Graham Greene: The Man and the Message

WITHIN the past decade, Graham Greene, now in his fifty-seventh year, has become one of the handful of contemporary novelists who enjoy both a major literary reputation and large-scale popularity. He is England’s best-selling author on the European continent; He has been translated into twenty-three languages, including Hebrew and Hindi; twelve movies have been made out of his work; and two of his novels, including his latest, A Burnt-Out Case, have been selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club. In addition to being widely read, Greene has been more voluminously discussed than any of his contemporaries: six books (including two in French and one in German) have been written about him. Among the distinguished writers who have expressed great admiration for his work one finds figures as diverse as François Mauriac and William Faulkner. And informed Swedish critics have spoken of him as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

As a novelist and as a man, Graham Greene is a figure surrounded by paradox, ambiguity, and surprise. To begin with, he has a dual literary personality: for twenty-nine years, he has been a writer both of serious novels and of thrillers, which he labels “entertainments.” Although he is widely regarded in Catholic circles as a leading Catholic novelist, Greene’s theology has been the subject of endless controversy. His admirers include atheists, who maintain that his books unintentionally show up religion as a blight; existentialists, who claim that he is one of them; the Moscow journal Soviet Literature, which sees Greene as a social critic boldly exposing the corruption of capitalist society; and tens of thousands of book buyers who find his storytelling irresistibly readable.

In his autobiographical writings, Greene has frequently expressed a profound attachment to failure — “seedy” has always been his favorite adjective. Yet his own career presents a picture of phenomenal industry and unflagging purpose. From the outset, he made it a rule to write five hundred words a day (“stepped up to seven-fifty as the book gets on”), and today his output totals eleven novels, seven “entertainments,” three plays, two travelogues, two collections of short stories and one of essays, and a volume of verse — twentyseven works all told, plus children’s books, film scripts, and a good deal of journalism.

Personal impressions of Greene vary considerably. Physically, he is a tall, lanky man, with arresting blue eyes, who likes to appear slightly seedy; he looks weather-beaten — as though he had spent a long time out in the rain. Some interviewers have seen the novelist faithfully reflected in the man; they have spoken of his “tormented smile” and “neuralgic agony” of spirit. Others, perhaps too literal-minded, have found Greene’s social manner and his way of life more worldly than his works had led them to imagine.

Two young magazine editors who visited Greene in London were disconcerted to discover that his so-called “hole in the ground” was an extremely snug, well-appointed flat in the aristocratic heartland of Mayfair. “What worries us,” one of them blurted out, “is that you yourself seem so much happier than we expected.” Those who know Greene well do not doubt that the inner man is a battleground on which punishing campaigns are constantly being fought. They emphasize his exceptional kindness, but they also see in him a streak of the schoolboy who delights in mystification and play-acting — Greene is an inveterate and elaborate prankster. But for all his contradictions, one thing is certain about Greene: at the basis of his work there is a deeply passionate and searching concern about the human situation. He is, unmistakably, a man and a writer who puts the Four Last Things first: death, judgment, hell, and heaven.

IN THE United States, Greene failed to make much of a splash until The Heart of the Matter appeared in 1948. Some American readers still think of him as a onetime writer of spy stories who, like Marquand, crossed over to the respectable side of the literary tracks. This is not the case. But Greene’s literary career has certainly been a curious one.

His three earliest books were historical novels with a romantic tinge, written under the influence of Stevenson and Conrad. The first of them, The Man Within — published when Greene was twentyfive — was well received in England. The setting is Sussex in the early nineteenth century, and the hero is in flight from a gang of smugglers he has denounced to the revenue officers. What is most striking about it today is that it introduces so many of the themes which have remained at the center of Greene’s work: betrayal, pursuit, the Greenean hero’s sense of endless self-defilement, the “good” woman as the redeemer, and suicide. The Man Within was followed by two murky failures, which Greene has never allowed to be reprinted. Then, needing money, he turned his hand to a modern thriller, Orient Express (1932), which was a popular success and was made into a Hollywood movie. Ever since then, Greene has alternated regularly between serious fiction and entertainments. But Orient Express killed off the historical novelist, for in the course of writing it, Greene discovered that he was most at home in the contemporary world.

During the nineteen thirties, Greene wrote three more novels, It’s a Battlefield, The Shipwrecked, and Brighton Rock, and two more first-rate thrillers, This Gun for Hire and The Confidential Agent. (The titles of Greene’s books used throughout this essay are the U.S. titles, which sometimes differ from the English. Publication dates given in parentheses refer to the original appearance in England.) It was not until the end of the decade that criticism began to take Greene really seriously. Brighton Rock (1938) marks the turning point in his career. Until then Greene, though converted to Catholicism as far back as 1926, had not explicitly given theology a major role in his fiction. Brighton Rock is the first of his Catholic novels. In it. Greene emerges as a writer seeking to restore the religious sense to the English novel, and theology begins to make his private world fully comprehensible.

However, even the work of Greene’s maturity can be and is read on two different levels. To the initiated, the heart of the matter in Greene is a complex and sometimes ambiguous spiritual dialectic; his novels are, in effect, dramatized theology — a Catholic critic has called them “modern miracle plays.” But one of Greene’s great achievements is that so many people of different persuasions are able to read these novels as realistic narratives and to become deeply involved in the fate of his characters without necessarily accepting, or even fully grasping, the underlying religious argument.

What is remarkable about Greene’s popularity is that it has been achieved with a vision of life that seems relentlessly bleak. In the whole of his fiction, there are probably not a dozen images of natural beauty. It is a world of bad teeth and bitten fingernails, where every form of pleasure is suspect, every love affair doomed; where the ever-recurring simile, “like an infection,” announces that infection lurks everywhere. Greene invests whatever he sees with squalor and heartbreak and wallows in the horror of it all. To be sure, he handles his characters with a poignant compassion, and his major theme is that there is hope for the blackest of sinners, since the human mind cannot comprehend the extent of God’s mercy. Even so, as Sean O’Faolain has wittily observed, Graham Greene, reversing Browning, is forever saying: “God’s in his heaven. All’s wrong with the world.”

The world’s wrongness fills Greene with a mixture of horror and fascination, from which he has managed to distill the spells of authentic drama. He is a consummately skillful storyteller, a master of incident, suspense, and atmosphere. One of the three or four finest stylists writing in English today, he has brought to the serious novel the swift transitions of the cinema. The compelling quality of his work stems, too, from the extraordinary intensity with which his vision of the world is experienced. To be sure, there are in Greene’s novels many meretricious bits of business; scenes that are blatantly “rigged”; manifestations of grace so contrived that even to that defiant Catholic, Evelyn Waugh, they have a “whiff of occultism”; and passages which seem to have been written by a clever schoolboy trying to score off his opponents. But the underlying vision, even if one repudiates it, is unmistakably something deeply felt, and one is not surprised to learn from Greene that his private world was perceived “once and for all” in childhood and adolescence. “Religion,” he has written, “might explain it later, but the pattern was already there.” And the pattern reveals with startling clarity how intimately and how directly Greene’s work is linked to his spiritual autobiography.

GREENE, the fourth of six children, was born in 1904 in Berkhampstead, a town near London best known for its boy’s school, of which Greene’s father was headmaster. When he entered the school, he became the inhabitant of “two countries" separated only by a door, through which he returned home on Saturdays and Sundays. How could this life on a border, he later wrote, be other than restless? “In the land of stone stairs and cracked bells ringing early, one was aware of fear and hate, a kind of lawlessness. . . . One met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil. There was Collifax, who practiced torments with dividers; Mr. Cranden, with three grim chins, a dusty gown, a kind of demoniac sensuality. . . . Parlow, whose desk was filled with . . . advertisements of art photos. Hell lay about them in their infancy.” Obviously, from his early days, Greene was imbued with a preternatural sense of evil. Peter Quennell, who went to the same school, found it an innocuous place, “strangely transmogrified" in Greene’s recollections.

Periodically, Greene would escape surreptitiously to the other country across the border, with its fruit trees and its rooms smelling of “books . . . and eau-de-cologne.” In these moments of release, he “became aware of God with an intensity. . . . And so faith came to one — shapelessly, without dogma, a presence above a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell.”

The future “really struck” when Greene, at fourteen, read Marjorie Bowen’s novel The Viper of Milan, a lurid story of the wars between the dukes of Milan and Verona. “From that moment I began to write. ... It was as if I had been supplied once and for all with a subject.” In his essay “The Lost Childhood,” Greene wrote: “She had given me my pattern . . . perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again. . . . Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in the human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey. I. read all that in The Viper of Milan . . . and I saw that it was so. There was another theme I found there . . . the sense of doom that lies over success. . . . And when success began to touch oneself, too, however mildly, one could only pray that failure would not be held off too long.”

In spite of his dramatic inner life, Greene’s childhood was haunted, he says, by boredom. Eventually he ran away from school and hid out on the Common, only to be humiliatingly ambushed after a few hours by his elder sister. His parents sent him to a London psychoanalyst, in whose house he spent “delightful months — perhaps the happiest months of my life.” The analysis, however, was hardly fruitful: “I emerged . . . correctly orientated . . . but wrung dry . . . . I was fixed in my boredom.” Nevertheless, Greene’s exposure to Freud is noticeable in his work — in the extensive use he makes of dreams to reveal the inner life and in his emphasis that the seeds of corruption are sown in the “lost childhood.”

After his analysis, Greene fell in love. But his despairing passion for his sister’s governess had the quite unusual effect of intensifying his boredom, and he resorted to a drastic remedy. Five or six years earlier he had attempted suicide on four occasions, by drinking photographic developing fluid, and later hay fever lotion, thinking they were poisonous; by eating a bunch of “deadly” nightshade; and by swallowing twenty aspirins and diving into a deserted swimming pool. Now he played Russian roulette with his brother’s six-chambered revolver. His gamble with death had the effect of an exhilarating drug, and for several years he periodically repeated it until he found he wasn’t even excited. “The war against boredom had got to go on”; and Greene is still fighting it. A friend has described him as “the world’s greatest master of the art of being bored without being boring.”

In contrast to Greene’s early years, the first phase of his adult life was in no way spectacular. At Oxford he published a conventionally romantic book of verse entitled Babbling April; and he joined and quickly deserted the Communist Party. After leaving Oxford and short-lived jobs with a tobacco company and as a tutor, Greene settled down to journalism. A year later, at the age of twenty-two, his impending marriage to a Roman Catholic made him decide that he “ought to learn about Catholicism.” During his instruction he became “convinced by specific arguments in the probability of [the Church’s] creed,” and he began to be aware of “the appalling mysteries of love moving through a ravaged world.”

One more event in Greene’s personal history seems to have played an important part in shaping his fictional universe: a trip, described in Journey Without Maps (1936), to the interior of Liberia. Ever since, as a small boy, he had read with “appalled glee” the novels of H. Rider Haggard, Africa had represented to him, and still does, “a strangeness, a wanting to know ... a nostalgia for something lost.” And the African safari was consciously prompted by “a curiosity to discover . . . from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.”

In spite of the squalor and the barbarism that met his eye, Greene was deeply stirred by the bareness of the African’s needs, his spontaneous gentleness and love, and the “depth and purity” of his terror. Toward the end of the trek, he had an experience that was “like a conversion.”After pulling out of a severe bout of fever, “I discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before . . . that death was desirable.” Greene returned with a heightened disappointment in what civilization had made out of the childhood of man; a conviction that something of value was lost when the primitive’s awed sense of supernatural evil was transformed into “small human viciousness.” His immersion in primitive Africa, with its witches, its devil dances, its uninhibited symbolization, had in effect carried him back to and revivified his demon-haunted childhood. The hero of Greene’s next book was directly inspired by the diabolic schoolboys at Berkhampstead, and, like the youthful Greene, he literally sees the dark furnishings of hell everywhere around him.

THE plot of Brighton Rock is based, as are the plots of many of Greene’s novels, on material from the daily newspaper: a clash between rival race-track gangs extorting tribute from the Brighton bookies. On the surface, it is a densely plotted tale of murder and amateur detection, whose central figure, Pinkie, is an adolescent gangster of limitless malevolence. But the novel is informed by a dark theology which places the supernatural in implacable opposition to ordinary human values. The diabolic Pinkie is seen as a tragic figure, and his progress in evil is presented with a horrified compassion. His pursuer, Ida, a fun-loving, maternal, cheerily sensual woman, intent on tracking down the killer of a man who spent his last hours with her, is a comic villain, whose “normality” is made to appear monstrous. In Greene’s eyes, Ida, with her boozy love of life and her inviting bosom, her middle-class assurance of what’s right, and her passion for justice on this earth, is the natural enemy of religion, a personification of invincible ignorance. Pinkie, a “Roman,” at least knows. As a child he swore he would be a priest, and even now he is scornful of those so blind they cannot see that there’s assuredly a hell, and “maybe” a heaven.

The third major character, Rose, the waif Pinkie marries so that she cannot give evidence against him, is as irretrievably good as he is evil. But she loves and is willing to be damned for Pinkie, and resents Ida’s efforts to save her from him. For Rose and Pinkie, good and evil, inhabit the same world, to which people like Ida are strangers — “the ravaged and disputed territory between the two eternities.”

There is a certain tin-chapel stridency, even a hint of the Manichee, in Greene’s avid insistence on the ubiquity and power of evil. Religion itself, as R. W. B. Lewis has pointed out in an acute study of Greene, often appears in his work as “an insidious, a perverse, an exhausting and lifedenying emotion.” Greene so arranges things that genuine faith seems incompatible with happiness. His conventionally pious characters are usually repulsive Pharisees. And he seems to forget or deny that God can be loved by the relatively sinless.

Greene is deeply imbued with Pascal’s view that “Man achieves greatness to the extent that he knows himself to be miserable.” For Greene, man learns of his relationship to God only through a wrenching awareness of the world’s pain and corruption, and without this relationship, man is condemned to nonexistence. Greene transforms Descartes’s famous proposition into, “I suffer, therefore I am.” The capacity for sin and suffering becomes the measure of aliveness, of how “hot" is one’s relationship to God. Many of Greene’s readers would agree with George Orwell’s remark that he creates the impression there is something distingue about being damned.

Throughout Greene’s work there runs Peguy’s idea that “The sinner is at the very heart of Christendom. No one knows more about Christianity than the sinner. No one, unless it is the saint. And in principle they are the same man.” The greatest saints, Greene wrote in a discussion of the self-styled Baron Corvo, “have been men with a more than normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have narrowly evaded sanctity.” Corruptio optimi est pessima. The hero of Brighton Rock, damned by Luciferian pride, is a saint manqué. Greene’s next hero is a sanctified sinner.

In 1938, Greene made a trip to Mexico to investigate the government’s persecution of the Church. Out of it came a travel book, Another Mexico, then The Power and the Glory (1940), first published in the United States as The Labyrinthine Ways, which possibly remains his finest novel.

The state of Tabasco is at once an image of the godless modern world and also of the wasteland of original sin; and the nameless “whiskey-priest” is the object of two pursuits — he is hunted by the police for performing his office, and the Hound of Heaven is at his heels. His conscience tells him, tormentingly, that he is a disgrace to the priesthood, a drunkard, a coward, and a fornicator who has fathered a child. He realizes that his godless antagonist, the idealistic police lieutenant, has all the exemplary human qualities he should have himself. But the redemptive power of God’s love does not depend on the spiritual condition of His priests, whereas the lieutenant’s revolutionary idealism has a fatal flaw: “There won’t always be good men in your party. Then you’ll have the old starvation, beating, get-rich-anyhow.”

The priest’s lonely, harrowing trek through the hovels and jungles of Tabasco becomes an allegory of the soul’s arduous journey toward salvation. In his degradation and suffering, the priest learns a humility, a love, a trust in God which he never knew in the old days when he was safe and comparatively innocent. The climax is faintly marred by a too pat parallelism to the Passion of Christ. But, as a whole, The Power and the Glory is a highly satisfying and extremely moving work of art, in which ideas, plot, and setting interpenetrate each other and almost every formal detail gives resonance to the story’s inner meanings.

A TOWN on the West Coast of Africa, where Greene worked for British Intelligence during the war, is the setting for The Heart of the Matter (1948). Its hero, Major Scobie, is a devout Catholic and a colonial administrator of legendary integrity and humanity. But pity for his neurotic wife leads Scobie to borrow money from a notorious Syrian diamond smuggler so that he can send her off on a holiday. And while she is away, pity from a very young widow rescued from a torpedoed ship leads Scobie into a lugubrious love affair. In a futile effort to spare his wife and his mistress from pain, Scobie, with a horror of what he is doing to God, advances deeper into sin and eventually commits suicide.

A certain fuzziness in Greene’s portraiture of Scobie sometimes encourages the impression that it is Scobie’s love of God which actuates his disastrous orgy of pity, and this leads to the paradoxical conclusion that Scobie is propelled into mortal sin because he is good. But, throughout Greene’s work, pity is repeatedly condemned as “the worst sin of all” — a mask for self-pity, or a sign that one is substituting oneself for God. Thus, Scobie’s “terrible promiscuous” pity is a fatal human flaw in conflict with his love of God. My reading of the conclusion is that Greene is not “justifying” Scobie; he is simply asserting that only God knows what was in Scobie’s heart in the moments before he died and that God’s mercy is infinite. Evelyn Waugh, a friend and admirer of Greene’s, found the handling of the suicide “a mad blasphemy.” Greene himself has said: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I wrote a book about a man who goes to hell — Brighton Rock — another about a man who goes to heaven — The Power and the Glory. Now I’ve simply written one about a man who goes to purgatory.”

The first half of The End of the Affair (1951) is a strong, brilliantly suspenseful tale of suburban adultery and obsessive jealousy, with a minor characterization (the Dickensian private detective) that is a comic masterpiece. The second half shows how an irreligious, sensual young woman arrives at sanctitude, and it is attended by a blunt assertion of miracles and a pat exposition of the workings of grace. Catholic as well as nonCatholic critics have complained that when the supernatural takes charge of the plot, the literary machinery creaks.

The Quiet American (1955), a novel about the war in Indochina (which Greene covered for the London Times), was treated by some critics as a political tract, hostile to America and “soft” toward Communism. Actually, its argument is that a dedication to improving the world, when it is not informed by a religious conscience, is doomed to make things worse. The novel has two weaknesses. Focusing, as it does, on a real political situation, it raises a practical issue of policy and proceeds to evade it. For Greene recognizes that the English correspondent’s total noninvolvement is hardly less irresponsible than the American’s overinvolvement. The characterization of the American, moreover, is not much more than a caricature. But the narrative, with its crosscurrents of love and complex intrigue, is consistently vivid and exciting.

Greene’s latest novel, A Burnt-Out Case, is a strange tale of spiritual and emotional death and rebirth, set in the interior of Africa, where Greene himself experienced a dramatic awakening. Its mysterious hero, Querry, has traveled to the Congo to get as far away as possible from civilization, and he becomes the guest of a remote leprosarium run by Belgian priests and nuns. Querry, once a famous Church architect, is a man reduced to such total aridity that he has even lost the capacity to suffer. Eventually he reveals, somewhat cryptically, that the disease which has reduced him to nothingness was success. It brought him boredom, disgust with his reputation, and the discovery that he was a fraud, that he did not love anyone and had ceased to believe in God.

Meanwhile, in a world where life is stripped to the essentials, Querry begins to rediscover a reason for living. A leper who has an accident in the forest gives him “the odd sensation that [someone] needed me.” He makes himself useful to the mission. He has a twinge of suffering and begins “to feel part of the human condition.” When an absurd death overtakes him, his last words are: “This is absurd or else. . . .” And it is a safe guess that the unfinished phrase is “or else there is a God.” Querry has traveled a good way up the road that leads out of the darkness of success.

A Burnt-Out Case is Greene’s fullest treatment of one of his early fixations — that the wages of success is a kind of death. This quietly absorbing book, artfully charged with mystery and psychological suspense, is one of Greene’s best novels. One feels that he put more of himself into it than into any other of his works.

GREENE’S entertainments differ from his novels in having a minimum of comment and a maximum of incident, less development of character, and a concession to the happy ending. But the vision remains the same. The protagonists are hounded not only by the police or political enemies but by guilt, the horror of life, a sense of moral implication in the criminality of the modern world. In Greene’s hands, the melodrama of contemporary intrigue becomes infused with spiritual meaning.

“Talent,” Greene has said, “even of a very high order, cannot sustain an achievement, whereas a ruling passion . . . gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.” Greene’s ruling passion — his intense consciousness of evil — has made his novels and entertainments pieces of the same sharply defined fictional universe, which the English critics call Greeneland. It is a world, we have seen, uniquely formed of elements ancient and modern: Christ’s Passion and the sordid catalogue of contemporary violence; Pascal and psychoanalysis; the defiant assertion of miracles and the literary techniques of the suspense story. Constantly re-enacted in this world is a drama of pursuit with four protagonists: the hunter, the hunted, the betrayer, and the long arm of grace. The symbols that give meaning to its landscape — vultures in search of carrion, an injured fly imprisoned under an unwashed tooth glass, fog swirling around lonely street lamps — express corruption, mutilation, the breath of evil. This ravaged landscape of Greene’s is a scenic image of the human condition—a view, so to speak, of original sin. It proclaims that mankind, in Cardinal Newman’s words, “is implicated in some terrible, aboriginal calamity.”

Like the Christian existentialists, Greene sees an unbridgeable gulf between human morality the concern with right and wrong, justice and good works — and theological virtue. Between the world of God and that of man there can be no rational connection: only love links the human and the divine. The priest in Greene’s play, The Living Room, quotes these words from some book of devotion: “The more surely the senses are revolted, uncertain and in despair, the more surely Faith says: ‘This is God: all goes well.’ ”

Greene’s theology uncompromisingly rejects the natural world as a realm of imperfection and corruption, and it admits of no human solutions to the problem of evil. The drama which is the storm center of Greene’s work is a drama of allegiance. Man has the liberty to love God and to recognize that grace is always in pursuit of him. This is his God-given power and glory, and if he repudiates or ignores it and lives by the values of corrupted nature, he reduces himself to a kind of “stubborn non-existence.”

All of Greene’s work is a revolutionary assault on man-made values. Its message is simply this: that the heart of the matter and the end of the affair are man’s relationship to God — “It’s not what you do [that matters]. It’s what you think.”

If Greene’s portrayal of priests is often harsh, it is to emphasize that they, too, are human and cannot comprehend God’s mercy. If a murderer like the harelipped Raven is treated with a curious tenderness, it is because he is an anarchist against man-made morality. Conventional piety and the formal aspects of religion are often slighted because, Greene feels, they tend to drive out the essentials — love of God and love for a corrupt and suffering humanity which is made in God’s image.

Greene shares Baudelaire’s view that the role of civilization has been to cover up the traces of original sin. In the “sinless, graceless, empty, chromium world,” the Greenean sinner symbolically plays a role like that of the detective who proves, in a murder mystery, that somebody believed to be dead is very much alive. By their consciousness of sin, Greene’s sinners affirm what the world around them denies: the existence of God. In Graham Greene, theology and melodrama are inseparable, for his subject, as François Mauriac has said, is “the hidden presence of God in an atheistic world.”