2
Religious matters
The following extracts are all comments by Greene.
From an undated letter to Vivien, probably of early December 1925 (Life I, p. 259):
I’ve suddenly realised that I do believe the Catholic faith. Rationally I’ve believed for some time, but only this evening imaginatively.
From a letter to Vivien, 7 December 1925 (Life I, p. 260):
One can believe in every point of the Catholic faith, and yet at times like this hate the initiator of it all, of life I mean.
From ‘Henry James: The Religious Aspect’, 1933 (CE, p. 49):
The Anglican Church had almost relinquished Hell.…. but no day passed in a Catholic Church without prayers for deliverance from evil spirits ‘wandering through the world for the ruin of souls’.
From ‘The Lost Childhood’, 1947 (CE, p. 17):
Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there.
From A Sort of Life, 1971 (SL, p. 165):
I dislike the word [God] with all its anthropomorphic associations …..
With the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation or darkness.
From an interview in the Observer, 12 March 1978, p. 35:
I’m a Catholic agnostic.
From The Other Man, 1983 (pp. 154, 157, 158, 161, 172–3):
(When I was baptised, I made it clear that I had chosen the name of Thomas to identify myself not with St Thomas Aquinas but with St Thomas Didymus, the doubter.) I eventually came to accept the existence of God not as an absolute truth but as a provisional one.
Personally, though I have never believed in hell, the evil which surrounded me [at school] prepared me for the paradoxes of Christianity.
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. … .The word ‘mortal’ presupposes a fear of hell, which I find meaningless. That being the case, I fear that I’m a Protestant in the bosom of the Church.
I don’t believe in hell: if God exists – I’m not convinced He does – He is omniscient; if He is omniscient, I can’t bring myself to imagine that a creature conceived by Him can be so evil as to merit eternal punishment.
With age ….. doubt seems to gain the upper hand. It’s my own fault. I’ve never been much of a religious person ….. If I went to Communion, I would have to confess and make promises. I prefer to excommunicate myself.
Survey
Greene had a conventional Anglican upbringing. At Oxford, however, he was atheistic. In the early tale, ‘The Trial of Pan’ (1923), Pan is brought before God; his music proves so seductive that God’s followers defect to the pagan nature-deity. In ‘The Improbable Tale of the Archbishop of Canterbridge’ (1924), God is revealed to be a Satanic aesthete, who, when shot by the Archbishop, confesses and dies. (He had caused wars in order to ‘make the poppies of a brighter scarlet, because they were dipped in blood’.)
After Greene’s conversion to Catholicism, his concern with religious matters became appropriately intense; his creative imagination became preoccupied with the debate between Catholicism, scepticism and communism; sometimes psychoanalysis was another participant. He explored a range of heretical and even blasphemous attitudes: Manichæism exerted its appeal; so, later, did forms of evolutionary theology. In his old age, his Catholicism was increasingly eroded by doubt and an inclination to agnosticism. At any one time of his adult life, his ideas were layered, complex, variable and paradoxical. He combined a desire for certainty with a distrust of authority; superstitious yearnings were offset by a salty scepticism; he relished the heterodox, supported the underdog, and was an eloquent Devil’s Advocate.
As we have seen, Greene had at least two grounds for his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1927. He was keen to win Vivien for marriage; and the course of instruction with Father Trollope had, he said, provided him with rational grounds for belief. Significantly, though, his second baptismal name was ‘Thomas’: ‘I explained to the priest that I was taking the name of Saint Thomas the Doubter …..’ (R, p. 305).
Such conversions were not highly unusual. Vivien herself was a Catholic convert; so, later, was Catherine Walston, the most influential of Greene’s lovers. G. K. Chesterton, the associate of the Catholic Hilaire Belloc, had converted to Catholicism in 1922; Eric Gill, the artist and writer, in 1913; and Evelyn Waugh would follow in 1930. Of the writers most admired by Greene, Conrad (though predominantly a sceptic) was an exile from Catholic Poland, and his ‘Heart of Darkness’ conveys a strong sense of supernatural evil. Henry James, Greene felt, was an honorary Catholic, in that his works, at their best, expressed the realities of Hell and Purgatory. (T. S. Eliot, entering the Anglican Church in 1927, chose its Anglo-Catholic extreme.) Ford Madox Ford was a Catholic, and Greene so admired his novels that he arranged for a series of them to be republished. Querry would have been aware that Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was a renowned Catholic architect.
In the two decades after the Great War, of course, many intellectuals felt (erring) that that war was an indictment of the liberal tradition and its rationalistic, democratic ideals; they therefore reacted against that tradition. Some (Auden, Spender, Isherwood, MacDiarmid, Caudwell, Day Lewis) veered towards Marxism; others (Pound, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell) towards right-wing politics; some – including a number of these named authors – towards religion or mysticism: Campbell, for instance, became a Catholic in 1935. Having advocated communism in various poems of the 1930s, Auden (turning to Anglo-Catholicism) suppressed some and revised others so that they expressed Christian views. Greene’s novels recurrently reflect that polarisation of debate which was so marked a feature of the 1930s and which, influenced by the depression, mass unemployment and the emergence of rival totalitarian states, was dramatically intensified by the Spanish Civil War.
Greene’s conversion coincided with a general revival of the Catholic Church in England. There were some 1,710,000 English Catholics in 1912, but 2,360,000 in 1939. The number of priests rose from 3,800 in 1914 to 5,600 in 1939. Conversions were 9,000 in 1917, over 12,000 in 1929 and over 8,000 in 1943. (See Edward Norman’s Roman Catholicism in England, 1985.) Notable events included the restoration of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in 1934, the canonisation in 1935 of two English martyrs, Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher, and the construction of Liverpool Cathedral, begun in the 1930s though not completed until 1967. It was a faith maintained by members of the nobility (often descendants of recusant families), of the middle classes and the intelligentsia, and of the urban working class (particularly in the north-west of the country); indeed, its communicants were largely urban and predominantly from the working class. Cardinal Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935, condemned uncontrolled capitalism but denounced the General Strike of 1926 as sinful.
Greene frequently proclaimed the virtue of disloyalty, the value of challenging orthodoxy. (As we shall see, he would criticise Shakespeare for having conformed to the Elizabethan Protestant establishment.) In a country in which the established Church was Anglican, Greene by becoming a Catholic was siding with a minority faith. Yet it retained the appeal of a long-established tradition, of a faith with a rich history, an elaborate ritual, a clear categorisation of moral vice and virtue, the drama of the Mass, a personal Confessional, and a vividly strong eschatology. It proclaimed the objective reality of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell; while, in Greene’s view (in the 1930s and 1940s), Anglicanism was moving towards compromise with agnosticism. Furthermore, in large areas of the world, notably in Central and South America, it was the faith of the poor and downtrodden: a faith in the Jesus who had cast the moneychangers from the temple and assigned Dives, the rich man, to Hell; so there were obvious ways in which Catholicism could blend with Greene’s left-wing political sympathies as they developed. He criticised the Vatican for its opposition to the worker-priests, those radical clerics who, whether in Mexico or France, espoused left-wing political action. Greene is such a persuasive advocate, so often associating his priests with the poor and needy (peasants in Central America, lepers in the Congo), that one may temporarily forget the Inquisition and the long historical association of the Roman Catholic Church with reactionary and repressive regimes. In nineteenth-century Paraguay, for instance, Catholic priests participated in the torturing and killing of the many victims of the Paraguayan tyrant, Francisco Solano López. During the Spanish Civil War, the Vatican supported General Franco. In the Second World War, the Vatican was neutral. (Franco, Hitler and Mussolini had all experienced a Catholic upbringing.) After the War, Pope Pius XII was much criticised for not having spoken out against Nazi persecution of the Jews. Catholic prayers referred to ‘the perfidious Jews’.
One obvious paradox of Greene’s outlook was his hope for a marriage of the Roman Catholic Church and communism. In Moscow in 1987, he told Mikhail Gorbachev:
We are fighting – Roman Catholics are fighting – together with the Communists, and working together with the Communists. We are fighting together against the Death Squads in El Salvador. We are fighting together against the Contras in Nicaragua. We are fighting together against General Pinochet in Chile.
(R, pp. 316–17)
He remarked that Marx condemned Henry VIII for closing the monasteries; but this was a rather disingenuous way of masking the obvious contrast between Catholicism and Marxism. Karl Marx was militantly atheistic; he stated that religion was the opium of the people; he argued that religious teachings were but the means by which the many were kept in their place, and they stemmed not from divine revelation but from economic necessities. The Communist Manifesto declares: ‘Law, morality, religion, are to him [i.e. the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.’ Marx and Engels specifically scorned ‘Christian Socialism’:
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy …..? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
Greene said that although he supported Marxist economics, Marxist philosophy was ‘as dry as Bentham and as outdated as Ingersoll’ (R, p. 219).
Of course, down the centuries there have been priests who sided with the people against exploiters; but there have been more who sided with authority. If the Church produced a Las Casas to champion the South American Indians, it also produced a Torquemada and the ruthless priests of the Inquisition. Greene even tried to justify Torquemada, on the grounds that he had helped to bring about the better order which prevailed centuries later; which is rather like praising Hitler because the Third Reich gave way to a democratic Federal Germany. The Catholic Church (which, financially, is a huge business enterprise with vast investments) negotiated a concordat with Hitler in 1933. In 1949 Pope Pius XII urged Catholics to oppose communism, and even excommunicated Italian Catholics who joined the Communist Party. Some Marxist regimes have been relatively tolerant of Catholicism; others have been oppressive, and keen to persecute the Church. In Poland in the 1980s, during the early days of the Solidarity movement, many priests cooperated with Solidarity in resisting the Marxist dictatorship.
In practice, Greene assailed numerous aspects of Catholicism. He frequently criticised the ‘hearty materialism’ of the Catholic Church of the USA, whose hierarchy, he said in 1963, helped to maintain the Cold War (R, pp. 199, 219). He regretted the supersession of the Mass in Latin (an international common language) by the Mass in national vernaculars; he regarded with distaste the Vatican’s affluence, and was scornful of the Vatican’s attempts at censorship and its prohibition of artificial contraception. He upbraided the Archbishop of Paris for withholding a full Catholic funeral from the novelist Colette (who had been twice divorced); and he clearly disliked those parishes in which, in his view, a comfortable priest ministered to a complacent middle-class congregation.
[We] can always turn away from Rome to some dry mountainside where a stigmataed priest spends hour upon hour in the confessional attending with kindness and insight to the worries of the poor.
(R, p. 199)
He was thinking of Padre Pio. In 1949 he visited the Franciscan monastery where Padre Pio mysteriously bore the stigmata, wounds like Christ’s on hands, feet and side. ‘I can recall the stigmata, the dried blood sticking out. It would dry and then it would bleed again and then dry again.’ Greene was impressed by Pio, but ‘[the] Vatican disapproved of him’ (Life I, p. xx). Pio, in his humble setting, was certainly more important to Greene’s imagination that were the splendours of the Vatican: ‘how much more difficult sanctity must be under the Michelangelo frescoes ….. than in the stony fields of Apulia where Pio is confined’ (CE, p. 396). Eventually, in 1991, shortly before his death, Greene contrasted President Gorbachev favourably to Pope John Paul II:
Gorbachev began to see that doubt was a virtue …..But this pope has gone in the opposite direction. He has become ever more dogmatic. The curia under Wojtyla is getting more like the old Soviet politburo.
(Sunday Times Magazine, 17 September 1995, p. 20)
Commenting on the atheistic Communist regime in East Germany in 1963, he said: ‘Official atheism I am able, perhaps mistakenly, to regard as a passing phase (I prefer in any case atheism to agnosticism under the guise of official Christianity) …..’ (R, p. 208). Repeatedly his novels depict Anglicanism satirically, as a faith so vague and flaccid as to be virtually agnosticism. One thinks of the funeral service of Hale in Brighton Rock or of Sarah in The End of the Affair. (In the latter, the service ‘was so inhuman. Like a conveyor belt’; the clergyman ‘talked about the Great All ….. I thought he was saying the Great Auk’.) Greene regularly regarded cremation with distaste, as though it were a vulgar mimicry of Hell’s fires, a vandalism of God’s image, or an intrusion of modern technology on the mysteries of death. ‘Resurrect that body if you can’, says the atheistic Bendrix to God after Sarah’s cremation. Farrant’s funeral, in England Made Me, is bleak and mechanical; Minty experiences ‘a horror of the death by fire’. In Travels with My Aunt, Augusta accidentally touches a button and thus incinerates the corpse before the funeral. ‘A Position in Life’ (R, pp. 323–4) mocks a crematorium’s public relations officer. Again, Brighton Rock’s satire is so good that it needs to be quoted:
‘Our belief in heaven,’ the clergyman went on, ‘is not qualified by our disbelief in the old medieval hell. We believe ….. that this our brother is already at one with the One.’ He stamped his words like little pats of butter with his personal mark. ‘He has attained unity. We do not know what that One is with whom (or with which) he is now at one. We do not retain the old medieval beliefs in glassy seas and golden crowns. Truth is beauty and there is more beauty for us, a truth-loving generation, in the certainty that this our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit.’ He touched a little buzzer, the New Art doors opened, the flames flapped and the coffin slid smoothly down into the fiery sea. The doors closed, ….. the clergyman smiled gently from behind the slipway, like a conjurer who has produced his nine hundred and fortieth rabbit without a hitch.
(pp. 45–6)
The phrasing – ‘at one with the One’, ‘like little pats of butter’, ‘with whom (or with which)’ – is so sharp that the passage represents Greene at his satiric best.
Greene seems, however, to have made little allowance for the diversity of modes of Anglican worship – let alone Protestant worship. High Church Anglicanism preserved liturgical formalism; he could, if he had wished, have found Anglican clergymen with robust conceptions of Heaven and Hell, or with strong left-wing leanings: he knew of the ‘Red Dean of Canterbury’, Dr Hewlett Johnson. He disliked Buchmanism and the Oxford Group of the 1930s, the movement which promoted the ‘Moral Rearmament’ campaign (founded in 1938). Spiritualism, too, is treated satirically in his works for offering a debased, vulgarised notion of the afterlife (‘Everything is very beautiful on the upper plane. There are flowers everywhere’); but he concedes it a modicum. In Brighton Rock, for example, the planchette board tells the truth, albeit in cryptic form. (Greene said he wrote The Confidential Agent with ‘the automatism of a planchette’.) The fortune-teller in The Heart of the Matter is a truth-teller. The priest in The End of the Affair says: ‘I’m not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world’s not everything ….. It could be the beginning of wisdom’ (p. 216). And there was certainly ‘a bit of superstition’ in Greene’s own attitudes: his preoccupation, for example, with omens to be found in dreams, in coincidences and in apparently random occurrences.
For readers of biographies of Graham Greene, one obvious paradox is that while espousing Catholicism he led a life of sexual infidelity and promiscuity. Christ’s seventh commandment is: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’; Greene repeatedly broke the commandment. He even claimed, when committing adultery with Catherine Walston in the 1940s and 1950s, that he felt closer to God when sinning with her. He tried to square the circle by suggesting sometimes that awareness of sin strengthens one’s faith in God; sometimes that adultery, to the extent that it is an expression of love, might help to bring a person closer to God’s love. (He appears to confuse Eros and Agape, profane and sacred love, illicit sexuality and the Creator’s love of humankind.) To Catherine he wrote in 1950 that God might well bless their adulterous relationship; and, later, he added:
I have certainly been to the sacraments far more often in our five years than in the previous eight. So with me – as far as you are concerned – there’s no real conflict, and sometimes I hate the conflict I cause in you.
(Life II, p. 502)
He was often capable of revising the Church’s teachings in ways which matched his own desires; on the other hand, The End of the Affair strongly suggests that there were more conflicts within Greene than he acknowledged in those letters to Catherine.
In ‘The Lost Childhood’, he had said that Bowen’s The Viper of Milan made sense of his early sufferings: ‘she had given me my pattern …..perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again’ (CE, p. 18). In Essais Catholiques (pp. 9–10), he declared that in the era of Belsen, it seemed that Satan (‘notre éternel ennemi’) had let his mask fall, ‘parce qu’il croit, dans son orgueil satanique, que le dernier combat approche’ (‘because he believes, in his satanic pride, that the final struggle is imminent’). Yet that dark vision, which, in its emphasis on dynamic evil, sometimes resembled Manichæism, lightened as he aged. He probably had himself in mind when he remarked that an old Catholic convert is one who has passed from enthusiasm to acceptance and doubt (R, p. 212). In 1988, three years before his death, he said:
I say my prayers. I go to mass. I never believed in hell. There’s a big question mark over heaven. I’m not an atheist, which is a form of dogma and I’m against dogma. I’m agnostic.
(Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 28 August 1988, p. 18)
Ten years earlier, in a New York Times Magazine interview with V. S. Pritchett, he had reportedly called himself a ‘Catholic atheist’. In another interview of 1988 he even remarked: ‘I’m not sure I believe in God.’ Thus, although he was following some of the procedures of a Catholic believer, he was denying and doubting the most central tenets of the faith. He denied Hell, doubted Heaven, doubted even God, and saw Purgatory as merely part of ‘this life’. Father Leopoldo Durán, his enthusiastic hagiographer, felt that Greene maintained a core of faith and ‘disbelieved his disbelief’; but there is ample evidence that, in Greene’s old age, his Catholicism had been almost completely subverted by scepticism and doubt. That qualification ‘almost’ is important. One of Greene’s many paradoxes was the claim that faith might be compatible with disbelief He could be sceptical about scepticism itself In any case, he had remarked that ‘no human being is capable of judging another’ (Life II, p. 471).
Some aspects of religion in Greene’s literary works
After the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel …..For with the death of 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 novelists as Mrs Virginia Woolf and Mr E. M. Forster wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin.
(‘François Mauriac’, CE, p. 115)
Greene famously declared that he was not a Catholic novelist but a novelist who happened to be a Catholic. In his literary works there is immense diversity in the rendering of religion. Sometimes God seems to figure as an essential character (in The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, for instance), as though an additional dimension has been restored. Readers are then lured into speculations on a major character’s afterlife. Sometimes the religious views of the texts seem relatively orthodox; sometimes they seem relatively heretical. Indulgence-collecting is burlesqued in the tale ‘Special Duties’. Pharisaical Catholic bigotry is fiercely assailed in A Burnt-Out Case and The Living Room. In some works, loss of belief is sympathetically presented, while other texts have a thoroughly secular atmosphere.
MYSTICISM, LAZARUS AND THE WAGER WITH GOD. A number of Greene’s fictional works strongly invoke supernatural agency. In Rumour at Nightfall, to take an early example, the Protestant hero marries the heroine in a Catholic ceremony, during which he experiences a mystical vision: the church seems to be filled with an uncanny light; he becomes a convert. Again, a ‘Lazarus’ motif recurs in various texts. The tale ‘The Second Death’ (1929) depicts a dying man who, in the past, was raised from the dead; and the narrator says that he himself was once given sight by a stranger: ‘I felt a cold touch like spittle on my lids’. The story thus offers a version of the miracles of the raising of Lazarus (John 11: 1–45) and the healing of the blind man by means of clay mixed with spittle (John 9: 1–12). A macabre contrast is offered by the horror-tale, ‘Proof Positive’. In The End of the Affair, as we have noted, Sarah makes a wager with God that if He will save her lover’s life, she will abandon the adulterous affair; the life is saved, and thereafter she becomes a miracle-worker. The Potting Shed, again, features a wager with God. This time, a Catholic priest says that if God saves the child’s life, the priest is willing to lose his faith in return. The child is saved, and the priest indeed loses his faith. In these last two works, the strong endorsement of the active presence of God creates obvious critical problems for the reader. A Roman Catholic is likely to find their plots more credible than would the sceptic; yet even the Catholic may find them distasteful in their blurring together of religion and superstition, in their depiction of God as one who descends to the childish level of swaps and forfeits. If all life is a gift of an omnipotent God, the ‘wager’ is fraudulent, as if a gambler were to steal a bookmaker’s money to bet against the bookmaker. The End of the Affair comes dangerously close to offering sin (rather than repentance for sin) as a medium of exchange for grace.
THE VIRTUE OF EVIL. In 1930, in the essay ‘Baudelaire’, T. S. Eliot said:
In the middle nineteenth century, ….. an age of bustle, programmes, platforms, scientific progress, humanitarianism and revolutions which improved nothing, an age of progressive degradation, Baudelaire perceived that what really matters is Sin and Redemption ….. To a mind observant of the post-Voltaire France ….. the recognition of the reality of Sin is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation – of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to living …..
It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. Baudelaire was man enough for damnation …..
(Selected Essays, 1932, pp. 375, 377)
The argument has a provocative paradoxicality. Would God perhaps, after reading Eliot’s essay, send to Heaven the man who is ‘man enough for damnation? Or, if that man has blasphemously put secular salvation (‘significance’) before heavenly salvation, would God send him to a region of Hell appropriately replete with ‘the ennui of modern life’? Since sloth and gluttony are deadly sins, would a ‘manly’ devotion to either of them guarantee us the glory of man’s capacity for damnation while redeeming us from the ennui of, say, a devotion to humanitarianism?
To an agnostic or atheist, Eliot’s claims may seem as speciously entertaining as some Wilde an jeu d’esprit; but they are an index to Eliot’s most earnest preoccupations. They provide a commentary on much of The Waste Land and of Eliot’s early mature poetry, those works pervaded by the feeling that with the secularisation of morals and with the consequent absence of a sense of sin and virtue, meaninglessness pervades human experience as surely as ennui haunts lust.
The comments on Baudelaire reveal an unholy union between the Christian and the Romantic traditions. Dante’s God sent the morally nondescript (those who lived without praise or blame) to the most ignominious of dooms. Hell proper was too good for them – that was reserved for definite sinners – so they had to congregate dismally on the fringes of Hell, in the dreary Vestibule. ‘[T]he deep Hell receives them not, for the wicked would have some glory over them’ (Inferno III, lines 41–2). From the Romantic tradition comes an over-valuation of sincere, intense, single-minded, passionate experience: better a bow of burning gold and arrows of desire than a prudential or humane reluctance to be the wielder of lethal weapons. Blake and Shelley deemed the rebellious Satan the true hero of Paradise Lost, and Blake declared: ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.’ Romantic literature abounds in charismatic hero-villains: characters like Ann Radcliffe’s Montoni or Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, who, though wicked, seem more intensely vital than do relatively respectable, civilised beings. Conrad’s Kurtz belongs to this tradition. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, some features of Romanticism lead to Hitler and Auschwitz.
Graham Greene was familiar with Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire. As early as 1933 (in an essay on Henry James), Greene quoted from the very passage cited above. In his fiction, the most forceful depiction of Eliot’s paradox is in Brighton Rock, which suggests that the guilty copulation of Rose and Pinkie, fraught with a sense of sin, is better (by ‘Virtue’ of its sinfulness, which makes it more significant) than the secularly hedonistic copulation of Ida Arnold and Phil Corkery. Eliot said: ‘[T]he sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, “life-giving”, cheery automatism of the modern world.’ Pinkie retains at least a belief in Hell; he transcends the secular ethic. Harry Lime, in The Third Man, clearly belongs to the tradition of charismatic villains; like Pinkie, he is a Catholic who holds a stronger belief in Hell than in Heaven.
In ‘The Lost Childhood’ (CE, pp. 17–18), Greene wrote: ‘Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a 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.’ ‘To be a Catholic ….. is to believe in the Devil’, he said in a review of Eliot’s After Strange Gods.
THE HOLY SINNER. The notion of the virtue of evil relates to the milder paradox of the holy sinner. Near the end of Brighton Rock, the priest refers to a remarkable Frenchman:
‘This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He never took the sacraments, he never married his wife in church. I don’t know, my child, but some people think he was – well, a saint.’
The Frenchman was Charles Péguy (1875–1914), a poet who was killed in the Great War. He provides the epigraph of The Heart of the Matter:
Le pécheur est au coeur même de chrétienté … Nul n’est aussi compétent que le pécheur en matière de Chrétienté. Nul, si ce n’est le saint. [The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity … Nobody is as competent as the sinner in the matter of Christianity. Nobody, unless it is the saint.]
Highly paradoxical, not to say dangerous. Who wants a Heaven that contains a Pinkie, or a Hitler? What of the sinner’s victims? Of course, Péguy’s paradox may briefly bring to mind various features of the New Testament. Jesus was rebuked by the Pharisees for consorting with publicans and sinners (Matthew 9: 11), and, addressing the chief priests of the temple, he said: ‘the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you’ (Matthew 21: 31). He also said: ‘Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine persons, which need no repentance’ (Luke 15: 7). But there is a big difference between the orthodox teaching that a penitent sinner may gain absolution and salvation, and this notion that a wilful and persevering sinner may, by that very perseverence in sin, be specially privileged in the eyes of God, and may be deemed saintly by human beings.
The ‘saintly’ element lies in that suggestion of altruism, of solidarity with the sufferers: ‘if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too’; ‘Péguy ….. risked damnation himself in order to save another soul’ (CE, p. 132). To the extent that the action is altruistic, perhaps it deserves lenient treatment by the Almighty. Thus the innocent Rose in Brighton Rock so loves Pinkie that she is willing to be damned with him rather than lose him. ‘It’s mortal sin’, he says, embracing her; ‘I love you’, she responds; ‘Wherever you go, I’ll go too.’
What was the good of praying now? She’d finished with all that: she had chosen her side: if they damned him they’d got to damn her, too.
(p. 275)
Again, in The Heart of the Matter, Scobie seeks to treat his ‘mortal sin’, his premeditated suicide, as altruistic; by his death, he reasons, he will be liberating his lover, his wife and God from his continuing sinful presence as an adulterer:
I can die and remove myself from their blood stream. They are ill with me and I can cure them. And you too God – you are ill with me. I can’t go on, month after month, insulting you ….. You’ll be better off if you lose me once and for all …..
He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then Hell will begin, and they’ll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You.
(pp. 280–1, 285)
There are various ways of judging this attitude. Perhaps, we may suppose, God thinks: ‘Scobie was altruistic; he laid down his life for those he loved. Even though, formally, he was committing a mortal sin, I’ll be merciful. He deserves salvation. Let him go to Heaven.’ Or perhaps God thinks: ‘Well, Scobie was trying to be altruistic, so although he appears to be committing a mortal sin, I’ll be lenient: I’ll sentence him to Purgatory, not Hell.’ Perhaps God thinks: ‘What arrogance! A mortal presumes to be helping me, the Omnipotent, by destroying the life that I have given. What pride! To Hell with him!’ An atheist might be inclined to say to Scobie: ‘That’s a fine mess you’ve got yourself into. If you really believed in the God of Catholicism, you wouldn’t have involved yourself in adultery. Alternatively, if you wanted adultery, you should have ceased to be a Roman Catholic. As it is, the contradiction in your value-system is destroying you. It looks like the nervous breakdown of a man suffering from a form of religious mania.’
Greene once said that The Heart of the Matter was ‘about a man who goes to Purgatory’; later, he disliked the self-pitying Scobie and the novel as a whole. George Orwell astutely observed:
The cult of the sanctified sinner seems to me to be frivolous, and underneath it there probably lies a weakening of belief, for when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.
(CCE, p. 107)
‘BETWIXT THE STIRRUP AND THE GROUND’: THE REDEMPTIVE PARADOX. In Brighton Rock, Pinkie quotes (imperfectly) William Camden’s poem, ‘Epitaph for a Man Killed by Falling from His Horse’:
My friend, judge not me;
Thou seest I judge not thee.
Betwixt the stirrup and the ground,
Mercy I ask’d, mercy I found.
Pinkie envisages a final escape-route: ‘One confession when he was safe to wipe out everything …..’
Greene exploited one of the great paradoxes of Catholicism. On the one hand, it specifies mortal sins: those sins punishable by an eternity in Hell. On the other hand, it offers to such mortal sinners various means of eluding entry to Hell. The first route is confession accompanied by contrition, and a sincere resolve not to sin again (‘a firm purpose of amendment’); these entail a readiness to undertake any penance meted. Then the priest may absolve the sin, however grave. If an individual is dying, the presence of a priest, though extremely desirable, is not essential. At death’s door a mortal sinner might repent when no priest was present; and, if the repentance were sincere, God’s grace might grant the sinner forgiveness. Pinkie reflects: ‘You could be saved between the stirrup and the ground, but you couldn’t be saved if you didn’t repent.’ God, of course, can see into one’s inmost being; so a person who, in the eyes of other people, is clearly heading for Hell, might nevertheless (thanks to God’s grace) gain admission to Heaven. No doubt, many sinners must atone by years of suffering in Purgatory; nevertheless, Purgatory is a preparation for Heaven. Archbishop M. Sheehan’s Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, a standard handbook for Catholics which Greene knew, offers the following definitions. Heaven is ‘an abode of perfect and everlasting happiness’. Hell is ‘an abode of eternal suffering’ in which the wicked experience both ‘the pain of loss’ and ‘the pain of sense’, the latter being agonies caused by the fires mentioned by Jesus (Matthew 13: 49–50). Purgatory is ‘an abode of purification’ in which souls experience both the pain of loss and, according to Saints Bonaventure and Thomas, extreme pain of sense. (One crucial difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is, of course, that the latter denies the existence of Purgatory.)
The Catholic Dictionary (which bears the Imprimatur) says: ‘It is very hard to decide in particular what is or is not mortal sin.’ Venial sins are reparable.
Mortal sin is, on the contrary, irreparable, and a man who is guilty of it has lost every principle of vitality, so that he is as unable to recover life as one who has suffered bodily death.
That sounds final; but the next sentence is: ‘Renewal cannot come from within, but only from the Almighty power of God, who can make even the dead hear His voice and live.’ Sheehan stresses that this power is shared with priests, and points out that in the second century the Montanists were expelled from the Church ‘because they contested her right to forgive the sins of idolatry, adultery, and murder’. Certainly Jesus said that a sin against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven either in this world or the world to come (Matthew 12: 32); nevertheless, explains Sheehan charitably, ‘His emphatic words do not denote absolute impossibility but extreme difficulty ….. “with God all things are possible”.’
At the end of Brighton Rock, the wheezing priest suggests that even Pinkie might attain Heaven, thanks to ‘the terrible strangeness’ of God’s mercy. In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie commits suicide: a terrible mortal sin, the sin of despair. His widow says: ‘He must have known he was damning himself’; but her priest retorts: ‘For goodness sake, Mrs. Scobie, don’t imagine you – or I – know anything about God’s mercy.’
In the play The Living Room, after Rose’s suicide, Michael, her lover, says to Father Browne: ‘Oh yes, your Church teaches she’s alive all right. She teaches she’s damned.’ Father Browne replies: ‘We aren’t as stupid as you think. Nobody claims we can know what she thought at the end. Only God was with her at the end.’
A striking feature of several of Greene’s most important works is the principle of eschatological suspense. The reader is led to consider what will happen to the protagonist in an afterlife: does Heaven, Hell or Purgatory await? To heighten the suspense, Greene drives a wedge between two aspects of Catholicism. On the one hand there is Catholicism’s very specific codification of sins and their consequences. On the other hand, there is Catholicism’s recognition that God’s wisdom transcends that of any human being. Consequently, God’s judgement of a soul may be far different from any that we may, on the available evidence, postulate or expect. Greene reflected this division when he said on one occasion that Pinkie ‘goes to hell’, and, on another, ‘I don’t think that Pinkie was guilty of mortal sin’ (GGFR, p. 528; OM, pp. 158–9).
When the novelist Colette was denied a priest at her funeral, because she had been twice divorced, Greene promptly criticised Cardinal Feltin, the Archbishop of Paris. Perhaps she had been deemed an impenitent sinner, Greene acknowledged:
But to repent means to rethink one’s life, and no one can say what passes through a mind trained in habits of lucidity when it is confronted with the imminent fact of death ….. Your Eminence, through such a strict interpretation of the rule, seems to deny the hope of that final intervention of Grace upon which surely Your Eminence and each one of us will depend at the last hour.
(Life II, p. 471)
This sounds gallant, fair-minded and devout. Nevertheless, by stressing the insuperable ignorance of mortals and the amplitude of divine grace, Greene appears to call in question the authority of the Church to which he belongs. Perhaps he recalled Laertes’ words to the priest at Ophelia’s burial: ‘I tell thee, churlish priest, / A minist’ring angel shall my sister be / When thou liest howling.’
In his late years, Greene doubted that any souls lay ‘howling’ in Hell. As he said in The Other Man (p. 161):
I don’t believe in Hell: if God exists ….. I can’t bring myself to imagine that a creature conceived by Him can be so evil as to merit eternal punishment. His grace must intervene at some point.
Greene’s ‘Catholic’ novels often exploit a tension between the evocation of the Hell-fires postulated by orthodox Catholicism and a theology which, to the extent that it stresses either divine grace or divine transcendence of human comprehension, veers towards the liberal, the heterodox and the heretical.
THE MANICHÆAN HERESY. Manichæism is a system of religious doctrines taught by the prophet Mani or Manichæism (c. 216–c. 276 AD). It postulates a primordial conflict between goodness (or spirit or light) and evil (or matter or darkness); the world is almost entirely subject to the Prince of Darkness, though a few enlightened souls, the puritanical Elect, may find their way to salvation. Woman is the gift of demons, sent to lure men to fornication. Procreation serves the ends of darkness, because each birth entails an increase of matter and a further dispersal of the light; it is the production of another subject for the realm of darkness, and a prolonging of the captivity of light. Greene provides a simplification and a revealing slip: ‘A Manichean believes that the world is wholly in the hands of God … I mean of the Devil’ (OM, p. 115). In the essay ‘The Young Dickens’ (1950), Greene argues that in various works of Dickens, particularly Oliver Twist, the depiction of virtue is sentimental and unconvincing, but the depiction of evil is nightmarishly convincing.
In this Manichæan world we can believe in evil-doing, but goodness wilts into philanthropy …..
[Is] it too fantastic to imagine that in this novel, as in many of his later books, creeps in, unrecognized by the author, the eternal and alluring taint of the Manichee, with its simple and terrible explanation of our plight, how the world was made by Satan and not by God, lulling us with the music of despair?
(CE, pp. 108, 110)
Though a heresy, it is ‘alluring’. Greene felt its allure often enough when writing his grimmer texts of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, his characteristic imaginative terrain, ‘Greeneland’, by its emphasis on the dark, seedy, sordid, disgusting aspects of the world, comes very close to suggesting, if not endorsing, a Manichæan interpretation of experience. From Brighton to Africa, from Trier to Mexico, corruption finds ample soil. The imagery of The Name of Action has a distinctly Manichæan quality: Kapper, the revolutionary, is associated with ‘perpetual night’, materialism and sexual promiscuity; he overthrows a puritanical (and sexually impotent) dictator and feels a bitter hostility to the Virgin Mary, ‘the mother of his eternal enemy’.
Manichæism has some resemblances to Jansenism, which is based on the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Bishop, Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638). Jansenism (condemned in papal bulls) emphasises the corrupted state of the world; its followers therefore seek to retreat from the world’s blandishments and to await the grace on which the salvation of the fortunate few depends. The doctrine was virtually one of predestination. Another echo of Manichæism was the Albigensian heresy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which declared that matter was evil; Jesus’s body was an appearance, not a material reality. St Augustine was a Manichæan before his conversion. The Bible declares that even since the Atonement, Satan has a terrible power over the world and its votaries, so that he is called ‘the god of this world’ (2 Corinthians 4: 4).
Of course, Greene’s reading of Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster and Tourneur, not to mention such satirists as Rochester and Swift, would have given him ample precedent for the literary expression of disgust at a befouled world and at the human body’s subjection to lust, disease and corruption. Pinkie, a debased descendant of the Jacobean malcontent or the satiric misanthrope, reflects:
That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape – anywhere – for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.
(Brighton Rock, 1938, pp. 127–8)
Greene repeatedly cited a passage from Cardinal Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864); he quotes it as one of the epigraphs to The Lawless Roads. Newman there considers the many woes of the world, ‘the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin’: ‘a vision to dizzy and appal’. He asks why these woes exist.
I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence ….. if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.
The ‘terrible aboriginal calamity’ is the Fall. To orthodox Catholic theologians, the Fall of Man is felix culpa: the fortunate Fall, since it led ultimately to the coming of Christ to the world and to the general redemption by the Atonement. Newman’s almost Manichæan negativity here, his stress on an enduring calamity, his image of a human race ‘discarded from [God’s] presence’, pulsed in Greene’s pessimistic imagination; it helped Greene to make sense of the depressing and sometimes horrific vistas he encountered, whether they were in Mexico or Africa or Europe.
THE EVOLUTIONARY HERESY. To Catholics as to Protestants, God is perfect and unchanging. It would be a gross heresy to suggest that He is imperfect and in process of meliorative evolution. (In order to harmonise with the terms used by Greene and the Church of his day, I use the traditional masculine pronoun for the deity; God alone knows what the correct pronoun should be.)
Greene knew well the writings of Thomas Hardy. In Jude the Obscure, The Dynasts and such poems as ‘The Sleep-Worker’ and ‘God’s Education’, Hardy offered the theory of ‘evolutionary meliorism’. He entertained the idea that the Creator, the ‘First Cause’ or ‘Creative Will’, has been creating blindly and automatically; human beings possess the awareness that their Creator lacks. Eventually, however, the Creator may evolve into consciousness (as creatures on earth have evolved), see what a mess it has made so far, and atone by reforming the creation – ‘Consciousness the Will informing, till it fashion all things fair!’
In Greene’s The Honorary Consul, the idealistic priest, Father Rivas, offers a kindred idea:
‘The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night-side as well as a day-side ….. I believe the time will come when the night-side will wither away, like your communist state ….. It is a long struggle and a long suffering, evolution, and I believe God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain.’
(p. 285)
He is speaking in character; as he is a priest who has lapsed temporarily in order to side with Marxist rebels against dictatorship, it is understandable that his imagination should effect a blending or confusion of Marxist evolutionism with religious aspirations. Rivas is not Greene; but Rivas is offering an imaginative solution to a problem that was inevitably perplexing Greene. As the author’s belief in Hell waned and faded, the stronger would become the heretical sense that God may be the immediate author of evil. For Aeschylus in The Oresteia, for Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, for Marx in The Communist Manifesto, for Hardy in The Dynasts and eventually for Father Rivas in The Honorary Consul, an evolutionary metaphysic is an imaginative way of reconciling the woes of known history with the better world that is desired.
The notion that God has ‘a night-side as well as a day-side’ is suggested in the harsh play Carving a Statue, in which the sculptor seeks photographs of child-killers to help him sculpt a statue of the God who sent His own son to die for man’s sins. Eventually, the sculptor feels that he has been depicting Lucifer, not God. The play suggests also, however, that any human attempt to define or depict God may be thoroughly marred by human sins.
Near the end of In Memoriam (1850), Tennyson had imagined that, in course of evolution, humans would be so improved in nature that they would become a transcendent ‘crowning race’:
the crowning race
Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth’s; and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;
No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit …..
And they would then blend with the deity who is:
One God, one law, one element.
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
In 1959 appeared Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s L’Avenir de l’homme (translated as The Future of Man, 1964). Teilhard, a Catholic priest, argued that the purpose of evolution was to unite human beings to the divine. With the growth of rationality and love, humans approach ‘a divine centre of convergence’:
That nothing may be prejudged, and in order to stress its synthesising and personalising function, let us call it the point Omega. Let us suppose that from this universal centre, this Omega point, there constantly emanate radiations hitherto only perceptible to those persons whom we call ‘mystics’ ….. Is it not conceivable that Mankind ….. will detach itself from this planet and join the one true, irreversible essence of things, the Omega point?
(The Future of Man, 1964, pp. 122–3)
In the 1972 text of A Sort of Life (Penguin, p. 120), Greene said that instead of the term ‘God’, ‘with all its anthropomorphic associations’, he now preferred ‘Chardin’s Omega Point’. (In the 1971 text he had muddled Teilhard’s jargon, referring to ‘Noosphere’ instead of ‘Omega Point’.) The optimistic teleology of Teilhard blended with the more benign moods of Greene’s old age; it had a certain appeal to a man who was now a grandfather. A curious consequence was that his view of the deity was then similar to the view he had once satirised: ‘Omega Point’, in its mystical vagueness, seems not far removed from ‘the universal spirit’, the One ‘with whom (or with which)’ Fred Hale might have attained unity.
LOSS OF BELIEF AS PROOF OF FAITH. As we have seen, one of the most ingenious religious paradoxes in Greene’s work is voiced in ‘A Visit to Morin’ and A Burnt-Out Case. Both Morin and Querry reflect that the state of unbelief might be proof of God’s existence. They suppose that for their sins or their neglect of Him, God has punished them by letting their belief die; but if they infer that this has happened, then, logically enough, their faith is maintained. Thus, ‘faith’ is tantamount to the hope that what is now not believed may yet have a basis; it is a strange trust that is actually nourished by scepticism.
There are strongly autobiographical features in these two works, and the paradox offered there may well have appealed to the older Greene. Certainly it helps to explain the co-existence of his sceptical pronouncements in interviews and his friendly relationship with Father Durán; it helps to explain the co-existence, in Greene’s late period, of markedly secular and markedly Catholic works, of The Human Factor and Monsignor Quixote. Once again, we see that Greene was thoroughly Pyrrhonian: like a devoted follower of the great sceptic, Pyrrho of Elis, he was prepared to be sceptical about scepticism.
CHARITY.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
(1 Corinthians 13: 13)
I’ve written some bad books, but I’ve also failed in charity …..
(OM, p. 164)
After Greene’s death, the Sunday Times reported that though some observers had estimated his wealth to be about ten million pounds, ‘the personal estate of the man whose novels sold more than 20 million copies in 27 languages is about £200,000’ (24 November 1991, p. 2). The explanation was that well before his death, Greene had established Verdant S. A.: its name, with its play on ‘Green(e)’, had come to him in a dream. This was a Swiss corporation which collected his royalties and paid him a salary, a familiar procedure for reducing income tax liabilities. Had he stayed in England, he would have made a larger tax contribution to public amenities. The corporation supplied funds to his family and made donations to a number of causes or groups approved by the author, ranging from the left-wing guerrillas of Nicaragua to the Trappist monks of Galicia. Outside the aegis of Verdant, Greene had helped various younger writers, among them Muriel Spark and Vincent O’Donnell.
One feature of Greene’s fiction is so frequently recurrent that it may be taken for granted and underestimated. That feature is the value of charitable action: the altruistic deed motivated perhaps by pity or even love – even if an element of pride or vanity is sometimes present. Such altruism flowers in both obvious and unlikely places. On a large scale, it is present in the léproserie depicted in A Bumt-Out Case, in the labours of the priests and the doctor among the lepers; it is often implicit in the actions of the fugititive hero of The Power and the Glory, and he is charitably helped by many people, including even his pursuer, the lieutenant. Scobie’s decision (in The Heart of the Matter) to help the Portuguese captain appears charitable, though he feels corrupted: ‘corrupted by sentiment’. In Scobie’s view there is also a form of charity in his own eventual suicide. On a small scale the virtue may be briefly evident in characters who are made more sympathetic thereby: in Carleton Myatt (of Stamboul Train), when he lends his fur coat to Coral Musker, or in Ida Arnold (of Brighton Rock), when she gives a pound to Charlie Moyne. Then there is the more extensive generosity patiently extended by Wormold, in Our Man in Havana, to his daughter Milly. Charity may take the form of forgiveness, as when Charley Fortnum forgives Clara (in The Honorary Consul). In the political field, the virtue is represented by whose who risk or give their lives in what, to the author, is a worthy cause: Jones at the end of The Comedians, the Captain at the end of The Captain and the Enemy. Charitable actions may sometimes be quixotic, misguided or fruitless; but, in their representation of apparent altruism in a harsh world, they constitute one of the most important ethical features of Greene’s works.
Political matters
The following extracts are all comments by Greene.
From a letter to Vivien, 6 May 1926, during the General Strike (Life I, p. 300):
Great triumph! Last night we [at The Times] got off a properly printed four page paper, with one machine working. The only paper in London to do it. The strikers are getting nasty though. Last night about 9.30 they set us on fire …..
From Greene’s diary, 11 August 1933 (Life I, p. 461):
Joined the I.L.P. My political progress has been rather curved.
From A Sort of Life, 1971 (pp. 37, 41):
I was easily aroused to indignation by cruelties not my own …..
I was ready to be a mercenary in any cause so long as I was repaid with excitement and a little risk.
From The Other Man, 1983 (pp. 19–20, 60, 80, 81, 84–5, 87, 88, 93):
I’m a committed person. I’m bound by certain ideas, though not by any clear political line. I’ve often felt a strong pull towards the Communist party (but never towards the extreme Right). I shouldn’t be a good recruit, though, for my loyalty would change with circumstances …..
At the time of the [Cuban] revolution I felt very close to the Fidelistas’ struggle. I brought them a large suitcase full of winter clothes …..
The Comedians is the only one of my books which I began with the intention of expressing a point of view and in order to fight – to fight the horror of Papa Doc’s dictatorship ….. I don’t want to use literature for political ends, nor for religious ends.
I’ve been a modest help to the Sandinistas [Nicaraguan Communists] in buying bullets which, I hoped, would eventually hit Somoza ….. But you see in such a case it isn’t the writer who is involved – it’s a character called Graham Greene who happens to be a writer.
I did what I could when Daniel and Sinyavsky were sent to prison. I asked the Russians to stop translating my books ….. I resigned from the American Institute of Arts and Letters to make a stand against the war in Vietnam ….. I certainly upset General Stroessner with an article on Paraguay and with passages from Travels with my Aunt.
I for my part very seldom commit myself a hundred per cent ….. but politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God.
I refuse to belong to this party or that.
The temptation to double allegiance tends to disappear before American capitalism and imperialism. I would go to almost any length to put my feeble twig in the spokes of American foreign policy.
From an interview in the Sunday Times, 1 April 1984, p. 33:
I would certainly have voted for her [i.e. Mrs Thatcher] in 1979 ….. I still believe in her honesty, but I don’t like her policy ….. I consider myself a social democrat, not a Marxist. I don’t like the extreme left slant in the Labour Party.
Survey
Greene’s political allegiances changed in the course of time, and, during much of his life, were layered like the skins of an onion, with an elusive centre. The extent of his involvement with British and foreign secret service agencies is not yet fully known, and, by the nature of the case, may never be fully known. Greene combined the conservative and the subversive, the patriotic and the communistic, hostility to socialism and approval of it, a fascination by power and a distrust of the powerful, a sympathy with the underdog and a revelling in the world of expensive and decadent pleasure.
‘A novelist ….. ’E’s a spy’, says Savory in Stamboul Train. Greene certainly worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) between 1941 and 1944. His dudes in Sierra Leone and London are indicated, if not fully specified, in Ways of Escape. His sister Elisabeth and her husband, Rodney Dennys, were both involved in secret service work. Greene had displayed an interest in becoming a confidential informant or secret agent (for Dublin and for Germany) during his Oxford days. He may well have been involved in espionage work before the Second World War, notably in the Baltic states (MW, pp. 189, 316). After the war, although he had officially left SIS, he continued to send back reports during his travels until the early 1980s. In French Indo-China, the French forces suspected him of being a British agent, and he denied being one; but they were right (see Life II, pp. 481–8). The link with SIS partly explains the frequency of his journeys to politically sensitive and contested parts of the world.
In the article ‘Malaya, the Forgotten War’, he urged the West to take effective action to defeat communist movements in Asia. Nevertheless, he came to be regarded in the USA as a ‘fellow-traveller’ of communism, in view, for example, of his sympathetic accounts of Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and of left-wing revolutionaries in Central and South America. Evelyn Waugh, as we noted, speculated that Greene’s pro-communist views were a bluff, a cover for secret service work. Another view might be that Greene was predominantly sincere in his support for communism and was hoodwinking the security services into subsidising his travel. The truth is probably a mixture. Graham always liked to have his travel subsidised if possible; he liked help in reaching locations that might be used in his fiction. In The Spy’s Bedside Book he quotes Balzac’s maxim: ‘The trade of the spy is a very fine one, when the spy is working on his own account.’ Regarding a proposal from Greene to carry out some espionage in Finland in 1952, an SIS officer reported to his superiors:
Bear in mind that he would certainly wish to be remunerated for any out-of-pocket expenses. Despite the money he makes out of making the great British public worry about its soul, he is extremely mercenary.
(MW, p. 37)
The SIS (‘the best travel agency in the world’) certainly facilitated Greene’s journeys and meetings with knowledgeable informants abroad. We have seen that in the 1940s Greene became a friend of Sir Alexander Korda; and Korda’s company, London Films, had long provided cover for British agents. Korda himself had completed valuable work in filming the North African coast as preparation for the allies’ wartime invasion of that region. Sherry and Shelden cite evidence that Greene reported back to SIS when he was in Poland (1955), in Vietnam (1955), in the Soviet Union (late 1950s) and in China (1957), and argue that he was repeatedly sending information to the service during his travels (Life II, Chap. 34; MW, Chap. 2 et passim). Yet, we may recall, in Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor the SIS is depicted as variously incompetent and treacherously unreliable.
During Greene’s long career, there is some patchy, intermittent evidence of right-wing sympathies and connections. There was his delight in strike-breaking while working for The Times in 1926, and his jubilation then on hearing of the arrest of Shapurji Saklatvala, a Communist MP. In 1936 his account (in the Daily Mail) of the funeral of King George V is romantically patriotic, declaring: ‘Just as much as Charles I, the King has laid down his life “for the common people of England and their liberties”.’ Another factor is the anti-Semitism of various novels between 1930 and 1938; the depiction of Kapper, the revolutionary leader of The Name of Action, is a clear example. Among Greene’s associates, Victor Cazalet, the main investor in Night and Day magazine, expressed the hope that ‘General Franco will win a victory for civilisation over Bolshevism’, and Douglas Jerrold, who employed Greene at the offices of Eyre & Spottiswoode, was also a Franco sympathiser (as indeed was Herbert Greene for a while). Between 1948 and the late 1970s the Information Research Department, a section of the Foreign Office, produced anti-communist propaganda; some of it was published by Bodley Head, the firm of which Greene was a director between 1958 and 1968. During interviews in the 1980s, he said he would have voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979; she seemed more trustworthy than the Labour leaders: ‘I don’t like the extreme left slant in the Labour Party.’ John Carey, the literary critic, has remarked that Greene sought ‘to keep in with the Establishment, while posing as a rebel and a misfit’.
More than a pose, and more like an obsession, however, is his long-term hostility to many aspects of the United States. His sympathy with the underdog entailed considerable antipathy to that upperdog in international affairs. He criticised the USA for its vulgar materialism and its interference abroad, and was particularly critical of the Central Intelligence Agency. During the Cold War, American fears of communism led to covert and overt support for numerous right-wing regimes; the CIA was an important channel of such support. In South and Central America, Greene sided with Marxist regimes and with dictatorships which, in his view, were left-inclined. He gave favourable publicity (in essays and novels) to Castro in Cuba, to Allende in Chile, to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and, of course, to the unsavoury Torrijos in Panama. The Honorary Consul suggests that the CIA participated in the torturing of South American dissidents; in The Human Factor, the Agency is involved with the British and South African security forces in supporting the Apartheid system. Looking to the east, in both The Quiet American and Ways of Escape Greene gives the CIA a large share of the blame for a terrorist atrocity in Saigon.
Greene’s communist friends included Claud Cockburn (from Oxford days) and later Kim Philby. The author’s visit to East Germany in 1963 resulted in an essay which was remarkably sympathetic to the Marxist dictatorship there. Notoriously, he once claimed that if he had to choose between living in the USA or the USSR, he would choose the USSR. He was a critical friend of the Soviet system: he was not blind to the persecution of dissident writers there, and protested against their incarceration; but in the main he seemed to give rather more sympathy to the Soviet regime than it deserved. Similarly, with hindsight, one can see that his anti-US views were sometimes excessive. After all, the USA had come to the rescue of Britain during the Second World War, and the Marshall Plan had helped the recovery of the whole of Europe in the war’s aftermath. There is no doubt, however, that the CIA has been deeply involved in the politics of South and Central America. The toppling in 1973 of Chile’s Marxist President, Salvador Allende, was widely regarded as evidence of this. The Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s revealed that funds had covertly been used to support the Contras, the rebels seeking to overthrow the left-wing government of Nicaragua. US troops intervened directly in Panama in 1989. Certainly Greene had a case, but he pushed it too far; and sometimes he gave the impression of wilfully biting the hand that fed him. Obviously, he had been helped along the route to wealth and fame by US publishers, US film-makers, US readers and reviewers, and US interviewers.
In his novels and articles, he frequently expressed a hope for a union of Marxism and Catholicism. In Stamboul Train Czinner, the idealistic Marxist, experiences nostalgia for Catholicism; so does D., the Republican emissary in The Confidential Agent. At the ideological climax of The Power and the Glory, the Marxist lieutenant is drawn to friendship with the Catholic priest who is his captive; the lieutenant is in some respects a priest manqué. In The Honorary Consul, the Marxist (Aquino) fights alongside the priest (Rivas) in their vain resistance to the Paraguayan dictatorship. Certainly, Catholicism and Marxism have, in practice, certain structural similarities, being hierarchical, authoritarian and dogmatic; each claims ownership of a master-narrative which explains history; both purport to bring salvation to the masses. Locally, in some areas of the world, they have established common ground for political action. In the main, however, as was shown by the Spanish Civil War, they are so obviously opposed that Greene’s hope for their union seems particularly Utopian – or Dystopian.
Anti-Semitism and the case of Stamboul Train
Anti-Semitism, whose history extends over many centuries, was internationally widespread between the two world wars. It could be found among all classes; depressingly, it could be found in the writings of some of the most brilliant cultural figures. Writers admired by Greene included some who expressed strongly anti-Semitic views: G. K. Chesterton (a Catholic), T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In The New Jerusalem (1920), for example, Chesterton, while denying that he was anti-Semitic, argued that Jews were loyal to each other rather than to the nations in which they lived; accordingly, there should be a law ‘that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab’ (pp. 271–2). He added:
Jews and Gipseys ….. are in different ways landless, and therefore in different ways lawless ….. It is normal for the nation to contain the family. With the Jews the family is generally divided among the nations ….. Even when the purpose is not any sort of treachery, the very position is a sort of treason ….. [If] the advantage of the ideal [of Zionism] to the Jews is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get rid of the Jewish problem ….. I would leave as few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to these I would give a special position best described as privilege; some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions …..
(pp.277–99)
In Eliot’s ‘Burbank with a Baedeker’ (1920), we read:
The rats are underneath the piles,
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.
(In later editions ‘jew’ became ‘Jew’.) Eliot assured his Virginian audience, in the lectures of 1933 published as After Strange Gods (1934):
I think that the chances for the re-establishment of a native culture are perhaps better here than in New York. You are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialised and less invaded by foreign races ….. The population should be homogeneous ….. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable ….. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.
(pp. 16–17, 20)
Ezra Pound’s Cantos poured scatological abuse on the conspiracy of Jewish financiers who, in Pound’s view, were responsible for the corruption and subversion of civilisation. During the Second World War, Pound would serve the Fascist cause in Italy, and in propaganda broadcasts for Rome Radio he reviled the ‘Kikes’ (Jews) who, he alleged, had caused the war.
[T]he big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into ….. The sixty Kikes who started this war might be sent to St Helena as a measure of world prophylaxis ….. The Jews have worked out a system, a very neat system, for the ruin of the rest of mankind …..
In Greene’s second novel to be published, The Name of Action, the English hero, Chant, supports Kapper, the revolutionary leader, a Jewish poet whose speciality is vulgar satire. In the course of time Chant becomes disillusioned in the revolutionary cause and finally sides with the toppled dictator of Trier. Early in the narrative, soon after Chant meets Kapper, we are told this (p. 38):
Chant ….. caught his first glimpse of what was happening behind the black, shifting curtain of the Jew’s eyes, dark halls and clammy mysteries and perpetual night. Must I, too, he wondered, become a part of that dream and let myself be shifted here and there by that imagination always in darkness?
(One is reminded of Max Bewer’s anti-Semitic cartoons, in which the Jew is a sinister night-creature.) Kapper’s home is squalid and grimy, and when he looks at the dictator’s beautiful wife, he does so with ‘those dark, desecrating eyes’. To him the Madonna is ‘the mother of his eternal enemy’:
There was nothing higher than the world to which this Jew could appeal, no supernatural tribunal to find his work of value. It was with envy that he looked through the window at the moonlit court in which the Madonna stood.
(p. 183)
In the thematic structure of this novel, Kapper is associated with revolution, murder, bawdily reductive satire, the sordid underworld, and with widespread vice and fornication; one of his henchmen bears ‘a grey syphilitic scar’. The dictator has tried to inaugurate a puritanical regime; when Kapper is victorious, the prostitutes emerge from hiding and saturnalia can begin. Furthermore, with gross implausibility, the dictator’s beautiful wife chooses not to follow her devoted husband but to stay with Kapper; there is a bond of dark attraction between them.
The anti-Semitic animus of The Name of Action is so marked that one may suspect that this is one of the reasons for Greene’s decision to suppress the work; for the novel was never reprinted in the collected editions which appeared when Greene became internationally lauded. In any case, it is generally an unconvincing work. Greene did include it, however, in the list of publications in his post-war Who’s Who entries. Furthermore, he chose not to suppress Stamboul Train, a work in which anti-Semitism appears more pervasively, subtly and tellingly. I give here an extensive account of this novel, because what makes the issue of its anti-Semitism difficult is that in some respects this is an admirable work, a deft, lively and shrewd political thriller.
As we have noted previously, with Stamboul Train Greene moved rapidly towards characteristic maturity as a writer. The cinematic qualities are still strikingly effective. Greene had long been an enthusiast for films; he was an astute film reviewer (as when he praised the emotional economy of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, which first appeared in 1923), and in Stamboul Train scene after scene is observed with sharpness, variety, mobility. The jump-cutting from character to character (sometimes from dialogue to dialogue) is handled with confident dexterity. The experience of train travel, away from the clammy darkness of the Channel coast deeper into the continent, further towards the cold and snow of Yugoslavia, is strongly evoked by a wealth of lively detail.
The characters of Stamboul Train are sharply etched and contrasted, often in a satirical pattern, as the novel accelerates towards its comprehensively cynical conclusion. Dr Czinner, the communist, is travelling to Yugoslavia to face a trial at which he hopes to denounce the tyrannical regime; but he is denied a public martyrdom: arrested at the border, he is shot there. On the journey, he feels a confessional yearning for the Catholic faith of his childhood; but the only priest available is a garrulous Anglican, Opie, who suggests that a psycho-analyst would be a more effective counsellor. A central character is Coral Musker, a showgirl, who is befriended by Carleton Myatt, a Jewish businessman. She loses her virginity to Myatt. He experiences tentative feelings of love for her, and, when she is arrested with Czinner at the border, he makes a vain attempt to rescuse her. Instead, he fortuitously rescues only Grünlich, a brutal killer (whose name, with an authorial wink, means ‘Green(e)-like’). Coral is then rescued by a predatory lesbian, Mabel Warren, not for any altruistic reason but because Mabel is seeking a new sexual partner; though Coral, who has a coronary disease, then dies from a heart-attack in Mabel’s car. As the summary indicates, the plot is certainly melodramatic, but it is grippingly well-paced, and repeatedly the characterisations have the vividness of sharp cameos; intimately shrewd detail invests them all.
In the final chapter, set in Istanbul, the cynicism reaches its merciless conclusion. Carleton Myatt decides to dismiss thoughts of Coral in order to woo and marry the more attractive Janet Pardoe; and the main reason for Myatt’s decision is financial. Janet is the niece of Stein, another Jewish businessman involved in a tricky transaction with him. By marrying Janet, Myatt will become the ‘family member’ whom Stein hopes to see on the board of the amalgamated company; and such cooperation will enable Myatt to buy out Stein and establish a lucrative monopoly.
‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’, said Greene (SL, p. 185); he repeatedly claimed that a novelist should strive for objectivity. As one looks back over Stamboul Train, a kind of iciness, a systematic ruthlessness, is evident; and one senses not objectivity so much as a determination to eliminate the reassuring patterns of moral justice and romantic fulfilment offered by conventional popular fiction. The text makes this opposition explicit, both by its satiric treatment of Quin Savory (the pipe-smoking popular novelist based on J. B. Priestley), who seeks to ‘bring back cheerfulness and ’ealth to modern fiction’, and by such remarks as this: ‘Novelists like Ruby M. Ayres might say chastity was worth more than rubies, but the truth was it was priced at a fur coat or thereabouts.’
Accordingly, in Greene’s novel, the left-wing idealist, Czinner, dies ignobly and apparently in vain (unless his truncated speech has influenced one of the soldiers who hears it); the tyrannical regime in Yugoslavia is unshaken, a coup against it having already failed; the weak, gentle and kind Coral perishes; the callous killer, Grünlich, survives; and Myatt’s heart is hardened. By the standards of fiction-writing in 1932, the outcome is remarkably harsh, with cruel irony heaped upon irony. Its treatment of sexuality, whether heterosexual or lesbian, whether crucial or incidental, is also, by the general standards of the the, remarkably explicit, and may partly account for the commercial success of the book. ‘I thought it was the dirtiest book I had ever read’, recalled one purchaser (Life I, p. 442). In cynicism and frankness, and in certain technical devices like the rapid interweaving of different characters’ dialogues, Greene may have learnt lessons from Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (which he admired); though the descriptive intensity is distinctively Greenian.
His previous novels had a psychologically blurred quality caused by the awkward mixture of personal preoccupations and narrative requirements. In Stamboul Train Greene seems fully in command of the fictional material, deploying it instead of slithering into it. The novel is adroit in its interweaving of several themes. These include: the claims of communism versus the claims of religion (a dialectic which would reach its culmination in The Power and the Glory); attitudes to religion; the injustice of class divisions in society; the difficulty of disentangling idealism and altruism from vanity and self-interest; the techniques of the successful writer (whether novelist or journalist) and the ways in which such a writer distorts the truth and manipulates the public (a discussion which would extend to A Burnt-Out Case); and, crucially, the justice or injustice of anti-Semitism. It is in its voicing of the last theme that Stamboul Train seems, in the post-Holocaust world, most controversial.
Of the central figures, the most important in the narrative is Carleton Myatt: ‘most important’ in the sense that the final emphasis falls on the outcome of his encounters and deliberations. During his journey, he experiences anti-Semitic prejudice in numerous forms, some mild, some extreme, from railway staff, fellow passengers, villagers and soldiers. He is clean and fastidious, but Mrs Peters calls him ‘A dirty little Jew’, and even an old woman who glimpses him briefly as he drives by in a taxi shouts ‘Dirty Jew’. Intermittently the narrator seems to be opposing such prejudice: its vileness is often made evident, most notably when Myatt faces a brutal guard at Subotica who strikes at him with a rifle-butt, saying ‘Go away, you Jew’:
[In] the small hungry eyes shone hatred and a desire to kill; it was as if all the oppressions, the pogroms, the chains, and the envy and superstition which caused them, had been herded into a dark cup of the earth and now he stared down at them from the rim.
(p. 244)
Yet it is evident that one of the central questions posed by the plot-structure is this: will Myatt give way to the temptation to step out of a familiar stereotype and be altruistic, brave and loving, or will he, in his own life, choose to be governed by that stereotype of the mercenary, scheming, manipulative rich Jew? Eventually, it is the stereotype which prevails. And, as it prevails within Myatt, so it prevails within the narrative. After fighting a resourceful rearguard action, the narrative is, in this respect, defeated by the very anti-Semitic prejudice which it has sought to analyse and has intermittently criticised.
Myatt himself believes that Jews are more duplicitous in business matters than are English gentiles. We are told that Eckman, a Jew who has become a convert to Christianity, keeps ‘a chained Bible by his lavatory seat’, so that every visitor will know of his conversion. Coral, reflecting on the Jews she has met in the world of the theatre, thinks that they are ‘mean with a commonplace habitual meanness, generous in fits and starts, never to be trusted’. Myatt treats her generously and even attempts a heroic rescue; but, by the end of the novel, it appears that he, too, was generous only ‘in fits and starts’. Taking the hand of the Jewess, Janet, he ‘wondered whether Mr. Stein had the contract in his pocket’.
Stamboul Train was written before Kristallnacht, before the pre-war pogroms in Nazi Germany, before the horrors of Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz. Nevertheless, after the war, Greene made no substantial changes to the novel. In the Introduction which he wrote for the 1974 edition, he said: ‘Hitler had not yet come to power when Stamboul Train was written. It was a different world and a different author – an author still in his twenties.’ For some of the characterisations, he added, ‘the old writer can salute his young predecessor with a certain distant respect’; and one of them is ‘Mr Stein the fraudulent businessman’. In the post-war conflicts between Israel and the Arab world, Greene spoke out on behalf of Israel; but the complex and insidious anti-Semitism of Stamboul Train he allowed to stand.
A Gun for Sale, too, remained substantially unchanged. The most depressing feature of the plot is that it presents with caricatural clarity a stale anti-Semitic thesis: the thesis of the destructive international conspiracy. In this novel, the arch-villain is Sir Marcus, the head of a powerful steel company. He has a ‘family resemblance’, Greene remarked, to the real-life Sir Basil Zaharoff (WE, pp. 69–70). He is gradually identified as a Jew, a Mason, a ruthless conspirator and a war-lover: he is ‘That old devil’ with ‘the old wicked face’. Aided by Davis, a financial racketeer, he has hired Raven to kill a continental socialist who was once a friend of his. Sir Marcus hopes that this treacherous assassination of the socialist, a Foreign Minister who opposes war, will be blamed on Serbs, and that the consequence will be the outbreak of the Second World War. Of course, the preparations for that war, as well as the conflict itself, will further enrich not only Sir Marcus (because steel will be needed for armaments) but also his circle of rich friends. They, too, appear to be Jewish.
Armament shares continued to rise, and with them steel ….. Sir Marcus had many friends, in many countries; he wintered with them regularly off Cannes or in Soppelsa’s yacht off Rhodes; he was the intimate friend or Mrs. Cranbeim. It was impossible now to export arms, but it was still possible to export nickel and many of the other metals which were necessary to the arming of nations. Even when war was declared, Mrs. Cranbeim was able to say quite definitely that evening when the yacht pitched a little and Rosen was so distressingly sick over Mrs. Ziffo’s black satin, the British Government would not forbid the export of nickel to Switzerland or other neutral countries ….. So the future really was very rosy indeed, for you could trust Mrs. Cranbeim’s word. She spoke directly from the horse’s mouth, if you could so describe the elder statesman whose confidence she shared.
(pp. 159–60)
It seems depressingly obvious that Greene is offering the old anti-Semitic myth of a world-conspiracy of wealthy Jews to profit by war and death. As the historian John Röhl has shown, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had instigated the Great War, was one of the influential bigots who alleged that in the 1930s, as in 1914, Jews and Freemasons were instigators of conflict. In England, the Right Review in 1937 denounced the ‘international Yiddish money tyranny’, while the Saturday Review praised Hitler and Mussolini. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland; and, in the ensuing years of devastation, six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
A Gun for Sale is widely pervaded by prejudice. Even the seedy revue in which the heroine, Anne, performs is controlled by a ‘Mr. Cohen’ as well as by Sir Marcus’s henchman, Davis. The back-street abortionist is ‘Dr. Yogel’. The malevolence of Sir Marcus is so stressed (‘his most vivid emotion was venom’) that the reader is invited to feel approval when Raven eventually assassinates him. (The assassination, after all, is supposed to have the effect of averting war.) In Stamboul Train, Greene had at least attempted to question anti-Semitic prejudice: sometimes its injustice and cruelty were displayed; but here that prejudice is all too easily endorsed. Oddly enough, when A Gun for Sale was adapted for broadcasting, Greene insisted that even Raven, who in the text does not appear to be a Jew, ‘should speak in a Jewish manner’ (Life I, p. 628).
In the case of Brighton Rock, Greene did later revise the text to reduce the anti-Semitic animus which is evident in the first British edition. (The first US edition differs: see p. vii above.) Pinkie, the Brightonian racketeer (‘I’m real Brighton’) is challenged on his local territory by a gang from London which serves the wealthy Colleoni. The 1938 text makes clear that Colleoni is Jewish: ‘a small Jew ….. [whose] eyes gleamed like raisins’ (p. 84); he is at home in the opulence of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where Jewesses sit like ‘bitches’. His henchman, Crab, is a Jew; and his razor-wielding gang-members are Jewish, too. One of the means by which the narrator seeks to win an element of pity for Pinkie is to contrast the Catholicism of Pinkie and Rose to the Semitic kinship of Colleoni and his gang, just as the sense that Pinkie is at least a Brighton lad is accentuated by the recognition that his territory is being invaded by lawbreakers from the metropolis. ‘You can’t stand against Colleoni’, the local police inspector tells him.
The Uniform Edition of Brighton Rock (1947, often reprinted) retained all these details; but, for the Collected Edition of 1970, Greene reduced the number of references to Jews. Whereas the 1938 Heinemann text, referring to Colleoni’s gang, has ‘the group of Jews stood in a bunch waiting’ and ‘The Jews with one accord came round them’ (p. 150), the 1970 text has ‘the group of men stood in a bunch waiting’ and ‘The men with one accord came round them’ (p. 129); their faces are no longer ‘Semitic’. Again, the 1938 text (pp. 11–12) reads:
Down the broad steps of the Cosmopolitan came a couple of Jewesses with bright brass hair and ermine coats and heads close together like parrots, exchanging metallic confidences.
For ‘Jewesses’ in this passage the 1970 text substitutes ‘women’. The sentimental crooner at Sherry’s dance-hall was ‘the Jew’ (p. 69); he becomes ‘the singer’ (p. 60). Instead of an ‘old Semitic face’ (p. 88), Colleoni has an ‘old Italian face’ (p. 77). When Pinkie waits to meet him at the Cosmopolitan, ‘A little Jewess sniffed at him bitchily and then talked him over with another little Jewess on a settee’ (1938, p. 83); this becomes ‘A little bitch sniffed at him and then talked him over with another little bitch on a settee’ (1970, p. 73). The revisions are incomplete, for both texts say of Crab, ‘He had been a Jew once, but a hairdresser and a surgeon had altered that’ (by dyeing his hair and straightening his nose: pp. 113, 98–9).
As we have seen, other works by Greene, including his film reviews for the Spectator and Night and Day, are tainted by anti-Semitic remarks: for example, ‘too perceptive dramatic critics ….. are able to recognize genius even when it speaks Yiddish’ (PD, p. 222). On the other hand, Forbes (formerly Furtstein) in The Confidential Agent is a wealthy Jew who proves to be generous, considerate and gallant; and, in The Honorary Consul (1973), Gruber is presented fairly sympathetically as a Jew whose parents were killed by the Nazis: ‘They had made their withered little plus two sign to that mathematical formula – the Final Solution’ (p. 90). In Travels with My Aunt (1969), however, when Visconti says ‘In my situation cash alone has a tongue’, Henry Pulling enquires: ‘Has Mr Visconti any Jewish blood?’ (p. 288).
Between 1934 and 1939, Graham Greene’s brother Hugh had worked in Berlin as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, and that newspaper regularly printed his indictments of the Nazi regime in Germany: he visited Dachau and was appalled by what he saw. Herbert Greene’s Secret Agent in Spain (1938), Chap. 4, depicted sympathetically the sufferings of German Jews victimised by the Nazis. So the novelist should have been well informed about the realities of the persecution of the Jews. Unfortunately, Greene’s ‘Notes from a Journal of the Blitz, 1940–1941’ (published in the Month, November 1952) say that the only cowardly person that he saw during one bombing raid was a ‘whimpering’ casualty with a crushed foot: ‘a large fat foreign Jew’. In Ways of Escape, he has become ‘a large fat foreigner’; and in A Sort of Life (p. 85), Greene pays tribute to ‘our old Jewish post warden’ at that time, ‘one of the bravest men I have known and the most unaware of his own courage’. In interviews, Greene said that after the war, during the Arab-Israeli conflicts, his sympathies lay with the Israelis. Writing during the aftermath of the Six-Day War, he noted (while on a tour of the front with the Israelis) that the truce had been broken by Egyptian artillery. He was on friendly terms with General Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Defence. In 1981 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize (which included a sum of $5,000), ‘to recognise an author who has contributed to the world’s understanding of the freedom of the individual in society’ (MW, p. 153). Interviewed in 1984, Greene said: ‘I have never felt any kinship with the Arab causes; I prefer the Israelis.’ Later, however, he was critical of Menachem Begin’s premiership, and said ‘Today some of my sympathies are with the Palestinians, because I don’t see what chance they have of real autonomy so long as Begin remains in power’ (OM, p. 116).
The texts discussed in this section offer various lessons and warnings. A novel which contains moral or political implications that we deplore may still, from a literary point of view, be a very good text. Creative writers are distinguished by their qualities of articulate intelligence and imagination, and not necessarily by their possession of an impeccable moral or political outlook. Chaucer and Shakespeare were, by most standards, remarkably humane; but even they endorsed some racist stereotypes. The literary ancestry of Greene’s Colleoni and Sir Marcus can be traced back via Dickens’s Fagin and Sheridan’s Moses to Shakespeare’s Shylock and the murderous ‘cursed Jewes’ of Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. Greene said that a writer should espouse the virtue of disloyalty; but he retained, in various early novels and non-fictional works, a loyalty to certain prejudices which is now painful to observe. One lesson is that present-day readers and critics should be circumspect in their judgement of him; for posterity may find in us prejudices of which we are currently unaware but which time and historical change may make painfully conspicuous.
Various influences
Throughout his life, Greene was a rapid, voracious and retentive reader: a remarkably catholic reader, in the sense that he could appreciate and employ the most heterogeneous texts, ranging from the children’s books of Beatrix Potter (which contributed phrases to Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory) to the magisterial novels of Henry James, from Metaphysical poetry and Shakespeare’s plays to the Victorian adventure-tales of Rider Haggard and the experimentalism of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Good evidence for these claims is provided by his book British Dramatists, his biography of Rochester, and the literary pieces (many of them book reviews) in Collected Essays. In the main, Greene is a fine literary critic: lucid, sharp and original. He conveys his enthusiasms, he moves well between the particular and the general, he strikes at the familiar from an unfamiliar angle; he renews one’s interest; he reminds one of the peculiar magic conjured by a good tale. Often his Catholicism provides the originality of the approach, as when he seeks and locates a sense of the infernal in the works of Dickens or James. Sometimes an important factor is his sense of chivalry to the underdog, aided by his warm nostalgia for the pleasures of adventure-stories. ‘Conrad, Dostoevsky, James, yes, but we are too ready to forget such figures as A. E. W. Mason, Stanley Weyman, and Rider Haggard, ….. who enchanted us when we were young’ (CE, p. 209). This chivalry may have strengthened his championship of Conrad’s erstwhile collaborator, Ford Madox Ford; indeed, Greene was prepared to argue that in narrative technique, Ford (in The Good Soldier) had surpassed his master. On other occasions, he was brilliantly mischievous, as when he made such a poker-faced pseudo-intellectual analysis of Beatrix Potter’s tales that the authoress, taking it seriously, wrote to protest against his ‘Freudian’ interpretation. (The analysis proved to be astute, even while offering a fine parody of critical hermeneutics.)
The epigraphs to his novels provide some indication of his range of reading: they are taken from (among others) Sir Thomas Browne, Shakespeare, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Traherne, George Santayana, Alexander Kinglake, W. H. Auden, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Hardy, A. H. Clough, Lord Byron, John Dryden, Dante, George Herbert, Edwin Muir, Cardinal Newman, Thomas Dekker, Charles Péguy, Auguste Flaubert and Sören Kierkegaard. A recurrent theme in these epigraphs is the fallen, sinful, divided and ignorant state of human beings. Literary quotations, literary allusions and sly literary jests proliferate in his novels and tales. Modern authors appear, variously disguised, variously criticised: most obviously, J. B. Priestley as both Savory in Stamboul Train and the pipe-smoking author at the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton Rock. Greene said that in the novella ‘The Third Man’, the literary character of the ‘great English writer Dexter ….. bore certain echoes of the gentle genius of Mr. E. M. Forster’. Greene himself, working on his biography of Rochester, appears in ‘May We Borrow Your Husband?’. Some quotations recur: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one favourite source (‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it’; ‘My heart’s so hardened I cannot repent’); George Russell’s ‘Germinal’ is another; Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ yet another. The tale ‘Mortmain’ gives a love-poem by Browning a crucial role in the plot, quotes Edmund Spenser and cites George Eliot’s letters. ‘Cheap in August’ quotes Henry James and cites Thomson’s The Seasons, Longfellow’s poems, Anthony Trollope, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.
Thus, scores of authors have left a verifiable imprint on Greene’s writings. Two of the most important of them, and one of the most curious, I discuss in the following sections.
Joseph Conrad
When we scan Greene’s career, his voyages, travels abroad, his literary range and the way in which first-hand observation was transformed into fictional narratives, he looks remarkably like a younger brother of Joseph Conrad: less powerful but enviously and industriously emulous. There is no doubt that one reason for Greene’s restless journeys to dangerous or formidable regions was a desire to rise to the challenge presented by Conrad. The evidence is tangible: when Greene travelled in a paddle-boat up a tributary of the Congo, he held Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ in his hand.
In Liberia, when Greene met Colonel Davis, he was at once reminded of the soldier of fortune, Captain Blunt, in The Arrow of Gold. Conrad journeyed to the Caribbean, the Far East, central Africa; so did Greene. Conrad’s Nostromo was, in part, a critical response to US imperialism in Colombia and Panama; Greene extended this criticism, with particular attention to Panama, in Getting to Know the General. (Both men criticised the role of the United States in the secession of Panama from Colombia in 1903.) Incidentally, Conrad’s friend Cunninghame Graham, who had travelled widely in Paraguay and written about the Jesuit missions there, had provided material for Nostromo; and, when Greene explored Paraguay, he remembered Cunninghame Graham and his writings.
Greene acknowledged that his earliest novels, The Man Within, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, were written under the influence of some of Conrad’s inferior work. As we have noted, The Man Within seems indebted to the Conrad-Hueffer novel of piracy and trial, Romance. Then The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, though so different from each other, both show the influence of The Arrow of Gold (which Greene later deemed ‘Conrad’s worst novel’). In The Name of Action, as in The Arrow of Gold, the hero experiences disenchantment with a political conspiracy and fights a duel over a seductive woman; in Rumour at Nightfall, the heroine (Greene explained) is an imitation of Conrad’s Doña Rita. After the failure of these two novels, Greene tried to break away from an influence he now saw as ‘too great and too disastrous’: ‘Never again, I swore, would I read a novel of Conrad’s – a vow I kept for more than a quarter of a century’ (IS, p. 48; SL, p. 208).
Although Conrad’s more romantic fiction exerted a deleterious influence, there were other aspects of Conrad which proved particularly productive. Greene’s greatest Conradian debt is probably to The Secret Agent, for Greeneland, that seedy, corrupt territory, has clear affinities with the base, murky world of Conrad’s novel of political crime and espionage, of double agents and sordid circumstances. The debt is clear in It’s a Battlefield, for Greene’s Assistant Commissioner of Police (corrected from ‘Commissioner’ after the first edition) is clearly a twin of Conrad’s Assistant Commissioner. Both have served in the tropics before returning to London; both like to leave their desks to explore the streets of the city; both deal with a Parliamentary Private Secretary who is devoted to a busy Minister. In a characteristic disguised acknowledgement, the first name of the hero, Conrad Drover, derives, we are told, from ‘a seaman, a merchant officer’ who had once lodged in his parents’ home. Caroline Bury, though partly based on Lady Ottoline Morrell (who met both authors), is a counterpart to the ‘lady patroness’ of The Secret Agent: each is liberal in outlook and willing to give help to a convict with revolutionary sympathies. In these two novels, Conrad and Greene offer pessimistic vistas of struggling selves lost in the urban crowd, of fallible authority, of hypocritical idealists and rather naïve patronesses; in both works, a vulnerable figure is killed while making a futile political gesture. Like Conrad, Greene makes fastidiously perceptive notations of urban squalor. The pessimistic irony that political action may prove counter-productive, self-destructive or absurdly unavailing is common to both writers.
When Greene travelled to central Africa, he was consciously emulating Conrad. In 1890 the latter had kept a ‘Congo Diary’; Greene in 1959 kept a ‘Congo Journal’. In the essay ‘Analysis of a Journey’ and in Journey without Maps, Greene actually quotes his predecessor’s diary when showing that he, like Conrad, associated the darkness of the interior of Africa with the darkness of the unconscious mind of a European. ‘Heart of Darkness’, of course, repeatedly formed a reference-point for Greene: it is cited in Journey without Maps, the ‘Congo Journal’ and A Burnt-Out Case. Both writers espouse a form of primitivism, for both suggest that the Africans are best left to themselves and are corrupted by the incursion of European (or American) trade and exploitation. Another connection is that Querry in A Burnt-Out Case has intermittent resemblances to the Marlow of ‘Heart of Darkness’. Marlow looks compassionately on the suffering Africans and finds that his role is misinterpreted by fellow-Europeans, who think that he belongs to Kurtz’s ‘gang of virtue’; Querry is similarly compassionate to the suffering lepers and is infuriated by the attempts by Rycker, Parkinson and some of the priests to stereotype him as an intrepid idealist.
‘Heart of Darkness’ seems to have left its mark on The Third Man. Martins is a weak descendant of Marlow; Harry Lime is a powerful descendant of Kurtz, that charismatic figure of eloquent corruption; and Anna shares the mournful fidelity of the Intended. The ‘river of darkness’ is transmogrified as the vast sewer beneath the city. Once again, Greene incorporated sly homage: one of Lime’s loyal henchmen is known as ‘Mr. Kurtz’. (A suspect character named Kurtz – a flawed idealist – also appears in The Name of Action.) The Conradian theme that loyalty to one person or cause may entail treachery to another was extensively developed by Greene, as we may be reminded by the quotation from Victory which is the epigraph of The Human Factor: ‘I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.’
Greene’s admiration for Conrad was changeable and discriminating. He praised the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis, who had emphasised Conrad’s moral intelligence, for rescuing him ‘from legend’ – i.e. the legend of the romantic yam-spinning master mariner (WE, p. 262). On re-reading ‘Heart of Darkness’ in 1959, Greene first found that Conrad’s ‘heavy hypnotic style’ made him aware of ‘the poverty’ of his own style, but later considered the language ‘too inflated’ and Kurtz unconvincing (IS, pp. 48, 51). ‘And how often he compares something concrete to something abstract. Is this a trick that I have caught?’ – to which the answer is yes, though Conrad was not the only source.
One of the finest brief appreciations of Conrad is Greene’s ‘Remembering Mr Jones’, in which, predictably seeking to give Catholicism credit for some merits of a predominantly sceptical writer, he finds ‘the rhetoric of an abandoned faith’:
Conrad was born a Catholic and ended – formally – in consecrated ground, but all he retained of Catholicism was the ironic sense of an omniscience and of the final unimportance of human life under the watching eyes ….. ‘The mental degradation to which a man’s intelligence is exposed on its way through life’: ‘the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil’: in scattered phrases you get the memories of a creed working like poetry through the agnostic prose.
(CE, p. 184)
That review was written in 1937. Curiously, the remark about ‘the memories of a creed working like poetry through the agnostic prose’ now seems to apply quite well to some of Greene’s own later works, such as A Burnt-Out Case and The Human Factor.
T. S. Eliot
It is a widely acknowledged platitude that T. S. Eliot’s earlier poetry, particularly The Waste Land, exerted a powerful influence on writers and intellectuals in the 1930s. Cyril Connolly described it as ‘a veritable brain-washing’. In Greene’s case, the influence is to be found not in his poetry – Babbling April, for example, offers rather callow romanticism – but in the early novels.
As we have seen, Eliot’s anti-Semitism, in which Jews are associated with affluence, corruption and subversion, finds an echo in Greene’s fiction. The Jews of Eliot’s poems (Bleistein, the ‘Chicago Semite Viennese’, Sir Ferdinand Klein, Sir Alfred Mond, Rachel née Rabinovitch with her ‘murderous paws’) are relatives of the Jewish conspirators in A Gun for Sale. Greeneland borrows numerous features of Eliot’s urban (and soiled rural) terrain: the drab streets and refuse-strewn river-bank, the sordid or joyless acts of copulation, and the pervasive sense that the secular outlook drains life of meaning whereas the religious outlook restores significance. As Michael Shelden says:
The mind that created Stamboul Train and Brighton Rock was teeming with memories of Eliot’s yellow fog, the gloomy pubs and cheap hotels, the half-deserted streets, the rats and oily canals, scraps of newspapers swirling in vacant lots, stale smells of food and drink, the lonely typist in her furnished room, the random bits of overheard conversation and popular tunes.
(MW, p. 99)
One of the two epigraphs of The Name of Action is a passage from ‘The Hollow Men’ which stresses the gap between the idea and the reality, the notion and the act: appropriate to a narrative illustrating vague idealism and disillusionment. Another connection is that the legend of the Fisher King, one of the sources of The Waste Land, influences the treatment of the dictator, Demassener. Among the unsavoury characters in The Waste Land is Mr Eugenides, who offers the narrator ‘a weekend at the Metropole’ –
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight
– and he is clearly a relative of Carleton Myatt, the Jewish currant-trader in Stamboul Train, who carries samples of the currants in his pocket, studies the trade documents, and makes calculations which take account of ‘C.i.f.’ (cost, insurance and freight). He offers Coral Musker accommodation not at the Metropole in Brighton but at a flat in Constantinople. (The Metropole features in Brighton Rock.) The Tarot Pack of The Waste Land, including the card that represents ‘The Hanged Man’, reappears in A Gun for Sale. In Journey without Maps, a quotation of several lines from The Waste Land accompanies a discussion of ‘the deep appeal of the seedy’. More generally, Greene’s fiction strove to vindicate Eliot’s thesis that the thriller and the serious novel could be combined and given poetic intensity.
It is not surprising that when Greene met Eliot in 1935, and occasionally thereafter, his attitude was that of the respectful disciple towards a master. Yet their careers had common features. Both (poets, playwrights, reviewers) had worked editorially on magazines and became executives of publishing firms; both served as fire-wardens during the Blitz; both knew the throes of depression and marital incompatibility; both admired James, Conrad, Joyce and Pound, and enjoyed popular entertainments (notably the music-hall); both combined radicalism and conservatism; both were converts who used religion as a criterion of the world’s situation; and both exploited ‘the literary possibilities of a modern world plagued by disillusion and despair’ (MW, p. 100).
Dunne and dreams
John William Dunne (1875–1949) was an early aircraft designer. His book. An Experiment with Time, appeared in 1927, and, though now largely forgotten, it was then much discussed and very influential. It received ‘unexpectedly continuous attention by the public press’, the author noted; and four editions were published by 1936. (He extended his theories in The Serial Universe, 1934.)
Dunne offered anecdotal evidence that certain dreams are precognitive: they truly foretell the future. For example: in 1902 he dreamt of a volcanic eruption; later in the year, he read in a newspaper that Mont Pelée had catastrophically erupted. To explain such coincidences, he offered a theory of ‘serial time’:
Every Time-travelling field of presentation is contained within a field one dimension larger, travelling in another dimension of Time, the larger field covering events which are ‘past’ and ‘future’, as well as ‘present’, to the smaller field.
(An Experiment with Time, 1927, p. 151; his italics)
One time-dimension is thus within another, which in turn is within another, like the skins of an onion or, to use his analogy, like the boxes within a Chinese box. In a dream, our attention is no longer directed by normal waking-state concerns; so our mind is free to roam, and may wander from one time-dimension into another: hence the previsionary glimpses. Dunne presents intricate arguments to vindicate the idea that a person in one time-dimension might be able to scan events in a different time-dimension; and, led to mysticism, he even claims to have proved ‘the unity of all flesh in the Super-body and of all minds in the Master-mind’ (1936, p. 233): there is ‘a superlative general observer’ (1927, p. 207). Dunne invites his readers to note and assess their own dream-experiences, and reports the results of a group experiment in which Oxford undergraduates were invited to send him accounts of their apparently precognitive dreams.
His theories have deterministic implications. He says that we have some limited scope for intervention to alter the foreseen future, but generally ‘we live too much in ruts’. Each person resembles ‘the amateur user of a pianola’ who may change ‘one perforated roll for another’, but ‘again a deterministic sequence start[s] from the point of interference’. If you reflect that the pianola roll is printed with perforations not by the player but by the machine at the roll factory, and that those perforations were originated by a different, distant player, Dunne is clearly implying that free will is limited to choices between destinies which have already been inscribed by some higher power.
Dunne’s book may now seem cranky and pseudo-scientific, but in the late 1920s and the 1930s its show of evidence, its elaborate theorising and its basis in the familiar (the déjà-vu feeling and apparently anticipatory dreams) made various readers regard it as, if not convincing, certainly thought-provoking. It influenced the ideas and sometimes the structures of various literary works. The Bible and classical literature had told of prophetic dreams; Dunne gave old notions a new theoretical framework. Incidentally, as his book appeared just nine years after the Armistice, its intimations of immortality may have provided consolation for some relatives of people who had died in the Great War.
Greene enjoyed works by such popular novelists as Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and John Buchan. In 1932 appeared Buchan’s novel The Gap in the Curtain, which, in its plot and themes, is based solidly on Dunne’s An Experiment with Time. The instigator of the main events is Professor Moe, a gaunt, intense yet frail genius. (He is called Moe partly because, the text hints, he is a modern Moses.) His theories are reported thus in Chapter 1:
Time ….. involved many new dimensions. There seemed to be a number of worlds of presentation travelling in Time, and each was contained within a world one dimension larger. The self was composed of various observers, the normal one being confined to a small field of sensory phenomena, observed or remembered. But this field was included in a larger field, and, to the observer in the latter, future events were visible as well as past and present.
In sleep, he went on, where the attention was not absorbed, as it was in waking life, with the smaller field of phenomena, the larger field might come inside the pale of consciousness. People had often been correctly forewarned in dreams.
This is virtually a paraphrase of Dunne’s basic ideas, which thus provide the premises of a plot which hinges on an experiment in group precognition and its intriguing consequences. Five of the people involved in Moe’s experiment do indeed foresee the future. To that extent, the plot endorses Dunne’s ideas; but it also assails Dunne by suggesting that it is dangerous and possibly lethal to indulge in such experiments. For example, a character who has a prevision of his own death-notice in The Times consequently worries himself to death: he dies of a heart-attack in time to validate that notice. Another character offers the moral of the story:
‘Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing. If he knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup.’
In British Dramatists (1942, p. 46), Greene noted that J. B. Priestley ‘has tried to enlarge the contemporary subject matter with the help of Dunne’. Theories of precognition influenced such plays of Priestley as Dangerous Comer (1932), I Have Been Here Before (1937), Time and the Conways (1937) and An Inspector Calls (1947). He said that I Have Been Here Before was indebted mainly to Peter Ouspensky’s A New Model of the Universe; but Time and the Conway s is heavily influenced by Dunne. Its time-scheme is mixed: in an interesting theatrical experiment, Priestley puts the last act in the middle. More precisely: Act 2 portrays events which take place nearly twenty years after the events to be portrayed in Act 3, so that the déjà-vu feeling is both depicted and evoked. The result of this shuffling of the time-sequence is that Act 3 is shrouded in melancholic ironies. For example, when the young people are discussing their ambitions, Carol, a young actress, says she wants many things: ‘I’d get it all in somehow. The point is – to live. Never mind about money ….. I’m going to live.’ But Act 2 has already told us that she died young, after a painful illness and an unsuccessful operation. Perhaps, indeed, her fervent desire to live is a response to some premonition of that early death. But there is a glimmering of hope in the play. One character, the prescient Alan, a disciple of Dunne, declares that after death ‘perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream’, and offers to lend Kay a book on the subject, presumably An Experiment with Time. Priestley, in his introduction to the play, urges his public to ‘read Dunne’s work with the close attention it needs – and deserves’.
After 1929, Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (formerly published by Black) was published by Faber & Faber, when T. S. Eliot was one of the firm’s directors; and some of Dunne’s notions seem to have influenced Eliot’s verse-drama The Family Reunion and his long meditative poem Four Quartets. In The Family Reunion, Emily refers to the ‘loop in time’, anticipating the situation in which Harry is found to be carrying the burden of guilt for his father’s criminal desires; and the sense of past and present is repeatedly confused as the Erinyes of Aeschylean drama assail the modern drawing-room, and more generally as echoes of the ancient Oresteia reverberate within the present-day situations. We are told that ‘the past is about to happen, and the future was long since settled’. Dunne’s notion of ‘serial time’ probably contributes to the metaphysical speculations of Four Quartets, augmenting the Christian paradox that the whole expanse of time is immediately present to a timeless God. The poem’s famous opening certainly brings to mind that concept of serial time:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past[;]
and, in a spiralling movement with spiralling allusions, the poem proceeds to consider and evoke the déjà-vu feeling. Indeed, by its subtly overlapping echoes and recurrent images, it virtually generates precognitions in the reader’s mind.
The most Dunnian of Graham Greene’s works is The Bear Fell Free, a tale published as a booklet. The central events are these: Anthony Farrell, a shady character but a pioneering aviator, sets out on a solo flight across the Atlantic, changes his mind, tries to return, and crashes to his death in the Irish Sea. (In An Experiment with Time, one example of the catastrophes that Dunne – the aircraft designer – had foreseen in his dreams was a plane crash in which the pilot was killed.) The technique of the tale is ostentatiously experimental, for the narrative leaps between future, present and past, jumbling the normal order, like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces have been vigorously muddled. Knowingly, the tale offers an explicit leitmotif of the jigsaw puzzle: for instance, one of the characters is ‘sorting out the muddle, patiently, like a child with a jigsaw puzzle’. When pieced together, the tale is a characteristic narrative of Greeneland. We find that Farrell is a feckless boaster; his socialist friend, Baron, has big plans but dies unexpectedly in the bath; Farrell’s mistress, Jane, is unfaithful to him with his friend Davis; and Davis later (burdened by guilt) commits suicide. The bear of the title is a mascot which survives the plane crash. (Greene himself took a teddy bear mascot on his travels.) Near the end, the narrative, shedding punctuation, modulates towards a Joycean stream of consciousness: ‘O my God it’s Davis glad you could come Mr. Baron kiss me Hardy fine young Conway best friend a man ever King will receive you dead in his bath members of the Book Society …..’
What relates the experimentalism to Dunne’s theory is the attempt to suggest the simultaneity or overlapping and intersection of different periods of time. The tale exploits the ironies resulting from prolepsis. Dunne said that a greater mind subsumes all the lesser ones; the tale hints that the mind may be God’s. Christ, we are told, is ‘eternally dying for a jigsaw piece, but gladly one would mislay this piece’. The mishmash of the narrative, in which images of present death and treachery are mixed with images of wartime death and suffering, tends to give a reductive impression of muddle without progress, of a hopeless impasse. There is strong emphasis on literally and metaphorically fallen people, sharing a communion of guilt. Near the end, we are offered this:
Birth and death simultaneously tainted with each other. Guilt and suicide in the maternity ward, guilt and suicide in the trenches, in Jane’s flat guilt and suicide ….. Prayers no good for something already happened, memory no good with no past, hope no good with no future …..
The Bear Fell Free is a slight but arrestingly strange item. In its techniques, it is so oddly and exceptionally experimental among Greene’s works that it may, in retrospect, be regarded merely as a purgation of experimental ambitions after which Greene could resume, stylistically, a relatively orthodox course, rather like Carving a Statue among his plays. Nevertheless, the tale is a conspicuous pointer to Greene’s extensive concern with prevision, time-jumps and dream-effects.
Dunne had invited correspondents to report nocturnal previsionary experiences. Graham Greene was already an assiduous recorder of his dreams. Of course, he was well versed in Freudian and Jungian ideas, and, during his psychoanalytic treatment by Kenneth Richmond, he had been trained to report his dreams for analysis. Gradually, he became remarkably adept at recalling and exploiting his night-self. In this, there was a mixture of psychological self-analysis, some superstition, and a pragmatic recognition of fertile material for literary husbandry. So efficient was Greene’s literary economy that a selection of his dreams was eventually published as a book in itself: A World of My Own, 1992, an oddly oblique form of autobiography. In the introduction to that volume, he refers explicitly to Dunne’s concept of prophetic dreams, and, on the basis of his own observations, remarks: ‘I am convinced that Dunne was right’ (p. xxi). In A Sort of Life, Greene claims, for instance, that at the age of five he had dreamed of a shipwreck on the night that the Titanic sank in 1912. (In a later version, Greene corrected his age at the time to seven, to fit the date of the sinking.) He also claimed that in 1944 he dreamed of a V1 pilotless aircraft before the first V1 raids on England began.
Of his novels. It’s a Battlefield and The Honorary Consul each sprang from a dream, he said; so did the tales ‘Under the Garden’ and ‘Dream of a Strange Land’. Sometimes, he remarked, one may, while writing a fictional work, identify so strongly with a character as to experience the character’s dream rather than one’s own. Thus, during the writing of A Burnt-Out Case, he had a dream which in its nature was one of Querry’s, and promptly incorporated it into the text (at the end of Chapter 3 in Part Two), ‘where it bridged a gap in the narrative which for days I had been unable to cross’. (After the dream of a lost opportunity, Querry seizes the opportunity to help Dr Colin.) The unconscious mind was Greene’s quiet collaborator: if a literary obstacle seemed insurmountable, he would read the day’s work over before sleep, and in the morning would often find that the obstacle had been removed by ‘the nègre in the cellar’ (WE, pp. 274–5). Querry’s experience is the same: ‘Problems which seemed insoluble would often solve themselves in sleep’ (p. 51).
In 1959, Greene remarked that ‘dreams can dictate the mood of a whole day and bring a dying emotion back to life’ (IS, p. 33). Repeatedly, his novels and tales incorporate significant dreams; indeed, it is probable that no other writer of predominantly realistic fiction has employed them so frequently. His first novel, The Man Within, is interfused by literal and metaphorical dreams. Andrews, in Chapter 2, has a nightmare which conveys his fear and guilt; later, his betrayal of Carlyon is seen as the destruction of that leader’s ‘sentimental blind dream of adventure’; and characters impinge on Andrews’s consciousness in a dreamlike way: ‘Like a dream the man had entered and like a dream he had gone.’ Later, in the much sharper novel Stamboul Train, Chapter 2 offers in rapid succession the dreams of Myatt (revealing a mixture of sexual desire and business worry), Coral Musker (in which she is a victimised dancer) and Mr Opie (which blends religious hope with his love of cricket). In the late novel Monsignor Quixote, Quixote himself approaches death as a somnambulist: in sleep he conducts his final Mass. It appears that Greene’s reading of Dunne accentuated an interest in dreams and prevision which pervades his fiction and creates distinctive thematic and textural effects.
Within a predominantly realistic narrative, dreams may provide the imaginative contrast of surrealism or fantasy, as in the following example from The Heart of the Matter. Scobie has a vision of peace which is fused with an ominous hint of a sinking like that of the Titanic:
[H]e dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck.
(p. 59)
Then there is Scobie’s vision of ‘perfect happiness and freedom’:
Birds went by far overhead, and once when he sat down the grass was parted by a small green snake which passed on to his hand and up his arm without fear, and before it slid down into the grass again touched his cheek with a cold, friendly, remote tongue.
(p. 81)
Within the hot, sweaty, smelly, sordid Africa of The Heart of the Matter, such dreams offer a contrasting lyricism (and a touch of refreshing coldness) while yet maintaining some of the thematic concerns. There is another general function, of course: Greene knew that to describe their dreams is an obvious way of giving psychological depth to characters that might otherwise seem too schematic – and schematic characterisation is an evident risk in some of his novels.
Sometimes the dreams have a Freudian import: they reveal the sexual desires or fears of the character. Sometimes they are not Freudian but Dunnian: precognitive; though the Bible doubtless provided Greene with the earliest introduction to the topic of prophetic dreams. Examples abound in his fictional works. In Brighton Rock, Rose dreams of Pinkie’s death; later, he himself has a nightmare of death in the sea: ‘no death was so bad as drowning’; and that is how he dies. In The Heart of the Matter, Helen Rolt dreams that she is gripped by Bagster, as she will be in reality after Scobie’s suicide. Sometimes dreams have a metaphysical import (as had Dunne’s theory): they seem to be the vehicles of divine revelation. In this category, the most important example is probably towards the end of The Power and the Glory. On the eve of his execution, the whisky-priest imagines that he is participating in a Mass, the wine served by Coral: which hints at his salvation – and at hers.
Precognition need not be confined to dreams. Near the close of The End of the Affair, it is revealed that Sarah’s turning to Catholicism was anticipated long ago, when she was an infant. Although she retained no recollection of the fact, she had been secretly baptized into the Catholic faith. Greene said that this was based on a similar linkage in the life of Roger Casement, and commented: ‘We are not necessarily in the realm of “magic” here or coincidence – we may be in the region of Dunne’s Experiment with Time (WE, p. 137). Sarah’s future seems to have influenced her past. Perhaps, Greene reflected, this was true of himself. In Ways of Escape, he notes that his novel The Confidential Agent had offered a satirical account of a holiday camp like those established by Billy Butlin that flourished after 1945, even though the novel appeared before those camps were founded. (He is wrong: the Butlin camp at Skegness opened in 1937.) He continues:
Dunne has written in An Experiment with Time of dreams which draw their symbols from the future as well as the past. Is it possible that a novelist may do the same, since so much of his work comes from the same source as dreams? It is a disquieting idea ….. Why in 1936 did I write of D [in The Confidential Agent] listening to a radio talk on the Problem of Indo-China? ….. Six years were to pass before the French war in Vietnam began and eight more before the problems of Indo-China became vivid to me …..
(WE, p. 92)
A ‘disquieting idea’, indeed. The concept of reversed causality, the later causing the earlier, would be explored by other novelists, notably by D. M. Thomas in The White Hotel (1981) and Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow (1991). In Time’s Arrow, the naive narrator, travelling backwards through time, talks as though the Nazis in the extermination camp are creators of life: they convert smoke and ash and bone into living victims whose agonies dwindle into discomfort and eventual happiness as they return, backwards, to home, family, friends, and early days. The reversed sequence is narratorially generated as a device for ironic ‘defamiliarisation’; the reader, perceiving the cruel ironies, reconstitutes the horrific historical sequence. In The White Hotel, we are invited to consider that the heroine’s eventual hideous death has generated the symptoms of pain which she had experienced many years previously. Here the local reversal occurs within a normal forward progression of historical events.
The idea that reversed causality may actually occur is strongly deterministic. It implies a mystification of history which may, from one viewpoint, be consolatory. The bereaved may think: ‘That’s the way it had to be: that was the inscribed destiny.’ The same mystification of history may, from another viewpoint, be depressingly fatalistic. Whether the historical event be the Holocaust, as portrayed in The White Hotel, or the Vietnam War, as discussed in Greene’s Ways of Escape, the linkage with precognition may convey the sense that these man-made catastrophes were inevitable: a matter of mysterious ordinance rather than of political choice. Perhaps Dunne’s An Experiment with Time should have been entitled Time’s Experiment with Us.
Being somewhat superstitious, Greene told various friends about his forebodings that he would suffer an early death, perhaps by water. In spite of all the risks that he took, his longevity refuted the foreboding, and he died in Switzerland, far from the sea. Graham Greene’s life-span was, among other things, a great experiment with time: an experiment which apparently refuted J. W. Dunne’s.