Graham Greene's Narrative Strategies: A Study of the Major Novels

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Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies A Study of the Major Novels

Murray Roston

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies

10.1057/9780230287082 - Graham Greene's Narrative Strategies, Murray Roston

By the Same Author PROPHET AND POET: THE BIBLE AND THE GROWTH OF ROMANTICISM BIBLICAL DRAMA IN ENGLAND: FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE PRESENT DAY

MILTON AND THE BAROQUE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE RENAISSANCE PERSPECTIVES: IN LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS CHANGING PERSPECTIVES: IN LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS, 1650–1820 VICTORIAN CONTEXTS: LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS MODERNIST PATTERNS: IN LITERATURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS THE SEARCH FOR SELFHOOD IN MODERN LITERATURE



THE SOUL OF WIT: A STUDY OF JOHN DONNE

A Study of the Major Novels

Murray Roston




© Murray Roston 2006

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00345–3 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–00345–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roston, Murray. Graham Greene’s narrative strategies : a study of the major novels / Murray Roston. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–00345–1 1. Greene, Graham, 1904–1991 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PR6013. R44Z73 2006 823'.912—dc22

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Acknowledgments

vi

1 The Strategies

1

2 The Power and the Glory

15

3 The Heart of the Matter

42

4 The End of the Affair

65

5 A Burnt-Out Case

83

6 The Comedians

104

7 The Honorary Consul

125

8 Monsignor Quixote

141

Notes

157

Select Bibliography

165

Index

167

v



Contents

I should like to express my gratitude to colleagues in the English department at UCLA for the hospitality they invariably extend to me on my frequent visits there – visits that, in addition to the pleasure of teaching, offer me access to larger libraries than are available in Israel. My thanks also to Ms. Paula Kennedy who graciously provided editorial support for this project. Quotations from Greene’s novels are from the standard Penguin editions (the De Luxe editions issued for the Greene centennial have different pagination) and they appear here by permission of Random House. I dedicate this book with deepest affection to my wife, Faith.

vi



Acknowledgments

1

When Greene was still in the early stages of his career, Marie Mesnet set the tone for much subsequent criticism by identifying parallels between events in the novels and Greene’s own life, the similarities, she maintained, being too close to be ignored. It has become commonplace since then to read the novels in the light of the author’s childhood difficulties at Berkhampstead where the green baize door divided him from the school of which his father was headmaster, in the light of incidents occurring on his journeys through Liberia, Mexico, and Haiti, as well as in the light of his religious beliefs, on the assumption that Greene had ‘translated his own experiences’ into his fiction.1 In that tradition, Roland Pierloot has provided a full-length psychological analysis in which he extrapolates incidents from Greene’s life into his exegesis of the novels and, in a reverse process, deduces from his reading of the novels and of the psychological condition of its characters a delineation of Greene’s emotional condition, traumas, and repressions. Similarly, W.J. West has chosen as the central theme for his study of the major novels what he terms ‘the “portraits of the artist” through which Greene confronts more directly and personally the tensions and conflicts of his personal life’. In the most extreme instance, Robert Hoskins, discussing the central character of The Power and the Glory, concludes: ‘The whiskey priest, then, is Greene himself.’2 Some relationship undoubtedly exists between an author’s personal experiences and the literary creations; but biographers’ attempts to trace fictional events to incidents in a writer’s life are at all times fraught with danger, since in the process of displacement such experiences inevitably undergo distortion. They are refashioned not only by being filtered through the author’s selective memory, a process involving retrospective reassessments of the events but also, when employed fictionally, by the 1



The Strategies


need to adapt the events to the contextual requirements of the new setting. In most cases, no reliable evidence is available for us to identify the nature or the extent of such reassessments and adaptations. On the other hand, from a number of comments he made, Greene appears to invite such linking of his fiction to past events within his own life. In an essay on the young Dickens written in 1950, he remarked that ‘the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share.’ Elsewhere, he has one of his characters remark: ‘For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation – but I think it is equally true of us all.’3 Moreover, his publication of a series of autobiographical works, including his essay, ‘The Lost Childhood’, and his full-length books A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape, together with the accounts of his travels in Journey Without Maps and The Lawless Roads, seem to have been offered by him as keys to his fictional writing. There is, however, a factor specific to Greene’s character that would seem to neutralise such parallels, quite apart from the asperity with which he has repeatedly rejected such procedures: ‘The opinions in my novels are not mine; they are the opinions of my characters. Readers are very stupid about this.’4 In a prefatory letter to Paul Rostenne’s Graham Greene Témoin des Temps Tragiques, he deplored the tendency to see his characters as extensions of self, insisting that he was motivated in writing not by the desire to express his own thoughts about humankind but by an authorial desire to describe the destiny of his characters. That warning has been expressed by many writers sharing this dislike of confusing fiction with autobiography; but the attempt to relate the two in Greene’s case, relying on reminiscences gleaned from the author’s conversations or from his published comments, needs to be treated with redoubled caution. For he was not only extraordinarily reticent in all matters relating to his private life, with an almost obsessive objection to being interviewed but, on the rare occasions when he was persuaded to meet critics or journalists, he used the opportunity, as he readily admitted later, deliberately to mislead them, feeding his interlocutors with false information. He noted on one occasion that, although his work in the Intelligence had trained him to lie, his falsehoods to interviewers arose from a different cause – ‘I don’t like people plundering my private life … regarding me as source of articles written for their own profit’5 – so that, on his own testimony, it becomes difficult to take seriously any of his personal disclosures. Shortly after the author’s death, Norman Sherry,



2

The Strategies 3

he was an intensely secretive man. His whole life remained a mystery even to those closest to him: his brothers, Herbert, Raymond and Hugh, didn’t understand him; his mother and sister Molly were often mystified by him and even his favourite sister Elisabeth, loved and trusted by Greene, admitted to me that her favourite brother was not easily understood … . Greene remained a mystery because the masks he wore, except with intimates, were very real and necessary to him. If he was a mystery even to his close family, carefully guarding from them his inner self, how much reliance can be placed on his remarks to interviewers, which have provided the basis for much criticism? If we would be wise to view his statements with suspicion, one such remark does seem genuine since it so clearly supports Sherry’s impression of him, that on one occasion Greene mused with patent relish that if anybody ‘ever tries to write a biography of me, how complicated they are going to find it, and how misled they are going to be’.6 Michael Mewshaw has recorded the care with which, during lengthy and cordial conversations with Greene, he took notes concerning details of the author’s life, only to receive on publishing the article (for which he had received the author’s prior permission) a vitriolic letter from Greene accusing him of gross inaccuracy and wholesale invention, and repudiating almost every item the article contained.7 Doubt has even been cast on Greene’s early statement – so often cited as evidence of his suicidal tendencies – that as an adolescent he had toyed with death by playing Russian roulette; for in later years he blithely admitted that the bullets in the revolver were probably not live; and, since there is no reason to attach any greater credence to that later admission than to the earlier statement, the entire incident becomes unreliable as a biographical source.8 The fact that Greene recorded the incident and denied or at least modified it later may in itself shed some light on the interest it held for him, but it needs to be treated with far more caution than critics have accorded it. Michael Shelden’s avowedly hostile account of Greene’s life provides numerous instances of such duplicity, and if Shelden’s depiction of him as a treacherous character with ‘a devilish imagination and a heart full



feeling that he could now speak more freely of their relationship, revealed that, even though Greene had appointed him as his official biographer, much of the information the author imparted to him consisted of untruths, that Greene seemed to revel in prevarication, his life remaining a mystery even to his family:


of darkness’ emerges as a gross exaggeration, the specific incidents provided of Greene’s disinformation should serve as a warning against any naive acceptance of the author’s declarations concerning either his life or his beliefs. He especially resented being pestered with questions concerning the nature of his religious faith, and to one persistent interviewer’s queries, ‘But what sort of a Catholic are you? Do you go to church? Do you go to confession? Do you even believe?’ he replied sharply that he defined himself as ‘a Catholic agnostic’, while in another interview he went even further, stating he was ‘a Catholic atheist’ – a contradiction in terms which, although taken seriously by many critics, seems in the context of his other deliberate misdirections and subterfuges to have been merely a ploy to silence further unwelcome probings. Viewed in that context, the parallels to his own life that Greene inserted into his fiction are thus to some extent traps. He will, on the one hand, assure the reader in a foreword to The Comedians: 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. ‘Ah, it may be said, Brown is a Catholic and so, we know, is Greene.’ But the very fact that he provides the leading character with a name so obviously evocative of his own undercuts his denial, revealing Greene’s propensity to tease, and leaving us uncertain how seriously he intends his warning to be taken, if at all. The biographical approach has been similarly applied to the settings of his novels, by relating the fictional scenes to Greene’s travel experiences on the assumption that he felt an urge to sublimate events that had affected him deeply by translating them into literary form. On closer examination, that would seem to be the reverse of the truth, the travels having been undertaken with the conscious aim of providing suitable settings for forthcoming novels. For throughout his life, he chose the venue for his travels with an eye to ways in which their social, economic, or political settings could serve the emergent interests of his reading public. Miriam Allott has noted the endurance of his appeal as a writer, his popularity extending from the thirties to the eighties while



4

almost all other novelists fell by the wayside, and that enduring popularity she attributes to the extraordinary relevance of his themes to current affairs and their continual updating to suit current interests. He was, we should recall, in his original profession a journalist, tuned in to contemporary events and the varying attitudes of his time, and that ability stood him in good stead as a novelist, endowing him with a sensitivity to shifts in public concerns and indeed, with an ability to perceive approaching changes before they had become widely accepted. His attack upon the American intervention in foreign affairs in The Quiet American, one should note, preceded the public ferment aroused by the Vietnam war, and if the novel attracted considerable critical hostility on its first appearance, it won enormous popularity during that later period when Lyndon Johnson’s policies were being attacked. Similarly, his adoption of a leper colony as the setting for A Burnt Out Case shrewdly exploited the 1952 award of a Nobel Prize to Albert Schweitzer and the consequent reawakening of public interest in the missionary care of lepers;9 and The Honorary Consul took as its theme the political kidnappings that were then only beginning to be adopted on the world scene and that were due soon to become widespread.10 His primary purpose, it would seem, then, was not to unburden himself in print of travel-experiences that had disturbed him, but rather to select for his travels localities that he believed to be potentially topical and which he could then employ to enhance the appeal of his novels. In this present study, I propose to leave aside the question of such putative connections between the author’s life and his fiction, including conjectures whether, as Francis Kunkel and others have enquired, his personal beliefs place him religiously as a Jansenite, a Manichaean, a Pelagian, or a Gnostic, an aspect to which a collection of essays, amounting to over 600 pages has recently been added.11 In the same way, I distrust Greene’s statements about his craft. Some comments may be true, but with this background of his deliberate attempts to mislead and his reluctance to discuss his writing, we cannot know when he is expressing his true views and when his comments are either partial or complete prevarications – for even as partial prevarications they cannot be relied upon. I shall therefore be following an approach which is, I believe, always more valid in literary analysis than the pseudo-biographical, namely focussing upon the novels as texts, watching how they manipulate reader response, and attempting to identify the strategies whereby they achieve their effects. Implicit in that approach is the view that the religious stances of his fictional characters – so often assumed to be reflections of his own – should be seen instead as devices in a subtle process of



The Strategies 5


literary manoeuvre, techniques he initiated, often brilliantly, to overcome the mid-century invalidation of the traditional criteria for creating fictional heroes and to arouse, despite any potential hostility, the sympathy or respect of readers. In 1980, Stanley Fish illuminated our understanding of texts by recognising the distinction between the final, overall impression left by a work (which had, until then, formed the generally accepted criterion for literary assessment) and the subtle process whereby a reader’s response is made to fluctuate, often line by line or sentence by sentence, those changing responses playing a central part in the cumulative experience. He perceived how in Paradise Lost, Satan’s speech urging Eve to eat of the fruit is so persuasive that we are momentarily convinced by it; then the subsequent authorial comment, ‘So glozed the Serpent’ suddenly reminds us of the evil nature of the speaker and hence surprises us into a realisation that, had we been there, we too would probably have fallen. The power of Satan’s speech, therefore, instead of being seen, as it has so often been seen, as a weakness in the epic, working against the author’s main purpose, is understood anew as deliberate, a momentary inveigling of the reader’s sympathies in order, by the subsequent reversal, to intensify our awareness of the need to be always on our guard against temptation. Subsequently Fish rejected his earlier approach, replacing it with a new concern for the authority of interpretive communities, that is, the changing responses of different societies in various generations, and hence placing major emphasis on the ideas that readers bring to a literary work rather than on the validity of the text itself. He has, of course, been followed by the deconstructionist movement of Derrida and others, negating entirely the authority of texts.12 The main principle underlying my approach derives from a different literary theorist. Hans Jauss was close to Fish’s initial approach in his acknowledgment of the ways in which an author manipulates reader response; but there was one fundamental distinction. He perceived the relationship between reader and text as a two-directional discourse. For the author is not simply directing the reader’s response but struggling against it. The reader in each generation brings to the work a referential framework derived in part from past tradition and in part from the codes embedded within the immediately contemporary cultural matrix. Jauss suggests, therefore, that an innovative writer, aware of the reader’s ‘horizons of expectation’ – whether they be moral, philosophical, social, or aesthetic – must attempt to overcome them, to wean the reader away from them towards new or modified values. For literary historians, Jauss suggests, more important than a knowledge of the author’s beliefs and



6

background should be our perception of the writer’s resistance to that cultural configuration, an awareness of the disparity between the reader’s assumptions and those gradually imposed by the literary work.13 There should be discerned within each literary creation, therefore, a process of seduction whereby the text lures the reader away from his or her preconditioning, from the established concepts brought to the work, in order eventually to ensure the adoption of a new set of criteria by which the actions of the fictional protagonists are finally to be judged. Seen from that angle, the behavioural codes directing Greene’s characters should, it seems to me, be regarded not as authorial self-projections but as techniques for manoeuvring the reader into the eventual acceptance of moral, religious, or social values that the author wishes to impart. It is an approach that can lead in many instances to a fresh interpretation of the novels themselves. That approach is especially relevant to Greene’s generation, as he shared with all mid-century novelists an urgent need to combat certain problems that seemed to negate the possibility of producing effective fictional narrative. It is in that area that his greatest achievement may be perceived and in which he served as a pioneer, laying down principles and initiating techniques that many novelists were later to adopt, not least of which was the creation of the modern anti-hero. Elsewhere, I have discussed the nature of the twentieth-century despair that haunted almost all major writers of the time, and I attempted there to delineate its causes.14 Albert Camus summarised the general sense of purposelessness in his image of twentieth-century man as a Sisyphus condemned repeatedly and endlessly to propel a huge rock to the summit of a mountain only to watch it roll down again. And his bleak view was stated even more explicitly in the opening sentence of his study, that the only problem facing the contemporary individual was whether to commit suicide – a comment echoed in the numerous instances of suicide in the novels of his time, from Faulkner’s Quentin and Huxley’s Spandrell to Salinger’s Seymour Glass. The despair motivating such suicides was not from the personal predicament of the individual, such as the suicides occurring in the nineteenth-century novel – Anna Karenina outlawed by society for her extramarital liaison or the bankrupt financier Melmotte in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now – but a despondency of cosmic proportions, a sense that humanity as a whole was doomed to an aimless existence in a vast, cold, and indifferent universe. It was a gloom described by Sylvia Plath, in recalling her first attempt at suicide, as a time of ‘darkness, despair, and disillusion’.15 The Darwinian concept that homo sapiens was merely a chance offshoot of the animal



The Strategies 7


world, driven like all other creatures to struggle competitively for survival, appeared to have left humankind with the sole purpose of procreating and proliferating in order for the next generation, in an unending cycle, to continue the struggle. Joseph Wood Krutch voiced eloquently in the twenties the despondency that he and his fellow intellectuals were experiencing. Formerly, he writes, man had believed in even his darkest moments that the universe was rational if he could only grasp its rationality, but gradually he comes to suspect that rationality is an attribute of himself alone and that there is no reason to suppose that his own life has any more meaning than the life of the humblest insect that crawls from one annihilation to another. Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature, and among them man is but one—perhaps the most miserable of all, because he is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question ‘Why?’16 Hence it was that Samuel Beckett, in a play vividly depicting the modern condition, chose as its representatives not an astronaut, medical researcher, or computer engineer to illustrate its achievements but two tramps lost in a sterile world, waiting despondently for the unlikely arrival of a Mr. Godot in the faint hope that he might offer them some direction for their pointless lives. As it is so relevant for a study of Greene’s novels, we should perhaps summarise, however briefly, those elements other than Darwinism, that contributed to that general despair, most notably the collapse of the ethical precepts and socially approved paradigms of living upon which the depiction of leading fictional characters had previously relied. The virtues of honesty, courage, and compassion that had typified the nineteenth-century hero, together with those of modesty and constancy epitomising the nineteenth-century heroine – either initially or after some minor failing corrected in the course of the novel – had been so seriously undermined that they could no longer function effectively. The mid-century reader, nurtured on Freud whose authority at that time seemed unquestionable, had learned, for example, that courage in battle, a readiness to risk one’s life to save others, was frequently indicative of a suppressed suicidal tendency, an unconscious death-wish, a factor that seemed to rob the act of its nobility and to re-define it as a weakness. Respect for one’s parents, a quality invariably distinguishing virtuous characters within the nineteenth-century novel, was now



8

overshadowed by, at the very least, the suspicion of an oedipal complex, which again disqualified it. D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, written in 1913 before he had come into contact with Freudian theory, was attacked by critics conversant with the new psychology on the grounds that Paul’s profound search for love was the result of a mother fixation, the maternal bond preventing him from achieving satisfactory relationships with other women. The novel was, they argued, simply the account of a mental illness. That negation of previously cherished values extended to other spheres. In anthropological terms, chastity and marital fidelity were now seen, in the light of the new science of anthropology, as primitive taboos, the outmoded social restrictions of ancient societies. Even love itself, the adoration of beauty, charm, and grace, that looks on tempests and is never shaken, seemed to shrivel away in the new dispensation, where such ardour was now seen as resulting from biological stimuli intended to ensure the preservation of the species. With the general collapse of those values, the serious novelist could no longer rely upon them to fashion his hero or heroine. The alternative was to create an entirely new kind of protagonist, and it was Greene’s originality in that respect that served as the groundwork not only for his major novels but for those of subsequent novelists too. A second problem applies more specifically to Greene’s Catholic novels, namely the marked slippage in religious belief in his generation. But if the general decline in religious belief made a protagonist’s faith appear outdated, the problem was considerably augmented by Greene’s choice of a church to which most English readers were antagonistic. François Mauriac, to whom he has frequently been compared, was, in contrast, writing in a Catholic country for a predominantly Catholic readership. No apology or extenuation was required for his portrayal of Brigitte Pian in La Pharisienne (1941) as a bigoted religiose, perversely convinced that her acts of jealousy or pride are fulfilments of the divine will. If she finds ‘each day ever stronger reasons for thanking her Creator that He had made her so admirable a person’, the reader assumes that the fault lies in her bigotry, not in the faith she imagines she epitomises. Contrasted with her in that novel is the humble Abbé Calou, dedicated to a life of poverty, his priestly celibacy and asceticism being qualities that the French reader, even though he or she may have left the religion, had been taught to admire. Greene, therefore, needed not only to overcome the problem of creating a central character with whose values the reader could identify, but also to overcome potential hostility towards a character committed to a religious belief generally disliked by his reading public.



The Strategies 9


His friend and contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, provides an interesting parallel to Greene. Until the mid-century, Waugh’s reputation had rested upon such mordant satires as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and A Handful of Dust.17 In 1945, however, a few years after he had converted to Catholicism, he produced a novel, stylistically more traditional, that offered some illuminating pointers both to the problems he and his friend Greene were facing and to their awareness of the need to overcome them. Waugh’s portrayal of the Flyte family in their wealthy, aristocratic home is, in the earlier chapters, patently unsympathetic to their Catholic faith, the central character’s dislike of his home environment calculated to defuse in the reader any latent animosity by conveying the impression that the author shares it. They are depicted as a family whose religious devotions are driving the charming younger son, Sebastian, to distraction. His mother’s obsessive piety has already thoroughly alienated her husband, who has left her to live with a mistress overseas; the eldest son is presented as a cold, self-centred pedant who would have withdrawn into a monastery were he not saddled with the duties of the estate; while his sister Julia, scorning the outmoded restrictions of her faith, has broken away from it to marry a rising politician whose conversion to Catholicism in order to satisfy the mother’s demands is presented as sheer farce. Asked in the course of his conversion what would be his reaction if the Pope prophesied that it would rain but in fact no rain fell, to the despair of his priestly instructor he responds brightly that no doubt it would be ‘sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it’.18 The reader has thus been lulled into a sense of security, assuming from that unsympathetic portrayal that the author subscribes to the contemporary rejection both of religion and of sexual taboos. Waugh then begins the task of reversal, as the narrator, Charles Ryder, impressed by the beauty of their home, a building added to over the years by succeeding generations, begins to recognise it as a symbol of Catholicism itself, that recognition of its charm extending by degrees to its inhabitants. Gradually, he perceives the humanity and generosity concealed beneath the seemingly cold exterior of Sebastian’s older brother, is deeply impressed when Julia returns to her faith, even though her decision ends his liaison with her, and he himself, we learn, eventually adopts the faith. Finding himself billeted there as an officer long after his connection with the family had ended, he contrasts the secular brashness of his adjutant Hooper, representing the crassness of contemporary society, with the refinement and delicacy of that older tradition: The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year,



10

generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. And yet, I thought … something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame – a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.19 Although widely read, the novel never won the acclaim accorded to Greene’s major works, perhaps because of the nostalgic sentimentalism in the conversions both of Julia and of the narrator, a sentimentalism that seemed inappropriate for the new age. But it provides a valuable example of the novelist’s attempt to resist the expectations brought to the novel by contemporary readers, especially in the religious context. Greene, more acutely conscious of that necessity, recognised that the problem he faced was not merely sectarian, a dislike of Catholicism, but that it formed only one aspect of a much broader and fundamental predicament. He felt himself to be writing for a generation that had lost the sense of human significance, without which no novel concerned with human affairs could be effective. As he put it in one of his essays devoted not to his own writings but to those of Mauriac, and therefore less likely to be deliberately misleading: with the death of [Henry] James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world of fiction had lost a dimension: the characters of such distinguished writers as Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Mr. E.M. Forster wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin. Even in one of the most materialistic of our great novelists, in Trollope, we are aware of another world against which the actions of the characters are thrown into relief. The ungainly clergyman picking his blackbooted way through the mud, handling so awkwardly his umbrella, speaking of his miserable income and stumbling through a proposal of marriage,



The Strategies 11

12


It is true that the dreary landscapes of his novels echo, as has long been recognised, the wasteland of T.S.Eliot’s poem, the drab world of sawdust restaurants with the detritus of urban civilisation symbolising the sterility of modern life; but there is a vital difference. Eliot’s wasteland had been removed from the actual world and placed in the realm of myth, peopled with legendary figures from the past – the Fisher King, Tiresias, the Phoenician sailor – and even the twentieth-century figures that do appear in the poem, such as the carbuncular clerk or the medium, Madame Sosostris, function as symbols rather than individuals. There was, of course, no sustained plot requiring character development, no attempt to elicit reader sympathy for a central character, such as a novel demands. Greene, however, transfers the wasteland to the actuality of twentieth-century existence, merging the symbol with the factual to create a setting within which his characters strive to find meaning. How Greene tackled the twofold problems confronting him, both the secular and the religious, and the ways in which his narrative strategies affected the structure and content of the novels will form the subject of the following pages, included in that investigation being the gradual changes in his own approach and his continual experimentation with new ways of confronting the challenges posed by his time. One further comment is needed concerning the works selected for inclusion in this study. The novels that Greene termed ‘entertainments’ such as England Made Me, The Ministry of Fear, or Our Man in Havana, although often exciting to read, were really pot-boilers intended to provide him with an income. From the moment that, delighted by the acceptance of The Man Within, he left the security of his post at The Times, he was under severe financial strain, writing reviews, composing travel books, and producing thriller after thriller – The Name of Action, Rumour at Nightfall, Stamboul Train – in order to earn a livelihood. In 1939, when he finally settled down to write his first major novel, The Power and the Glory, he could only permit himself to devote the afternoons to it as he needed the mornings to complete The Confidential Agent, written ‘with the automatism of a planchette’ and the help of benzedrine in order to obtain the financial advance he desperately needed.21 The entertainments, moreover, did not deal with the concerns confronting



exists in a way that Mrs. Woolf’s Mr.Ramsay never does, because we are aware that he exists not only to the woman he is addressing but also in a God’s eye. His unimportance in the world of the senses is only matched by his enormous importance in another world.20

him as a serious novelist, the concerns I have outlined above, and they are therefore extraneous to this present study. Two novels omitted here are, however, generally regarded as among his major works. Brighton Rock was intended by him as a thriller, a sequel to his Stamboul Train and A Gun for Sale, as evidenced by the subtitle, ‘An Entertainment’, inserted by Greene after he had completed it. It conformed in many ways to the pattern of the earlier novels, opening as it does with the dramatic pursuit and murder of Hale. Its appeal for the public resided in its vivid depiction of gangland violence – it contained two brutal homicides, razor-slashings, the near-death of Rose, and the spectacular demise of the central figure by the smashing of a bottle of vitriolic acid. These were not the qualities that were to distinguish Greene’s major phase. But the novel did constitute a turning-point in Greene’s career, in its exploration of the nature of evil, the figure of Pinkie providing one of the most chilling portrayals in literature of utter ruthlessness, his sadism contrasted with the simple, trusting loyalty of Rose on the one hand and the pleasure-seeking cheerfulness of Ida on the other. Yet even in that respect it marked on Greene’s part not a confrontation with the issues concerning us here but an avoidance of them. For in this, his first foray into a serious exploration of the modern condition, he circumvented the problem created by the collapse of the traditional hero. The novel contains no hero, only a villain in the fullest sense of the term, Greene being content to leave him as a figure of evil, and making no attempt to evoke sympathy. Even the knowledge of Pinkie’s unhappy childhood and of his need to assert himself as leader of the gang despite his youthfulness are presented not as alleviating factors, the narrator’s pejorative descriptions repeatedly negating any possibility of reader identification: The poison twisted in the Boy’s veins. He had been insulted. He had to show someone he was – a man. He went scowling into Snow’s, young, shabby, and untrustworthy, and the waitresses with one accord turned their backs. (p. 87) Greene took the principle of avoiding the theme even further, ensuring that no other character in the novel should qualify for admiration or represent the moral principles endorsed by society as had been traditional in the nineteenth-century novel. If Pinkie is at times evocative of the motiveless malignancy of Shakespeare’s Iago, there is a substantial difference in the setting. For in Shakespeare’s drama, the moral values of



The Strategies 13


society are asserted, the Machiavellian Iago being contrasted throughout with the virtuous Desdemona and the noble, if misguided, Othello. In this novel, even the contrasting figures are discredited. Rose, for all her simple trust, is a pathetic individual, led by her misplaced loyalty to condone the murder she realises Pinkie has committed, while Ida’s optimistic gusto and undisturbed complacency are, as the narrator repeatedly points out, offset by her cheap standards and her promiscuity. For her, we are informed, life ‘was sunlight on brass bedposts, ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post. There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism’ (p. 36). Although, then, the novel launched Greene’s reputation as a serious novelist rather than as the writer of potboilers – very effective potboilers, we should add – it as yet lacked the qualities that were to distinguish his finest work. The introduction of religion into this novel is, for example, remarkably inept. Rose and Pinkie are, we are told, ‘Romans’, but that aspect contributes little, if anything, to the novel itself. Pinkie’s occasional mention of mortal sin and his intoning of Dona nobis pacem are decidedly out of character, while it is unlikely, to say the least, that he would have been familiar with an obscure seventeenth-century poet’s reference to divine salvation in his repeated citing of the phrase ‘Between the stirrup and the ground’.22 If this was Greene’s first serious introduction of the Catholic theme into his writings, there was no need to initiate techniques for conciliating readers unsympathetic to religious belief, as the characters representing it were either undeniably evil or, as in Rose’s case, so obtuse in moral principle that she continues to love and admire Pinkie even after discovering that he is a cold-blooded murderer. The Quiet American is indeed a powerful work presented in fictional form, with the slim, attractive Phuong providing the love interest. But it belongs more closely to political journalism, the main interest and the main impact of the novel being its scathing exposure of the machinations of the CIA and of the misconceptions dominating American foreign policy. It does not, therefore, belong within an investigation of Greene’s innovative strategies in coping with the literary problems of his time. This study, therefore, will be focusing upon those novels dealing with the twofold theme outlined above, namely, Greene’s attempt to find some effective substitute for the traditional hero whose validity had been so severely weakened by the new concepts and, in addition, to overcome in the pre-dominantly non-religious climate of his day his readers’ potential antipathy towards fictional characters wrestling with the demands of their faith, especially when that faith was one generally disfavoured in England. Such an approach does, I believe, offer essentially new readings of the novels.



14

2

In The Power and the Glory, Greene devised a method of coping with the problem of the protagonist in a manner that was not only brilliant but also unprecedented, the first effective portrayal in literature of the twentieth-century anti-hero. If Thackeray had declared much earlier that his aim in Vanity Fair was to defy tradition by creating ‘a novel without a hero’, his disavowal had been no more than a gesture – Amelia may be ridiculed by him for her excessive weeping and Dobbin for his large feet, but their devotion, their unflinching loyalty, and their high principles clearly win out against the scheming Becky Sharp who had seemed to occupy centre stage. Nor is Becky herself an anti-heroine, Thackeray portraying her as a callous mother, a disloyal wife, and (he hints) a murderess. The term ‘anti-hero’ requires definition, since it has been employed so loosely in criticism. Such characters, of which there were to be numerous examples after Greene had initiated the genre, are not simply schlemiels or social failures as has so often been claimed. Ihab Hassan, in an otherwise admirable study of the contemporary novel, provided a frequently quoted definition that is so wide-ranging as to preclude any possibility of precision. In fiction, he claimed: the unnerving rubric ‘anti-hero’ refers to a ragged assembly of victims: the fool, the clown, the hipster, the criminal, the poor sod, the freak, the outsider, the scapegoat, the scrubby opportunist, the rebel without a cause1 In fact, the inclusion of the word ‘hero’ as the hyphenated second-half of the term effectively removes a substantial number of the characters he lists, such as the fool, the criminal, and the poor sod; for the anti-hero 15



The Power and the Glory


as he emerges in the mid-century is not simply the opposite of a hero. He is instead a character who, although seeming to lack the qualities associated with the traditional hero, succeeds nonetheless in eventually evoking the respect, even the admiration of the reader. Saul Bellow’s Herzog, published in 1964, over 20 years after Greene’s novel, typifies that pattern in presenting a figure who initially seems merely pitiable. Suffering from a nervous breakdown after his wife has cuckolded him, unable to function in his profession, and an undoubted social failure, he is a misfit incapable of coping with the pressures of living, obsessively writing letter after letter to leading figures both dead and living, letters that he never mails. But as we meet the source of those pressures – the vulgar, hectoring Valentine, the spiritually castrating wife, the hypocritical lawyer – we come to learn that the cause of his breakdown is not a weakness but a virtue, an admirable inability to conform to the false standards prevalent in his generation. In contrast to the nineteenth-century hero’s function as the exemplar of contemporary values, the protagonist here represents the reverse, embodying in pitiable isolation values that contemporary society appears to have abandoned. By the end of the novel, Herzog achieves peace by coming to terms not with society but with his singularity, realising, as he puts it, that he may turn out not to be such a terribly hopeless fool as everyone suspected, that in contrast to those around him, he still cherishes the innate holiness of the individual and will continue to cherish it, satisfied to be the social exception: I look at myself and see chest, thighs, feet – a head. This strange organization, I know it will die. And inside – something, something, happiness … . ‘Thou movest me.’ That leaves no choice Something produces intensity, a holy feeling … . Some hearts put out more love and some less of it, presumably … . ‘But what do you want, Herzog?’ But that’s just it – not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy.2 Holden too, in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye of 1951 (also published after Greene’s novel) is in a state of near-collapse. He too is a total misfit, rejected by school after school, believing himself ineffective in lovemaking, and unable to cope with his environment. Unlike Herzog, he is, as an adolescent, unable to find a solution, but as the reasons for his supposed failure gradually emerge, the fault is transferred from him to society. He is driven in a frenzy to flee from his school in search of an answer to the nagging question, where do the ducks go when the lake is frozen over, namely, where can he find refuge in a world that has turned



16

into a spiritual wasteland. And in accordance with the new pattern, the reader in the course of the work comes to recognise the very real moral standards he possesses that make him a misfit – that he cannot abide the cheap commercialism and corrupt standards of the schools to which he is sent, and that his lack of female ‘conquests’ derives from an attitude fundamentally different from and superior to that of his peers. While Stradlater cannot even remember the names of the girls he seduces, Holden has too much regard for them to take advantage of such conquests, treating the girls always as individuals, not sex-objects, and respecting their requests to desist. Seen within the context of the need to find a substitute for the traditional hero, the emergence of the anti-hero in the literature of the mid-century was clearly not fortuitous, certainly not producing, as was argued, a casual rag-bag of freaks or scrubby opportunists. It was an attempt to create in an age where heroism seemed dead a central character who could in some way remain admirable while yet acknowledging the moral vacuum that had disqualified his earlier counterparts. The process was reflected in the contemporary cinema where such ruggedly male leads as Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck were replaced by Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Gene Wilder, and Dudley Moore – short in stature, not particularly good-looking, but representing the individual’s resistance to the falsities, corruptions, or absurdities of contemporary society, characters closer to the spectator’s own situation than the cellulose heroes of the past. The second problem that Greene needed to confront was the need to circumvent or in some way overcome the wide spread prejudice against the Catholic priesthood, the stories of self-indulgent whisky-priests hypocritically harbouring mistresses. If the genre he inaugurated presented a character seeming initially to lack heroic features, that same principle was employed concurrently to still religious hostility. For the nameless priest of this story, so far from being the noble, dedicated martyr one might have expected in a Catholic novel, is introduced as conforming closely to the unflattering stereotype conceived by his detractors. He is, we learn, a wine-bibber, he has fathered an illegitimate child, is attempting to flee from his priestly duties to the safety of another country, and in appearance is distinctly unattractive, a little man with bloodshot, protruding eyes, dressed in a shabby city suit. He seems at first to form part of the dreary setting of the opening scene, with its evocation of T.S. Eliot’s wasteland, a sterile world in which, it seems, nobility and courage have no place.3 All is bleak and seedy in a country impoverished by a harsh dictatorship, where, symbolically,



The Power and Glory 17

18


Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn’t find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr. Tench went on across the plaza.4 Here too, the despair and drabness of that scene is calculated to disarm any reader liable to be alarmed by a pro-Catholic theme. That dreary opening, confirming the author’s familiarity with the spiritual quandary of his time, serves to qualify him as admissible by the intellectual avant garde. I have placed considerable emphasis upon Greene’s need to lull potential opposition since the narrative strategy he developed to combat it has led to a disturbing consensus among critics. Instead of perceiving the priest’s negative portrayal as only the initial stage in a subtly developing process during which the damaging aspects will gradually be discarded or their implications reversed, they have taken the disparagement at face value, as if it were the author’s final evaluation, seeing the priest as a sinful, ineffective minister of the Church, who in some strange way (never defined) is partially redeemed in the final scene. Roger Sharrock states unreservedly in his overall evaluation: He is a drunkard and has broken his vow of chastity: more seriously he has not achieved anything: ‘What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless.’ The villagers are too terrified to shelter him: he cannot help his child: the American will not make his confession to him: he is caught in the end like a rat in a trap. Francis Kunkel describes him categorically as ‘a drunkard and a fornicator’, employed by Greene to illustrate how God can use an imperfect human to attain his ends. David Pryce-Jones assumes that Greene is showing ‘how unworthy this man is to be the final representative of the church in a province cleared of priests’, the concluding calamity being the denial of his last confession which, according to orthodox doctrine,



a wearily disillusioned dentist listlessly awaits the pain-relieving canister that he knows will never arrive:


He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind – a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret – the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. (p. 60) Gwenn Boardman goes even further, seeing his progress through the novel in terms of a downward path. In a secular world in which those around him are utterly corrupt, ‘… the Roman Catholic priest does no better. The whisky priest yields readily to the world’s demands: he gives up the wine that should have been preserved for the sacrament and in doing so loses all – wine, brandy, and freedom. The steps of his fall are carefully recorded. First, “painful anxiety” as the cork is pulled and the wine level falls; then, “making allowances”; finally, the sacrifice of personal need and public duty.’ And R.W.B. Lewis, in a widely respected study of the picaresque saint in the modern novel, after noting how badly the priest has broken the laws of his church, concludes that he is a rogue, a picaro, in several kinds of ways; his contradictory character includes much of the comical unpredictability of the traditional picaro; and the narrative Greene has written about him is perhaps the most patently picaresque of any we are considering – the lively story of the rogue on his travels, or better, on his undignified flights from and toward the forces of destruction. To define the priest as a rogue or picaro is, I believe, a travesty of criticism. With regard to the latter, it would, I believe, be difficult to find a single passage in the novel that hints at any comedy or comic unpredictability in his character. Even K.C. Kurismmoutil, who has written one of the most sensitive studies of Greene, follows the same line. While admitting that the priest’s character does gain depth as the novel progresses, he notes with some degree of puzzlement how unfit the priest was for his vocation, exciting neither admiration nor pity: He is an anomaly of a priest and a scandal to the pious. A weakling and a brandy-bibber, corrupted with an ill-begotten child, he is by his



means that he ends in a state of mortal sin. In the academic journal devoted to criticism of Greene’s work, Michael Higgins stresses the priest’s spiritual unsuitability to his task – ‘The hounded cleric in Mexico has long been unfit as Christ’s representative’ – and quotes as substantiation a passage from the priest’s meditation on his own failings:

20


Such comments abound in Greene criticism, usually followed by an admission that, by the end of the novel, the priest does, in some strange way, achieve at least the possibility of grace – although the means whereby he is even partially regenerated is, in such commentaries, left unspecified.6 I propose to argue that the reverse of this reading is true, not only that the priest does not progress or change in the course of the novel but that he is, from the very opening and throughout the narrative itself, Greene’s ideal of what a Catholic priest should be – not a model the Vatican would endorse but one, the author suggests, fundamentally more deserving of respect and admiration than the martyrs traditionally venerated in the Church. Moreover, that in this respect he provided a prototype not only for the figure of the anti-hero within the mid-twentieth-century novel but also the pattern for some of the central figures of Greene’s subsequent novels. And this reverse reading is, I suggest, rooted in the text itself. M.M. Bakhtin revealed some years ago how, in the best type of novel, there exists a muted dialogue, a suppressed sub-text that undercuts, modifies, and at times may even parody the surface theme, creating a coded ambivalence to which the sensitive reader is intended to respond, not always at the conscious level. That counter-text is present invisibly, as an actualising background for creating and perceiving the ultimate theme. The two elements, text and countertext, represent respectively what Bakhtin terms the centripetal and the centrifugal. The centripetal appears to reinforce contemporary attitudes, while the centrifugal resists or modifies them, producing thereby a linguistic tension or heteroglossia: Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralisation and decentralisation, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language as an individualised embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech diversity.7 That concept is distinctly relevant to this novel. For if at the surface or ostensible level the priest is presented ‘centripetally’, reinforcing the



own admission a coward. Nothing about him seems to measure up to the dignity we normally associate with the figure of a protagonist. He appears like a rogue, a picaro; as much unpredictable as he is ridiculous.5

unsympathetic view of the Catholic priesthood prevalent among contemporary readers, at the same time a concomitant ‘centrifugal’ impulse re-shapes that impression, gradually encouraging a more charitable and appreciative response, a progressive and retrospective re-assessment of the priest’s supposed delinquencies. In effect, therefore, it is not the priest who changes but the reader’s assessment of him, as the truth of his spiritual condition gradually emerges into the light. In criticisms of the novel such as those cited above, the evidence adduced for the reading of the priest as a spiritual failure, at least until his final moments, is drawn almost invariably from his own statements. Michael Higgins determines on those grounds that the priest resembles other failed clerics in Greene’s novels, citing as proof that, ‘the whisky priest has no illusions about his character: he tells his hunter, the contemptuous lieutenant that he is not a saint; he is not even a brave man. He accepts the judgment of a fellow priest, one who has fled to safety, that he lacks firmness of character, and he freely acknowledges that he has broken his vows.’ However, to accept the priest’s statements as evidence is to misunderstand a fundamental aspect of the new genre, namely, that the harsh self-condemnations of the anti-hero, while accepted initially by the reader, are intended by the author to be gradually discarded as invalid, the reader being led to re-assess in the anti-hero’s favour those aspects that had been seen so pejoratively until then. That principle of retrospective re-assessment holds true for the secular versions too, those that follow Greene’s lead. As part of his problem, Herzog repeatedly bemoans his inability to follow the advice of his counsellors, counsellors whom we eventually perceive to be totally unworthy of his trust. But that quality of self-condemnation has a deeper significance in a Christian-oriented novel, where humility functions as the cardinal virtue of the creed, the priest’s harsh judgement of his actions and conviction of his own unworthiness – ‘You see, I am a bad priest and a bad man …’ – testifying in that respect to his very real worth. The priest here is self-deprecatory not through false modesty but out of a deep conviction that he is indeed a total failure, irrecoverably damned for the sins he has committed, wearily living out his term until facing the inevitable and, he believes, censorious tribunal awaiting him on the Day of Judgement. It is a consciousness of guilt that, as he puts it, rests at all times like a weight at the back of his tongue. ‘I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God’, he confesses to the lieutenant, ‘I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this – that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too’ (p. 200). Here lies the basic contrast with the nineteenth-century hero,




22


‘Wretch,’ rejoined Nicholas, fiercely, ‘touch him at your peril! I will not stand by and see it done; my blood is up, and I have the strength of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, for by Heaven I will not spare you, if you drive me on’ … Concentrating into that one moment all his feelings of rage, scorn, and indignation, Nicholas sprang upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and, pinning him by the throat, beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.8 For the twentieth-century reader, those assumptions now seemed simplistic – not his attempt to rescue the boys, but his confident adoption of the role of justicer meting out punishment to a ‘ruffian’ in the name of moral uprightness. The new era required a questioning of social values, a dissatisfaction with simple divisions of right and wrong, an agonised probing of self to determine one’s real, hidden motivation, a sense, indeed, of the complexity of the human situation. Instead, we have in the priest a central figure who is scared of physical pain, deeply depressed, weighed down by a sense of guilt, and in that regard reflecting the general despair of the age, the disillusionment, the doubts concerning ethical probity, and the inability to cope with the pressures of living: What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived … . He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed with nothing done at all. (p. 210) Greene’s intention that the reader should reverse the initially pejorative judgement is patent in the text. There are numerous hints in the earlier part of the novel preparing the way for the reversal – as in the opening scene. The priest is indeed about to board the General Obregon bound for Vera Cruz, attempting to flee from the Hell in which he lives and the threat of imminent capture. However, he does turn back to answer the call of a peasant woman who believes she is dying, even though the call is, he knows from experience, almost certainly false – the scene functioning as a prefiguring of his return from freedom at the end of the novel in the faint hope of saving the soul of an American gangster.



traditionally assured of his rectitude and his moral fibre. Thus Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, on witnessing Squeers’ brutality towards the schoolboys in his charge, sees himself as the defender of society’s noblest principles:

In such earlier instances, however, the negative elements are given precedence, the monstrous bitterness he feels at missing the boat is highlighted and the more virtuous aspect subdued. On our next meeting with him, we hear through his thoughts the long list of his misdemeanours, the years littered with surrenders such as the discarding of the altar stone as being too dangerous to carry, even though, concealed within that passage, is an intimation of his justification in discarding a mere ritual appurtenance in order to continue performing the Mass. But it may be more valuable to focus upon the passage that marks the culmination of those hints, the passage that in effect demands from the reader a fundamental re-assessment of the priest’s supposed incompetence and sin. In conversation with the lieutenant shortly before his death, he recalls bitterly how, when commanded by the communist regime to break his vows of celibacy and to marry or else suffer the penalty of death, and when the other priests (with the exception of Padre José who chose to betray his priestly office) had elected to flee the country, he remained behind: It was when [they] left I began to go to pieces. One thing went after another. I got careless about my duties. I began to drink. It would have been much better, I think, if I had gone too. Because pride was at work all the time. Not love of God.’ He sat bowed on the packingcase, a small plump man in Mr Lehr’s cast-off clothes. He said, ‘Pride was what made the angels fall. Pride’s the worst thing of all. I thought I was a fine fellow to have stayed when the others had gone. And then I thought I was so grand I could make my own rules. I gave up fasting, daily Mass. I neglected my prayers and one day because I was drunk and lonely well, you know how it was, I got a child. It was all pride. Just pride because I’d stayed. I wasn’t any use, but I stayed. At least, not much use. I’d got so that I didn’t have a hundred communicants a month. If I’d gone I’d have given God to twelve times that number. (p. 196) Throughout this passage, the countermanding subtext is at work, dislodging the overt meaning as, through the sombre recriminations of the priest, can be discerned factors that in his simplicity and humility he totally ignores, factors not only mitigating what might appear outwardly as vice or sin, but revealing them as highly admirable traits, indeed as virtues that elevate him above his peers. One central point he entirely overlooks in that self-flagellatory passage is that, in contrast to the priests who fled, he had chosen to risk his life, to remain behind





fulfilling his duty despite the threat of capital punishment. That act of courage he sees dismissively as arising from pride, an evaluation that no sensitive reader can accept. Moreover, there emerges at this point a major distinction between the new anti-hero and the conventional, often unbelievable heroes of the past who faced all dangers unafraid, secure in their knowledge of the rectitude of their actions. Instead, the priest is lonely and fearful, desperately needing to bolster his courage by an occasional sip of brandy, a practice that slowly takes its hold upon him (‘I began to drink’). If he is a whiskypriest, he has become one, we now learn, not through the self-indulgence traditionally associated with corpulent monks and clerics, a relish for the pleasures of wine-bibbing, but as a desperately needed aid in fulfilling the duties of his calling. A hint had been offered earlier in the novel, as usual phrased detrimentally to himself, when, unable to obtain brandy from Coral, he had remarked ruefully that a little drink will ‘do wonders for a cowardly man’ (p. 42). If we are to weigh the dereliction of priestly responsibility evinced by his colleagues against the dedication of the priest in remaining, the occasional imbibing of a drink shrinks to insignificance, to a forgivable recourse in time of peril. That justification, however, does not prevent the priest from regarding his actions in the most damning light, seeing his remaining behind and the bolstering of his determination by drink as reprehensible weaknesses. Yet, one notes, almost all critics have accepted his self-condemnation at face value. Michael Shelden, for example, without the slightest support from the text, writes that his remaining behind ‘gives him the chance to be the pope in one little corner of the world, to be the sole keeper of all the mysteries of his religion. But this grand ambition turns into nothing more significant than a personal surrender to petty vices. He drinks heavily, plays card tricks, sleeps with a woman and makes her pregnant … . Whenever he is required to perform the traditional functions of a priest, he reveals his incompetence.’9 One may note that the only instance of card-tricks is his harmless attempt to amuse Coral. In fact, the above passage does more than alter our conception of him as a self-indulgent whisky-priest; it reveals very movingly his tendency not only to minimise his achievements but to invert their implications, seeing them as vices. It is true, as he says, that, had he fled, he could have served a far larger number of communicants; but what he ignores, and no alert reader should ignore, is that in the adjoining country there was a plethora of priests available for that purpose while here he was utterly alone, risking his life to offer communicants their sole hope of absolution.



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In that same passage, he castigates himself for being neglectful in his duties, such as ignoring fast days – at a time, as he omits to mention, when he was literally starving, when fasting, a practice intended to encourage abstemiousness, would have been an absurdity. As he regretfully remarked earlier, ‘it was only one more surrender. The years behind him were littered with similar surrenders – feast days and fast days and days of abstinence had been the first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary – and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went – too dangerous to carry with him. He had no business to say Mass without it; he was probably liable to suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death’ (p. 60). Again the subtext is powerfully at work, as the technical rituals of altar stone and breviary become nugatory beside the glowing fact of his courage in continuing to care for the spiritual needs of his parishioners. Then there is the sin of his having fathered a child – a sin so grave in a priest that one might think it impossible to find extenuating circumstances. But those extenuating factors are provided in the novel when we are informed, again obliquely, of circumstances that he, with his harsh self-appraisal, totally ignores. So far from having indulgently maintained a mistress as we are originally led to suspect, for having, as one critic recently put it, experienced a ‘deplorable fall from grace’ through drinking and fornication,10 the priest, it transpires, fathered the child in a single, isolated incident under conditions so strongly mitigating as in effect to absolve him. Not only was he blindly intoxicated at the time, unaware of his actions as a result of having tried to fortify his ebbing courage but, as we learn from her own lips, was the victim of a calculating peasant woman, eager for the celebrity of being known in the village as a priest’s mistress, a woman who deliberately seduced him in his state of inebriation. As always, that alleviating factor is not mentioned by the priest; we learn of it only when she complains of the change in circumstances that has deprived her of the renown she had craved: ‘When you-know-what happened, I was proud. I thought the good days would come back. It’s not everyone who’s a priest’s woman. And the child … I thought you could do a lot for her’ (p. 79). The only hint we obtain from the priest is, as usual, phrased to his detriment, when he declares his inferiority to the mestizo. He asks himself how he could pretend ‘with his pride and lust and cowardice’ to be any more worthy than the half-caste, adding: ‘This man intended to betray him for money which he needed, and he had betrayed God for what? Not even





for real lust’ (p. 99). The act that produced his child was, that last phrase suggests, not initiated by him. In that connection, there is a further instance of our requirement as readers to respond to Greene’s narrative strategy and resist the priest’s statements. He informs us a number of times that he is not a learned scholar, only a humble parish priest. As such, he makes what we must perceive to be a serious theological error, serious insofar as he assumes it to be unforgivable while we can only praise it. Having accepted full responsibility for the guilt of having fathered an offspring, he believes that his subsequent love of the child bars him from any hope of divine forgiveness. A truly repentant sinner should, he is convinced, abhor the proceeds of his crime: He said, ‘I don’t know how to repent.’ That was true: he had lost the faculty. He couldn’t say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed, because the sin seemed to him now so unimportant and he loved the fruit of it. He needed a confessor to draw his mind slowly down the drab passages which led to grief and repentance. (p. 128) While a thief, it is true, must, as a precondition for forgiveness, renounce the fruits of his crime, returning any object he may have stolen or misappropriated, that requirement is patently inapplicable when the outcome of the sin is a living child. On the contrary, the truest form of atonement in that situation is acceptance of parental responsibility, an unbounded love for the offspring, a love such as the priest does indeed experience for Brigitta despite her unattractiveness and even at the price, he believes, of eternal damnation. Greene takes care to make her a peculiarly repulsive child, a seven-year-old possessing an ‘ugly maturity’, who responds maliciously and impudently to his gestures of affection (p. 67). But his love blinds him to her deficiences. When hearing the peasants confessing their sexual sins, he thinks immediately of his own misdemeanour, longing to tell them that lust is not the worst thing; the danger is that lust may turn into love and ‘when we love our sin then are we damned indeed’ (p. 172). Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan has noted interestingly how, in all Greene’s Catholic novels, the term ‘Father’ not only denotes the title conferred upon priests by virtue of their office but represents also the priest’s need to undertake paternal responsibility towards some child within the novel;11 and that insight certainly applies in this instance, in his awareness of an immense weight of responsibility for the child who, in fact, despises him. Once again, therefore, the message of the novel is to be found not in the priest’s evaluation of his actions,



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but in the dissent that evaluation evokes from the attentive reader, our awareness of the theological misconception on his part that makes his paternal love not the moral failing he believes it to be, but an emotion redounding to his credit. The concern with children connects a number of threads within the plot. If Brigitta is his biological child, arousing his (if not the reader’s) tender affection, Coral Fellows is a daughter-substitute more appropriate to his own character, the child he really deserved. A serious-minded thirteen-year-old who, she solemnly informs him, had lost her faith when she was ten, she resembles him in her immense sense of responsibility and her altruism and compassion. Courageously, she protects him from the lieutenant, and supplies him with food and drink. When he returns much later to the deserted home, he remembers her kindness to him ‘and he remembered his own child enticing him by the rubbishdump’ (p. 143). The concluding line of a poem he chances upon in Coral’s schoolbook – ‘My daughter, O my daughter’ – conveys to him far more than the poet had intended: ‘The words seemed to contain all that he felt himself of repentance, longing, and unhappy love’ (p. 147). And in his final dream before the execution, Coral appears, filling his glass with wine, a hint that she, if not Brigitta, has come to admire his devotion. Moreover, that relationship is reflected in Luis, initially fascinated by the lieutenant’s gun, but subsequently disgusted by it, who concludes by welcoming the new priest. Together, Luis and Coral indicate that there are among the younger generation some who, in contrast to Brigitta, would ensure the continuation of the faith. It has been suggested that the best type of novel is one in which the leading characters are ‘round’, developing and changing in the course of the work. If they are not capable of surprising in a convincing way, they remain flat and ineffective.12 I have argued here that Greene’s priest does not change in the course of the novel, but that does not make him ineffective even by that literary standard. For he does indeed surprise and change, not in his own character but in the assessment of the reader who, as the novel progresses and as new aspects are revealed, is impelled retrospectively to re-evaluate his past actions and, in accordance with that change, to re-assess his spiritual standing. There is, indeed, support for this reading in a remark made by Greene (a remark that could not have been intended to mislead, as there would have been no discernible purpose in so doing). Dismissing the accepted critical interpretation of the priest as progressing from sinfulness to saintliness – a development described by Georg Gaston as his ‘arduous journey from corruption to redemption’ in the process of which his Christian understanding





gradually matures13 – Greene declared unequivocally that, ‘The priest and the lieutenant remained themselves to the end; the priest, for all his recollection of periods in his life when he was different, never changed.’14 A distinction is of course to be made, as Greene’s comment acknowledges, between the priest as we meet him in this novel, struggling to fulfil his duties in a country under a viciously anti-Catholic regime, and his earlier career long before the story began when he had been utterly different, a self-satisfied clergyman complacently enjoying the good things of life, ‘a fat youngish priest who stood with one plump hand splayed out authoritatively’, as depicted in the photograph on the notice-board in the lieutenant’s office (p. 93). But such scenes are, as Greene notes, outside the parameters of the novel itself, recollections from a more distant past, emphasising the contrast in living conditions as well as the profound change in his character that had followed the communist take-over. It is not a process of maturation occurring during the course of the novel. Even the opening scene of the novel when, about to board the General Obregon, he seemed to be fleeing the country, has, restrospectively, a different light cast upon it when later in the novel he does cross the border to safety. For his flight occurs, as did the slightly earlier attempt, only when all possibility of continuing his work has been exhausted. Starving, with the police closing in upon him, with the wine for performing the Mass having been consumed by the jefe and with no money left to purchase more, he realises that he can no longer perform any valid task. Unless he crosses the mountains in the next few days before the rains came ‘he was trapped – he might as well hand himself over to the police, because how could he live through the rains with nobody daring to give him food and shelter?’ (p. 141). The fact that, when he does eventually cross the mountain to safety, he finds himself gradually corrupted by the easy way of life, charging high fees for baptismal rites, marks Greene’s absorption of the existentialist philosophy that dominated the mid-century in the various versions by Sartre, Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Buber, and others. The basic co-ordinator between those different forms, whether secular or religious in affiliation, namely the belief that life must be lived as if on a tightrope where one false step could cause disaster, that life should be a constant challenge, serves as the incentive for him to return to the battlefield, a recognition that the true purpose of priesthood is not to foster ladies’ guilds or build expensive churches, but to devote oneself to the needy, to comfort the suffering, and to lead the sinful to penitence. On the free side of the border, he feels the old life hardening around him like a



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habit – ‘the habit of piety’ (p. 169) – a dreadful sense that he had never really been away from the Guilds, the Children of Mary, and the easy life recorded so clearly in the photograph of him from previous years, plump, bubbling with harmless feminine jokes, petted with small delicacies. Something within him longs to return to the Hell he had left, to the spiritual wasteland of Mexico where his ministrations were truly needed. Suddenly, without warning, he experiences a sense of homesickness as he thinks of the hostages in the prison-yard, the suffering and endurance that existed on the other side of the mountain (p. 172). He knows that the half-caste is lying, he knows that by returning to administer last rites to a gangster who has no intention of repenting he is walking into a trap; but he knows also that such was the true justification for his vocational choice, that however remote the chance might be of saving the gringo’s soul, the attempt must be made. Across the border, he is hosted by the Lehrs, who of course contribute to Greene’s manipulation of reader-response. As Lutherans, they are represented as kind, good people, generously hospitable to the priest despite the difference of their religious beliefs. They care for him, are tolerant of his conducting Mass for the peasants, Miss Lehr insisting on preparing sandwiches for his journey to the distant town. Yet slipped in to the scene are comments calculated to ensure sympathy with the priest. After having watched the starving priest fighting with a dog over a scraggy meat-bone, suffering immense privation for his faith, it is ironical to read the comment from a Protestant pastor, living in comparative peace and comfort, the charge: ‘We don’t hold with your Church, father. Too much luxury, it seems to me, while the people starve’ (p. 162). Whatever justice there may be in general in that charge, within the context of this novel, it rings hollow, as does the snide comment about collections from the poor and high charges for baptism when a few pages later the atheistic schoolmaster, echoing the charge, is astonished to receive from the penniless priest the entire sum collected, as a donation for distribution to the needy. Much critical attention has been focused in recent years on the principle of framing, the process whereby a painter, photographer, or writer may deliberately exclude parts of a scene in order to impel the viewer mentally to extend its limits and to conjecture the hidden elements beyond. Initially suggested by Rudolf Arnheim, that theory has attracted increasing interest in recent years.15 Rubens’ canvas, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, with its myriad figures cascading down from heaven, reinforces the sense of infinite space by limiting it, by having the frame slice through the bodies of those located at the edge, creating the impression of





hundreds of similarly cascading bodies existing beyond the visual parameters. For literature, Hemingway had employed a similar principle of exclusion, declaring that a writer of prose ‘may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them’.16 So in this novel, the omission of all mention of extenuating circumstances in the priest’s self-accusations prompts us to search for those mitigating factors more diligently than if they had been supplied by the author and, once we have perceived them, encourages us to place in those unstated factors more trust than if they had been stated explicitly. The depiction of the lieutenant follows a reverse strategy. If the priest surprises us by his initially negative depiction in a patently pro-Catholic novel, the lieutenant, the representative of an oppressive, fiercely antireligious and inhumane totalitarian regime, emerges in that initial scene not as a sadistic torturer but as an idealist, genuinely dedicated to alleviating the misery of the poor. In contrast to the usual stereotype of the communist official in western literature, exploiting his rank to indulge in the luxuries denied to the proletariat – for that aspect we have the selfindulgent, exploitive jefe – he is selflessly devoted to the task he has undertaken, conscious at all times that, however harsh he may need to be in the interim, his ultimate purpose is to improve the lot of the working class and relieve them of their suffering. As Greene informs us, he carries within him ‘his secret of love’ and at one point charitably donates some of his own money to the unrecognised priest. At the end of the novel, despite his personal hatred of religion, in direct contradiction to his own principles and to the totalitarian law, he generously attempts to find a confessor for the priest. That he is in certain ways the priest’s counterpart has long been noted. He lives ascetically, spurning all luxury and comfort, indifferent to women, his room resembling a monastic cell, with Greene adding the further comment for any who may have missed the point that there was ‘something of a priest in his intent, observant walk – a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again’. He is thus, it might seem, a fairly typical lapsed Catholic, disillusioned, as he says, by the white muslin dresses, the candles, and the laciness of a church that is reprehensibly impervious to the poverty of the peasants,17 yet, like many lapsed Catholics, unconsciously retaining, even after his defection, certain minor habits of his youth. That authorial comment that he resembled a priest points, however, to a more significant function. Were he merely a disillusioned Catholic, a communist disgusted at the church’s exploitation of the poor and at its



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demand for the payment of tithes out of the peasants’ meagre earnings, whatever residue of his younger days he might unconsciously retain, such as his intent method of walking, he would surely reject consciously everything in his character and way of life that might resemble the theologian or priest he had come to detest. If revolutionaries often unconsciously adopt certain elements of the traditions they are discarding, they do not normally retain the way of life against which they are rebelling; yet he preserves the ascetic, celibate existence of those he is determined to destroy. The lieutenant is, in fact, not a foil to the priest, representing the system opposed to Catholic values and principles but, in a very profound sense, a mirror-image or alter ego of the priest, representing what the priest might have become had he taken a slightly different path. The basis for apprehending this Doppelgänger relationship is embedded in one of the earliest descriptions of him, where Greene is making a point intimately related to the twentieth-century predicament: The lieutenant sat down upon his bed and began to take off his boots. It was the hour of prayer. Black-beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. (pp. 24–5) The black beetles exploding against the walls like crackers are not inserted as casual background description but as symbols, pointing to the lieutenant’s conviction of the utter pointlessness of the godless Darwinian world in which he finds himself, where human-beings ‘who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all’ are subject to the same vagaries of an absurd and capricious fate as the hapless insects. So far from being a confirmed secularist rejecting religion as an outmoded set of superstitions, he is essentially a mystic, one who had in his youth longed desperately for a priestly vocation but had been denied it. At a crucial moment in his life, one may assume from this passage, when he had been closest to fulfilling his longing for a ‘vocation’, for a divine call to priesthood, the conclusions intellectually arrived at within his twentieth-century setting had vitiated the promptings of his heart. Like so many of his contemporaries who had transferred their allegiance from Christianity to the promise provided by the Bolshevik revolution,





to ‘the new star of Bethlehem’ that had risen in the East,18 the lieutenant had transferred his religious yearning to an alternative messianic hope that required no belief in the supernatural and could fit conveniently into the Darwinian concept of the universe. To communist ideology he dedicated the same priest-like devotion as he had hoped to pledge to the Church. It becomes clear in that context that his rabid hatred towards those who continue to believe in a loving deity is a hatred born of envy and frustration, a Freudian desire to kill elements in himself that he cannot eradicate. He is, in fact, a prêtre manqué, who had yearned for but failed to achieve a vocation, a figure recurrent in Greene’s novels. Hence it is that his day is still haunted by the regular pattern of ‘the hour of prayer’, of matins, nones, and vespers, a pattern to which he remains linked emotionally as he continues to live, if in a totally different context, the life of a selfless ascetic. The lieutenant is thus a mirror image of the priest in the sense of representing what the latter might have become had he, at that same vital moment in his life, succumbed to the pressures of twentieth-century secularism. Where a lesser novelist would have depicted the priest’s pursuer as a cruel and evil figure, Greene treats him with delicacy and a degree of sympathy. They are both compassionately devoted to relieving the suffering of the poor and humble of this world, the lieutenant aiming at the economic and material advancement of the masses, the priest pledged to advancing their spiritual well-being.19 And if, it is implied, the priest chose his path through lack of academic learning, clinging simply to his faith unaware of those larger twentieth-century issues, the contrast between the two provides a structural relationship endowing with especial pathos the final scene, the debate between the two men shortly before the execution. That debate constitutes not only a dialogue between the contrasting premises of communism and Christianity but also, and perhaps more movingly, a silent inner dialogue between the lieutenant and his suppressed, unfulfilled self. The distinction between the two figures rests upon their attitude to the sanctity of the individual. If they share a selfless dedication to the welfare of their fellow human-beings, it is in that regard, Greene suggests, that communism and Christianity part ways, offering here as his supreme example of the disparity the shooting of the hostages. The lieutenant, focusing on the distant fulfilment of the communist ideal, executes, however painful it may be to him, innocent peasants in the cause of achieving that end. If they refuse to identify the priest in their midst, he announces, he will randomly select a hostage to be shot, and he proceeds



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The villagers still stared at the ground; everyone was afraid to catch his eye. He broke out suddenly, ‘Why won’t you trust me. I don’t want any of you to die. In my eyes – can’t you understand – you are worth far more than he is. I want to give you’ – he made a gesture with his hands which was valueless, because no one saw him – ‘everything.’ He said in a dull voice, ‘You, you there. I’ll take you.’ A woman screamed. ‘That’s my boy. That’s Miguel. You can’t take my boy.’ He said dully, ‘Every man here is somebody’s husband or somebody’s son. I know that.’ (p. 77) Herein lies the crux of the matter. Communism had begun in a mood of profound compassion, the horror of seeing some poor woman and her babe starving to death in a country where the wealthy live at ease, what Marx termed the exploitation of one part of the society by another. It was the suffering of the individual that drove Marx and Engels to formulate the new doctrine, their claim that the labourer ‘sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper.’20 But the aim of creating a state that could provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number had produced in the movement a doctrinal willingness to sacrifice the individual in the process of working towards that ultimate purpose, just as in the pattern explicated by Darwin Nature discards the individual when no longer required for the advancement or proliferation of the species. As Arthur Koestler, a once-fervent but eventually disillusioned communist, pointed out: There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to he applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community – which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. (p. 128) The arithmetic fallacy he explained elsewhere, namely, that the greatest happiness of twenty million people is valid when the figure is twenty-million-times-one. But if the individual loses its significance,



to carry out the threat:


twenty-million-times-zero is zero.21 So here, the lieutenant longs to eliminate from the children’s lives everything that had made his own childhood miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt; and he is, in fulfilling that aim, quite prepared to create a massacre for their sakes, ‘even his own chief would one day have to go’ (p. 58). As Koestler realised, the liquidation of thousands of innocent people under Stalin during the twenties and thirties was not an aberration caused by communist leadership happening to fall into the wrong hands, but was intrinsic to communist principles – that so far from being an unpleasant, passing, interim period before the messianic fulfilment, the individual would always be sacrificed to the supposed good of the regime. Hence the exchange between the lieutenant and the priest during their final dialogue: ‘Those men I shot. They were my own people. I wanted to give them the whole world’; and the priest’s reply, ‘Well, who knows? Perhaps that’s what you did.’ The reply is not a clever debating-point, distinguishing the priest’s belief in a world-to-come from the lieutenant’s conviction that nothing exists beyond the terrestrial. It marks the culmination of a theme developed as a leit motif throughout the course of the novel – Greene’s claim for the sacrosanctity of each person, however nugatory, despicable, or unequivocally evil he or she may appear to human eyes. For the lieutenant, the individual, having ceased to contribute to the advancement of the state or by whose death some advantage might be achieved for the state, must be eliminated, while the priest’s concern at all times is with the eternal soul of each person. Hence the enormous responsibility he bears for the spiritual fate of each individual, whether rich or poor, parishioner or non-parishioner. He will return from safety beyond the mountain, fully aware that he is walking into a trap that will cost him his life, if there is even the faintest chance that the murderer may repent at the final moment. His duty is to be there to administer extreme unction, the ritual condition for salvation in Catholic belief, however remote the possibility of repentance may be. The soul even of so contemptible a creature as a ruthless gangster remains to him of immense significance. In connection with that hostage scene, one may wonder why the priest declines to identify himself. Would he not, thereby, be fulfilling the highest ideal of sacrificing himself to save others? Is it cowardice on his part? The text rejects that suspicion. It reveals how much he longs to take that course, to disclose his identity and save the others, but is prevented by the responsibility of his priestly office. ‘He felt an enormous temptation to throw himself in front of the lieutenant and declare himself’; and he does, indeed, approach as close to such self-surrender as possible, saying in his guise as a peasant – ‘Lieutenant … I’m getting too old to be much good in



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the fields. Take me’ (p. 76). But that is the furthest he may go, for a reason that may seem far-fetched to a non-Catholic but was of central significance to the church. For were he to reveal himself as a priest, he would be depriving of eternal salvation any peasant preferring death to betraying him. He would be robbing the faithful of the eternal bliss ordained for martyrs; and that he must never do. As he remarks to himself in a moment of bitterness, ‘you went round making God knew what martyrs – in Concepción or elsewhere – when you yourself were without grace enough to die’ (p. 71). That concept lies behind his later comment quoted above, during the discussion shortly before his death, that by killing the hostages the lieutenant may have unintentionally given them the whole world. The idea of the sacrosanctity of the individual pervades this novel. The most repulsive figure next to the gangster is the half-caste, a character enacting the role of Judas to the priest’s unconscious portrayal of Jesus. Malicious, greedy, deceitful, planning to betray him to the police for the few pesos offered as a reward, the mestizo would seem deserving of hatred and contempt, above all by his intended victim. But the feelings he evokes in the priest are very different: at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery that we were made in God’s image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out, and God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, ‘Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?’and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God’s image. (p. 101) As he remarks elsewhere, ‘When you visualised a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate’ (p. 131). And again in line with that older tradition, with the Christian ideal of humility, the priest, recalling what he unforgivingly terms his own ‘despairing act of rebellion with Maria’, evaluates himself as morally inferior even to the mestizo.





That self-deprecation carried with it a certain danger of which Greene was cognisant. The humility of the priest could create an impression of complacency, a suspicion that he is aware at some subdued level that his actions could lead to his own martyrdom and glory. Even a hint of such self-interest on the priest’s part could militate against his effectiveness in the novel. Greene employs two methods of dealing with the problem, the first, less important, is the priest’s genuine incredulity at any mention of his candidacy for martyrdom, a fear, indeed, that, were he to be caught and executed, dying in the name of his religion and thereby qualifying as a martyr if only technically, such status would bring shame instead of honour on the church. Hence the priest’s involuntary response to any mention of such absurdity, his amazement that he should ever be considered a martyr, his dismay at Maria’s jeering comment: ‘Suppose you die. You’ll be a martyr, won’t you? What kind of a martyr do you think you’ll be? It’s enough to make people mock.’ That had never occurred to him – that anybody would consider him a martyr. He said, ‘It’s difficult. Very difficult. I’ll think about it. I wouldn’t want the Church to be mocked.’ (p. 79) And later in the novel, when the suggestion is made once again, the priest giggles: ‘he couldn’t stop himself. He said, “I don’t think martyrs are like this.” He became suddenly serious, remembering Maria’s words – it wouldn’t be a good thing to bring mockery on the Church. He said, “Martyrs are holy men. It is wrong to think that just because one dies … no. I tell you I am in a state of mortal sin” ’ (p. 126). More fundamental, however, was the element in this novel that helped make it theologically unacceptable to the Catholic authorities. In 1953, Cardinal Pizzardo, after examining the novel on behalf of the Vatican’s censors, informed the archbishop of Westminster of his disapproval, concluding his report: I am therefore writing to beg Your Eminence to inform Mr. Graham Greene with your accustomed tact of the unfavourable verdict of the Holy See on his book, and to exhort him to be more constructive from a Catholic point of view in his writings, as all good people expect him to be. As for the book in question, Your Eminence will not fail to ensure that the author does not allow further reprints or translations of it to be published without his introducing into it the necessary corrections that the foregoing remarks would suggest.22 Fortunately, Greene ignored the advice, leaving the novel unchanged on the excuse that the copyright lay with the publishers. The Vatican’s



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opposition arose in large part from the second strategy he adopted for treating the danger outlined above, namely the contrast he provided between his anonymous priest and the holy martyrs or saints of the Church as they had been – and continued to be – traditionally venerated. Where Catholic hagiography, both in its official accounts and in the versions produced for educational purposes, had consistently emphasised the imperturbable faith, the untroubled devotion, and the unhesitating courage of the saint as he or she laid down life for beliefs, in the new dispensation where psychological investigation had penetrated beyond outer appearances to the medley of traumas, anxieties, and hidden terrors operative within, far more admirable for the modern reader was the martyr’s struggle to overcome the instinctive dread of physical torture and death, to stifle legitimate fears and to suppress, however falteringly, a powerful and very natural impulse to flee. To convey that aspect of the priest’s character, Greene provides a tale within the tale, the account of Juan’s martyrdom, reverentially read to Luis and his sisters by their mother, a story that highlights by contrast the traits within the priest that we will learn to admire. The foil or antithesis of the priest is not so much the lieutenant as the traditional martyr. Greene employs here, as he does elsewhere in the novel, a minor technique for arousing the reader’s dislike that can only be tolerated if we recall that the novel was written well before the emergence of feminism – namely the assumption that piety and sentimentality are essentially female characteristics. While Luis is bored by the readings, his sisters sit ‘with beady intense eyes’ drinking in the story, licking their lips secretively as they mentally frame little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents (pp. 26–7); and elsewhere, both in the prison scene and in the confessional across the border, it is again the women who are identified with that tendency. But that apart, the story itself is sufficiently repellent. No-one, the mother reads to them, was ‘more amused than Juan’ when chosen to play Nero in the school play. That remark, intended by the author of the hagiographical tract to display Juan’s good humour and youthful sense of fun, is, to the perceptive reader, the first in a series of comments exposing what to Greene was an insufferable element in such accounts, a revelation of Juan’s deplorable arrogance, his conviction (even though the story informs us that he was known for his humility and piety) that his personal saintliness makes him the obvious choice for the role of the noble martyr in the play and hence that his selection for the role of Nero is patently ridiculous. The recurrence, in such accounts authorised by the Church, of the saints’ awareness of their piety would seem, as Greene so rightly





perceives, to betray the reverse, that they were imbued with the cardinal sin of pride. The contrast the Juan story affords reaches its culmination when the priest in this novel, having attempted to bolster his courage with whisky, desperately trying to keep up a bold front as he is led to his execution, finds his legs involuntarily buckling beneath him; while Juan, supremely confident of his own saintliness and certain of the joys awaiting him in heaven, happily (and nauseatingly) asks the jailer if the latter has come ‘to lead him to the banquet’. Juan’s martyrdom, such comment reveals, is motivated not by altruism but by his confidence in the celestial reward awaiting him. Indeed, the only type of person with whom the priest and, by extension, Greene himself find it difficult to empathise is the piously self-satisfied. For the nineteenth century, Browning’s expression of contentment, ‘God’s in his heaven / All’s right with the world’, while it may not have suited all moods in that period, was accepted as a basically valid viewpoint for Christian trust in a benevolent deity. But for the twentieth century, with its augmented consciousness of the cruelty of nature in the Darwinianrevealed predatory struggle for existence and the evidence of human depravity in the holocaust, such sentiments seemed grossly inappropriate. Religious faith, where it was retained, needed now to be a faith despite human suffering, an attitude exemplified in the title of Paul Tillich’s theological tract, The Courage To Be. In such a setting, the priest can feel genuine affection and forgiveness for the prisoners in the jail, even when they are covertly indulging in sexual intercourse, but he finds it almost impossible to feel the same for the woman he meets there who self-righteously condemns them, or for the communicant across the border who, when urged by him to confess her real sins instead of her minor infractions consisting of abbreviated prayers or fasting, replies with astonishment, ‘But I’m a good woman, father!’ He had always been worried by the fate of pious women. As much as politicians, they fed on illusion. He was frightened for them: they came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity … . He said in hard accents, ‘I have a child.’ (p. 127) Such attacks on the supposedly devout within the church and on those selected to serve as exemplars of the faith were unlikely to endear Greene to the Church authorities, not least because of the unstated corollary that, to be fully cognisant of one’s faith, one needs to have experienced sin and a profound sense of guilt. The priest comes to realise



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that venial sins such as impatience, a trivial lie, or having ignored a fast day – the kind of sin usually recited by the pious in the confessional – could cut one off from grace more effectively than the worst malefactions. He himself, he comes to recognise, when comfortably installed in his parish before the revolution, had really loved no-one, while now, after having fathered a child, he had learnt to empathise with the sinners of the world, to feel a deep kinship with and love for the supposed dregs of humankind, of which he sees himself to be a member. The end of this novel marks the culmination of the process we have been following in its various aspects, the re-assessment of the priest by means of a gradual rejection of his self-condemnations and those of his detractors. His anguished confession of failure should evoke from any sensitive reader a mental dissociation from his sentiments, through a perception of his innate underestimation of his own virtues and his unforgiving censure of his supposed imperfections. That dissociation is most marked in the passage recording his thoughts shortly before his death, in the reader’s realisation that, after his immense suffering and dedication to his faith, he conforms far more closely to the true ideal of saint and martyr than those appearing in the the church’s hagiographical annals, a figure deeply conscious of the supposed failures in his life and totally unaware of the bravery, the self-sacrifice, and the devotion to his calling that we have witnessed: He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. (p. 210) If we may return at this point to the critical consensus concerning the novel, I trust I have suggested how far from the mark are those statements cited earlier in this chapter, the view that the priest is ‘a picaresque rogue on his travels’, that he is ‘unfit as Christ’s representative’, that he is, at the conclusion, ‘caught like a rat in a trap’, that there is ‘only a small difference’ between the priest and the dying American gangster,23 evaluations citing as textual substantiation the passages of self-flagellation such as the above. Even the view that the novel recounts the maturing of a fallen figure into an eventual recipient of divine grace – Marie-Béatrice Mesnet maintains that ‘this poor, corrupt man, who is little better than a thief, finds his vocation at the eleventh hour with the help of





brandy’24 – may be seen to be misreadings, since in fact he never changes within the framework of the novel. The persistence of such negative readings some sixty years after the novel’s appearance may be indicated by an article by Matthew Price that appeared in 2004, describing the priest as an individual who ‘succumbs to every vice and wallows in decadence.’25 Intrinsic to the new genre of the anti-hero, not only in this novel but in the genre at large, is a movement from an initial impression of the character’s failure and despair towards the reader’s gradual discernment of his superiority to those around him, to the perception that he has indeed a claim to heroic stature, not through a process of self-improvement in the course of the novel but as a quality inherent in him from the opening scenes. The narrative strategy that Greene introduced was in marked contrast to a developmental change in the twentieth-century novel in its treatment of a character’s mental processes. In the nineteenth-century tradition, the narrator’s disclosure of the thoughts passing through a character’s mind was, whatever outward pretence or facade that character may have adopted, understood to be a disclosure of his or her true feelings. Thus we learn of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede: ‘How she yearned to be back in her safe home again, cherished and cared for as she had always been.’ Freud, by depriving conscious thoughts of their ultimate authenticity and transferring such validity to the concealed fears, longings, and traumas of the repressed self, had prompted novelists such as Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner to concentrate instead upon the borderline where the subconscious rises to affect, and even to control, the associative flow within a character’s mind. The reader is impelled in such writings to search for the incestuous desires lurking behind Quentin’s frenzy at his sister’s marriage or the mother-fixation disturbing Stephen Dedalus, the reader stimulated to perceive underlying motivations of which the character is itself unaware. But the new genre of the anti-hero focused not on the gap between conscious and subconscious thought, but on the contrast between the anti-hero’s sense of personal failure and the laudable qualities unperceived by him which, once detected by us, raise him above the moral level of his peers. If it has been generally claimed that the anti-hero must summon up courage and reserves for a challenge he is inadequate to fulfil, one suspects upon a close reading of such texts that he in fact emerges as far from inadequate to the task. Physically such anti-heroes may be defeated – executed, as is the priest, confined to a sanatorium as is Holden Caulfield, or otherwise penalised by society – but spiritually they prove not only eminently qualified to address the challenges of the time but



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function as models for the way the author believes such challenges should be confronted. In brief, the anti-hero emerges not as social failure, picaro, rogue, nor even partial hero, but as an exemplar of moral integrity in a world that has lost its ethical and spiritual standards, his social ostracism exemplifying not an inferiority to his peers but an ethical sensibility too refined to permit him to capitulate. By his innovative use of the genre, Greene not only circumvented the disqualified tradition of the hero but also, and perhaps more importantly, restored, despite the pessimism that won him the appellation of ‘grim Greene’, a sense of the potential nobility and dignity of the individual in the bleak surroundings of the twentieth century. Moreover, the seeming failings of the priest in this novel – his illegitimate child, his supposed disregard for fast-days, his dislike of the ‘pious’, priding themselves on having refrained from meat on a Friday – are not to be seen as unorthodoxies reflective of Greene’s personal antinomianism, revealing, as has so often been argued, his dislike of ritual and dogma. Whether they conform to his own beliefs is to me irrelevant in analysing the literary work. What does emerge as significant is the opportunity they provide, an opportunity carefully crafted by the author, for countering the predominant antipathy of his readers to religious belief and, especially, to their prejudice against the church he had joined. By initially presenting the priest as almost a caricature of antiCatholic views of the priesthood, Greene lulls the non-Catholic reader into a sense of security; but at the same time, by depicting him in the opening pages as a failure, miserably convinced of his own ineffectuality, Greene reveals that he is fully aware of the contemporary disillusionment with the fictional heroes of the past, and conscious of the spiritual desolation to which his generation is heir. Having achieved those goals, he subtly implants, as the novel progresses, the possibility of an alternative reading, a strategy that leads us, in our gradual dissociation from the priest’s self-condemnations, to advance in our evaluation of him, both as priest and as human being, from initial contempt to eventual esteem.




3

Greene, it has often been remarked, reveals a more tender concern for his sinners than for his saints, for those contravening the doctrines of the church than for those faithful to its tenets. It has been charged that he had, as an advocate of Catholicism, become restless and subversive, lapsing into theological unorthodoxy as his allegiance to the church weakened. The ‘pious’ in his novels – a woman with no more to confess than the abbreviation of her prayers one evening, or proud of her arrest for having possessed a religious painting – do indeed emerge as anathema to his protagonists, who are generally appalled at the frequent concern of the devout with trivia instead of the cultivation of charity and love. As the priest remarked: ‘it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins – impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity – cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all.’1 Conversely, those characters who have offended against the church and are aware of some grave misdemeanour weighing upon their conscience arouse the author’s sympathy, even his admiration, with the implication that it is only after one has transgressed and repented that true faith can be achieved – a principle of which the church could scarcely approve since it implied an encouragement to sin. Frank Kermode put the case in its strongest form, applying to Greene the wry comment offered by Blake, that Milton was ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’. Kermode added, however, that in this instance the author comes close to knowing it. The supposed unorthodoxy of his novels has occupied a central place in criticism, but a close reading suggests that his alleged deviations conform more closely to the fundamentals of Christian doctrine than those espoused by the church establishment. One recalls, as noted above, his contempt for the hagiography permeating Sunday-school teaching, 42



The Heart of the Matter

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with its idealisation of the saints who are presented there as perfect and untroubled, in a manner coming dangerously close to complacency, to the pride that constitutes the cardinal sin of Christianity. That principle, his sympathy with the sinner, has major literary implications. C.S. Lewis, reviewing some years ago a new edition of the Oxford Book of Christian Verse, commented with justice that devotional poetry achieves its greatest success not when portraying the spiritual comforts of unsullied faith but when expressing a sense of personal deficiency or failure. With a characteristic turn of phrase, Lewis concluded that such poetry works best when the speaker describes ‘not what he ought to feel but the fact that he did not feel as he ought.’2 In that, he echoed a point made earlier by Cardinal Newman, a comment that Greene himself has cited with admiration. Newman wrote: ‘if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than Literature ever was, and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all.’3 We may add that a stanza such as the following, authorised by its inclusion in the official Church Hymnary: Looking upward every day, Sunshine on our faces; Pressing onward every day Toward the heavenly places. may be useful in encouraging the faithful, but few would prefer it as poetry to Gerard Manly Hopkins’ anguished protest to his God: Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me?4 By that criterion, Greene’s preference for individuals haunted by a conviction of postmortal damnation over those assured of their eternal happiness should be seen not as an offence against his adopted religion but as fully warranted exploration of those religious struggles and disquietudes that orthodoxy often prefers to ignore in the interests of advocating righteousness among its simpler laymen. He explores those struggles of faith that lie at the heart of Christianity and, indeed, of all religions advocating spiritual self-improvement and decrying self-righteousness. Pope Paul VI seems to have agreed with that principle. During a personal





interview with Greene, the Pope, concurring that the novels would inevitably offend some Catholics, encouraged him to ignore such criticism, including, one assumes, the objections of Cardinal Pizzardo and the Vatican censors.5 On the other hand, as Michael Higgins has pointed out, the depiction in his novels of the representatives of the church as weak vessels, as fallen, reprobate, or renegade, redeemed only and by no means always, by some residual spark of the divine, would seem to corroborate this prevalent sense of Greene’s dissatisfaction with his faith. The ecclesiastical disobedience of these fictional characters and their religious doubts speak, we are told, for the alienated, the abandoned, and the desperate of this world. James Noxon notes that in these later novels the intellectual qualms and moral perturbation of those straying from the church are never satisfactorily answered nor assuaged by its representatives, the absence of such comfort suggesting that there was none that either the clergy or Greene himself could offer. In his discussion of the novel presently under discussion, Terry Eagleton, a critic especially sensitive to the nuances of Greene’s writing, has deduced from Scobie’s unsatisfactory exchange with Father Rank not only an inability to conform to church doctrine but a rejection of the constraints of religion – attitudes that Eagleton attributes to the author too. Scobie’s dissatisfaction after his absolution: ‘The words brought no sense of relief because there was nothing to relieve. They were a formula: the Latin words hustled together – a hocus pocus’ (p. 154). Eagleton sees as ‘essentially Greene’s: given a tragic tension between the claims of human relationship and the demands of faith, the rigours of orthodoxy must be guiltily denied in the name of the human.’6 This widely accepted identification of Scobie’s views with the author’s is, after all, the kind of error against which we constantly warn first-year students; yet it has found a firm place in almost all writings on these novels – an approach especially disturbing in this instance as it ignores the subtle manipulation of reader response so central to his work. We shall be examining a number of instances in which the lack of identity between Greene and his protagonist is evident in this novel. Indeed, on the basis of the strategy examined in the last chapter – the author’s clear intention that readers dissociate themselves from the priest’s self-denigrations – we may expect a similar dissociation here, such dissociation from the protagonist’s statements applying no less to Greene himself. Moreover, where Greene’s supposed heresies have aroused the sternest censure from critics, the error is often on the side of the critic. One item that has evoked considerable concern is the ‘bargaining’ scene in which



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Scobie, gazing at a dying child, prays, ‘Father, … give her peace. Take away my peace for ever, but give her peace’ (p. 125). Is Greene, we are asked, ‘so badly instructed in the Catholic faith as to suppose that this is sound and acceptable doctrine?’; or as another claims in arguing for Greene’s heresies, ‘such scenes of soul-wagering testify not to a God so merciful that he will accept even the crassest swap of eternal destinies, but to a God who inhabits a zero-sum universe in which any spiritual disbursement from on high must be countered by an equal and opposite payment from the petitioner … God’s inexhaustible love and gratuitous plenitude has been replaced by a scheme of quid pro quo between heaven and earth.’7 What then, are we to make of Moses’ similar prayer after the incident of the Golden Calf, when he offers himself as a substitute for the sinners: ‘Yet now, if thou wilt, forgive their sin –; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written’; a plea which God rejects, replying, ‘Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book’ (Exod. 32:32–3). The plea is indeed rejected on the grounds that such bargaining is incompatible with justice, but Moses’ spontaneous impulse is seen not as theologically reprehensible but as highly admirable, evidence of selfless compassion. So here, Scobie’s altruistic urge may be untenable in terms of ultimate justice, yet be regarded as in itself laudable. Moreover, was his impulse basically different from the imitatio dei central to Christianity, the readiness to offer oneself for the salvation of others? The idea of Greene’s religious recalcitrance has been accepted with especial readiness as it seemed to conform to the antinomianism permeating so much of that era, the existentialist outlook of Sartre and Camus rejecting fixed or imposed norms in favour of individual decisions, decisions needing to be reassessed at every moment of crisis and confrontation. For them, as for the religious existentialists, the individual, although bound by the demands and pressures of society or faith, is not absolved from the obligation of personal moral responsibility, from assessing his situation in the light of his or her personal beliefs even if those conflict with the norms. Among the most influential of religious existentialists at that time, Martin Buber, in advocating the need for an intense I–Thou relationship with God, reduced the observance of ritual and formal doctrine to minor status: Only out of a personal relationship with the Absolute can the absoluteness of the ethical coordinates arise without which there is no complete awareness of self. Even when the individual calls an absolute criterion handed down by religious tradition his own, it




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There can be no doubt that Greene was responsive to these current existentialist concepts in his scorn for ritualists more concerned with infractions of abstinence days than with ethical matters. Even the most devoted of his priests seem to shun the daily duties of a parish, preferring to live in the wasteland of human detritus where liturgical ceremonies and formal observances often fall aside – an aspect so often regarded as a projection of his own unorthodoxy.9 If that attitude is anti-Catholic, where are we to place such Catholic models as St Francis leaving society in order to dwell with lepers, St Xavier journeying to pagan China and Malacca, or the hundreds of missionaries throughout the history of the church exchanging the amenities of normal life for the hardship of distant, and frequently dangerous environments? Greene does indeed see the world of corruption, despair, and suffering as a truer challenge to the priest than attending afternoon teas at the Ladies Guild or raising funds for a new belfry, activities which certainly may dull the soul; but to term that preference anti-Catholic is to misinterpret both Greene’s religious stance and the ideals of the church to which he subscribed. His negative portrayal of certain fictional priests, like his castigation of the pious, in fact constituted in the deepest sense not unorthodoxy but a re-affirmation of Christian values. His negative portrayals arose either from disdain towards those ministers who had defaulted on their pastoral function or as part of a process whereby, through the seemingly reprehensible exterior, there would eventually be perceived a spiritual devotion of which God, if not the formal Church, would ultimately approve. There are indeed mean-spirited priests in the novels, lacking the compassion or altruism demanded from such emissaries, including those in The Power and the Glory who fled from the communist regime leaving their co-religionists deserted and uncared for, or Padre José, abrogating his vow of celibacy to avoid arrest; but they are intended to highlight by contrast the dedication of his central characters who do live up to the highest ideals of the vocation, whether or not they are actually priests. Father Rank in The Heart of the Matter comes into that latter category. He is by no means an ideal cleric. His booming, jovial laugh constitutes a hollow attempt to camouflage what he sees miserably as his total ineffectiveness. He bemoans his failure to win the confidence of his parishioners and his chronic inability to find appropriate words of comfort and guidance when they are needed. To Scobie he admits in a moment of weakness his sense of utter uselessness, the fact that his parishioners call upon



must be reforged in the fire of the truth of his personal essential relation to the Absolute if it is to win true validity.8

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him only to assist the dying, never the living. For his superiors within the official Church, he is clearly no candidate for promotion. Yet no-one reading the novel could question the genuineness of his dedication, however ineffectual he may be in performing his task, nor the integrity of his allegiance to the church he so longs to serve. Incompetent though he may appear, he does, at a time of crisis, provide the advice and understanding one would expect from the finest of priests, as in his sensitive but firm refusal to grant absolution until Scobie repents of and terminates his adulterous liaison: ‘We are told to forgive our brother seventy times seven and we needn’t fear God will be any less forgiving than we are, but nobody can forgive the uncontrite.’ And in response to Scobie’s complaint that he feels an emptiness towards God, the advice he offers is equally perceptive: ‘That’s sometimes the moment God chooses.’ Moreover, as has been noted, the prominence in these novels of unsuitable or incompetent clerics serves as a sop thrown to the Protestant Cerberus, lulling potential animosity by providing them initially with the kind of priest they tend to caricature, yet leading them, within the novels, eventually to respect those who do win Greene’s approval. Heinz Antor is among the many who fault Greene for his unorthodoxy, pointing out that his image of God ‘… is not the schematic one of a strict but benevolent father figure who rewards His obedient children, severely punishes and even damns the bad ones, who inflicts upon his faithful believers the occasional little trial, but who on the whole preserves them from harm.’10 If that is a summary of Catholic or indeed of biblical doctrine at large, what are we to make of the repeated protests at the victory of evildoers, the Psalmist’s cry, ‘How long will the wicked prosper?’ (Psalm 94:3), ‘Your Father which is in heaven … maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust’ (Matt 5:44), or the lines by the Jesuit poet, Hopkins, quoted earlier? Scobie, distressed at the seemingly pointless suffering of the child surviving for forty days in an open boat only to die on reaching land, puzzles over the problem: ‘that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God’ (p. 120), but in that he was echoing a protest heard repeatedly from the most faithful, even in the Bible itself: ‘Behold I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud but there is no judgment’, followed a moment later by the assertion, despite all contrary evidence: ‘I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth’ (Job: 19). The image of the deity for which Antor seeks in vain in Greene’s writings, the concept of a benevolent God rewarding the faithful and punishing wrongdoers in this world is indeed one the author rejects, but it is one that most





thinking Christians, including Catholic theologians, would reject with equal scorn. Baldridge has more recently taken that point much further in a book suggesting that Greene’s novels are so opposed to Catholicism that they might be termed ‘great Protestant documents.’11 He is especially concerned at the theological contradiction in Greene’s conception of God, at one time seen as omnipotent and at another as debilitated and vulnerable, a contradiction leading him to conclude that ‘Greene’s God is fallible, conflicted, struggling, and less than all-powerful.’ Scobie, he points out, complains that God in His immense power could have saved the child its suffering, while at the communion he sees himself as ‘striking God when he’s down – in my power’. At this point Baldridge cites approvingly Kermode’s censure of Greene for presenting us with a God who is, paradoxically, both strong and vulnerable. But the term ‘God’, we need to recall, is applied in Christianity both to the omnipotent Father and to the suffering Son, the two existing in unison within the Trinity. Baldridge insists that Greene is evoking only God the Father, and that like most Catholics he thinks infrequently about the Son – an extraordinary comment in its own right. But in the very passages he cites for the weakness of Greene’s all-powerful God, it is patently the Crucifixion that is evoked. At the unshriven communion, Scobie castigates himself bitterly, envisioning himself as the Cross, by his sins re-inflicting agony on ‘a bleeding face, … eyes closed by the continuous shower of blows, the punch-drunk head of God reeling sideways.’ This is the traditional vision of the conscience-ridden Christian imagining, as did Donne, that he is, by his misdemeanours, re-enacting the Crucifixion, himself fulfilling the task of the torturer whose sins passe the Jewes impiety: They kill’d once an inglorious man, but I Crucifie him daily.12 A major aim of Greene’s novels is, indeed, to re-assert religious principles that are only too often forgotten or obscured in the routine of daily living. The technique that Greene developed in order to effect that re-assertion, the retrospective validation of the protagonist’s ideals as employed in The Power and the Glory, is repeated in The Heart of the Matter; but it is achieved by an entirely different and fascinating strategy. Many years ago, Wayne Booth’s magisterial study of the function of the narrator in fiction stimulated the emergence of an essentially new critical school, the study of narratology, focussing upon the authorial voice dominating fictional works. One chapter discussed ‘the unreliable



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narrator’, a voice seeming to carry the authority and credibility normally assigned to the narrator but proving less trustworthy as the fictional work proceeds. Some doubts had, before the appearance of his study, already been voiced, in connection, for example, with Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, a character previously regarded as the faithful servant on whom we could safely rely. In the fifties, she was suddenly attacked as the villain of the piece, on the grounds that her misrepresentations undermine the effectiveness of the tale. The story-teller of Henry James’s Aspen Papers was similarly charged with aesthetic deficiencies and a tainted view of the past. For such critics, as for Booth himself in his larger study, such unreliable narrators were condemned as negative features, marking a failure on the author’s part. As Booth complained in a typical passage, ‘Again and again in the story one is forced to throw up his hands and decide that James simply has provided insufficient clues for the judgments which he still quite clearly expects us to be able to make.’13 There is thus a discrepancy between the author’s reliance upon the persuasiveness of his narrator and the reader’s lack of confidence in the latter. Greene, however, uses an essentially innovative strategy – subtle and highly effective. In the previous novel, the ‘unreliability’ gradually recognised by the reader was, I have suggested, confined to the priest’s self-evaluations, the priest there not being the narrator. In this novel, while the narrator himself is not unreliable, the narrative is. The narrator is employed to create ambiguities, ambiguities of attribution, leaving us in doubt who is speaking or meditating the comments reproduced. Repeatedly, statements that seem to emanate from that voice with all the authority one normally accords to a narrator turn out to be equivocal, leaving the possibility that they constitute an unmarked elision into the thoughts of the protagonist, with major implications for the novel at large. Such elisions temporarily mislead the reader into imagining them to be authoritative while opening up the possibility for the kind of retrospective re-assessment that we have seen applies to the selfcondemnations of the Mexican priest. It had long been accepted practice for a character’s thoughts to be presented in the form of indirect speech – a technique that Trollope frequently employed. In The Duke’s Children, Lady Mabel’s regret at having refused an offer of marriage from a highly eligible suitor and her determination to recover the loss are presented as emanating directly from her musings, although transmitted by the narrator as a third-person account: But the prize was not yet utterly beyond her grasp. To recover it, to recover even the smallest chance of recovering it, there would be need of great exertion. She must be bold, sudden, unwomanlike, and





yet with such display of woman’s charm that he at least should discover no want. She must be false, but false with such perfect deceit, that he must regard her as a pearl of truth. If anything could lure him back it must be his conviction of her passionate love. And she must be strong; – so strong as to overcome not only his weakness, but all that was strong in him.14 It is patent in such passages that we are listening to Lady Mabel’s thoughts. So it was in certain passages in The Power and the Glory, where, although the sentiments the priest expressed are transmitted through an authorial voice, they are obviously those of the protagonist, as when in the prison scene he has just publicly acknowledged that he is a priest: It was like the end: there was no need to hope any longer. The ten years’ hunt was over at last. There was silence all round him. This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short. (PG, p. 125) Even without the phrase ‘he realized’, which comes late in the passage, we know to whom the statements are to be assigned. In the present novel, such third-person accounts leave us unsure whether we are listening to an authorial condemnation of Scobie’s actions or the latter’s self-criticism: [He] looked up at Fraser to see whether he could detect any surprise or suspicion. There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term. Only his own heart-beats told him he was guilty – that he had joined the ranks of the corrupt police officers – Bailey who had kept a safe deposit in another city, Crayshaw who had been found with diamonds, Boyston against whom nothing had been definitely proved and who had been invalided out. They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered. (p. 55) The passage begins as narration, informing us of his movements. But it seems to shift into his thoughts, and the attribution of the axiom



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concerning sentiment is left blurred as is the statement concerning his guilt. Is there a transition? And if so, what validity are we to assign to those statements? In an oft-quoted passage, Evelyn Waugh remarked on the debt this novel owed to the cinema, most notably to the absence of ‘an observer through whom the events are recorded and the emotions transmitted’;15 yet it is in fact the presence of a narrator observing and recording the actions that serves as a primary ingredient here for reader manipulation. When the unfortunate captain begs for the return of his letter, he kept on wiping his eyes with the back of his hand like a child – an unattractive child, the fat boy of the school. Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive. (p. 50) The factual description is followed by what appears to be a universal truth inserted by the narrator. Yet, as we come to realise, it is far from universal, indicating instead a quality rare among humans, most of whom are indeed attracted by the beautiful and successful. It constitutes, therefore, an unmarked slide into Scobie’s thoughts, for whom it is the inadequacies, failures, and pitiable aspects of others that he finds so hard to resist. In none of the above instances are the implications of that ambiguity of vital importance, but they establish a mode of writing that prepares the way for passages whose equivocality will prove central to the work. As Helen, on her first meeting with Scobie, talks eagerly of her schooldays, we are informed that, ‘He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love’ (p. 138). Is the concluding phrase a continuation of the narrator’s comment or an elision, a transition into Scobie’s thoughts? If the former, we are merely being offered an authorial generalisation on the misconceptions of adolescents; if the latter, the moment is one of dramatic irony, revealing not the narrator’s but Scobie’s dangerous assumption that his age provides him with immunity to falling in love. Which of the two is the correct reading we only learn retrospectively: When the sound of Bagster’s feet receded, she raised her mouth and they kissed. What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust, and pity. (p. 160)





Kunkel, like many others, bases his reading of the novel on the proposition that Scobie’s pity is to be regarded as a terrible folly and that such is the author’s view. He cites the phrase that pity smouldered like decay at Scobie’s heart as marking ‘Greene’s strongest condemnation’ of him.16 But as the final sentence in the passage Kunkel quotes makes clear, the condemnation is not the narrator’s but Scobie’s, his conviction that his compassion for others is an encumbrance of which he cannot disburden himself. The passage runs: She said furiously, ‘I don’t want your pity.’ But it was not a question of whether she wanted it – she had it. Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself. (p. 178) No less central is the scene in which he promises to find the money for his wife’s passage, with the comment inserted there concerning despair. He would still have made the promise even if he could have foreseen all that would come of it. He had always been prepared to accept the responsibility for his actions, and he had always been half aware too, from the time he made his terrible private vow that she should be happy, how far this action might carry him. Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. (p. 60) To whom in this passage are we to assign the pregnant statement that despair is the unforgivable sin? Is it a doctrinal pronouncement by Greene, a theological animadversion by the narrator, or a transition into Scobie’s musings, expressing a belief not necessarily condoned by the author? R.W.B. Lewis has no doubt that it is the author’s view, concluding that Scobie not only receives the sacrament in a state of mortal sin but commits ‘the still graver sin of despair and suicide’.17 If the comment is the narrator’s, then Scobie is indeed damned as Lewis suggests; if it is Scobie’s, then it constitutes the type of theological error on his part that we have met with in The Power and the Glory, an error whose rejection by



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the reader contributes significantly to our eventual exoneration of the protagonist. That point, so essential for an interpretation of the novel, needs to be examined more closely. The common view among Catholics is indeed that despair is a mortal sin, Isidore of Seville stating categorically in his seventh-century De Summo Bono (2: 14) that ‘to despair is to fall into hell’. But Augustine’s Summa Theologica had earlier, and with greater authority, distinguished carefully between despair arising from a denial of God’s infinite mercy – which is indeed unbelief and hence defined by him as a mortal sin – and despair arising from a conviction of personal unworthiness which, he determines, is not (De Libero Arbitrio 2: 19). Since such conviction of unworthiness emanates from humility, the cardinal virtue of Christianity, that type of despair is, if not to be advocated, to some extent commendable. There can be no doubt to which of these categories Scobie belongs; and the ambiguity concerning to whom the statement on the unforgivability of despair is to be attributed leaves room for the reader’s subsequent movement from initial censure to retrospective respect. This perception of the equivocality of seemingly authoritative statements and hence of a dichotomy between the author’s views and those of his protagonist does not conform to the normal critical stance. Kurismmootil, a Jesuit priest especially sensitive to the theological implications of the novels, maintains with most others that Scobie’s religious ideas are fully consonant with the author’s judgement: ‘We accept [Scobie’s] as our point of view’, he explains, ‘because we are confident of the author’s concurrence’.18 F.N. Lees, while confirming that identity of viewpoint, does argue for the reader’s dissociation from that joint viewpoint, but interprets the dissociation as a blemish. We see, he maintains, beyond the views of Father Rank and Scobie, responding negatively to the novel’s sentimentality. Accordingly, he faults Greene for ‘adopting the hero’s viewpoint without fully realizing the implications and responsibilities of the method.’ For Karen Radell, it is Scobie’s view that ultimately prevails. His, she suggests, is the controlling viewpoint in the story in spite of the presence of an omniscient narrator, but she concludes that to be a fault: ‘if we as readers subscribe wholly to Scobie’s view of things, then Scobie must be seen as a failure, both as a man and a Catholic’.19 In contrast, I would argue that there is, in fact, no consistent controlling viewpoint in the novel, the technique of narrative ambiguity being the primary means whereby Greene manipulates reader response, creating an initial impression of Scobie’s failings which is gradually – usually retrospectively – modified in his favour.




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‘I oughtn’t to have dragged you up, but I wanted us to have Communion together.’ ‘I’m afraid I’ve ruined that – with the brandy.’ ‘Never mind, Ticki.’ Carelessly she sentenced him to eternal death. ‘We can go any day.’ He knelt in his seat and watched Louise kneel with the other communicant at the altar rail. (p. 213) The insertion, ‘Carelessly she sentenced him to eternal death’ appears to carry the full weight of narrative comment; but by this stage, sensitised to such elisions, we should be aware not only that it is Scobie’s unspoken comment but that it is indicative of a mistaken theological assumption on his part, the reader recognising that his refusal to indulge in duplicity towards his God far outweighs the technicality of missing communion. The recurrence of such ambiguities produces eventually a recognition that here too, as in The Power and the Glory, there is a subtext countering the surface text, a growing sense that Scobie’s conviction of his inevitable damnation is not to be taken at face-value; and that disparity has a distinct bearing on the final assessment at the time of Scobie’s suicide. Shortly before the act, while contemplating the implications of his decision, we read: ‘Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers; he went to an eternity of deprivation’ (p. 261). That remark, if emanating from the narrator, condemns him irrevocably; but if an echo of his own thoughts, its effect is exactly the reverse, highlighting the extent of his sacrifice, his readiness to die for others even when convinced, however incorrectly (that aspect will be examined below) that it entails the inevitable negation of his eternal future. This mention of communion in the earlier passage involves once again the claim that one needs to be a Catholic to respond to these novels.20 Many readers reject the principle of Catholic confession, disliking the idea that, in the baldest terms, communicants can commit whatever sins or indiscretions they wish, divulge them to a priest, recite the requisite number of Hail Marys, and cheerfully return to their peccadilloes absolved and unrepentant. In fact, Greene, shortly before the above scene, carefully prepares for that possible response, as Helen scoffs



Instances abound, often in central passages and with major implications for reader response. After Scobie deliberately sips brandy in order to disqualify himself from a communion that he fears would be hypocritical, Louise remarks apologetically:


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‘Well,’ she said with the same undertone of contempt that seemed to pull her apart from him, into the safety of the shore, ‘can’t you go and confess everything now? After all it doesn’t mean you won’t do it again.’ ‘It’s not much good confessing if I don’t intend to try …’ ‘Well then,’ she said triumphantly, ‘be hung for a sheep. You are in – what do you call it – mortal sin? now. What difference does it make?’ (p. 210)22 Wearily he tries to explain that to confess when he is as yet unrepentant appears to him as evil as the performing of a Black Mass, ‘stealing the sacrament in order to desecrate it.’ Of course, Helen is right in one respect. Scobie is indubitably committing the sin of adultery, however much Greene may try to persuade us that he is doing so out of compassion and not for sexual gratification.23 Yet we should recall that Scobie is not a prêtre manqué, the figure recurrent in Greene’s novels, even though he has some of the attributes of the priest. His examination of the native girl in his office resembles, we are told, a ritual between priest and server; his office is as austere as a monastic cell, the pair of rusty handcuffs that hang on the wall testifying to a reluctance to punish that is unsuited to an officer of the law, and Father Rank admits that people in trouble, instead of turning to their priest for advice, prefer to turn to Scobie. But he is a layman, not bound by vows of celibacy. On the other hand, being a layman does not exonerate him. Although not bound by a vow of chastity, he is committing adultery. Indeed, one weakness of the novel is the series of moral offences he commits – offences, whether they be judged by religious or secular criteria. Even for those condoning sexual freedom, there is in Scobie’s affair with Helen an element of the exploitation of the weak and trusting, a sense that he is taking advantage of the bewilderment she has suffered and of her confidence in him as the guide and mentor to whom she clings. And his other offences are equally distasteful. The loan he obtains from Yussef is by any standards a grave contravention of his obligations as a police officer, and his failure to inform his superior of the loan until it is too late constitutes a serious breach of responsibility. Greene’s attempts to justify such dereliction of duty do not succeed completely, but we should at least note the care he takes to point out



at Scobie, charging him with hiding behind those rulings of his church that suit his convenience while blithely ignoring those that conflict with it:21


that each of those acts was prompted not from motives of personal gratification or profit. As regards the affair with Helen, we are informed repeatedly how physically unattractive she was – ‘The face was ugly with exhaustion: the skin looked as though it were about to crack over the cheekbones … her arms, as thin as a child’s lay outside the blanket’ (p. 122). She is repeatedly, as in the above passage, referred to as immature, not least in the way she cherishes her stamp-collection. Moreover, she is scarcely a figure to arouse lust. As Scobie leaves the hospital after their initial meeting, he experiences not exhilaration but a weight of misery, as though, having been relieved of Louise’s presence, he is entering a new form of incarceration – ‘It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another.’ Behind his response to these various incidents lies the pain of his own bereavement, the death of his daughter. The agony he experiences on seeing the shipwrecked girl dying, longing to see her father, arises from deeper roots than mere humanity – ‘He put his head in his hands and wouldn’t look. He had been in Africa when his own child died’ And that sympathy is transferred to the immature Helen. As he struggles with the need to break off the relationship, it ‘was not Helen’s face he saw as he prayed but the dying child who called him father’ (p. 220), so that his personal bereavement is seen by extension to prompt in large part his attempt to comfort Helen. In the same way, his decision not to report the captain’s letter arises primarily from the fact that it is a deeply affectionate epistle to a beloved daughter. As we are informed as he burns the letter, beginning his incrimination: ‘That had been the turning point, the daughter.’ The loan he so reluctantly accepts from Yussef is, of course, not for himself but for a Louise desperate to leave the country. Both acts, therefore, are presented as arising from the enormous compassion he feels for the unattractive, the helpless, and the unloved, from his sense of moral obligation, and from the memory of the bereavement that he and Louise have suffered. That compassion forms part of his strange affection for an area of Africa appalling in its corruption, in the perversions of its legal system, in the bewildering mendacity of its inhabitants, and the wearisome monotony of the colonists’ lives. He loves it because of its bleakness, because no-one there could talk of a heaven upon earth. It was a country in which ‘flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed’ (p. 36). The first requirement for membership in the mid-century avant-garde was a rejection of the old concept of an ordered universe under divine



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benevolence and, in its place, an acute awareness of the suffering and corruption of humankind, accompanied by a determination to become involved in the actualities of human affliction, to engage in a profound relationship with one’s fellow creatures and the grimness of their lives, rather than to indulge a selfish concern with one’s personal relationship with God. As Gabriel Marcel put it: My most intimate and unshakable conviction and if it is heretical so much the worse for orthodoxy – is, whatever so many of the pious and learned people may have said about it, that God does not at all want to be loved by us over against the created, but to be glorified through the created and starting from it. That is why so many pious books are intolerable to me. This God standing against the created and in some way jealous of his own works is in my eyes nothing but an idol.24 One notes in this passage the parallel to Greene’s view in Marcel’s dislike of ‘the pious’, as well as his recognition that the views expressed, although clearly in accord with the basic tenets of Christianity, may not conform to official Church doctrine. In the context of that existentialist commitment to the tormented of this world, Scobie’s liaison with Helen emerges not as a surrender to concupiscence but as a longing to relieve her distress, to grant her the affection and love she so sorely needs. George Orwell, in an early review of this novel, offered a remarkably simplistic assessment of their affair. Scobie’s character is, he wrote, incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken.25 Human beings can, as Greene well knows, be entrapped in sins from which they struggle desperately and unsuccessfully to escape; or, in Scobie’s instance, can fall into sin through a virtue that at least partially redeems it. But there is one element of truth in Orwell’s observation, not making the situation incredible but suggesting a somewhat individualistic belief on the author’s part. For Greene, not only here but throughout his other novels, as well as in his own life, did adhere to one unorthodoxy, his view of sexual misdemeanours as being negligible or venial sins. His own frequent and unabashed recourse to brothels, testified to by his





friends, and his own extra-marital affairs, as well as the treatment of that aspect in his fictional works, would seem to validate his remark that sexual misdemeanours were in his eyes so trivial as not even to deserve the name of sin.26 It is a view that may not appeal to all. However, there is some support to be found in the Gospels, if not in the official doctrines of the Church. Jesus, defying the Pharisees, declined to condemn the woman taken in adultery, gently urging her instead to go and sin no more. As that final phrase confirms, the affair with Helen is, theologically, a sin, but the forgiveness implicit in the Gospel scene suggests that it is not to be treated with undue severity. In brief, it cannot be too strongly stressed that Greene’s purpose here is to depict his protagonist, not, as in The Power and the Glory, as a perfect exemplar of the faith, but as a layman struggling to find his way between the calls of conscience and the urgings of an innate compassion for humankind. His relationship to Louise reflects that trait. In this novel (as opposed, for example, to The End of the Affair and The Comedians), the women are, from a feminist viewpoint, passive characters, functioning only to reveal aspects of Scobie’s character. Louise has long lost her physical appeal for him. As he gazes at her through the muslin net while she sleeps, he notes her ageing flesh, the hair stringy with sweat. But her unattractiveness generates in him a feeling not of disgust but of overpowering tenderness, as well as of personal accountability. ‘These were the times of ugliness when he loved her, when pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion’ (p. 22). Above all, it is her suffering that moves him, suffering for which he feels a partial responsibility. She had borne him a child in agony, and in a later agony had watched it die while he was absent overseas, unaware of her torment. ‘It seemed to him that he had escaped everything. If only, he thought, I could so manage that she never suffers again’ (p. 211). Hence his willing acceptance of such tiresome traits as her yearning for social acceptance and her pseudo-literary pursuits, aspects of her personality that he tries earnestly to gratify while fully aware of their superficiality, even risking a charge of cuckoldry in encouraging Wilson to share her interests. If, as so many have argued, his pity is to be regarded as a failing, it is described with remarkable sympathy throughout the novel. Greene’s purpose is not to provide a guidebook for Catholics but to depict a believer’s struggle with the occasional – sometimes baffling – convergence of virtue and sin, of good and evil. He offers here a study, within the framework of Catholicism, of a man confronting the paradoxes of human existence. And that factor is especially relevant to the ending of the novel, to Scobie’s suicide. Waugh, who as a fellow convert to Catholicism might be expected to respond more positively to Greene,



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dies believing himself damned but also in an obscure way – at least in a way that is obscure to me – believing that he is offering his damnation as a loving sacrifice for others. We are told that he is actuated throughout by the love of God. A love, it is true that falls short of trust, but a love, we must suppose, which sanctifies his sins. That is the heart of the matter. Is such a sacrifice feasible? … To me the idea of willing my own damnation for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a mad blasphemy, for the God who accepted that sacrifice could be neither just nor lovable. Soon after, Canon Joseph Cartmell provided clerical support for Waugh’s view in an uncompromising condemnation of Scobie’s actions, articulated in terms of church precept: As the book depicts him, Scobie retained his Faith. He lost hope; his first deliberate mortal sin forfeited charity. He intensified the forfeiture by piling sin on sin; and, by losing hope, he lost the will to repent. He was offered many actual graces leading to repentance; these he rejected. He remained therefore with what is technically known as dead Faith, for by charity is Faith alive. Being without charity, he could not really love God; for the real love of God, the love that is salutary, is the work of charity.27 Canon Cartmell, adopting Isidore of Seville’s stricture defining despair as a mortal sin, ignores Augustine’s more generous and more authoritative view, as summarised above. From that preference, the Canon deduces step by step, with the certainty of a geometric proof, the church’s inevitable condemnation of Scobie’s actions. But Greene, I would suggest, is both more subtle and more charitable. That harsh censure he assigns to the insensitive Louise, reacting to her husband’s suicide with the ungenerous summary: ‘He was a bad Catholic … And at the end – this horror. He must have known he was damning himself.’ But Father Rank displays a sympathy and understanding that Greene clearly intends should be seen as a more valid Christian response: Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and said furiously, ‘For goodness’ sake, Mrs. Scobie, don’t imagine you – or I – know a thing about God’s mercy.’



was forthright in his disapproval of the ending, effectively summarising the objections experienced by many, even those predisposed to religious faith. Scobie, Waugh states,

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Certainly, the Church discouraged suicide – we know of the tradition shared by both Catholics and Protestants whereby suicide was so abominated that perpetrators were, in the sixteenth century, buried at the crossroads with a stake driven through the heart as a warning to all. But in fact, the church’s rulings were not as inflexible on this point as Louise and most critics have assumed. Once again, we may turn to the authoritative rulings of Augustine. In a lengthy discussion in his City of God concerning the Christian women who had killed themselves in order to avoid being raped at the time of the capture of Rome in the year 410, he concluded that they were technically wrong, for even if their bodies had been defiled their spiritual virginity would have been preserved. But he was patently sympathetic towards them, since they committed suicide out of pure motives. As martyrs to the faith, they came into a category vastly different from those deserving a stake through the heart, and their predicament suggests that the border-line between suicide and martyrdom was indeed slight. For in almost all instances of martyrdom, the saint had chosen and indeed caused his or her own death by preferring it to a renunciation of faith. In a famous later instance, John Donne, deeply versed in the writing of the fathers and eventually appointed Dean of St.Paul’s, had produced a study of the subject which, as its title declared, raised doubts concerning the illegality of suicide – his Biathanatos: a declaration of that paradoxe or thesis, that selfe-homicide is not so naturally sinne. He had written it in his younger years, in 1608, but did not repudiate it even after he had been ordained, enjoining his friend, Sir Robert Ker, in 1619 not to destroy it: ‘Reserve it for me, if I live, and if I die, only forbid it the Presse and the Fire: publish it not, but yet burn it not.’ Although he offers a warning against any presumption that suicide is permissible, he notes in the peroration the complexity of the matter and the haziness of the sources. He abstained from any clear formulation, ‘both because I dare not professe my self a Maister in so curious a science, and because the limits are obscure, and steepy, and slippery, and narrow, and every errour deadly, except where a competent dilligence being fore-used, a mistaking in our conscience may provide an excuse’. Suicide is, he concludes, an act permissible only when performed in the service of God, such as Samson’s toppling of the temple on the heads of his enemies even though he knew that the collapse



‘The Church says …’ ‘I know the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’ (p. 272)28

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would cause his own death, having, in fact, specifically prayed, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’29 Greene, in this novel, is presenting a fascinating problem. He places Scobie’s decision on the same borderline as the instances offered by Augustine and Donne, but with one essential difference – that Scobie’s situation is much closer to the highest Christian ideal than either of the above instances. However noble their act, the women of Rome had chosen death in order to preserve their own purity, to ensure their own salvation, not the salvation of others. Samson had been prompted by a far inferior purpose and one equally egoistic, namely personal revenge, pleading immediately before pulling down the temple, ‘I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.’ (Judges 16:28) yet was exonerated by Christian theologians. Neither instance comes close to genuine imitatio Dei, to giving one’s life ‘as ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). What should we say, Greene asks, if a human-being finds himself in a situation approximating to that of Christ’s, selflessly offering up his own life to ease the suffering of others. In this instance an added factor intensifies the self-sacrifice – for, whereas Jesus believed himself to be about to enter heaven, Scobie was offering a far greater sacrifice, believing himself to be damned eternally to hell by that act, and yet persisting in its performance. That Greene viewed this suicide as essentially admirable is indicated by the concluding sentence of that scene, a sentence that has caused such problems to critics, the symbol suggesting that Scobie has indeed achieved sainthood – an anonymous sainthood since that accolade would never be bestowed upon him by the Church, nor has it, we may add, been bestowed upon him by most critics: He said aloud, ‘Dear God, I love’ but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like a coin under the ice-box – the saint whose name nobody could remember. (p. 265)30 If Augustine did, after a sympathetic account, ultimately condemn suicide and Donne, more doubtful, hesitated to authorise it, Greene has perceived an indeterminate area. The Gospels themselves had regarded the Crucifixion as a form of suicide, Jesus declaring unequivocally, ‘I lay down my life … No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of my self’ (John 10:17–18). The church understandably refrained from advocating such action for others except in its passive form, when a martyr allows





himself to be killed by his persecutors by refusing to convert or to betray a priest. But, Greene asks, when a man does commit suicide entirely for the sake of others, is he not fulfilling the act of imitatio Dei in a more literal and fuller sense than official church doctrine permits? In later years, Greene offered a contrary interpretation, a remark that has formed the basis for most subsequent critical evaluations, the statement that Scobie’s suicide was motivated by ‘inordinate pride.’ My reasons for discounting most of the author’s comments about himself and about his work were noted earlier; but in this instance there is the added factor that the statement was preceded by a reservation on Greene’s part, an admission that it was prompted by annoyance: ‘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.’31 As Roger Sharrock rightly remarks, there is little indication of any inordinate pride in Scobie’s character that would justify this later remark.32 In any case, for the literary analyst the final criterion must – as always – be the text itself, not an author’s retrospective comments upon it. Scobie is too modest to imagine that he is imitating Christ, but Greene inserts numerous hints earlier in the novel to ensure that the parallel be noted, as well as the peculiar nature of Scobie’s suicide. The death of the young Pemberton is inserted to provide that opportunity. Father Clay, convinced that self-slaughter inevitably carries the penalty of damnation, murmurs, ‘It’s too terrible. It puts a man outside mercy.’ Scobie, irritated by the comment, reflects compassionately on Pemberton’s immaturity, that ‘unquestionably there must be mercy for someone so unformed’ (p. 88). But his restriction of such mercy to the unformed leaves no doubt of the corollary, his conviction that for someone as mature as himself there would be no room for clemency. When hesitating concerning his own planned suicide, he has no doubt of the punishment awaiting him – ‘he couldn’t condemn himself for eternity – no cause was important enough’ (p. 94). Whatever the reader may think, therefore, Scobie’s belief in the dread judgment awaiting the act is absolute, so that his final act cannot be viewed as an escape from the worldly problems that beset him. The reader’s preparation for the Christ equation comes later, when Scobie is planning the specific method of his suicide. Priests, he thought, told one it was the unforgivable sin, the final expression of an unrepentant despair, and of course one accepted the Church’s teaching. But they taught also that God had sometimes broken his own laws … Christ had not been murdered – you



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Immediately, he rejects the parallel. ‘He put his glass down and thought again, I must not get hysterical’ – but the equation, though rejected by him, has been placed firmly in the reader’s mind. A little later, Scobie again identifies the Crucifixion as a form of suicide. When Fellowes casually defends Pemberton’s right to take his own life, Scobie muses that ‘through two thousand years we have discussed Christ’s agony in just this disinterested way’ (p. 193). That Scobie was dying in order to help others is amply clear. But there is a further aspect. When Greene wrote this, John Donne’s poetry was at the height of its popularity, widely quoted in the kind of circles in which he moved (which is the reason I have cited him here a number of times). Greene himself quoted him at times, referring to his ‘Extasie’ in a letter to Vivien during his courtship, when trying to persuade her that the spiritual aspects of love could co-exist with the physical. Moreover, he inscribed lines from The Relique as the epigraph to a manuscript collection of his poems he sent her.33 He was thus well acquainted with the poems. And there is an interesting parallel here that casts light upon the ending. Donne’s ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’ begins with what seems to be a man casually turning his back on the vision of the Crucifixion in the east because of the pressures of business and pleasure. Gradually one becomes aware that there is a deeper, hidden reason; and only at the end of the poem does the truth emerge: I turne my backe to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face. The speaker, it transpires, has turned his back not through lack of devotion but because he is convinced that the warping and deformation of the divine image within him would, were he to face his God, prove an insult to his Creator. So here, whether Greene was thinking specifically of this passage or not, Scobie’s suicide, expressed in his final thoughts, derives from a longing not only to spare the two women further suffering but also to spare God the pain of having to gaze upon him any more – a humility,



couldn’t murder God. Christ had killed himself: he had hung himself on the Cross as surely as Pemberton from the picture-rail. (p. 190)

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Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing. He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then Hell will begin, and they’ll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You. (p. 262) – ‘You’, of course, here being God. From a close reading of this novel, then, it would appear that the supposed unorthodoxies it contains were not movements away from Christianity, marking a writer dissatisfied with his adopted faith but, in the opposite direction, deviations from the official doctrines of the Church in order to re-assert and re-affirm its fundamental concepts. The innovative strategy here consists primarily of the ambiguities of attribution that create, by means different from the technique employed in The Power and the Glory, that gradual reader-reassessment of the central figure that was to characterise all Greene’s major novels and permit the presentation of a protagonist assuming himself to be eternally damned for his actions yet redeemed in the reader’s eyes as fulfilling the highest ideal of his faith.



one notes, even greater than that of Donne’s speaker, for Scobie offers no plea for mercy, having no hope of ever becoming worthy:

4

The parallels between the events in this novel and Greene’s own experiences at the time of writing are obvious enough and have long been recognised, the story reflecting the triangular situation in which he was then openly engaged. His passionate affair with Catherine Walston was at its height, her husband discreetly choosing to ignore the liaison as physical relations between the married couple had ended many years previous – just as they had between their fictional counterparts. Bendrix, the narrator, is, like the author himself at that time, a novelist with a growing reputation, and Sarah in the latter half of the novel becomes, like Catherine, a deeply believing Catholic, echoing in her own statement a comment once made by Catherine on the totality of her religious faith: ‘I believe the whole bag of tricks, there’s nothing I don’t believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I’d believe just the same.’ Although this was by no means Catherine’s only extramarital affair, she felt guilty about their relationship, especially in its later phase, hesitating to attend communion while it lasted and trying repeatedly to end the affair. Some of the scenes in the novel, such as the pair’s making love while the husband was in the house, were based upon actual events. Greene, on his part, made no effort to conceal the parallels, despite his usual tendency to secretiveness. He prefaced the British edition with a dedication to ‘C’ and the American edition, more explicitly, with the words: ‘To Catherine with Love.’ Moreover, he acknowledged to her that he was basing the book on their relationship by asking her to read the manuscript before publication, especially the passages from Sarah’s diary, to ensure that it would cause her no offence. While neither the characters nor the situations were identical with their originals, yet so 65



The End of the Affair


obvious were the similarities that Catherine’s sister considered charging the author with libel for the aspersions it cast upon her family.1 All this, as has been said, is well known. Nor, indeed, is it unusual for writers to project themselves into their novels. Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina embodies Tolstoy’s own love of the soil and his affection for the peasantry, as well as the author’s admitted tendency to carry principles to extremes. Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch is a fictional representation of a young, idealistic and still devout George Eliot; and James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man offers a searing account of his experiences as a black boy growing up in a racist southern state. Narratologists have, however, put us on our guard against facile equations, not merely acknowledging the difficulty of separating fact from fiction but also in terms of a more complex structural analysis. Seymour Chatman has drawn attention to the multiple configurations present in fiction, a phenomenon that he presented diagrammatically:2

In the novel presently under discussion, the distinctions are blurred, as Bendrix is not only a main participant in the action, but also the narrator, and even the distinction between narrator and implied author is hazy since Bendrix is presented as a novelist, repeatedly interrupting his account to remind us of his profession. We learn that he averages five hundred words per day, thereby allowing time for revisions and corrections of the typescript; that on the first page of his typescript he updates daily the total number of words written; he expresses his frustration when the affair with Sarah interferes with his daily output; and he pauses at times, as though debating with himself how best to continue relating the story. Supposedly, he is engaged in composing a different novel, about a civil servant, a subject that originally prompted him to contact Henry and hence led him to meet Sarah; but those repeated references to Bendrix’s activities as a writer produce the impression that we are not merely reading a novel but watching it in the process of being created. If Bendrix is both narrator and implied author, there is, in addition, a constant sense of the real-author’s presence, as when Bendrix expresses annoyance at certain ineffective scenes in the film-versions of his novels at a time when the filmversions of Greene’s The Third Man and The Fallen Idol had attracted wide attention. In such instances, one cannot miss the deliberate invitation to relate the narrator to Greene himself.



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Of all the novels, this, then would appear to conform most closely to the idea that Greene projected his own life-experience into fictional form. But there is a striking difference between the usual form of author self-projection and that operating in this novel, a difference that should make us wary of the equation; for self-depictions in other fictional works, even if only partial, are almost invariably intended to arouse sympathy for the character, as with Tolstoy’s Levin, George Eliot’s Dorothea, and James Baldwin’s black boy. Even when the fictional character is less attractive, the overall effect is empathic. Philip Roth provides a marked instance of the latter variety, with his Alexander Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman shocking us by their defiant accounts of their sexual misdemeanours, their psychological complexes, and their general inability to cope with their problems. Roth invariably insisted in interviews that his central figures did not represent the author, complaining mischievously that he had written ‘a novel in the guise of a confession [which] was received and judged by any number of readers as a confession in the guise of a novel’.3 But that denial is belied by the care he took to make those characters, like himself, natives of Newark, New Jersey, growing up in that town in the same years as he did and, even more pointedly, to depict Nathan as the author of a book that had infuriated his community, as had Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Yet the fictitious counterparts are presented with such exuberant humour and disarming frankness that in the final analysis Roth endears them to the reader. And here emerges the main innovation of Greene’s novel. For Bendrix, despite his patent similarities to the author in profession and in his amorous affair with the wife of a civil-servant, is, in contrast, presented from the first as thoroughly obnoxious, to the extent that one is made to wonder at times how Sarah could possibly have loved him. He is consumed by hatred, by a twisted longing for revenge lacking any hint of compassion for the one who had so recently been the object of his tenderness and love, for one who had, throughout their affair, displayed only loyalty and affection towards him. He comments viciously, ‘… nothing would have delighted me more than to have heard that she was sick, unhappy, dying … I could even like poor silly Henry, I thought, if Sarah were dead’ (p. 8). The actions he undertakes are contemptible. He sets a detective on her trail. When Parkis generously permits him to take his son with him on a visit to Smythe, he responds not with gratitude but with spite, as he deliberately gives the boy an ice that his father forbade (p. 78); and, in an act robbing him of the last vestige of respect, he reads without hesitation a private diary stolen from Sarah, a journal in which, as he knows, she has recorded her most intimate thoughts and feelings.



The End of the Affair 67


If his anger at her supposed desertion of him is understandable, the actions he takes to express it are by any standard despicable. Bendrix makes no attempt to conceal his obsessive animosity. So intense is his malignity that he imagines others must share it: ‘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’ (p. 7). Throughout their affair, during the height of their passionate relationship, Bendrix distrusts Sarah, is fiercely jealous, suspecting in the most casual movement of her hand a hint of concealed intimacy with others, and distorting every act and gesture of hers to her discredit. After deliberately instigating a quarrel and walking out on her, his only response when she generously calls him the next morning as if nothing had happened is to turn her action against her, to berate her for frigidity, charging that ‘the waste of those three hours meant nothing at all to her’ (p. 59). The image he adopts to describe his feelings provides a chilling indication of his character: ‘It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck’ (p. 35). All this occurs before she left him. When she does, his response is both crude and vicious. He longs, he tells us, to have sex with her once more ‘however quickly and crudely and unsatisfactorily’ – not to gratify his longing for her but solely for reasons of revenge, to humiliate her so that he will be in a position to leave her, instead of her leaving him (p. 28). His fury is directed even at the harmless Henry, a man who had throughout behaved to him with friendship and trust, when he flings at him the venomous accusation (an accusation that might have held true for Catherine’s husband, but certainly not for his fictitious counterpart): you were her pimp. You pimped for me and you pimped for them, and now you are pimping for the latest one. You pimped by never learning how to make love with her, so she had to look elsewhere. (p. 67) Such reactions, however angry he may be, pass all bounds of decency. From the evidence in our possession, Greene himself was far from behaving in his affair with Catherine as did the mean-spirited character he created. The author was indeed at times nervous and depressed, fearful of losing her affection; but his relationship with her throughout was one of deep affection and solicitude, even as the affair was drawing to its close and Catherine was attempting to end it. She was, in that later period, like Sarah, under pressure from her Catholic priest to terminate the liaison; yet at a time when Greene could have reacted with anger,



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Dearest Catherine, ever since I persuaded you over a long night & a long morning not to leave me … I have at intervals felt guilt & uncertainty – guilt to you & uncertainty of the future … I used to go off & give you a breathing spell – Malaya, IndoChina & what not. This time I’m only giving you a three week one, but do think a bit & tell me how you really feel.4 The negative portrayal of Bendrix was thus a divergence from the parallel on which he was constructing the story, and it was a divergence that, for anyone perceiving the similarities, would have redounded very much to his discredit. One must ask, therefore, what prompted him to portray his supposed self-projection in so unfavourable a light. His decision in fact marked the next stage in the author’s experimentation with narrative strategy, the introduction of a technique based upon, yet different from, those in his earlier novels. In those novels there was, as we have seen, a process of dissociation at work as the reader learned to discount the central character’s version of events, perceiving, if only retrospectively, the need to make allowances for the misrepresentations of self resulting from the priest’s humility or from Scobie’s theological misconceptions. Here three major changes occur. In the previous instances, the protagonist was not the narrator, while here it is the narrator, Bendrix, whom we must learn to distrust – a dangerous process, as traditionally the primary function of the narrator is to win credibility for the events related. In The Heart of the Matter, even though the narrator’s remarks were at times of uncertain attribution, they functioned in the main as authoritative statements, drawing attention to the rusty handcuffs on the wall of Scobie’s office to indicate his dislike of imposing punishments and noting the ascetic quality of its furnishings as a preparation for perceiving his selflessness and dedication. Depriving himself of so valuable a tool, Greene was taking a considerable risk. The second change is one of timing, that in this novel the distrust of the protagonist’s self-evaluations is not gradually evoked but operates from its opening lines, where Bendrix’s admission of the hatred that consumes him provides ample warning of his bias. That produces the third change, namely that its effect is immediately to alienate the reader and hence to negate the possibility of that gradual process of sympathetic re-assessment that had worked so effectively in the past.



perhaps with a ferocity similar to Bendrix’s, his primary emotion was of tender concern for her. As he wrote during the period of their break-up:


Yet whatever negative results those changes may appear to produce, in fact the element of distrust does not detract from the validity of the story related but impels the reader to search beyond the account provided by Bendrix, to discount the narrator’s prejudices, and to seek for the true events obscured or distorted by his animosity – another instance of that ‘framing’ or deliberate omission discussed above. He himself, it transpires, is unsure of the authenticity of his own version of the events, a factor that further places us on our guard. As he warns us: ‘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’ (p. 50). Indeed, the warning he proffers of his antipathy leads us not only to doubt his evaluations but to counter them. When he vilifies Sarah, we instinctively come to her defence; and when, conversely, he begrudgingly grants her a virtue, the admission is afforded augmented authenticity, as when he records her insistence on telling the truth, her refusal to play the game of make-believe even in describing her love. The narrator’s failings are thus transformed into positive tools for achieving credibility. When Bendrix admits Henry’s qualities of ‘gentleness, humility, and trust’ (p. 26), traits contrasting so markedly with his own, the statement carries the more conviction because of the reluctance with which it is expressed. Such concessions to the victims of his hostility are patently inconsistent with the fierce prejudice from which he suffers and could appear either to militate against it or to function as a failure on Greene’s part to create an integrated and believable character; but justification for the contradiction is carefully provided on the opening page of the novel, where the concessions are attributed to Bendrix’s vocational dedication as a writer: 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 neartruth, even to the expression of my near-hate. The device of a tangential recounting of the story, with its requirement that the reader make out the true course of events existing beyond that provided by the narrator, functions remarkably well. We are constantly directed to seek out elements stifled or distorted in Bendrix’s account, crediting them with greater authenticity than the stated account. We have mentioned how the narratologists’ recognition of the ‘unreliable’ narrator was usually interpreted as a weakness in the work.



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Moreover, in the instances discussed by critics, the unreliability is, unlike the present instance, only a minor blemish in a generally acceptable figure.5 Benjy, the mentally-handicapped character in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, has no sense of time, so that in the recording of his thoughts we need to compensate for his tendency to merge chronologically disparate scenes. The narrator in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, though loyal and well-meaning, admits his inability to interpret the events effectively. When a narrator is morally unacceptable, as in Henry James’ Aspen Papers – an unscrupulous adventurer prepared to make love to the owner’s unattractive niece in order to lay hands upon a manuscript and recoiling when he finds he will be required to marry her – Wayne Booth deplores the device on the grounds that a narrator cannot simultaneously fulfil the function of revealing his own deficiencies with unconscious irony and at the same time of praising elements deserving of praise.6 In contrast, Greene’s ability to present a narrator who suffers from serious deficiencies of credibility and yet points to those elements that are deserving of praise is a rare achievement. The depiction is, however, even more complex in this instance; for Bendrix the narrator is not relating the story as it occurs, momentarily blinded by hatred because of her supposed desertion. He has, since the period he is describing, learnt something of profound significance, knowledge that has changed his viewpoint. He has read the diary with its revelation of Sarah’s true reasons for ending the affair, and that perception has led him to deplore retrospectively the hatred that gripped him then, to regret ‘those clouded hours when the demon took charge of my brain’ (pp. 10–11). One would expect his hatred, therefore, to have evaporated; but, as we know from the opening page of the novel written after Bendrix’s discovery of Sarah’s vow, even with the hindsight provided by that knowledge he cannot rid himself of the anger that consumes him. Well after the journal has been read, when Sarah is already dead, he remains steeped in hostility, informing us that, ‘Hatred lay like boredom over the evening ahead’ (p. 159). When Henry, after reluctantly revealing to Bendrix his suspicions concerning Sarah, took the admirable step of tearing up the detective’s address and refusing to spy on his wife, Bendrix’s comment – dating, we should recall, from long after the event – preserves much of the animosity that he felt at the time. He writes, one notes, not of his response at that moment in the past, but of his feelings at the time of writing, ‘Perhaps [Henry] was ashamed at what he had told me, for he was a very conventional man. I write the adjective with a sneer’ (p. 19). The contemptuous term ‘sneer’ reveals that he retains his venom. And if the continuation of that





passage suggests some degree of rehabilitation, the reform, it is clear, is only partial – ‘and yet if I examine myself I find only admiration and trust for the conventional, like the villages one sees from the high road where the cars pass, looking so peaceful in their thatch and stone, suggesting rest’. He admires Henry’s moral stance but such ethical principle remains distant from him, an unattainable end. The malevolence persists, as he confesses on another occasion, when he describes how his antipathy surges up again even at the thought of those events: ‘as I write of 1939, I feel all my hatred returning’ (p. 27). The persistence of Bendrix’s animosity long after it ought to have subsided suggests that it functions in this story in a more subtle way than mere anger at Sarah’s supposed defection. Both the nature and the significance of that continued hatred need to be examined more closely than they have in the past. One more indication of its centrality. The introduction of Parkis and his son as a sub-plot provides a light-relief typical of ‘grim Greene’ humour at its best, as in the incident of the detective’s mistaking Bendrix in the restaurant for the rival lover he is supposed to trail. But at the same time it contributes to the main theme. For throughout the story, the conscientious, lugubrious Parkis is motivated above all by tender love for his son, a feeling of parental responsibility not only for the youngster’s advancement in the profession but also, and most scrupulously, by concern for his moral education. His son Lancelot (amusingly enough, named mistakenly after an adulterer instead of the finder of the Holy Grail) he carefully protects from contact with unchaste aspects of the detective work, ensuring, as the boy copies out reports, that passages unsuitable for his age be inserted by himself. And when Bendrix asks permission to take the boy with him to visit Smythe, he agrees only on condition that there will be nothing ‘unpleasant’ for the boy to witness. His is a love undemanding, generous, and selfless, highlighting by contrast the unwavering animosity of Bendrix. Even after the discovery of the journal, therefore, Bendrix’s mordant animosity persists, turning everything it touches into loathing: ‘I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us’ (p. 181). Yet if we have learnt to distinguish between his statements and the actual events, we learn gradually to distinguish also between his statements and the hidden emotions that prompt them, a discrepancy permitted to emerge only in the final stages of the novel. It is a technique reliant upon elements in the twentieth-century configuration that could not have been effectively employed in earlier eras, and that is employed here in a manner vital for an understanding of the story.



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Our generation is so familiar with Freudian concepts that we may easily forget how revolutionary they were during the period of their original dissemination. After the appearance of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, the concept of ambivalence in literature became common knowledge, leading to the New Critics’ recognition of the positive function in literature of the connotations, nuances, and doublemeanings of words, such as the duality of the word die in seventeenthcentury poetry with its secondary meaning of sexual intercourse: ‘We die and rise the same’. In fact, Empson had learnt the principle from Freud, who first introduced to the western world the previously unknown term, ambivalence. He had used it not in connection with poetry but in his perception that the conflicts of ego, superego, libido, and id within the human personality produce fantasy substitutions, so that an emotion suppressed by one of those elements could appear in an inverted or antithetical form either at the conscious level or in the dream-experience of the individual.7 Moreover, those contradictory aspects could emerge not only individually but in combination, paradoxical as that might seem. The relevance here is Freud’s discovery that the counterpart to libido could appear individually as a form of sadism, the ‘transformation of love into hatred’ or, in combination, in terms of a love–hate relationship.8 In earlier eras, the love-hate relationship, the simultaneous experience of contradictory emotions, had been regarded as a rare and lamentable aberration. Catullus, bemoaning the incongruity of his passion for Lesbia, acknowledged in touching terms the sense of wonder it would arouse in his readers: Odi et amo, quare id faciam fortasse requiris. Nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I love and I hate. Perhaps you will ask Why this is so. I do not know; But that it is so, I feel and am tormented.

In a later generation, Trollope’s novel, Can You Forgive Her?, similarly treated the dual experience as a regrettable anomaly. Its central character is a young lady who both idolises and abhors her male cousin, being in some way strangely attracted to him yet disliking him intellectually. As the title indicates, the author assumed unquestioningly that the reader would condemn her for the aberration, as he himself did. Freudian theory changed that response, Virginia Woolf recording with relief in connection with her own confused and (until then) incomprehensible sentiments: ‘It was only the other day when I read Freud for the first time that I discovered that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling, and is called ambivalence.’9 For




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But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallised with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated.10 It was against the background of that concept that Greene developed the central theme of this novel. Bendrix’s feelings for Sarah were, as we have seen, both during the affair and after her leaving him, within the category of a love–hate relationship. But that element has much deeper roots within the novel, for it functions not only in the context of the human love-affair. It functions also in the relationship of both characters to God, in a manner echoing their own liaison as they each move cautiously, and against their better judgement, from a firm rejection of belief towards ultimate acceptance. Employing this comparatively new concept of Freudian love–hate relationships, in this novel Greene presents their initial antagonism to religion not as a chronological prelude to eventual conversion but as the surface expression of a co-existent, suppressed, and deep-rooted longing for belief. In a very real sense, therefore, their devotional progression is seen not only as paralleling their love affair but as its mainspring, its hidden cause. We may on first reading imagine the following passage to be mere casual musing on Bendrix’s part, but retrospectively it can be seen as the key to the entire novel, his awareness even at that early stage that his passionate affair with Sarah may have a profounder motivation, that it may contain within it a foretaste of that ‘dark night’ of divine love, the ascent into a mystical union between the soul and its Maker, as experienced by St John of the Cross: The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and



D.H. Lawrence, that emotional polarity was to become a central theme of his novels, where time after time the simultaneous desire, to cherish the object of love and to destroy it, is depicted as a norm, as in Ursula Brangwen’s passionate but confused embrace in The Rainbow:


Bendrix adds, ‘It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don’t recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like “the dark night” or of prayer, who have only one prayer? … And yet there was this peace.’ Consciously, he suppresses here, as something he hates, a religious emotion that he dimly perceives to be analogous to his experience of love. And that duality is brilliantly expressed in the device whereby Bendrix is led to believe in the existence of a rival to his love for Sarah, a rival he eventually discovers to be God himself. There are repeated hints in the text to this love-hate duality both in regard to the love theme and the religious theme. As Bendrix warns himself at one point: ‘I’ve got to be careful. I mustn’t be like Richard Smythe, I mustn’t hate, for if I were really to hate, I would believe, and if I were to believe, what a triumph for You and her’ (p. 138). But that duality emerges most effectively in Sarah’s case, where her belief is presented less as a sudden volte face than as the culmination of a long-existent inner debate. Bendrix may remark that Sarah in the early days believed in God as little as he did, but he admits in afterthought: ‘Or so I thought then and wonder now’ (p. 50). They had both chosen ‘to eliminate God from their world’ (p. 69); but even that decision implies the reverse – for a true atheist has no God to eliminate. Throughout, Sarah is aware that her overt denial is counterbalanced by an embryonic faith. She admits in response to Smythe’s urgings that, despite her desire to reject Christianity, she cannot be sure that she does disbelieve; and soon finds herself spontaneously praying to the very God of whom Smythe promises to disabuse her (pp. 106, 109). The negative aspect of that duality, her ostensible dislike of religion, forms an essential ingredient of Greene’s strategy. Had Sarah been portrayed from the first as a potential religiose as Catherine was in real life (it was her conversion to Catholicism that first brought her into contact with Greene, she preserved her faith throughout their affair, and it eventually ended, as has been noted, on the urging of her priestly confessor) Sarah’s ‘conversion’ would have seemed somewhat trite. With his usual sensitivity to a readership either atheistic or, as the British public had become in the mid-century, luke-warm towards religion, he presents her at the conscious level as strongly opposed to belief. Even at the moment when, desperate to save Bendrix’s life, she undertakes the oath – an oath that



sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. (p. 47)

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I knelt and put my head on the bed and wished I could believe. Dear God, I said – why dear, why dear? – make me believe. I can’t believe. Make me. I said, I’m a bitch and a fake and I hate myself. I can’t do anything of myself. Make me believe. I shut my eyes tight, and I pressed my nails into the palms of my hands until I could feel nothing but the pain, and I said, I will believe. Let him be alive, and I will believe. Give him a chance. Let him have his happiness. Do this and I’ll believe. But that wasn’t enough. (p. 95) It is, however, her prayer later in the process that retrospectively illumines the connection between the love affair and the participants’ eventual recourse to faith. Their incessant quarreling, it transpires, their fear that the affair will end, represents, however obscurely, a covert search for the faith that would prohibit their love and replace it. Unknown to themselves, they were ‘squandering’ or destroying their love in order to move beyond it, reaching out for a higher form of love, for a peace more lasting than mortal love could provide. As Sarah gradually perceives, addressing God: ‘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 that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You’ (p. 89). Their infighting is thus an expression of a love–hate relationship with the divine, where hate will eventually emerge in its inverted or truer form, as love. Admitting the complexity of her feelings, she declares, again addressing God: ‘I said I hate you, but can one hate a vapour? … Oh God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?’ (pp. 111–12). And she concludes with a recognition of the part her hatred of religion had played in leading her to belief: ‘You’d taken my hate like You’d taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh – as I have sometimes laughed at Maurice, saying, “Do you remember how stupid we were?” ’ (p. 113). That idea, that their squandering of eros was an unconscious yearning for its replacement by agape, a jettisoning of mortal joy in order to obtain the eternal version, is expressed in their shared dread of the desert that awaits them if their love-affair should end, the fear of what they should do in the wasteland of loneliness. At the highpoint of that fear, Sarah wondering how they could go on living in the wilderness if they were to lose each other, muses in a foretaste of what is to be, ‘If one



could only be effective if God does exist – she does so as an atheist, pleading paradoxically with a God whose actuality she is unable to accept:

could believe in God, would he fill the desert?’ (p. 91). Only later does she recognise the possibility that the affair had itself been a prefiguring of belief, as she asks herself, ‘Did I ever love Maurice as much before I loved You? Or was it really You I loved all the time?’ (p. 123). Even Bendrix seems at some level to have been aware that the squandering of their love was an unconscious craving for its replacement by a higher form, remarking early in the story that, in his constant badgering of her, his love and fear acted like conscience, as though he wanted to bring the future, the desert of their eventual separation, in at the door as an unwanted and premature guest (p. 56). Greene’s innovation is to reverse the secular form of the love–hate relationship. In its human version as Freud had delineated it, the love emotion is dominant and the hatred buried in the subconscious, emerging in various unexpected forms. If eventually recognised, as it was by Virginia Woolf, it was a puzzling phenomenon. Here the opposite holds true. The pervasive hatred Bendrix experiences towards God is the pre-eminent sensibility of which he is conscious, while the potential love is almost totally repressed. Indeed, as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that the affair with Sarah is not the primary theme of the novel but a vehicle for depicting their progression towards faith. Or to put the case another way in this investigation of Greene’s narrative strategies, he beguiles the reader in the earlier part of the novel into imagining it is an account of a passionate, extramarital love-affair, only revealing much later its true theme, the search for religious faith. Once again, the change of view is effected retrospectively, as in Sarah’s cryptic remark in her journal that Maurice thinks he hates, but loves, loves all the time; clarifying the point a little later with the question, ‘But was it me he loved, or You? For he hated in me the things You hate. He was on your side all the time without knowing it. You willed our separation, but he willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love’ (pp. 101/123). Before focussing upon Bendrix’s reluctant pilgrimage towards faith, we should note the difference between Sarah’s prayer and that of Scobie. Scobie’s prayer, that he be punished instead of the child, aroused, as we have recorded, the scorn of certain critics as being a quid pro quo unworthy of a supposedly just God, even though the prayer rests on such biblical precedents as Moses’ prayer to take upon himself the punishment due to the Hebrews for the sin of the Golden Calf. But there is a profound difference in this instance. Where Scobie had simply murmured an altruistic prayer that was never consummated, Sarah undertakes with it a vow imposing upon herself the sacrifice of everything that made her life





worthwhile. It is a renunciation of the joys of this world paralleling a nun’s undertaking of the vow of celibacy The immediate implementation of her prayer, Bendrix’s restoration to life, thrusts upon her the full responsibility for discharging its attendant conditions. Her subsequent compliance, despite the enormous temptation to abrogate the oath, constitutes a test not only of her moral integrity but also of her burgeoning faith. For the oath can only be regarded as valid if there exists a Being to whom she swore it. Moreover, her vow had been preceded by a specific acknowledgment on her part that its validity depended upon belief, and by a prayer, no less fervent than that on behalf of Bendrix, in which the word ‘dear’ reveals, to her puzzlement, an affection that she as yet has failed to acknowledge: Dear God, I said – why dear, why dear? – make me believe. I can’t believe. Make me … Make me believe. I shut my eyes tight, and I pressed my nails into the palms of my hands until I could feel nothing but the pain, and I said, I will believe. Let him be alive, and I will believe. Give him a chance. Let him have his happiness. Do this and I’ll believe. (p. 95) Only after that commitment does she offer the additional promise to leave him. Her subsequent struggle is thus not only against the temptation to return to Maurice but to achieve a belief that was, she thought, nonexistent within her. With her too, there is a love–hate relationship at work in her relations with God. For her desire to believe has to combat the recognition that it is belief in a Being who demands that she cease her affair with Maurice not merely on the grounds of her vow. She realises with her innate honesty, that the affair is in His eyes a sin that she must forego, and for that requirement she feels she must hate Him. She is caught in a vicious circle: ‘I said to God, “So that’s it. I begin to believe in you, and if I believe in you I shall hate you. I have free will to break my promise, haven’t I, but I haven’t the power to gain anything from breaking it … You make me drive love out, and then you say there’s no lust for you either’ ” (p. 101). The agony continues, an agony from which only death will free her. But before she dies, her belief is complete. As she states in her final letter to Maurice, ‘I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now’ (p. 147). It has been a long and painful journey, but the end is one of total commitment. And now to Bendrix. The battle between the conscious and subconscious elements in his being emerges into recognition after her death, as he argues bitterly against the bourgeoning religious impulse within. In



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that, he functions as a counterpart to Smythe who more obviously, and perhaps somewhat tritely, parallels that struggle. It is clear from the first that Smythe’s obsessive need to wean others away from Christian belief arises from his own feeling of rejection, his anger that God has cruelly marred his facial features, depriving him of the faith he craves. Accordingly, his conversion not only comes as no surprise but is even dismissed as being a trifle absurd, Bendrix visualising the headline in the newspapers: ‘Rationalist Speaker Converted in Miraculous Cure’. And perhaps here we should mention the one serious weakness of the novel, a point in which I share the general critical condemnation. After Sarah has died and Bendrix has finished reading the journal, he re-assumes the role of narrator, commenting that if he were writing a novel he would end it at that point (p. 147). In many ways, one wishes he had. Still to be recounted, it is true, is Bendrix’s contretemps with Father Crompton and his final movement towards faith. But the series of far-fetched or miraculous events – the convenient revelation that Sarah had been baptised as a Catholic in her childhood, the mysterious curing of Smythe’s disfigurement, the healing of Parkis’ son – are totally inappropriate, more suited to the Catholic hagiography that Greene scorned so effectively in his earlier novels. They mark a desertion of the subtlety and delicacy that distinguish his finest writing, especially as they contribute nothing to the spiritual pilgrimage of both central characters. Those incidents apart, the final pages are important in providing hints that Bendrix will follow Sarah into the church. When he confidently assures Henry that Sarah had no religious belief – and, again from Freud, we have learnt to suspect confident assertions as attempts to suppress latent doubts – he warns himself, as cited above, not to be like Richard Smythe since hate is liable to lead him to belief. Such repeated assertions of his refusal to believe confirm that there exists deep within him a contrary impulse. Addressing the departed Sarah, he acknowledges that the love–hate relationship with her was indeed a foretaste of another love–hate relationship: all right, have it your way. I believe you live and that He exists, but it will take more than your prayers to turn this hatred of Him into love. He robbed me and like that king you wrote about I’ll rob Him of what he wants in me. Hatred is in my brain, not in my stomach or my skin. It can’t be removed like a rash or an ache. Didn’t I hate you as well as love you? And don’t I hate myself? (p. 191) The basic difference between Bendrix and Sarah in their religious progression is that his hatred is more bitter, more resistant, and hence more





protracted. He fights fiercely against his suppressed inclination before succumbing; but the inclination is there, as a prominent symbol confirms. Gazing into a mirror early in the story, he had been reminded of the face we all have seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop-window as we stare with longing at the bright unobtainable objects within. The nature of the desired objects is left unstated; but the reference is picked up much later, in the dream he has shortly 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 would be as factitious as all the others – perhaps a hideous green bird with scarlet eyes meant to give the effect of rubies. Time was short and I hurried from shop to shop. Then out of one of the shops came Sarah and I knew that she would help me. ‘Have you bought something, Sarah?’ ‘Not here,’ she said, but they have some lovely little bottles further on.’ ‘I haven’t time,’ I begged her, ‘help me. I’ve got to find something, for tomorrow’s the birthday.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Something always turns up. Don’t worry,’ and suddenly I didn’t worry. (p. 140) The idea that he is really searching for a jewel, the jewel of faith, occurs as yet only in sleep, when repressed ideas surface. On awakening, he remains obdurate, fervently opposed. But the fiercer his opposition, the closer he comes to submission. Hence the scene with Father Crompton – the priest familiar to us from Greene’s novels, an ugly, awkward, and seemingly ineffective representative of the church who nonetheless represents it effectively. Bendrix’s outburst marks the apogee of his spiritual crisis, the moment when the remaining pent-up hostility is finally released, when, losing all control, he shouts like some fretful child that he hates Henry, hates Sarah, and hates the priest and his imagined God because they took her away (p. 181). The absurdity of his complaint – that they have deprived him of someone whom he says he hates – is sufficient indication that the crisis has been reached as, again like a fretful child, he angrily exits, slamming the door behind him. When the fury has subsided a little and he attempts to be reasonable, he asks himself – as he should have asked himself much earlier – how, if he hates Sarah so much, he can yet love her. The question once



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again parallels his relationship to God: ‘Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself I really hate.’ Finally, he declares in a phrase indicating him to be on the threshold of belief, however warped its form may still be: ‘I hate You, God, I hate You as though you existed’, that latter phrase indicating his approaching recognition of divine existence (p. 191). Greene does not present the culmination of Bendrix’s religious progression, the moment when he will finally surrender to faith. To do so would seem banal. Instead, he leaves us at the penultimate stage, as Bendrix murmurs, ‘O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.’ The plea, still resistant to religious acceptance, is nevertheless, one notes, a prayer to the God whose existence he had previously denied so strenuously. The animosity has subsided, the weariness that floods over him marking his desire to fight faith no longer. His acceptance of a new kind of love and compassion, replacing the past hatred, is marked here by his changed attitude to Henry. Throughout the earlier part of the novel, Bendrix had treated the cuckolded husband with condescension, even contempt, referring to him as ‘poor, silly Henry’. He had originally selected him – an assistant secretary in the Ministry of Pensions – as the model for a character in a novel he was planning who would function as the ridiculous, comic element in the book. Here he is not comic, but he is indeed treated as a foolish victim to be exploited for Bendrix’s needs, the latter hiring a detective in Henry’s name in order to discover his own rival for Sarah’s affections. Throughout the novel, therefore, Henry is regarded by him as a figure to be despised, not to be taken seriously, a victim deserving to be tricked and imposed upon. But by the end of the novel, as Bendrix undergoes a spiritual change, he realises the pettiness of his hatred and callousness, the need for compassion: I opened the door softly and looked in at Henry. He lay asleep with the light on and his arm shielding his eyes. With the eyes hidden there was an anonymity about the whole body. He was just a man – one of us. He was like the first enemy soldier a man encounters on a battlefield, dead and indistinguishable, not a White or a Red, but just a human being like himself. I put two biscuits by his bed in case he woke and turned the light out. (pp. 182–3) In the final scene, he has, it seems, fully learnt the lesson, placing his hand with tenderness on Henry’s arm, determined to be strong for both of them. In summary, the strategy adopted here is totally different from that employed in the previous novels. As the story opens, it appears to be the





account of a passionately amorous affair, with a cuckolded husband in the background, the theme being entirely secular, namely, Bendrix’s attempt to discover the hated rival who has usurped his place in Sarah’s affections. But as the novel progresses, the real theme emerges, their agonised search for religious faith, with its concomitant conversion of hatred into compassion. Had that devotional theme appeared initially as the motive force of the work, it would no doubt have affronted many readers and have failed to hold their interest. It is the subtlety with which Greene gradually merges the search for Eros into a search for Agape that soothes potential opposition, brilliantly transmuting the anguish and suspense of a disrupted love-affair into a quest for spiritual peace.



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5

One critic has remarked of this novel that after twenty pages we ‘have already encountered all Greene’s recurrent themes and metaphors and major symbols’1; but in fact, Greene again adopts here a narrative strategy very different from those employed in his previous novels. There the central characters – the hounded priest, Scobie, and Sarah – were all, at least by the end, committed Catholics, struggling in their various ways to live up to the requirements of their faith and, whatever their human deficiencies – or, perhaps, because of their human deficiencies – serving ultimately as models of such pursuit. In marked contrast, the representatives of Catholicism in this novel range from the pathetic to the repulsive. The priests whom Querry meets at the seminary on his journey upriver are depicted with a disdain previously reserved only for such renegades as Padre José or those who had fled across the Mexican border instead of performing their duty. These, however, are missionaries in the fullest sense of the term, fulfilling the vows they have undertaken; but they are depicted here as childish and unworthy of serious respect. They laugh excitedly over a game of cards, using matches for stakes; when one is caught cheating, the others join in, surreptitiously stealing matches or deliberately calling the wrong suit. The game, like so many children’s games, seems likely to end in chaos, with narrator commenting disparagingly, ‘and would there be tears before bed?’ They are seen as lacking in devotional fervour, performing their religious duties perfunctorily, as part of a repetitive routine: Those who marry God, he thought, can become domesticated too – it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. … This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves – it was God’s taste to be 83



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The incongruous application of that final image to celibate priests intensifies the disdainful effect of the description. The same scorn for childishness pertains for those we meet at the leproserie itself, this time not as seen through the eyes of Querry. Father Henri, we learn, had tried to imitate a circus trick by balancing on the back of a chair but managed merely to break it. There is a great deal of raillery when, during a celebration, one of them mischievously fills an empty wine-bottle with soda-water, circulating it half-way around the table before anyone notices. There is little to inspire admiration in these descriptions. The Superior, inseparable from his cheroots, drops ash wherever he goes and naïvely imagines that a bidet is a kind of footbath, while the nuns are cited in the novel not as angels of mercy but as culinary incompetents, unaware that their soufflés invariably collapse on the quarter-mile journey from kitchen to priest-house. These incidents add a touch of drollery to the novel, but function at the same time as a means of downplaying, sometimes ridiculing the dedication of the missionaries. One misguided nun, we are told, on learning that a new drug was helping to cure leprosy, complained that it would deprive her of her work – ‘It’s terrible, doctor. Soon we’ll have no lepers at all.’ Even more damaging is the Superior’s response to that story – the comment, we should recall, of a priest whom one would expect to respect the altruism of his female counterparts – that she was probably an ‘old maid, without imagination, anxious to do good, to be of use. There aren’t so many places in the world for people like that’ (p. 23). That comment has wider implications, suggesting that the same may hold true for the priests themselves, undertaking their roles not through spiritual dedication but through their inability to function in the real world. Greene’s derogatory approach – an attitude assigned in part to Querry but neither contradicted nor modified by the narrator – is especially notable, as a new model of Christian altruism had at that time emerged into the public eye. Albert Schweitzer, the eminent theologian, author of The Quest for the Historical Jesus, a brilliant organist and musicologist, had turned his back on international acclaim, choosing to become a Christian missionary and to establish a leproserie in Equitorial Africa. Repeatedly referred to in the novel, he would seem ideally suited to Greene’s purpose. Yet Greene not only rejects the parallel, with the possibility it offered of placing the priestly missionaries in a similar laudatory light, but inverts it, deprecating by his patronising tone the activities of



worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night. (p. 14)

the fictional priests as well as of Schweitzer himself, with implications that we shall examine later. Moreover, the two most prominent Catholic figures in the story, one a priest the other, as the final pages of the novel suggest, due soon to become a priest, are both depicted negatively. Father Thomas emerges as dislikable. Unfirm in faith and afraid of the dark, he experiences a craving to confess his personal problems and religious doubts to others, though not to the priest assigned to him for that purpose, the narrator again employing a sexual image to intensify the pejorative effect: The dangerous desire to confide grew in Father Thomas’s mind like the pressure of an orgasm. He said, ‘You won’t understand how much one needs, sometimes, to have one’s faith fortified by talking to a man who believes.’ (p. 91) He lacks compassion, as well as the generosity to recognise the different mores of the natives and the need to adapt Christian concepts and terminology to their traditions, and he chaffs at the menial task he has been assigned. But, above all, his blind idolisation of Querry, followed by his swift condemnation of him after the Marie affair, reveals the unbalanced and unreliable aspects of his character. He, if not admirable, is at least not disgusting, as is Rycker, a figure representing almost everything that Greene abhors. He is indeed a prêtre manqué, but in the worst possible sense. Where other such figures in these novels grieve at their missed vocation and yearn to find some method of translating their religious devotion into a lay setting, Rycker blames his failure to qualify on others, nursing a grievance against the novice-master at his seminary for refusing to recognise his suitability for the priesthood. Accordingly, he regards the six years he spent in the Jesuit seminary as ‘wasted’. Like Father Thomas, he too is impelled to discuss his religious problems with others – not with the priests, whom he despises, but with an ‘intellectual Catholic’ such as he believes himself to be and, again like Father Thomas, he totally misjudges Querry. How he might have functioned as a priest we may infer from his innate fear of contact with the lepers, as well as from his sexual incontinence. In addition, he is patently unqualified for the confidentiality required of a priest, assuring Querry that he will respect the latter’s incognito yet revealing the discovery to others. Above all, there is his harsh treatment of his wife, at times bordering on sadism. He chose her, it transpires, for her youthfulness, having cynically calculated that a younger woman would serve his physical needs for a longer period; and demands that



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she fulfil her marital ‘duties’ irrespective of her wishes. Marie’s account of her experiences in the bedroom and of her timid but entirely useless attempts to reach some understanding leave no room for sympathy towards him. The chastity she had been taught by the nuns was something which she had connected with clean white garments and light and gentleness, ‘while his was like old sackcloth in the desert’ (p. 67). Finally, Rycker’s shooting of Querry in an act of personal revenge for his supposed cuckolding and his perverted conviction that his action has elevated him in God’s eyes mark the antithesis of Christian forgiveness and humility. Scarcely less repellent is the journalist Parkinson. He is not a prêtre manqué, but there are hints not to be missed. Querry sees him as one who, like ‘a spoilt priest’, has deserted his vocation, that of a dedicated correspondent, in favour of pandering to readers of pulp journalism. No longer bothering about facts – ‘they won’t know the difference’ – misquoting literary sources, and deliberately fabricating stories in order to appeal to the masses, he emerges, as the anonymous narrator confirms, as a thoroughly objectionable character: There is a strong allurement in corruption and there was no doubt of Parkinson’s; he carried it on the surface of his skin like phosphorus, impossible to mistake. Virtue had died long ago within that mountain of flesh for lack of air. A priest might not be shocked by human failings, but he could be hurt or disappointed; Parkinson would welcome any kind of failing. Nothing would hurt Parkinson or disappoint him but the size of a cheque. (p. 109) His religion is not specified, but Querry’s assessment of him in terms of a failed vocation and his twofold comparison of him to a priest place him by association with Father Thomas and Rycker, Querry’s other persecutors. How then, does this creation of unlovable Catholic figures function? On the one hand it does, of course, serve once again to suggest to Protestant readers the author’s admission of the failings of his religion – like Greene’s description of the Catholic churches in all his novels as ‘hideous’ in appearance, with ‘cheap plaster saints’ cluttering their interiors. Indeed, on the matter of stilling potential hostility, there is in this novel a comment remarkably applicable to the strategy we have been examining. When Querry insists that, as an architect, he built for his own pleasure, not for the needs of his clients, Dr Colin wrily comments that he would, then, not trust the plumbing. Querry replies by a



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comparison to the art of the novelist:

These instances of the seeming degradation of Catholic elements in the novels are Greene’s method of making his Protestant readers ‘comfortable’. But even in that regard, the technique in this novel differs from that of its predecessors. We are not provided here with seemingly corrupt priests or laypriests due to be retrospectively vindicated, but with two committed religionists whose characters remain repugnant throughout. Yet that technique serves an additional, and more important aim. For since each of those individuals is seen by the reader in so objectionable a light, their persecution of Querry, their pursuit of him in defiance of his wishes, their blatant invasion of his privacy, and their distasteful attempt to publish to the world his supposed saintliness swing the reader to Querry’s side, prompting a degree of empathy with him, a desire, as it were, to protect him from such abuse. Without that defensive identification, any sympathetic reading of Querry’s situation would be difficult to achieve. As we first meet him, he is not an attractive figure. Disillusioned with the world, leaving a trail of betrayed women behind him (one of whom he seems to have driven to suicide), having abandoned his children (‘they disappeared into the world a long time ago. We haven’t kept in touch’), devoid of love for others, and so morbid that he detests laughter ‘like a bad smell’, he seems in the opening pages of the book totally unsuited for the sympathy necessary for the effective development of the novel. His unsavoury victimisers, by repelling us, perform a twofold office. On the one hand, as suggested, they manoeuvre us in his direction, encouraging us to commiserate with his longing for privacy; but at the same time they create, by their perverted concept of their faith, a sense that there exists somewhere a purer form, one towards which, as we eventually perceive, Querry is himself moving. That use of negative characters to highlight Querry’s personal traits and to win eventual approval for them applies also to the repeated derogatory references to Schweitzer. There is, in this comparison, a hint that Greene regarded the contemporary idolisation of Schweitzer as factitious. The fact that Schweitzer was a Protestant is clearly not the reason for Greene’s disapproval, as that fact is mentioned with a sneer by Rycker (p. 63), an instance of intolerance that the reader is intended to deplore. Greene was, perhaps, responding to growing contemporary criticism of the autocratic methods by which Schweitzer was running his leproserie,



A writer doesn’t write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same to make them comfortable. (p. 44)


and the charge that he employed outdated medical practices to the detriment of his patients, not bothering to research and import new techniques. Dr Colin, in contrast, strives to obtain the very latest medical equipment, turning to every possible source to raise money for technical innovations that could alleviate his patients’ pain or help him discover new ways of treating the disease. In discussing leprophils, those suffering from a mental sickness that attracts them to lepers, he cites Lambarene: ‘you know very well that leprophils exist, though I daresay they are more often women than men. Schweitzer seems to attract them. They would rather wash the feet with their hair like the woman in the gospel than clean them with something more antiseptic,’ adding caustically a little later: ‘A patient can always detect whether he is loved or whether it is only his leprosy which is loved. I don’t want leprosy loved. I want it eliminated. … We don’t want to waste time with neurotics, father’ (p. 22). This disparagement has an important function to perform in the novel, an element for which Colin sets the tone. On Querry’s arrival at the leproserie, Colin enquires with sudden suspicion whether he is a writer: ‘There’s no room for a writer here. We want to work in peace. We don’t want the press of the world discovering us as they discovered Schweitzer’ (p. 28). If Schweitzer seemed to have turned his back on civilisation, to have shunned acclaim by retiring into the jungle, he in fact courted publicity. After his supposed withdrawal from the world, he accepted numerous honorary doctorates and other ceremonial distinctions bestowed upon him, including in 1955 the British Order of Merit, while in 1952, a few years before this novel was published, he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, awards that the humility and reticence of a true saint might have prompted him to decline. Acceptance of the Nobel prize, it is true, could be justified by the substantial financial gratuity it carried, which sum he devoted to the development of his hospital; but the same cannot be said of the honorary doctorates, of the Order of Merit, or of the many other awards carrying no emolument. Querry, we are quite sure, would firmly have rejected such honours, not merely because he preferred privacy but through a conviction that he was entirely unworthy of adulation. In a well-known passage in Lycidas, Milton, acknowledging that his desire to compose a major religious epic was animated in part by a desire for fame, readily admitted that such pursuit was contrary to the Christian advocacy of humility, but he offered some justification: Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes:



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Such desire for fame is, he granted, an infirmity but disarmingly suggests that it is forgivable as being the very last weakness to which noble minds are prone. Querry, in contrast to Milton and, even more so, to Schweitzer, has passed beyond that stage, for he is totally free of that infirmity. In headlong flight from renown, he buries himself in a jungle where, he believes, his admirers can never follow him. He shuns journalists when his location is discovered, opposing every attempt to publicise his whereabouts; and, above all, decries all efforts to interpret his withdrawal from the world as an act of sainthood. His journey into the Congo is on the one hand a flight from crass idolisation by the public, but it is, at a deeper level, also revelatory of an innate modesty, a fundamental qualification for his religious odyssey. Schweitzer is specifically evoked in the novel as the antithesis to such self-effacement when Parkinson, to Querry’s disgust, declares his conviction ‘that the world which discovered the way to Schweitzer at Lambarene’ will not fail to seek out Querry, the hermit of the Congo (p. 134). If the unpleasantness of the leading Catholic figures is surprising, even more unexpected is the choice of an atheist, Dr Colin, as the model for selfless devotion to the relieving of human suffering. He had, the narrator informs us, long before his journey to Africa lost faith in any god that a priest would recognise. Occasionally he attends Mass but only, he states, because he finds it convenient for the fathers to imagine he is a crypto-Christian, since many of them would be unhappy about working ‘with an atheist as a colleague’ (p. 82). His quiet dedication to relieving the sick and his late wife’s partnership in the same cause, a partnership that led to her death, suggest tangentially that the ideals of altruism and compassion forming the bedrock of Christianity can emerge no less effectively in a secular setting. It is an assumption that would seem to contradict any impression that the novel’s purpose is to encourage Catholic belief. As Greene advanced in his career, there did enter, as many critics have noted, a more universal concept, an advocacy of the basic Christian ideals as extending beyond the narrower bounds of the Church; and that aspect will be examined in a subsequent chapter. But, although there is a hint of that tendency here, the ultimate purpose of assigning such selflessness to a non-believer has a more practical purpose. It provides the reader with a neutral figure through whom one may regard with greater understanding the more specifically Catholic maturation of Querry. Dr Colin’s integrity as a compassionate individual transforms him into a ‘choric’ figure whose comments we learn to trust, while, as so often in Greene’s novels, Querry’s own comments about himself need to



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be regarded with considerable reservation, prompted as they are by the harsh self-criticism and mordant self-abnegation that frequently warp his judgment and for which we must learn as readers to make due allowance. The setting for the novel is also innovative, more intensely pessimistic than the ‘Greeneland’ of his previous novels with scenes reminiscent of Eliot’s wasteland, presenting dispirited characters in a seemingly empty world. Here, instead of mere sterility or aimlessness, the boredom arising from a sense of the pointlessness of existence, we are confronted with the appalling suffering of humanity, with ailments too horrific even to imagine. Quite apart from the physical agony that the victims undergo during the course of their illness, they are left at its conclusion gruesomely deprived of limbs, or with parts of their bodies so enlarged that they can scarcely move. Such scenes may be reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, but with one chilling difference, for the suffering here is utterly unearned, suggesting a God who has abandoned humankind and discarded any form of justice. Ironically, Greene assigns to Querry’s servant, a leper left with only the stumps of hands and feet, the name, Deo Gratias. For what has that leper to thank the Deity, we are led to ask; what Deity could be responsible for such torment? The main theme of the novel in fact hinges upon this question, with Querry needing to find his way not to a justification of God – like the biblical Job, he recognises that no human is qualified to comprehend the divine purpose – but to an understanding of the response due from the believer. While Querry sees himself metaphorically as a burnt-out case, as having lost part of his being, he relates his condition to the numbness that occurs in lepers after the cure is completed. In the earlier stages of the illness, with their stiffened fingers and strangled tendons, they suffer agonies almost beyond bearing; but once the disease has run its course, the damaged limbs become immune to pain. ‘The palsied suffer, their nerves feel, but I am one of the mutilated,’ remarks Querry. His flight from the world, he declares, was a flight from emotion, the search for an empty place ‘where no new building or woman would remind me that there was a time when I was alive, with a vocation and a capacity to love – if it was love’ (p. 46). If we accept Querry’s reading of his condition, he does seem at the beginning of the novel to have resigned himself to apathy, to a sense of the aridity and pointlessness of human existence. So Gaston has seen him, remarking that Querry, on his arrival in the jungle, had lapsed into ‘a condition of emotional lethargy and spiritual decay because his interest in anything outside his physical comfort has atrophied.’2 All that is left to him, Gaston continues, is indulgence in



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self-pity. As usual in Greene’s novels, however, the surrounding text controverts Querry’s interpretation of his condition. Dr Colin, whose experience as a diagnostician extends beyond medical analysis, rejects Querry’s claim, declaring that there is a further stage to be experienced before the ‘disease’ will burn itself out. For what Querry mistakenly regards as marking the final stage of his spiritual sickness – his supposed numbness or apathy – is in fact the ailment from which he is in the process of recovering. His flight from civilisation was in effect a flight from apathy, a search for some more meaningful existence. Erroneously he imagines that he is in flight from reality, attempting to escape to the end of the world, to bury himself in a jungle location from which neither river nor road leads any further, in order to avoid emotion; that he is committing, in effect, a form of suicide, having explored all that life can offer and finding it vanity. But there is, in fact, a far more positive impetus in that process, for an understanding of which it may be helpful to examine a work whose shadowy presence is felt throughout this novel. Robert Pendleton has studied in depth the intertextual influence of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an influence freely admitted by Greene himself and by which the author feared that his own style was in danger of being swamped. As he modestly remarked, its ‘heavy hypnotic style falls around me again, and I am aware of the poverty of my own’.3 Pendleton assumes that, for all its indebtedness, A Burnt-Out Case differs in one important respect, that the dénouement of Conrad’s novel is negative, namely the discovery of ‘the horror, the horror’ in the dark continent of the human heart.4 It may, however, be argued that the two novels were fundamentally similar in that regard; for Marlow does learn something of profound significance in the course of his journey, not merely the horror of the human heart but the need to recognise and cope with that horror. Obliquely, the reader is warned of the importance of some vital word central to the novel, Marlow recalling: ‘I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.’ The awaited word does appear eventually, when Marlow finds himself alone with a number of natives in the jungle, cannibals accustomed to eating human flesh. To Marlow’s amazement, they refrain from attacking him: Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact



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The natives, he realises, because they are aware of their cannibalistic impulses, can curb them – they will consume a dead body but will not murder in order to eat – while Western man, convinced of his immunity to primitive urges, mercilessly kills and loots under the guise of bringing civilisation to the backward places of the world. Marlow’s discovery is thus not only the darkness of the human heart but the urgent need for Western man to acknowledge the horror of which he had believed himself to be exempt, and thereby to learn to restrain it. Querry’s discovery is equally positive. His journey was not, as he claimed, a flight from reality into numbness but, at a subliminal level, a quest, a pursuit of something as yet undefined, a search for something more valuable and more spiritually satisfying than anything he had experienced in the past. Terry Eagleton sees the disparity between Querry’s statement of the cause of his flight and its true motive as a weakness in the novel: ‘Querry’s journey to the leper-hospital is a conscious renunciation of humanity; yet he is anxious from the beginning to help with menial tasks, and the discrepancy of motive is not successfully accounted for.’6 But in the context of the strategies we have been examining, it emerges as a further instance of Greene’s familiar technique, Querry’s self-disparagement leading him to acknowledge only the negative aspects of his action, and to ignore those that would redound to his credit. His withdrawal from the world was, as we soon learn, not the symptom of lethargy he claimed but a renunciation similar in purport to a monk’s undertaking of holy vows, an abdication of the mundane not as an end in itself, but prompted by a longing to fulfill a higher purpose. That purpose, he eventually discovers, is the only legitimate response of a sensitive humanbeing to the inexplicable torments of humankind, namely dedication to relieving the suffering of others, a movement away from the self-indulgence that had dominated his earlier life in favour of an abiding concern for his fellow humans. Within this novel, his gradual acceptance of that ideal is, as we shall see, endowed with patently religious connotations, so that Querry’s discovery of a purpose in life approximates to the discovery of a religious vocation, a recovering of lost faith. Robert Hoskins has interestingly perceived that this novel is in certain ways an inversion of The End of the Affair. He notes that in both novels a diary occupies a central role in the plot; but while Sarah’s diary, her solemn recording of a spiritual journey, fulfils a positive function,



facing me – the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma …5

making possible Bendrix’s future conversion and transforming an adulterous affair into a religious quest, Marie’s diary is not only trivial, a schoolgirlish romanticising of facts, but a distortion of them that leads to disaster. And where the earlier affair had been as passionately mutual as that of Greene and Catherine Walston, Marie is merely seeking a substitute for her husband’s embraces.7 There is, however, a further difference. Whatever Greene’s liberal views of adultery may have been, Bendrix and Sarah are engaged in an illicit, extra-marital affair, while here Querry’s visit to Marie’s bedroom is entirely innocent, devoid of any immoral intent or act. He is therefore, unlike Bendrix, already on the path to selfregeneration from the beginning of the novel, discarding sexual activity and retiring from the world in order to seek a more satisfying aspiration than the self-indulgence that had dominated his previous life. In that respect – the reason for withdrawal from the world – Father Thomas functions as a foil to Querry. It is true that Thomas had renounced the world in order to serve his God, for, whatever his other blemishes, he cannot be faulted on grounds of his sincerity. There is no trace of hypocrisy in his devotion to the priesthood, nor any sign of regret for the choice he has made. But he is tormented by a nagging dissatisfaction with his work in the leproserie and his failure to find fulfilment in his missionary role. He misses the sense of satisfaction and pride that he imagined he would obtain through such abnegation. To Querry he confides his feeling that the tasks he has been given lack the splendour that he associates with martyrdom or with such heroic missionary activity as Francis Xavier’s journey to the Far East. He himself had wanted to be sent to China but his request had been denied; and when Querry attempts to comfort him by suggesting that the work in the leproserie may be equally valuable, he replies sourly, ‘Teaching the alphabet?’ The fault in his reasoning can perhaps be best illustrated by recalling George Herbert’s poem, ‘The Collar’. Having left an eminent position at Cambridge University in order to undertake the humble position of parson to a small country village, Herbert expressed through his speaker a similar sense of disillusionment; and the comfort the latter eventually finds indicates what is missing in Father Thomas’s condition – the realisation that the purpose of the self-sacrifice was not to achieve satisfaction but, in accordance with the principle of imitatio Dei, to suffer, to be prepared to mortify oneself in order to assist the poor and the needy. Herbert therefore inserts into his speaker’s fretful protests unconscious allusions to the crown of thorns, to the wine and wafer of the Eucharist representing the blood and flesh of the sacrifice, suggesting that there is, even in this rebellious outburst, an unacknowledged or suppressed



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Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn Before my tears did drown it. Those hints prepare the reader for the speaker’s final recognition – that his true aim had not been self-gratification but a readiness to serve to his Creator, however menial the task: But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde At every word, Me thought I heard one calling, Child: And I reply’d, My Lord.8 Father Thomas suffers from a similar dissatisfaction with his task, but he never achieves that insight. The only time he derives any degree of pleasure from his work in the leproserie is on his appointment as Acting Superior, when he begins ‘taking a more favourable view of the mission than he had a month before’ (p. 134). From that blemish in his character emerges his misplaced admiration of Querry’s withdrawal from the world, an abnegation that he sees as deserving the kind of public acclaim which he himself would so wish to have enjoyed, a gratifying acknowledgment of ‘sainthood’ as recorded in the laudatory article in Time magazine. He insists, over Querry’s repeated objections, on imposing upon the architect his own failed image, including the experience of the Dark Night of the Soul that he himself – so fearful of the dark – has been incapable of fulfilling. ‘Don’t you see that perhaps you’ve been given the grace of aridity?’ he declares to Querry. ‘Perhaps even now you are walking in the footsteps of St John of the Cross, the noche oscura’ (p. 92). If Querry’s arrival had provided for him a form of stimulation and encouragement, the architect’s supposed downfall at the end proves all the more devastating, returning the priest to his condition of despondency and fear, a despondency now intenser in form: ‘We gave you a warm welcome here, didn’t we? We asked you no questions. We didn’t pry into your past. And in return you present us



recognition of the ultimate purpose of his priestly office despite his momentary despair:

with this – scandal. Weren’t there enough women for you in Europe?’ Father Thomas said. ‘Did you have to make our little community here a base for your operations?’ Suddenly he was again the nervy and despairing priest who couldn’t sleep and was afraid of the dark. He began to weep, clinging to his umbrella as an African might cling to a totem-pole. (p. 180) What of Querry’s religious affiliation or spiritual condition? We are told that he is a lapsed Catholic who ceased attending Mass some twenty years before. He himself declares firmly that he has moved beyond the stage of religious doubt to atheism: ‘Father, if I must speak plainly, I don’t believe at all. Not at all. I’ve worked it out of my system’ (p. 91). Even more sweepingly, he asserts not only that he has no belief whatever in a god, but also no belief in the soul, nor in eternity. He has, we are assured, no interest in such questions (p. 144). On awaking on his first morning at the leproserie, and on hearing the prayers being chanted in the nearby chapel, he feels only disgust, the sound reminding him ‘of an illness from which he had long recovered’ (p. 25). However, when mentioning later that he would like to be buried in the same plot as Dr Colin and his wife so that between them they would form an atheists’ corner, Colin recognises the inappropriateness, replying sagely, ‘I wonder if you would have qualified for that.’ Eventually, he will indeed be buried in that plot, but the interment there forms, as we shall see, part of the absurdity of life, of the misunderstandings prevailing amongst those around him. Querry is not a prêtre manqué in the normal sense of that term. He had, it is clear, never intended to enter the priesthood and hence had never been disappointed by a failure to experience a vocation. The term ‘vocation’, however, occurs frequently in the novel, in a context somewhat different from its usage elsewhere. His vocation had, we are repeatedly informed, been that of an architect, but the parallel between the secular and the religious versions is evident. The term ‘vocation’, we may note, in fact derives directly from the priestly usage. The early Protestants, such as William Perkins, as part of the desire to justify activity in this world and to establish a work-ethic, suggested that every worldly occupation should now be regarded as a holy task to which the individual had been called, and hence they bestowed upon all worldly professions the term ‘vocation’.9 For Querry, the task of creating buildings was an aesthetic vocation, a dedication to the concept of beauty. The adulation accompanying professional success was for him not merely nugatory but thoroughly objectionable. Where the highest ideal in



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Catholicism, especially for those hoping for a vocation, is self-abnegation – a rejection of personal ambition, a repudiation of wealth, and total dedication to the service of the church – such was Querry’s dedication to architecture. Commissioned to design churches and cathedrals in addition to secular edifices, he insists that he built them not for the glory of God, nor for the pleasure of those who commissioned them, but ‘for himself’ as an act of love for the ideal he cherished (p. 51). Such was his secular vocation. But for any who may have missed the parallel between the two types of vocation, sacred and secular, Greene assigns to Querry in the comment quoted earlier in this chapter, when he is attempting to dissuade Parkinson from pursuing him, a merging of the two types, with the priest employed as the yardstick: ‘you are a man like me. Men with vocations are different from the others … Behind all of us in various ways lies a spoilt priest’ (p. 110). Eventually, Querry’s secular vocation, for all the aesthetic satisfaction it gave him, had proved in some deep sense unsatisfactory. Indeed, the word ‘vocation’ echoes like the ringing of a bell throughout the novel. As Querry wrote in a missive to Dr Colin, a vocation is ‘an act of love: it is not a professional career. When desire is dead one cannot continue to make love. I’ve come to the end of desire and to the end of a vocation.’ He had, therefore, come to the end of his secular vocation; but, whether he realised it or not, he was moving ever closer to a religious vocation. It becomes apparent that Querry’s dissatisfaction with his profession and with his amorous affairs had been the absence of such selflessness, the fact that rewards and success had come too easily, making no demands upon him. It was not boredom with his profession as such that drove him to the Congo but, as the epigraph to the novel suggests, the emergence within him of self-disgust. For the leper, the epigraph states, self-disgust is essentially aesthetic – ‘In cases where he has a deformity or abnormality or develops it later, his own aesthetic sense revolts and he develops a sort of disgust towards himself.’ But Querry, having rejected aesthetic criteria, experiences a moral self-disgust, an awareness, as yet undefined by him, of the irrelevance of his material success to the compassion which he knows, at some level of consciousness, to be the only truly redeeming quality of humankind. Whatever other concepts, rituals, or doctrines may be intrinsic to the Christian faith, the most basic is clearly compassion, a concern for others, a willingness to suffer oneself in order to relieve others or free them from their misery. His habit of self-centredness is noted at the beginning of the novel, when the natives singing of him on the bank of the river remark that he smokes continually yet never offers a cigarette to others, a gesture, he



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admits, that had never occurred to him. And it is his movement towards compassion and concern for his fellow human beings that provides the primary theme of the novel. His suppressed awareness of what he lacks, the dissatisfaction that drove him to Africa, is hinted at in the opening line of the novel, when, parodying Descartes, he records in his diary ten days into his journey up the river the sensation of a new experience, ‘I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive.’ In isolation, that might suggest mere masochism. Moreover, his growing concern for others could have been interpreted as simple humanity, like Dr Colin’s, divorced from any religious impulse. But before the first major instance of the change occurring in him, the rescue of Deo Gratias, Greene inserts the account of a dream that leaves no doubt not only of the religious nature of his spiritual journey but also, as so often in Greene’s writings, the suggestion that, despite all contrary evidence, Querry was indeed a prêtre manqué – that hidden within him is an embryonic religious vocation for which architecture had been a temporary substitute or prelude: He had a dream that night from which he woke in terror. He was walking down a long railway-track, in the dark, in a cold country. He was hurrying because he had to reach a priest and explain to him that, in spite of the clothes he was wearing, he was a priest also and he must make his confession and obtain wine with which to celebrate Mass. He was under orders of some kind from a superior. He had to say his Mass now that night. Tomorrow would be too late. He would lose his chance forever. He came to a village and left the railway-track (the small station was shuttered and deserted: perhaps the whole branch line had been closed long since by the authorities) and presently found himself outside the priest’s door, heavy and medieval, studded with great nails the size of Roman coins. He rang and was admitted. A lot of chattering pious women surrounded the priest, but he was friendly and accessible in spite of them. Querry said, ‘I must see you at once, alone. There is something I have to tell you,’ and already he began to feel the enormous relief and security of his confession. He was nearly home again. (p. 50) The vision, however, ends in disappointment, as the priest fails to notice him: ‘Then Querry broke down. It was as though he had had an appointment with hope at this turn of the road and had arrived just too late.’ For him, immersed in near-despair, it seems that he has missed hs chance, that it is too late. But events prove the contrary; it was not too late.



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His pursuit of Deo Gratias into the jungle shortly after that dream, at the risk of his own life, is a patent instance of the ideal of selflessness at the heart of the Christian faith; but it is more than a mere attempt to save his servant’s life. Realising Deo Gratias’s terror of being left alone, and compassionately holding the mutilated, fingerless hand of his servant, he remains with him throughout the long night, echoing St John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. For Querry, it is a totally new experience, the kind of experience he had lacked both in his architectural work and in his amorous affairs: ‘I’ve needed people often enough in my life. You might accuse me of having used people more than I have ever loved them. But to be needed is a different sensation’ (p. 57). The result is a revaluation of his past life, an unprecedented remorse for the carelessness with which he had wrecked people’s lives to gratify his vanity, and the voicing, if only to himself, of an apology to one such victim, Marie Morel: ‘I can promise you, Marie, toute à toi, all of you, never again from boredom or vanity to involve another human being in my lack of love. I shall do no more harm, he thought, with the kind of happiness a leper must feel when he is freed at last by his seclusion from the fear of passing on contagion to another.’ But his change is as yet incomplete. It is followed by the cynical comment: ‘There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself’ (p. 118). Different though it may appear from the Deo Gratias incident, his attempt to comfort Marie is, Greene informs us, prompted by the same altruism. Querry’s attitude to her is fatherly, he repeatedly comments on her immaturity, treating her throughout as a child in need of reassurance; and his visit with her is (in contrast to the Scobie affair) devoid of sexual impulse or misdemeanour. As usual with Greene’s anti-heroes, he denies any possibility that he is prompted by pity, that his act was in any way virtuous, claiming he was merely irritated by what he thought was the sound of weeping from next-door; but the incident is linked with that earlier episode. As he sat and wondered what he should do to comfort her if the doctor told her in the morning that she was pregnant, he was, we are told, ‘reminded of his long night’s vigil with Deo Gratias’ (p. 159). Moreover, it is the atheist Colin who once again links this search for suffering and compassion with the religious impulse, remarking to Querry that it is the only means to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition, adding, ‘With suffering we become part of the Christian myth’ (p. 122). The night-time visit to Marie brings us to the story of the jeweller that he recounts to her, the allegorical fairy-tale whereby he attempts to distract her from her worries. The subject of the story, the jeweller, is so obviously



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intended by Querry as a surrogate for himself that even the immature Marie perceives the substitution, triumphantly catching him out when, slightly inebriated, he inadvertently refers to the jeweller’s artifact as a building instead of a jewel. It is tempting for a critic to take the next step, to equate the jeweller not only with Querry but with Greene himself, as, in fact, Frank Kermode does: For ‘jeweller’ one reads ‘architect Querry novelist ?’ The protective question-mark would seem to leave the final equation open to doubt, but the parenthesis Kermode added – ‘Mr.Greene has said before that a novel is always a kind of confession’– as well as the subsequent analysis reveal that Kermode accepted the equation. Cedric Watts follows that approach in assuming that Querry’s loss of religious conviction, as recounted in the guise of the Fabergé jeweller, reflects Greene’s own movement towards agnosticism.10 On the one hand, there can be no doubt of a personal allusion to the author’s situation in certan passages, such as the jeweller’s complaint of attacks made by ‘believers’ on the supposed heresies in his work concerning original sin. The passage is patently inappropriate to the jeweller story as neither a Fabergé jewel nor an architect’s design would seem vulnerable to attack for misrepresenting original sin, while there was indeed a spate of criticism of Greene’s novels at this time on the ground of their unorthodoxies. Hence the tongue-in-cheek comment on those who began to write books about his art, especially those who claimed to know and love the King wrote about him. The books all said much the same thing, and when our hero had read one he had read them all. There was nearly always a chapter called ‘The Toad in the Hole: the Art of Fallen Man’ or else there was one called, ‘From Easter Egg to Letters of Marque, the Jeweller of Original Sin.’ (p. 157) But to assume that the thinly-veiled account of the jeweller’s disillusionment with God parallels a similar development in Greene’s spiritual condition has no basis – not because of any declaration by Greene himself, but because that view is contradicted internally, within the novel, both by the character of the story-teller and by the story itself. First, the tale is recounted not by a person whose comments we trust but by one constantly misreading or misjudging himself, whose self-evaluations are intended to be treated with suspicion. Even more important, however, is



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the central theme of the inner story – the speaker’s bitter complaint that the King always rewarded but never punished him, which reflects so closely the theme we have been following of Querry’s dissatisfaction with the ease whereby he has won success. One is reminded of a fictional character with which Greene was no doubt acquainted, the character of Spandrell in Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley, a novelist whom Greene greatly admired.11 Spandrell, seemingly a carefree debauchee, is, we learn eventually, a deeply frustrated religiose, longing to believe in God but with his potential faith paralysed by twentieth-century intellectual disproofs. Paradoxically, he commits sin after sin in order to provoke God to destroy him, so that in the second that he sees the approaching thunderbolt, he will have the profound satisfaction of knowing that God exists. Querry does not go quite so far, but the reason for his disbelief is similar, the puzzling absence of divine retribution for his misdemeanours – ‘he would have welcomed feeling the pain of the punishment that the King must all the time have been inflicting on him’ but which never materialised. Here too, the reader is meant to go beyond that thought, to perceive a truth as yet unknown to Querry or as yet unacknowledged by him, that the punishment, though it may not have come in the form of a thunderbolt, has indeed fallen upon him, the profound self-disgust that has compelled him to bury himself in the jungle. The conclusion of that inner story bears out this reading. After railing against an unjust God who allows children to be born deaf or blind, whose rewards and punishment are not visible in this world, the jeweller eventually rejects belief in the King as mere superstition, as a series of old wives’ tales. Were that Greene’s own conclusion, the story of the jeweller would have ended there. But it does not. In place of the sense of liberation that such disburdenment should have provided, Greene has Querry’s jeweller experience only vacancy, a sense of the utter pointlessness and selfishness of his life. The final sentence of Querry’s story is the most significant, suggesting on his part not a rejection of faith but an approaching conviction that his sense of vacancy might itself be evidence of God’s existence, the punishment that he had been waiting for: when he discovered there was no such King as the one he had believed in, he realized too that anything that he had ever done must have been done for love of himself. How could there be any point any longer in making jewels or making love for his own solitary pleasure? Perhaps he had reached the end of his sex and the end of his vocation before he made his discovery about the King or perhaps



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That account, especially in its ending, could scarcely be described as a movement towards atheism, or even towards agnosticism. And if so, what grounds are there for assuming that it indicates Greene’s rejection of faith? And now to the conclusion of the novel. Shortly before Rycker’s entrance, Colin, after remarking on Querry’s unsuitability for the atheists’ cemetery-plot, comments that he seems to finger his lack of faith like a sore that he wishes to get rid of, that he seems deeply troubled by it. To that, Querry replies that perhaps no-one can have two vocations and, having surrendered one, he needs to go further. Again, therefore, there is the hint of the second vocation, the religious vocation towards which he seemed to be moving had Rycker not prevented it. Querry’s last words before he dies – ‘Absurd, this is absurd’ – have been seen as negating the possibility that he has found faith. Evelyn Waugh, a fellow convert initially sympathetic to Greene’s Catholic novels but increasingly disturbed by what he saw as their unorthodoxies, noted in his diary that Querry, ‘recovers a spark of humanity but not his “faith” and dies in an absurdly melodramatic way’, while J.D. Dooley interpreted that last murmur as expressing an existentialist view, Querry’s continued conception of the universe as utterly haphazard and pointless.12 But those are not Querry’s last words. The addition of ‘or else …’ provides an alternative to the view of cosmic absurdity. The series of dots not only indicates the curtailment of the thought by death, but also offers a lacuna for the reader to fill. As with Bendrix, so here, the novel stops short of presenting Querry’s final affirmation of belief, partly to avoid the banality of so convenient an ending. Instead, it leaves him at the penultimate stage of his spiritual journey, with the reader encouraged to perceive the direction in which he is moving, that he is at the threshold of embracing a concept of the universe very different from existentialist vacuity. If there is absurdity, it is in the way his visit to Marie had been misinterpreted and the senselessness of his being killed for an act he did not perform. The absurdity is reflected also in the behaviour of the humans around Querry, including the funeral itself, a ceremony that verges upon farce. Catholic burial had been denied him by those who should have known better, the decision



that discovery brought about the end of everything? I wouldn’t know, but I’m told that there were moments when he wondered if his unbelief were not after all a final and conclusive proof of the King’s existence. This total vacancy might be his punishment for the rules he had wilfully broken. (p. 158)


being to inter him in the atheists’ section. Beside the grave is placed an old jam-pot filled with twigs and plants, probably a pagan offering to Nzambe; but if that offering comes from Deo Gratias as the text suggests, it is a more moving tribute than the truncated ceremony performed by Father Thomas in the absence of the Superior. Placed on the grave is a wreath from Parkinson bearing the ridiculously inappropriate quotation, ‘Nature I loved and next to Nature Art’ – as usual, falsely attributed by him to Browning instead of Landor.13 Again as part of the concluding absurdity, Rycker is now acclaimed a hero, believes himself brought closer to God by his flagrantly un-Christian act, and is considering entering the priesthood. The final scene provides a shift in narrative strategy. Until now, Colin had been the choric figure whose comments and psychological insights we learned to trust. Summarising Querry’s life in entirely secular terms, he declares that the architect’s pursuit of women had been motivated not by the satisfaction the affairs provided but by a frustrated search for the love he failed to find; Querry had, he continues, then transferred that search for satisfaction to his profession, until that too failed him, producing the crisis that led him to Africa. Recalling Querry’s remark that he was happy at the leproserie, Colin concludes that he had been cured. But as an atheist Colin is limited, unable to respond fully to any spiritual or religious change that may have occurred. For the first time, the Superior takes over the choric role from Colin, gently correcting the latter’s diagnosis and nudging the reader into the interpretation Greene wishes to establish: The Superior said shyly, ‘I thought perhaps you meant that he was beginning to find his faith again.’ ‘Oh no, not that. Only a reason for living. You try too hard to make a pattern, father.’ ‘But if the pattern’s there … . You remember what Pascal said, that a man who starts looking for God has already found him. The same may be true of love – when we look for it, perhaps we’ve already found it.’ (p. 198) Colin remains unconvinced; but he has ceased to be the diagnostician whose views we accept, and there is evidence in the novel that strengthens the Superior’s interpretation, clues inserted earlier in the novel for the reader to grasp. Querry’s flight to Africa had arisen, we know, from the sobering realisation that throughout his adult life he had loved no-one, and he had concluded therefore that he was incapable of love, a burnt-out



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case immune to feeling. During his stay at the leproserie, a concern for others had begun to emerge, evidenced both by his rescue of Deo Gratias and by the night spent with Marie, misinterpreted as it was by others. But there is also a significant intimation earlier in the novel that points forward to the ending, his discovery that human love is a prerequisite for religious faith, that one cannot believe in a god without loving a human being, and that one cannot love a human being without believing in a god (p. 114). Immediately after he made that discovery, while brooding upon the selfishness that had motivated his actions in the past, he suddenly declares aloud, as though addressing the young student whose girl-friend he had once seduced: ‘I am sorry. I really believed that I meant you no harm. I really thought in those days that I acted from love.’ It marked an awakening compassion for others such as he had never experienced before, fulfilling, as did his comforting of Marie, the first half of the above axiom. The result is the unstated implication that, having developed love for his fellow human beings, he has indeed become eligible to experience a love of God. Shortly before his death, Querry recognises the change that has occurred within him, the change from ‘I feel discomfort, therefore I am’ with which the novel opened. But it is a change not only in his emotional make-up but, as he realises if only dimly, in his religious commitment too. As he declares to Dr Colin in a scene immediately preceding his death: You said once that when one suffers, one begins to feel part of the human condition, on the side of the Christian myth, do you remember? ‘I suffer, therefore I am.’ I wrote something like that once in my diary, but I can’t remember what or when, and the word wasn’t ‘suffer’. (p. 186) He may not remember the earlier statement, but the reader does. The shift from mere discomfort to suffering that marks that change is acknowledged by Querry himself as a movement towards the Christian ‘myth’ – a movement that he may be hesitant to acknowledge but which Greene has encouraged the reader to perceive.



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The grim setting of the novel, a country terrorised under Duvalier’s vicious dictatorship, would seem to offer little room for the comedy suggested by the title. Hounded by the secret police, citizens were tortured or murdered there indiscriminately and, as Greene informs us in the letter prefacing the novel, the atmosphere he described was not fictitious, some of the most macabre scenes in the novel being based on actual events. And lest one imagine he exaggerated, he added, ‘Only in Santa Domingo have things changed since I began this book – for the worse.’ There are, indeed, some fine instances of Greene’s humour in the midst of the horror, such as the moment when the ambassador, although aware that his visitor is Jones disguised as a woman, absent-mindedly offers him an arm to escort him into the house, and Martha, watching Jones moving ‘magnificently across the hall like a Victorian matron’, laughs till her eyes fill with tears when he introduces himself as ‘Major Jones’, adding circumspectly, ‘In the women’s army, of course’. But such instances occur only in minor scenes. The comedian of the title is of a graver kind, as confirmed by Greene’s frequent use of the foreign term, comédien, a term that in French includes all categories of actors, serious as well as comic. The comedy alluded to here is the kind bordering upon tragedy, evocative of the existentialist concept of the absurdity of life in a world ruled, if ruled at all, by a Being whom Brown can only regard as a practical joker: When I was a boy I had faith in the Christian God. Life under his shadow was a very serious affair; I saw Him incarnated in every tragedy. He belonged to the lacrimae rerum like a gigantic figure looming through a Scottish mist. Now that I approached the end of life it was only my sense of humour that enabled me sometimes to believe 104



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Throughout the novel, the term reverberates with these solemn connotations. As Brown embraces his mistress on their reunion, he muses that ‘the corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy. The corpse of Doctor Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme; we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief’ (p. 57). The opening scene sets the tone for the sense of universal incongruity permeating the novel. In contrast to the grim wastelands or the agonising sufferings in the leproserie that formed backgrounds to the earlier novels, here the initial setting, before we reach the shores of Haiti, resembles a music-hall act. A rusty cargo-boat ploughs the seas bearing in its passenger-list a confidence-trickster claiming the dubious title of ‘Major’, a one-time marginal candidate for the American Presidency representing the vegetarian vote, his eccentric wife for ever advocating the pacifist virtues of Barmene, and the narrator, a nondescript Mr Brown dejectedly returning to the empty hotel he owns in Haiti and to an almost equally empty love-affair. To deepen the absurdity, for the farewell party on the last night of the voyage the purser, since his supply of balloons is exhausted, employs inflated condoms decorated with comic faces. The ship is, ironically, named Medea in an age in which the insignificance of humankind had made heroic tragedy no longer viable. Joseph Wood Krutch’s incisive study, The Modern Temper, had foreseen as early as 1929 that tragedy, which demands as a prerequisite some conviction, however limited, of the importance of the human being in the universe at large as well as the existence of some supernal power or fate directing human affairs, could no longer function in the modern world.1 Here the commonplace names – Jones, Smith, and Brown – are, as the narrator notes, interchangeable ‘like comic masks in a farce’. With so idiosyncratic a cast, there seems little opportunity for any assertion of heroic values, for recording noble achievements, nor for justifying Brown’s strange opening statement that the modest stone on Jones’ grave bears comparison with the noblest sepulchral monuments in London, a gravestone that Brown personally is proud to have helped raise. Critical evaluations of this novel have almost invariably assumed that the defeatist view of life, as represented in this opening scene, with ostensibly farcical characters involved in pointless occupations, typifies the novel at large, that Brown, the central character, if he does eventually become involved is, as R.H. Miller has recently argued, essentially a failure, disillusioned, lacking ideology and suffering throughout from



in Him. Life was a comedy, not the tragedy for which I had been prepared … (p. 31)


‘total lack of purpose or program’.2 I shall be suggesting that the reverse is true, that, in accordance with the impressive hint in the opening paragraph concerning Jones’ grave, there emerges from the dreary emptiness of twentieth-century existence a heartening sense of human potential, of the individual’s ability to achieve heroic stature despite the seeming impossibility of such attainment. The narrative strategy adopted here has no precedent in any of the earlier novels. The key to that strategy lies in the title; for whatever general allusion it may carry to the gravity of the human condition, the type of comedy bordering on tears, its major implication, the hint offered to the reader, relates to the way each of the characters responds to the challenges posed by this dismal environment. They are not, as one critic has called them, ‘actors, fakers, liars’3 but engaged in a far more serious undertaking. For as the story unfolds, it transpires, I would suggest. that each of them is indeed a comédien in the sense that he or she is acting out a role – but a role of profound significance. The role in each instance is initially adopted to mask an existentialist despair, to cloak however temporarily the prevailing sense of the impossibility of living from day to day unless some pretence is embraced. Each is deeply conscious of the disparity between his or her true condition and the ‘heroic’ or dignified role adopted as a mask; but gradually we are led to perceive that the selection of the role, cynical though each may be in deprecating it, represents the ideal that they would have yearned to fulfil had the universe been more amenable to such ambition. And the main point of Greene’s strategy is that each of these characters in the course of the novel, although generally unaware of the fact, eventually does merge into the adopted role, fulfilling it in the highest degree. The result is the novel’s vindication of human nobility, the triumph of each character over the seeming vacuity of human existence. Although the process is more subtly conveyed in the presentation of the central characters to whom we shall soon return, the peripheral figures provide valuable paradigms, pointers to the process that perhaps we should begin with. Brown’s mother, for example, unable to believe that her black paramour, Marcel, could really love so old a woman, assumes that he is pursuing their affair solely in the hope of receiving a legacy, that he is playing the part of lover for eventual financial gain. Dreading the blankness of a life devoid of love, she sends him a note begging him to continue playing the role: I know I’m an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending. As long as we pretend we escape. Pretend that



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Marcel on his part, convinced that so wonderful a woman could never love the ugly black man he believes himself to be, acts out the role of the gigolo that he believes she requires. Yet at the end, both are seen to have been far from role-playing. For the sake of a last embrace with him, she knowingly risks death, having been warned by her physician that her heart is weak; and his despair at her demise, the tears flowing at the funeral, his discarding of the money she has left him and, finally, his suicide retrospectively authenticate the passionate mutuality of their love-affair. As Brown comments with surprise after Marcel’s suicide: ‘perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity’ (p. 253). The adopted roles or masks are donned not only to conceal from others the inner misery, an attempt to ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’ as T.S. Eliot had formulated the process.4 The purpose of the mask was, beyond that need, to hide from themselves, however momentarily, their paralysing sense of the purposelessness of their existence, permitting them to live out their depressing lives with a modicum of normalcy. On the occasions when they acknowledge the roles they are each playing, they do so contemptuously, regarding the pretence as merely pathetic. But the reader is led to perceive otherwise. The ambassador, fully aware of his wife’s infidelities, chooses to play the part of an unobservant cuckold, commenting (without admitting the nature of his pretence): ‘We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians – it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed – that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men’ (p. 134). But while he sees his role as a failure, we are led later to discern his real purpose, his determination to preserve the marital framework for the sake of his child. And he rises further in our estimation when, in pursuing this role of imperturbable insouciance towards rivals for his wife’s affection, he offers his potential rival, Jones, a permanent refuge in the ambassadorial home. One of the more obvious instances of this transition occurs in Brown’s changing attitude to the Smiths. The claim to the title of Presidential Candidate in the recent elections in the United States is clearly preposterous, Smith having campaigned on the platform of vegetarianism, obtaining only a tiny percentage of the vote, and that only in his own locality. The function he attempts to perform in claiming that role seems to echo Greene’s attack in The Quiet American on the fatuity of American foreign policy, with Smith trying to establish a people’s



I love you like a mistress. Pretend that you love me like a lover. Pretend that I would die for you and that you would die for me. (p. 253)


vegetarian centre under a regime where ninety-five percent of the population could in any case afford neither meat, fish, nor even eggs. He believes naively in the rectitude of Papa Doc’s regime and generously throws money to a crippled beggar, totally unaware that the moment his back is turned the so-called ‘justice of the peace’ will brutally snatch it from the mendicant’s hand. However, if he is gullible, he acts with such selfless dedication and commitment that by the end of the novel he has won Brown’s unhesitating admiration. He is, in a sense, a correction to Greene’s depiction of Pyle in The Quiet American. There are, in this novel too, numerous references to the evils of the CIA, such as their betraying to foreign governments details of revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the corrupt regimes and thereby causing their executions; and we are reminded throughout of the mismanagement of so-called American aid, serving merely to bloat the coffers of local officials. But Smith, in contrast, represents Greene’s admiration of the sincerity of those Americans who genuinely wish to help the backward countries of the world. If the role of Presidential Candidate seems initially absurd, sometimes even to Smith himself, he is eventually perceived as conforming, despite his naivité, to the finest ideals of his country and of the role he has adopted, as in his insistence on demanding Jones’ release and his determination to attend Dr Philpot’s funeral despite dire warnings of the dangers involved in such participation. At the end of the novel, Smith remarks ruefully: ‘Perhaps we seem rather comic figures to you, Mr. Brown,’ ‘Not comic,’ I said with sincerity, ‘heroic.’ The exchange crystallises the process examined here, as the hint of ‘comic’ in the term comedian is elevated to ‘heroic’. This process of living up to a role gradually metamorphosed from the ludicrous to the splendid applies no less to Smith’s wife. Initially, she seems farcical in her conviction that Yeastrel and Barmine could prove panaceas for world violence and Listerine a solution to human ills. She prides herself, with a touch of racial condescension, on her participation some years previous in demonstrations in favour of the downtrodden blacks in Nashville; and she spends her time supposedly mastering French overnight with the aid of Hugo’s manual. Yet under pressure she rises magnificently to a true defence of human rights in a manner that transcends the black/white divide. Outraged to discover a black Tontons Macoute officer torturing Brown, she attacks the armed Captain so



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She advanced on him, all her hard-won vocabulary forgotten. ‘How dare you come here flourishing a revolver? Give it to me,’ and she held out her hand for it as though he were a child with a catapult. Captain Concasseur may not have understood her English, but he understood very well the gesture. As though he were guarding a precious object from an angry mother, he buttoned the gun back inside the holster. ‘Get out of that chair, you black scum. Stand up when you speak to me.’ She added, in defence of all her past, as though this echo of Nashville racialism had burnt her tongue, ‘You are a disgrace to your colour.’ (p. 186) The role of defender of the oppressed for which her one-time journey to Nashville had seemed a very thin basis is amply justified in that scene. If Roger Sharrock maintains that the comedians of the title who play a part and wear the actor’s mask ‘refuse to come to terms with themselves and stay on the edge of life avoiding involvement,’5 that statement is patently inapplicable to such characters as Brown’s mother (awarded a medal for her work in the Resistance), to Marcel’s suicide, and to the inflexible determination of the two Smiths to improve the lot of their fellow human-beings. Another peripheral figure, Martha, at one point vehemently denies that she is a comedian, insisting, after her husband’s remarks quoted above on their combined failure at such roles, that she at least has no illusions, being concerned with the practicalities of daily life: ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Martha said in English, as though she were addressing me directly; ‘I’m no comedian.’ We had forgotten her. She beat with her hands on the back of the sofa and cried to them in French, ‘You talk so much. Such rubbish. My child vomited just now. You can smell it still on my hands. He was crying with pain. You talk about acting parts. I’m not acting any part. I do something. I fetch a basin. I fetch aspirin. I wipe his mouth. I take him into my bed.’ (p. 134) But the vehemence itself betrays the truth. With her father hanged as a Nazi murderer, she has had to create for herself a new role in life, ‘the virtue of innocence’. On leaving the room in tears, she murmurs to Brown: ‘I exaggerated, didn’t I? but all, that talk irritated me. It made every one of us seem cheap and useless and self-pitying. Perhaps we are,



ferociously, so unexpectedly, and so imperiously in her hopelessly demotic French that he is cowed, calling off his men in dismay:


but we needn’t revel in it.’ Later in the novel, Brown concludes that she has proved ‘to be the best comedian of us all’. A remark appearing in Greene’s much earlier Ministry of Fear (1943) suggests that he had already been toying with the idea of producing a work embodying the principle I have outlined here. He wrote there: ‘One could laugh at day-dreams but so long as you had the capacity to day-dream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn’t believe in.’6 That he intended to employ in this novel the process we have outlined is amply confirmed by the lines that Greene selected as the epigraph, a quotation from Thomas Hardy which, if one has not perceived the presence of that process, might appear irrelevant: Aspects are within us, and who seems Most kingly is the King. The pretence or seeming becomes the reality. Whatever the peripheral figures may suggest, it is in the two central figures that this process achieves its primary effect. For ‘Major’ Jones the reader can have nothing but contempt in the opening scenes. He is, we learn, a cheat, a briber, and a fraud, pursued by the international police for criminal activity, and engaged at present in some form of shady arms deal. His claim to senior military rank, to having served with distinction in Burma is, we discover, utterly baseless, his military service having consisted, because of disqualification for flat feet, in checking travelvouchers for third-class troop-entertainers. Yet by degrees he wins our sympathy, first by his endearing humour, and then by the compassion aroused as we learn of his background. Born out of wedlock, his father unknown to him, condemned to survive unaided in a hostile world and resorting to any expedient that would keep him from starvation, he yet retains throughout a cheerful resilience to misfortune. More significantly, his pose as an ex-officer, adopted in the faint hope of obtaining respect from others, merges into actuality at the close of the novel when, totally ignorant of warfare, unable even to fire a gun, he undertakes command of a Haitian rebel force in a dangerous expedition, despite his fear that his military incompetence will soon be exposed and that his innate cowardice will betray him at the vital moment. But, we



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discover, there is no innate cowardice, as Jones exhibits under fire the finest qualities of a military commander, winning his men’s admiration and trust, and dying courageously and selflessly in the abortive coup when, unable to walk further, he orders his men to leave him behind and save their own lives. As Philipot reports: ‘He could hardly move because of his feet He said he’d keep the soldiers off till we had time to reach the road. He said he would follow slowly, but I knew he would never come. I had grown to love him. I would like to write about him to the Queen of England’ (p. 282). Hence Brown’s pride in having helped erect the modest roadside stone in his honour, a memorial, he believes, amply deserved. So bald a summary does scant justice to the subtlety of the gradual reversal in the reader’s evaluation of him, from contempt to respect, but it may suffice for the moment. The aspect so frequently missed in critical assessments of the novel is the intimate relationship between Jones and Brown that serves as the structural basis of the novel, not merely in the similarity of their backgrounds but, more importantly, in this process of Greene’s re-assertion of positive moral values. In the same way as the fringe characters had prepared the way for our understanding of Jones’ gradual merger into his adopted role, so Jones functions, like Gloster in King Lear, as a simpler reflection of the central character’s spiritual odyssey, a structural parallel from which we may learn to re-assess Brown. Despite the patent contrasts between the two, Jones lacking the intellectual finesse and emotional range of the narrator, they are close in their experience of life. Both are, we learn, illegitimate, their fathers unidentified; both were cast into the world to fend for themselves. As Jones, regretting Smith’s departure in one of the final scenes, remarks to Brown: ‘He reminded me of my father. Not physically, I mean, but … well, a sort of goodness.’ ‘Yes, I know what you mean. I don’t remember my father.’ ‘To tell you the truth my memory’s a bit dim too.’ ‘Let’s say the father we would have liked to have.’ ‘That’s it, old man, exactly.’ (p. 195) Both have been confidence-tricksters, Brown having at one period sold paintings bearing the forged signatures of well-known artists – a source of income redeemed, as he says, by the fact that it harmed no-one. It ensured a livelihood to the young, struggling artist who provided the paintings (as well as an income for himself), while the fake signatures



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gave pleasure to the purchasers who imagined they owned famous works and caused no loss to the painters whose names he used, since they were long dead. As Brown later mentions to Philipot, in addition to posing as an art expert, he had, on another occasion, used false credentials to obtain a position as waiter at the prestigious restaurant, Fouquet’s, and in neither case had anyone called his bluff. To that admission he adds the pensive comment, ‘I wonder sometimes whether Jones isn’t playing the same game’ (p. 133). Jones on his part has some vague sense of the bond between them. After defining the difference between his terms ‘toffs’ and ‘tarts’ – the ‘toffs’ being those with a settled job or a plentiful income, the latter being the ne’er-do-wells existing on their wits, compelled to pick up a living wherever they can find it – he remarks quizzically to Brown: ‘You aren’t a tart by any chance pretending to be a toff?’ (p. 25). Moreover, they both sense some sort of bond between them, not least, a tendency to conceal their backgrounds. In discussion, they would snatch at small clues, pretending to accept each other’s story: ‘I suppose those of us who spend a large part of our lives in dissembling, whether to a woman, to a partner, even to our own selves, begin to smell each other out. Jones and I learnt a lot about one another before the end’ (p. 40). They both have dreams of an unattainable Eden, Jones envisioning a high-class golfcourse that he might one day own, situated on a coral-reef with white sand, ‘real white sand that you could build castles with, and behind are green slopes as smooth as real turf,’ while Brown dreams of a lost Edenic world, a return to the days when, at the height of the hotel’s success, he had watched a naked girl swim in its pool. In a passage towards the end of the novel, the parallel between the two intended by Greene is conveyed unmistakably: ‘It was like meeting an unknown brother – Jones and Brown, the names were almost interchangeable, and so was our status. For all we knew we were both bastards, although of course there might have been a ceremony – my mother had always given me that impression. We had both been thrown into the water to sink or swim, and swim we had – we had swum from very far apart to come together in a cemetery in Haiti’ (p. 266). They are both lapsed Catholics, a point to which we shall need to return. If Jones lays claim to powers as a water-diviner, that faculty is intended to reflect Brown’s own search for spiritual fulfilment, his need for life-giving water within the barren wasteland of his time, again echoing the imagery of Eliot, the poet whom Greene admired above all: Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water …



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For all the similarities, there are significant differences between Brown and Jones apart from their intellectual levels. Jones, as we have noted, is invariably perky and bright, full of humour even in the worst of situations. But Brown suffers from a depressing sense of personal failure, a conviction that remains with him throughout the novel and that has led critics, as in the quotation from R.H. Miller above, to see him in an entirely negative light. There are, however, two factors to be taken into consideration in assessing that discrepancy, a discrepancy that might otherwise seem to militate against the Doppelgänger quality of their relationship. First, as the narrator of the story, Brown cannot without immodesty convey his virtues to us; he cannot describe the existence in himself of the kind of talents Jones possesses, such as the latter’s ability to provoke laughter and to win the affection of those with whom he comes into contact. We have therefore, to learn of Brown’s virtues through his counterpart. Secondly, there is the familiar Greene technique of providing as his central character an anti-hero seemingly unable to cope with life’s demands, sternly self-critical, apparently lacking in confidence, yet ultimately revealing sterling moral qualities. As so often in these novels, Brown’s derogatory interpretations of his condition, and even more so of his motives, are repeatedly contradicted by the events in the novel. To give one instance, when accompanying Smith to the chargé d’affairs in an attempt to obtain Jones’s release from prison, he dismisses his own act contemptuously as a mere parody of antiquated colonialism, remarking derisively that he was ‘playing the part’ of an Englishman concerned over the fate of a fellow-countryman. But he omits to mention what should be apparent to the reader, the enormous personal risk he is undertaking in so doing. Smith, as a distinguished foreign visitor, has the protection of his embassy and is in less danger; but Brown, as he well knows, is entirely vulnerable, exposing himself on Jones’ behalf to police brutality, to the kind of retribution at the hands of the Tontons Macoute that he will indeed experience a little later. It is in the waiting-room of the Minister from whom they wished to obtain Jones’ release that Concasseur first stares at him through his dark glasses with cold cruelty, marking him as a future victim. Brown’s cynicism cannot conceal the patent bravery of his act. Then again, despite his warning to the Smiths of the danger to which they will be exposed by joining Dr Philipot’s cortège – an act, as he informs them, that will be interpreted by the authorities as a political gesture – he himself accompanies them, ‘more slowly and with reluctance’,



There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain …


he modestly remarks, but he escorts them nonetheless. And throughout his subsequent meetings with Concasseur, one notes how he refuses to cringe, taunting the police-captain with sarcastic, barbed comments despite the obvious danger. That distinction between his own view of himself and the perception of him into which the reader is eventually led has ramifications throughout the novel. In his view, his life has, he informs us, been totally futile. He has lost faith in everything and sees every aspect of his existence in a negative light. Even Martha’s love for him evokes from him only a bitter premonition that her disloyalty to her husband bodes future disloyalty to himself, one of the pains of illicit love being that ‘even your mistress’s most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn’t last.’ On returning to Port-au-Prince and discovering her waiting in her car at their usual meeting-place, he assumes at once that she has an assignation with some new-found lover; and in the welcoming cry she utters on recognising him he hears gloomily only ‘the kind of tone she might have used for a recurrent fever’. But her constancy, the fact that she has indeed waited longingly for his return, implies that there must indeed be more positive aspects of his character to have inspired such devotion. In a larger perspective, when asked the reason for his returning from New York to the dangers of a totalitarian regime, he insists that his purpose is simply to sell his hotel and to return to an ‘empty love’, both reasons becoming retrospectively suspect as we learn both of Martha’s genuine love for him and of the sheer impossibility of selling the hotel under present circumstances, a fact patently known to Brown. Moreover, he has no illusions concerning the danger of returning. He had left because of the terror, convinced, after Joseph’s torture at their hands, that the Tontons Macoute were now pursuing him. Only later are we offered a hint of the real reason for his return, expressed as usual in casually self-disparaging terms: The truth was less fatiguing than invention and the hour was late. ‘I found I missed the place’, I said. ‘Security can get on the nerves as much as danger.’ (p. 41) He is, in fact, motivated by the existentialist need for commitment that we have seen in Greene’s other protagonists, a desire whatever the cost to share in the suffering of such admirable Haitians as the faithful Joseph and the young, dedicated Philipot. As the ship reaches the shores of Haiti, admitting that he is returning without much hope to a country of fear and frustration, he yet adds that every familiar feature as the Medea drew



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in to land gave him a kind of happiness. There are those, he comments elsewhere, who belong inextricably to the country of their birth; but he experiences no link with Monte Carlo, feeling a greater tie to this ‘shabby land of terror’, chosen for him by chance, where he aches empathically with the crippled Joseph limping painfully up and down stairs. His frequent declaration that he is a paradigm of non-commitment, having renounced all principles and ideals – ‘somewhere years ago I had forgotten how to be involved in anything. Somehow, somewhere I had lost completely the capacity to be concerned.’ – is contradicted in a manner more specific than in this instance of covert existentialism. His sour condemnation of his moral and spiritual bankruptcy is, it transpires, like those other assumptions, patently untenable. It comes as a surprise to the reader (though not to any familiar with the other novels) to realise, as Martha eventually suspects, that beneath that non-committal exterior Brown is, of all things, a prêtre manqué, one who had in his youth longed desperately for a vocation. He had been a prize pupil, and it was half expected that he would prove in time to have a vocation. He had even believed it himself; the sense of vocation hung around him like the grippe, a miasma of unreality, at a temperature below normal in the cool rational morning but a fever-heat at night. As other boys fought with masturbation, he recalls, he had fought with faith at the seminary, but no inner voice had come to assure him of election. To his profound disappointment, he concluded that he was unworthy of the privilege of holy orders (p. 59).7 Through despair of ever entering the priesthood, he organises his dismissal from the seminary, leaving it with the conviction that his last vestige of faith has been blown away and that he has left behind him all priestly ambition. But the dream he experiences recurrently in the novel, confirming his bond with Jones’ water-divining, reveals to us that his yearning for spiritual dedication remains both latent and strong. In such dreams, dressed as an altar-boy, he stands on the shore of a lake attracted by its still, quiet waters: Then a wind blew and the surge rose over the lake, like a small tidal wave, but instead of coming towards me, it went in the opposite direction, raising the water in a long retreat, so that I found I walked on dry pebbles and that the lake existed only as a gleam on the far horizon of the desert of small stones. (p. 74) In another version of the dream, he sees himself waiting patiently at the communion-rail, only, to his enormous disappointment, to be passed over by the ministering priest.



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The inconsistency between his latent priestliness and the illicit loveaffair in which he is engaged is not ignored by Greene. He highlights it at the moment of Martha’s insight: ‘Perhaps you are a prêtre manqué.’ ‘Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.’ I mocked myself while I made love. (p. 225) The anomaly is at least partially resolved in the course of the novel, if one bears in mind the leniency with which Greene viewed extra-marital intercourse, as mentioned briefly in an earlier chapter. Aquinas had rated such indulgences as less damaging than acts of pride but he had not, of course, condoned them,8 while Greene seems to have regarded them, both in his novels and in his own life, as venial sins, if sins at all. There was his prolonged affair with Dorothy Glover beginning in 1938; and he made no attempt to conceal his passionate romance with Catherine Walston.9 In an interview with Marie-Françoise Allain he spoke frankly of his unorthodox view: I don’t like the term ‘sin’: it’s redolent of a child’s catechism. The term has always stuck in my throat, because of the Catholic distinction between ‘mortal’ and ‘venial’ sin. The latter is often so trivial as not even to deserve the name of sin. As for mortal sin, I find the idea difficult to accept because it must by definition be committed in defiance of God. I doubt whether a man making love to a woman ever does so with the intention of defying God.10 But whatever his personal standards may have been, it is, as always, upon the text that we should rely, and within the framework of the novel there are elements militating against the idea of Brown’s affair with Martha as mere sexual indulgence, an indulgence that would have appeared contradictory to any latent aspiration to priesthood. He clearly derives little physical satisfaction from the affair – as he morosely comments, he was flinging himself into pleasure ‘like a suicide on to a pavement’. For his liaison with her forms to some extent a continuation of his rebellion as



The priest came down the row and placed in each mouth a bourbon biscuit, but when he came to me he passed me by. The communicants on either side came and went away, but I knelt obstinately on. Again the priest distributed the biscuits and left me out. I stood up then and walked sullenly away down the aisle … (p. 207)

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a frustrated novice, a sequel to his initial truancy to the Casino from the Jesuit College of the Visitation that had culminated in his loss of virginity with an older woman. The rebellion is motivated not by lust but by his attempt to suppress the residual desire for a vocation. Both in that affair and in his initial meeting with Martha, he had proved sexually impotent, being aroused only by feelings of compassion or tenderness. At the Casino, he felt suddenly protective as a seagull flew in, frightening his companion; and with Martha he responds only when impressed by Martha’s gentle understanding, the two instances being closely connected in the text: She said. ‘We needn’t, you know. We’re grown-up people,’ and suddenly I was back in the Hôtel de Paris and powerless, and no bird came to save me on white wings.’ (p. 85) Only when she has soothed him does potency return. Then again, on his visit to Mère Catherine’s establishment, a brothel described by him as a sort of ‘convent-school’ with innocent girls wishing only to please, he is tortured by his act, entering the abode with self-hatred. Sexual satisfaction for him emerges in that scene as the reverse of the norm – not indulgence of lust but resistance to the alluring possibility of self-denial or celibacy – ‘For a moment fidelity became a temptation and I wanted to drive away’ (p. 142). Yet despite these contrary indications, the affair with Martha might still seem an abrogation of his priestly tendencies, militating within this setting against any penchant for continence. The anomaly, however, becomes significantly modified within the novel as Brown eventually recognises the true reason for his love – not Martha’s physical attractions (one recalls the language he invariably uses to describe their intercourse: ‘tangled legs’, ‘cramped position’, ‘tawdry love’ and his statement that there was little in their love-affair to balance the fear and the boredom) (p. 92). The basis of his affection, it transpires, is his respect for a trait in her character. Paradoxically, the quality he admires within her is the principle that has worked so strongly against their affair – her sense of responsibility towards her son Angel, the ‘unbearable child that helped to keep us apart’, the ever-present obstacle to their assignations. She will never, he recognises, in the slightest way compromise her maternal duty in order to facilitate their meetings. Her repeated postponements and cancellations may anger Brown at the time, but they form for him her primary appeal, testifying to the fact that she embodies the altruism that lies at the heart of the



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She had kept the virtue of innocence, and I know now why I loved her. In the end the only quality but beauty which attracts me in a woman is that vague thing ‘goodness’. The woman in Monte Carlo had betrayed her husband with a schoolboy, but her motive had been generous. Martha too had betrayed her husband, but it was not Martha’s love for me which held me, if she did love, it was her blind unselfish attachment to her child. With goodness one can feel secure. (pp. 138–9) I have spent some time examining the discrepancy between Brown’s ostensible motives and the underlying truths gradually revealed to the reader because a failure to perceive that contrast can lead, as it has with so many critics, to a misapprehension of the climactic events that conclude the story. For Richard Kelly, the assistance Brown provides Jones in escorting him to the safety of the embassy and his initiative in arranging for him to join the rebels are inexplicable inconsistencies in character. Brown, he concludes, is flawed and chameleon-like and hence an artistic liability as a narrator. He has, we are told, no soul or centre of being to which the reader can relate, and ‘lives up to his drab name, untouched by the people around him, a hollow man spiritually and sexually dead, who presides over a tale of meaningless cruelty and comedy’.11 Even Georg Gaston, who penetrates far more deeply into the novel, accepts Brown’s statement that he was motivated by jealousy in arranging the escape, by his increasing suspicion that Martha and Jones are engaged in a love-affair.12 But that reading is, I believe, incorrect. Brown, of course, does declare unequivocally that the motive prompting him to trap Jones into agreeing to lead the rebels is jealousy, the urgent need to remove him from proximity to Martha. But, as always, Brown attributes to his own actions the worst construction that can be placed upon them, ignoring or suppressing his real purpose. Even if the motive were jealousy, it would fail to explain why he placed Jones in the security of the embassy in the first place, in dangerous proximity to Brown’s mistress. And if Brian Thomas interprets the later stage, Brown’s smuggling him out of the embassy, as fulfilment of the role of Judas, a betrayal of Jones,13 here too, if jealousy were in any sense the real incentive, Brown could have achieved his purpose far more simply by accepting Concasseur’s broad hint – that is, by luring Jones out of the embassy into the welcoming hands of the Tontons



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Macoute without risking his own life in the slightest. Instead, although warned that he is being closely watched by the Tontons and fully aware that, if caught, his action will make this the last time he will ever see his beloved Hotel Trianon and almost certainly lead to his torture and death, he offers to accompany Jones, to escort him on the dangerous mission to the border. Brown’s suppression, as narrator, of the admirable impulses behind his decision – his hatred of tyranny and his sympathy with the rebel cause – forms part of his innate modesty. When, as part of his nagging discomfort at his own affair with Martha, he finally drives her to the angry lie that she has been sleeping with Jones, he comments, ‘The worst thing was I only half believed her’, a remark suggesting that even for him the charge was only a cover for his real motives. In any case, the novel contains all necessary clues to the real reason for Brown’s decision to escort Jones to the border. In the scene immediately before Brown persuades him to lead the rebel unit, he had learnt from Petit Pierre that Captain Concasseur, after a visit to Miami to investigate Jones’ credentials, had discovered to his fury that Jones had duped him, and the Captain was out for revenge. Duvalier himself, it was rumoured, had informed Señor Pineda’s government that Jones was persona non grata and that consequently Jones’ life was in danger even though he was ensconced in an embassy – a rumour confirmed by Martha’s realisation that her husband had lately been seriously worried. Hence, whatever ulterior reason Brown might claim for assisting Jones, Greene’s juxtaposing of that warning in the text is intended to cast a very different light upon Brown’s motives, suggesting that he is indeed trying to rescue him from capture and death. The climax occurs during the scene in the graveyard, as Jones and Brown await the arrival of the rebels. K.C.J. Kurismmootil, himself a Jesuit priest focussing primarily on the religious dimensions of the novels, on the author’s ‘deeply Christian insights into the tortured and traumatic circumstances of twentieth-century life’, has provided one of the most perceptive readings yet of Greene’s writings; but, surprisingly, he omits The Comedians from his study (his book appeared many years after the novel had been published), presumably because he did not think it relevant to those Christian concerns.14 In many ways, however, this novel is one of the most relevant of them all, as Brown’s latent desire for a vocation and his Doppelgänger relationship with Jones culminate in a moving mirror-image of the Catholic confessional, the moment when pretence, evasion, and concealment are discarded and spiritual truths confronted. Jones, no longer the brash ex-Major, admits as he meditates



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‘I can understand why people want to confess. Death’s a bloody serious affair. A man doesn’t feel quite worthy of it. Like a decoration.’ ‘Have you such a lot to confess?’ ‘We all have. I don’t mean to a priest or God.’ ‘To whom?’ ‘To anyone at all.’ (p. 263) Brown is not only conscripted into the role of confessor, the priestly role he believes he has discarded for ever, but is compelled to perceive an aspect of himself that he had never confronted. For it is here that the phrase quoted earlier occurs, Brown’s recognition that it was like meeting an unknown brother: Jones and Brown, the names were almost inter-changeable, and so was our status … We had both been thrown into the water to sink or swim, and swim we had – we had swum from very far apart to come together in a cemetery in Haiti. That comment lends Jones’ confession a twofold appositeness. For, as the two figures merge, the confession is seen as a mirroring, that is, as equally relevant to Brown. As Jones divests himself of the pose, discarding his claims to military rank and the achievement of distinction in battle, the gap between actuality and ideal leads him to the pregnant question he poses to Brown: ‘You can feel a vocation, can’t you, even if you can’t practise it?’ Brown’s surprised perception of Jones’ true condition, the seriousness underlying his apparent light-heartedness, reflects the latent religious impulse beneath Brown’s own repeated claim of non-commitment and non-involvement: I wondered whether perhaps in all his devious life he had been engaged on a secret and hopeless love-affair with virtue, watching virtue from a distance, hoping to be noticed, perhaps, like a child doing wrong in order to attract the attention of virtue. And lest the parallel be missed, as Jones recounts his dream of creating and owning a high-class golf course, Brown comments, ‘Making money had been my dream also. Had there been another? I had no wish to search so far back.’ He may have no such wish, but the comment is there for us to grasp, indicating that his Edenic dreams of his hotel, his return



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to it despite the dangers involved and, indeed, almost everything we had thought of as constituting his ambitions in life had really been ineffective substitutes for his missed religious vocation. We have already noted Greene’s preference for ending a novel at a point when the central character has not yet grasped a truth already comprehended by the alert reader. After Brown crosses the border, he muses to himself (in a passage repeatedly cited by critics as defining his non-involvement) that he is one of the rootless and faithless, admiring the Doctor Magiots and Smiths of this world for their courage, integrity, and dedication, but himself committed through timidity to indifference. Michael Gorra takes at face-value Brown’s statement, assuming that he remains passive, devoid of belief.15 But the passage immediately subsequent to that admission reverses the self-condemnation, with its hint that the teachings of the Jesuits had indeed left their mark upon him: ‘The argument interested me. I daresay it eased the never quiet conscience which had been injected into me without my consent, when I was too young to know, by the Fathers of the Visitation’ (p. 279). Such comments scarcely support the prevailing critical view that Brown belongs to a new type of character emerging in Greene’s novels, characters ‘who have apparently no religious dimension in their lives, whether inclining them to salvation or dimension, characters existing in the huge contemporary zone of indifference.’ 16 Brown has, despite his claim, been anything but timid or indifferent, repeatedly risking his life – in returning to Haiti, in accompanying Smith to rescue Jones, and in his commitment to the rebel cause. The preacher at the funeral of the dead rebels in the last scene of the book stresses the virtue of commitment in his sermon: ‘The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never.’ Such advocacy may be unpalatable to Smith, committed as he is to pacifist principles, but it holds validity for Brown himself. His determination to provide the rebels with a leader – Jones’ lack of military experience is only revealed to him in the graveyard scene – and his readiness to run the gauntlet of the Tontons Macoutes in order to deliver Jones to the fighters thus receives Christian approval in that sermon. On returning to the hotel, he finds a letter from Dr Magiot, a person whom we have not mentioned until now but who serves throughout the novel as a choric figure, an individual wisely commenting on the story’s events and providing a standard of behaviour by which others are to be judged. It is he who recognises the heroism of Brown’s mother and her greatness of character despite outward appearances, notably her



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participation in the French Resistance; it is he who, endangering himself, assists Brown in disposing of Dr Philipot’s body; and he who, long before Duvalier’s rise to power, had perceived the threat posed by the country doctor. He has no faith in American intervention or aid, which he sees as manipulated by corrupt politicians and dominated by commercial interests. One need scarcely add that, like the priest in The Power and the Glory, he has, with the knowledge that he will almost certainly be killed, remained in the country to aid the sick when other physicians have fled. Like Dr Colin, he is a lapsed Catholic; but, unlike him, he has moved even further away to join the Communist cause. The choice of Magiot as the choric figure conveys even more clearly than did Colin that, for Greene, the Christian virtues of commitment, compassion, and altruistic dedication may find their place outside the faith, even in a belief generally regarded as the antipole to Christianity. Here, Greene’s universalism is expounded even more clearly as, in Magiot’s final letter to Brown explaining that his commitment to Communism relies less on the economic aspects of its creed than on its desire to improve the lot of humankind, the concluding image revealing how close he remains to Christianity: We are humanists, you and I. You won’t admit it perhaps, but you are the son of your mother and you once took the dangerous journey which we all have to take before the end. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate. (p. 286) He concludes by urging Brown, if he has abandoned one faith, not to abandon all faith, since there is always an alternative to the faith we lose – ‘Or is it the same faith under another mask?’ For the last time, we are offered Brown’s claim to non-involvement in a statement that patently contradicts both the quality of his thoughts and the actions he has performed. On reading Magiot’s letter, he is reminded of Martha’s claim that he is a prêtre manqué: How strangely one must appear to other people. I had left involvement behind me, I was certain, in the College of the Visitation: I had dropped it like the roulette-token in the offertory. 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



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We have learnt for what belief Jones died, as has Brown who fully approves of the monument erected for him. Jones had died to save his fellow human-beings, remaining behind to ensure their escape, just as Brown had been prepared to die in order to help the rebel cause, however he may resist admitting the fact. The final reminder in the above passage of his latent vocation, the vocation which he believes it is too late to fulfil, prepares us for the conclusion. If Brown had craved throughout his life the role of priest, symbolically keeping upon his desk a brass paper-weight in the form of a coffin marked with the letters ‘R.I.P’, he ends, ironic though the office may appear to him, fulfilling one of the major tasks of a priest, the burial of the dead. David Lodge maintained that in this novel ‘the possibility of religious faith has all but retreated out of sight in the anarchic confusion of human behaviour,’17 and DeVitis sees in the irony of that appointment Brown’s resemblance in his black suit and black hat to ‘a comic Baron Samedi, a testimony to his failure to commit to love, religion, or God.’18 But apart from the other elements those readings overlook, they miss the hint in the word call within the final sentence of the novel, the allusion to the missed vocation, a call that Brown himself – in the phrase ‘so far as I could make out’ – suggests may come from a higher authority than his employer: ‘The ringing of the telephone woke me – I had overslept. The call came, so far as I could make out, from Mr.Fernandez who was summoning me to my first assignment.’ As the novel draws to its close, we are prompted retrospectively to reassess the opening paragraph of the novel – but not only in reference to Jones; for Brown’s laudatory tribute to so unlikely a hero as Jones turns out not only to be fully valid in reference to the seemingly contemptible Jones, but to be no less applicable to himself. Drifting purposelessly, it had seemed, in a world that had lost all meaning, involved in a depressingly unsatisfactory love-affair, consumed by jealousy, bereft of ideals and moral principles, and insisting on his non-involvement, he had appeared unworthy of respect. That initial presentation conforms perfectly to the pattern of the anti-hero, incapable of functioning effectively in the modern world. If at the end he does not, like the priest in The Power and the Glory, achieve sainthood, he has, as we learn through



flats. Once I might have taken a different direction, but it was too late now. When I was a boy the fathers of the Visitation had told me that one test of a belief was this: that a man was ready to die for it. So Doctor Magiot thought too, but for what belief did Jones die? (pp. 286–7)


the veil of his unforgiving self-deprecation, proved to be dedicated to far finer ideals than he will admit, courageously resisting evil whatever base motives he may attribute to his actions, and emerging as worthy of no less praise than that which he bestows on his alter ego. If both had assumed that their dreams were unattainable, beyond the reach of the human failures they believe themselves to be, they unknowingly achieve in their lives a dignity and integrity surpassing those dreams. Once again, in an era that had seemed incapable of creating heroic figures, Greene, by a process of indirectness, by a strategy that works upon us subtly and obliquely, had produced a novel whose characters, both central and peripheral, emerge as fully deserving of the encomium to Jones with which it opens.



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In The Honorary Consul, the Catholic theme slips into the background, perhaps because Greene was becoming tired of being referred to so frequently as a Catholic novelist; but it does not disappear.1 Prominent in this novel is the excitement of the chase, a talent he had developed so successfully in the tales of espionage and murder that he termed ‘entertainments’. From the moment that a group of rebels fighting against their country’s corrupt regime moves into a neighbouring state to kidnap an American Ambassador and bungles the attempt, capturing the wrong man, the suspense mounts. The plot contains all the ingredients familiar from those novels, gripping the reader’s attention throughout, leaving us at every stage anxious to know the outcome – whether Fortnum will indeed be shot, how far Plarr will be drawn into the affair, whether the chief of police will discover the hiding-place in time, and who, if any, will survive. Yet it is enormously to Greene’s credit that the tension generated by the plot is not the motive force of the novel but the vehicle for a far more serious theme. The dual significance of the term ‘father’ in Greene’s novels was noted in an earlier chapter,2 that, in addition to being a term of respectful address, it alludes also to the priest’s search for a child towards whom he can exercise paternal feelings as compensation for his surrender of the right to become a biological father. Even, one may add, when a priest, such as the Mexican in The Power and the Glory, was indeed a biological father, Greene has him, when his longing to care for her is blocked by the mother, establish instead a fatherly relationship with the teenage Coral. This need for compensatory fatherhood affects not only Greene’s priests but also his lay-priests or prêtres manqués. Scobie, bereaved of his biological daughter, responds with tenderness and compassion to the child-like Helen; and Querry attempts to offer paternal comfort to an immature Marie. 125



The Honorary Consul


In this novel, however, the theme of father–child relations functions entirely differently, and it does so not as a minor element, but as the co-ordinating theme. For a change of viewpoint has occurred; the relationship is examined here not from the father’s angle but from the offspring’s – not as an impulse to act paternally but in terms of a son’s antipathy, affection, or contempt for an absent father, for a parent remembered only from the period of childhood, yet whose memory continues well into adulthood to exert a powerful influence on the son’s character and way of life. The theme is thus transferred from its previous religious setting where it had been limited to priests and lay-priests, and is broadened here to function in predominantly secular terms. Almost all characters are obsessed with the filial relationship. Aquino may have ceased composing poetry, but one line that he wrote – ‘I see my father only through the bars’— remains embedded in his mind, expressing some deeply-felt experience. The words are too vague to be meaningful in isolation, but the commentary he provides reveals their significance to him. The poem, he explains, was written in prison, the bars therefore referring to those confining him during his period of incarceration; but they are also evocative of his childhood home, a home that he terms ‘the first prison of all – the one we all of us know’: I was thinking, you see, of the pens in which they put children in bourgeois houses. In my poem the father went on following the child all through his life – he was the schoolmaster, and then he was the priest, the police officer, the prison warder, and last he was General Stroessner himself. I saw the General once when he was touring the countryside. He came to the police station I was in and I saw him through the bars. (pp. 121–2) Fatherhood represents to him repression and tyranny and, as he recounts his career, it becomes apparent that his movement towards political commitment and revolution derives in large part from his protest against the restrictions imposed by those whose authority he resents, represented in the first instance by an autocratic father. Charles Fortnum lives in the shadow of his childhood experiences no less, although his response is more intense than Aquino’s. He detests his father’s memory, bitterly recalling the moment when that parent, attempting to develop machismo in his son, forced him, a mere six-year-old, to ride a recalcitrant horse, and when the son was thrown to the ground, proved too inebriated even to recognise him as his child. One would expect Charles, therefore, to distance himself from his father’s example; but,



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as part of the paradoxes of human behaviour, he sees himself as fated by heredity to follow the same path. His own alcoholism he justifies on the grounds that he ‘must take after the old bastard,’ his frequent headaches he attributes to the same hereditary cause, and grimly assumes that he too is destined to die early from a sudden stroke. In the same way, he deplores his father’s decision to live in Argentina with its damnable heat and humidity, yet makes no move to live elsewhere, being ordained, it would seem, to re-enact the life and death of a father he detests. Even his parent’s love of horses, a major cause of Charles’s hostility, he adopts, transferring it to his beloved jeep, ‘Fortnum’s Pride’, which he cares for as tenderly as if it were alive, accompanying each change of gear with the cry, ‘Off for a gallop’ (p. 34). The significance of these filial attitudes for the development of the main plot we shall examine soon. Doctor Saavedra provides a further, if more subtle instance. In his case the father-son affinity is not biological but metaphorical. Moreover, in contrast to the others, the affinity is to some extent viewed from the paternal angle; but it serves to underscore the pervasive picture of troubled relations between the generations. Saavedra sees himself as having behaved ‘as a sort of father’ towards a past disciple, Montez, arranging for the publication of the young man’s first novel, and encouraging him in his literary career, so that he is deeply hurt when the latter turns against his erstwhile patron by publishing a review ridiculing the imagery of Saavedra’s novels and their outdated theme of machismo. The older novelist, resorting to the same image, bemoans the treachery of one who was ‘like a son to me’ (p. 159). But if the relationship is presented from the parental viewpoint, it belongs instrinsically to the other instances, illustrating the rebelliousness of a putative son. Saavedra offers, of course, an amusing opportunity for providing a tongue-in-cheek parody of Greene’s own aims as a novelist. He makes regular visits to brothels, not so much to satisfy his physical needs as to search for material for his novels. Greene made no secret of his visits to brothels, as recorded in Otto Preminger’s account of their joint visit to one, and repeatedly introduces vivid descriptions of them in his own novels. And, as I mentioned in the opening chapter, Greene’s voyages to various locations in Africa and elsewhere were, like Saavedra’s visits, carefully designed to provide material for forthcoming novels. But the parody is only allowed up to a point; Saavedra’s absurd concept of literary symbolism – a girl with one eye to provide a Cyclopic image of visual concentration, or deproved of a leg to indicate cosmic despair – has no parallel in Greene’s writings. Moreover, contrasting markedly with Greene’s forthright attack on Papa Doc in The Comedians or on the activitites of



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the CIA in The Quiet American is the Spanish author’s insistence that fiction must be free of contemporary relevance: ‘A novelist today who wants to represent tyranny should not describe the activities of General Stroesser in Paraguay – that is journalism not literature’ (p. 57). And the contrast reaches its acme when Saavedra comments, ‘You might as well expect me to write a story about the kidnapping of Semor Fortnum’ – which is, of course, precisely what Greene is doing here3. But to return to the father-son theme, other characters in the novel are equally obsessed by it, and we shall need to enquire why Greene is at such pains to create a web of generational conflicts. Léon Rivas’s childhood resentment is less personal than that of the others, arising from moral, social, and economic principles. Born to a wealthy abogado or lawyer, and raised in a lavishly furnished mansion, he is alienated by his father’s bourgeois standards, by the fact that his parent serves only rich clients, never defending the poor; and, by contributing liberally to his political party, ensures the safety of his own person and his possessions for the time when the General would come to power. Antagonised by these elements, Léon finds a substitute father in the gardener, Pedro. His disgust when the latter is dismissed leads to a rebellion against the principles represented by his parent, a rebellion determining the course of his future life. Planning initially to become a lawyer dedicated to the needs of the proletariat that had been ignored or exploited by his father, he is led eventually to join the rebels in fighting their cause. Eduardo Plarr’s filial feelings reveal greater complexity and bring us closer to the underlying significance of that theme. Initially, he is antagonistic. As a child, he had condemned what he believed to be his father’s desertion of his family, sending wife and son away while he himself remained behind never to be seen by them again. That gesture seemed to Plarr an instance of the Latin-American machismo he so detested, the pointless insistence upon ‘manliness’ whatever the consequences. Gradually, however, comes a perception of the courage and dedication that lay behind his father’s decision, the determination to ensure their safety by placing them in the comparative haven of Argentina while himself remaining in Paraguay committed to the ideal of political activism and opposition to a brutal regime. It was a decision, as his father had well known, almost certain to result in imprisonment or death, and Eduardo throughout the subsequent years loyally strives to ascertain his father’s fate. There is, however, a corollary to this change of heart. If his original rancour towards his father prompted him initially to side with his mother, that impulse became gradually alienated by his perception of



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her egoism, so markedly contrasted with his father’s altruistic devotion to a cause, her self-absorption symbolised here by an insatiable appetite for cream-cakes. The reaction leads him – to some extent unconsciously – to identify with his missing father in a manner directly affecting his personal choices. His decision to enter the medical profession, not for financial gain but in order to serve the poor, is, he subsequently realises, an echo of his father’s concern for others. On graduating, he leaves Buenos Aires with its promising prospects for a successful medical practice to move instead to a small, humid, unhealthy town. He imagines he does so in order to distance himself from his mother, declaring to one of his mistresses that this was the case. But eventually he acknowledges his real motive – to be close to his father’s jail or grave, the border-town in which he settles being located across the river from Paraguay. There he abides, ‘like a watchman waiting for a signal’, in the hope that some indication of his father’s condition might reach him (p. 12). The bond with his English-born father is expressed in other ways. He regularly renews his English passport to preserve the paternal link, while the novels of Dickens and Conan Doyle become his favourite books, reminding him of his father’s native country. He even follows the latter’s custom of reading in the open air, strange as that seems to those around him, More important than these minor elements is the decision of which they are symptomatic, his involvement in the rebel attempt. His reason for agreeing to offer the rebels medical assistance is, he imagines, loyalty to a childhood friendship with their leader, Léon; but the latter, more perceptive, informs Plarr that his father is among those they are trying to help – despite (as we are to learn much later) Léon’s knowledge that Plarr’s father is already dead. Plarr may deplore machismo, the kind of heroics with which his friend Saavedra endows his fictional males and which he had, in his youth, so resented in his father; but his own heroism in assisting the rebels, however he may downplay it, reflects the dedicatory trait exhibited by his parent in remaining in the dangerous setting of Paraguay. We shall need to extrapolate on this theme a little further before enquiring into its deeper significance. There is a negative aspect to this filial affection that fulfils a major function in the novel. For Plarr’s identification with his male parent has produced not only a disgust for his mother – in an unsavoury vision he imagines the cream from her éclairs oozing out of the pouches under her eyes – but an antipathy towards all women, a conviction of their incorrigible egocentricity. Formally, he treats his mother with due respect, visits her at regular intervals and supplies her financial needs, but it is a filial duty devoid of affection. He classes her with the indolent, self-centred




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You are a perceptive man, Saavedra. Yes, it may have been my father’s nearness which brought me here. In the barrio of the poor I am aware of doing something he would have liked to see me do, but when I am with my rich patients, 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, and when I have tea with my mother in the Calle Florida among all the other ladies of B.A … he sits there too and criticizes me with his blue English eyes. (p. 164) Clara’s poverty would seem to place her outside the category of such rich, spoilt women, and in fact Plarr concludes the above quotation by remarking that of her his father might have approved. But Plarr is unaware of the extent of his own antipathy to women. His avoidance in his past affairs of uttering the phrase ‘I love you’ arises not only from his own emotional frigidity but from a conviction that women indulge in these liaisons only to satisfy their personal needs, noting that, despite their protestations of affection, they have no difficulty, on his leaving them, in finding substitutes (p. 139). Such cynicism makes any intimacy with women abhorrent to him. Real affection between lovers, he convinces himself, produces an eventual merging of tastes and habits that results in a narcissistic love of oneself, the kind of self-indulgence he detests. Accordingly, he perversely prefers a stranger in bed, preferably a paid prostitute who will make no demands upon him. The result is an emotional paralysis, an inability to experience love for any woman, a fear of becoming involved representing a fundamental distrust of love itself, all this deriving from a mother-complex which itself is an offshoot of his relationship to his father. With Clara, therefore, he attempts to conduct a dispassionate, rationally based relationship, treating her as though she were a purchased item. Her warm responses to their lovemaking he interprets cynically as the kind of ‘faking’ learnt in her previous calling, designed to satisfy her clients. He buys her expensive sunglasses not to please her but to ensure she will not be recognised when he takes her to his room; and in devising future plans to meet her, disparagingly thinks in terms of her past, that ‘it would be no more difficult than leading her to her cell’ in the brothel. The affection that he gradually experiences despite his resistance is for him an entirely new emotion, to be dismissed as ‘an obsession’ from



women that his father would have despised, as in a remark to his novelist friend:

which he must release himself. His fear of love leads him to misunderstand her when she asks whether he thinks Charles is dead – ‘Is it true? Do you really’. He imagines it to be, in truncated form, the question ‘Do you really love me?’ that his mother constantly imposed upon him in his youth (p. 90). When, later, Clara does ask that question, their affair having become for her a new experience, a genuine love relationship on her part, her query remains unanswered, interrupted by a ring at the door. There is, however, sufficient time before that interruption for Plarr’s thoughts to turn once again to the childhood experience that created his emotional paralysis, contrasting the emptiness of the term ‘love’ as his mother had always employed it with the affection his father had displayed towards him, a selfless fondness demanding nothing in return, rarely articulated, and yet warm and ever-comforting. ‘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. Perhaps he had loved his father all the more because he had never used the word or asked for anything. He could remember only a single kiss on the quay at Asunción and that was the kind of kiss one man can give to another. It was like the formal kiss he had seen French generals give in photographs after they have presented a decoration. It claimed nothing. His father would sometimes pull at his hair or tap him on his cheek. (pp. 169–70) Although Clara’s question receives no answer, it reverberates throughout the remainder of the novel, a question left dangling, a question, we are told, that Plarr has difficulty in remembering – or, in Freudian terms, that he constantly represses. It is, in fact, a question central to the novel. I realise that this detailed discussion of the various filial relationships and their effects on the characters themselves seems as yet to be leading nowhere, but there is one more aspect to be raised before we can confront its significance. We have noted that each of Greene’s major novels introduces an innovative strategy. In the previous novels, the focus had been upon a single main character – the Priest, Scobie, Bendrix, Querry, or Brown, each of whom must find his way towards some form of fulfilment or self-regeneration. In this novel, the process is different. There can be no doubt who occupies our primary attention in the first half of the novel. The opening words consist of Plarr’s name,





it is through his eyes that we view the characters, his gradual involvement in the kidnapping creates the tension, and his relationship with Clara provides the love-theme. Charles Fortnum is only a peripheral character there, a somewhat absurd drunkard, incapable even of hanging the British flag correctly, a man who exists largely on a dubious tax item permitting him, as Honorary Consul, to import and sell a Cadillac every two years. His unimportance to the British embassy, which regards him as an encumbrance it would be glad to be dispensed with, complicates the kidnapping, since no real diplomatic effort is made to release him. But as the novel progresses, he takes over from Plarr as the central figure, as the title of the novel indicates, becoming, in fact, the main exemplar of the principles conveyed by the work. For if Plarr fails to find the meaning of love even by the end of the novel, Fortnum, for all his apparent weaknesses and foibles, is the model of a dedicated and devoted lover. He emerges as a far finer character in that regard, as well as displaying in his captivity a heroism and dignity we would not have expected from him. From the moment he marries Clara, fully aware of the ridicule he will suffer for taking a known prostitute as his wife, he rises steadily in our esteem. Unlike Plarr, he treats her with admirable gentleness and consideration, regarding her neither as a whore nor as a child but as a lady, with her happiness and welfare being his primary concern. If Fortnum until this point had served merely as a foil to Plarr, his filial impiety contrasted with Plarr’s filial affection, the roles are now exchanged, Plarr’s cavalier treatment of Clara highlighting the moral principles that Fortnum and the novel as a whole represent. The love that Plarr refuses to acknowledge is not only experienced by Fortnum in the purest form but expressed in action, despite his sad acknowledgment that, as a far older man, he can never win Clara’s true affection. As a result, his is an altruistic love. It is not her body but her character that he cherishes. For months, he refrains from touching her until he can perceive some indication, however small, of an affection for him. He delights in her interests and conversation. Unexpectedly, this seemingly insignificant character emerges as a person of distinction, not only displaying true courage when in captivity but demonstrating generosity too, expressing for his dead captors in the final chapter of the novel neither contempt nor hatred but a sympathy and understanding of their motives patently lacking in those around him – in fact, he becomes, even though he makes no claim to religious belief, an eminent example of Christian forgiveness. Plarr’s treatment of Clara is odious. Called as a physician to her bedside, he treats her, without justification, in a cold and callous manner, cruelly



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revealing to her his knowledge of her previous calling and contemptuously reminding her of the inspections for venereal disease she had been required to undergo there. With a similar lack of respect for her husband’s feelings, he informs Fortnum, again quite unnecessarily, of his having seen her at Mother Sanchez’s brothel. Their contrasting attitudes to Clara merge with the recurrent father theme when she becomes pregnant. Plarr, the real father, not only urges an abortion but regards the embryo with disgust, considering the child ‘to be a useless part of Clara, like her appendix, perhaps a diseased appendix which ought to be removed’ (p. 209). When she refuses to abort, he shrugs off responsibility with the excuse that Fortnum would probably prove the better father. For Fortnum the reverse is true. On discovering that Plarr is the father, not only does he generously undertake the role of parent, caring solicitously for the child’s welfare, but inverts the usual response of a cuckold. Instead of anger at Clara’s betrayal, he protects her, begging Plarr not to reveal to her his own discovery of her adultery lest she should feel guilty. And after Plarr’s death, so far from upbraiding her, his sole concern is to comfort her for the loss of her lover. Plarr for his part does eventually come to acknowledge, if only just before his death, his inability to feel true affection, admitting that he feels jealous of Fortnum for loving Clara so truly: ‘That stupid banal word love. It’s never meant anything to me … I don’t know how to love. Poor drunken Charley Fortnum wins the game’ (p. 249). As the climax to this central theme, a filial relationship gradually develops between these two rivals for her affection, Plarr beginning to identify Fortnum with his father – ‘Strangely the face [Plarr] conjured up when he spoke was not his father’s but Charles Fortnum’s … When he tried to substitute Henry Plarr’s face for Charles Fortnum’s he found his father’s features had been almost eliminated by the years’ (p. 165). Charles for his part reciprocates the feeling when, in a final act of forgiveness, he determines to name the child Eduardo, explaining, ‘You see I loved Eduardo in a way. He was young enough to be my son.’ Even minor figures mirror this theme of lost or rejected paternity. Gruber’s father had, in response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, insisted on his son’s escaping from Germany while he and his wife remained to perish in the holocaust. ‘So Gruber, like Doctor Plarr, was a man without a father. He didn’t even possess a family grave’ (p. 75). * * * What, after all, is the significance of this reiterated theme, epitomised in Plarr’s bitter comment, ‘We all of us seem to live with dead fathers,





don’t we?’ (p. 215). Earlier, it was noted that, in contrast to the other major novels of this period, the Catholic theme is no longer of primary importance; but it is present in this novel nonetheless. It emerges very late in the novel, but its effect is to produce retrospective reverberations, revealing religious aspects of a work that had seemed entirely secular. Léon, we had learnt earlier, had at some stage in his career exchanged his intention of becoming a lawyer for that of a priest, believing that in the latter calling he could serve the poor more effectively than in any legal form. Later, he revoked his vows, demonstratively marrying in order to proclaim his repudiation of his vocation; but his religious calling, if it lies dormant, emerges into prominence towards the close of the novel. There, after Léon concludes a somewhat bitter account of his relationship with his parent, whom, he adds cynically, people described as a good father because he left plenteous wealth behind him, Plarr asks pointedly: And God the Father, Léon? He doesn’t seem to provide much. I asked last night if you still believed in him. To me he has always seemed a bit of a swine. I would rather believe in Apollo. At least he was beautiful. To which Léon replies: The trouble is we have lost the power to believe in Apollo. We have Jehovah in our blood. We can’t help it (pp. 215–16). In the earlier novels, the exemplar of the Catholic faith was almost invariably Jesus – even when asserting that man is created in God’s image, the Mexican Priest is thinking of the mestizo who will, like Judas, betray him. Plarr’s provocative question directs attention instead to God the Father, linking that religious query with the theme of parental–filial relationships we have been examining. The pervasive problem of children deprived of their parents is, by that significant query, seen to echo the problem of humankind deprived of its God, the current depiction in the modern era of an orphaned world, a civilisation in which God the Father seems either to have disappeared or to be so cruel in the treatment of His children that no thinking person can now believe in Him. The human race has been abandoned. Léon reads detective stories because they offer an escape, depicting an alternative to the real world in their assumption of a moral order and the due punishment of criminals, aspects that appear so painfully absent in the twentieth century: there is a sort of comfort in reading a story where one knows what the end will be. The story of a dream-world where justice is always done. There were no detective stories in the age of faith – an interesting point when you think of it. God used to be the only detective when



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people believed in Him. He was law. He was order. He was good. Like your Sherlock Holmes. It was He who pursued the wicked man for punishment and discovered all. But now people like the General make law and order. Electric shocks on the genitals. Aquino’s fingers. Keep the poor ill-fed, and they do not have the energy to revolt. I prefer the detective. I prefer God. (p. 206) One would have expected this paragraph to end with the phrase, ‘I prefer the detective’. It ends instead with, ‘I prefer God’ and the difference is crucial. For him, there exist two Gods, the God who, he believes, in previous generations judiciously dispensed rewards to the innocent and punishment to the guilty, and the God who in his own day had either reversed the process or become impervious to human affairs. Hence the continuation of that passage: ‘Do you still believe in him?’ ‘In a way. Sometimes. It is not so easy as all that to answer yes or no. Certainly he is not the same God as the one they taught us at school or in the seminary.’ (p. 206) Behind the characters’ variegated responses to their absent parents, their anger, their frustration, their longing to be reunited, their hatred, or their imitation of the lost model, rests the shadowy image of God the Father. Plarr, doubtful whether he would prove a suitable father for Clara’s unborn child, cites as one reason that Fortnum would be more capable of transmitting to the child a belief in God, he himself being unable to do so. He then calls across to Léon, as he does a little later in the above passage: ‘Do you really believe in God the Father Almighty, Léon?’ Of all the characters in the novel, there is not one, it would seem, other than the minor figure, Marta, that believes in God in any traditional sense. Plarr states firmly that he is no longer a Christian (p. 180), Aquino can write only of death, death as the end to the torture of living where children die and the threat of protracted disease is ever-present (p. 123), Dr Saavedra contemplates suicide in his blacker moods since he has ‘no faith, no faith at all’ (p. 54), Fortnum remarks dismissively, ‘Oh, you can have your God … I don’t see any sign of him around, do you?’ (p. 203), and of course Father Léon has deserted his calling. The novel presents, therefore, a dreary, godless world, evidence, it would seem, for the critics’ claim that the author himself was experiencing a diminished faith. There is, however, a contrary interpretation that suggests this novel represented no fundamental change in attitude. Léon has left the priesthood,





but it is made clear from the first that beneath that outward rejection there remains a deep faith. As so often in Greene’s novels, it is not Christianity itself that Léon has left; he has only deserted the version of Christianity represented by the established church of his day. When declaring early in the novel that he has lost faith, he quickly adds: ‘I only mean my faith in the Church. Or in what they have made of it.’ He had been inspired to join the priesthood under the genial Pope John, had become disillusioned under that pope’s successor and, he remarks, is not patient enough to wait for another John. (p. 103) How closely his condition parallels Plarr’s attitude to his parents, his disgust with his mother’s self-indulgence, is revealed a little later when Fortnum asks Léon with whom he had been angry when he left the priesthood: The Church, the man said and added with irony, my Mother the Church. (p. 113) God the Father, as Léon had conceived of Him in his younger days, the benevolent God of love and mercy he had cherished. But the formal Church he associates with the mother, more concerned with its own needs than the care of its parishioners. It is the fact that the Archbishop banquets with the General while the people starve, that he rejects. As a priest he had come to feel shame at the phrases he had been required to quote to the people. ‘Sell all and give to the poor’ had been a splendid injunction when addressed by Jesus to the wealthy of his generation, but was absurd when his superiors required him to address it to the starving inhabitants of Asunción. He was required to drink wine at the Mass when none of his congregants could afford it, and he longed to join them by exchanging it for water. In such circumstances, Jesus, he suggests, would surely have made some such alteration. And if Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself for others, perhaps that is what Léon should be prepared to do for his own people, joining the rebels and attempting to overthrow the people’s oppressors. In noting Léon’s distinction between the Christian faith in its original form and the contemporary version of faith represented by the Church, one should recall once again the dominance at this time of existentialist philosophy, which had penetrated even into the religious sphere despite the unlikelihood. In the form Sartre and Camus had popularised, the starting-point of the philosophy was belief in the total absurdity of the human condition and the conviction that only by discarding all conventions or norms and accepting personal responsibility for one’s actions could the individual assert his or her being. Christianity rested



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upon two fundamental elements militating against these principles, namely the belief in a benevolent God responsible for the order of the universe, and the acceptance by the worshipper of a series of doctrines and rituals defining the religion and not dependent on the decision of the individual. But existentialism did permeate religious belief nonetheless, evoking such influential studies as Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be for Protestants and the writings of Gabriel Marcel for Catholics. They remained orthodox but shifted emphases, stressing the existence of a chasm between man and his Creator with the implication that until it could be crossed or diminished the individual would remain in an incomprehensible and hence absurd world. And with that shift in emphasis came a minimising of the weight attached to ritual, with greater significance transferred to the spiritual aspects. Hence Léon’s dissatisfaction with the use of wine for the Mass and his dislike of Pope Paul’s insistence on doctrinal conformity in contrast to the generous flexibility of his predecessor, Pope John. Léon’s repudiation of his priestly office because of the patent injustice and disorder of the world does not mean that Greene approved of the rejection. Once again, we should beware of identifying the actions of a fictional character with the author or, indeed, identifying Léon’s views as constituting the message of the novel. Greene was too sophisticated a thinker suddenly to have discovered, like Léon, that there is injustice in this world. Long before he wrote this novel, he had (as he recounted in The Lawless Roads) witnessed the atrocities perpetrated by President Calles, including the hounding and murder of innocent priests; but it produced a novel, The Power and the Glory, where the deserters, the priests who fled across the border, were the ones condemned and the priest who retained his faith admired. The existence of arbitrary suffering was not new to him. Moreover, Greene’s technique of encouraging the reader to distrust a central character’s statements applies here no less than in the earlier novels. Is Léon justified in assuming that the suffering of the poor and the cruelty of dictators are phenomena unique to the twentieth century; that there was in earlier times cosmic order under a benevolent God with only the wicked being punished? There may not have been electric shocks to the genitals in those earlier eras, but there were alternative forms of torture no less agonising for victims incarcerated in medieval dungeons. Yet Léon constantly contrasts the present ‘absence’ of God with the supposedly golden days when, as he puts it, ‘He was law. He was order. He was good.’ The complaint that the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer has been heard in all generations, and Christianity’s





emphasis on the afterlife, we should recall, arose primarily as a means of providing an answer to the visible injustice of this world by the comforting belief that justice would be meted out beyond the grave. All this might be termed mere speculation. What evidence is there in the text that Greene intends the reader to reject Léon’s conclusions concerning the absence of God? There is, first, the negative aspect. We have seen Greene’s gradual introduction of characters such as the communist Dr Magiot and the confirmed atheist, Dr Colin, who represent a dedicated altruism lacking in certain of the Christian characters, the hint that it is possible to be a noble and fulfilled individual without religion. But here, in contrast, the world of the non-believers or atheists is presented as utterly dreary, a vacuity exemplified in the unsatisfying lives of those who have lost their faith. Saavendra, as noted, contemplates suicide in his bouts of intense depression, Aquino can write only of death, Plarr proves utterly incapable of love, and even Fortnum, admirable as he is in certain ways, remains something of a clown, unloved by Clara, deprived of his consular office, and offered as a consolation prize an O.B.E. that carries no financial advantage. On behalf of the faithless, Plarr presents in traumatic terms the reasons for denying the existence of a benevolent God, but in the context of his own spiritual vacuity: I have seen a child born without hands and feet. I would have killed it if I had been left alone with it, but the parents watched me too closely – they wanted to keep that bloody broken torso alive. The Jesuits used to tell us it was our duty to love God. A duty to love a God who produces that abortion? It’s like the duty of a German to love Hitler. Isn’t it better not to believe in that horror up there sitting in the clouds of heaven than pretend to love him? (p. 224) Were Greene the agnostic he pretended to be or even the man of diminished faith he is so often assumed to be, that is a passage that could have stood by itself, uncorrected, a powerful statement of the reasons for rejecting belief. But it is followed by a rejoinder – not, perhaps, a rejoinder to which the Church would willingly subscribe (we recall that Léon has been disbarred from the priesthood) but reflecting a faith that defies all seeming contradictions: ‘I believe in the evil of God,’ Father Rivas said, ‘but I believe in His goodness too. He made us in His image … How could I love God if He were not like me? Divided like me. Tempted like me.’



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There is a subtle elision here, a sliding across from God the Father, responsible for the good and evil in the universe, to the Son who, in Christian doctrine, shared human suffering in order to relieve it – again a reflection of the two-way child–father relationship presented elsewhere in the novel in human terms. But the emphasis here is clearly upon Léon’s reply, upon the need for faith in order to explain the otherwise incomprehensible cruelty of human existence. Léon never attains to the larger view of divine justice as presented in the Bible, where a voice from the whirlwind reminds Job of his limited vision as a mortal, of his presumption in assuming the absence of divine order when he is ignorant even of the purpose of existence: ‘Will you condemn me,’ God asks, ‘that you may be justified?’ (Job 40: 8) and Job silently accepts the rebuke. Yet if Léon does not achieve such intellectual humility, he is, like the central characters of all these Greene novels, moving in the direction of acceptance and submission. He has indeed repudiated the priesthood; but a longing to remain within his faith and, indeed, within his vocation remains strong. Repeatedly he denies that he has left the church, describing his condition as only a separation by mutual consent (p. 217). And while he speaks bitterly of the evil of this world, a recognition that has, he believes, exiled him from the priesthood, he sees that universal evil in terms very close to the central principles of Christianity, stating his belief even more explicitly shortly after the above passage: But I believe in Christ,’ Father Rivas said, ‘I believe in the Cross and the Redemption. The Redemption of God as well as of Man. I believe that the day-side of God, in one moment of happy creation, produces perfect goodness, as a man might paint one perfect picture. God’s good intention for once was completely fulfilled so that the night-side can never win more than a little victory here and there. With our help. Because the evolution of God depends on our evolution. Every evil act of ours strengthens His night-side, and every good one helps his day-side. We belong to Him and He belongs to us. But now at least we can be sure where evolution will end one day – it will end in a goodness like Christ’s. (p. 226) His penultimate act is, despite his disbarment, to don once again the garb of the priest and to perform the Mass. On what he terms this ‘crazy notion of Léon’s’, Plarr wrily comments a little later, ‘You would almost think there was a great joker somewhere who likes to give a twist to things. Perhaps the dark side of God has a sense of humour.’ But at that





stage Plarr no longer qualifies as a choric figure. His comment reflects his own bitterness of spirit rather than a theological concept bearing authorial approval. Ostensibly, both Léon and Plarr have declared themselves renegades from their religion. Yet as they lie dying, both of them, in accordance with the highest standards of imitatio Dei, are dedicated to the welfare of others. Plarr, leaving the protection of the hideout, goes outside to meet the police, exposing himself to almost certain death in the hope of saving the others; and Léon in his turn follows Plarr in the hope of saving him. The culmination of that scene draws the variegated threads of the novel together. As Plarr lies dying, unable to turn his head, he hears Léon whisper a phrase of which he can only distinguish the significant word ‘Father’: ‘Ego te absolvo,’ Doctor Plarr whispered in a flash of memory. He intended to laugh, to show Léon he was only joking – they had often joked when they were boys at the unmeaning formulas the priests taught them to use – but he was too tired and the laugh shrivelled in his throat. (p. 251) Was it mere tiredness, or did his inability to laugh indicate that both men, despite their overt rejection, remained emotionally within their faith? Plarr had initially rejected his male parent but had eventually come to love him, and would seem here to undergo in his last moments a similar movement of reconciliation with his spiritual Father, intellectually rejecting belief yet emotionally acknowledging and affirming it. To assume that the novel evidences a diminishing of religious commitment on Greene’s part is to ignore the implications of that ending and to undervalue the brilliant interweaving of the human and divine aspects of father–son relations that structure the entire novel.



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8

Greene’s last major novel proved to be surprisingly different from its predecessors both in mood and in narrative strategy and, justifiably, it became one of his most popular. The humour, instead of being restricted to minor, isolated instances, here is pervasive and, though the novel concludes with the protagonist’s demise, his end is peaceful, the culmination of a life lived with simplicity and integrity. Moreover, unlike the deaths of Scobie, and Querry, Quixote’s leaves no doubt concerning his saintliness. From the first, the priest emerges as admirable, an extraordinary achievement after Greene’s careful development in his previous novels of methods designed to overcome the potential disapproval of Protestant readers. For such disapproval seems here to evaporate. There is no attempt to portray the priest initially in the worst possible light and only later to win sympathy. We are informed in the opening scene of his virtues, of an ascetic way of life suited to an ideal priest, the small, simple house in which he lives, the ancient car he had purchased second-hand some eight years before, devoid of air-conditioning despite the searing heat of Spain. The battered car is contrasted with the luxurious Mercedes driven by the bishop of Motopo; but the ancient Seat not only satisfies Quixote’s vehicular ambitions but arouses in him a tender affection, a fear that one day he may have to part from it, an affection reflecting his innate compassion towards those around him. If the description is of an ideal Catholic priest, how, we may ask, does Greene succeed in mollifying those readers unsympathetic to his church without resorting to the devices he had used in the past? He does so, I would suggest, by subtly merging three intertextual sources, each calculated to disarm antipathy. The first is his fanciful linking of his priest to his putative ancestor, Don Quixote; for by that means he transfers to his new character the rapport Cervantes had created for 141



Monsignor Quixote


the earlier figure. Greene thus evokes an amused empathy with a priest tilting at the windmills of the establishment church. Any hostility is deflected from the priest to the windmills, the unattractive representatives of the formal church – a bishop invariably misinterpreting the priest’s well-intentioned, if misguided actions, and the parish priest’s replacement, the complacent, uncharitable Father Herrera. The debt to Cervantes is proclaimed in the title; but there were further sources immediately recognisable to any contemporary reader. The second of the three can easily be missed today but would not have been overlooked when the novel appeared initially – the popular series of novels by the Italian author, Giovannino Guareschi, published in English translation between the years 1951 and 1965, and consisting of lively stories devoted to Don Camillo, the parish priest of a small Italian town. Their popularity was considerably augmented by the films based upon those stories, with the famed French comedian, Fernandel, in the role of the priest. The aspect of Greene’s novel deriving from that series was the unique relationship between Guareschi’s priest and the mayor of the town, Peppone, leader of the local Communist party. The stories had focused on the rivalry between them, each decrying their opponent’s actions and beliefs, each devising methods of outwitting the other, yet held together by a strong bond, twofold in origin. Peppone and most of his comrades, despite their affiliation to the Communist party and their formal renunciation of religion as required by the party, secretly retain their Catholic faith, as a brief example may illustrate. On one occasion, Don Camillo concocts a letter supposedly from Communist headquarters ordering Peppone to leave permanently for the Russia he supposedly admires; but the priest subsequently relents, feeling the device was cruel, and sends a forged countermand. The story concludes: No one ever knew who it was that brought an enormous candle into the church under the cover of darkness that evening. But Don Camillo found it burning near the crucifix when he went that night to say his prayers. There is even a hint of this incident in Greene’s novel when the bishop receives the instruction from Rome concerning Quixote’s promotion, a letter which, he states, ‘at first I took for a joke in the worst of taste imitating an ecclesiastical style and probably inspired by a member of the communist organization which you thought it your duty to support’ (p. 27). The second bond between them was from World War II, when Don Camillo had repeatedly risked his life, bringing his field-altar through



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enemy lines in order to celebrate Mass for them in the hideout where Peppone and his group were fighting as partisans in the Resistance. Here too, a brief illustration of that aspect may be in place in order to convey the flavour of the work, as it is no longer widely read. Peppone attempts to trick the priest into holding a thanksgiving service in the church for a leading communist who had recently survived an assassination attempt. On being refused, in defiance he calls a political meeting in the People’s Palace on Christmas Eve in order to draw crowds away from the celebration of Mass. He is only partially successful, as their own wives insist on attending Mass nonetheless. But the comrades gather obstinately at their secular meeting, listening to boring readings from Das Kapital and the communist press, till a burly figure unexpectedly appears, shouldering his way in, to ascend the dais and, to their delight, sets up the familiar field-altar, conducting for them the Christmas Eve Mass they have all secretly been missing.1 The stories are light-hearted, lacking any real depth, accompanied by amusing cartoons of saints and devils drawn by the author; but there does emerge from those stories a touching camaraderie that Greene was to borrow. The verbal exchanges between the two figures in Guareschi’s work cannot compare with those between Greene’s Monsignor and the ex-mayor, but the scenario of a priest and a communist, opposed in their doctrines but bound by a warm underlying friendship, not only proved ideal for his revived Quixote and Sancho Panza but served the additional function of predisposing contemporary readers, familiar with the Don Camillo series, to empathise immediately with both characters. There remains the third intertextual source. In general, Greene preserved a clear separation between his ‘entertainments’ and his major works. The Honorary Consul did adopt the excitement of the chase as an ingredient, but this novel imports a different element. In discussing in an early chapter Greene’s initiation of the genre of the anti-hero, best represented by his Mexican priest, I dissociated myself from Ihab Hassan’s statement that the modern anti-hero was a kind of picaro; for there is no rascally element, neither in the priest’s character nor in subsequent examples of the genre whether by Greene or others. On the contrary, it is their moral superiority to their social environment that wins them the second half of their rubric, the heroic element. Here, however, Greene did introduce one central aspect deriving from the picaresque. From the time of the sixteenth-century work, Lazarillo de Tormes, which set the pattern, the picaresque novel had introduced a fresh, open-air quality to the novel, with the central character depicted as constantly on the move, encountering numerous, often amusing adventures



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in the course of his journey, In that tradition, Fielding’s Tom Jones, banished by Squire Allworthy, travels through the countryside experiencing amours, duels, attacks by highwaymen, as well as female entrapments from which he duly escapes. That tradition Greene had employed with great success in the most recent of his entertainments, Travels With My Aunt. Henry Pulling, a guileless retired bank-manager, whisked away by his new-found female relative, finds himself accompanying her on journeys to regions he has never visited, meeting types he did not know existed and, through his naiveté, generally misinterpreting whatever occurs around him. He happily accepts a cigarette unaware that it is marijuana, assumes his aunt had earned her living in a theatre company despite indications that the group was of somewhat lesser repute, and unknowingly carries through customs a suitcase filled with bank-notes. Readers of that novel had thus been primed to appreciate Quixote’s travels to unfamiliar cities, where he spends a night in a brothel imagining it to be a hotel, a facility impressing him by the generous supply of clean sheets and the toy ‘balloon’ thoughtfully left beside the bed. He meets an armed robber who deprives him of his shoes, views a pornographic film disarmingly entitled The Maiden’s Prayer, and causes confusion and misunderstandings when for a moment he lends his friend his clerical collar. By combining those three sources intertextually – Cervantes’ tale, Don Camillo, and the picaresque genre familiar from Travels With My Aunt, Greene precluded any discomfort the English reader might have experienced at being offered a Catholic priest as the central character. Greene could now create, without the devices previously employed, a figure who is, from the first, close to his ideal of a Catholic priest. Father Quixote has no illegitimate child and, if he enjoys good wine, is no whisky-priest, at most gently falling asleep after amicably sharing a bottle with his friend. Later, when the two protagonists are enjoying their wine, Greene takes care to dispel any such impression by Quixote’s remark: ‘In your company I fear if I’m not careful I shall become what I’ve heard called a whiskey-priest’ (p. 90). The priest is fully exonerated from any suspicion that his housekeeper is his mistress when she is described as, ‘a square woman with protruding teeth and an embryo moustache.’ Lest the point be missed, Greene has the visiting bishop of Motopo comment approvingly on her uncomely appearance: ‘In these days one is often embarrassed to find even in Italy very marriageable housekeepers – and alas! only too often marriage does follow’ (p. 18). The priest has, we learn, never been troubled by sexual desire (p. 141). He is, indeed, essentially an ascetic, not only satisfied with the horseflesh-steaks his meagre salary permits the housekeeper to supply but



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even pleased to learn they are of horseflesh, since he need no longer reproach himself for indulging in luxury, his sole complaint being the generosity of the portions she assigns him. From a salary that with difficulty covers his minimal needs he gives readily to charity. Indeed, everything about him conforms to the abstemiousness and dedication one should expect from a priest. If the evocation of Cervantes’ knight creates reader empathy for the protagonist, there is a major factor distinguishing the priest from his supposed ancestor; for there is no hint that he is mentally disturbed. In fact, the situation is subtly reversed. In the original story, the knight’s friends and neighbours, representing society, try repeatedly and ineffectually to calm a crazed Don Quixote and to return him to sanity. On meeting some traders, the knight demands, in accordance with the chivalric tradition, that, without ever having seen his Dulcinea, they must acknowledge her superiority over all other women. Realising that he is unbalanced, they attempt to soothe him, assuring him that, ‘even though her portrait should show her blind of one eye, and distilling vermilion and sulphur from the other, we would nevertheless, to gratify your worship, say all in her favour that you desire.’ But the knight, insulted by the reservation, charges at them furiously with lance upraised, only to fall from his horse. Pinned down by the weight of his armour, he cries, ‘Fly not, cowards and caitiffs! Stay, for not by my fault, but my horse’s, am I stretched here.’2 Society there represents sanity, and it is the knight who is deranged. Here, with echoes of the anti-hero genre, the roles are transposed. However crazed the priest may appear to his bishop and the Guardia, it is he, not those that condemn him, who represents the sanity and morality lacking in society – it is he, not the representatives of his church, who possesses the humility, gentleness, and charity advocated by the faith. When he ruefully remarks that the bishop and Father Herrera believe him to be mad and his friend points out that people had thought the same of his ancestor, the priest, for all his claims to affinity, in a rare instance of asperity vigorously denies any hint of lunacy. The people that disturb him, he declares, are not illusory windmills, nor are his guides for living absurdly outdated: ‘Why are you always saddling me with my ancestor?’ ‘I was only comparing …’ ‘You talk about him at every opportunity, you pretend that my saints’ books are like his books of chivalry. You compare our little adventures with his. Those Guardia were Guardia, not windmills.




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That he is not mad is obvious enough – he protests at one point, ‘But I’m no more mad than Father Herrera is. Or the bishop, come to that’ (p. 156) – but the fact that he needs to deny the accusation has filaments connecting it closely to the anti-hero genre of the mid-century novel. Although Greene himself had not employed that aspect in his earlier novels, a characteristic of the genre emerging in the mid-century was the supposed mental disturbance of the central character. Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Salinger’s Holden whom we cited earlier betray all the symptoms of nervous breakdown. Herzog obsessively writes letter after letter to leading personages whether alive or dead, letters he never mails, while Holden, in headlong flight from his school and imagining he is falling into an abyss, the fear of a loss of identity, is finally placed in a sanatorium in the hope that he will calm down and return to studies. But as the novels gradually reveal the nature of the society from which they are in flight, their nervous collapse or ‘insanity’ comes to be seen as a badge of honour, a mark of the moral sensitivity that makes them admirably incapable of conforming to the corrupt standards of their society. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest took the process even further in depicting the inmates of a mental asylum as significantly more sane – and more ethical – than the medical staff society has appointed to cure them. In that literary context, Greene’s idea of relating Father Quixote to his crazed ancestor while asserting his ultimate sanity serves a similar function. The climax of this aspect is that, at the end, the priest is indeed in a state of mental disturbance, yet performs in his sleep an act which, like those of his counterparts in contemporary literature, possesses a validity transcending the psychiatric labelling that society places upon him. There is a further aspect to these parallels. It will be recalled that anti-heroes narrate their own stories in a mood of calmness achieved after their ‘breakdowns’, a technique suggesting that the preceding disturbance was more sane than it appeared. Herzog concludes, ‘ “But what do you want, Herzog?” “But that’s just it – not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy.” ’3 And Holden rightly dismisses as absurd the psychoanalyst’s query whether he intends to apply himself when he returns to school: ‘It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The



I am Father Quixote, and not Don Quixote. I tell you, I exist. My adventures are my own adventures, not his. I go my way – my way – not his. (p. 160)

answer is, you don’t.’ So here, if Father Quixote appeared unbalanced to the bishop and society at large, from the beginning of the novel his indebtedness to his fictitious ancestor is related not to the period of the knight’s insanity but to the conclusion of that story, the period when sanity had been restored. In a moving passage in Cervantes’ tale, the knight renounced on his deathbed the books of chivalry that had so misled him: now I perceive my folly, and the peril into which reading them brought me … . I was mad, now I am in my senses; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, I am now, as I said, Alonso Quixano the Good; and may my repentance and sincerity restore me to the esteem you used to have for me. Sancho in the original pleads with his master to continue their adventures, but Quixote replies that there can be no return to the mania he experienced in the past – ‘There are no birds this year in last year’s nest.’ That deathbed scene is highlighted at the beginning of Greene’s novel, thereby connecting the priest with the sane Quixote rather than with the crazed adventurer in his earlier role. The visiting bishop of Motopo exhorts the modern Quixote to go forth like his ancestor on the highroads of the world, but the priest replies ruefully that his ancestor had been called a madman. The bishop, in his reply, cites the ending of Cervantes’ tale: ‘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 nest.’ ‘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’ (p. 24) Neither of the two understands the import of the phrase; but Greene, we may presume, does, inserting it as a pointer for the reader, an indication to which stage of the original journey the priest’s is to be related. To confirm this pointer, shortly before he sets out with Sancho on their journey, he dreams he had been climbing a high tree and had dislodged a nest, empty and dry and brittle, the relic of a year gone by (p. 37). The humour of connecting the priest with Cervantes’ protagonist is never allowed to obscure other differences between them. The knight, in





conformity with the chivalric tradition in which he had immersed himself, demands from everyone he meets due acknowledgment of his excellence, recognition that he is peerless in courage, in honour, and in martial skill: ‘But tell me, as thou livest, hast thou seen a more valiant knight than I in all the known world; hast thou read in history of any who has or had higher mettle in attack, more spirit in maintaining it, more dexterity in wounding or skill in overthrowing?’4 That pathetic claim to grandeur has no parallel in the priest who possesses the humility characterising all Greene’s heroes. He makes no claim to learning, modestly granting that in his youth he would have preferred to have studied at the more famous seminar in Salamanca, ‘but the standard there was beyond me’ (p. 23); he admits to being puzzled by the intricacies of theology, and declares on more than one occasion that, although he may have read more books, he is as ignorant as his parishioners. That he is by no means as unlearned in theology as he claims is evidenced by the insightful analogy he offers to explain the unity of the Trinity in terms of the three bottles of wine, separate, yet containing the same substance, so that whoever partakes of one partakes of all three – only to be followed by a horrifying realisation that, because the third bottle happened to be half-empty, his analogy had derogated from the sanctity of the Holy Spirit. The purpose of the novel’s intertextuality, merging the paired protagonists with those in the tales of Cervantes and Guareschi, was, of course, to provide, by exploiting the warm relationship between fundamentally different characters, a series of friendly and mutually respectful debates between adherents of two seemingly opposed creeds. Greene’s involvement with communism and his defence of Philby’s defection in real life are outside the bounds of the text and hence peripheral to this present study; but the novels themselves reveal a progressive change in attitude. The condemnation of communism in The Power and the Glory, with the Lieutenant driven by bitterness and hatred, was gradually replaced in later novels by a recognition that, whatever cruelties communism may have perpetrated under such dictators as Stalin, its aim of improving the lot of the poor was in itself not only noble but in some respects close to that of Christianity. In The Comedians, the lapsed Catholic Dr Magiot had made the point very clearly in the passage quoted earlier, pointing out that Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. Marking a further stage in that shift in viewpoint, this later novel not only offers discussions, free of acrimony, between the representatives of



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the two creeds but conveys the feeling that there is room for truth on both sides. When the mayor quotes Marx’s cynical dictum that ‘religion is the opium of the people’, the priest surprisingly agrees; but he reverses the implication, pointing out that so far from drugging the poor into submission as Marx had suggested, opium was, in Marx’s day, the only effective pain-reliever. While opium was then a tranquillizer for the well-to-do, one that the poor could not afford, religion performed the important task of providing them with a valium. And since tranquillizers are a necessity for all, the two of them amicably agree to share another bottle (p. 50). The priest’s replies may ultimately carry greater weight, but the mayor’s arguments have much to recommend them. Moreover, both disputants are partial renegades, unlike the situation in the Don Camillo stories, having recently been dismissed from their posts. They are hence more ready to grant the inadequacies of their present leaders and to admit the past misdemeanours of their movements – a viewpoint especially congenial to the dissociation from the establishment church expressed in Greene’s other novels. They find themselves seated beneath a hammer and sickle crudely drawn on the wall, at which the priest murmurs he would have preferred to be resting beneath a cross. The ex-mayor replies: ‘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?’ (p. 46) They agree that there were, in both areas, departures from the ideal and, in their friendly continuation of the discussion, admit that they sometimes despair whether their creeds will eventually lead humankind to a happier future. Theirs, however, is not final despair, for that would be an offence against both creeds, but they share the realisation that there is still a long and painful journey for humankind to travel before their respective messianic dreams will be fulfilled. At times the ex-mayor’s arguments are given precedence, the priest conceding, however hesitantly, the justice of his friend’s charge. Greene,





in fact, entitled one chapter, How Sancho in his turn cast new light on an old Faith, for there Sancho makes two points. The first is trivial and, one may add, based upon a misunderstanding on Greene’s part. Sancho objects to the New Testament’s preference for the sheep over the goats on the grounds that the latter are more valuable to mankind, providing milk and cheese rather than mere wool. Why, then, he asks, should they be cast down to Hell on the day of judgment and the sheep saved, as recorded in the New Testament: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left … Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire. (Matthew 25:32–41) Greene was apparently unaware that, while goats in England are white, those in the Holy Land were – and are to this day – black, their identification with the damned being based on their colour and not on their value to mankind. But it is the deeper significance of his comment that disturbs Father Quixote, touching upon a sensitive point in his own belief, so that he quickly turns to his breviary in an attempt to ignore Sancho’s words. His discomfort concerns the very existence of Hell, of a God who could wish to make humans suffer. Some alleviation he finds in the fact that Hell is mentioned far more in Matthew than in the other gospels, since its author ‘… was a tax collector, poor man, and he probably believed in the efficacy of punishment.’ Nonetheless, the existence of Hell is mentioned elsewhere in the Gospels too, and the priest can only admit, ‘it made me wonder’ (p. 58) Sancho, it transpires, experiences similar reservations concerning his own creed, and Quixote is led to ponder how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together, perhaps even more than sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer, he notes, over a shade of difference: the doubter fights with himself. The priest’s admission of religious doubt might seem to militate against the Catholic message of the novel. But behind that trait lies Greene’s admiration for Miguel de Unamuno, whom he and the ex-mayor discuss with reverence when they reach Salamanca, respectfully visiting the house in which the philosopher had died.5 Unamuno, after a crisis of faith, had rejected rationalism, arguing that true religious belief demands a degree of doubt. Reason could only lead to a certain point, after which a leap of faith was requisite. On those grounds, he distrusted theology, regarding it as a process attempting to compress



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faith into a logically-consistent system. The subjective self, he insisted in The Tragic Sense of Life, should be the final arbiter in matters of religious belief, and claimed, in a striking statement, that more valid than Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum was the principle Sum, ergo cogito, that the subjective self and its instinctive responses were more valid than cerebral cogitation.6 In his antinomianism and his belief in the need for perpetual anxiety, Unanumo was a harbinger of existentialism. His Life of Don Quixote and Sancho seems to have inspired this novel, according to the testimony of his friend and confessor, Father Duran, who claimed that Greene conceived the idea on their joint visit to Unamuno’s grave in 1976.7 But there can be no question concerning Greene’s respect for Unamuno’s advocacy of doubt and anxiety, after the scene in which the priest and Sancho visit the house in which Unamuno died. In response to the priest’s somewhat envious remark that Sancho must be happy now that he has complete belief in the prophet Marx, his friend soberly disclaims such happiness, recalling from his days in Salamanca a warning he had once heard from a professor he respected while he was studying at the seminary: ‘There is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty which whispers in the ears of the believer. Who knows? Without this uncertainty how could we live?’ (p. 112). This emphasis on the need for doubt and the priest’s envy of what he thought was Sancho’s unconditional belief but what turned out to be a doubt paralleling his own reservations concerning theology have, even with the sanction of Unamuno, provided support for those accusing Greene of unorthodoxy; but it should be recalled that there were authoritative precedents. Tertullian, a powerful influence on the thinking of the early church, in discussing the Incarnation in the second century coined a phrase that was to reverberate throughout the centuries, Certum est quia impossible – that one should believe not despite belief’s contradiction of Reason but because of its contradiction. It is rationalised dogma to which Quixote objects, not faith itself. The doubt to which both protagonists admit on more than one occasion serves a number of aims in the novel’s construction. Their shared misgivings, as the priest noted above, strengthen their friendship and mutual respect. They also make Quixote into a more human and a more likeable character. But apart from those functions, it also prepares the way for the change Sancho will undergo towards the end of the novel. For like so many of Greene’s other characters – and, indeed, like Guareschi’s Peppone – he is a lapsed Catholic who retains deep within him a fondness and a respect for the faith his political commitment has compelled him to reject. On hearing the priest quote a line in Latin,





Sancho, his tongue loosened by vodka, admits to an item in his biography that he had concealed until then – that his parents had wanted him to be a priest and that, in his youth, he had studied for a time at the seminary in Salamanca. (p. 33) Hence his remark later in the novel, as he stares gloomily into his glass of wine, that there is more to his willingness to accompany Quixote than mere whim: Oh, I laugh at your superstitions, father, but I shared some of them in those days. Is that why I seek your company now – to find my youth again, that youth when I half believed in your religion and everything was so complicated and contradictory – and interesting? (p. 90) The priest’s doubt, his dislike of theology, emerges early in the novel when, hesitant to ask the visiting bishop whether he is permitted to pray for his car, he poses the question in what he feels may be a more acceptable form, whether one may pray for the welfare and happiness of one’s horse. His compassionate feelings towards his Seat 600, eccentric though they may be, reflect his compassion for humanity at large, and one wishes that the bishop could approve; but the bishop’s reply is based not on compassion but on reason and utility, the only consideration being whether the prayer could make the horse more docile and hence more amenable to its owner. His response leads to speculation on the danger of imagining that animals have souls, and Father Quixote’s comment, that the ruling would apply equally to a mosquito or flea, serves to reduce the theological discussion to absurdity. The main attack on theology is, however, more specific. Shortly after this exchange, Father Herrera compliments him on having included on his bookshelf a copy of Father Heribert Jone’s Moral Theology. Quixote’s reply is dismissive, that he has not read the book for many years as it has so little relevance to parish work, to the problems brought to him by the baker or garage mechanic. He places greater trust, he declares, in the works of St John of the Cross, of St Teresa, and of St Francis of Sales – namely, writers concerned with spiritual values and devotionalism rather than doctrinal argumentation. Greene’s most effective attack on casuistic reasoning is reserved for two later discussions, both focusing on Heribert Jone. In the first, Sancho recalls with amusement the theologian’s solemn ruling that in the event of a baby being born with two heads, since there is present only one human-being, one head should be baptised absolutely, the other conditionally. From that instance, one may well understand why Quixote did not find the book relevant to the daily affairs of his parish.



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The second consists of Sancho’s merriment on recounting the story of the pious Spaniard who, following Jone’s decision that onanism was not to be considered a sin in the case of coitus interruptus, hired a butler to knock at the bedroom door at the vital moment. The Spaniard discovered subsequently that he had in fact sinned, as the ruling applied only to accidental, not pre-arranged interruptions. Such passages may seem extraneous to the advancement of the story, but they form part of Greene’s strategy. Jesuitical casuistry had long been a subject for derision, as in the famous instance of Father Garnet who, after his involvement in the attempted assassination of King and parliament in 1605, was lampooned for his denial when asked whether he was a Jesuit priest. Garnet claimed that his reply came into the category of legitimate ‘equivocation’ since, he argued, after his spoken reply, ‘I am not a priest’, he had added mentally, ‘of Apollo’.8 Quixote’s dislike of the sophistical hair-splitting of theologians and his preference for writers, like St John of the Cross, concerned with spiritual purity and dedication, offer the reader a view of Catholicism free from the association with the casuistry so disliked by its detractors. Quixote is saddened by Sancho’s mockery of Heribert Jone, but his reply is not a rebuttal; he grants that such absurdities exist among ecclesiastics and their writings. Their existence does not, however, affect his ultimate trust in the fundamentals of religious belief. ‘You can mock me as much as you like, Sancho. What makes me sad is when you mock my books, for they mean more to me than myself … . I know I’m a poor priest errant, travelling God knows where. I know that there are absurdities in some of my books as there were in the books of chivalry my ancestor collected. That didn’t mean that all chivalry was absurd. Whatever absurdities you can dig out of my books I still have faith.’ (p. 85) His dislike of certain elements that have crept into church doctrine and practice results in his angry outburst in the village of Learig, where the priests, more concerned with money than repentance, are auctioning salvation to the highest bidders. Significantly, the incident Greene chooses to arouse Quixote’s fury is one reminiscent of Luther’s primary objection to Catholicism, the objection that was to unleash the Reformation movement, namely, the practice of selling pardons to those donating money to the church. The use of that incident therefore allies him with the Protestant view of indulgences, again disarming readerhostility. The windmill here is not, as with his supposed ancestor, the




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The priests here have driven him from his old parish. He was a danger to them. The poor people loved him because he refused to take money and say the Responses when anyone died. Responses, what nonsense! To gabble a few words and ask a thousand pesetas. So the priests wrote to the bishop and even though there were good Mexicans who defended him he was sent away. (p. 218) This distinction between faith and dogma that serves as a central theme in the novel reaches its culmination in the moving final scene, when Quixote, comatose after his concussion, celebrates without paten or chalice a doctrinally dubious Mass. His sincerity and devotion are beyond question; and one recalls how the Priest in The Power and the Glory continued to offer communion even after the altar stone had been lost, representing Greene’s suggestion that, in extreme circumstances, the technical requirements of ritual are less important than the intent of the celebrant. Quixote has actually been debarred from celebrating Mass, but the antipathy aroused by the bishop responsible for the debarment reduces the disqualification to a merely doctrinal and hence nugatory factor. But Greene introduces a further component to direct our responses, a visiting American professor of Hispanic studies. He declares himself to be only a nominal Catholic, his interest in Ignatius Loyola being not spiritual but academic, with a firm preference for fact over fiction. He thus represents rationalism, disqualified by the novel as a final arbiter. As Quixote advances toward the altar murmuring the words of consecration and, turning towards the Mayor, performs for him the act of communion without wine or wafer, the professor whispers that it is mere delirium or madness, insisting after the priest’s demise that the consecration was invalid. If, however, the professor remains unconvinced, there can be no doubt where the narrator stands, when Father Leopoldo responds in the name not of physical facts but of the central mystery of the faith: ‘Do you think it’s more difficult to turn empty air into wine than wine into blood’? Nor, in this instance, is there any doubt where the author stands. For the epigraph he affixed to this novel points forward



figment of a fevered brain, but a very real threat to the faith, and acknowledged as such. But one should note that Greene includes in the mise-en-scène a young priest, José, disgusted by the practice, refusing to participate in it, and hence representing what Greene sees as the true church. As the young priest’s grandfather recounts:

precisely to this moment – the quotation from Shakespeare: ‘There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ Sancho appears to side with the professor, remaining sceptical. He prefers. as he declares, Marx to mystery. But we have seen how often in Greene’s novels a central character, such as Bendrix, remains at its conclusion seemingly unconverted yet, by a subtle hint, is perceived to be on the threshold of spiritual change. So here, the novel ends with a pregnant question: The Mayor didn’t speak again before they reached Orense; an idea quite strange to him had lodged in his brain. Why is it that the hate of man – even of a man like Franco – dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote. seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence – for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end? Beneath the often humorous account of Quixote’s journey, with its echoes of Travels With My Aunt, may be perceived, then, a more serious theme, a theme that had, in fact, served as a leitmotif throughout the major novels – the primacy of faith over theological cerebration, over the technicalities of dogma, and over such alien practices as had entered the established church in conflict with the spiritual values to which it formally subscribed. Above all, I have tried to suggest that there is in all these novels a process of reader-manipulation at work, a series of manoeuvres specific to each novel, intended – in line with Hans Jauss’s theory of the author’s resistance to ‘horizons of expectation’ – to wean the reader away from preconceptions brought to the work and to assure identification with, or at least understanding for characters who might otherwise appear unfamiliar or even distasteful. To cite repeatedly the self-condemnations of such central characters as though such statements were valid – as so many critics have done, assuming the Mexican priest to be a sinner and fornicator, and Querry an atheist – is to miss the subtlety and brilliance of Greene’s fictional strategies. Moreover, critical consensus continues to affirm that Greene’s religious belief weakened in later years, the majority of scholars, as William Hill recently noted, seeing him as an apostate who continued to use Catholic themes after he had lost his faith.9 Evelyn Waugh was so deeply offended by A Burnt-Out Case that he refused to review it on the grounds that Greene – no longer relying on the certainty of Catholic truths and teachings to give meaning





to the fallen world – now portrayed the universe as unilluminated by any divine presence or pattern. However, to assume from his writings that Greene moved in the direction of agnosticism or atheism is to ignore the repeated validations of faith even in the latest of the novels – Plaar’s final benediction ‘Ego te absolvo’, and Quixote’s poignant celebration of the Mass. Those endings provide no final evidence concerning Greene’s personal beliefs; but as texts, they consistently express, and encourage in the reader, a reverence for and empathy with religious experience. The innovative strategies he introduced into his fiction, progressively modified to suit the varied challenges confronting a mid-century writer, succeeded, one should note finally, not only in generating solutions for his own novels, recognised as among the finest of his era, but also enabling him to function as a pathfinder for others, constructing an essentially new type of anti-hero that was to serve as a model for his contemporaries.



156

Notes to pages 1–6 1 The strategies 1. Marie B. Mesnet, Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter (Westport, CA: Greenwood, 1954), pp. 2–4. 2. Roland A. Pierloot, Psychoanalytic Patterns in the Work of Graham Greene (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). A study of Brighton Rock, he argues, confirms that Greene wanted ‘to exorcise by writing’ his pre-existing paranoid anxieties, projecting his concept of evil in terms of fictional oppositions and splitting phantasies (pp. 72–3). John Spurling’s Graham Greene (London: Methuen, 1983) claims, like many other critical studies, that the importance of Greene’s childhood for an understanding of his writings can hardly be exaggerated; and W.J. West’s The Quest for Graham Greene (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) is a detailed and very thorough search for events in Greene’s life believed to have inspired his fictional works. The final quotation is from Robert Hoskins, Graham Greene: an approach to the novels (New York: Garland, 1999), p. xvii. 3. The Comedians, p. 61. 4. Quoted in V.S. Pritchett, ‘Graham Greene into the Light’, in A.F. Cassis ed., Graham Greene: man of paradox (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994), p. 289. 5. Marie-Françoise Allain, The Other Man: conversations with Graham Greene trans. G. Waldman (London: Bodley Head, 1983), p. 23. 6. Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, 3 vols (New York: Penguin, 1989–2004), 3: p. xiv and 2: p. 320. 7. Michael Mewshaw, in a book review in the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, 6 February 2000. 8. Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: the enemy within (London: Heinemann, 1994), p. 14. 9. A Burnt Out Case contains the doctor’s sardonic remark, ‘We don’t want the press of the world discovering us as they discovered Schweitzer’ (p. 22). 10. Miriam Allott, ‘Surviving the Course, or a Novelist for All Seasons’ in D. Jefferson and G. Martin eds, The Uses of Fiction (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982). 11. Francis L. Kunkel, The Labyrinthine Ways of Graham Greene (Marmaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1973), especially pp. 18–20, and the collection edited by W.T. Hill, Perceptions of Religious Faith in the Works of Graham Greene (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002). 12. Stanley E. Fish, Surprised By Sin: the reader in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), especially chapter 1, and his Is There a Text in this Class?: the authority of interpretive communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). For the view that Milton had unintentionally transformed Satan into a heroic figure, thereby undermining the purpose of

157



Notes

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Notes to pages 7–20 the epic, see A.J.A. Waldock, ‘Paradise Lost’ and its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 77f. Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, in Ralph Cohen ed., New Directions in Literary History (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 11–41. Jauss developed that approach in such later studies as his comparison of Racine and Goethe in Rainer Warning ed., Rezeptions ästhetik (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 355f., and it was presented in its fully developed form in his own, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). M. Roston, The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), chapter 1. The book included a brief discussion of Greene’s writings, out of which this present study evolved. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), p. 208. J.W. Krutch, The Modern Temper: a study and a confession (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956 [orig. 1929]), p. 7. Waugh produced a number of non-fictional works on Catholic themes, such as his biographies of Edmund Campion and Ronald Knox, but those were intended primarily for a Catholic readership. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little Brown, 1945), p. 192. The conclusion to the novel. The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 76. Sherry, 2: pp. 13–14. William Camden, Epitaph for a Man Killed by Falling from his Horse, containing the lines: ‘Betwixt the stirrup and the ground / Mercy I asked, mercy I found.’

2 The Power and the Glory 1. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: studies in the contemporary American novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 21. Cf. also, Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), and David Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 2. Saul Bellow, Herzog (London: Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 326 and 340. 3. Greene’s debt to Eliot is examined perceptively in F.D. Crawford, Mixing Memory and Desire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). 4. His admiration for T.S. Eliot expressed itself frequently in his work, one instance being his choice of the title for The Third Man, an allusion to The Waste Land’s, ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?’ Raymond M. Olderman discusses the dominance on the American scene of Eliot’s metaphor in his Beyond the Waste Land: a study of the American novel in the 1960s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972). 5. Roger Sharrock, Saints, Sinners, and Comedians: the novels of Graham Greene (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984), p. 123; Kunkel, pp. 114–15; David Pryce-Jones, Graham Greene (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), p. 48; Michael W. Higgins, ‘Greene’s Priest: A Sort of Rebel’, Essays in Graham Greene: an annual review, 3 (1992), p. 10; Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill



158

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

Gwenn R. Boardman, Graham Greene: the aesthetics of exploration (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971), p. 65; R.W.B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint: representative figures in contemporary fiction (Philadelphia: Lippincot, 1958), p. 249; and K.C.J. Kurismmootil, S.J., Heaven and Hell on Earth: an appreciation of five novels of Graham Greene (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982), p. 64. In the most recent book on Greene, Mark Bosco S.J., Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), that same view is adopted, namely that the priest, as a result of his ‘sinfulness and suffering’, undergoes a change in the prison (p. 52). Bosco’s study offers a sophisticated examination of Greene’s religious beliefs, not least in relationship to decisions of the Vatican Council, but it relies heavily upon Greene’s own statements about his faith, statements in which I place little trust. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination ed. and trans. by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), especially pp. 76 and 272. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 222. Shelden, p. 221. Theodore P. Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe (New York: Twayne, 1994), p. 100. Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan, Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954), pp. 73–8. This further instance is from Georg M.A. Gaston, The Pursuit of Salvation: a critical guide to the novels of Graham Greene (Troy: Whitson, 1986), p. 29. Allain, p. 136. Discussions of framing were stimulated in the sixties by Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception: a psychology of the creative eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) and Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), especially pp. 201–2 in the latter. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 182. Cf. Susan Beegel, Hemingway’s Craft of Omission (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). Note also, Hemingway’s further comment in A Moveable Feast (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 75, on his ‘new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story’. Cf. Kurismmootil, p. 61. Arthur Koestler’s essay in Richard Crossman ed., The God that Failed (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), pp. 16–17. The priest’s statement at one point that he chose the priesthood because it offered a rise in social status and an improvement in his living standards forms, of course, part of his negative evaluation of his actions. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, section 1. Jeremy Bentham’s phrase ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, appearing originally in his Commonplace Book, had been intended by him as a democratic, humanistic ideal, but was adopted by the communists in a very different sense. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947), p. 128 and The Invisible Writing: an autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 356–7. Quoted in Shelden, p. 227. Waugh, a friend and admirer of Greene, reproached him for his unorthodox doctrines in his review of The Heart of the Matter. For details, see Donald Greene, ‘Greene and Waugh, “Catholic



Notes to pages 20–36 159

Notes to pages 36–49

Novelists” ’ in Jeffrey Meyers ed., Graham Greene: a revaluation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); and on his Gnosticism, David H. Hesla, ‘Theological Ambiguity in the Catholic Novels’ in Robert O. Evans ed., Graham Greene: some critical considerations (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1963). 23. The final comment is from Frederick R. Karl, A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), p. 103; the others are listed in the opening of this chapter. 24. Mesnet, p. 60. 25. Matthew Price, ‘Sinner Take All: Graham Greene’s damned reception’ in The Bookforum Oct./Nov. issue 2004.

3 The Heart of the Matter 1. PG, 139. 2. The opposing views of reviewer and editor are discussed in Helen Gardner, Religion and Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), pp. 121f. 3. In a letter Greene wrote to Elizabeth Bowen, printed in E. Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett eds, Why Do I Write? (London: P. Marshall, 1948), p. 32. 4. Hymn #674 by Mary Butler, in the revised edition of the Church Hymnary (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). The second passage is from the opening of Gerard Manly Hopkins’s ‘Thou Art Indeed Just’. 5. John Cornwell, ‘Why I am still a Catholic’, an interview with Greene in Cassis, pp. 457f. 6. Michael W. Higgins, ‘Greene’s Priest’ in Peter E. Wolfe ed., Essays in Graham Greene: an annual review 3, and Terry Eagleton, Exiles & Emigrés: studies in modern literature (New York: Shocken, 1970), p. 109. 7. Raymond Chapman, ‘The Vision of Graham Greene’ in Nathan A. Scott ed., Forms of Extremity in the Modern Novel (Richmond, CA: John Knox Press, 1965), pp. 92–3, and Cates Baldridge, Graham Greene’s Fictions: the virtues of extremity (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 68. 8. Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God, trans. Maurice Friedman (Harper: New York, 1957), p. 129. On Greene’s relationship to existentialism, cf. James Noxon, ‘Kierkegaard’s Stages and A Burnt-Out Case’ in the Review of English Literature 3 (1962), p. 90. 9. Baldridge, pp. 55f. 10. Heinz Antor, ‘Graham Greene as a Catholic Novelist’ in P. Erlebach and T.M. Stein eds, Graham Greene in Perspective (Frankfurt-on-Main: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 91. 11. Baldridge modifies this statement later, referring to the parody of Protestantism in the portrayal of the Lehrs (pp. 55–6); but his book is devoted throughout to arguing for Greene’s Protestant-type unorthodoxy. The discussion of Greene’s paradoxical God is on pp. 71f. 12. Helen Gardner ed., The Divine Poems of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 9. The Scobie references are to pp. 225 and 237. 13. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 361, preceded by James Haffley, ‘The Villain in Wuthering Heights’



160

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

and W.B. Stein, ‘The Aspen Papers; a comedy of masks’, in Nineteenth Century Fiction 13 (1958), p. 199, and 14 (1959), p. 172 respectively. Anthony Trollope, The Duke’s Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 470–1. Evelyn Waugh, ‘Felix Culpa’, first published in The Tablet in 1948 and reprinted in Samuel Hynes ed., Graham Greene: a collection of critical essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1773), p. 95. Kunkel, p. 124. R.W.B. Lewis, ‘The Trilogy’ in Hynes, p. 49. Kurismmootil, p. 100. F.N. Lees, ‘Graham Greene: a comment,’ Scrutiny 19 (1952–53), 36, and Karen M. Radell, Affirmation in a Moral Wasteland: a comparison of Ford Madox Ford and Graham Greene (New York: Peter Lang, 1987). Waugh, ‘Felix Culpa’ in Hynes’ collection of essays, described this novel as a book ‘only a Catholic can understand’. J.C. Whitehouse, Vertical Man: the human being in the Catholic novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 51, makes the valid point that Helen’s affair with Scobie is prompted less by love for him than by her need of a palliative for her despair. R. Miller’s ‘Scobie’s Faith’, in the Hill collection, takes a contrary view, that the reader identifies with Helen’s strictures. In contrast to the Old Testament, which restricts the term adultery to liaisons involving a married woman and hence would exclude the recently widowed Helen, Catholicism includes in that category liaisons in which only the male is married. Gabriel Marcel, Être et Avoir trans. Katherine Farrar (New York: Harper, 1955), pp. 196–7. George Orwell, ‘The Sanctified Sinner’, in The New Yorker (July 17, 1948), pp. 61–3. Cf. Otto Preminger’s account of their joint visit to a brothel, as recorded in Cassis. Waugh, ‘Felix Culpa’ and Canon Joseph Cartmell, ‘A Postscript to Evelyn Waugh’ published in Commonweal 48 (16 July 1948), pp. 325–6, expressing in its opening remarks the canon’s approval of Waugh’s response. Tom Burns, the co-owner of the Catholic Tablet, in a letter to Waugh summarising his response to the novel, described Greene caustically as ‘a sort of smart-Alec of Jansenism’, a remark that seems to have been transmitted to Greene himself, prompting his story ‘A Visit to Morin’. Cf. Alan Grob, ‘The Power and the Glory: Graham Greene’s Argument from Design’ in Criticism 11 (1969), p. 1. Augustine, The City of God 1: sections 15–27, and Donne, Biathanatos (London, 1644), p. 216. Cf., for example, David Lodge’s comment, in his pamphlet on Greene in the Columbia Series On Modern Writers (New York, 1966) that the end of the novel ‘leaves little doubt’ that Scobie is not saved. In his preface to the novel, written for the Collected Edition. Sharrock, p. 152. Sherry, 1: pp. 292–3 and 337.




162


1. Details of these parallels are recorded in Sherry’s Life, notably 2: 219, 2: 259f., and 2: 507. The affair with Catherine began in 1947 and drew to its close in 1955, the novel being published in 1951. 2. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 151. The concept is based upon Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction. See also, Mieke Bal, Narratology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 3. Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 218. 4. Letter to Catherine, 31 August 1956, quoted in Sherry, 2: p. 505. 5. See, for example, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 100f., as well as Booth, pp. 339–74. 6. Booth, p. 362. 7. ‘Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex’ in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud trans. and ed. A.A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 598. 8. Ibid, p. 575. 9. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (London: Hogarth, 1985), p. 108. 10. D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958, orig. 1915), p. 322. On this aspect, see H.M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: a study of D.H. Lawrence (London: Faber & Faber, 1965). Daleski applied the same approach to this novel in his The Divided Heroine: a recurrent pattern in six English novels (New York: Homes & Meier, 1984), pp. 133f.

5 A Burnt-Out Case 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

Boardman, p. 140. Gaston, p. 78. Graham Greene. In Search of a Character (New York: Viking, 1961), p. 31 Robert Pendleton, Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot: the arabesques of influence (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 111. Conrad, Joseph, The Heart of Darkness (New York; Signet, 1950), pp. 95 and 113. Eagleton, p. 123. Hoskins, pp. 172f. The English Poems of George Herbert ed., C.A. Patrides (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1977), pp. 161–2. Cf. William Perkins, ‘A Treatise of Vocations’ in Workes (Cambridge: John Legatt. 1608–09), vol.1. From Frank Kermode’s negative review of the book in Encounter 16 (1961), and Cedric Watts, A Preface to Greene (Harlow: Longman, 1997), p. 68. Neil Sinyard, Graham Greene: a literary life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 70, argues similarly that the story is ‘clearly an allegory of himself’. For Greene’s admiration of Huxley, see Sherry, 1: p. 312. Michael Davis ed., The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), p. 778, and D.J. Dooley, ‘The Suspension of Disbelief: Greene’s Burnt-Out Case’ Dalhousie Review 43 (1963), p. 347. Heinz Antor, ‘Graham Greene as a Catholic Novelist’ in Erlebach and Stein, p. 91, takes a view of the ending similar to my own. The quotation is from Walter Savage Landor’s poem, ‘Finis’.



4 The End of the Affair


1. Krutch, pp. 52 and 93; and George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1956), which presented an essentially similar view many years later. 2. R.H. Miller, Understanding Graham Greene (Columbia, SC, 1990), p. 118. 3. Hoskins, p. 180. 4. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 27. 5. Sharrock, p. 227. 6. The Ministry of Fear, p. 77. 7. In R.H. Miller’s view (p. 118), for example, Brown’s sole contribution to the novel is his function as a ‘dispassionate narrator’, a quality deriving from his ‘rootless, undoctrinaire’ character. 8. Aquinas’ view in the Summa Theologica is quoted in Kunkel, p. 143. 9. Details are provided in the second volume of Sherry’s biography. 10. Allain, p. 158. 11. Richard Kelly, Graham Greene (New York: Ungar, 1984), pp. 85–6. 12. Gaston, p. 96. Gaston’s otherwise perceptive analysis assumes that Brown changes fundamentally in the course of the novel, that he ‘is forced by a series of events to enter into the violent action which has been revolving around him’. He fails to see that even Brown’s return to Haiti forms part of his covert longing for involvement, that the prêtre manqué element is impelling him throughout. On the reason for his aiding Jones, see also Paul O’Prey, A Reader’s Guide to Graham Greene (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), p. 118: ‘his sole impulse is jealousy … he has lost completely the capacity to be concerned’, a viewpoint accepted also by David Lodge, p. 44, and Neil McEwan, Graham Greene (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), p. 92. 13. Brian Thomas, An Underground Fate: the idiom of romance in the later novels of Graham Greene (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 156. 14. R.H. Miller (p. 90) declares unequivocally that A Burnt Out Case marked the conclusion of Greene’s exploration of religious themes, while others, such as Peter Mudford, Graham Greene (Plymouth: British Council, 1996), p. 3, and John Spurling, p. 45 place the break even before that, identifying The End of the Affair as the last of the Catholic novels. 15. Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 152. 16. Sharrock, p. 24. 17. Lodge, p. 44. 18. A.A. DeVitis, Graham Greene (Boston: Twayne, 1986), p. 130: ‘Brown makes no real commitment to anything, not to love, not to religion, not to God, not to innocence. It is only right that at the novel’s end he becomes a partner in an undertaking business. In his black suit and black hat he appears a comic Baron Samedi.’ Pierloot, p. 175, takes a similar view, that Brown is condemned at the conclusion to a ‘futile existence as an undertaker, a compromise with tragedy and death’.

7 The Honarary Consul 1. Among Greene’s many signs of irritation on this point was his statement: ‘I would claim not to be a writer of Catholic novels, but a writer who in four



6 The Comedians


or five books took characters with Catholic ideas for his material.’ It appears as a footnote to his In Search of a Character (London: Bodley Head, 1961), p. 26. 2. As noted in an earlier chapter, the double-meaning of ‘father’ in these novels was first perceived by Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan. 3. For a valuable discussion of Saarveda’s warped conception of novel-writing, as well as of his eventual redemption when he offers himself as a hostage, see Smith, pp. 177f.

8 Monsignor Quixote 1. Giovannino Guareschi, Don Camillo and His Flock (New York: Pocket Books, 1955), pp. 70–6 and 229f. Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote: an intertextual analysis’ in Erlebach and Stein, p. 161 notes this indebtedness, which would have been obvious to Greene’s contemporaries. 2. Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1: p. 4. I have used the electronic text by Project Gutenberg, which employs John Ormsby’s translation. 3. Herzog, p. 340. 4. Don Quixote, 2: p. 74. 5. There is an excellent study of the indebtedness in Jae-Suck Choi, Greene and Unamuno: two pilgrims to Mancha (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 6. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life trans. F.E.C. Finch (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 21. 7. Hoskins, p. 258. 8. The incident is ridiculed in the porter’s repeated references to ‘equivocation’ in Act 2, scene 3 of Macbeth. 9. Hill, p. 1.



164

Allain, Marie-Françoise, The Other Man: conversations with Graham Greene trans. G. Waldman. London: Bodley Head, 1983. Bal, Mieke, Narratology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Baldridge, Cates, Graham Greene’s Fictions: the virtues of extremity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Beegel, Susan, Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1988. Boardman, Gwenn R., Graham Greene: the aesthetics of exploration. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971. Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Bosco, Mark S.J., Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Cassis, A.F. ed., Graham Greene: man of paradox. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994. Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Choi, Jae-Suck, Greene and Unamuno: two pilgrims to Mancha. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Crawford, F.D., Mixing Memory and Desire. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982. Crossman, Richard ed., The God that Failed. New York: Bantam Books, 1965. DeVitis, A.A., Graham Greene. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Dooley, D.J., ‘The Suspension of Disbelief: Greene’s Burnt-Out Case’ Dalhousie Review 43 (1963), p. 34. Eagleton, Terry, Exiles & Emigrés: studies in modern literature. New York: Shocken, 1970. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphne, Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Erlebach, P. and Stein, T.M. eds, Graham Greene in Perspective. Frankfurt-on-Main: Peter Lang, 1991. Evans, Robert O. ed., Graham Greene: some critical considerations. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1963. Fraser, Theodore P., The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe. New York: Twayne, 1994. Galloway, David, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Gorra, Michael, The English Novel at Mid-Century. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1990. Grob, Alan, ‘The Power and the Glory: Graham Greene’s Argument from Design’ Criticism 11 (1969), p. 1. Hassan, Ihab, Radical Innocence: studies in the contemporary American novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Higgins, Michael W., ‘Greene’s Priest: A Sort of Rebel’, Essays in Graham Greene: an annual review, 3, 1987–92. Hill, W.T. ed., Perceptions of Religious Faith in the Works of Graham Greene. Bern: Peter Lang, 2002. 165



Select Bibliography

Select Bibliography

Hoskins, Robert, Graham Greene: an approach to the novels. New York: Garland, 1999. Jauss, Hans Robert, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1982. Kelly, Richard, Graham Greene. New York: Ungar, 1984. Kunkel, Francis L., The Labyrinthine Ways of Graham Greene. Marmaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1973. Kurismmootil, K.C.J., S.J., Heaven and Hell on Earth: an appreciation of five novels of Graham Greene. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982. Lewis, R.W.B., The Picaresque Saint: representative figures in contemporary fiction. Philadelphia: Lippincot, 1958. Lodge, David, Graham Greene. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. McEwan, Neil, Graham Greene. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1988. Mesnet, Marie B., Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter. Westport: Greenwood, 1954. Meyers, Jeffrey ed., Graham Greene: a revaluation. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. Miller, R.H., Understanding Graham Greene. Columbia, SC, 1990. Mudford, Peter, Graham Greene. Plymouth: British Council, 1996. O’Prey Paul, A Reader’s Guide to Graham Greene. London: Thames & Hudson, 1988. Pendleton, Robert, Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot: the arabesques of influence. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Pierloot, Roland A., Psychoanalytic Patterns in the Work of Graham Greene. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Pryce-Jones, David, Graham Greene. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963. Radell, Karen M., Affirmation in a Moral Wasteland: a comparison of Ford Madox Ford and Graham Greene. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction. London: Methuen, 1983. Scott, Nathan, ed., Forms of Extremity in the Modern Novel. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1965. Sharrock, Roger, Saints, Sinners, and Comedians: the novels of Graham Greene. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Shelden, Michael, Graham Greene: the enemy within. London: Heineman, 1994. Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene, 3 vols. New York: Penguin, 1989–2004. Sinyard, Neil, Graham Greene: a literary life. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Spurling, John, Graham Greene. London: Methuen, 1983. Thomas, Brian, An Underground Fate: the idiom of romance in the later novels of Graham Greene. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1988. Turnell, Martin, Graham Greene: a critical essay. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967. Watts, Cedric, A Preface to Greene. Harlow: Longman, 1997. West, W.J., The Quest for Graham Greene. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Whitehouse, J.C., Vertical Man: the human being in the Catholic novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos. New York: Garland, 1990. Wisse, Ruth, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971.



166

Allain, M.-F., 116 Allott, Miriam, 4 anti-hero, 7, 15–17, 21, 40–1 Antor, Heinz, 47 Arnheim, Rudolf, 29 Bakhtin, M.M., 20–1 Bal, Mieke, 162 n2 Baldridge, Cates, 47 Beckett, Samuel, 8 Beegel, Susan, 159 n16 Bellow, Saul, 16, 146 biographical reading, 1–5, 44, 65–7 Boardman, Gwenn, 19, 83 Bosco, Mark, S.J., 159 n6 Booth, Wayne, 48, 71 Buber, Martin, 45–6 Burns, Tom, 161 n27 Camus, Albert, 7 Cartmell, Canon Joseph, 59 casuistry, 152–3 Catullus, 73 Cervantes, 141 Chapman, Raymond, 160 n7 Chatman, Seymour, 66 Choi, Jae-Suck, 164 n5 communion, 54, 154 Communism, 30–4, 122, 142 confessional, 54–5, 119 Conrad, Joseph, 91–2 Cornwell, John, 160 n5 Crawford, E.D., 158 n3 Daleski, H.M., 162 n10 Derrida, Jacques, 6 despair, religious, 53 DeVitis, A.A., 123 Dickens, Charles, 22 divine image, 32–5 Don Camillo, 142 Donne, John, 48, 60, 63 Dooley, J.D., 101

Eagleton, Terry, 44, 93 Eliot, T.S., 12, 17, 90, 107, 112 Empson, William, 73 Erdinast-Vulcan, D., 26, 125 existentialism, 28, 45, 57, 105–6, 115, 136–7, 151 father-child relations, 26, 56, 125 Fish, Stanley E., 6 Forster, E.M., 27 framing, 29–30 Fraser, Theodore F., 159 n10 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 32, 40, 73 Galloway, David, 158 n1 Gardner, Helen, 160 n2 Gaston, Georg M.A., 27, 90, 118 Greene, Donald, 159 n22 GREENE, GRAHAM: ‘entertainments’, 12, 125 humour, 72, 104 prevarication, 2–5 Russian roulette, 3 topicality, 5 travels, 1–5 ‘unorthodoxy’ 5, 36, 42–8, 59, 99, 135, 151, 156 A Visit to Morin, 161 n27 Brighton Rock, 11–14 The Lawless Roads, 2, 137 The Ministry of Fear, 110 The Quiet American, 14, 107–8 Travels with My Aunt, 144 attitudes to: adultery, 57–8, 116, 127, 136–7 existentialism, 28, 45, 57, 101, 104–6, 114–15 piety, 38–9, 57 ritual, 45–6,137, 154 sinners, 42 Glover, Dorothy, 116 Gorra, Michael, 121 167



Index

Index

Grob, Alan, 161 n28 Guareschi, G., 142 Haffley, James, 160 n13 hagiography, 37–9 Hardy, Thomas, 110 Hassan, Ihab, 15, 143 Hemingway, Ernest, 30 Herbert, George, 93–4 Hesla, David H., 160 n21 Higgins, Michael, 19, 21, 44 Hill, William, 155 Hopkins G.M., 43 Hoskins, Robert, 1, 92 Huxley, Aldous, 100 Jauss, Hans, 6–7, 155 Jone, Heribert, 152–3 Karl, Frederick R., 160 n22 Kelly, Richard, 118 Kermode. Frank, 42, 48, 99 Kesey, Ken, 146 Koestler, Arthur, 33–4 Krutch, J.W., 8, 105 Kunkel, Francis, 5, 18, 52 Kurismmoutil, K.C., 19, 53, 119 Lawrence, D.H., 9, 74 Lees. E.N., 53 Lewis, C.S., 43 Lewis, R.W.B., 19, 52 Lodge, David, 123, 161 n30 love-hate, 73 Luther, Martin, 153 Marcel, Gabriel, 57, 134 Mauriac, François, 9, 11 McEwan, Neil, 163 n12 Mesnet, Marie, 1, 39 Mewshaw, Michael, 3 Miller, R.H., 105, 113, 163 n7, n14 Milton, 88 Moses, 45, 77 Mudford, Peter, 163 n14 Miller, R.H., 163 n7 and n14 narratology, 48–50, 66, 70–1 Newman, Cardinal, 43 Norton, James, 44

O’Prey, Paul, 163 n12 Olderman, R.M., 158 n4 Orwell, George, 57 Pendleton, Robert, 91 Perkins, William, 95 picaresque, 19–20, 143–4 Pierloot, Roland, 1 Plath, Sylvia, 7 Pope Paul VI, 43 Preminger, Otto, 127 prêtre manqué, 32, 55, 85–6, 95, 97, 115–16, 122, 125 Price, Matthew, 39 Pritchett, V.S., 157 n4 Pryce-Jones, D., 18 Radell, Karen, 53 Rimmon-Kenan, S., 162 n5 Roth, Philip, 67 Salinger, J.D., 16–17, 146 Scharf, Aaron, 159 n15 Schweitzer, Albert, 5, 8, 84–5, 87–9 Sharrock, Roger, 18, 62, 109 Shelden, Michael, 3 Sherry, Norman, 2–3 Sinyard, Neil, 162 n10 Spurling, John, 157 n2, 163 n14 St John of the Cross, 74, 94, 98, 153 Stein, W.B., 161 n13 suicide, 60 Tertullian, 151 Thackeray, W.M., 15 Thomas, Brian, 118 Tillich, Paul, 38, 137 Trollope, A., 7, 49, 73 Unanumo, Miguel de, 150–1 vocation, 31, 96, 115 Walston, Catherine, 65, 68–9, 93, 116 Watts, Cedric, 99 Waugh, Evelyn, 10–11, 51, 58–9, 101, 155 West. W.J., 1 Whitehouse, J.C., 161 n21 Wisse, Ruth, 158 n1 Woolf, Virginia, 73



168

Graham Greene's Narrative Strategies: A Study of the Major Novels

Graham Greene: An Approach to the Novels

Hawthorne's narrative strategies

Jane Austen's Novels: A Study in Structure

Narrative Strategies in Television Series

Narrative Strategies in Television Series

Brutal choreographies: oppositional strategies and narrative design in the novels of Margaret Atwood

Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels of Graham Greene (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

The Frontiersman - A Narrative

Ratio and invention: a study of medieval lyric and narrative

Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse (Studies in Narrative, V. 3)

Masterton, Graham - The Pariah

(Graham Masterton) The Manitou

New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film

Study Strategies for Lifelong Learning

(Graham Masterton) The Pariah

Masterton, Graham - The Manitou

(Graham Masterton) The Djinn

Masterton, Graham - The Sphinx

The Sociolinguistics of Narrative

(Graham Masterton) The Sphinx

Masterton, Graham - The Djinn

Heather Graham - The Presence

Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Frontiers of Narrative)

Contemporary Spanish American Novels by Women: Mapping the Narrative (Monografias A) (Monografias A)

Graham Victor

Graham Victor

Major

Major

Major

Major

Graham Greene's Narrative Strategies: A Study of the Major Novels

Graham Greene: An Approach to the Novels

Hawthorne's narrative strategies

Jane Austen's Novels: A Study in Structure

Narrative Strategies in Television Series

Narrative Strategies in Television Series

Brutal choreographies: oppositional strategies and narrative design in the novels of Margaret Atwood

Fighting Evil: Unsung Heroes in the Novels of Graham Greene (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

The Frontiersman - A Narrative

Ratio and invention: a study of medieval lyric and narrative

Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse (Studies in Narrative, V. 3)

Masterton, Graham - The Pariah

(Graham Masterton) The Manitou

New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film

Study Strategies for Lifelong Learning

(Graham Masterton) The Pariah

Masterton, Graham - The Manitou

(Graham Masterton) The Djinn

Masterton, Graham - The Sphinx

The Sociolinguistics of Narrative

(Graham Masterton) The Sphinx

Masterton, Graham - The Djinn

Heather Graham - The Presence

Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Frontiers of Narrative)

Contemporary Spanish American Novels by Women: Mapping the Narrative (Monografias A) (Monografias A)

Graham Victor

Graham Victor

Major

Major

Major

Major

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