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A crooner in A Gun for Sale sang of Greenland, thus encouraging critics to talk of ‘Greeneland’. Apparently the term was coined by A. C. Marshall, who, in Horizon (May 1940), said that Greeneland was characterised by seediness. Eventually, A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary I (1972) included the word, defining it thus: ‘A term used to describe the world of depressed seediness reputedly typical of the setting and characters of the novels of Graham Greene.’ Whether the fictional location were Brighton or Mexico, London or Liberia, Vietnam or Sierra Leone, Greene transformed it into Greeneland: a distinctively blighted, tainted, oppresssive landscape. He, however, resisted the term.
Some critics have referred to a strange violent ‘seedy’ region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered. ‘This is Indo-China,’ I want to exclaim, ‘this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal of Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water …’ But I know that argument is useless. They won’t believe the world they haven’t noticed is like that.
(WE, p. 77)
One response is, of course, that Greene repeatedly sought what others would seek to avoid: warfare, oppression, crisis, vice, squalor. He had chosen to go to Phat Diem in Vietnam, and there he had seen, as his journal for 16 December 1951 records, the child dead in the ditch and the canal ‘thick with bodies’; meanwhile bombs and mortar shells exploded nearby. Such matters he chose to observe and to note; and the notations were amplified in the fictional works (in the case of Vietnam, in The Quiet American). Another response is that Greene, as he conceded, had a strongly depressive side to his temperament; and he tended to relish depressing vistas, redolent of decay or corruption or sleaziness. In Journey without Maps he acknowledged ‘the deep appeal of the seedy’.
Examples abound. The Brighton of Brighton Rock has vulgar opulence, tawdry amusements, dog-muck on pavements, rusting prams in front gardens, murder and corruption among the holiday-makers. When the moon shines in at Pinkie’s window, it’s the moon of Greeneland: it shines on ‘the door where the jerry stood’, seeking out the chamber-pot. This is how Pinkie’s ‘honeymoon’ with Rose begins at his lodgings:
A smell of cabbages and cooking and burnt cloth hung about the dark passage. He nodded – ‘That was old Spicer’s room. Do you believe in ghosts?’
‘I don’t know.’
He pushed open his own door and switched on the naked dusty light. ‘There,’ he said, ‘take it or leave it,’ and drew aside to expose the big brass bed, the washstand and chipped ewer, the varnished wardrobe with its cheap glass front.
‘It’s better than a hotel,’ she said, ‘it’s more like home.’
(p. 261)
In The Heart of the Matter, Freetown (as we infer it to be) has a climate of humidity so oppressive that Scobie puts blotting-paper under his wrist to absorb the sweat; cockroaches and ants besiege the rooms. Scobie goes into his bathroom, ‘disturbing a rat that had been couched on the cool rim of the bath, like a cat on a gravestone’; and there he contemplates ‘the tin bucket under the lavatory seat emptied once a day: the fixed basin with another useless tap: the bare floorboards: drab green black-out curtains’ (p. 35).
Again, the opening of The Power and the Glory is a famous instance:
Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder: out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few buzzards looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr. Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly up at them. One of them rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn’t find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr. Tench went on across the plaza.
(1940 text, p. 3)
It’s a superbly atmospheric and cinematic opening. As the buzzard rises, we have a buzzard’s-eye view, cinematically a panning crane-shot over the brilliantly lit scene. Greene said that with films in mind, ‘in a description one uses a moving camera instead of a stationary one’ (GGFR, pp. 547–8). The paragraph has a quality of grim humour: ‘he wasn’t carrion yet’; ‘ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being’. The heat is oppressive; the dust bleaches; there are repeated reminders of death. Even the river and sea offer not a sense of refreshment but more reminders of destruction, death and decay: ‘the sharks looked after the carrion’. And Mr Tench is looking for ether because he is a dentist, an expert on decay within the living. His gesture of revolt is self-lacerating and ineffectual. Syntactically and rhythmically, the passage is already well crafted, though for later editions Greene polished it further, substituting ‘vultures’ for ‘buzzards’, ‘towards them’ for ‘up at them’, and ‘One rose’ for ‘One of them rose’. It offers a lyrically pessimistic vista, an intense contemplation of a blighted environment.
In so many of his novels and tales, particularly those of the late 1930s and the 1940s, Greene’s descriptive emphasis on blighted landscapes as the setting for blighted lives gave a distinctive and even parody-inviting character to his works. The pye-dogs and vultures, the slums and their refuse, the harlots and weary priests: all become a predictably obedient entourage to the author on his imaginative travels. (In 1949 the New Statesman ran a competition in which readers were entitled to submit parodies of Greene’s work; the author entered under the name of ‘M. Wilkinson’ and came second with a passage in which a lonely boy looks with apparent contempt at ‘the large breasts and the fat legs’ of his aunt.) The various details in the characteristic descriptions of Greeneland may all be found in reality; what matters is his recurrent emphasis on them and his elision of more positive and life-enhancing features. And, though distinctive, such passages can be related to various traditions.
Here, for example, is a famous source of that adjective ‘seedy’:
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Greene’s more bitter narrators are descendants of Hamlet and the vengeful malcontents of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, who survey with saturnine relish the corruption around them and invoke the skull beneath the skin. Another contributor is the satiric tradition, emphasising lust, squalor and the decay of the flesh, which extends from Shakespeare’s Timon and Ben Jonson’s Volpone to Pope’s Dunciad, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Matthew Bramble in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker. This blends with the tradition of social satire in the English novel: Greeneland was in some respects anticipated by the depressing urban landscapes, decaying environments of sordid crime, in works by Dickens and Conrad. Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Bleak House and Little Dorrit come to mind: the infernal rotting slums of Bleak House have established an outpost in the Carlton Hill slums of Brighton Rock. Parts of Conrad’s ‘Karain’, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, The Return’ and Chance stress urban ugliness and oppressiveness; and we have noted that It’s a Battlefield has explicitly-registered continuity with The Secret Agent. In ‘Heart of Darkness’ Conrad had shown how even the primaeval jungles of Africa could be degraded and defiled by the incursions of avaricious Europeans. The travel books, histories, tales and essays of Conrad’s friend Cunninghame Graham (a writer cited by Greene) had repeatedly associated ‘progress’ with a materialism which inflicts on exotic regions an alien detritus: sardine tins, gin bottles, mass-produced shoddy goods.
Greene’s characteristic work can also be related to the poetic tradition of urban realism and decadence. He admired Baudelaire’s poems as well as Eliot’s, and the ‘decadent’ poets of the 1890s had often enough depicted the city as a location of both squalor and corruption. Arthur Symons, Richard le Gallienne, John Davidson, Eugene Lee-Hamilton and W. E. Henley were among those who sought to reconcile the lyrical and the sordid. Lee-Hamilton, in the sonnet ‘Baudelaire’ (1894), provides an extreme example of nostalgie de la boue (gutter-nostalgia):
A Paris gutter of the good old times,
Black and putrescent in its stagnant bed,
Save where the shamble oozings fringe it red,
Or scaffold trickles, or nocturnal crimes.
It holds dropped gold; dead flowers from tropic climes;
Gems true or false, by midnight maskers shed;
Old pots of rouge; old broken phials that spread
Vague fumes of musk, with fumes from slums and slimes.
And everywhere, as glows the set of day,
There floats upon the winding fetid mire
The gorgeous iridescence of decay…..
In addition, Baudelaire and the decadents gave prostitution and sexual ‘deviance’ new prominence in literature; and a characteristic aspect of Greeneland is the frequency with which prostitutes, brothels, promiscuous women, deviant adults and even depraved children appear. Of course, Greene knew well the depressing urban and psychological landscapes of Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ and the ‘Preludes’: ‘restless nights in one-night cheap hotels’, ‘The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes’, ‘faint stale smells of beer’, ‘A broken spring in a factory yard’, ‘that woman / Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door’, ‘The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted’, alleviated faintly by ‘The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing’.
Greeneland sometimes implies a despairing form of romanticism, a regret for an Eden blighted. At its darkest, it evokes that Manichæan sense of a world almost entirely conquered by the evil or the negative. The human characters variously fit that landscape. So many of them are failures or inadequates; often it seems that to possess understanding is to fail. Those who try to do good seem repeatedly to be striving against hopeless odds. The lords of the world are the rich, the powerful, the successfully corrupt, the insensitive. Again, we may recall that Cunninghame Graham repeatedly offered the paradox of ‘the failure of success’, claiming that those who are exemplary in moral terms are likely to be failures in worldly terms. (See his Success, 1902.) He also offered a memorable autobiographical essay, ‘A Jesuit’, describing a tobacco-priest (his luggage is merely a newspaper filled with cigarettes) who disembarks at a Paraguayan wilderness. All the other priests have been killed by the Indians; ordered by Rome to return to the region, this Jesuit accepts his lonely duty. ‘I am the mission, that is, all that now remains of it.’ One of his descendants was perhaps the Mexican whisky-priest of The Power and the Glory, another solitary in a different alien wilderness.
Roman Catholic critics have sometimes objected that Greene underestimates the positive aspects of religion and of the world about us: he fails to acknowledge ‘all things bright and beautiful’ that the hymn ascribes to God; he says too little of redemption, regeneration and the pervasiveness of divine love. All writers are selective; Greene selected what he wanted to emphasise; and for much of the time his imaginative outlook was sombre, even jaundiced. Fastidious, he sought and portrayed what offended his fastidiousness; sensitive, he sought and portrayed what lacerated that sensitivity. Love-hate relationships burgeoned; he himself knew them all too well: the love-hate relationship with promiscuity, with sexual passion, with the decadent and the depraved.
At his most parody-inviting, however, Greene seems almost complacent in the contemplation of the fallen world. The love-hate relationship modulates into an almost patronising love of the degraded. In The Heart of the Matter (p. 30), Scobie considers life in his African colony:
Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meannesses that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.
This is Scobie, not Greene; but Greene offers similar views in his non-fictional work, notably in Journey without Maps and The Lawless Roads. A Marxist academic, Arnold Kettle (in An Introduction to the English Novel II, Part 3), has criticised the easy identification here of ‘the truth’ with the worst. He proceeds:
The question arises as to whether the sentimentality involved in seeing life as better than it really is, is necessarily worse than an opposite kind of sentimentality which takes pleasure in seeing the world as worse than it happens to be.
‘Perverted sentimentality’ is at work in this novel, says Kettle. ‘Scobie likes the stink’; he isn’t committed to fighting it. Conrad’s Marlow is indignant about human corruption; Scobie partly embraces it and partly is ambushed by it. The plot-mechanism, Kettle adds, is not convincing but ‘slick’ and ‘glib’ in its repeated ironies. When Wilson visits a brothel, the narrator remarks that ‘he had reduced himself to human nature’: a facile negative essentialism. Kettle sums up: ‘It is the way in which human nature in this novel is indeed reduced that constitutes its ultimate failure.’
One response to Kettle might be to show that Scobie knows less than he thinks he does; his pitying outlook merges with pride, complacency and myopia; so the critical distance between the narrator and the central character is sometimes greater than Kettle allows. Another response might be that The Heart of the Matter is one text among many, and the narrator’s outlook varies. A narrator is never identical with the author. Greene was an acute literary critic, not least of his own writings. A Burnt-Out Case challenges the kind of indictment offered by Kettle. The account of the léproserie in that novel is no gratuitous horror but is a careful, discriminating, accurate rendition of an African leper colony and the diligent work done there by the patients, the priests and the doctor. We know from Greene’s In Search of a Character how careful he was to get exactly right the details of leprosy and its treatment. Here is no shoulder-shrugging ‘acceptance’ of pain and disease but a sympathetic rendering of the struggle to treat, cure or at least contain an appallingly disfiguring and crippling ailment. When Querry arrives at the colony, Dr Colin is understandably distrustful. Colin says to the Superior:
‘I was afraid for a moment that we might have a leprophil on our hands…..Schweitzer seems to attract them….. Sometimes I wonder whether Damien was a leprophil. There was no need for him to become a leper in order to serve them well…..
The second day [Querry] was here, I took him to the hospital. I wanted to test his reactions. They were quite normal ones – nausea not attraction. I had to give him a whiff of ether.’
(pp.19–20)
Querry, the architect, does not ‘like the stink’; he applies his talents to help the work of healing. Greene, in his way, also helps that work.
A further irony is that Arnold Kettle, the Marxist, seems not to have allowed for, or foreseen, the extent to which Greene’s novels would express sympathy for characters who become involved in left-wing revolutionary struggles: such characters as Fowler in The Quiet American, Jones in The Comedians, Father Rivas in The Honorary Consul, or Castle in The Human Factor. Sometimes they may fail or be misguided; but they try to oppose tyranny in this world, rather than, resignedly, rest their hopes on the next.