed with foreign names, which Brown then sold out of a roving van to naive customers who believed they were investing in great art at a bargain price. But Brown is also an artist-figure in a more subtle and more serious sense. He emerges in the second half of The Comedians as a figurative “novelist” who interprets other people’s actions according to the


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roles he has created for them. Evidence that Greene conceived of his character in such terms even before he had chosen the name “Brown” for him can be seen in rough notes preserved in the collection at the Humanities Research Center in Austin. On a sheet of his “C. 6 Albany” stationery Greene drafted the passage which would appear in the closing paragraphs of the novel: I had felt myself not merely incapable of love—many are incapable of that—but even of guilt. There were no heights and no abysses in my world—I saw myself on a great plain walking and walking on the interminable flats. Once I might have taken a different direction, but it was too late now. (286) The draft in Greene’s notes is almost identical to this published version but differs in two important ways: it is written in third person, and it appears as something that the protagonist has written and is now rereading. Upon reaching the end, he reflects that he must have had a literary talent, and that with sufficient time and application he might have become a novelist. (Greene repeats the latter suggestion, adding an exclamation point.) Brown, then, emerged from the author’s imagination as a man who saw himself as potentially a writer. The irony is that he would very likely have been a poor one, for his obsessive jealousy, intense egoism, and habitually cynical outlook lead to a distortion or misinterpretation of the world around him, and the story that he narrates exposes his own failure as “artist.” In this regard his closest kinship among Greene’s characters is with Maurice Bendrix, a “real” novelist who progressively reveals the inadequacies, distortions, and misunderstandings upon which his view of the world has been based. Martha Pineda, the mistress with whom Brown might have experienced happiness of some duration had he not poisoned their relationship with jealousy and mistrust as surely as Bendrix poisoned his affair with Sarah, is the character who sees Brown’s failing directly: “You should have been a novelist,” she said, “then we would all have been your characters. We couldn’t say to


you we are not like that at all, we couldn’t answer back. Darling, don’t you see you are inventing us?” “I’m glad at least I’ve invented this bed.” “We can’t even talk to you, can we? You won’t listen if what we say is out of character—the character you’ve given us.” “What character? You’re a woman I love. That’s all.” “Oh yes, I’m classified. A woman you love.” (228–29) In the charge that Brown “classifies” individuals and experiences is perhaps an echo of the failing of Bendrix, who classified his involvement with Sarah as an “affair” with beginning, middle, and end, and therefore hastened its ending. Martha’s warning to Brown further identifies his failing specifically as that of a writer: “My darling, be careful. Don’t you understand? To you nothing exists except in your own thoughts. Not me, not Jones. We’re what you choose to make us. You’re a Berkeleyan. My God, what a Berkeleyan. You’ve turned poor Jones into a seducer and me into a wanton mistress. You can’t even believe in your mother’s medal, can you? You’ve written her a different part. My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren’t there. We’re independent of you. None of us is like you fancy we are. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter much if your thoughts were not so dark, always so dark.” (229) Of the rightness of Martha’s diagnosis there can be no doubt, for the novel proves not only Brown’s error in accusing her of involvement with Jones but his flawed representation to himself of two other related matters: in one he has believed himself possessed of a deep passion for Martha, but discovers the shallowness of his love; in the other he hopes to get revenge against Jones by trapping him in the web of Jones’s own lies about his heroic exploits as a commando, but Jones surprises him by seizing the opportunity to act out a role quite different from the one Brown had conceived for him. As the “novelist” who fails to catch the true character of the individuals who populate his story, Brown, in his failure, may point toward a source that influenced Greene’s naming of characters in this novel.


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Upon meeting first the Smiths and then Jones as his traveling companions, Brown is understandably amused by this conjunction of the commonest names: “Smith, Jones and Brown —the situation was improbable. I had a half-right to my drab name, but had he?” (11). Lest the reader suspect Greene’s invention of flagging altogether, Brown observes a few pages later that the three names are “interchangeable like comic masks in a farce” (23). The connection with farce is instructive, of course, yet these particular common names carry a more specific literary association for students—and practitioners—of the English novel. Smith, Brown, and Jones are after all the names used by Virginia Woolf in her familiar essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in which she discusses the ideas of truthfulness to the human character as essential to the art of the novel: “Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, ‘Come and catch me if you can’” (94). Woolf goes on to say that few actually succeed in the catching; most have to be content with bits and pieces. She illustrates her point with an account of a “Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith” she met on a train. “I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite,” she writes. “I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character…that the form of the novel…has evolved” (102). Writers must come down off their plinth and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what…. for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.” (118–19) What Woolf establishes as prerequisite for success in the art of the novel is what Brown as “novelist” has failed to do; that is, he has failed to capture the heart or truth of his characters in a way that would enable them to have their own lives in his narrative until too late. As explained earlier, his failure spoils his relationship with Martha and sends Jones to his doom; it also deprives Brown of an appreciation of his mother and


propels him into a series of actions that lead to the loss of his “home,” his work, and his source of livelihood. In this ruined state at the end of his story he has survived the dangers of Haiti only to find employment in the funeral parlour of Mr. Fernandez in the Dominican Republic. The consequence of his failure, in the novel’s symbolism, is his entrance into the world of the dead. The theme of death in the novel has been commented on by several critics, and with good reason; nothing else that Greene wrote is so persistently expressed through images of death as The Comedians. Murder, suicide, execution, funerals, mourning, cemeteries, graves, tombstones, coffins, monuments—such terms or their variants appear on virtually every page of the text; death pervades The Comedians the way hell pervades Brighton Rock. Brown even implies at the outset that the book itself is a prose monument to Jones, the unsung hero whose “modest stone” is remarked in Wordsworthian fashion (cf. “Michael”) in the opening paragraph. Certainly a metaphorical region of the dead provides an apt expression of the impoverishment of life and hope under the brutally oppressive Duvalier regime in what Greene described elsewhere as “The Nightmare Republic.” Yet the novel’s conclusion wherein Brown takes up life among the dead points to another important connection between The Comedians and the writings of James Joyce. Greene had long admired Joyce’s Dubliners and especially the short story “The Dead.” He praised it highly in a letter to Vivien prior to his marriage, and in an interview late in his career he said that he regarded “The Dead” as “the finest short story in the language” (Parini 444). Moreover, his long-term familiarity with Joyce had been updated and refreshed in the years shortly before his early planning of The Comedians, for he read both Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce and a volume of Joyce’s letters. Both books remained in his library, along with two editions of Dubliners and three of Ulysses. In addition to his casting of a long work in the symbolic region of death, as Joyce had done in the Dubliners stories (of which “The Dead” is, in this regard, the supreme example), Greene employs textual and thematic echoes of “The Dead” in The Comedians. Joyce’s story, as its title predicts far more directly than Greene’s does, is also insistent upon the themes and images of


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death. As the narrative progresses through the long night of the Morkans’ dinner party and its brief aftermath, the conversation turns repeatedly to the dead—to long-gone opera singers, monks who sleep in their coffins, stories of Gabriel Conroy’s grandfather Patrick Morkan, and finally to Gretta’s account of the death of Michael Furey. The entire story, set on the feastday of Epiphany, moves toward a private epiphany in which the protagonist Gabriel, like Greene’s character Brown, discovers the sense in which he, too, belongs with the dead. Since both story and novel concern lovers and failed love relationships, it is not surprising that both establish an early link between love and death by alluding to Romeo and Juliet. In “The Dead” Gabriel notices a picture of the balcony scene from Shakespeare’s play on the wall near where Mary plays the piano. And the balcony scene is deliberately recalled in a later moment in which Gretta, standing alone at the top of a staircase, is seen by Gabriel below. At such moments in “The Dead” love is never far from death. Next to the picture of Shakespeare’s lovers is one of the two murdered princes in the Tower. When Aunt Julia sings of young love in “Arrayed for the Bridal,” Gabriel sees in her a haggard look that signals the approach of death. And of course Gretta’s appearance on the stair, which stirs Gabriel to both affection and desire, merely hastens the moment when her memory of a young man’s death will come between them. The Comedians alludes to Romeo more extensively through Brown’s recollection of how as a schoolboy he acted the part of Friar Laurence (Greene at a similar age had performed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Brown’s early identification with the bungling cleric anticipates in a curious way Martha’s later suggestion that he is a prêtre manqué, and in fact he does assume a priestly function in hearing the long confession of Jones as the two hide in a cemetery to await the rebels. Love and death are rarely far apart in The Comedians. Brown’s mother dies in the arms of her lover whom she has summoned to her bed for a sexual encounter in defiance of the doctor’s order to avoid any physical activity. Brown wants to make love to Martha in the bath house near his swimming pool, but the knowledge that Dr. Philipot’s body lies in the pool makes him impotent. And the same body is discovered later in a bizarre scene in which a peasant woman is forced to give sexual favors


to a militia man before he will allow her to pass a roadblock. In the garden to which he leads her, she drops to the ground and finds herself looking at Dr. Philipot. Seen in the context of such events, Brown’s story becomes a prolonged attempt at a love affair or erotic consummation that is constantly delayed or interrupted by death—an appropriate shape, it would seem, for a novel set in a country where murder and execution are commonplace and people, as Brown says, die of their “environment.” Joyce’s “The Dead,” for all of its obvious differences, has a similar shape: it traces the slow rising of erotic desire in Gabriel only to leave him frustrated and unfulfilled when death, in the form of memory, intrudes at the very moment he expects to begin lovemaking. When Gabriel sees Gretta on the staircase in the simulated balcony scene mentioned earlier, she seems strangely detached, as if she were someone else’s wife; the unfamiliarity helps to kindle his desire even though it contains distinctive foreshadowing: he will shortly discover the sense in which she is unknown to him and does belong to someone else. As they travel to the Gresham Hotel, Gabriel anticipates the playing out of a somewhat theatrical love scene in which he and Gretta are the actors, and his desire is heightened by the recollection of their secret life together. But he must discover that in the most important “secret” they have not been together, and that in the drama that is unfolding Gretta cannot play the part he has conceived for her. She, of course, has been moved to profound grief by Bartell D’arcy’s singing of the song Michael Furey used to sing. Unable to respond to Gabriel’s passion, she gives an anguished explanation of how that young man died for love of her: on the night before she left home for a convent school he came, though already ill, to stand in the rain outside her window and say that he did not want to live without her. For Gabriel the consequences of Gretta’s revelation are devastating. The young man’s love for Gretta was perfect and immortal; it is true that Gabriel cannot compete with a dead man for his wife’s affection, but more importantly he has been measured by a standard he cannot hope to meet. The love he has felt so powerfully this night pales with his honest recognition that he has not been willing to die for love: “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling


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must be love” (224). Greene’s protagonist, though he lacks the generosity that is Gabriel Conroy’s most redeeming quality, is brought to the same conclusion through his discovery that his passion for Martha that has fueled so much jealousy and bitterness is not a great and powerful love at all. Like Gabriel, he is found wanting when measured by a higher standard: his mother’s lover Marcel (with a phonetic resemblance to Michael) kills himself after her death. “Death,” Brown observes with cold detachment regarding the act, “is a proof of sincerity” (253). On the night of his discovery of Marcel’s body he begins his affair with Martha. He pursues that affair obsessively for a while, only to recognize eventually the limits of his own feeling: “Neither of us,” he says with an apparent reference to Marcel, “would ever die for love” (161). For both Brown and Gabriel their failure in love is symptomatic of a larger failure. Gabriel, already sensitive to rebukes by Lily and especially by Miss Ivors, who has castigated him for his lack of patriotism, now sees himself as “a ludicrous figure…a sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror” (221). In his fashion Gabriel, too, is a comedian. It is not merely that he has never really loved, but that he has never been taken hold of by some cause or belief or passion. Yet he knows that death in some cause—whether for love, like Michael Furey’s, or by extension some other belief or for honor—is preferable to the form of death in life he now recognizes in himself: “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age” (224). Marcel in The Comedians had “passed boldly,” and so do Jones and Dr. Magiot. Brown’s mother had lived to an old age, but she had been willing to die for something and therefore had lived well. (In a manner characteristic of the novel’s macabre humor she does, of course, die for love.) The discovery of these truths constitutes an epiphany for Brown. If less dramatic than Gretta’s sudden revelation, it nevertheless corresponds to Gabriel’s discovery and focuses attention similarly on what is missing from Brown’s life. He is not a true lover, not a Marxist, not a priest or even a good Catholic, good son, or good patriot. He is not, in Martha’s terms discussed earlier, a good novelist. And our feelings toward him


are not altered by his cynical invocation of Wordsworth to dignify his “rootless” life: We are the faithless; we admire the dedicated, the Doctor Magiots and the Mr. Smiths for their courage and their integrity, for their fidelity to a cause, but through timidity or through lack of sufficient zest, we find ourselves the only ones truly committed—committed to the whole world of evil and of good, to the wise and to the foolish, to the indifferent and to the mistaken. We have chosen nothing except to go on living, “rolled round on Earth’s diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees.” (279) Wordsworth had written these lines to describe the heroine of the “Lucy” poems, who is dead. Gabriel Conroy, in his vision of deadness, at least approaches the “shades” of people who once lived. Wordsworth’s vision of a union with the natural world, rendered very stoically here, is not consoling. Soon after recalling it, Brown exits the stage appropriately; after having dreamed of Jones’s death, he leaves for his first job as undertaker.

CHAPTER EIGHT Travels with My Aunt

I suggested earlier in this study that a necessary development in Graham Greene’s first-phase novels had been an increase in the apparent distance between author and protagonist that enabled Greene to achieve mastery in rendering a world that had an adequately solid existence outside his own mind. A corresponding necessity in the second phase was to bring the writer himself back into that world so that both his presence within it and his artistic responses to it could become part of his subject. The second-phase novels from The Confidential Agent to A Burnt-Out Case had in varying degrees blurred the distinctions between the writer and his protagonist, and the four novels discussed here as “portraits of the artist” had treated thematically the problematic relationship of the writer to subjects and audiences, the moral costs of artistic objectivity or detachment, and the lingering, persistent evidence of misgivings about the ability to give truthful expression— whether in Bendrix’s novels, Querry’s churches, or Brown’s fevered fantasies—to the human personality. Taken as serious meditations upon personal and professional crises, these novels suggest an impressive measure of self-scrutiny transmuted successfully into art. Many of their concerns can be heard in a minor key in Travels with My Aunt. For example, Henry Pulling remarks tellingly that he has read, in a book on Dickens, “that an author must not be attached to his characters, he must treat them without mercy. In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens’s wife and mistress had to suffer so that Dickens could make his novels and his fortune.” A bank manager, Henry adds, “doesn’t leave a trail of the martyred behind him” (159–60). Nevertheless, as a


transitional novel Travels signals an end to the most troubled and troubling period of Greene’s work by insisting, with a force unmatched in any of his earlier novels, on the ideas of acceptance, reconciliation, the pursuit of pleasure in life, and a new understanding of love. Travels leaves behind the somberness and bitterness of the portraits but continues to employ their reflexive strategies, now in a far more artificial construction in which conscious, often humorous allusions to the author’s own works are subsumed within the larger context of extended reflections upon writing, story-telling, and the relationships between life and art. The novel begins where The Comedians ends—in death, with the funeral and cremation of Henry Pulling’s mother Angelica. Events in that earlier novel lead up to the protagonist’s discovery of his own spiritual deadness, at which point he takes rather literally the direction of Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy (who “must enter the region of the dead”) and becomes a funeral director who exits the novel at death’s first call. By contrast, Henry in Travels is able to pull back, or rather to be pulled back from a comparable condition of “deadness” by his titular “Aunt” Augusta, who introduces him to a life far more exciting than he has ever known before. In these inverted parallels between the two works may be seen a further instance of Greene’s tendency, in the later second-phase novels beginning with A Burnt-Out Case, to extend his habitual allusive methods with increasing reflections upon his own work. The plot of Travels presents a virtual parody of the situation in Greene’s first-phase novels which offer the prospect that the male protagonist’s crises may be escaped or resolved through his relationship with a woman. Henry Pulling, the most naive of Greene’s narrators, is unaware that his life is problematic in any respect at all; a quietly retired bank manager whose main interest in life is the tending of his dahlias in a north London suburb, he regards himself as happy. In the course of the narrative he will first be made to discover that his condition is actually a kind of death-in-life because he is deeply afflicted by boredom; then he will be converted into a different sort of life. The pattern of his conversion under the tutelage of Aunt Augusta takes an ironic turn, however, away from domestic life, duty, honesty, and conventional morality and into travel,

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pursuit of pleasure, smuggling, and a distinctly unconventional morality. Another element from the first-phase novels that is humorously reprised in Travels is the division of women into two antithetical types, the carnal and the virtuous or spiritual (Lucy/Elizabeth, Kay/Milly, Ida/Rose). I suggested in an earlier chapter that after Sarah Miles, in The End of the Affair, had successfully united these symbolic opposites in a complex, mature woman, the division would not appear again in serious form in Greene’s novels. It appears in ironic form in Travels, however, in the sharply contrasted sisters Angelica and Augusta, whose names suggest humorous reflection upon Greene’s own life and work: Augusta’s name (and her sister’s maiden name) Bertram was also the maiden name of Sarah Miles; and Angelica’s nickname “La Pucelle”—a name associated with the virginal Joan of Arc—recalls the period of Greene’s courtship when he identified Vivien with Shaw’s St. Joan. More immediately, of course, Aunt Augusta is a further development of a character Greene had treated very briefly and found too interesting to discard: she is a reincarnation of “La Comtesse,” Brown’s mother in The Comedians, and like her is an aging, free-loving adventuress who has a younger black lover and who is reunited with her son late in life. Because La Comtesse dies shortly after the reunion, she can become Brown’s tutor in life and love only indirectly, whereas Augusta lives on to become an active agent in the reshaping of Henry’s life. Brown, as discussed earlier, is figuratively a writer whose misconception of his “characters” spoils his relationship with them. Brown’s view of the world has been false; the correct one, the novel implies, is that of his mother as interpreted by the wise counselor Dr. Magiot. Had Brown grown up under his mother’s influence, he presumably would not have become the warped, unhappy character we know. Henry Pulling, though he is the nominal author of the story we read, presents himself primarily as a reader; Aunt Augusta is the artist-figure in whom Greene invests several characteristics of a novelist. In this symbolic relationship, she is the writer and Henry is a character who has been living out a false or inadequate conception. The American girl Tooley sees him as a character out of Dickens, and Henry introduces himself to the reader


early in the novel as a “static character” (16). Augusta will enter his life and save him by rewriting him as a dynamic character. Virginia Woolf wrote, in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” that “getting to know Mrs. Brown is getting to know life itself.” Woolf s allusion to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in her description of “Mrs. Brown”—who is remarkable for her “infinite variety”—is consistent with Greene’s conception of La Comtesse (also a “Mrs. Brown”) and her reappearance as Aunt Augusta. Indeed, Augusta seems to call attention to the comparison by telling Henry that his lazy father “wouldn’t have fought for Cleopatra herself—but he would have found a way round.” (147). Both Augusta and La Comtesse have had remarkable lives and both exert even as septuagenarians a powerful sex appeal: both have much younger lovers who are not just willing to die for them but actually do so. Virginia Woolf s comment that her Mrs. Brown is not predictable—“she may say or do anything”—is not merely suited to Augusta but calls to mind an aspect of her character that critics seem to have overlooked: that if she was conceived in part as a continuation of Brown’s mother, she was also inspired by the most illustrious “Aunt Augusta” in English literature, Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The model of Wilde’s immortal character provided Greene with a perfect voice for the kind of irony that inverts conventional morality and stands the serious world upon its head. Lady Bracknell’s eccentric logic enables her, for example, to praise Jack Worthing for smoking (“A man should always have an occupation of some kind”) or to blame rather than pity him for the loss of his parents (“That seems like carelessness”). And her comment about Lady Bloxham might well be applied to Greene’s Aunt Augusta: “Oh, she goes about very little. She is a lady considerably advanced in years,” says Jack. “Yes,” Lady Bracknell replies, that “nowadays that is no guarantee of respectability of character” (66). In this vein of humor Augusta instructs Henry Pulling about such subjects as theft: “A little honest thieving hurts no one, especially when it is a question of gold. Gold needs free circulation.” (69)


Fidelity in love: “[A]t my age one has ceased to expect a relationship to last. Think how complicated life would be if I had kept in touch with all the men I have known intimately.” (36)

Prudence: “I don’t know from which side of the family you inherited prudence. Your father was lazy but never, never prudent.” (82)

Sexual morality: “I am all for a little professional sex.” (69) and Respectability: “I would have made an unsatisfactory mother. God knows where I would have dragged the poor child after me, and suppose he had turned out completely respectable…” “Like myself,” I said. “I don’t yet despair of you,” my aunt replied. (82) In their verbal humor the resemblance between Greene’s character and Wilde’s seems far too pronounced to be coincidental. Greene was in fact a great admirer of The Importance of Being Earnest: according to interviewer John Sutro he regarded it as “the finest English comedy since Wycherley’s The Country Wife” (380). Moreover, he appears to tip his hand by incorporating an allusion to Earnest in one of Augusta’s epigrammatic judgments—about names, a central concern in Wilde’s play: “Your own Christian name is safe and colourless. It is better than being given a name like Ernest, which has to be lived up to” (57; italics added). Finally, it should be remembered that both Wilde’s story and Greene’s conclude with the protagonist’s discovery of his true identity—a discovery which for each is the key to happiness. Greene’s use of Wildean humor in the novel’s most distinctive voice suggests that in a sense everything in the novel is some kind of joke, and on one level of reading this must surely be the case. The


strategy creates a comic perspective through which the novelist’s own serious characters and themes can be viewed with amused detachment. Recalling in Ways of Escape his mood in the 1950s, Greene wrote: I was in that mood for escape which comes, I suppose, to most men in middle life, though with me it arrived early, even in childhood—escape from boredom, escape from depression. If I had been a bank clerk, I would have dreamed of betraying my trust and absconding to South America. (Ways 145) Perhaps coincidentally, these remarks describe rather succinctly the plot of the delightful Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), in which Alec Guinness portrays an aging bank employee—also named Henry—who, after a long career of dull dependability, steals a gold shipment from the firm and absconds to Brazil, where he takes up with a young woman of probably less than half his age. Greene’s comment also describes, of course, part of the situation in Travels, the important difference being that Henry Pulling, unlike his creator, would never dream of betraying or absconding, for he has yet to discover the boredom of his own life or the need to escape. He must be shown and taught—by Aunt Augusta. One suspects that Greene’s phrase “if I had been” is at the heart of his conception of this protagonist, for Henry is the clearest example in all of the novels of an antiself, a fictional foil to the author— as if Greene, having for two decades shaped characters out of what he was, had decided in a playful or prankish mood to shape one out of what he was not. The result is a hilarious, artificial construction with occasional serious overtones, which bears a relation to earlier images of the author in the “portraits” rather like that of a photographic negative to a print. Henry Pulling shares the first name which author Henry Graham Greene disliked and had often applied to dull, timid, or uninteresting characters: Henry Wilcox, the submissive husband who is Rowe’s old friend in The Ministry of Fear; Henry Miles, the naive, passionless husband in The End of the Affair. (The complex case of Henry Scobie is another matter; he is a character Greene avowedly condemns but seems unable to


avoid sympathizing with.) A complacent, solitary, dully respectable man who never travels, and who evinces no concern for religion, politics, or women, Henry Pulling is the opposite of his father, who “travelled from one woman to another…all through his life” (55); and he conjures up a comically exaggerated image of the author as he might have been if, say, he had remained a sub-editor for The Times or had adjusted quietly to the sort of domestic married life that he once believed he wanted. This Greene-that-might-have-been could never have given life to the splendid array of characters the real Greene created, of course; and that is why he must be given life here by the storyteller, Aunt Augusta. It is fitting that as artist-figure Augusta should call attention to the delightful artifice of the novel. At the end of a day’s touring with Henry in Istanbul, she reads a thriller (loaded up by Greene with literary jokes about Kingsley Amis and Eric Ambler) in which the locations of events in the plot correspond to their travels that day. “We might almost have been doing a literary pilgrimage,” she remarks (130). The specifically literary nature of the journeys became the subject of a detailed analysis published by Jerome and Marie Thale a few years after the novel appeared. Describing the book as “a compendium of allusions and quotation” (208), the Thales list over a hundred “definite and probable allusions,” the most important being those to Marjorie Bowen’s Viper of Milan, Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode,” and Scott’s Rob Roy. Normally the literary allusions are easy to identify, although Greene’s humor often depends upon sustained parallels which are less obvious, as in the case of the frequently mentioned Rob Roy, a favorite of the hero’s father, who hid a picture of Augusta in its pages. The Thales point to several similarities between Scott’s novel and Greene’s: Both hero-narrators, Henry Pulling and Francis Osbaldistone, are rather conventional types, businessmen who are introduced by relatives into a wild and turbulent world. In Scott the experiences are with an abortive rebellion, the rough and lawless ways of the border country, and most spectacularly with Rob Roy, the Robin Hood of Scotland. Both heroes are strongly affected by unconventional and strong-willed women; both acquire a


bride in the course of their adventures. Both are continually astonished at what they discover about the ways of a world previously unfamiliar to them, and both respond with a certain superficial imperturbability. Thus the nineteenth-century novel which Henry has brought with him as escape reading offers a sort of pattern of what is happening to him in real life. However, while Greene’s hero has his values turned about and begins to live for the first time in his life, Scott’s hero only has his experience enlarged a bit and then settles down as a landed proprietor. And that irony, one guesses, is the point for Greene’s so elaborately summoning up Scott’s romantic tale. (210) The Thales offer a valuable and comprehensive study of the allusive strategies in Travels, though it seems to me that their conclusion, which emphasizes the characters’ failure to understand the literature or to distinguish it from ordinary life, is misdirected: Possibly literature could tell people things: Henry and his father could have learned from the experience of Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy, but the fact that they did not is another of Greene’s ironies or jokes. On the surface, then, Greene’s allusions would seem to have an anti-literary thrust. The literature that the characters read from the nineteenth-century seems to fill their heads with illusions and idealizations and to serve therefore as a barrier to understanding reality. Strangely this objection to nineteenth-century literature is much like the objection that is so often made to Greene’s fiction, that it is a distortion of reality. If Greene has a moral here as well as a joke, it is that literature, whether it is Sir Walter Scott or Graham Greene, will tell us nothing about life unless we ourselves understand the ways in which literature is not life but only like life, and the ways in which it can be serious or playful, or both at the same time. (212) Such an understanding must indeed be necessary, but Greene’s emphasis is rather on something more complex and subtle. He is interested—nowhere more obviously than in Travels—in the


interpenetrability of life and literature and the ways in which the two can seem inseparable. At this point in his career Greene is looking backward at his own writing that has been shaped out of both “real” and “literary” experience. As I have tried to show in these pages, his mode of understanding and interpreting life, as reflected in letters, essays, and imaginative works, relied heavily upon literary experience. When major events from his own life began to make their way into the fiction, in books like The End of the Affair, they induced quite understandably a greater degree of reflexiveness in the conduct of the narrative; we see it, for example, in scenes where the behavior of Bendrix and Sarah is directly affected by that of characters in the film adaptation of one of Bendrix’s novels. Moreover, The End of the Affair itself was an event in the author’s life, and became in turn the subject of a serious form of parody in A Burnt-Out Case. Clearly Greene, as a writer who had so often insisted upon a close identification of “real” and “literary” experience, had reached the point, long before the appearance of Travels, when both his own life and his fictional renderings of himself had become the subjects for further writing. The recording of human experience results in the telling of stories which may be pure fact or fiction, or a mingling of the two. And the importance of a story may be determined less by its literal truth than by its effect upon audiences. Mr. Visconti confirms this idea late in the novel, pointing out that “Any Catholic knows that a legend which is believed has the same value and effect as the truth. Look at the cult of the saints” (261). Henry introduces this thematic concern when it occurs to him that Augusta’s wonderful story of Uncle Jo Pulling, whose final experience of “travel” involved an attempt to spend one week in each of fifty-two rooms in his house, might not be true. The moment of doubt causes Henry to recall how, as a boy, he had wondered whether there was really a corpse buried there at the Cenotaph, for governments are usually economical with sentiment and try to arouse it in the cheapest possible way. A brilliant advertising slogan doesn’t need a body, a box of earth would do just as well, and now I began to


wonder too about Uncle Jo. Was my aunt a little imaginative? But after this pause he drinks to Jo’s memory “whether he existed or not”: What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions. Hamlet is no less real now than Winston Churchill, and Jo Pulling no less historical than Don Quixote. (62) Aunt Augusta herself reflects the theme from a slightly different angle. A memorable and distinctive character in her own right— arguably Greene’s most successful comic creation—she nevertheless cannot be contemplated for long without calling up a host of literary associations (Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, Scott’s Diana Vernon, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Greene’s Ida Arnold) and autobiographical ones. A woman who brings Henry to “some sort of life”—the phrase anticipates the title of Greene’s autobiography, A Sort of Life, which would appear two years later—by teaching him to pursue travel, love, and danger, Aunt Augusta implicitly defends and rationalizes the author’s own approach to life. Greene plays most effectively upon this complex interrelationship between literature and life in the scene in which Henry, pursuing the Sortes Virgilianae with Rob Roy to escape his mood of depression, discovers a photograph of a young Augusta which his father had placed next to a revealing passage about the novel’s heroine Diana Vernon: “Be patient and quiet, and let me take my own way; for when I take the bit between my teeth, there is no bridle will stop me.” Had my father deliberately chosen that page with that particular passage for concealing the picture? I felt the melancholy I sometimes used to experience at the bank when it was my duty to turn over old documents deposited there, the title deeds of a passion long spent. (143) Henry, not the most astute reader or observer, still thinks that the photo must have been hidden there from his “mother,” and


he fails to recognize that Augusta is in a very early stage of pregnancy. Thus Henry, too, has a sort of literary origin, since the earliest record of his existence is contained in a book in his father’s library. It is important, moreover, that the association with Scott’s lively heroine enhances our understanding of Augusta by enabling us to see how Henry’s father understood Augusta when she was young. And she, in turn, validates the conception of the original author Scott; to the extent that she is like Diana Vernon, then Diana must be true to life. Greene’s playful approach to the relationship between literature and life creates at least two significant paradoxes in the structure of Travels. One of these is that as the protagonist Henry moves from his stuffy bachelor’s isolation into the exciting world of the storyteller Augusta (and presumably, according to the Thales’ argument, into “reality”), he also moves into the world of Greene’s fiction. In the second paradox, Henry’s movement into a radically different future becomes a symbolic movement backward, specifically into the world of Victorian literature of which he is fond. These paradoxical movements are at the heart of the novel and need fuller explanation. Henry’s lifelong “literary pilgrimage,” to borrow Augusta’s term, began in his father’s library, where the aforementioned photo of Augusta tucked into Scott’s novel suggests the importance of literature in his genesis and development. He pursues the mystery of his father through literary clues— learning “to enjoy what [his father] had enjoyed” in the dogeared pages of Scott and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. (The latter was one of the volumes in what Greene called his “books for a desert island”—the small collection he took with him to Sierra Leone during the war.) Henry concludes: One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books. (I don’t think there was much passionate love in Marion Crawford, and only a shadow of it in Walter Scott.) (203)


The sentiment is akin to that expressed by Greene in, for example, his following of his own father’s tastes by developing a passionate love of Browning’s poetry and living vicariously in the world of “thieves, adulterers,” and the like. Writing in 1947 that it is in childhood that books have the deepest influence on our lives, Greene had recorded memorably his powerful, even frightening awareness of the feeling that books had the power to shape his future: having discovered with “the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock” that he could read, he kept it a secret for an entire summer holiday: I suppose I had consciously realized even then that this was the dangerous moment. I was safe so long as I could not read—the wheels had not begun to turn, but now the future stood around on bookshelves everywhere waiting for the child to choose—the life of a chartered accountant perhaps, a colonial civil servant, a planter in China, a steady job in a bank, happiness and misery, eventually one particular form of death, for surely we choose our death much as we choose our job. (“The Lost Childhood,” 13–14; italics added) In the remainder of the essay Greene traces his progress through boys’ adventure stories with idealized heroes by Weyman and Rider Haggard, to his first confrontation with a portrait of evil that he understood as expressing the truth of human nature in Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan. By moving from his narrowly circumscribed world into the expansive one of Augusta, Henry moves into a version of Greeneland where references to the author’s life and works lurk in every corner—or on every page, so abundantly that the reader is constantly aware of the author’s hand controlling the movements of his characters. Henry’s (and his father’s) love of Walter Scott calls to mind Greene’s character Mr. Davidge in England Made Me, a stuffy Englishman with an abiding interest in Scott; and Greene records in A Sort of Life the occasion when as a schoolboy he identified Scott as his favorite author. Some of the self-references are more audacious: when Aunt Augusta tells the story of Monsieur Dambreuse, who kept two mistresses simultaneously in separate parts of a strange


Parisian double hotel called the St. James and Albany, the reader who knows that Greene lived for a time in a flat in St. James’s Street, London, during part of the time of his affair with Catherine Walston, and that he moved from there to the nearby Albany, will surely suspect that a novel whose protagonist is “Henry Pulling” may well be one in which Henry G.Greene is pulling the reader’s leg. Henry, too, is reminded of the Albany in London, but in a literary connection: staying in the Albany, he says, makes him feel as though he is taking up a part in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a popular Victorian play in which a key element in the plot is a romantic liaison alleged to have taken place in the Albany. In another instance of this vein of humor, we learn that Henry’s father Richard Pulling died on October 2, Greene’s birthday, and it is in the chapter immediately following the visit to his gravesite that Henry begins to realize how thoroughly his life has been changed by Augusta’s intrusion, and how he wants to abandon his “little world” for her larger one; in other words, he wants to be reborn. At the gravesite Henry and Augusta meet a former mistress of Richard’s, Miss Paterson, whose identification with children’s books (“She had a way of repeating words as though she were used to reading children’s books aloud” [153]) suggests Greene had in mind his former mistress Dorothy Gloverwalston, who illustrated children’s books. That suggestion is strengthened by the description of Miss Paterson as looking for her gloves (no one else in the novel wears them) and by the responses to her revelation that Richard had called her “Dolly.” “Doll,” after Shakespeare’s Doll Tearsheet, was the name by which both Graham Greene and his brother Hugh called Dorothy (Sherry 2:145). When Augusta repeats the name Dolly disapprovingly, Dolly adds, “My name is Dorothy” (157). Greene is similarly audacious in asking the reader to accept certain facts in the narrative that contradict the reader’s instincts and common sense: he introduces a character named Wordsworth and surrounds him with allusions to works of the great poet, only to insist through Aunt Augusta that the character was named for the bishop, not the poet. She says also that Wordsworth, like “all the eldest sons in his family . . . for generations,” is named “Zachary” after Zachary Macaulay, “who did so much for them on Clapham Common” (18). The house on


Clapham Common where Greene lived for several years had once been occupied by Zachary Macaulay. The Thales argue that “it is not always easy to know whether [self-reference in Travels] is accident, the result of Greene’s compulsion about certain images, or deliberate self-reference” (208). My own impression is that the design of the novel and its position in the sequence of Greene’s works make it difficult to conclude that we are reading anything other than the result of a highly self-conscious reflexiveness. In any case, it is clear that the abundant references to the author’s life are more than matched by references to his own works. Although the self-reference in Henry and Augusta’s trip to Istanbul aboard the Orient Express is not very specific with regard to Greene’s first thriller Stamboul Train, their journey to Brighton involves detailed self-parody through amusing allusions to Brighton Rock. In the Brighton setting Augusta’s comments on her pursuit of sexual pleasure, her reference to Nell Gwynn’s figure in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, and her drinking of Guinness and Port inevitably recall Ida Arnold, with the obvious difference that the narrative approves of Augusta on the basis of many of the very same qualities for which Ida was condemned: cheerful paganism, frank sexuality, unashamed pursuit of pleasure. Greene’s use of the “black dog” and related imagery to support the Faust theme of Brighton Rock is parodied here in Augusta’s story of her friend Mr. Curran—a name as doggish as Colleoni’s—who set up a church for dogs and conducted marriages for them. Like Graham Greene, Augusta became a reader of theology, but she did so at Curran’s request to find references to dogs. One of her discoveries is recorded in a conversation in which, for a change, she delivers the straight lines and another character voices the pseudo-logical absurdities: “Once I had a terrible shock. I said to Curran, ‘It’s no good. We can’t go on. Look what I’ve just found in the Apocalypse. Jesus is saying who can enter the city of God. Just listen to this—” Without are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters, and whosoever loveth or maketh a lie.” You see the company dogs are supposed to keep?’


“‘It proves our point,’ Curran said. ‘Whoremongers and murderers and the rest—they all have souls, don’t they? They only have to repent, and it’s the same with dogs. The dogs who come to our church have repented. They don’t consort any more with whoremongers and sorcerers. They live with respectable people in Brunswick Square or Royal Crescent’” (46–7) After her experiences with Curran Augusta became a fake Catholic (whether she actually joined the Church is unclear) because all the girls she knew were Catholic and she “didn’t like to look superior” (43). As if this application of Wildean humor were not sufficient to reduce the foundation of Greene’s Catholic novels to an absurd perspective, she later offers a topper: “I sometimes believe in a Higher Power,” she tells Henry, “even though I am a Catholic” (84–5). Perhaps it is only fitting that Henry, just after this excursion into the heartland of Greene’s Catholic themes and characters, would learn that the name of the first girl his wayward father ever slept with was that of the saintly girl who loved Pinkie: Rose. It was in A Burnt-Out Case, with its pointed inversion of elements in The End of the Affair, that Greene seems first to have discovered the uses of extended self-parody, and Case too is reflected upon ironically by Travels. As the two novels that translate most directly into fictional events their author’s oftenexpressed pursuit of “ways of escape,” they are like two sides of a coin—one a serious story that concludes with the laughter of absurdist comedy, the other a comedy tinged with the absurd, that leads toward serious themes. Querry, disillusioned with his life and work and fatally afflicted by the loss of feeling, travels to a remote part of the world in search of solitude and isolation, trying to escape himself by as much distance as he can. Henry Pulling, utterly complacent about life and work, comfortable in his own solitude, journeys in the opposite direction, toward companionship, adventure, and love. As a burnt-out case, Querry announces that he no longer desires “to sleep with a woman nor design a building.” Henry, who seems never to have wanted such things at all, is chastised by his aunt for his lack of desire: “[Y]ou, I suppose, never cheated in all your little provincial banker’s life because there’s not anything you wanted enough, not even money, not even a


woman” (111). Both Querry and Pulling are controlled in some manner by a writer or writer-figure. Querry is written up ludicrously by the shabby journalist Parkinson, who makes him a sort of tabloid saint while ignoring altogether the complex soulstruggle going on within the character. Henry, as mentioned earlier, is “rewritten” by Augusta, who at various points is conceived as a writer. “She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story,” Henry says. “She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it” (56). Although she may use on occasion a phrase “worthy of a Haymarket author” (81), she is conceived on the whole to be a good artist. Yet in her artist’s role she seems at times destructive: “She had come into my life only to disturb it,” Henry reflects. “I had lost the taste for dahlias” (163). The reader understands by then that the dahlias are emblems of Henry’s death-in-life, and that to be reshaped by Augusta would be to come to life: She was one of the life-givers. Even Miss Paterson had come to life, stung by the cruelty of her question. Perhaps if she ever talked about me to another… I would come to some sort of life, and the character she drew, I felt sure, would be much more vivid than the real I. (159) Commenting on the extensive allusions to Wordsworth in Travels, the Thales suggest that the book be read as a sort of Mortality Ode: as the knowledge of mortality comes to Henry, Aunt Augusta tells him that the right response to mortality is to live yet more vigorously. As Wordsworth wrote about the innocence and joy that he had lost as he grew up, Greene writes about the joy Henry Pulling finds in his fifties as he loses his innocence. Travels with My Aunt is the “Immortality Ode” in reverse, showing how one can escape the prison-house even in his sixth decade. (212) This interpretation seems valid and yet incomplete. If innocence is taken to mean the opposite of experience, then the novel is clearly about the broadening of Henry’s experience and the way the “deep disturbance” his aunt causes in his “familiar


world—the little local world of ageing people…where one read of danger only in the newspapers” alters his life forever and gives him the prospect of intense happiness (167). If innocence is taken as the opposite of guilt, however, then something is at work in the novel that has not been accounted for by saying that the novel reverses Wordsworth’s ode. For Henry, in accepting his aunt’s libertine morality, her casual disregard for the law, and her involvement in smuggling, abandons his longheld notions of guilt and responsibility and embraces an attitude toward life that in a more serious novel would be the equivalent of moral collapse. This aspect of the novel must be considered in the context of the author’s self-reflection and the paradoxes I described earlier in this chapter. The point of the extensive allusions to Wordsworth is not just that Greene is imitating Wordsworth but that he is imitating himself imitating Wordsworth, specifically himself as the author of The Ministry of Fear. It is not likely to be mere coincidence that the character Wordsworth in Travels comes from Freetown, in West Africa, where Greene wrote his most Wordsworthian book; or that Mr. Visconti, in remarking that he was unable to kill a rat to end its suffering, echoes Rowe in Ministry. And Augusta’s explanation that she loves Mr. Visconti partly because he can’t be hurt and “Life can be bearable when it’s only one who suffers” (223) mirrors ironically the more sentimental conclusion of Ministry, in which Rowe must protect Anna forever from the discovery that he has regained the knowledge of his own identity: he can bear his own suffering, but not hers. Rowe, deeply troubled by guilt over the mercy-killing of his wife, dreams of escaping his present life into the innocence and tranquility of his childhood. He tries to escape imaginatively by reading Dickens and other writers beloved to him as a child. (Like Henry, he prefers the Victorians to the moderns.) The destruction of London in the blitz threatens to destroy Rowe’s own identity; for that reason he welcomes it as a “loosening of prison bars,” the reversal of the process by which growing up, in Wordsworth’s ode, imprisons us by locking us out of the recollection of our divine origins. In Travels the Wordsworthian themes and images are asserted even more directly and insistently. Henry reads the “Ode” on one morning of a river boat journey along the border of Argentina and Paraguay. Then,


having disembarked to walk the streets of an “ignoble little town” he recalls his home in Southwood and begins a “long dialogue” with himself, concluding that “It was as though I had escaped from an open prison, had been snatched away…into my aunt’s world, the world of the unexpected character and the unforeseen event” (202). He recalls that upon first entering the bank’s employ he “had thought of it in Wordsworth’s terms as a ‘prison-house’—what was it my father had found a prison, so that he double-marked the passage?” (203). As a young man Henry had so completely lost sight of the celestial vision that he could not imagine any alternative to the “prison-house”; now, as the result of travels with his aunt, he understands the means of escape and the freedom from morality it demands: I can remember very little of the vision preceding the prison-house: it must have faded very early “into the light of common day,” but it seemed to me, as I put Palgrave down beside my bunk and thought of my aunt, that she for one had never allowed the vision to fade. Perhaps a sense of morality is the sad compensation we learn to enjoy, like a remission for good conduct. In the vision there is no morality. (203) Arthur Rowe wants to regain a lost innocence, which he does briefly when he loses his memory after an injury. He wants forgetfulness but not moral anarchy, and the novel restores him in the end to the full awareness and acceptance of adult morality, guilt, and atonement through suffering. His earlier attempts to escape through imaginative literature—by reading Dickens—articulate successfully the nostalgic appeal of a simpler and more peaceful world, but the novel moves to a relatively realistic conclusion that denies the fantasy of a literary escape. Travels, then, “rewrites” or parodies The Ministry of Fear by allowing its protagonist to throw off Rowe’s heavy burden of moral responsibility. Rowe regains, finally, his own identity (as a murderer) and loses his briefly-recovered innocence; Henry gains a new identity (as the son of Augusta, not Angelica) and a new innocence (in the form of Augusta’s guiltless moral anarchy). It is only appropriate that his acceptance of his new identity comes with a symbolic acknowledgment that the


traditional morality underlying Wordsworth’s poetry (and Rowe’s childhood) is no longer operative in his world: “Mother,” he says—it is the first time he has addressed Augusta thus —“Wordsworth’s dead” (264). Wordsworth may indeed be dead in the closing pages of the novel, but Tennyson is not. It is Tennyson’s poetry—specifically “The Day-Dream,” “Maud,” and “The Lotos Eaters”—that provides the framework of allusion through which Greene creates the paradox I described earlier, whereby what appears as a movement into the future and a new life is also a movement into the past. Writing about his travels in Paraguay for The Daily Telegraph Magazine in January 1969, a few months before Travels with My Aunt was published, Greene emphasized the country’s isolation, its extremes of wealth and poverty, and its tranquil stability purchased at the cost of submission to a military dictatorship. Sir Richard Burton, Greene notes, had seen Paraguay as “‘the inland China,’” and CunninghameGraham had called it “‘a lost Arcadia’” (258). But for Greene, this “land of deep tranquillity and the smell of flowers, where wind-blown oranges lie ungathered along the country roads” was Tennyson’s “‘land where all things always seem’d the same’”: the land of “The Lotos-Eaters,” where Ulysses’s mariners, seduced by the appeal of a life of “dreamful ease” and the pleasures of the lotos, abandoned their efforts to return home and their desire to pursue a life of purposeful struggle. “What price,” Greene asks, “is the lotus-eater prepared to pay for his tranquillity? Here he will pay not in dollars for a luxury suite with double windows against the traffic (there is no traffic), only with the half-closed eye and the prudent pen: to live here one would be charged in the quite small currency of the conscience” (259). For all of its mingling of Spanish and Indian cultures, the country seems in some respects like a frozen moment of English Victorianism: the railway “built to the south by Englishmen in the 1860s” still uses some of the rolling stock from that period; the popular dances, the polka and the gallop, are suitably Tennysonian names for a land which mingles with the seventeenth-century baroque a certain nineteenth-century romanticism—the railway station in


Asuncion belongs to the early railway age, an international college is built in neo-Gothic and looks like the home of Mr. Rochester, a little white battlemented Baptist church bears the date 1822, and all the overgrown gardens of the crumbling houses are scented like Maud’s with rose and jessamine. (258–59) This conception of Paraguay as Tennyson’s lotos-land informs the final two chapters of Travels, which provide a brief coda in which the travellers’ journeys end and a desirable form of stasis is achieved. Henry realizes that the moment is at hand when he must either return home to his dahlias, his friend Major Charge, and his letters from Miss Keene, or “pass the border into my aunt’s world where I had lived till now as a tourist only” (249). By this time there is no serious doubt as to which he will choose, however, and the pleasure of the company, the tropical heat, the champagne and the smell of flowers and the ripe oranges falling from the trees all confirm his decision to stay. Realizing that he has reached “the lotos land” of Tennyson’s poem, Henry quotes lines from the work— To hear each other’s whispered speech, Eating the lotos day by day ........................... Death is the end of life, oh [sic], Why should life all labour be?”’ —and remarks, “Tennyson has always been my favourite poet” (251). Having accepted life in this version of the lotos-land, and having accepted implicitly Aunt Augusta’s view of love as the ultimate goal of life, Henry conducts a brief courtship of the young daughter of the chief of customs and arranges to marry her as soon as she turns sixteen. This outcome is in one sense a representative second-phase solution to the problem of marriage, age, and the risk of boredom: this bride will never grow old or lose her beauty in Henry’s lifetime. In a more serious plot the prospect would be unsettling—as if the whisky priest had proposed marriage to Coral Fellows, or D. to Else Crowle. (Henry’s fiancée admires Campbell’s “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” which Coral Fellows was studying at the time of her death in The Power and the Glory.) Greene sustains a mood of


lightness and humorous artifice, however, by making Henry’s romance part of the steady movement of characters and events into an imagined Victorian world. Henry meets his fiancée Maria at a dinner party where he first dances with a girl named Camilla, who tries to teach him the aforementioned “national dances,” the polka and the gallop. He sees these names as Graham Greene did: “The names sound very Victorian,” he remarks to her father. A moment later he sees a stout man eating “like a good trencherman in a Victorian illustration” (259). The man soon introduces Henry to his daughter Maria. In a brief courtship so literary that it could be a parody of Greene’s extravagant use of allusion and quotation in his love letters to Vivien, the two fall in love over poetry, and almost exclusively English Victorian poetry at that, with Tennyson’s Maud as the poem most often mentioned and quoted. When Henry quotes the line “The brief night goes in babel and revel and wine”—an apt description of the present circumstances—Maria wants to know more about the sad parts of “Maud,” but Henry, trying to recall some of the sad lines, can only remember “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood” (260; italics added). These lines might seem insignificant —indeed, they do to Henry, who remembers but does not recite them—but they serve to indicate how the landscape of the Victorian poem begins to merge with the landscape in which Henry finds himself. Awakening later from a strange dream in which he hears Mr. Visconti quoting from Maud (including the phrase “bury me deeper,” which Greene had quoted in a letter to Vivien some forty years earlier), Henry “felt oddly elated to be alive, and…knew in a moment of decision that I would never see Major Charge again, nor the dahlias, the empty urn, the packet of Omo on the doorstep or a letter from Miss Keene” (262). He then moves even closer to Maud: I walked down towards the little wood of fruit trees nursing my decision close to my heart—I think even then I knew there would be a price to pay for it…. Again lines from Maud came to mind in the early sweet-scented morning: ‘Low on the sand and loud on the stone the last wheel echoes away.’ It was as though I were safely back in the Victorian world where I had been taught by my father’s books to feel more at home than in our modern


day. The wood sloped down towards the road and up again to the back gate, and as I entered the little hollow I trod on something hard…. It was Wordsworth’s knife. (262–63; italics added) One other poem by Tennyson has significance for the conclusion of Travels; it is “The Day-Dream,” which Henry tells Augusta he identified with life in Southwood. The poem, which he quotes briefly, is a version of the fairy tale “The Sleeping Beauty,” but it is also about storytelling itself; the lines quoted by Henry —“Then take the broidery frame, and add /A crimson to the quaint Macaw”—signal the beginning of the narrative proper, which opens with a picture of timeless stasis in the “sleeping palace”: More like a picture seemeth all Than those old portraits of old kings, That watch the sleepers from the wall. Here sits the butler with a flask Between his knees, half-drain’d; and there The wrinkled steward at his task, The maid-of-honour blooming fair. The page has caught her hand in his; Her lips are sever’d as to speak; His own are pouted to a kiss; The blush is fix’d upon her cheek. The imagery is entirely consistent with the indolent mood of the lotos-eaters in the more familiar poem and, more specifically, with the imagery of stasis in the closing pages of the novel, especially the slow waltzing of Mr. Visconti and Augusta while “The musicians were still playing on the terrace, they were tired out and almost falling asleep over their instruments.” Like a fairy tale, the narrative seems to flow backward into the past, so that “At one moment the shadows gave my aunt a deceptive air of youth: she looked like the young woman in my father’s photograph pregnant with happiness “The concluding image is in fact one of complete stasis, a cinematic “freeze-frame” in which the three surviving principal characters appear:


A flashbulb broke the shadows up. I have the photograph still—all three of us are petrified by the lightning flash into a family group; you can see the great gap in Visconti’s teeth as he smiles towards me like an accomplice. I have my hand thrown out in a frozen appeal, and my mother is regarding me with an expression of tenderness and reproof.” (264)

Travels is sometimes described as a series of comic reflections on old age and death, and yet it is the most life-affirming of Greene’s novels, perhaps one of the qualities the author had in mind in describing it as a book in which he broke the “pattern” of his fiction (Allain 24). For a writer whose protagonists often find release in death, or at best face the future with a sort of grim melancholy, a character’s desire to extend life in order to savor its pleasures strikes a new note: “Like Uncle Jo,” Henry says to Aunt Augusta, “you want to prolong life.” “Certainly I do,” she replies, “because I enjoy it” (147). She teaches that enjoyment by precept as well as example, and by doing so introduces attitudes that are inconceivable in the protagonists of Greene’s first-phase novels and largely inaccessible for those of the earlier second phase. Travels is the first novel in which the characters regularly enjoy food and drink for their own sake, or in which sexual pleasure is afforded free of emotional turmoil or guilt in the characters. Augusta interprets such pleasures as prerogatives of middle age: “[T]he young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste for poetry flags a little, but I would have always gladly lost my taste for the sonnets of Wordsworth…if I could have bettered my palate for wine. Love-making too provides as a rule a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five. Aretino is not a writer for the young.” “Perhaps its not too late for me to begin,” I said….


“You must surrender yourself first to extravagance,” my aunt replied. “Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.” (72–73) As a transitional work, written for fun, Travels with My Aunt is Greene’s most exuberantly comic novel and his most playful discourse on the relationships between truth and fiction, storytelling and life, writers and characters. It is a humorous complement to the more serious portraits, as revealing in its ironic way as they are, and even more direct in acknowledging its reflexive qualities. Once the artist begins to acknowledge his own appearance in his work, the mirror held up to nature or the world outside becomes a double mirror wherein not just the artist but the work he performs becomes part of the subject matter. Greene’s portraits and Travels might be compared in this regard with the best-known and perhaps the finest cinematic example of the double mirror, Fellini’s 8 1/2, a film about a film director much like Fellini himself, who undertakes a project intended to express his view of life’s meaning and to sort out the seemingly hopeless entanglements of art (his producer and his audience are impatient), his private life (he is a flagrant adulterer, pursued by women and estranged from a wife whom he regards with affection but who cannot accept his waywardness) and his religious belief (he is a long-troubled, alienated Catholic unable to reconcile his sexual life with the teachings of the Church). In a memorable scene which best expresses the film’s reflexive nature, Guido’s wife becomes furious when the screen test she has been invited to watch reveals not only that the wife is a character in the film but that the dialogue has been taken verbatim from a recent painful conversation between her and Guido; shocked and grieved, she walks out of the screening room. The incident bears a curious resemblance to the occasion discussed earlier in these pages, when Vivien discovered that Greene had incorporated their conversation into the book he was writing. Released in 1963, roughly half-way between Greene’s last portraits A Burnt-Out Case and The Comedians, 8 1/2 shares not only the striking elements of reflexiveness but similar concerns with artistic failure. Like Querry, the Catholic architect who turns against his own work and his profession,


and Brown, the figurative “novelist” who fails to grasp the reality of other people, Fellini’s Guido abandons his own project and concludes that it cannot be accomplished. Two concluding elements in 8 1/2 are worth mentioning because they illustrate conveniently the shift that takes place in Greene’s late second-phase. First, the “girl in white” whose special wisdom Guido has long sought explains to him that the cause of his failure is that he does not know how to love. Second, Guido himself attains a new measure of tranquility and a basis for continuance in life and art through acceptance—putting aside judgment and exclusions, abandoning the quest for some interpretive key that will show forth the meaning of his life. The film ends with Guido’s declaration of unselfish love for all of the “characters” in his life-story, followed by his vision of all of them in a circus ring symbolic of happiness, completion, and the uniting of Guido the artist with Guido the child. This concluding fantasy displays an effusive warmth of emotion unmatched in Greene’s fiction; tonally it is quite different from the works under discussion here, for Guido has attained something like the peace Greene’s characters so often pursue and so rarely attain, even for brief moments. Those in the late second-phase novels certainly move closer to it, however, as they are variously affected by the ideas similar to those that sweep across Fellini’s Guido at the end of the film: ideas of acceptance of life on terms of the small measures of happiness it may offer; of reconciliation to the imperfections in the self and in others; and, most importantly, of a new understanding of, or at least a new attitude toward, the meaning and importance of love. These ideas are brought to the foreground in Travels and will be prominent in varying degrees in The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, Dr. Fischer of Geneva and The Captain and the Enemy, and will receive their fullest expression in Monsignor Quixote. Together with Travels, these works comprise the author’s late second phase and have as a common defining characteristic his preoccupation with the need to define and express the nature of love. This is hardly a new subject for Graham Greene—all of the novels have been about love in some important way—yet the subject recurs with sufficient urgency to convince attentive readers that it was of primary concern to him in his later years. At least some of the reasons for that concern should be easy to adduce: one is


that after his failure in marriage, his disappointment in a longlasting and sometimes tormenting affair (with Catherine Walston), and numerous other romantic entanglements, Greene’s life entered a happier period of stability and tranquility through his enduring relationship with one woman, Yvonne Cloetta. Another reason may be traceable to his oftenexpressed religious doubts which, in this period during which he eventually began referring to himself as a “Catholic agnostic,” must inevitably have given a new dimension to that human love which he had so often treated as inseparable from the belief in divine love; conceived in purely secular terms, human love changes, losing its potential for transcendence but paradoxically increasing in its absolute value. Perhaps these changes in the life and outlook of a writer whose characters and themes have always been closely tied to his own life meant inevitably that in the conception of new works he would feel compelled to reconsider what he had created in the past. In any event, as the shape of his own life and work move steadily closer to the condition of history rather than destiny, the nostalgic but also critical reworking of earlier subjects and themes Greene began in A Burnt-Out Case and resumed energetically in Travels with My Aunt becomes increasingly evident in the remaining novels, so that Greene’s final vision of life appears as if refracted through layers of his earlier creations.

CHAPTER NINE The Honorary Consul

Apart from its similar South American setting, The Honorary Consul is in most respects a very different book from Travels with My Aunt. The later novel employs a much more serious tone and builds slowly toward an exciting conclusion full of suspense and violent action. For over half its length, however, Consul, like its predecessor, is a book about readers and writers, one that briefly sustains the earlier work’s concerns with the elusive borderline between fiction and reality and continues to tease readers with reversed or negative images of the author. Indeed, in one curious way the novel might be said to follow Travels very closely by presenting a protagonist (here Doctor Eduardo Plarr) who has long been a reader of English Victorian literature in the lotos-land: Perhaps reading in the open air was a habit he had acquired from his father who always took a book with him when he went farming, and in the orange-scented air of his abandoned country Doctor Plarr had got through all the works of Dickens except Christmas Tales. People when they first saw him sitting on a bench with an open book had looked at him with keen curiosity…. It was a sign, like his English passport, that he would always remain a stranger: he would never be properly assimilated. (21) Although by birth Plarr is only half-English, his reading, like Henry Pulling’s, follows the example of his English father. As a young reader he was like “foreigners” in substituting fiction for reality by viewing contemporary England through the perspective of Dickens’s novels:


When Doctor Plarr as a boy read a novel of Dickens he read it as a foreigner might do, taking it all for contemporary truth for want of any other evidence, like a Russian who believes that the bailiff and the coffin-maker still follow their unchanged vocations in a world where Oliver Twist is somewhere imprisoned in a London cellar asking for more. (16) At the age of fourteen Plarr felt the power of literature to simulate life: the first person to arouse him sexually, he says, was Della Street, secretary to the fictional detective Perry Mason. As the novel opens, however, the mature Plarr is struggling to read a different kind of literature, in the form of a novel by one of his patients, Jorge Julio Saavedra. The book is “written in a heavily loaded melancholy style, full of the spirit of machismo” and Plarr finds it “hard to read more than a few pages at a time. These noble and uncommunicative characters in Latin-American literature seemed to him too simple and too heroic ever to have had living models.” Again Greene emphasizes the importance of literary influence: “Rousseau and Chateaubriand were a greater influence in South America than Freud—there was even a city in Brazil named after Benjamin Constant” (20). The Comedians and Travels contained characters who were important as figurative writers; in The Honorary Consul Greene continues in a similar reflexive mode by making the novelist Saavedra a substantial character. This strategy and its effects may be illuminated by taking up once more the comparison with the film 8 1/2, in which Fellini intensifies the serious reflexiveness described earlier by incorporating criticism of his film into the work itself. The criticism is provided by a writer named Daumier, who studies Guido’s deeply personal script and advises him not to make the film. The design, Daumier says, has at one time or another almost all of the weakness of an avant-garde film but none of the strengths. He also criticizes the egocentricity of the artist Guido, arguing that the self-centered man is eventually strangled by his own emotions. The creation of this character was a bold stroke for Fellini, for the intelligent and articulate Daumier voices the most serious objections that might likely be made to the very

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film we are watching. Fellini’s strategy is a humorous and playful move as well, however; in a dream-fantasy, Guido has Daumier hanged for criticizing him so severely. Greene achieves something again comparable to this strategy of Fellini’s work by putting into The Honorary Consul the writer Saavedra, who in certain superficial ways is rather like Greene himself but on the whole is quite different aesthetically and philosophically. Through Plarr’s conversations with the writer and his reflections on Saavedra’s works, Greene offers still another variation on the theme of portraits of the artist. In Travels he had called attention to qualities of his own life and personality by presenting a character who was his opposite. In Consul a definition of Greene’s view of his own art is established through a sort of negative image. If Henry Pulling was in obvious respects an antiself of Greene’s personality, Saavedra is the antiself of Greene the artist. And Greene defines his own territory and aesthetic principles by once again reminding the reader of what he is not. The resemblances between Greene and Saavedra are few but important. Like his creator, Saavedra follows a steady routine— five hundred words in the morning, after breakfast; he suffers from manic-depression; he writes about spiritual suffering—the noche oscura; and he has created a “Saavedraland” analogous to what readers have called “Greeneland”: “Strangely enough the mental geography of his novels remained unaltered. Wherever he might choose to live now, he had found his mythical region once and forever as a young man…” (22). Greene writes in Ways of Escape about the difficulty of creating major characters from real people: A real person stands in the way of the imagination. Perhaps a trick of speech, a physical trait, may be used, but I can write no more than a few pages before realizing that I simply don’t know enough about the character to use him, even if he is an old friend. With the imaginary character I am sure—I know that Doctor Percival in The Human Factor admires the painting of Ben Nicholson, I know that Colonel Daintry will open a tin of sardines when he returns from the funeral of his colleague. (308)


The difficulty is one shared by Saavedra, who finds that he cannot complete an important letter concerning Charley Fortnum: “I want to begin the letter with a character study of the victim…but somehow Señor Fortnum refuses to come alive. I have had to cross out almost every other word. It is his reality that defeats me’” (188). Saavedra lives in a modest, sparsely furnished flat, as Greene would do in Antibes in his late years, although in Saavedra’s case the simplicity is a consequence of poverty. Finally, by having Saavedra testify that one of his characters, a fisherman named Castillo, is “a portrait of the artist” (67), Greene reveals that the idea of self-portraiture was on his own mind at this time. If there is something resembling a self-portrait in Consul, however, it arises only indirectly, through a character who, superficial resemblances to the author notwithstanding, seems intended to remind us of what the author is not. Saavedra’s character Castillo, “who wages an endless war with the sea for such a small reward” (67) and is said to resemble Saavedra, sounds much more like a creation of Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Old Man and the Sea Greene admired. Other qualities of Saavedra’s character—his lack of religious consolation, his machismo, his love of good wine and conversation—are consistent with the Hemingway code and are much more suggestive of Hemingway’s characters than of Greene’s. And Saavedra’s obsession with his work and reputation, together with his indication that the discipline of work tempers his melancholy and enables him to carry on in spite of his bleak outlook on life, may have some connection with Greene’s view, expressed to his friend Leopoldo Duran, that Hemingway committed suicide because “he could see that his reputation as a writer could go no further… He could no longer produce ideas. His creativity had run dry and that was intolerable. There was no substitute, not even love” (45). Duran points out that Greene himself did not want to outlive his ability to work. Other evidence supports the likelihood that Greene had Hemingway specifically in mind here. His library contained a copy of Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway, published a year before Consul appeared; and his next novel, The Human Factor, contains a disparaging reference to the American writer by the protagonist Maurice Castle, who warns of the dangers of American involvement in an African war:


“They are just as ignorant of Africa as they were of Asia— except, of course, through novelists like Hemingway. He would go off on a month’s safari arranged by a travel agency and write about white hunters and shooting lions— the poor half-starved brutes reserved for tourists.” (173) Some of Saavedra’s most memorable characteristics, however, are derived neither from Hemingway nor from the author Greene. Saavedra’s obsession with his own work, his determination to work on grand but outdated material, and his claim that he needs more discipline than many writers because he has “a demon where others have a talent” (67) all bear unmistakable resemblance to Greene’s judgment of the nineteenth-century painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, on whom Greene based the character of his sculptor in Carving a Statue. Greene saw Haydon as “obsessed—to the sacrifice of any personal life—by the desire to do great Biblical subjects, already, even in his day, out of fashion. You cannot read the diaries of Haydon without realizing that he had a true daemon and yet he had no talent at all—surely a farcical character, though he came to a tragic end” (Ways 245). Saavedra’s current project, the story of a beautiful girl who has only one leg but maintains “a stubborn hope in a future which somehow will be better than today’s” and therefore may be a symbol “of this poor crippled country” (70), sounds rather like the protagonist of Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s film Tristana, released three years before the publication of Greene’s novel. Critic Raymond Durgnat maintains that the beautiful Tristana, who loses her leg to cancer, is “allusively” Spain itself (152). Such symbolism, whether the resemblance to Buñuel is deliberate or accidental, is central to the aesthetic of Saavedra, who sees symbolism and abstraction as the proper means for a novelist to employ in expressing his political views. The political novel, he argues, should be free of “petty details that date it. Assassinations, kidnapping…” (71). The dialogue between Plarr and Saavedra becomes indirectly a dialogue between Greene and Saavedra, through which Greene defines his own world view as it informs the novel we are reading. Saavedra believes in an old-fashioned world (Plarr calls it “absurdly outdated”) of tragic heroism. Plarr’s view is much


closer to the one Greene has been establishing in novels from A Burnt-Out Case onward, a view that emphasizes the comic rather than the tragic: “Life isn’t like that,” he wants to say to patients sometimes. “Life isn’t noble or dignified. Even LatinAmerican life. Nothing is ineluctable. Life has surprises. Life is absurd. Because it’s absurd there is always hope” (23). Arguing that “the true novelist must always be in his way a poet,” and that a poet “deals in absolutes,” Saavedra cites the example of Shakespeare as the great artist who dealt properly with abstraction: Shakespeare avoided the politics of his time, the minutiae of politics. He wasn’t concerned with Philip of Spain, with pirates like Drake. He used the history of the past to express what I call the abstraction of politics. A novelist today who wants to represent tyranny should not describe the activities of General Stroessner in Paraguay—that is journalism not literature. (71) No clearer instance could be found of Greene’s use of a fictional writer as a foil to himself than in this declaration of Saavedra’s principles which contradict the spirit of a novel like The Comedians, with its harrowing expose of the evils of the Duvalier regime in Haiti. Moreover, the appeal to Shakespeare for validation calls to mind Greene’s criticism of Shakespeare, delivered somewhat ironically on the occasion of his receipt of the Shakespeare Award at the University of Hamburg in 1966. Speaking on “The Virtue of Disloyalty,” Greene called Shakespeare the “one supreme poet of conservatism, of what we now call the Establishment,” because Shakespeare “worked backward” from the dangerous political climate of his time and “into the safer past”: Of course he is the greatest of all poets, but we who live in times just as troubled as his, times full of the deaths of tyrants, a time of secret agents, assassinations and plots and torture chambers, sometimes feel ourselves more at home with the sulphurous anger of Dante, the self-disgust of Baudelaire and the blasphemies of Villon, poets who dared to reveal themselves whatever the danger, and the danger was very real. (266–67)


Saavedra’s judgments about literary art and methods reflect ironically upon Greene’s. Committed to “timeless” characters and subjects, Saavedra protests to Plarr that he cannot write about urgent political events, such as the imprisonment of Plarr’s father. How, he asks, “can I make art out of a man shut up in a police station?” (72). The best response might be to suggest that he read of the whisky priest’s night in jail in The Power and the Glory—one of the finest scenes in Greene’s fiction. Saavedra also dislikes the detective story and believes that fictions about contemporary events should have historical settings. In a comment surely intended by Greene to force the reader into making some kind of judgment in these matters, Saavedra appears to comment on the very book we are reading: “Nothing dates more quickly than the immediate contemporary. You might as well expect one to write a story about the kidnapping of Señor Fortnum” (184–85). The Honorary Consul does not display the sustained, conspicuous reflexiveness of novels like Travels with My Aunt and A Burnt-Out Case. It does, however, show signs of Greene’s reworking of older material in ways that demonstrate changes in his sensibility. Several elements in the novel bear more than a passing resemblance to Brighton Rock. For example, Léon Rivas, a priest who threatens to become a murderer, recalls Pinkie, the murderer who wanted to be a priest. Both novels focus attention at the end on a young woman who is pregnant (Clara Fortnum) or believes herself to be (Rose), and who mourns the loss of her lover (Plarr, Pinkie) who has met a sudden, violent death. In both novels the belief that although the doomed protagonist did not achieve the peace he sought and was unable or unwilling to declare his love, the likelihood that he was capable of love offers hope for the survivors. But whereas Rose is utterly alone at the end of Brighton Rock, The Honorary Consul has two survivors, Clara and Charley, whom Greene spares the cruelty he had exhibited over thirty years earlier toward Rose. Rose has only the gramophone record, with its message of hatred that is no longer true, to console her; Charley, at least, is consoled by knowledge that Clara really loved Plarr, even though she denies it. Greene seems to have drawn upon earlier, less successful works as well: Rumour at Nightfall, his third published novel,


involves a group of guerrillas with a mysterious leader, Caveda, who rules from a distance as “El Tigre” does in Consul. More interestingly, Rumour presents a love triangle in which the same woman is the object of interest for sharply contrasted men who serve as dual protagonists. One of the men, Chase, is cynical about both love and religion, as Plarr is; the other, Crane, though quite different in other respects from Charley Fortnum, is a more romantic and sentimental character who briefly finds peace through love when he marries Eulelia Monti. In this earlier work, however, the cynical friend is the survivor; Crane, less fortunate than Charley, is actually killed by guerrillas. In both plots the survivors are united, their relationship strengthened by memories of the dead friend and lover. Key elements of the plot of Consul can also be seen as a deromanticized version of Greene’s second published novel, The Name of Action. In both works paired revolutionaries (Torner and Kapper, respectively, in Name; Rivas and Aquino in Consul), one of whom is an artist (Kapper, Aquino), are aided in their struggle by a protagonist who is an outsider and who is at least part English (Chant, Plarr). The result in both works is an angled perspective on events and culture; machismo, for example, is not something Plarr has inherited. The protagonist is sympathetic to the cause but develops conflicting loyalties because of his growing sympathy for an older man (Demassener, Fortnum) whom he has cuckolded. In both stories the older man’s wife (Anne-Marie, Clara) is young and beautiful. The working out of these complex relationships in The Name of Action produces a profound disillusionment for Chant, who enters the scene as an inexperienced romantic idealist. By the time he wrote Consul Greene had long since discovered that he could generate much richer ironies and a greater sense of contemporary reality by employing a protagonist who is without romantic illusions. In his treatment of love he had also progressed beyond both the naive romantic views of Oliver Chant and the tortured passions and jealousies of mature protagonists like Bendrix and Brown. The Honorary Consul is often referred to as a “political novel,” and while that description is not a misnomer, it is equally correct to describe the work as a mature expression of Greene’s continuing concern with the nature of love, and in that regard as well as its self-


reference it can be seen as a logical successor to Travels with My Aunt. When Aunt Augusta tells Henry Pulling that she will never be represented in Madame Tussaud’s, a museum more interested in crime than in love, she identifies herself as the incarnation of the impulse to love joyfully and guiltlessly; and Henry’s forthcoming marriage at the close of the novel signifies the completeness with which he has accepted her example. Love is talked about throughout Travels, yet the tone, epigrammatic humor, and episodic structure of the novel do not allow for much serious consideration of the subject of love. Wordsworth’s devotion to Augusta may have an element of nobility, especially when he connects it with hymns he learned in childhood, but it is immature and unsophisticated, and the shock effect of his frequent references to “jig-jig,” together with the fact that his death fails to move Augusta to the slightest degree of emotion, undermines the seriousness with which his love might otherwise be taken. Moreover, Augusta’s application of Wildean humor to such hallowed notions as fidelity and trust and mutual need in lovers implies that Greene is no more earnest about these matters than Wilde is. To Henry’s suggestion that she must have “despised” Mr. Visconti for cheating her, she admonishes him never to assume a superior morality and never to despise; after all, she was cheating Visconti as well: “What do you suppose I was doing in the house behind the Messagero? I was cheating, wasn’t I? … Your poor father didn’t have a chance. He was a cheat too, and I only wish you were” (111). She responds to Henry’s doubts that Visconti is “trustworthy” by asking, “If he were, would I have loved him…? (240). She also explains that she loves Visconti because he does not need her: “I like men who are untouchable. I’ve never wanted a man who needed me, Henry. A need is a claim” (222). Clearly Augusta’s long-term relationship with Visconti involves a remarkable degree of loyalty, however, and it is in that concept of loyalty that Henry’s reflections move tentatively toward a serious definition of love itself: Loyalty to a person inevitably entails loyalty to all the imperfections of a human being, even to the chicanery and immorality from which my aunt was not entirely free. I wondered whether she had ever forged a cheque or robbed


a bank, and I smiled at the thought with the tenderness I might have shown in the past to a small eccentricity. (177) The decision of Augusta and Visconti to marry offers an odd displacement of sexual love from the sphere of marriage. Visconti explains: “Now that the sexual urge is behind us, marriage presents no danger of infidelity or boredom” (248). His statement seems humorous and paradoxical yet, within the context of the novels to follow, it is serious as well. The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, and Dr. Fischer of Geneva will display a deep interest in qualities that displace sexual love as the sine qua non of a successful married life. The Honorary Consul presents a serious, probing consideration of love that is conducted primarily through the consciousness of Eduardo Plarr. This direction in the novel is announced in a conversation between Plarr and Fortnum that takes place before the honorary consul is kidnapped by terrorists. “Haven’t you ever loved anyone?” Fortnum asks. Plarr’s evasive answer—“That depends on what you call love”— betrays his own deep doubt and skepticism about the nature of love (64). Plarr has had affairs but has never loved; to say that he stands in relationship to love as an atheist does to religion would not distort the emphasis of the narrative, for Greene presents Plarr’s inability to love as a problem of belief. Part of Plarr’s difficulty is traceable to his childhood: the loss of his father, who was taken as a political prisoner in Paraguay, left him hostage to the oppressive emotional demands of his mother, and his determination to resist those demands crippled him emotionally: “Love” was a claim which he wouldn’t meet, a responsibility he would refuse to accept, a demand…. So many times his mother had used the word when he was a child; it was like the threat of an armed robber, “Put up your hands or else….” Something was always asked in return: obedience, an apology, a kiss which one had no desire to give. (204) The barrenness of Plarr’s emotional life is symbolized by the sterile atmosphere of his apartment, where there are “no


sentimental relics… not even a photograph. It was as bare and truthful—almost—as a police station cell. Even during his affairs with women he had tried to avoid that phrase of the theater, ‘I love you’” (171). At times he becomes a rationalist explainer like Bendrix and especially Smythe in The End of the Affair, trying to deny love’s existence as they had denied religious belief, by reducing it to harmless parts. Because Plarr does not use the word love, women with whom he has had affairs have often accused him of cruelty, [T]hough he preferred to think of himself as a painstaking and accurate diagnostician. If for once he had been aware of a sickness he could describe in no other terms, he would have unhesitatingly used the phrase “I love,” but he had always been able to attribute the emotion he felt to a quite different malady—to loneliness, pride, physical desire, or even a simple sense of curiosity. (171) The test of his ability to reduce love to such “other terms” arises through his relationship with Charley Fortnum’s young wife Clara, a former prostitue who had caught Plarr’s eye, though he did not hire her, in a brothel he frequented. A lingering sense of mystery in the girl leads Plarr to invite her to his apartment for a brief, impulsive sexual encounter. Surprised afterward by his strong attraction to her and believing himself too rational to fall in love, he worries that his fate may be “obsession” instead. Thus he convinces himself for a time that he is interested in the “idea” of Clara rather than in the girl herself. Plarr’s self-analysis is unfortunately flawed by his egotism. In contrast to Charley Fortnum, who is primarily concerned with the welfare of someone other than himself, Plarr is so caught up in attempts to analyze and limit his own emotions that he pays inadequate regard to others. This tendency surfaces most embarrassingly when, after they have been to bed together, Clara tries to ask whether Plarr really believes her husband is still alive. “Do you really…?” she begins, but Plarr replies with a firm “No” before she can complete her question: He thought she was demanding the same answer to a banal question that his mother had constantly forced out of him after they left his father, the answer which each of


his mistresses sooner or later had always insisted on—“Do you really love me, Eduardo?” (111) Like Bendrix, who insists on seeing his relationship with Sarah as the story of an affair with beginning, middle, and end, Plarr wants to reduce even a natural expression of sympathy and desire to a predictable formula—a version of play-acting, or the rules of a game. Thus, when Clara is distraught over the fear that Charley will die, and Plarr’s attempts to comfort her lead “without intention” to a episode of sexual love, he is saddened: He wondered…why did I ever want this to happen? Why did I think it would be a victory? There seemed no point in playing the game since now he knew what moves he had to make to win. The moves were sympathy, tenderness, quiet, the counterfeiting of love. He had been drawn to her by her indifference, even her enmity. (118–19) Plarr also resembles Bendrix in the essential selfishness of his attitude toward Clara. Just as Bendrix treats Sarah coldly at times in order to shield his own emotions, Plarr maintains a distance from Clara by asking whether her pleasure in their sexual acts is real or faked. Her answer that she had been faking is a lie, a sign that his coldness has injured her—and he is strangely relieved to be assured that the pleasure is “comedy” or acting. It is a peculiar case of male vanity being outweighed by an even more powerful expression of ego: if Clara does not experience pleasure, Plarr reasons, then there is still some “mystery” about her that he has not fathomed, and he can continue to pursue that mystery without fear of being held accountable to love. Clara is able eventually to secure from Plarr something close to a confession of love; ironically, however, it is love not for her but for his father. Upon learning of the father’s death, she asks Plarr if he loved his father. “Perhaps,” he replies, but the reader suspects an inadequate concealment of the truth. In a curious way, Plarr’s love for his father—love was not a word the father used either—offers him a final chance to explain his attachment to Clara as something other than love. Plarr feels guilt over a sense of having betrayed his father. As he explains to Saavedra, in caring for the poor in the barrio he believes he


is doing what his father would have approved. With his rich patients the opposite is true: “I feel as though I had left his friends to help his enemies. I even sleep with them sometimes, and when I wake up I look at the face on the pillow through his eyes. I suppose that’s one reason why my affairs never last long”(198) His father might have cared for Clara, however, since she is one of the poor. When Saavedra asks, “Do you love the girl?”—a restatement of Charley’s earlier question about whether Plarr had ever loved anyone—Plarr responds evasively as he had done before: “Love, love, I wish I knew what you and all the others mean by the word. I want her, yes. From time to time. Sexual desire has its rhythms as you well know.” He added, “She has lasted longer that I thought possible…. Perhaps Clara is—my poor.” (198–99) This interpretation of Clara is not unfounded. She comes from a background of poverty and extreme hardship, best illustrated by the story she tells Plarr of her sister, who bore an illegitimate child, strangled it, and killed herself. Having become a prostitute to help support her aged father, Clara is skilled at her trade and is untroubled by the kinds of selfanalysis that afflict Plarr. She has accepted Charley’s kindness and affection with genuine gratitude but also with pragmatic self-interest that she does not conceal, nor is Charley deceived about the basis of their marriage. He promises money and security. To Plarr’s question “Did he love you?” Clara responds that he was always very kind to her. Her answer is not evasive; it was the kindness that mattered. Clara is intelligent and seems to know that, as a former prostitute and present adulteress, her declarations are suspect, perhaps even to herself. But when she admits that her only “acting” in her relationship with Plarr was an attempt to conceal her sexual pleasure rather than to fake it—presumably in response to Plarr’s concern that she had deceived him in that way earlier—she asks him, “Is it [the acting] because I love


you?” (204), but the scene ends and he does not answer. Charley Fortnum, the character who can answer such questions unequivocally, is not the chief protagonist, but as the eponymous honorary consul who has a substantial chapter devoted to his point of view and is the controlling sensibility at the end of the novel, he is virtually a co-protagonist. Moreover, Charley Fortnum is the very type of a second-phase protagonist in Greene’s novels: an older man, in his sixties as Graham Greene was at the time of writing, whose first wife has died and who finds a kind of happiness with a second and much younger woman. (Clara is more than forty years younger than Charley; the difference between their ages is approximately that between Henry Pulling’s age and his fiancée’s.) The reader hardly needs to be reminded that she will remain youthful throughout the remainder of his life, but Plarr reminds us nevertheless that “a man should never love a woman less than twenty years younger than himself. In that way he can die before the vision fades” (169). Charley’s love for Clara is characterized by charity, sympathy, kindness, and affection. A degree of sexual desire is present too, but its importance is played down and Charley is regarded by Clara as less than a skilled or virile lover. Dr. Humphries accuses Charley, behind his back, of marrying Clara because he wanted to have a whore conveniently close, but Saavedra scolds him for the slur and implicitly defends both Charley and Clara by confessing that he once loved a prostitute who demonstrated a remarkable generosity of spirit. Charley’s love is also distinguished by the absence of the obsessive jealousy that drives earlier Greene characters like Bendrix and Brown, but on the other hand it is never confused with pity. Upon discovering that he has been cuckolded by Plarr, Charley would like to hate his friend but finds that he cannot; even in his anger and hurt he regards the younger man as something like a son. Instead of hatred he displays, to his friend and especially to his errant wife, the kind of loyalty that, as discussed earlier, Henry Pulling discovers as a transcendent value: the “loyalty to a person [that] inevitably entails loyalty to all the imperfections of a human being, even to the chicanery and immorality…” (177). Undoubtedly Clara is something of a daughter figure for Charley as well. Her future about which he is so deeply


concerned is one he will share only in part, and likely a small part. Yet Charley is motivated primarily by loving concern for her happiness and well-being, and for her child’s—even though the father is Plarr and not, as he had believed, himself. In an early statement to Plarr he sums up the essence of his attitude toward his marriage: “When you get to my age you accumulate a lot of regrets. It’s not a bad thing to feel you’ve made at least one person a little happier.” This kind of remark is so at odds with Plarr’s egocentricity and emotional coldness that Plarr cannot reply: “It was the kind of simple, sentimental and selfconfident statement which Doctor Plarr found embarrassing. No reply was possible” (88). Charley Fortnum is a notably imperfect character, but his unselfish love approaches a kind of perfection usually reserved in Greene’s novels for saintly women like Rose or Sarah. Perhaps that makes appropriate the unique and paradoxical situation at the end, where the love of Plarr and Clara is perfected only through Charley. Clara, after all, regards Plarr’s wanting her to have an abortion as proof that he did not love her; she tries to convince Charley that she did not love Plarr either, but Charley detects her lie and in fact is happier— because he knows that Plarr loved her—to realize that she is lying. Charley needs to believe her capable of love, even if she loves someone besides him. Plarr can never bring himself to use the word love to describe his own feelings, although just before his death he admits his jealousy—both to Léon Rivas, in an important confessional scene; and to Charley, who asks pertinently, “jealous of what?” (281). Charley is convinced by the power of Plarr’s emotion that Plarr does love, and one of Plarr’s final remarks, even though it reveals that in his own mind he has never satisfactorily grasped the meaning of love, indicates that he has been converted by Charley’s example to a belief in love: “I know how to fuck,” he says; “I don’t know how to love. Poor drunken Charley Fortnum wins the day” (295). To win the game on Charley Fortnum’s terms is to enact a form of unselfish love that is not driven primarily by either sexual desire or a romantic ideal of perfection. This is the idea that Henry Pulling sees at work in his aunt’s love for Mr. Visconti, an idea of “loyalty to all the imperfections of a human being.” If his books are to be taken as an index of his thinking, the author who faulted himself for cruelty and jealousy came


increasingly to value kindness, loyalty, tolerance, and companionship. Aunt Augusta’s testimony and Charley’s “victory” affirm this conclusion, which Greene had stated a few years earlier through the voice of William Harris, the writernarrator of the short story “May We Borrow Your Husband” (1967), as he reflects upon the anguish of a young woman who believes she would want to die if she loses her husband: If I had been twenty years older, perhaps, I could have explained to her that nothing is quite as bad as that, that at the end of what is called “the sexual life” the only love which has lasted is the love that has accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship. (28)

CHAPTER TEN The Human Factor

As protagonist Maurice Castle, disguised as a blind man, makes his escape from London near the end of The Human Factor, he barely avoids recognition by an old acquaintance who turns up unexpectedly. Castle remarks to the agent who is guiding him, “Everybody in the world, so they say, has a double” (297). The idea was certainly close to the heart of Graham Greene, who would conclude his autobiographical Ways of Escape, published two years later, with a chapter on the strange “double” who called himself Graham Greene and turned up at unpredictable times and places around the world, occasionally reaching the author’s destinations before Greene himself did. Castle’s remark also underscores the important theme of doubling in the novel in which Castle, a double agent who works for MI6 and passes information to the Soviets, leads a double life at home as well, since no one in his family knows what he is doing. Castle drinks “a whisky or two before dinner at eight” (25), delivers coded messages to two booksellers named Halliday, orders double copies of the books to be used for code, and describes himself as “doubly dangerous” (158) because he is motivated by hate as well as love. Castle has had two wives, his wife Sarah has had two husbands, his son Sam two fathers. He also meets a kind of shadow or double in Colonel Daintry, the security officer who shares Castle’s respect for “the human factor” but remains loyal to his agency and his country. Daintry’s situation inverts the destiny of Castle: whereas Castle’s love of wife and child has led him into treason, Daintry has preserved his patriotism at the cost of love and family. The burden of duplicity weighs heavily upon him as it does upon Castle: Daintry is “tired to death of secrecy and of errors which had to be covered up and not admitted,” and he blames his own


loss of wife and daughter on the firm’s secrecy: “They killed my marriage with their secrets” (277). Daintry’s extreme loneliness and isolation in his spare two-room flat in St. James’s is doubled at the end of the novel by Castle’s isolation in symbolically identical conditions in Moscow at the end of the book. Even Daintry’s last attempt to contact his family—a telephone call that fails when he cannot remember his daughter’s married name and hangs up in embarrassment—is doubled by Castle’s attempt to call Sarah from Moscow. The line goes dead before he can say more than a few words. In their common humanity Castle and Daintry are paired in thematic opposition to the duo of sportsmen: Hargreaves, who loves to hunt, and Dr. Percival, who is obsessed with trout fishing. Finally, The Human Factor itself “doubles” in ways to be discussed later one of Greene’s earlier novels, The End of the Affair. The devices of formal and thematic doubling in The Human Factor seem only appropriate to a novel in which the protagonist is in many respects a “double” of the author. Like Graham Greene, Maurice Castle grew up in Berkhamsted and played as a boy among the trenches that had been dug into the Common during the Great War. Like Greene, too, he hated school and loved adventure stories, especially those of Rider Haggard, and regarded Haggard’s Quatermain as a favorite hero. Castle admits to having a “splinter of iceberg” in his heart similar to the “splinter of ice” that Greene’s cousin Barbara and others ascribed to him, and which Greene in turn gave to his character James Raven in A Gun for Sale. More importantly, Castle, like Greene, has served British intelligence in Africa and later in London. These elements of personal doubling, together with the novel’s autumnal perspective of an older man looking back upon his past, make The Human Factor rival England Made Me and The Ministry of Fear as the most nostalgic of Greene’s novels. Castle is not a writer, however, and in spite of the doubling of author and character his story is not a portrait of the artist in the sense several earlier novels were. In addition to the strong element of self-reference The Human Factor displays Greene’s extensive use of literary allusion and draws an implied comparison between this familiar technique of the novelist and certain methods of

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espionage. After all, allusion as practiced by Greene bears at least an analogy to the encoding of messages: allusions extend or enrich the meanings of texts and create a special form of communication between writer and reader, though only the reader who shares privileged information with the author—a common background of literary experience—can have direct access to that extended meaning. Greene clearly did not write for such readers alone, but they are the ones likely to gain the fullest understanding of his work. It is not surprising, then, that toward the end of his career he would write a novel in which the use of literary texts to encode meaning within messages is a principal activity of Castle, the character of Berkhamsted origins who has made a career out of military intelligence. Castle echoes both Greene and his character Henry Pulling in commenting that “There are verses in childhood…which shape one’s life more than any of the scriptures” (227). Greene writes in A Sort of Life that “The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than religious teaching” (55). The imagery in the poem Castle reads to Sam from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses,

Over the borders a sin without pardon, Breaking the branches and crawling below, Out through the breach in the wall of the garden, Down by the banks of the river we go. seems innocent enough but is in fact strongly evocative of Greene’s own obsessive themes and images: childhood, the garden suggestive of Edenic innocence, sin and damnation (or at least lack of pardon), escape, and the familiar borders. Whatever such images may imply in Stevenson’s work, their appearance in a Greene novel gives them special resonance. And their specific reference to the book we are reading is called to our attention by the child Sam, a reminder of the frequent troublesomeness of innocence:


“What are borders?” “It’s where one country ends and another begins.” It seemed, as soon as he spoke, a difficult definition, but Sam accepted it. “What’s a sin without pardon? Are they spies?” “No, no, not spies. The boy in the story has been told not to go out of the garden, and…” “Who told him?” “His father, I suppose, or his mother.” “And that’s a sin?” “This was written a long time ago. People were more strict then, and anyway it’s not meant seriously.” “I thought murder was a sin.” “Yes, well, murder’s wrong.” “Like going out of the garden?” (228) These passages illustrate Greene’s method in this novel, where the allusions are rarely subtle but more often obvious and selfconscious. The allusions in The Human Factor therefore have a mechanical quality that parallels their role in the plot. The first two texts Castle uses for encoding, Clarissa Harlowe and War and Peace, call attention, respectively, to the love theme of the novel (and its unhappy outcome) and the perpetual cycle of war and peace that necessitates the kind of intelligence work Castle performs. Other famous love stories, Anna Karenina and Tristan for example, are alluded to briefly for a similar purpose. A man on a Sussex golf course calls Sarah “Topsy,” an allusion to the Harriet Beecher Stowe anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which Tolstoy regarded as a great work of literature). Mr. Halliday’s quoting of lines about going to Moscow from Chekhov’s Three Sisters generates a considerable irony: in the play, Moscow is imagined as the place where the fulfillment missing from ordinary life will be achieved, but the sisters never reach Moscow and the play ends with a deep sense of futility; Castle does reach Moscow and expects to be united with his family there, but his plans are thwarted and his story also ends in futility. Settled unhappily in Moscow, Castle listens to his visitor Bellamy recall a line from Swinburne apropos to Castle’s situation in an alien environment: “the foreign faces, the tongueless vigil…and all the pain” (334). And Castle himself reads Robinson Crusoe with special attention to passages that correspond to his loneliness and isolation:

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Crusoe divided the comforts and miseries of his situation into Good and Evil and under the heading Evil he wrote: “I have no soul to speak to, or relieve me.” Under the opposing Good he counted “so many necessary things” which he had obtained from the wreck “as will either supply my wants, or enable me to supply myself even as long as I live.” (283) Finally, Greene’s literary allusions are adapted to the motif of doubling: Hargreaves, having received an urgent message that Castle, not Davis, is the likely source of intelligence leaks, reluctantly lays aside the Trollope novel he had looked forward to reading that afternoon; ironically this book, The Way We Live Now, is a strong indictment of capitalist greed and is therefore the one Castle had chosen as the source of code for his next message. The studied reflexiveness of the novelist who takes a lingering look at old places, themes, characters, and images reminds us that we are in that period when not just the writer’s own history but also his earlier works become part of his subject. The Human Factor recalls briefly the motif of acting and related theatrical allusions from The Honorary Consul and especially The Comedians: Castle’s hapless associate Davis, inefficient in his work and unsuccessful in love, but completely innocent of wrongdoing, is “like an actor who has been miscast; when he tried to live up to the costume, he usually fumbled the part” (4). The consequence of his fumbling is a meaningless, absurd death; casual blunders in his work, together with a sincere attempt by Castle to help him out, lead to his being first suspected of treason and then poisoned by Dr. Percival. The object of Davis’s unrequited love, Cynthia, is also linked with the “comedians” theme: She had something in common with Davis, for she played a comedy too. If faithful Davis looked as untrustworthy as a bookie, Cynthia, the domestic-minded, looked as dashing as a young commando. It was a pity that her spelling was so bad, but perhaps there was something Elizabethan about her spelling as well as about her name. She was probably looking for a Philip Sidney, and so far she had only found a Davis. (45)


The Human Factor recalls certain elements of Consul somewhat more directly: for example, the story of a husband who loves a woman (his present or future wife) made pregnant by another man, and then loves her child; the discrepancy in age between husband and wife (the future condition of Henry and his fiancée in Travels also). There is also the strong link between the protagonist’s present emotional state and his childhood: Plarr’s coldness and inability to love are attributed to his mother’s selfish and oppressive demand for his love; Castle’s chronic “insecurity” might be expected to come with the territory of his profession, but it is traced, without detailed explanation, to his childhood, when insecurity made him too generous in expressing his gratitude for friendly gestures. Finally, both Factor and Consul are about the purgation of guilt: Plarr confesses to Léon Rivas and admits to himself his own inability to love, which he recognizes with deep regret near the moment of his death and, ironically, at that point in his life when he seems to have overcome that failing. His friend Charley Fortnum, grateful for the chance to make “at least one person a little happier,” implies that he is atoning for unspecified guilt in his past. And Maurice Castle harbors deep guilt that stems less from the crime of treason than from the heavy burden of secrecy and duplicity; his longing for a release through death and his not wanting a child of his own—“I see enough of myself every day when I shave,” he says to Sarah (149)—appear to be at odds with his belief in the justness of his actions. Castle tries repeatedly to confess; in an unhappy scene he beseeches a priest for help and is turned away from the church. Eventually he is forced to confess to Sarah, and in a moment of heroic but desperate defiance he confesses also to Daintry. Readers may find the strongest connection between The Human Factor and The Honorary Consul in the way Eduardo Plarr’s poignant discovery about the reality of love in Greene’s world—that “Caring is the only dangerous thing” (280)—points directly toward a restatement of the same idea in the epigraph for Factor, taken from Conrad’s Victory: “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.” In various ways this idea is reiterated in the novel: “Love was a total risk,” Castle reflects in the second chapter. “Literature had always so proclaimed it. Tristan, Anna

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Karenina, even the lust of Lovelace—he had glanced at the last volume of Clarissa” (16). It is because of love that Castle broods over a sense of ill destiny and feels “certain that one day a doom would catch up with them” (14). Love has made him paradoxically a “coward” (103) and a dangerously careless man: “Oh, I’ve always been very careful,” he says in a sad joke to Sarah, “except when I fell in love with you” (161). Such reflections have both a metaphysical quality—the book is an extended reflection on the value and meaning of love—and an explanatory one, since they account for the connection between past and present in a man who became a double agent to repay the Soviets for helping to rescue his Bantu wife from the racist authorities in South Africa: “His love of Sarah had led him to Carson, and Carson finally to Boris. A man in love walks through the world like an anarchist, carrying a time bomb” (155). The simile may seem extravagant but is justified by the connection between Castle’s treason and its cause. One could say also that in a curious way Castle’s “anarchy,” a consequence of love, is the serious counterpart to the comic anarchy brought about in Travels by the irrepressible Aunt Augusta, whose ultimate justification of her lawlessness and defiance of conventional morality rests on her belief in love. I said that Greene’s treatment of love here bears a sequential relationship to Consul, and it does. But what this novel expresses in its sustained consideration of love can best be understood by looking once more at its reflexiveness, its commentary on Greene’s other work. For the novel that looms heavily in the background of The Human Factor, as it had done for A Burnt-Out Case, is the most personal of Greene’s novels, The End of the Affair. Resemblances between that novel and Factor are apparent in numerous ways that may at first seem merely coincidental and superficial. Both novels depict a moving story of lovers who try to create a separate peace against the background of war—the hot war that rains down upon London, the cold war that posits the genocidal destruction of African blacks as an acceptable cost for preserving Western control over South Africa’s gold mines. Both deal with secret codes, juxtapose loving and spying, and dramatize the unavoidable mingling of love, fear, and hate. In each novel an important character dies well before the end of the story and is cremated at Golders Green, and in each case a Browning poem


(“In a Year” for Sarah Miles, “By the Fireside” for Arthur Davis) provides a key to important private thoughts of the deceased. In both works, too, imagery of snow is linked with death and desolation: snow mounts “slowly on the sill like mould from a spade” as Bendrix mourns the loss of Sarah (141), and “merciless, interminable, annihilating snow” covers the Moscow streets as Castle begins to grasp the permanence of his separation from his Sarah (287). Both scenes are strongly reminiscent of the conclusion of the short story Greene admired above all others, Joyce’s “The Dead,” where Gabriel Conroy’s meditation on death and the failure of love merges with the image of “snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (225). For The Human Factor, in its treatment of love, can be read as a rewriting—a secularizing—of The End of the Affair. As Ways of Escape reveals, Greene was disappointed with the spy story in The Human Factor because it was less “realistic” than he had intended. By contrast, “As a love story—a married-love story of an elderly man—I think it may have succeeded” (309). Surely it must have been his own interest in the love story that led him to the audacity of giving his lovers here the same names —Maurice and Sarah—he had used for the characters in the earlier novel. The choice of names suggests that Greene invited a comparison, and that suggestion is affirmed by even a cursory review of similarities between the characters. Maurice Bendrix, as pointed out earlier in this study, is the first self-portrait of Greene as artist; in a first-person narrative characterized by doubts and uncertainties Bendrix traces his inadequacy as an artist to a failure in love and human understanding, and in doing so manifests many of Greene’s own habits, experiences, and obsessions. It can hardly seem coincidental that the life of the second Maurice, which draws upon Greene’s through associations with Berkhamsted and intelligence work, shares qualities with that other Maurice as well. Bendrix, with his “Cophetua complex,” finds Sarah Miles “too beautiful to excite me with the idea of accessibility” (31). Castle counts himself among those “unable to love success or power or great beauty,” probably because he feels “unworthy” and “more at home with failure” (194). Both Castle and Bendrix share their creator’s habit of watching automobile license numbers to pass the time,

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both describe the powerful effect of love and hatred on their actions, and both are profoundly affected by insecurity. Sarah Miles says that Bendrix feels safe “only when he is there, with me…. If I could only make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully…” (91). Castle confesses to his Sarah a fear of being left alone, and says that his idea of “fun” is “a sense of security” (30). The author plays ironically upon the notion of security in both cases: Henry, the husband cuckolded by Bendrix, works in the Ministry of Home Security; Davis, upon learning that Castle would “absolve” him, as a friend, if Davis were guilty of a security leak, remarks casually that Castle is “the real security risk”—never realizing that he has touched upon the truth that could save his own life. Sarah Castle is far less developed as a character than Sarah Miles, whom she resembles most directly in the brief moment when, watching Castle’s mother dial a telephone number, she prays “to God whom she didn’t believe in that she might at least hear Maurice’s voice” (263)—an undisguised reference to the crucial scene in The End of the Affair in which Sarah Miles, also a non-believer, prays desperately for the life of Bendrix: “Let him be alive,” she begs, “and I will believe” (95). Certain other key actions of Sarah Miles—her spontaneous visits to churches, for example, and her willed attempt to perform an imitation of Christ—are paralleled by actions of Maurice Castle, actions through which the process of secularizing becomes evident. Sarah Miles wants to draw closer to Christ through suffering: “If I could suffer like You, I could heal like You,” she says with what proves to be prophetic understanding of the transcendent, miraculous power of the God she has at last come to believe in (129). Castle’s longing to imitate Christ is at once more general, practical, and secular. He does not believe in the divinity of Christ but nevertheless accepts Christ’s precepts; he wants to restore justice in the world by “righting the balance” as Christ was said to have done—by loving the unloved or unlovable, by supporting the poor and weak against the wealthy and powerful. His lack of a specific political orientation —he never votes, he betrays his own country to the Soviet Communists even though he is not a Marxist himself— emphasizes the radical importance of love in the novel, as Castle’s love of individuals takes precedence over all other traditional loyalties and allegiances that might claim him.


In The End of the Affair the love of Maurice and Sarah is a modern variation of the grand passion in which love of an idealized woman ennobles the heart and prepares the way for a more exalted, spiritual love. Greene, of course, colors it with irony and paradox suitable to the modern age and his own sensibility: Sarah is in her own estimate “a bitch and a fake,” deeply troubled over her betrayals of a faithful but passionless husband; Bendrix is jealous, insecure, and cynical, and his inability to love selflessly makes it questionable whether he and Sarah could have sustained any kind of happiness even if God had not intervened to disrupt their relationship. The suffering of both lovers evolves into Christian virtue, as suffering gives “existence” to “places in the heart” in accordance with the epigraph from Léon Bloy. Sarah becomes the interpreter of their condition: the fault is not that they have loved insufficiently, but that human love itself is inadequate. Early in her diary she expresses her fear that something is necessary beyond the passion that may burn itself out in the end: I wonder whether it isn’t possible to come to an end of sex, and I know that he is wondering too and is afraid of that point where the desert begins. What do we do in the desert if we lose each other? How does one go on living after that? (91) Her question could serve as a rejoinder to that most familiar of carpe diem love poems, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” where “deserts of vast eternity” lie in wait for those who would deny the impulse to carnal love; in Sarah’s experience passion does not negate fear of the desert but intensifies it. Addressing God in her diary, she admits that she and Bendrix have “spent all” of their love, without purchasing peace or enduring happiness: For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love, that soon there wasn’t anything left, when we’d finished, but You. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so

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that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. (123) This conclusion clarifies the novel’s approach to the theme of grand passion and answers positively the question Sarah had posed (with the aid of Browning’s poem) long ago upon reading Commander Scott’s account of his last days: “And what comes next? Is it God?” (173). Human love may be the only means by which divine love can be approached, but it gives out in the end and must be transcended. In The Human Factor Greene returns, after more than two decades, to characters named Maurice and Sarah in order to restate his attitude toward love. Between these lovers there is no conflict; in their dealings with each other, Castle and Sarah demonstrate the complete trust and freedom from anxiety that Bendrix and Sarah were never able to attain. Their marriage displays deep affection, mutual respect, a natural, unforced sexual passion, and a surprising degree of pleasure in ordinary rhythms and rituals of domestic life; it is the first such relationship between principal characters in Greene’s novels and might be taken for a model were it not for the terrible secrecy—ironically, a consequence of the strength of their love— that haunts Castle. Indeed, the language in which their love is often described hints that Greene intended it to echo the models of perfection created by the Metaphysical poets, especially his favorite John Donne. Sarah’s remark upon first hearing Castle’s confession of treason—“We have our own country. You and I and Sam. You’ve never betrayed that country” (246)—and her reminder at the end that “He said once I was his country— and Sam” (344) are restatements of a conceit often employed by Donne in love poems such as “The Sun Rising”: “She is all states, and all princes I, /Nothing else is.” His reflection on the meaning of silence in their relationship Silence was relaxation, silence meant that words were unnecessary between the two of them—their love was too established to need assurance; they had taken out a life policy in their love. (243)


and his feeling that their love is so secret as to be dangerous —“To speak of it to others would invite danger” (16)—call to mind Donne’s elegant tribute to his own marriage in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” where lovers “inter-assuréd of the mind” can tolerate physical separation and prefer silent understanding to public display: So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move, ’Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity of our love. The relationship of Maurice and Sarah Castle does in fact lead to a crucial “valediction” when Castle abruptly decides that she must leave in case the police should come for him. “Then it’s the end for us?” Sarah asks. “Of course it’s not the end,” Castle replies. “As long as we are alive we’ll come together again” (224). A measure of what I have called the “secularizing” of the Maurice and Sarah story may be seen by comparing this farewell to Sarah Miles’s attempt to reassure Maurice Bendrix that she will continue to love him even in separation: “People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?” 74). The separation of these earlier lovers is the painful but needful means of enabling them to experience transcendence. Sarah tries to reject God’s love in favor of “ordinary corrupt human love” (124), but finds that she cannot; Bendrix protests that he cannot learn love on God’s terms even after he has demonstrated that he is doing precisely that. But in The Human Factor no transcendence is possible; “ordinary corrupt human love” is all there is. Greene has transposed the love of “Maurice and Sarah” from the realm of grand passion and saints’ lives to that of secular love poetry of a very high order. Love remains an ultimate value here as in The End of the Affair and Travels with My Aunt, but its status points to the author’s inability to sustain “the religious sense” that he had once found missing from the English novel. It is Greene’s response to the problem identified in another context by Robert Frost as “what to make of a diminished thing.” His treatment of love in the novel—both the marriage of Maurice and Sarah and the expression of Castle’s love for humanity in his attempt to “right the balance” in the manner of a Christ in whom he does

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not believe—corresponds to the paradoxical position the author revealed in the interviews with Allain which took place in the two years following the novel’s publication. On the one hand Greene confessed to uncertainty about the very existence of God, yet on the other he felt that “Human love can be only a pale reflection of the emotion that God must feel for what He has created” (Allain 155).

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CHAPTER ELEVEN Dr. Fischer of Geneva

In a confessional moment in The End of the Affair, Maurice Bendrix speculates that it should be as easy to believe in a “personal devil” as in a personal God, for he has seen the work of that demon in his own imagination, raising doubt and jealousy that spoiled his happiness with Sarah: He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred; he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? (59) The “enemy of love” in this case, however, is Bendrix himself; his own failings define the limit of his happiness in love and lead Sarah to contemplate the “desert” that awaits the end of the affair. Love has no other enemy in the novel—not the easily deceived Henry, not even the war, which Bendrix regards ironically as “a rather disreputable and unreliable accomplice in my affair” (57). By contrast, for the later Maurice and Sarah in The Human Factor something like the opposite is true: the enemies of love are external, numerous, and powerful; they are built into the very organization of political states and into policies such as the “Uncle Remus” plan whereby the mass murder of innocent Africans is acceptable as a condition of capitalist greed. Through his love of Sarah, Maurice Castle became, as he says, a


“naturalized African,” and his betrayal of his country is predicated on the simple logic by which his love of Sarah and Sam “forms a tie,” to borrow from Greene’s epigraph, that binds Castle not just to her people but to others who would oppose the enemies of love. This description of the protagonist is purposely reductive but does not, it seems to me, distort the novel, for The Human Factor does have the effect of reducing powerful, complex affairs of international politics and espionage to simple questions of human love and loyalty. Castle’s action is consistent with Antony’s attitude toward Cleopatra in Dryden’s All for Love—“She’s worth far more than any kingdom I could lose” (I, i, 368–69)—and also with the question Greene wrote in his introduction to Kim Philby’s My Silent War. “[w]ho among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?” In this reductive quality The Human Factor is far more abstract than its predecessor The Honorary Consul, where love is of comparable importance to the characters but not nearly so consequential for the outcome of the plot. The movement toward a greater degree of abstraction is more pronounced in Greene’s final three novels—Doctor Fischer of Geneva, Monsignor Quixote, and The Captain and the Enemy. All are comparatively brief works in which an undeniable thinning of plot and character may reveal declining energy in the aging novelist but may also reflect his heightened concentration on a few key ideas that held the strongest grip on his imagination and his concern for truth. I have tried to point out several ways in which Greene, late in his second phase, turns back upon his own work, recasting characters and events, and imitating, parodying, and commenting on his earlier creations. The Human Factor, which sets the love story of a second “Maurice and Sarah” in the Berkhamsted of Greene’s childhood, is perhaps the least disguised of these efforts. The resemblance of Doctor Fischer of Geneva to the earlier works is less immediately apparent, although distinctive echoes of The End of the Affair can once again be heard. And Doctor Fischer is by far the most fabulistic rendering of Greene’s theme of love; in that regard it bears less resemblance to the other novels than to Querry’s fable of the jeweller in A Burnt-Out Case. The primary moral failure in Doctor Fischer, as in that fable, is the inability to love.

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The conflict between the sympathetic central lovers and the “enemies of love” is outlined in a much severer fashion in Dr. Fischer than in The End of the Affair or even The Human Factor. As is often the case in the second-phase novels, the love relationship is that of a middle-aged man (Alfred Jones) and a much younger woman (Anna-Luise Fischer, his junior by thirty years) who becomes his second wife. The chance meeting, courtship, and marriage of Jones and Anna-Luise are sketched out in a few short chapters, yet even in such highly condensed narrative one can see abundant evidence that The End of the Affair remains the primary text among Greene’s novels about love—perhaps among all of the second-phase books. Like Bendrix and Sarah, these lovers fall in love over a meal, their love “constructed” over sandwiches (23). Jones’s narration begins as Bendrix’s does, with a powerful statement about his own feelings of love and hatred: “I think that I used to detest Doctor Fischer more than any other man I have ever known just as I loved his daughter more than any other woman…. I hated him for his pride, his contempt of all the world, and his cruelty. He loved no one, not even his daughter” (16). Jones’s further resemblances to Bendrix are too obvious to overlook: both served in civil defense posts during the blitz; both are physically impaired (Jones lost his hand on the same night his parents were killed by the bombing; Bendrix has a “lame leg” of which he is self-conscious); and Jones suffers (as Castle also does) from something like Bendrix’s Cophetua-complex: [I]t was not constancy which stopped me looking for another wife—to have found one woman who accepted me as a lover in spite of my plastic imitation of a hand and my unattractive income had been a near-miracle, and I couldn’t expect a miracle like that to be repeated. (19) Once he has gained the love of Anna-Luise, Jones follows Bendrix and Castle in defining “security” in love as the key to happiness: I said to her once, “I’ve never been so happy.” “Why do you say that?” she asked me. “You were married. You were happy with Mary.”


“I was in love with her,” I said. “But I never felt secure. She and I were the same age when we married, and I was afraid always that she would die the first and that’s what she did. But I’ve got you for life—unless you leave me. And if you do, that will be my fault.” (76)

Forever wilt thou love and she be fair. since Jones is the eighth of Greene’s second-phase protagonists to find consolation in the prospect of his wife’s continued youth and beauty as he grows old, readers may not be surprised to find that Jones actually reads Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Unfortunately his confidence that Anna-Luise will survive him is shattered when she is killed in a skiing accident. Her death is naturally associated with the image of snow, which is subsequently linked with Jones’s grief, creating a mood similar to that surrounding Sarah Miles’s death and Maurice Castle’s final separation from his wife. When Doctor Fischer expresses surprise that Jones and Anna-Luise had not spent any of the legacy from her mother, Jones replies: “No, we kept that untouched. For the child we meant to have.” I added, “When the skiing stopped,” and through the window I saw the continuous straight falling of the snow as though the world had ceased revolving and lay becalmed at the center of a blizzard. (119) Doctor Fischer shows no remorse over the death of his daughter, just as he admitted none in the death of his wife years earlier. His cynical view of love—“[People] don’t die for love except in novels,” he says (119)—is disproved, however, by Jones, whose response to Anna-Luise’s death proves the strength of his love. In the manner of other Greene characters who die for love—Marcel in The Comedians, Wordsworth in Travels, and arguably Sarah in The End of the Affair—Jones tries to escape the misery of separation by attempting suicide; his method—drinking a large portion of whisky with aspirin dissolved in it—is one that Greene once tried. As Greene’s was on that occasion, Jones’s inspiration is literary: Jones says he got the idea from a detective story; Greene found it in a story by Agatha Christie. Finally, Jones’s longing for death links him once again with Maurice Bendrix, who does not attempt self-


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destruction but prefers the prospect of death to that of even temporary separation from Sarah: Death never mattered at those times; in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the Common like the tail light of a slow car driving away. (70) After her death Anna-Luise becomes for Jones a kind of “saint”— not in the manner of Sarah, who performs the miracle of healing and intervenes to save Bendrix from falling into sin, but a saint ironically conceived. Remembering her by her kitchen, her chair, and a few snapshots, Jones concludes: All these were like the relics of bone they keep in Roman Catholic churches. Once as I boiled myself an egg for my supper, I heard myself repeating a line which I had heard spoken by a priest at the midnight Mass at Saint Maurice: “As often as you do these things you shall do them in memory of me.” (155) One suspects that Greene’s choice of the church of St. Maurice is a humorous aside and that the element of banality in Jones’s language and emotion is a mild form of self-parody. It is not a case of the author’s mocking his character, but rather a deliberate flattening that underscores the secularizing of familiar elements of Greene’s plots and characters. The attribution of “saintly” qualities to Sarah Miles had emphasized the strength of her belief and its challenge to Bendrix’s atheism; but in the case of Anna-Luise the effect is to emphasize Jones’s loss of belief. As a fable about love, Doctor Fischer offers a condensed exposition of Greene’s idea of love at this late stage of his life and work. That he intended some such statement seems probable on the basis of Jones’s belief that “real” love can be experienced only in maturity: My wife had died in childbirth twenty years before, taking with her the child who doctors told me would have been a


girl. I was in love with my wife, but I had not reached the age when a man really loves, and perhaps there had not been the time. (18–19) Jones’s attitude confirms the experience of his predecessors Charley Fortnum and Maurice Castle, both of whom find in their second marriages a deeper and more profound experience of love. One reason for this may involve Jones’s distinction between being “in love,” with its implication of a transient passion, and “loving”: “I doubt if one ever ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy” (13). The power of love to endure—unlike pity, Jones says—reflects Greene’s continuing concern with the need to distinguish between the two, a need that was crucial to Rowe in The Ministry of Fear and to Scobie in The Heart of the Matter. And love is again identified with kindness: in The Honorary Consul, Clara Fortnum, when asked whether Charley loved her, replied that he was kind to her; Jones praises AnnaLuise for her kindness and suspects that their first meeting was owed to that kindness when, having mistakenly sat at his table in a café, she remained there so that he would not think her repulsed by the sight of his artificial hand. Jones interprets love as extending between the two poles of “happiness” and “loss.” The meaning of loss appears selfevident, but Greene’s characters often find happiness more difficult to define, as Bendrix explains from a novelist’s perspective in The End of the Affair: The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism—this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us; we lose our identity. (55) Jones approaches the question by distinguishing between love and sexual pleasure: Is there happiness in a sexual embrace? Surely not. That is an excitement, a kind of delirium, and sometimes it is


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close to pain. Is happiness simply the sound of a quiet breath on the pillow beside me, or kitchen noises in the evening when I returned from work and read the Journal de Genève in our only easy chair? (53–54) Jones never answers his own question about the nature of happiness, however; perhaps his experience of it is too brief to allow him to reach a conclusion. In the world of Greene’s serious novels happiness emerges briefly only to disappear as a casualty of defects of the human personality (as in The End of the Affair) or of society (as in The Human Factor). In The Human Factor and Doctor Fischer it is a private realm, difficult to enter and, given the nature of the world, impossible to sustain. In both novels a sense of fatality pervades the narrator’s account of happiness in love. Ever since coming to Berkhamsted with Sarah, Castle has “felt certain that one day a doom would catch up with them, and he knew that when that happened he must not be betrayed by panic: he must leave quickly, without an attempt to pick up any piece of their broken life together” (27–28). Jones describes happiness metaphorically as an island that cannot be found on navigators’ charts; it emerges from the haze for such a short time that when it disappears again the beholder has difficulty continuing to believe in its existence. The ephemeral nature of happiness is a major reason why in Doctor Fischer, as in all of Greene’s serious novels, love demands suffering; suffering does not guarantee the existence of love, but love seems always to guarantee suffering. And suffering, according to Anna-Luise, defines the existence of the soul, which emerges from its embryonic state into full existence only through suffering. (Again the idea recalls The End of the Affair and its conception of “places in the heart” that are given existence through suffering.) Jones has a soul, she says, because he suffered for his parents. Her father, too, may have a soul—in some way he suffered greatly over the loss of his wife. But if he does have a soul, she adds, it may be damned. As the incarnation in one person of those human vices that Greene has treated in more realistic contexts as the “enemies of love,” Doctor Fischer helps to define love through opposition. In some respects he is merely an allegorical figure of evil, hated by


Jones for his cruelty, pride, lack of compassion, and contempt for humanity. He has chosen to use his enormous wealth and the power it brings to enact an outrageous parody of God—not the God of love from the New Testament, but a malign and vindictive God who delights in the exposure and punishment of human weakness, especially greed, by using precisely measured rewards (“gifts”) that are just sufficient to motivate his symbolic followers, the “Toads,” to affirm their love and admiration for him in spite of the malicious pleasure he takes in humiliating them repeatedly. In his own view Doctor Fischer, an atheist, is simply imitating what he believes to be the only kind of God who could have created life as we know it in the twentieth century. The godlike power assumed by Doctor Fischer, certain of his personal traits, and the very dark mood of the novel may be traceable to the individual most responsible for a period of great difficulty and unhappiness for Graham Greene in the years 1978–83. The person was Daniel Guy, son-in-law of Greene’s companion Yvonne Cloetta, and a powerful figure in the Mafia in Nice. Guy’s offenses are too numerous to be listed here, but they included abuse of his wife Martine, slander against Martine and Greene, and the abduction of his own daughter Alexandra. Corruption in Nice was so widespread through the judicial system and the police that the family had no effective recourse, and Greene undertook considerable personal risk in attempting to help them by publishing his pamphlet J’accuse, with its title echoing Zola, in 1982. Greene’s description, in J’accuse, of Daniel Guy’s jealousy and its effects sounds rather like Doctor Fischer’s jealousy of his wife’s friendship with Steiner, her interest in music, and her quiet suffering: Guy was jealous of her friendships, of her love for her mother, of her artistic interests which he was very far from sharing. She kept her unhappiness secret from her parents, she gave up her work twice to please her husband, she began a second child in the hope of calming his quite baseless suspicions, she put up with blows and violence for the sake of the child Alexandra. (9)


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When Martine formed an innocent friendship with a man named Marc, Guy and a cohort beat him up. “At all events they [Martine and Marc] were friends,” Guy remarked, “and so far as I’m concerned friendship is the same as adultery” (13; italics added). The same attitude can be seen in Doctor Fischer, who resents his wife’s friendship with Steiner: “If you mean did she copulate with him, no, I am not sure of that. It’s possible, but I’m not sure. It wouldn’t have mattered to me very much if she had. An animal impulse. I could have put it out of mind, but she preferred his company to mine. A clerk of Mr. Kips earning a minimum wage.” (118) To Daniel Guy’s cruelty and jealousy, Greene may have added a measure of pride and vanity from Browning’s Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess,” who was so offended by his wife’s pleasure in simple beauty and ordinary gestures of friendship —“as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift”—that he “gave commands” and had her killed rather than tell her of his displeasure. Browning’s character, however, gained quick revenge by having his wife killed without revealing his jealousy to her; to have done so, he says, would have been a form of “stooping,” and he never stoops. Doctor Fischer’s revenge, described by Jones from the account of Anna-Luise, was more protracted: [I]t seemed to her that he made love with hatred. She couldn’t explain that to her daughter, but I could imagine the way it went—how he thrust his way in, as though he were stabbing an enemy. But he couldn’t be satisfied with one final blow. It had to be the death of a thousand cuts. (48–49) Jones’s vivid imagining of the Doctor’s sexual cruelty may seem a little at odds with his own gentle personality. In fact it recalls Fowler in The Quiet American, for whom this kind of sadistic lovemaking is real rather than imagined: I remembered that first tormenting year…when I had begged [Phuong] to tell me what she thought and had


scared her with my unreasoning anger at her silences. Even my desire had been a weapon, as though when one plunged one’s sword toward the victim’s womb, she would lose control and speak. (134) Several other elements in Doctor Fischer suggest how often Greene drew upon his earlier characters in addition to those mentioned already. For example, Jones, in possession of what he believes to be the deadly explosive Christmas cracker (a “gift” from Dr. Fischer) that will provide his release from life, contemplates death as the unborn child of his marriage: “This was a death which belonged to me, it was my child, my only child, and it was Anna-Luise’s child too. No skiing accident could rob the two of us of the child I held in my hand. I wasn’t lonely any longer…” (133). The metaphor is the one Greene used to describe the death of Raven in A Gun for Sale: Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation. (170) Lurking more obviously in the background of Doctor Fischer is the most sinister and demonic of all of Greene’s protagonists, Pinkie in Brighton Rock. Like Pinkie, Doctor Fischer is characterized by “infernal pride” (47), is described as “damned” (94), and is deeply troubled by music: “[Anna-Luise] told me how her mother loved music, which her father hated—there was no doubt at all of that hatred. Why it was she had no idea, but it was as if music taunted him with his failure to understand it, with his stupidity” (47). Moreover, Doctor Fischer resembles Pinkie in that he suffers from a hidden wound (the “betrayal,” as he sees it, by his wife) from which he derives both contempt for the world and, as he explains to Jones, a deep desire for revenge: “To despise comes out of a great disappointment. Most people are not capable of a great disappointment, and I doubt if you are. Their expectations are too low for that. When one despises, Jones, it’s like a deep and incurable


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wound, the beginning of death. And one must revenge one’s wound while there’s still time. When the one who inflicted it is dead, one has to strike back at others. Perhaps, if I believed in God, I would want to take my revenge on him for having made me capable of disappointment.” (117) Pinkie, of course, never ceases to believe in God; what fails him is the ability to believe in heaven. Hell is real—“the only thing that fits” (52); of heaven he is uncertain. The God he believes in may be closer to the malicious God imagined by Doctor Fischer than to the merciful Christ of the Gospels. Pinkie’s belief, rooted more firmly in hell than in heaven, has sometimes been compared with Greene’s recollection, in Another Mexico, of the early stages of his own belief: And so faith came to one—shapelessly, without dogma, a presence above a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell, but for a long while it was only hell one could picture with a certain intimacy— the pitch pine partitions in dormitories where everybody was never quiet at the same time; lavatories without locks: “There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison…” (Lawless Roads 14) If the comparison between Pinkie’s diabolism and Doctor Fischer’s is justified—and I believe it to be—then Doctor Fischer bears to Brighton Rock a relationship not unlike that of The Human Factor to The End of the Affair. The later novel secularizes the earlier one by denying its demonic character any meaningful relationship to the supernatural, and as it does so, the paradoxical basis of Pinkie’s (and the author’s early) belief— the approach to heaven based upon the certainty of evil, violence, cruelty, hell—loses its tension like a clock unwinding. Doctor Fischer is confronted by Steiner with the truth of his own crime (“You killed your wife”) (150) and is forced to recognize that Jones disproves his view of human nature: not only is Jones completely unmotivated by the greed that infects the Toads, but his eagerness to die rather than live without


Anna-Luise seems to validate the charge that Fischer’s wife wanted to die rather than live without love. Robbed of the absolute contempt that is his only source of pleasure in life, Doctor Fischer weakens abruptly, becoming less a figure of omnipotent cruelty than a sort of demonic Wizard of Oz whose curtain has been pulled back. Yet what the reader might expect in the form of Jones’s satisfaction over the doctor’s suicide—it is after all a defeat of the “enemy of love”—becomes instead the closing out of the last prospect of belief. The reason for this seeming contradiction is that the grief-stricken Jones’s realization that his choice of death over life and fortune—the choice by which he defeats Doctor Fischer—was predicated on a belief in heaven. To die would afford the prospect of finding Anna-Luise in the afterlife. But the death of evil incarnate in Doctor Fischer robs Jones of his ability to believe in transcendent good: Courage is sapped by day-to-day mind-dulling routine… and death seems in the end to lose its point. I had felt Anna-Luise close to me when I held the whisky in my hand and again when I pulled the cracker with my teeth, but now I had lost all hope of ever seeing her in any future. Only if I had believed in a God could I have dreamed that the two of us would ever have that jour le plus long. It was as though my small half-belief had somehow shriveled with the sight of Doctor Fischer’s body. Evil was as dead as a dog, and why should goodness have more immortality than evil? There was no longer any reason to follow Anna-Luise if it was only into nothingness. (154–55). Jones’s logic not only suggests a reversal of that process by which Greene had once groped toward a belief in goodness through a belief in evil; it also is an indication of how, at this point in his life, the writer appeared to find the problem of belief and the question of love inseparable. Jones’s connection between dream (of the jour le plus long) and belief is worth noting, for dreaming is important in Doctor Fischer and Monsignor Quixote, as indeed it was to Greene throughout his life but especially at the end. (At the time of his death he was preparing a small collection of his recorded dreams,


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which was published posthumously as A World of My Own in 1992.) The sudden defeat of the omnipotent Doctor Fischer seems abrupt but in fact has been prepared for much earlier by a dream in which Jones sees him weeping over an open grave. The truth implied by the dream—that Doctor Fischer is ultimately human, vulnerable, and touched by grief if not actually by love—is substantiated by Steiner’s recollection that the Doctor did cry at his wife’s funeral. Doctor Fischer of Geneva is not about dreaming in other respects, yet Greene identified it as connected with personal “nightmares.” Responding to a question by Marie-Françoise Allain about his use of “several types of fantasy” in his fiction, he remarked: Some, like Travels with My Aunt, are escapist, while others try to cure anguish by giving it a symbolic representation. “Under the Garden” evoked fragments of my childhood (that’s always a wrench) and the painful recollection of a recent operation. So I don’t exactly escape by writing them down; on the contrary, I tamed certain nightmares in making use of them as a background. Even though it’s a less personal book, Doctor Fischer of Geneva is more or less in this vein. (135) That the novel is in some way connected with literal or figurative bad dreams is not surprising, for certain disturbing images in the book linger in the imagination like fragments of an evil nightmare: the repeated references to the painting of a woman carrying a skull, a foreshadowing of death; the recurring images of red and white that culminate in the horror of Anna-Luise’s white sweater stained with her blood; and especially the phantasmagoric final banquet, held outdoors at night with great bonfires lighting up the frozen landscape. Such haunting images contribute to the mood of bitterness and disillusionment with which the narrative concludes, a mood that might at first seem odd in a plot that produces the triumph of love over hatred: “our enemy is dead and our hate has died with him…” (141). The victory of love in the fable of Dr. Fischer creates a form of dramatic and situational irony at the end, for the reader’s perspective in this regard is different from the


protagonist’s, as it is in the case of Bendrix in The End of the Affair: the effect of the narrator’s bitter unhappiness is mitigated by the larger picture within which it appears. In the late second phase novels all “faith,” whether religious or political, is measured in some way by love. In The Comedians Dr. Magiot, a faithful Marxist, urges Brown, a lapsed Catholic, to retain a kind of faith even when he has lost religious belief: “[I]f you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?” (286). The attempt to reconcile these two forms of “faith”—Marxism with its materialism, atheism, and pursuit of social and economic justice in this world; Catholicism with its belief in the justice of the world to come—was a concern of Greene’s for well over half a century. It is at the heart of The Power and the Glory, where the whisky priest and the lieutenant recognize each other as good men even though their conflicting loyalties make them irreconcilable enemies. And it defines the character of Father Léon Rivas in The Honorary Consul, the priest who has abandoned his calling in order to pursue the cause of social and political justice in this world. The good and wise Magiot’s ideal of a reconciliation in the long dialogue between Marxism and Catholicism is never achieved by the characters in Greene’s realistic fiction. To accomplish that reconciliation—through the agency of love—he would turn to the comedy and fantasy he had used in Travels with My Aunt, and in doing so would produce the novel with the best claim to serve as the capstone of his long career: Monsignor Quixote.

CHAPTER TWELVE Monsignor Quixote

Monsignor Quixote tempts one to think of it as Greene’s valedictory work even though it is not. The most serene of his novels, it seems almost calculated to lay to rest demons from the past. In Monsignor Quixote the agonizing problem of doubt that has troubled so many of Greene’s characters and, by his frequent admissions, Greene himself, is safely contained within a Christian perspective and declared essential to true faith. Sexuality and sexual jealousy, the source of endless unhappiness and conflict in earlier works, become the stuff of comedy, viewed with tolerance, compassion, and humane detachment by the kindly and innocent protagonist, Father Quixote. Innocence itself, so often conceived in Greene’s earlier novels as lost, or hopelessly inadequate to deal with the world, or positively dangerous (wandering the world like a leper without a bell), is restored here to its proper theological role as a saintly virtue. Moreover, Father Quixote performs actions and voices attitudes that seem to reprise many of the author’s characters and themes: he fulfills the ambitions of the lost child in Pinkie (to be a priest, to be celibate) and the failed adult in Greene’s other priest-protagonist, the whisky priest (to be a good priest); he dignifies failure by suggesting that those who fail are closer to God; he believes in human love as an expression of divine love; and he contends that hatred is the other side of love. Greene has made Monsignor Quixote highly personal and revealing of his own spiritual life yet also characteristically oblique, its revelation framed in an extensive artifice that runs counter to the surface realism through which the narrative is otherwise conducted. For an understanding of how the novel came into being and how it reflects Greene’s thinking in his later years, readers are


indebted to his friend and confidant, Father Leopoldo Duran, whose book Graham Greene: Friend and Brother (1994) is a history of the friendship and travels out of which substantial elements of the story took form.1 Father Duran, a Spanish priest studying literature at King’s College, London, began his acquaintance with Greene in June 1964 by writing to the novelist with questions about the doctoral thesis he was preparing on Greene’s work; Greene responded helpfully, and the two continued to correspond for several years before eventually meeting, at Greene’s invitation, in 1973. They quickly became friends and, in 1976, began traveling together in the summer—usually in July, in Spain and Portugal. Already a friend and ardent admirer of the writer, Father Duran eventually became his adviser in certain doctrinal matters and occasionally his confessor as well. On several occasions he celebrated private mass for Greene. According to Father Duran, Greene conceived the idea for Monsignor Quixote during their visit to the burial site of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in Salamanca in July 1976. Initially he wanted Duran to publish a record of their travels and conversations; when Duran declined, Greene decided to write the story that would become Monsignor Quixote, and soon he became “obsessed” with the idea. In July 1977 the author and his friend visited El Toboso, home of Don Quixote’s Dulcinea; on that occasion Greene announced his intention to reread Don Quixote. Later that year he completed the first chapter of Monsignor Quixote, and in July 1978 he read the second chapter to Duran. In Madrid, July 1980, he met Mayor Galvan, who became the model for Father Quixote’s kindly doctor. In the spring of 1981 Greene announced that the novel was “well advanced,” and in November, after a discussion of “doctrinal points” with Duran that led to a revision of the novel’s ending, he returned to England to complete the writing. On 1 February 1982 Duran received the complete typescript from The Bodley Head. Duran’s account of the celebration at Bentley’s restaurant in London on August 25, 1982, the day Monsignor Quixote was 1This

title of the American edition was changed without Father Duran’s consent to Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by his Closest Friend and Confidant.

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published, conveniently summarizes some important ways in which episodes in the narrative arose directly from events in their travels: Somewhat emotionally, we recalled some of the actual moments of the journey which are echoed in the novel: our innumerable discussions about theology and communism; the five or six bottles of tonic water that I drank in Talavera; the spotless Roman collar that I wore when I first met Graham, which would be worn later by the rather unpleasant Father Herera; the inedible Spanish omelette that I cooked in Madrid one night, which was a prelude to the foul dishes served by Father Leopoldo in Osera; the volume of Descartes which Graham discovered on my table, and which would lead the young Leopoldo into a Trappist monastery…. There were many other memories, but above all we remembered those countless meetings we had with Señor Antonio de las Regadas (Señor Diego in the novel), the picnic lunches under his fig tree, and his excellent “unlabelled” wine which we took with us everywhere. (221) Greene initially saw his protagonist as drawn from the character of Father Duran. “I am Sancho,” he once remarked to the priest, “and you are Monsignor Quixote” (216). That distinction does not form an altogether accurate picture of the relationship between author and character, however, for the eponymous hero reflects qualities of both men, and the two central characters just as surely embody dualities that persisted within the novelist himself. The priest’s simple, mystical declaration of faith—“I don’t just believe in Him, I touch Him” (141)—is a direct transcription of a remark by Father Duran, one that Greene quoted elsewhere. Father Quixote’s questioning of the existence of hell, however, and his expressed longing that everyone, even Franco, should be admitted to heaven are loose transcriptions of Greene’s own views as recorded by Father Duran. To read Duran’s book along with the novel is to discover in the latter a degree of selfrevelation readers do not expect from Greene, for the struggle between doubt and faith articulated by the protagonist is that


of the author himself as he confided it to his friend and as he would sometimes speak of it later in interviews. Greene’s depiction of lapsed Catholics in novels like A BurntOut Case and The Comedians understandably led many readers to assume that he was writing about his own loss of belief, an idea that he hardly discouraged by referring to himself as a “Catholic atheist” or a “Catholic agnostic.” And he did experience a long period of crisis when intellectual doubt together with “irregularities” in his private life—he had “broken the rules” of the Church most obviously through adultery—led him to cut himself off from the Church in a manner much like that of his protagonist in the story “A Visit to Morin.” The wavering of faith and belief found distinctive expression in those second-phase novels which rewrite or revise earlier books —most notably in the inverted parallels between A Burnt-Out Case and The End of the Affair and in the thoroughly secularized love relationship between the second “Maurice and Sarah” in The Human Factor. Yet, as Father Duran explains from Greene’s own testimony, “From the time of his conversion, his faith sustained him at difficult moments in his life, and he always prayed, even though he did not go to confession or take communion in those years” (269). Duran describes Greene as “troubled” and “obsessed” by faith and acknowledges that the difficulties created by that “obsessive faith” were at the core of their relationship; Greene’s good fortune in finding the companionship of a sympathetic priest appears to have been at least equal to Duran’s in forming a friendship with a great writer he had long admired. At times Duran’s account of Greene’s spiritual life is necessarily speculative, as when he expresses his own belief that Greene’s faith was “present continually in his conscience” or that Greene may, like Unamuno, have “turned his life into a tragedy, either through struggling at times with his conscience or by doubting his God” (312). Nevertheless, his interpretation of Greene’s inner life seems on the whole consistent with testimonies of others who knew him, including the biographer Sherry, and with the novelist’s self-revelation in certain of his characters; and Duran’s comments on the elusiveness of peace and happiness in Greene’s life call to mind not just the writer’s comments about himself but any number of his protagonists in the novels:

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Graham Greene recognized that his temperament was not stable; it was not perfectly balanced. Thus his moments of peace were often fragile. And if there is not permanent peace in one’s heart, there can be no real happiness. Graham Greene carried a “dark angel” that tormented him as it did St Paul; and his malign angel was, in Graham Greene’s case, his rather unbalanced temperament which resulted from a character that was afflicted by sudden bad temper and psychological depression, as well as boredom. He was thus never able to enjoy permanent happiness in this world. (313) The self-divided Andrews, longing to give expression to “the man within”; Pinkie and Querry, in whom the longing for peace is so powerful that they are moved, respectively, to extremes of active violence and passive withdrawal; Bendrix, struggling with his “personal devil”; Alfred Jones, whose happiness appears briefly like an uncharted island, only to disappear again into the mist—these are only a few of the protagonists whose inner lives correspond in obvious ways to Greene’s as interpreted by his friend. Duran’s picture is nevertheless full of indications that toward the end of life Greene had attained a means of accommodating his own doubts and a measure of happiness for which he was grateful Duran believes that the annual summer travels afforded Greene “the happiest and most relaxed moments” in the last third of his life (76), and by Greene’s own account he became ‘less and less gloomy’ as he aged” (85). More importantly, he retained a faith strong enough to withstand the decay of “belief,” or intellectual certainty. Deeply disturbed by unbelief, he was sustained by faith: “The trouble,” he remarked once, is that “I don’t believe my unbelief” (97). In a commonplace book of reflections and quotations prepared as a gift for Father Duran, Greene wrote of his conviction that in his own case the failure of belief was inseparable from a failure in love: One must distinguish between faith and belief. I have faith, but less and less belief, in the existence of God. I have a continuing faith that I am wrong not to believe and


that my lack of belief stems from my own faults and failure in love. (289; italics added) Father Quixote, as he explains to Sancho, also relies upon faith to overcome doubt: When I am alone I read—I hide myself in my books. In them I can find the faith of better men than myself, and when I find that my belief is growing weak with age, like my body, then I tell myself that I must be wrong. My faith tells me I must be wrong—or is it only the faith of those better men? (180; italics added) One suspects that it is because Greene confronted openly and steadily the ambiguous quality of his own faith that he chose in these later works to rely upon a considerable element of fantasy in order to give fictional expression to such fundamental questions. The tendency toward a greater degree of abstraction noted earlier in the late second-phase novels is especially evident in Monsignor Quixote and Doctor Fischer of Geneva, which together with Travels with My Aunt and The Captain and the Enemy are the most artificial—the term is not pejorative—of Greene’s novels. Quixote and Dr. Fischer may seem remarkably unlike on the whole, yet in one most important aspect they are complementary, so that reading them side by side will result in a fuller appreciation of both. I suggested in the preceding chapter that Doctor Fischer of Geneva is a figurative nightmare in which the ultimate despair arises from the protagonist’s contemplation of a world without transcendent good or evil, one in which doubt and disbelief are absolute. Monsignor Quixote presents a complementary vision in which life is given meaning and purpose by the presence of doubt, and absolute belief is paradoxically as disheartening, as great a cause for despair, as absolute disbelief. This thematic paradox is expressed most memorably in the nightmare that troubles Father Quixote’s sleep in Madrid: He had dreamt that Christ had been saved from the Cross by the legion of angels to which on an earlier occasion the Devil had told Him that He could appeal. So there was no final agony, no heavy stone which had to be rolled away,

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no discovery of an empty tomb. Father Quixote stood there watching on Golgotha as Christ stepped down from the Cross triumphant and acclaimed. The Roman soldiers, even the Centurion, knelt in His honor, and the people of Jerusalem poured up the hill to worship Him. The disciples clustered happily around. His mother smiled through her tears of joy. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all. The whole world knew with certainty that Christ was the Son of God. It was only a dream, of course it was only a dream, but nonetheless Father Quixote had felt on waking the chill of despair felt by a man who realizes suddenly that he has taken up a profession which is of use to no one, who must continue to live in a kind of Saharan desert without doubt or faith, where everyone is certain that the same belief is true. He had found himself whispering, “God save me from such a belief.” (69–70) The acceptance of uncertainty as a condition of most of our waking moments is the basis for many of the principal virtues celebrated in the novel: tolerance, acceptance of difference, the love of inquiry and debate, the pursuit of broader experience through travel, and the full appreciation of the pleasures of this life associated with fellowship and conversation. Again and again the novel resorts to paradox: without doubt there is no hope—because in a world of absolute certainty hope would serve no purpose. Father Quixote’s nightmare is happily balanced by a nobler and more hopeful “waking dream of how their journey would go on and on—the dream of a deepening friendship and a profounder understanding, of a reconciliation even between their disparate faiths” (61). A dream that travels would continue: the emotion could be that of Henry Pulling, protagonist of the novel to which Monsignor Quixote is closest in spirit among Greene’s works. In its comedy, its picaresque form, its celebration of the pleasures of travel and companionship, its characters’ delight in good food and wine, and its stated and implied attitudes of tolerance, acceptance, and reconciliation, Monsignor Quixote is the most affirmative of Greene’s novels and by far the most important successor to Travels with My Aunt, a book it resembles in important respects. Both works trace a humorous pattern of


conversion whereby a naive, unworldly character (Father Quixote/Henry Pulling) is enticed into travel by an experienced and worldly one (the Mayor/Aunt Augusta). In both novels these journeys result in a kind of rebirth for a principal character: at the end of Travels Henry discovers a new identity and a new life; in the conclusion of Quixote the Mayor has been radically affected by the love and the example of Father Quixote, and appears to have been directed toward a recovery of his own lost faith. Within this pattern the novel draws together many familiar themes of Greene’s fiction: the vocation of the priest, the struggle between belief and doubt, the dialogue between Marxism and Catholicism, and the mystery of love. It also draws extensively upon narrative strategies described in this study: the conception of experience in literary terms, the creation of elaborate structures of literary allusion and parallels, the interjection of elements of the author’s personality into his protagonist, and ultimately the blurring of distinction between fiction and reality. The narrative of Monsignor Quixote again resembles that of Travels by creating, especially at the end, an element of fantasy and a dream-like mood and by moving out of the ordinary world and into the world of fiction, both the author’s and that of other writers. In Travels with My Aunt, as discussed earlier, Greene looks back affectionately to Stamboul Train, Brighton Rock, and especially The Ministry of Fear, humorously blending allusions to his own works with occasional details from his life and reflections upon the interpenetrability of life and literature. Monsignor Quixote operates in the same mode: we cannot read for long without becoming aware of how the author is again returning to the territory of his earlier work—in this case reworking extensively material from the novel which he usually regarded as second only to The Honorary Consul and which critics more often than not have considered his best novel: The Power and the Glory. That The Power and the Glory is tonally very different from the two works under discussion here hardly needs pointing out; it is picaresque in form without being comic in spirit, and it employs the journey motif without being “about” travel. Nevertheless, it points toward Monsignor Quixote by featuring as its central character a minor priest who is troubled by a sense of his own inadequacy and who—although for very

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different reasons—finds himself pursued by authorities (in this case ecclesiastical as well as civil) who for somewhat different reasons want to put a stop to his travels and his ministry. Father Quixote’s anxiety—“In your company I fear if I’m not careful I shall become what I’ve heard called a whiskey priest” (81)—is an amusing reminder that the reader is to consider the earlier novel part of the extended context of the later one. Both works are dialogic; they create dramatic opportunities for the protagonist and a character foil to debate issues of faith and politics. The lieutenant in The Power and the Glory is a mortal enemy of the protagonist and not merely his opponent in debate, although in the end he recognizes elements of goodness in the whisky priest. The Mayor in Monsignor Quixote is a friend whose opposition to the priest is entirely ideological, and their relationship is a lesson in the ability of friendship and mutual respect to reconcile opposing points of view. In both novels the antagonists are avowed atheists; the Mayor was once a half-believer, however, and the lieutenant shows evidence of being not a disbeliever but a hater of God. If the latter’s determination to pay any price to prevent future children from suffering in poverty as he did recalls the lost-child figures of Brighton Rock and A Gun for Sale, it may also be echoed in the Mayor’s sardonic comment on the idea that unwanted children must be entrusted to God’s mercy: “He’s not always so merciful, is he, not in Africa or India?” (89). In The Power and the Glory, the lieutenant is ironically more priestlike in his habits than the priest himself: he is celibate, highly disciplined in his devotion to the duty of his belief, and ascetic in his conduct of life. Monsignor Quixote employs a comparably ironic reversal: the priest is a better Communist than the Mayor, who patronizes expensive restaurants and hotels and argues that Marxism does not forbid the enjoyment of such bourgeois pleasures while they last; when Father Quixote leads him to an inexpensive hotel in a poor section of Madrid, he is afraid of getting his throat cut. Father Quixote, in contrast, cares nothing for luxury and is completely at home among the poor and humble. In both novels Greene gives at least a nominally fair hearing to opposed sides of the argument. When, for example, the whisky priest elicits from his persecutor an affirmation that the lieutenant hates the rich and loves the poor, then adds, “[I]f I


hated you, I wouldn’t want to bring up my child to be like you” (199), the reader is likely to agree with the lieutenant’s complaint that the priest is just twisting his words, for the lieutenant’s genuine compassion for suffering children outweighs paradoxes and contradictions in his theories. Mayor Sancho in Monsignor Quixote is a more learned antagonist whose verbal duels with Father Quixote frequently end in stalemates. Such is the case when the two friends, picnicking beside an abandoned farm building on which the hammer and sickle have been painted, compare the vices of the Church and the Party throughout history: “I would have preferred a cross,” Father Quixote said, “to eat under.” “What does it matter? The taste of the cheese will not be affected by cross or hammer. Besides is there much difference between the two? They are both protests against injustice.” “But the results were a little different. One created tyranny, the other charity.” “Tyranny? Charity? What about the Inquisition and our great patriot Torquemada?” “Fewer suffered from Torquemada than from Stalin.” “Are you quite sure of that—relative to the population of Russia in Stalin’s day and of Spain in Torquemada’s?”… “Torquemada at least thought he was leading his victims towards eternal happiness.” “And Stalin too perhaps. It is best to leave motives alone, father. Motives in men’s minds are a mystery. This wine would have been much better chilled. If only we could have found a stream. Tomorrow we must buy a thermos as well as your purple socks.” “If we are to judge simply by actions, Sancho, then we must look at results.” “A few million dead and Communism is established over nearly half the world. A small price. One loses more in any war.” “A few hundred dead and Spain remains a Catholic country. An even smaller price.” “So Franco succeeds Torquemada.” “And Brezhnev succeeds Stalin.” (45–46)

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To the extent that there is a “victory” at all here, however, it belongs, as in the earlier work, to the priest. After capturing the priest he has so long pursued, the lieutenant in The Power and the Glory is disappointed to experience not fulfillment but vacancy: [H]e felt moody, as though now the last priest was under lock and key, there was nothing left to think about. The spring of action seemed to be broken. He looked back on the weeks of hunting as a happy time which was over now for ever. He felt without a purpose, as if life had drained out of the world. (207) After the execution of the priest, this despondent mood persists: “[T]he dynamic love which used to move his trigger-finger felt flat and dead. Of course, he told himself, it will come back. It was like love of a woman and went in cycles: he had satisfied himself that morning, that was all. This was satiety” (220). The Power and the Glory, “written to a thesis” by the author’s own testimony, transforms Greene’s journalistic account of terrible events, arising from the “fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth” (Ways 84) into a powerful tale of martyrdom, with a dramatic intensity appropriate to its subject. Monsignor Quixote is serious comedy in the manner of many of the second-phase works beginning with A Burnt Out Case, although it is lighter in tone than all of those works except Travels with My Aunt. In Power the whisky priest lives in constant fear of his pursuers, under the perpetual threat of death; he is overwhelmed by the sense of guilt arising from his inadequacies as a priest—his drinking, his resultant miserable performance (he once christened a boy baby “Brigitta”), and especially his betrayal of his vow of celibacy. By contrast, Father Quixote, though he has been “imprudent” and has caused “certain scandals” that remain unnamed, is a faithful if not always conventional priest who is hard to convince that he has anything to fear from the authorities even when he does. He has never experienced lust, he has never been tempted to abuse his vows, and as mentioned earlier he does not believe in hell even though he knows he is supposed to. Nevertheless, his sexual innocence and freedom from desire trouble him profoundly: in contrast to the whisky


priest, who fears that his love of his daughter (the “fruit of his sin” of adultery) may cut him off from salvation, Father Quixote fears that his failure to experience sexual desire may mean that he is deficient in his ability to love God. Greene remarked to Marie-Françoise Allain that in Monsignor Quixote he had returned to something like “a seventeenth-century play in which characters symbolize a virtue or a vice, pride, pity, et cetera” (129)—the very thing he had done in The Power and the Glory. (In fact he had done that to a degree already in Doctor Fischer of Geneva, although that rather skeletal story lacks even the degree of realism to be found in Monsignor Quixote.) What further distinguishes Monsignor Quixote from the predecessor it so strongly resembles is the theme of friendship. Much of the emotional force of The Power and the Glory arises from the extreme loneliness of the protagonist; his predicament cuts him off from his parishioners out of necessity, and as the last practicing priest in the state he is utterly alone. For a time he has a traveling companion in the venal mestizo, but that man’s transparent intention to betray the priest makes fellowship or friendship impossible. The most crucial episode in the priest’s journey occurs when he is cast for a night into a jail cell populated by a ragged assortment of common humanity. These are only temporary companions who for the most part treat him with respectful distance once they discover that he is a priest, yet his experience with them leads him to the full discovery and expression of his humanistic—and saintly—impulse to identify with them absolutely: if a single person in the entire country is damned, he says, he wants to be damned also. I have described the whisky priest’s movement out of isolation and into fellowship at some length in order to emphasize how Monsignor Quixote approaches the same theme from a different direction. The whisky priest as a younger man had been proud in his position and complacent in his enjoyment of the comforts it afforded. Father Quixote shows no evidence of having been anything other than humble, yet his acceptance of the Mayor’s invitation to travel together is in effect a turning away from pride, since he chooses travel and companionship over the chance to assert immediately the importance of his newly-acquired rank of monsignor. In a short time he and his companion become such devoted friends that their

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disagreements are entirely the stuff of intellect rather than passion. They value victory in debate less than the joy of conversation, and their pleasure in each other’s company is greatly enhanced by their ritual consumption of food and drink —the sausages and cheese provided by the priest’s housekeeper, the abundant “honest” Manchegan wine provided by the Mayor. In this respect the novel is deeply joyful and life-affirming in spite of the priest’s confessed envy of the dead and the senselessness of his death brought about by the Guardia. It is the joyful and affirmative quality of the narrative that makes it the novel that fulfills promises implied in Travels with My Aunt. Greene could hardly have avoided seeing the later book as a further exercise in the mode of comic, episodic travel narrative begun in Travels. It was a mode highly suited to the increasing reflexiveness of his second-phase narrative and one he had begun to identify with Quixotism. His often-quoted remark that after A Burnt-Out Case, also a “travel” story of sorts, he expected to remain “in the tragi-comic region of La Mancha” (Ways 266) is one measure of that identification, and Henry Pulling’s response to his travels with Aunt Augusta is another: “I felt as though I were being dragged at her heels on an absurd knight-errantry, like Sancho Panza at the heels of Don Quixote, but in the cause of what she called fun instead of chivalry” (86). Augusta’s remark to Henry Pulling that their journey to Istanbul “might be a literary pilgrimage” should alert even casual readers to the novel’s allusive structure, just as destinations like Istanbul and Brighton signal that much of the territory traversed will be “Greeneland.” Figuratively, Henry’s “pilgrimage” takes him backward through the geographical territory of Greene’s novels and into a Victorian literary world— Tennyson’s “lotos land” of “The Lotos-Eaters” and his “little wood” in “Maud.” Father Quixote undertakes a comparable “pilgrimage”—he refers to it as an “absurd pilgrimage” to some unknown destination—in which literal travel across Spain becomes figurative travel into literary territory, once again through the author’s earlier work (primarily The Power and the Glory) toward a point where fiction and reality converge as the protagonist takes on the attributes of his most illustrious literary ancestor, Cervantes’s Don Quixote.


In Travels this conjunction of life and literature in the protagonist is hardly subtle but nevertheless depends upon the reader’s familiarity with Greene’s work, his allusive methods, and the nineteenth-century works from which he drew. In contrast, the eponymous hero of Monsignor Quixote announces at the outset that he is a descendant of Cervantes’s hero, thus proclaiming the merging of fiction and reality as if to imply that this is the goal toward which Greene’s novels have been moving all along. Indeed, Greene’s method in this book is often to instruct the reader in the carefully designed parallels. “I’ve never read a book of chivalry in my life,” Father Quixote protests to his Sancho, the Mayor. “But you continue to read those old books of theology,” the Mayor replies. “They are your books of chivalry. You believe in them just as much as he did in his books” (34). Like his fictional ancestor, the priest is absorbed by reading, but by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Francis de Sales, and St. John of the Cross rather than The Four Books of Amadis de Gaul. The sustained parallels between Cervantes’s knight errant and Greene’s “knight errant of faith” have been described at length in previous studies. Both are aging men of La Mancha who have lived tranquil, unremarkable lives in the village of El Toboso. Tranquillity ends for Don Quixote when the attraction of knightly heroism represented in his reading becomes too strong for him to endure passively. With his grandfather’s armor and an old stable horse named Rocinante, he sets out upon the quest for heroic adventure, accompanied by his “squire,” the peasant Sancho Panza. Don Quixote is inspired by a romantic, idealizing imagination that constantly transforms the world around him. Ordinary inns become castles, their keepers powerful lords; servant girls become noble ladies in distress, windmills become giant warriors, and the peasant wench Dulcinea becomes a great lady. Throughout a series of comic misadventures he is undaunted by defeat and suffering, and his absolute faith in his own version of reality is undiminished until the very end of his life, when at last he admits the unreality of his dreams and what he now sees as the corruptive influence of chivalrous books. He dies disillusioned, but not before being urged to return to “Quixotic” adventures by Sancho, who has inherited his master’s faith.

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Father Quixote is similarly driven by an idealizing power— derived from the conjunction of his innocence and his faith— commensurate with his ancestor’s imagination. He too transforms the world around him: he spends a night in a brothel he believes to be an unusually friendly family-run hotel; he inflates the condoms he finds there, thinking they are balloons; and in an incident intended to correspond to Don Quixote’s freeing of the “galley slaves,” he enables a thief to escape from the Guardia, only to be robbed of his shoes by the same man. The most notable of his adventures, his defense of the Virgin Mary against the Mexicans, is also the one in which he chooses to merge with his fictional forebear. Prior to his adventures among the Mexicans, his attitude toward Don Quixote is paradoxical: on the one hand he accepts unquestioningly the idea of his own descent from a fictional character, yet on the other he refuses to be “tethered to an ancestor who has been dead these four hundred years ago” (141). He insists that he is Father Quixote, not Don Quixote, that he has free will, and that he is not bound to follow in the Don’s steps: “My adventures are my own adventures, not his. I go my way—my way—not his. I have free will” (141). Yet the kindly Señor Diego accepts the blending of fact and fiction without question: “I shall always remember how under this fig tree I was able to entertain for a short while a descendant of the great Don” (195). And when the gentle priest learns of the desecration of the image of the Virgin Mary by the greedy Mexicans who pin money to her clothing, he seems to accept fully the calling of his ancestor: “We are going into battle, Sancho,” he says to the Mayor. “I need my armor. Even if it is as absurd as Mambrino’s helmet” (196). He interrupts the feast day procession, accuses the leaders of blasphemy, and tears away the bank notes pinned to the image of the Virgin. For this truly quixotic action he is captured by the Guardia and returned against his will to El Toboso, where he is locked up in his room—“a prisoner, he thought, like Cervantes” (169). Don Quixote’s books were burned; Father Quixote is locked out of the study where his books are kept. With the assistance of the Mayor, he escapes to set forth on a second round of adventures as Don Quixote does. At least one aspect of Greene’s borrowing from Don Quixote seems to have received insufficient attention from critics, and that is the way in which his conclusion represents a reversal of


the direction of Cervantes’s work. On his deathbed the Don renounces his own illusions, acknowledges his return to the world of ordinary reality, and rejects the pleas of Sancho to resume knight-errantry once more. His response to Sancho reflects the hopelessness of his squire’s request: “There are no birds this year in last year’s nests.” Greene, in what I take to be a pointed inversion of Don Quixote—uses the same close to the beginning of his narrative, where the Bishop of Motopo encourages Father Quixote to undertake a journey of faith: “It was only by tilting at windmills that Don Quixote found the truth on his deathbed,” and the bishop, seating himself at the wheel of the Mercedes, intoned in Gregorian accents, “There are no birds this year in last year’s nests.” “It’s a beautiful phrase,” Father Quixote said, “but what did he mean by it?” “I have never quite made it out myself,” the bishop replied, “but surely the beauty is enough.” (25–26) The Don’s phrase affirms, in this new context, not a return to an old idea of reality but a willingness to seek a new one. Greene stresses the positive interpretation of the line by having his priest dream—after the Mayor has brought up the idea that they should travel together—of dislodging an empty bird’s nest, “the relic of a year gone by” (37). Both the priest and the Mayor seem aware of the inevitable pull of change and the future. “Perhaps,” says the latter in Salamanca, “we should have traveled east towards the home I’ve never known. To the future, not to the past. Not the home I left” (98). And Father Quixote is aware of the connection between travel and change: “We have just left La Mancha,” he says to his friend, “and nothing seems safe any more.” “Not even your faith?” the Mayor asks, but the priest does not answer (43). Again the echo of Travels is prominent, for the priest’s insecurity resembles Henry Pulling’s feeling that “nothing will ever be the same again” after his travels with his aunt. Father Quixote and the Mayor travel through a land interpreted as timeless and unchanging, a relic of the past as emphatically as the Victorian Paraguay of Travels. Both novels pose characters who accept dramatic, all-encompassing change

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against the background of a timeless land. The Mayor comments on this sense of timelessness: “It’s only in Spain and Russia that time stands still. We shall have our adventures on the road, father, much as your ancestor did. We have already battled with the windmills…” (96). The Mayor’s unanswered question about the priest’s faith applies more properly to his own doubt. The priest’s journey—also an intellectual journey through the process of extensive debate—is proof of his faith. That is, he confesses doubt, confronts it, yet retains unshaken faith and demonstrates the courage of a Christian soldier. He completes his mission by getting his friend to accept the imaginary—or invisible—sacrament. Thus it is the Mayor who is truly at risk. Father Quixote’s remark to the Mayor that he will pray to his ancestor for the thief who stole his shoes (178) reaffirms his belief in the reality of the fictional character and indicates, furthermore, that he regards Cervantes’s hero as a holy man—a saint. It is also one of many reminders that Greene’s inspiration for the novel was not just Cervantes’s Don Quixote but especially Don Quixote as interpreted by the Spanish mystic and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. As Father Duran points out, it was Greene’s visit to Unamuno’s simple tomb that provided the direct inspiration for the writing of Monsignor Quixote, and Greene signals his indebtedness in various ways: the travelers visit Unamuno’s grave, and the Mayor reveals that long ago he was one of Unamuno’s students. Like the parallels between Greene’s novel and Cervantes’s masterpiece, those between Greene and Unamuno have been discussed at length by critics. Patrick Henry argues cogently that the novel’s thematic treatment of the relationship between faith and doubt in Monsignor Quixote derives from Greene’s interest in Unamuno and his discovery of a strong kinship between his own thinking and that of the Spanish writer. Unamuno denied the belief that reason could provide access to spiritual truth, arguing instead that only faith, which grows out of a longing for immortality and for the existence of God, would suffice. The inability to achieve intellectual certainty in matters of belief is a condition of human existence; doubt is perpetual and must be accommodated into faith. Quoting Unamuno’s famous question “Without this uncertainty, how could we live?”, Henry points out that “his notion of perpetual


doubt and belief that doubt is the permanent state of the believer lie at the heart of Monsignor Quixote whose hero is ‘sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God.’” Unamuno’s fideism, Henry adds, is recalled by the priest, “who doesn’t step along the path of reason to God but leaps out of it to find Him” (17). An interesting view of Greene and Unamuno as “kindred souls” is advanced by Jai-Suck Choi in his book Greene and Unamuno (1990). Choi suggests that Greene’s reading in the 1930s of Unamuno’s Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, which Duran says Greene knew “almost by heart,” produced an influence that worked for years “in the cellars of [Greene’s] unconscious” (3); it was not until his reading of The Tragic Sense of Life sometime after 1962 that Greene became aware of the common ground between his own thinking and the Spanish writer’s, although that commonality extends through much of Greene’s earlier work: “The central affinity between Unamuno’s world and Greene’s fiction,” Choi argues, “is the emphasis on the spiritual fruitfulness of the emotional climate of disquietude and anxiety…. With his spiritual brother Unamuno, Greene belongs to a well-known tradition of passionate Christian contemplatives who have lived in a state of creative suffering” (5). Choi sees a strong resemblance between Unamuno’s thinking and Greene’s characters and themes in the novels. He asserts that the peace sought in vain by so many of the protagonists— most memorably Andrews, Pinkie, and Scobie—is in fact not a desirable condition; rather, their despair in the absence of peace is “the true state of a noble soul” and is ultimately what brings them into contact with spiritual reality (43). Most important for Choi is his perception that Greene shares Unamuno’s distrust of rationalism and theology. In The Power and the Glory, for example, that distrust becomes a redeeming quality: The whisky priest’s discovery of the mystery, which is possible when he abandons intellectualism and the old habit of piety, indicates nothing else than his spiritual rebirth. Although he says that he was no more an intellectual than Padre José, and that he was never any good at books, he was “a man of education” …who liked to use pedantic words or literary phrases. The narrator

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comments: “Life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery” (74). Some of the same distrust appears to be at work in Monsignor Quixote; moral theology is a favorite subject of the dislikable Father Herrera, Father Quixote’s successor in the parish of El Toboso, and it is gently satirized through the Mayor’s comments on the writings of Herebert Jone, a moral theologian whose excessively rational approach to the faith led to his hilarious discourse on contraception: the Mayor tells the story of the unhappy Diego, a man who, having read Jone’s argument that the practice of coitus interruptus is permissible if the interruption is provided by a third party, arranged for his butler to enter at the critical moment. Even this imaginative expedient proved futile, however, when Diego learned that a premeditated interruption does not qualify. More important than Greene’s attitude toward moral theology, however, is that his treatment of Don Quixote follows the example of Unamuno in The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho. Both writers, Choi says, accept the spiritual aspect of Don Quixote’s passionate adventures and turn Cervantes’ novel into a religious book. Their books belong in different categories—a novel and a commentary on Don Quixote; in spite of this, they show affinities both in their ideational content and in their emotional climate…. Father Quixote and Unamuno alike take much account of motives and inner intentions and advocate the mercy of a God who understands them. Unamuno maintains that a living faith is attained only when we go through agonizing doubt and uncertainty. By presenting a monsignor who doubts the existence of God, Greene comes closer to Unamuno in Monsignor Quixote than in the previous Catholic novels. (188–89) Whether Unamuno exerted an “unconscious” influence on Greene’s entire corpus of Catholic fiction may be open to question, but that his writing affected Greene’s attitude toward Don Quixote and contributed to his understanding of the relationship between faith and doubt seems clear. And it is


perhaps equally likely that Greene’s treatment of the relationship between fact and fiction in the novel reflects Unamuno’s influence as well. Greene’s lifelong practice of drawing ideas for his own works from a rich variety of literary sources has been discussed at length in this study, and his repeated insistence on the importance of books in shaping life demonstrates his belief in the way imaginative writing (fiction) can impinge upon the real world. Not surprisingly, he seems to have found congenial Unamuno’s belief in the life of literary characters: Unamuno felt that Don Quixote lived in the hearts of the Spanish people—that he took on a life beyond the control or intent of his creator Cervantes, and thus that his historical reality, in the only way that matters to Unamuno, is greater than that of Cervantes. That conviction lies at the heart of his theoretical argument, set forth in the essay “Saint Quixote of La Mancha,” for the canonization of the famous Don: To say that perhaps Buddha possesses no more historical reality than Hamlet is not to deny him reality, but altogether the contrary. Whoever knows our philosophy of history—andh’io sono pittore!—expressed in our Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, just published in its third edition —knows that we believe that Don Quixote and Sancho have more historical reality than Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and more than the author of these lines, and that far from Cervantes being their creator, it is they who created Cervantes. (Tragic Sense 430) Readers may recall that Greene had written in a similar fashion about fiction and reality in the passage in Travels with My Aunt in which Henry Pulling wonders whether Aunt Augusta’s stories of his Uncle Jo are true: What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions. Hamlet is no less real now than Winston Churchill, and Jo Pulling no less historical than Don Quixote. (62) Greene once remarked to Father Duran that thematic intent of his novels was expressed in their epigraphs. In that regard the

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epigraph chosen from Hamlet for Monsignor Quixote—“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”—offers an interesting perspective on the power of the mind to create reality. The Bishop of Motopo’s Berkeleyan suggestion to Father Quixote a few pages into the novel—“Perhaps we are all fictions…in the mind of God” (25)—points in a similar though not identical direction. Of Father Quixote, the honest doubter, it could be said that his intense longing to believe results in an intuitive or mystical apprehension of God—“I don’t just believe in Him, I touch Him”—and enables him to live an exemplary life of humility, charity, and courage. To put it slightly differently, his generous longing that others may believe guides him in his vocation and thereby leads at the end toward the recovery of lost belief by his friend. The Mayor’s state of mind, in turn, depends upon a mystery of fact and fiction, belief and faith, that arises from the strange events at the end of Father Quixote’s life. Having been taken into the monastery at Osera after his car is wrecked in the attempt to escape the Guardia, the priest seems dazed but not, apparently, mortally injured. He performs an imaginary Mass—imaginary in that there is no visible paten, chalice, or Host—at the end of which he places the Host on the tongue of the Mayor, calling him for the first time “companero,” then collapses and dies. The Mayor kneels over his fallen friend, repeats the term “companero,” and then identifies himself by his Quixotic name: “[T]his is Sancho” (217). This strange sequence of events leads to a concluding dialogue between Father Leopoldo and the Mayor. “Fact and fiction again,” Father Leopoldo says, “one can’t distinguish with any certainty” (218). He then tells the Mayor that what Father Quixote “dreamed” may have been the true reality after all. The Mayor may in fact have received communion; certainly he did in his friend’s mind, and the possibility of such a miraculous occurrence is hardly less plausible than that of transubstantiation itself. The Mayor is disturbed as Bendrix was by the possibility that miraculous events followed the death of Sarah in The End of the Affair; like Bendrix, he wants to preserve a purely rational view of experience: “I prefer to think that there was no Host…. Because once when I was young I partly believed in God, and a little of that superstition still remains. I’m rather afraid of mystery, and I am too old to change my spots. I prefer Marx to mystery, Father” (220). It is


the mystery of his friend’s love, however—of his sudden awareness that the love is still felt strongly, that it grows, and that it threatens to alter the future—that occupies the Mayor’s thoughts in the novel’s closing lines cited earlier. He wonders why love continues to grow “in spite of the final separation” of death—“for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?” (221). This is a masterful, affirmative yet understated conclusion that tempers powerful emotion with mystery and unites character and reader in contemplation of the question that quite properly raises Greene’s thematic treatment of love once more to that level at which human love and the love of God begin to converge. The climactic “convergence” in the novel occurs in the celebration of the invisible mass by Father Quixote; this is the moment in which reality and dream, “fact and fiction,” matter and spirit become indissoluble. “Let him live out his dream,” advises the skeptical onlooker Pilbeam, a visiting American scholar who sees the priest’s behavior as nothing more than a deranged fantasy. Yet to “live out a dream” is at the heart of Quixotism as interpreted by Unamuno, who saw the Don’s idealizing power as the essence of his saintliness. In his essay on “Quixotism,” Unamuno discusses the meaning of Don Quixote’s return to “sublime madness” after a brief reversion to the worldly selfhood of Alonso the Good: The Knight had returned to the dream of life, to his generous madness; he had emerged fresh in spirit from the egotistic sagacity of Alonso the Good. And on returning to his sublime madness, he returned to the magnanimous purity of intention with which he purified the world, his world; it was then that his clear look cleared wherever it looked; it was then that his pure conscience purified everything; it was then that, forgetting himself, he found his own great depth; it was then that sanctifying his acts, he became a saint. (331) Greene’s Quixote is restored at the end of life to the fullness of his dream, his ideal, with a force that overpowers the ordinary reality around him and leaves his beholders to ponder the meaning of his remarkable actions. For critic John Desmond,

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who sees in Greene’s later fiction a development of the theme of “Christian emergent evolution” influenced by the author’s reading of Teilhard de Chardin, the incident expresses the meaning of love as Greene at last regarded it. Greene’s “imaginative conception of history is evolutionary,” Desmond writes, and “increasingly his major work comes to be shaped by a Christian vision which sees love as the spiritual power energizing the process of redemption of the world—spirit in matter—and the physical world is the medium through which that love is manifested” (61). In Desmond’s view, then, The novel’s final action at the monastery, culminating in Quixote’s “imaginary” mass, is a masterpiece in which the form and substance of the mass—centered on the mystery of transubstantiation—and a primary concern of the novel —the mystery of “fact” versus “fiction”—coalesce brilliantly to focus the question of the real. The mystery of “fact” and “fiction” is transformed into the theological mystery of matter and spirit—signified specifically in the act of communion that seals the bond of love between Quixote and Sancho. (74) Variations on the process of convergence take place on several thematic levels at the end of Monsignor Quixote. Patrick Henry interprets the “entire movement” of the book as “the progressive convergence of self and other” (13), a reconciliation of opposites. Henry describes this movement as fourfold: from apparent dissimilarity to similarity, to friendship and finally to love. Despite their differences of opinion on birth control, natural law, God’s mercy—not to mention his existence—the two men come together believing in their difference only to discover their profound affinities. This convergence of the Marxist and the monsignor is only possible because of doubt. (14) Because neither the Mayor in his Marxism nor the priest in his Christianity is capable of absolute, dogmatic belief, their lives allow space in which their common humanity can operate. The novel thus offers “a relevant message to the modern world,”


Henry suggests, “a clear and unambiguous invitation to struggle against the horrors of certitude and abstractions that cause men to split off into camps and factions that negate their common humanity” (22). Another kind of convergence may be seen at work in the larger context of Greene’s novels, for Monsignor Quixote achieves the most complete convergence of his own work with literature of the past, more complete even than the comparable movement in Travels with My Aunt, for the protagonist’s ancestry is literally and not just figuratively literary, and Greene’s intention to shape the entire work in imitation of other works (both the immortal Don Quixote and Unamuno’s profound reading of it) is transparent. At the end of the novel the identity of Greene’s protagonist has converged with that of his ancestor (when he puts on “Mambrino’s helmet” and enters into combat against the desecrators of the Virgin Mary’s image), and also with that of Unamuno’s interpretation of Don Quixote, for he both acknowledges the holiness of Cervantes’s character (by praying to him) and is revealed as a saintly character in his own right. POSTSCRIPT: “YOUR DREAM HAS BEEN YOUR LIFE." I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter that while Greene had initially urged Father Duran to write about their adventures together and had imagined himself as a Sanchofigure to his friend’s Don Quixote, it is clear that many of his own qualities along with Duran’s are invested in his priestprotagonist. Yet to read Duran’s memoir of friendship along with the novel that celebrates it is to see the latter as in part a tribute to the writer’s companion, and a warm and generous one at that. As a novel about a man’s ability to “live out his dream” until the power of his idealism begins radically to affect those closest to him, Monsignor Quixote probably reflects several aspects of Greene’s appreciation of Father Duran’s character. Duran writes interestingly of his discussion with Graham Greene of celibacy and chastity—virtues which for obvious reasons fascinated the novelist. On one occasion Duran confided to Greene that his own “greatest human experience” grew out

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of the “boundless trust” bestowed upon him by young people, and that he had formed eternal friendships with women—“a ‘love’…Which is eternal and cannot be expressed in human language”—by behaving decently and properly in his relationships with them. “All that was needed” in such friendships, he told Greene, “was purity and idealism—the idealism of truth—a great deal of respect, and a genuine longing to exalt that person. And, of course, the grace of God!” (109). Recalling the time when a married woman friend praised him for always behaving “so well” with her, Duran added that “It would be a terrible thing to destroy a friendship that might have been immortal…Just because one didn’t know how to dream a little” (110). Father Duran’s record of his discussions of this topic with Greene suggests a Quixotic quality in himself of which both men were aware. “Perhaps,” he said once to his friend, “only a priest can dream up such nonsense. The ideal girl deserves to be put on a pedestal. That makes her happy. And you will also be fortunate because, without even trying, she will help you to be truly happy yourself” (110). Greene did not follow Duran’s recommendation that he take even a temporary vow of chastity, nor did he agree with the priest’s perception of beauty in “masses of marvellous girls,” but he apparently felt a genuine respect for his friend’s idealism: Graham never interrupted me in my pipe dreams, although I see in my diary that he once said: “I have never seen anyone dream in this way. But I am delighted, because I know that your dream has been your life. And it continues to be.” (110) The gap between dream and achievement worked powerfully in Greene’s imagination and is expressed memorably in the Mayor’s comment on that particular form of failure: “[W]e all make cruel parodies of what we intend” (194). It would be difficult to find a writer who has written more authoritatively or sympathetically about failure than Greene. An interest in the dreamer as idealist and in the redeeming power of the dream itself is traceable to the origins of his career as novelist. Even Andrews, the cowardly, self-deprecating protagonist of Greene’s first novel, The Man Within, is keenly aware of the


ennobling potential of the dream. Of Carlyon, whom he both loves and fears, he thinks: Carlyon and I are on the same plane. He follows his dreams and I do not follow mine, but the mere dreaming is good. And I am better than my father, for he had no dreams…. (170) Later, when his final failure draws near and he thinks of being judged for his actions, Andrews reflects on the redeeming quality of his dreams: I have as good dreams as any man, of purity and courage and the rest…. Suppose after all that a man, perhaps when a child, at any rate at some forgotten time, chose his dreams whether they were to be good or evil. Then, even though he were untrue to them, some credit was owing simply to baseless dreaming. They were potentialities, aspects, and no men could tell whether suddenly and without warning they might not take control and turn the coward for one instant into a hero. (169–70) This redemptive moment does not occur for Andrews, but it does for the faker Jones in The Comedians, who seizes the opportunity to live up to the stories he has told about himself and dies a hero, expressing thereby the truth of the novel’s epigraph from Thomas Hardy: “There are aspects within us, and who seems most kingly is the king.” Greene’s final novel, The Captain and the Enemy, also concerns dreamers and failures—men without the religious vision of Monsignor Quixote but with dreams equally familiar to Graham Greene: dreams of adventure, dreams of artistic success as a writer. Yet even these secular dreams are linked thematically with Monsignor Quixote through Greene’s final investigation of the meaning of love. The Captain is a very different sort of book altogether and, I think, a lesser one, though in one early, offbeat moment it appears to echo its predecessor. The Captain, a strange, rough, worldly man whose tales of adventure include the story of his escape from a German prison camp into Spain, explains to the protagonist Jim Baxter,

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“[W]hen I walked down off the Pyrenees after I escaped I found a monastery. They didn’t ask for any paper, they didn’t go to the police—what I saw going on was all a lot of nonsense, of course, but they were good men, at least they were good to me. When you are not a good man yourself you respect a good man. I would prefer to die with a good man around.” (61) It is in a Spanish monastery, of course, that the events of Monsignor Quixote conclude, and that real monastery at Osera was a place where Greene, according to Father Duran, found a deep and abiding sense of peace for which he was grateful. The Captain found nothing there to retain him—indeed, he left because he suffered there the most familiar of Greene’s afflictions, boredom; but this lonely adventurer who is unhappy with himself, who recognizes and values good men in the Spanish priests, and who would “prefer to die with a good man around,” must surely have in him a touch of the author himself. When Graham Greene died at Vevey, in Switzerland, in April 1991, Father Leopoldo Duran was at his bedside.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Captain and the Enemy

“Captain is a good travelling name, and so I take it.” Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem “It is just as well. To know an enemy, I mean.” The Power and the Glory Graham Greene was dissatisfied with his final novel The Captain and the Enemy, and it is unlikely that even his staunchest admirers would disagree that the book is one of his weakest. Two of its three primary characters—the Captain and Liza—remain sketchy figures at best; the motives of both the Captain and the protagonist, Jim Baxter, are at times vague or even baffling; and Jim’s juvenile cynicism—“I never believed that Cinderella would marry the prince” (69)—is distressingly flat and stale. Moreover, Greene’s use of the popular culture icon King Kong as a symbol is both clumsy and distracting. The Captain identifies with Kong because “all the world was against him” (45); yet the whole world is not against the Captain —his outlawry is entirely a matter of his own choice. Jim’s remark at one point that he has seen a film about a giant gorilla he thinks was King Kong is simply unconvincing; Kong may be a good or a bad film according to taste, but it is not a forgettable one. When the worst has been said, however, The Captain and the Enemy remains an interesting novel for several fine passages that partially offset such weaknesses, and especially for the ways in which the author’s apparent weariness produces a kind of transparency in which his familiar themes and conflicts are thrown into unusually sharp relief.


Fortunately, for readers who regard Monsignor Quixote as a far more suitable “last word” from an old master, the claim of The Captain and the Enemy to displace it is qualified in a minor way: Greene had written a substantial part of The Captain some fourteen years earlier but had set it aside, to return to it only after the completion of Monsignor Quixote, at which point he found much difficulty and little pleasure in finishing and revising it. According to Father Duran, “the revision of The Captain and the Enemy almost drove him to despair. He did not like it. He never had liked it. He returned to the typescript several times; on various occasions he told me: ‘at last it’s finished’. And yet, on 9 November 1987, he was still working on this stubborn novel” (205). Duran adds that Greene, a perfectionist who now regretted having published his first three novels and his volume of poems, Babbling April, had lingering doubts about The Captain and kept it “lying around in a box for many years before it was published. Even when it was completed, I came to the conclusion that he would never be satisfied that it was publishable” (233). Greene’s displeasure with an uneven performance in the work may have owed something to fatigue. In May 1987 he was “worn out” by travel and correspondence and frustrated by the failure of his dictaphone. He took refuge in Anacapri to continue work on The Captain. Of his friend’s condition Duran wrote in a notebook: ‘“I have never seen him looking quite so tired, dejected and overwhelmed as on this occasion’” (347). The author’s disappointment and the slightness of the work notwithstanding, The Captain and the Enemy brings the second phase of Greene’s novels to a close in a way that tempts this writer to see its delayed completion as oddly appropriate if not somehow intuitive. For The Captain performs the dual function of reprising major themes and qualities of Greene’s second phase while simultaneously bringing his novelistic career full circle, so that in a curious way the second phase returns to where the first began. In this final novel Greene incorporates, as if he were nostalgically returning to the beginning of his creative life, details from his life as well as character types, themes, and plot elements that bear a strong resemblance to his first published novel, The Man Within. Some of these are sufficiently obvious as to be difficult to overlook. This pronounced reflexiveness is the most distinctive characteristic

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of the novel: the book is literally the writer Greene’s presentation of a fictional writer, Jim Baxter, writing about writing as he produces the book we read. The structure of the novel derives not only from stages of Jim’s life, but also from the stages of his writing of the narrative, and his attitudes toward writing and toward himself as writer become inextricably entwined with his attitudes toward the characters and events he describes. Jim’s story is simple and not entirely plausible: on his twelfth birthday he is taken from his boarding school by a man who goes by several names but is most often just “the Captain.” Having won Jim from the boy’s father in a backgammon game, he takes Jim to London to live with him and his beloved Liza, who was once Jim’s father’s mistress. The Captain proves to be a thief who stays home very little but regularly sends money for Liza and Jim. Eventually he goes to Panama for several years in search of a fortune; when Liza dies, Jim follows him there but delays telling him of her death. From Mr. Quigly, who claims to be a journalist but is probably a CIA operative, Jim learns that the Captain is involved in some kind of smuggling operation in which he aids or at least cooperates with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Subsequently, Jim betrays the Captain by revealing to Quigly the whereabouts of the Captain’s plane. When the Captain learns that Liza is dead and that Jim has not told him, he undertakes a suicidal mission against the Somoza government forces and is killed. Jim contemplates becoming a double agent for Panama and the CIA but abruptly leaves for Valparaiso, the destiny of his boyhood dreams; he is killed in a plane crash that may or may not have been accidental. In an epilogue, the manuscript of his novel— the book we have been reading—has been found by the Panamanian military, who suspect that it is written in some kind of code. They are especially concerned to know “Who is King Kong?” The Captain’s death in a futile attempt to attack Somoza’s headquarters led critic Terry Eagleton to express disappointment in the novel: “Despite his political actions,” Eagleton wrote in The Times Literary Supplement, the Captain reveals no explicit revolutionary commitment: his political swashbuckling is more in line with his


criminal pursuits than evidence of political idealism…. In this novel, then, the most decisive political action is performed by one whose political principles remain obscure; and this suggests an ambiguity in Greene’s work which makes it hard to enlist him unequivocally into the radical camp. (16 Sept. 1988) Yet surely Eagleton has missed the point, for The Captain is not seriously about politics at all. Beneath its realistic surface is a highly personal fable about writing and the writer; in its fabulistic quality the novel most resembles Dr. Fischer of Geneva among Greene’s works, although thematically it is closer to the fable of the jeweller in A Burnt-Out Case. To demonstrate the working of the fable and its relation to the author’s career, I will look first at several ways in which its sustained allusions and parallels to Greene’s early life and work self-consciously recall Greene’s first phase; then I will discuss its function as a fable which constitutes a final portrait of the artist. By returning, in his last novel, to elements of The Man Within Greene fulfills a certain logic implied by the course of his second-phase works. After he had begun in The End of the Affair to make writing and himself as writer subjects of his works, the novels began a turning inward or backward, so that later works, as I have tried to show in this study, increasingly reflected upon earlier ones. A Burnt-Out Case looked backward very specifically to The End of the Affair, as did The Human Factor and, to a less obvious degree, Dr. Fischer of Geneva. Travels with My Aunt recalled Stamboul Train superficially, parodied serious themes and symbols in Brighton Rock, and reworked at some length the Wordsworthian themes of The Ministry of Fear; and it called attention to the strong pull of nineteenth-century writers upon the imagination that had, for example, shaped A Gun for Sale under the influence of Tennyson and Browning. The Honorary Consul drew upon both The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, and Monsignor Quixote recalled The Power and the Glory. In that sense it seems only fitting that Greene’s final novel should recall his first so clearly. The sense of a deliberate return to origins conveyed by The Captain could hardly be more obvious. An autobiographical


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novel written by a young man who frequently mentions his longheld, passionate desire to write, the book opens in the unnamed but immediately recognizable setting of Greene’s Berkhamsted. Jim, like his creator an avid reader of adventure stories, has read Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, a favorite of Greene’s, four times and is ripe for an adventure of his own. The opportunity comes on his twelfth birthday—only one year earlier than the age at which Greene moved from his secure family home into the hostile territory of the Berkhamsted school’s dormitories—when the mysterious Captain appears to take him away. The Man Within had presented a similar situation in which Carlyon arrives to tell the protagonist Andrews that his father has died. Andrews is running—to escape momentarily from the school—when he sees Carlyon: He had one hour of freedom and exhilarated by it ran up the hill beyond the school, the sooner to escape the sight of the red brick barrack-like buildings, the sooner to see the moors stretching away, sweep beyond sweep of short heather, into the sunset. He ran with his eyes on the ground, for then he always seemed to move faster…. He raised his eyes. A man stood with his back to him, in much the same way as he had stood a few days before at the turn of the road beyond Hassocks. He was dressed in black…. (171) In The Captain, almost sixty years later, Greene renders a similar situation in which the running boy encounters the man who will take him away: I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to an abrupt halt while my pursuers went whistling away, because there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat…. (9) It may perhaps go without saying that what happens to these characters—being removed from school altogether—would have


satisfied an ardent longing of the boy Graham Greene, whose attempts to run away from the school life he hated are amply documented. Jim has already dreamed of escape; that may explain why he takes so easily in stride what might have been a frightening experience. Not only is Jim unafraid, but his imagination quickly transforms his circumstances into a fantasy of romantic adventure: For a moment I wondered who was going to join him, but my mind drifted off to more interesting things, for never before had I even been in sight of a bar and I was fascinated. Everyone standing there had so much to say and everyone seemed to be in a good humour. I thought of the raft and the long voyage I had planned, and it seemed to me that I had arrived at the other end of the world, in the romantic city of Valparaiso, and that I was carousing with foreign sailors who had sailed the Seven Seas (15) Jim and Andrews are victims of evil fathers who are hated or feared. The elder Andrews terrorized his own son and drove his gentle, suffering wife to an early death by breaking her spirit. The death of Jim’s mother is not blamed upon the father, yet he associates the memory of her death with her frequent warning: “Your father is a devil” (12). Both protagonists mature under the influence of father figures, Carlyon and the Captain, men who combine lawlessness with bravery and the love of adventure. The Captain explains, late in the novel, that he turned to thievery out of “boredom,” the condition that had an enormous effect on Greene’s course in life. But the Captain longs to be more than an ordinary thief; he dreams of being a “pirate” like Drake, of capturing his own version of the gold carried by Drake’s mules: “‘When I dream it’s when I’m awake, not when I’m asleep. I dream of all that gold which Drake took from the mules in Panama. I dream that we are rich all three of us, rich and safe, and I dream that Liza is able to buy anything that takes her fancy’” (66). Andrews regards Carlyon as a “romantic fool,” but he recognizes in Carlyon qualities he longs for in himself: Carlyon, who was all the things which Andrews wished to be—courageous, understanding, hopelessly romantic, not


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about women, but about life, Carlyon who hated well because he knew so clearly what he loved—truth, danger, poetry. (169) The association with Drake appears in the earlier novel also, although it applies not to Carlyon but to Andrews’s father: His father when he desired something which could not be attained by other means had the power of showing himself as a sort of rough, genial fellow—a sea dog of the old Elizabethan tradition. He was of Drake’s county and he spoke Drake’s tongue. The sea had even given him a little of Drake’s face and manner, the colour, lines, aggressive beard, loud voice, loud laugh, what those who did not know him in his black moods called “a way with him.” (170) The elder Andrews, Carlyon, and apparently the Captain are smugglers, and all are (or appear to be, in the Captain’s case) seamen and are viewed ambivalently by the hero. Carlyon and the Captain are ultimately betrayed by the younger hero: Andrews testifies in court against Carlyon and the smugglers; Jim defies the Captain’s orders by moving out on his own and leaving Liza to live alone, by failing to tell the Captain promptly of Liza’s death, and finally by revealing to Quigly the whereabouts of the Captain’s airplane. Central to both novels is a lonely, somewhat mysterious young woman whose capacity for love and fidelity is thematically important. Elizabeth, as discussed in an earlier chapter here, is an idealized young woman who lives in isolation in a remote cottage on the Downs. Figuratively a Gretel to Andrews’s Hansel in the fairy tale dimension of the story, she is more significantly the first of Greene’s women-asredeemers who have the potential to transform the unsatisfactory life of the hero. The inadequacy of Andrews’s love when measured against Elizabeth’s causes the untimely deaths of both: when she is captured by the smugglers, Andrews protects himself rather than attempting to rescue her, and she dies by her own hand rather than risk betraying him; faced with the consequences of his cowardliness, Andrews kills himself.


Liza, unlike Elizabeth (e-LIZA-beth), is neither virginal nor idealized, but she nevertheless has a similarly lonely, isolated life (a basement flat in Camden Town rather than an enchanted cottage). And she retains a vestige of the first-phase heroine’s transformative power: the Captain is devoted to her as the only person he was ever able to help; she does not inspire him to become a law-abiding citizen, but as the object of his care she gives meaning and purpose to the thievery he had earlier engaged in to escape boredom. Jim witnesses her love in his characteristically detached manner, remaining unmoved by and unsympathetic toward it. Even the Captain is never fully convinced that she loves him, and therefore he condemns her to loneliness by loving from afar. The Man Within is not the only early work whose presence can be felt in reading The Captain and the Enemy, for the novel also resembles certain aspects of one of Greene’s finest pieces of short fiction, “The Basement Room” (1936). The story concerns a seven-year-old boy, Philip Lane, whose parents leave him in the care of their butler and the butler’s wife while they are away for two weeks’ holiday. The title refers literally to the basement living room—the butler’s quarters—and figuratively to the entire world of adulthood represented by this strange other realm that exists alongside the child’s world Philip has always known. The butler’s pantry is entered through a green baize door derived from Greene’s own boyhood experience: a green baize door separated “home,” or the family quarters, from the world of the boarding students at Berkhamsted; to pass through it was to leave the secure life he had known for “a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties: a country in which I was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature, known to have dubious associates” (A Sort of Life 74). (That this “savage country” is also inhabited by the outcast or “Amalekite” Jim Baxter will be apparent; as mentioned earlier, he is literally running to escape his enemies between classes when he first sees the Captain.) Philip’s passage through the door becomes his symbolic—and premature —entry into the frightening world of adulthood. Philip’s experience begins with exuberance and optimism that prove heavily ironic. To be “alone in the great Belgravia house with Baines and Mrs. Baines” excites him: “He could go anywhere, even through the green baize door to the pantry or


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down the stairs to the basement living-room. He felt a happy stranger in his home because he could go into any room and all the rooms were empty” (457). Philip’s happy expectancy gives him the sense that this is life. All his seven nursery years vibrated with the strange, the new experience. His crowded brain was like a city which feels the earth tremble at a distant earthquake shock. He was apprehensive, but he was happier than he had ever been. (458) The boy’s happiness comes from his feeling of liberty but also from his affection for the good-natured Baines, who tells tall tales of his adventures in Africa—eating exotic “chop,” carrying a gun as he supervised forty African laborers, doing “a man’s job” in intense heat. Baines’s stories are ways of escape from the drabness and misery of life with his shrewish and domineering wife, whom Philip instinctively dislikes. Through her harsh treatment of him the boy becomes aware of some undercurrent of feeling that he cannot understand: “This was life: a strange passion he couldn’t understand moving in the basement room” (462). His apprehensiveness is justified by subsequents events: by accidentally discovering Baines with his mistress in a tea shop, Phillip is drawn into a web of adultery, deceit, and betrayal that ends with the death of Mrs. Baines, witnessed by Philip, when her husband pushes her from the top of a staircase. The effect of this premature exposure to adult life is traumatic for the boy, who, as the narrator explains, never overcame the shock: “He never opened his Meccano set again, never built anything, never created anything…” (470). Jim Baxter’s experience parallels Philip Lane’s in significant ways. Both stories begin with something like an extended holiday—absence of parents, escape from school—and in both cases the “holiday” proves to be the major formative period in their lives. It begins in a spirit of adventure and ends in confusion and uncertainty. Jim does not pass through a symbolic door, but he too finds himself in a “basement room,” literally the basement flat in the large house where Liza is the caretaker who has keys to the other rooms. Jim finds the idea of exploring such a large house enticing, just as Philip does in


the absence of his parents. Philip’s imagination is fired by Baines’s tales of his adventures in Africa; it is this serious, manly Baines that he most admires, not the emotional one spied upon in the tea shop. Jim, five years older than Philip when he enters his new basement home, has dreamed of his own African adventure, his imagination stimulated by his reading of King Solomon’s Mines. He listens avidly to stories of the Captain’s adventures, which may be tall tales; “the Devil” accuses him of fabricating them, and Jim notices that the Captain does change the stories from time to time. Jim instinctively likes the Captain more than he likes Liza, just as Philip prefers Baines to Mrs. Baines. But Liza proves a benevolent figure, whereas Mrs. Baines is the most authentic witch in all of Greene’s fiction. Both boys are exposed in the basement room to rather veiled and murky complexities of adult love: in “The Basement Room,” secrecy, jealousy, adultery, betrayal, violence, and death; in The Captain, abortion, fear, betrayal, and the gambling away of a child. In Philip’s case the result is the emotional stunting described above; his future is a loveless, lonely life. Jim Baxter does not experience emotional trauma as Philip does, but as an adult he nevertheless is emotionally frozen—believing, perhaps rightly, that he has never been able to love anyone. The many resemblances to earlier works notwithstanding, The Captain and the Enemy is readily identifiable as a secondphase novel: with the exception of its brief epilogue, it is a firstperson narrative; it is severely economical, written in a generally flat, spare style; it deals with adventure, political intrigue, and violence but is primarily a continuation of the inquiry into the nature of love seen in the second phase since The End of the Affair, presenting in the Captain an eccentric but recognizable lover who, in the manner of Greene’s middleaged lovers like Charley Fortnum and Maurice Castle, values affection and companionship more than passion in his relationship with a much younger woman. The theme of emotional frigidity appears rarely in Greene’s first-phase novels: apart from the skeptical Chase in Rumour, who eventually discovers that he can love, the only significant examples are Raven in A Gun for Sale, and Pinkie in Brighton Rock. Raven “goes soft on a skirt,” falling for Anne Crowder even though he knows that she could never be more than a


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“friend”; and Pinkie is won away from hatred and shows signs of a capacity for love even though he resists love until his death. In all three characters the inability to love is traceable to specific childhood experiences and ingrained in their natures. Greene’s distancing of such characters from himself denies them the probing, analytic self-consciousness that distinguishes the protagonists after Brighton Rock; these late first-phase characters do not worry about or otherwise reflect upon their own inability to love. By contrast, several protagonists of the second phase reveal a troubled awareness of the deficiency in themselves. Maurice Bendrix is the first of Greene’s protagonists to announce an intense and anxious uncertainty over his inability to read the map’s boundaries between love and hatred. Significantly, he is also the first of Greene’s self-portraits. Several of his successors admit to a more complete failure in their inability to love: Querry announces his own emotional deadness; Brown suffers at length before admitting that his love is inadequate; Henry Pulling has never experienced love at all until his abrupt and comical engagement to a fifteen-year-old girl at the end of his travels; Plarr admits that he knows how to perform sexually but not how to love. The final descendant of these second-phase characters is Jim Baxter, whose narrative self-scrutiny in the matter of love is persistent and unforgiving. Jim’s having been gambled away by his father could hardly be expected to teach him to love, yet he never implies that he regards that circumstance as a cause of his condition or even an unfortunate event. Jim has no affection for his father, is “bored” by the aunt with whom he has lived in Richmond, and admits that he felt no grief at his mother’s death. (In this last regard his situation recalls that of Bendrix, who was not called home from school to attend his mother’s funeral.) Jim regards an early interchange between the Captain and Liza—she expresses both “relief and complaint” at the Captain’s return from some unspecified journey—as his first witnessing of the “complexity of human love” (38), and from that point on he becomes a fascinated observer. Liza’s revelation to Jim that even though she does not want to outlive the Captain, he has provided Jim to take care of her when she does, provides his second lesson about “what love might mean between two grownup people”: “Love, it was quite clear to me now, meant


fear. And I suppose it was the same fear which made Liza go out very early each morning to buy a Telegraph…” (51). The Captain’s frequent long absences provoke Jim to question his own feelings about his surrogate parents: Did I miss him? I have no memory of any emotion unless it was the occasional wild desire for something interesting to happen. Had I grown to love the Captain, this putative father who was now as distant from me as my real parent? Did I love Liza who looked after me, gave me the right food, dispatched me at the correct hour to school and welcomed me back with an impatient kiss? Did I love anyone? Did I know what love was? Do I know it now years later or is love something which I have read about in books? (77–78) He is aware that in their letters neither the Captain nor Liza uses the word love at all. Jim’s father discourages use of the word, telling Jim to “leave a word like lovers to the gossip columns” (100). He and Liza were “bedfellows,” he says; she cheated him by becoming pregnant. Years later, as Liza lies close to death in the hospital, she urges Jim to be kind to the Captain as he has been to them. “Does he love you?” he asks. “Oh love,” she replies. “They’re always saying God loves us. If that’s love, I’d rather have a bit of kindness” (84). Her answer recalls Clara’s response, in The Honorary Consul, to Plarr’s question about whether Charley Fortnum loves her: “He is very kind to me,” she says. When Liza asks Jim to destroy letters from the Captain which she has collected for years, he keeps them and reads them instead. The effect on him resembles that of Sarah’s diary upon Bendrix: the discovery of another writer’s perspective reawakens the protagonist’s interest in the nature of love and ultimately in his own writing—in Jim’s case, interest in the narrative he had begun years earlier as an attempt to understand the love between his foster parents. His responses to the letters reveal as much about him as about his subjects: when he is puzzled, for example, by the Captain’s reference to his “funambulist” dream that Liza would be in an accident and in the hospital, Jim ignores the prophetic element of the dream


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and focuses his attention instead on the Captain’s fondness for strange words like funambulist. He concludes that the Captain “must have connected [funambulist] with words like ‘funeral’ and ‘funereal’, for the true meaning ‘rope-walker’ certainly made no sense” (90). Yet “rope-walker” makes perfectly good sense if understood in terms of the Captain’s attempt to balance his love for Liza against his fear of harming her, or his feeling of responsibility for her against his inability to believe that she really loves him. In another letter he writes, “I wish to God this wasn’t such a business kind of letter, when all I want to write is how much I miss you. I miss you every hour of the day. But, Liza, it won’t be long now, I’m sure it won’t be long. Your Captain.” And then there was the inevitable postscript: “Before you go to bed give me a thought.” (103) The modesty of his understated claim to Liza’s affection —“Together we were not often unhappy, were we?”—forms a sharp contrast to the more self-assured, intimate, seductive letters Jim writes: I read my own letter with a certain nostalgia. It began, “Whenever I get into bed” (I was surprised how close that phrase was to what the Captain had written) “I put my hand out and try to imagine that I am touching you where it pleases you most” (103–4) Jim’s attitude toward the Captain is ambivalent. He argues to himself that the Captain is a sentimentalist who lies about love and imprisons Liza by “robbing her of her liberty as the price of her loyalty” (105); yet Jim puzzles over the sense of shame he feels when comparing the two letters: Was it because I no longer wanted to put my hand out to touch Clara when I went to bed and I no longer troubled even to write to her. I had left her—or rather we had left each other—a few weeks after I wrote that letter. In my experience love was like an attack of flu and one recovered


as quickly. Each love affair was like a vaccine. It helped you to get through the next attack more easily. (104–5) Even the coldly manipulative Quigly grasps more readily than Jim the truth of the Captain and Liza’s relationship. “Why, it’s quite a love story,” he remarks after hearing it described by Jim. “I don’t know about love,” Jim replies. “Well,” says Quigly, “they seem to have…needed each other. I suppose that could be called love” (156). Liza’s final letter to the Captain confesses that she had always loved him but felt too shy to say so. He was the kindest man she ever knew. To her recollection that the Captain was missing a button on his shirt when she first saw him—a small detail that authenticates the emotion—Jim responds with a “stab of jealous pain” and the awareness that “there had been, after all, some kind of love between them. Whatever that phrase meant it seemed more durable than the casual sexual interludes which I had in my way enjoyed.” Now Jim has a “furious sense of inferiority. I was shut out, an Amalekite again” (168). In the aftermath of the Captain’s death Jim brings his narrative to a hurried conclusion that leaves unresolved the ambiguities of their relationship. Although he claims to hate the Captain, his simultaneous acknowledgment of jealousy (“Compared with Liza I was nothing to him”) and his reminder that “Perhaps I have never understood the nature of love” (178– 79) imply that his hatred may be no more authentic than Bendrix’s hatred of Sarah. That may be why at this point Greene, as he has often done in the novels, resorts to a dream to express symbolically ideas that his character struggles to articulate: Sometimes if I think of the Captain I imagine that in some strange way he will prove one day to have been my real father if only for this legacy of illegality which he has injected into my bloodstream. I remember again the dream I had last night before Mr. Quigly woke me, with an added detail, which I had forgotten. All that remained in my mind when I woke was the dark path which I was following into some deep wood, but now the reason for my walk came back to me. I had been following two mules which stopped


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again and again to crop the grass. There was nothing on their backs and I had no idea why I was pursuing them. The Captain of course would have known. How often he had spoken to me of those mules, but in his version they always carried sacks of gold. (177–78) The dream is important to what I have described as a “personal fable” in the novel: the book is a fable because it is a thinly developed story fashioned to comment upon the writer’s work— the craft, the purpose, the achievement—and because it links the pursuit of that work with the pursuit of adventure and the search for treasure or gold; it is personal because it is so heavily colored with elements from the writer’s own life, as can be seen through a comparison of the rough outlines of the lives of the protagonist and his creator. Jim attends a boarding school (clearly set in Berkhamsted, though neither the town nor the school is named), where he feels an outsider beset by enemies, and is unhappy. His fantasies of escape come true when he is taken away to London by a would-be pirate, the Captain. As he grows up he is possessed by a “passionate desire to write” (51) and begins composition of an autobiographical narrative centered around his relationship with the Captain and Liza. Later he realizes that he chose this form because he “knew so little of the outside world that could possibly have any interest for others” (84). His literary ambition is deflected, however, when he leaves home and becomes a journalist, a “hack” whose ambition to be a “real” writer is buried under the weight of quick, easy work. In approximately this same period he experiences not the authentic love that he has struggled to understand but a series of “meaningless affairs” with women. The long hiatus in his creative work ends when he rediscovers his earlier manuscript and, although at first he does not even recognize his own handwriting, regains his desire to be a serious artist. Abruptly he quits his job at the newspaper, leaves England forever, and becomes an international traveler, pursuing the Captain in Panama with the intention of completing in a foreign setting the work he had begun earlier. He continues writing until the Captain is killed; then he feels adrift without his subject. Now dissatisfied with his work, he discards it and leaves for the


romantic destination Valparaiso, only to meet his death enroute to the airport. These events do not present a literal account of Graham Greene’s career any more than Querry’s fable in A Burnt-Out Case offers a literal description of his own life—or Greene’s— even though that fable is audaciously suggestive of both. The parallels between Jim’s life at school and Greene’s have been mentioned already, but it should be added that Greene also escaped to London: as a boy he was sent to live there with Kenneth Richmond for several months of analysis and therapy, and as a young man he went to London in the hope of getting work as a journalist; he eventually landed a job as sub-editor for The Times, but only after a year of apprenticeship with a provincial newspaper, the Nottingham Journal. He did well at The Times and contemplated a career as journalist, only to abandon the job when his ambition to be a novelist was bolstered by the success in 1929 of The Man Within, a novel that is not autobiographical like Jim Baxter’s book but is closely related to his own life and personality. It is unhappily true also that Greene turned away from the wife he had vowed to love until death and ventured into affairs with numerous women. Many of these relationships must have been meaningless in Jim Baxter’s sense of the word; Greene, as mentioned earlier, said that he had been the lover of more than forty women. The war years brought about something of a hiatus in Greene’s work: the man who had published eight novels in the 1930s produced only two—The Ministry of Fear and The Heart of the Matter—between 1940 and 1951. (The novella The Third Man originated as a treatment for a film script.) And although his first full-length novel of the ’50s was set in England (London, in The End of the Affair), ten of the twelve remaining would have settings completely or primarily outside of England. (Most of the action in The Human Factor and about half of that in The Captain takes place in England.) Panama became the terminus for Greene’s writing as it does for Jim’s. The latter’s quest for his subject leads him into political intrigue and the opportunity to become involved in Central American politics as a double agent; his death makes impossible a prediction about what the future might have held for him, but his decision to leave for a new adventure in Valparaiso—a destination that in context seems more symbolic than real—emphasizes the end of his


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work as a writer. (Jim’s imagination parallels that of the sculptor’s son in Carving a Statue, who dreams of life as a sailor bound for Valparaiso.) Whether Graham Greene regarded The Captain as a last novel is unclear, though given his age and his admitted difficulty with the book, the strong possibility must have occurred to him. To these parallels might be added the reminder that Jim Baxter’s “work” is comprised of two phases, the first of which centers around childhood, imagination, school, and the passage to adulthood in a domestic English setting; the second phase, by a more mature and experienced writer, looks back on the first, explains apologetically the autobiographical nature of that first phase, and pursues the understanding of love at the same time it is drawn into political intrigue in an international setting. While it would be an exaggeration to imply that these divisions correspond precisely to the two phases discussed in this study, it interesting to see how the writer who preferred not to be reminded of patterns in his work created in his last novel a pattern that bears a curious resemblance to the shape of his own career. After Jim’s departure, the manuscript of his book falls into the hands of Colonel Martinez, who concludes upon reading it that “the boy had talent” and should have stuck to the safe activity of writing. Martinez puzzles especially over the book’s ending, in which the Captain in his last letter wishes that he had the strength of King Kong, and Jim remarks that it was strange that the Captain, too, had thought of Kong. Could it be “a name in some elementary book code…?”, Martinez asks Quigly, who claims that does not know and leaves. Martinez then explains to the translator who is working on the book why the question is important: “It haunts me that name King Kong. King Kong is the only clue we have. Could he be a name in some elementary book code which is all they would have trusted to an amateur like that? A character in Shakespeare perhaps. Some famous line that even the gringos would recognize. Well, the boy’s gone. He can do no harm to us. All the same…how I would like to break that code of his.” (188)


As they talk, a telephone call brings the news of Jim’s death. “It is all the more important that you go on with the translation,” Martinez concludes, “however irrelevant the earlier parts may seem. The vital question remains—what or who is King Kong?” (189) Whether Kong provides an adequate symbol for Greene’s purpose here is at least debatable. My own feeling is that he does not, and that the result is an unsureness of tone: there appears to be cause for laughter, though whether that cause is Martinez’s ignorance of Kong, or Jim’s failure to persuade his first readers that the book is more than a code for spies, or the Captain’s grotesque sentimentality in identifying with the immortal gorilla, or simply the absurdity of the entire affair, is difficult to determine. Certainly there is an element of selfreflexive humor in this late introduction of the idea of a book code. We are reminded of Greene’s familiarity with such codes in his SS work, and more importantly of his fondness for private codes in love letters. Moreover, Jim’s speculation about the Captain’s possible use of coded telegrams recalls familiar territory in Greene’s fiction: I wondered if he used some kind of code in his telegrams— perhaps something as simple as the book code which as a boy I had once read about in a novel of espionage. The spy and his correspondents chose a sentence out of an agreed book perhaps an edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, which would give a wide choice of lines to play with, and on that sentence and its order of words the code was somehow based. (165) Although Jim could not have read it as a boy, one book that fits the description perfectly is Greene’s The Human Factor, published in 1978–the year in which the concluding events of The Captain occur. And Greene’s character Wormold in Our Man in Havana employs a book code based upon Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Jim’s book is not a code for spies, yet a fable too is a kind of coded message, and the question with which Martinez is left—“Who is King Kong?”—is simply a displaced version of the unanswered question that overarches Jim’s story:


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Who is the Captain? And this is ultimately, I believe, a question about writing itself. Who is the Captain? What is the meaning of his relationship with Liza? These are the implied questions Jim pursues to the full limit of his craft, carefully reconstructing events in an attempt to make his characters come alive. As narrator he employs a realist convention, pointing out that he does not pretend to recall all of the words of conversations but is filling in gaps in the words because he wants to hear once more the tone of their voices: “Above all,” he says, “I want to understand the only two people in whom I could recognize what I suppose can be described as a kind of love, a kind which to this day I have certainly never felt in myself” (60). “Why am I so possessed by them?” Jim asks midway through his story. He never discovers a definite answer, though one might be offered in the form of a parallel question: why was Greene so possessed by questions about the nature of love that he made it a persistent theme in his novels of the last forty years of his life? Thinking of his own question leads Jim to reflect upon the writer’s necessary sang-froid: “It is as though I had taken them coldbloodedly, as fictional characters, to satisfy this passionate desire of mine to write” (51). His creator too had sometimes evinced concern over the morality of fictionalizing the lives of those to whom one is attached by love or other ties, as he had done at various times in his career. To the extent that writing is an attempt to understand, to reach the truth, then failure—whether for the weakest unpublished novel or the year’s bestseller—is the author’s inability to achieve that understanding. Jim never gains what he wants from his writing, never learns to love, never forms any lasting ties, loyalties, or allegiances. His loneliness and the uncertainty of his narration again recall the condition of Bendrix in The End of the Affair, and one suspects that in The Captain, as in that earlier novel, Greene was influenced by what may be the greatest masterpiece in which a naive narrator chronicles his utter inability to understand the love experienced by the characters who most interest and affect him. “I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men,” writes John Dowell in F.M.Ford’s The Good Soldier. “I only know that I am alone, horribly alone” (9).


Greene’s epigraph poses the question, “Will you be sure to know the good side from the bad, the Captain from the enemy?” A version of this question becomes Jim’s problem near the end of the book: confused by Quigly, angered by the Captain, he treats the Captain as his enemy. The Captain offers to show Jim “one of the mules in its own stable”—i.e., his plane, used in his smuggling activity, on his secret airstrip. The occasion produces the most direct scene of betrayal in the novel: “You and I will be the only ones who know where the stable is—except of course a few of my real friends who will never, I hope, betray me…. You are one of my real friends, aren’t you?” Jim reasons that he was blameless for answering yes, “for if he was not my friend, who, literally on earth, was my friend now that Liza was dead?” (145) In the context of the novel’s prominent theme of love and loyalty, the enemy is of course Jim himself, who is destructive because he cannot love. He fails to take care of Liza, fails to show adequate concern for the Captain in the matter of her death, fails to show or feel love or gratitude for either of them. Such failures lead him to bring about the Captain’s death and to blunder into his own. Readers may recall that many years earlier, in The End of the Affair, the narrator Bendrix had written of the “enemies of love” as being the “devil’s saints” who would set out to destroy love wherever they found it. Perhaps it is instructive in this regard to recall Jim’s ancestry: his father has tried to persuade him not to use the word love and has implied that love doesn’t exist. And the father is, according to Jim’s mother, “the Devil.” How strong is the link between author and character in The Captain and the Enemy? Surely any attempt to argue that Jim’s inability to love means that Greene did not experience, understand, or believe in love would be offset by the equally compelling argument that the opposite is proved by his confident, convincing portrayals of married love in The Human Factor, or brotherly love and the love of God in Monsignor Quixote. Yet Greene’s greatest personal failure very likely did lie in his mistreatment of those he loved, and he made no secret of his troubled conscience in his abandonment of first Vivien and then Dorothy. To Father Duran he remarked that in bringing about the breakup of his marriage he had been “the base Indian who threw the pearl away, richer than all his tribe…” (314). These matters deeply troubled Greene, and those


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characters in whom the failure of love and the failure of art converge—Bendrix, Querry, Brown, and finally Jim—suggest that the question was one Greene felt compelled to return to again and again. It seems impossible not to conclude that Jim’s status as an outsider, someone who by failure of imagination or understanding or some innate quality is, as it were, denied access to love, probably does reflect in some way upon the author’s self-concept. Jim puzzles over and eventually admires and envies the love of the Captain and Liza, but in his own life he knows only “meaningless affairs.” Unlike his foster parents, he does use the word love, but it has no meaning. To “know the Captain,” then, is on one level to know and understand the central question of love in human relationships. Jim uses his writing to try to reach that understanding, and he fails; his failure in art and his failure in life are coterminous. But he also understands that the Captain, as his subject, represents far more than just a single question or set of related questions. The writer’s quest—for answers, truth, control, escape—is the heart of the fable. As a figure strongly identified with Graham Greene’s early reading—part of his inspiration and motivation to write—and as a traveler in search of wealth that is forever elusive, a moral rather than a tangible quality, the Captain symbolizes the pursuit of art itself. And as a man who struggles to control words, peppering his letters with obscure polysyllables recalled from his reading of the dictionary in a POW camp, he is a symbol of the artist. Jim seems to grasp intuitively this understanding of the Captain’s life even though he does not fully appreciate it: I told Mr. Quigly the story which the Devil had told me of the prison camp and the half-destroyed dictionary. “He doesn’t often use words like that when he speaks, but they seem to get control when he writes.” “Like a poet?” “Not much of a poet.” But suddenly I thought, can it be from the Captain I have somehow inherited this irritating desire to be a writer? It certainly wasn’t from the Devil or from my mother, and I began to feel a certain shame that I might be betraying to Mr. Quigly one who had perhaps in a sense fathered me. Didn’t I a bit resemble, in my desire


to find words, the Captain in his perpetual search for the mules which carried gold? (140) What the Captain sought becomes a symbol for what the serious writer wants from words: the “realms of gold” of which Keats wrote, in a poem that coincidentally concludes an image of awe-struck discoverers in Panama, “Silent upon a peak in Darien.” Words are the treasure, the Spanish gold, the object of the quest and of life itself. Finally, Jim’s quest to describe the Captain, to make him come alive through words, and to understand him is symbolically the writer’s pursuit of answers to ultimate questions of which the specific one about love is only representative: If it were possible for the Captain to read what I am writing now he would learn how much I have continued to wonder about him—he is to me an eternal question-mark never to be answered, like the existence of God, and so, as all theologians do, I continue to write in order to turn the question over and over without any hope of answer. (109) The Captain symbolizes such eternal questions that drive the serious writer who seeks—to borrow a phrase—the heart of the matter. Jim has written to turn the question over and over again without any hope of answer, and so has Greene. It is both explanation and defense, acceptance and loss. FINIS Jim’s brief life ends with what might be seen as a despairing gesture. Convinced that “this failed book of mine” has not satisfied its purpose, has not answered the burning question, he writes a line under all this scroll before I throw the whole thing into the same waste-paper basket, where anyone who chooses can find it. The line means Finis. I’m on my own now and I am following my own mules to find my own future. (180)


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But of course what awaits Jim is death; he has no future that is separate from the book he is writing and in which he will live. The logic of the fable as I have been describing it might seem to point toward Graham Greene’s having lost belief in his own work, but I think not. Rather, it is important to remember that Jim does not destroy the work. Someone who finds it may read, or publish, or destroy. It is not for him to decide, for at the end of life that is what all writers, the best and worst, must do; at the end all abandon their works to readers who must judge what is to be preserved and remain in print, what is good, bad, or great, what is false or true, lead or gold.

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Selected Bibliography

(A) WORKS BY GRAHAM GREENE Novels Brighton Rock. 1938. New York and London: Penguin, 1970. A Burnt-Out Case. 1960. New York and London: Penguin, 1977. The Captain and the Enemy. 1988. New York and London: Penguin, 1989. The Comedians. 1966. New York and London: Penguin, 1976. The Confidential Agent. 1939. New York and London: Penguin, 1971. Dr. Fischer of Geneva. 1980. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. The End of the Affair. 1952. New York and London: Penguin, 1975. England Made Me. 1935. New York and London: Penguin, 1970. A Gun for Sale. 1936. New York and London: Penguin, 1974. The Heart of the Matter. 1948. New York and London: Penguin, 1978. The Honorary Consul New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. The Human Factor. 1975. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. It’s a Battlefield. 1934. New York and London: Penguin, 1977. Loser Takes All 1954. New York and London: Penguin, 1971. The Man Within. 1929. New York and London: Penguin, 1977. The Ministry of Fear. 1943. New York and London: Penguin, 1978. Monsignor Quixote. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. The Name of Action. 1930. New York: Doubleday, 1931. Our Man in Havana. 1958. New York and London: Penguin, 1969. The Power and the Glory. 1940. New York and London: Penguin, 1971. The Quiet American. 1955. New York and London: Penguin, 1977. Rumour at Nightfall London: Heinemann, 1931. Stamboul Train. 1932. New York and London: Penguin, 1975. The Tenth Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Travels with My Aunt. 1969. New York and London: Penguin, 1977.

312 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Other Works “The Basement Room.” Collected Stories. New York: Viking, 1973. “Henry James: The Private Universe.” Collected Essays. New York and London: Penguin, 1970. 21–34 “Henry James: The Religious Aspect.” Collected Essays.: New York and London: Penguin, 1970. 34–44. “The Horoscopic Approach.” Rev. of Pretty Witty Nell by Clifford Bax. The Spectator, 23 December 1932:897–98. “Introduction” to Kim Philby, My Silent War. London: Panther, 1969. J’Accuse—The Dark Side of Nice. London: The Bodley Head, 1982. Journey Without Maps. 1936. New York and London: Penguin, 1980. The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism 1935–40. Ed. John Russell Taylor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. A Sort of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. Ways of Escape: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. “The Worm inside the Lotus Blossom.” Daily Telgraph Magazine, 3 January 1969. Rpt. in Reflections. Ed. Judith Adamson. New York and London: Reinhardt, 1990.

(B) CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS Allain, Marie-Françoise. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. Atkins, John. Graham Greene. New York: Roy, 1958. Allott, Kenneth, and Miriam Farris. The Art of Graham Greene. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951. Bax, Clifford. Pretty Witty Nell. New York: Wm. Morrow, 1933. Biles, Jack. “‘Mistook for the Symbolic’ at Brighton & Elsewhere: Greene and the Association of Ideas.” Essays in Graham Greene: An Annual Review. Ed. Peter Wolfe. Greenville, Fl.: The Penkevill Publishing Company, 1987. Vol. I: 25–46. Boardman, Gwen. Graham Greene: The Aesthetics of Exploration. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1971. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1961. Braybrooke, Neville. “Graham Greene: A Pioneer Novelist.” College English 12 (October 1950)s: 1–9. Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 1888. Rpt. London: Oxford, 1940. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends. Boston: Houghton, 1990.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 313

Cassis, A.F. ed. Graham Greene: Man of Paradox. Foreword by Peter Wolfe. Chicago: Loyola U P, 1994. Choi, Jae-Suck. Greene and Unamuno: Two Pilgrims to La Mancha. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Christ, Carol. Victorian and Modern Poetics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984. Clarens, Carlos. Crime Movies: An Illustrated History. New York: Norton, 1980. Couto, Mario. Graham Greene: On the Frontier. New York: St. Martins, 1986. Crawford, Fred D. Mixing Memory and Desire: The Waste Land and British Novels. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1982. Dear David, Dear Graham: A Bibliophilic Correspondence. Oxford: Alembic, with Amate, 1989. Desmond, John F. “The Heart of (the) Matter: The Mystery of the Real in Monsignor Quixote. Religion & Literature 22 (1): 59–78. DeVitis, A.A. Graham Greene. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Donaghy, Henry J. Graham Greene: An Introduction to His Writings. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983. Duran, Fr. Leopoldo. Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant. Trans. Euan Cameron. London: HarperCollins, 1994. Durgnat, Raymond. Luis Bunuel. Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1977. Eagleton, Terry. Rev. of The Captain and the Enemy. Times Literary Supplement. 16 September 1988:1013. Eliot, T.S. “Baudelaire.” Selected Essays. 1917–52. New York: Harcourt, 1932. Evans, Robert O. Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1963. Ford, John, Thomas Dekker, and Samuel Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton. The Works of John Ford. Ed. William Gifford. 3 vols. 1895. Rpt. New York: Russell, 1965. Gaston, George M.A. The Pursuit of Salvation: A Critical Guide to the Novels of Graham Greene. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1984. Henry, Patrick. “Doubt and Certitude in Monsignor Quixote.” College Literature 12, 1 (1985), 68–79. Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1972. James, Henry. “Preface” to Wings of the Dove.” 1909. Rpt. New York: Modern Library, 1930. Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners. New York and London: Penguin, 1993. 125–225.

314 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Karl, Frederick R. The Contemporary English Novel. New York: Farrar, 1962. Kelly, Richard. Graham Greene. New York: Ungar, 1984. Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition.. New York: Norton, 1957. Lewis, R.W.B. The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction. New York: Lippincott, 1959. Lodge, David. Graham Greene. New York: Columbia U P, 1966. Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. 1932. New York: Norton, 1957. Parini, Jay “Getting to Know Graham Greene”. Interview 18 (1988): 70–73. Rpt. in Cassis, 443–55. Patten, Karl. “The Structure of The Power and the Glory.” Modern Fiction Studies 3 (1951): 225–34. Rama Rao, V.V.B. Graham Greene ‘s Comic Vision. New Delhi: Reliance, 1990. Sharrock, Roger. Saints, Sinners, and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene. Tunbridge Wells and Notre Dame: Burns and Oates and U of Notre Dame P, 1984. Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene. 2 vols. to date. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1989-. Smith, Grahame. The Achievement of Graham Greene. Totowa, NJ: Barnes, 1986. ——. “Post-modern Elements in the Novels of Graham Greene.” In Graham Greene in Perspective. Ed. Peter Erlebach and Thomas M. Stein. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991. 189–99. Spurling, John. Graham Greene. London: Methuen, 1983. Stratford, Philip. Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in Greene and Mauriac. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1964. Sutro, John. “Greene’s Jests.” The Spectator, 29 September 1984:16– 19. Rpt. in Cassis, 375–84. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Poetic and Dramatic Writings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Cambridge Ed. Boston: Houghton, 1898. Thale, Jerome, and Rose Marie Thale. “Greene’s ‘Literary Pilgrimage’”: Allusions in Travels with My Aunt” Papers on Language and Literature 13 (1977), 207–12. Theroux, Paul. “Graham Greene.” New York Times Book Review. 18 April 1991. Thomas, Brian. An Underground Fate: The Idiom of Romance in the Later Novels of Graham Greene. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1988.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 315

Unamuno, Miguel de. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. Trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, v. 4. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1972. Wilde, Oscar. The Plays of Oscar Wilde. New York: The Modern Library, n.d. Rev. of The Witch of Edmonton. The Times, 9 December 1936:12. Wobbe, R.A. Graham Greene: A Bibliography and Guide to Research. NewYork and London: Garland, 1969. Wolfe, Peter. Graham Greene the Entertainer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1972. Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” 1924. The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1950. 94–119. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, Selected Poems and Sonnets. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Holt, 1954.

316

Index

Allain, Marie-Françoise, vii, 35, 88, 90, 210, 242, 256, 269 Allott, Kenneth, vii, xiii, 2, 12, 23, 30, Atkins, John, ix, 57, 136, “The Basement Room,” 296 Bax, Clifford, 86–88, Berkhamsted, 30, 156, 231, 232, 237, 245, 251, 291, 294, 300 Biles, Jack, 9 Boardman, Gwenn, x Booth, Wayne, 58 Bowen, Elizabeth, 42, 90 Braybrooke, Neville, 58 Brighton Rock, x-xiv, 1, 7–9, 18, 19, 26, 28, 32, 48, 49, 51, 58, 73, 75, 75, 77, 81–83, 85, 86, 88–92, 98, 110, 117, 124, 136, 160, 161, 176, 183, 201, 202, 221, 254, 255, 266, 267, 289, 296 Brooke, Rupert, 37 Browning, Robert, 31, 36, 56, 59, 60, 75, 84, 91, 141, 149, 176, 237, 289 A Burnt-Out Case, xi, xiv, xvii The Captain and the Enemy, xv, 98, 117, 154, 175, 212, 245, 263, 284–287, 294, 296, 305

Cervantes, 277, 278 Choi, Jae-Suck, 275–277 Christ, Carol, 59 Christ, 15, 19–2, 149, 171, 238, 242, 254, 263, 265 Clarens, Carlos, 48, 312 TheComedians, ix-xii, 107, 110, 116, 133, 136, 154, 159, 163, 175–177, 180, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 212, 215, 220, 234, 247, 257, 261, 283 The Confidential Agent, xv, 73, 98, 101, 109, 114, 115, 132, 138, 188 Conrad, Joseph, ix, xiv, 28, 145, 165–167, 169, 176, 235 Crawford, Fred, 49, 51, 56, 63, 90, 199 Dekker, Thomas, 92 Desmond, 280 DeVitis, A.A., x, xiii Dr. Fischer of Geneva, 116, 133, 154, 212, 224, 289 Duran, Fr. Leopoldo, 217, 259– 262, 275, 278, 282, 284, 287, 306 Durgnat, Raymond, 218 Eagleton, Terry, 288, 289 Eliot, T.S., 49, 51, 56, 91, 144

Carpenter, 136, 141, 145, 312 317


The End of the Affair, vii–xi, xiii, xiv, 99, 105, 109, 116, 133, 136, 138–141, 143, 144, 147, 152–155, 157, 158, 161, 163– 165, 167–170, 172–174, 176, 190, 194, 196, 197, 202, 224, 231, 236–239, 242–246, 250, 251, 255, 257, 261, 279, 289, 296, 302, 305 England Made Me, 5, 15, 17, 24, 28, 29, 32, 42, 44, 46–48, 55, 57, 85, 117, 148, 200, 231, 309 Evans, Robert O., 90 Farris, Miriam, ix, 2, 12, 23, 30 Faulkner, William, xii, 51, 55, 75 First-Phase Protagonists, xv, 1– 30, 31, 59, 69, 117 Andrews, 1–2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 22, 26, 29, 34, 99, 100, 110, 143, 262, 276, 283, 291–293 Chant, 1, 10–12, 14, 17, 26, 29, 33, 39, 99, 222 Chase, 1, 2, 12, 15, 23, 26, 29, 45, 110, 222, 296 Conrad Drover, 28, 59, 100 Crane, 1–2, 7, 12, 14, 15, 18, 23, 26, 29, 32, 99, 110, 144, 222 Jules Briton, 5, 16, 17, 24 Myatt, 3, 5, 15, 16, 23 Pinkie, xiv, xv, 1, 7–9, 19–21, 25–28, 33, 35, 48, 52, 59, 66, 73, 75–84, 86, 88–97, 98–101, 117, 124, 141–144, 159, 161, 202, 221, 254, 258, 262, 276, 296 Raven, xv, 1, 6, 7, 18, 25–28, 33, 51–55, 59–67, 69–71, 73, 74, 75, 84, 99–102, 117, 124, 141, 143, 231, 254, 296 Tony, 6, 26, 48, 117 Ford, John, 92 Forster, E.M., 44

Glover, Dorothy, 112, 115, 158, 201 A Gun for Sale, xv, 6, 18, 25, 32, 42, 48, 49, 51, 55, 56, 58–61, 63–66, 68, 72–75, 75, 77, 124, 176, 231, 254, 267, 289, 296 Greene, Vivien, 30–42, 47, 74, 112, 114, 115, 132, 145, 151, 152, 156, 158, 159, 176, 183, 190, 208, 211, 306 Gwyn, Nell, 86, 87 Hardy, Thomas, 37, 39, 177, 283 The Heart of the Matter, ix, xv, 73, 105, 109, 111–113, 115, 132, 136, 138, 165, 250, 307 The Honorary Consul, xii, xiii, xv, 99, 110, 116, 154, 175, 212, 214–216, 221, 222, 224, 227, 234, 235, 245, 250, 257, 266, 289, 298 The Human Factor, 107, 116, 133, 212, 216, 217, 224, 230, 231, 233–237, 241–246, 251, 255, 261, 289, 302, 304, 306 Hynes, Samuel, 73, 74, 313

It’s a Battlefield, 1, 3, 23, 28, 29, 32, 42, 46, 47, 57, 59, 74, 77, 85, 145, 176 James, Henry, vii, ix, xv, 6, 25, 44, 45, 51, 60, 61, 65, 66, 75, 90–92, 163, 183, 200, 231 Journey Without Maps, 122, 124, 139, 166 Joyce, James, xii, 132, 176, 179, 183 J’Accuse, 252 Kelly, Richard, 313 Langbaum, Robert, 59, 65 Lewis, R.W.B., vi, 120

INDEX 319

Lodge, David, ix Loser Takes All, 100, 106, 117 The Ministry of Fear, xiii, 44, 55, 73, 100, 102, 109, 116, 120, 122–125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 138, 176, 194, 204, 206, 231, 250, 266, 289, 302

Monsignor Quixote, xv, 28, 110, 117, 133, 175, 212, 245, 256, 258–260, 263–271, 275–277, 281, 282, 284, 287, 289, 306 The Name of Action, 1, 2, 10, 14, 25, 30, 33, 35, 57, 222, 289 Ortega y Gasset, José, 46 Our Man in Havana, 100, 106, 117, 163, 304 Parini, Jay, 183 Patten, Karl, 120, 314 Philby, Kim, 311 Pleasure Dome, 85, 311 The Power and the Glory, 73, 101, 105, 106, 109, 110, 115, 119, 120, 137, 208, 257, 266– 271, 276, 285, 289 Rama Rao, V.V.W., xiv Redemption, 10, 11, 14, 15, 31, 85, 280 Rowley, Samuel, 92, 313 Rumour at Nightfall, 1, 2, 12, 14, 19, 30, 35, 44, 57, 110, 221, 289 Second-Phase Protagonists, xv, 100–117 Baxter, Jim, 5, 17, 23, 24, 98, 117, 133, 284, 285, 288, 291– 302, 304–308 Bendrix, vii, 99, 100, 105, 106, 116, 117, 133, 138, 140– 149, 152–160, 162, 163, 169–

174, 178, 180, 181, 196, 222, 224–226, 228, 237–243, 246, 248, 250, 257, 262, 279, 296– 298, 304, 305 Bertram, 106, 117, 190 Brown (in Comedians), xv, 1, 7, 9, 25, 33, 37, 51, 75, 100, 107, 110, 111, 116, 117, 133, 133, 142, 154, 162, 163, 176– 188, 190, 192, 212, 222, 228, 257, 297, 306 Castle, Maurice, 42, 99, 111, 116, 117, 133, 217, 230–238, 241, 242, 245, 246, 250, 251, 296 Chavel, 107, 108 D, xv, 98–102, 107, 109, 115, 117, 119, 208 Father Quixote, 99, 110, 117, 119, 258, 263–274, 277–279 Fowler, 33, 100, 111, 117, 133, 152–163, 253 Jones, 99, 116, 133, 154, 178, 181–185, 187, 246–251, 253– 256, 262, 283 Martins, 7, 105, 117, 132, 146, 152 Querry, xi, xiii, 100, 107, 109, 111, 116, 117, 159, 163–175, 203, 212, 262, 297, 306 Pulling, Henry, 42, 99, 107, 117, 132, 188–192, 194, 195, 203, 204, 216, 223, 228, 229, 232, 265, 271, 278, 297 Rowe, 100, 102–105, 109, 116, 117, 120, 121, 124–128, 130, 131, 138, 204–206, 250 Scobie, x, 100, 105, 109–114, 132, 144, 148, 159, 169, 174, 194, 250 the whisky priest, 100, 101, 109, 117, 117, 137, 208, 257, 258, 267, 269, 270


Wormold, 107, 117, 163, 164, 304 Sharrock, Roger, xi, xii Sherry, Norman, 31, 33–37, 40, 41, 57, 86, 112, 113, 120, 132, 140, 141, 145, 158, 160, 170, 201, 261 Smith, Grahame, xii, xiii, 86, 164, 177, 182 A Sort of Life, 52, 56, 60, 178, 189, 198, 200, 203, 232, 294 Stamboul Train, 1, 2, 3, 15, 23, 29, 32, 33, 42, 45, 57, 85, 144, 201, 266, 289 Stratford, Philip, 90 Sutro, John, 192 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 36, 37, 59, 66, 68, 72, 75, 141, 176, 206, 209, 289, 314 The Tenth Man, 107, 311 Thale, Jerome, 195, 314 Thale, Rose Marie, 195, 314 Theroux, Paul, 136, 314 The Third Man, vii, 73, 105, 132, 138, 152, 176, 302 Thomas, Brian, 39, 132, 133, 155, 163, 165, 177, 283 Travels with My Aunt, iv, 32, 42, 48, 66, 106, 109, 117, 132, 152, 188, 204, 206, 211, 213, 214, 221, 222, 242, 256, 258, 263– 266, 269, 271, 278, 281, 289 Unamuno, Miguel de, 259, 261, 275–277, 280 Walston, Catherine, 112, 141, 172, 200, 213 Ways of Escape, vi, 194, 216, 230, 237, 295 Wilde, Oscar, 223 Women (characters)

Anna Hilfe, 102, 103, 116, 125, 131, 204 Anna Schmidt, 152 Anna-Luise Jones, 204, 233, 236, 246–251, 253–257 Anne Crowder, 6, 18, 25, 51– 55, 63, 69–71, 102, 143, 222, 296 Aunt Augusta, 109, 189–192, 194, 195, 197–204, 206, 207, 209, 210, 223, 224, 229, 236, 265, 271, 278 Clara Fortnum, 154, 221, 222, 225–229, 250, 299 Coral Fellowes, 73, 102, 151, 208 Coral Musker, 3, 15, 16, 23, 26 Elizabeth, 1, 2, 10, 14, 22, 23, 26, 33, 101, 107, 110, 151, 190, 293 Else Crowle, 73, 100, 102, 108, 208 Eulelia Monti, 2, 5, 12–15, 23, 32, 101, 222 Helen Fowler, 155, 156 Helen Rolt, 105, 110, 144 Ida Arnold, 8, 22, 26, 79, 82, 85–89, 96, 151, 162, 190, 197, 201 Kay Rimmer, 5, 16, 17, 24, 26, 57, 151, 190 Liza, 154, 288, 292, 293, 295– 300, 304–306 Marie Rycker, 107, 170–173 Martha Pineda, 107, 154, 178, 180–182, 185, 187 Milly Drover, 5, 23, 24, 45, 57, 151 Phuong, 152, 155–157, 159– 161, 253 Rose Cullen, 73, 101, 108, 119

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 321

Rose Wilson, 8, 9, 19–22, 26, 73, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 88, 89, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98–100, 142, 151, 159, 161, 162, 202, 221, 229 Sarah Castle, 111, 230–233, 235–245, 251, 261 Sarah Miles, 105, 106, 109– 111, 116, 138–143, 145–152, 155, 157, 159, 160, 168, 170– 173, 180, 181, 190, 196, 225, 226, 229, 237–243, 246–248, 279, 300 Thérèse Mangeot, 107, 108 Woolf, Virginia, xii, 44, 176, 182, 192 Wordsworth, William, 91, 122, 125–126, 129, 130, 132, 176, 187, 188, 201, 203, 204, 206, 210, 247 “The Worm inside the Lotus Blossom,” 42 Yeats, W.B. 37, 41, 176, 177

Permissions Acknowledgements

PENGUIN PUTNAM INC. From THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE, VOL. I & II by Norman Sherry. Copyright © 1989, 1994 by Norman Sherry. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE CAPTAIN AND THE ENEMY by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1988 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE END OF THE AFFAIR by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1951, renewed © 1979 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1969, renewed © 1997 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From ANOTHER MEXICO (LAWLESS ROADS) by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1939, renewed © 1967 by Graham Greene. British title LAWLESS ROADS. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From a BURNT-OUT CASE by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1960, 1961, 1975 renewed © 1988, 1989 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE COMEDIANS by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1965, 1966, renewed © 1993, 1994 by Graham Greene. Used by

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permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1939, renewed © 1967 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From A GUN FOR SALE by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1936, renewed © 1964 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1948, renewed © 1976 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From IT’S A BATTLEFIELD by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1934, renewed © 1962 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. “The Lost Childhood”, “Henry James: The Religious Aspect”, from THE LOST CHILDHOOD AND OTHER ESSAYS by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1951, 1966, 1968, 1969 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE MAN WITHIN by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1929, renewed © 1957 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE MINISTRY OF FEAR by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1943, renewed © 1971 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE POWER AND THE GLORY by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1940, 1968 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE QUIET AMERICAN by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1955, 1956, renewed © 1984 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. From THE SHIPWRECKED (ENGLAND MADE ME) by Graham Greene. Copyright © 1935, renewed © 1962 by Graham Greene. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. “The Basement Room”, Copyright © 1936, renewed © 1964 by Graham Greene, “May We Borrow Your Husband?” Copyright ©

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