6
Greene testified to the husbandry of the creative writer: he is like ‘a careful housewife, who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn’ (IS, p. 17). Greene’s imaginative and commercial husbandry was remarkable. For instance, he re-used, in work after work, certain locations, character-types and plot-situations, so that repeatedly one has a sensation of déjà vu or of the familiar within the unfamiliar. A ‘transtextuality’ is a narrative feature which appears in two or more different texts; and Greene offers a labyrinth of transtextualities.
In The Human Factor, the hero, Castle, cycles through Berkhamsted, ‘across the canal bridge, past the Tudor school, into the High Street, past the grey flint parish church which contained the helmet of a crusader…..’ There are also the remains of a castle which may have given him his surname: he speculates that one of his ancestors was an artisan there. The location is probably as familiar to Greene’s regular readers as to Castle; for this is the author’s homeland, the area of his upbringing described in Journey without Maps, A Sort of Life and Reflections;, it is the ‘Denton’ of the tale ‘The Other Side of the Border’, the ‘Bishop’s Hendron’ of ‘The Innocent’, the ‘Bankstead’ of ‘Doctor Crombie’, and the schooltime location of Farrant in England Made Me and Jim in The Captain and the Enemy. As we have noted, the associated detail of the despairing man who sought suicide at the almshouses by the humpbacked bridge appears in several works, including A Sort of Life, Journey without Maps, The Lawless Roads, ‘The Innocent’, The Captain and the Enemy and Reflections. Thus, various umbilical cords connect Greene’s real-life experience and his fictional world.
Further instances abound. Harston House in Cambridgeshire, the home of Greene’s rich uncle Sir William Graham Greene, had gardens which contained a potting shed and a big pond with a small island. These featured in the play The Potting Shed and in various tales, including ‘Under the Garden’. Oxford University and, particularly, Greene’s Balliol (or ‘Belial’) College, appear in ‘When Greek Meets Greek’ and The Great Jowett. The Liberia of Journey without Maps provides the oppressive jungle of ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’. The Freetown of ‘The Other Side of the Border’ reappears in The Heart of the Matter and Ways of Escape, as well as Journey without Maps. Mexico, and particularly its port of Frontera, with its vultures (or ‘buzzards’), sharks and bust of Obregón, feature in The Lawless Roads, The Power and the Glory and ‘The Lottery Ticket’. Nottingham, where Greene worked as a journalist and owned a dog which vomited after eating salmon, appears (sometimes as Nottwich) in Stamboul Train, Journey without Maps, A Gun for Sale and The Confidential Agent; the location and even the vomiting dog are used in The Potting Shed. Some of the Nottingham details are uncannily sharp: in a stationer’s window, a printed card bears a Sassoon poem, ‘Aftermath’, with the refrain ‘Have you forgotten yet?’; that card in the window is quoted in Journey without Maps, A Gun for Sale and A Sort of Life. The Gower Street area of London, where Greene worked in the Ministry of Information and was a warden during the Blitz (as Ways of Escape tells), is depicted in A Gun for Sale, The End of the Affair and ‘Men at Work’. And this is only a brief selection of the recurrent locations. The repeated use of the same locations in both the fiction and the non-fiction is another of the methodological similarities between Greene and Conrad.
One of the most important associative clusters concerns childhood betrayal and bullying. Greene’s ‘The Lost Childhood’ adapts its title from George Russell’s poem ‘Germinal’, which says: ‘In the lost boyhood of Judas / Christ was betrayed’. These lines echo in ‘The Basement Room’ and elsewhere; Greene quoted them in interviews. In ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’, Brighton Rock, The Lawless Roads and Reflections, Greene associates bullying with ‘a pair of dividers’ used as a weapon. The childhood foe, Carter, is vicariously defeated in the form of fictional namesakes: for instance, Carter is the name of the embarrassed husband in the tale ‘The Blue Film’, of the harassed lover in ‘Mortmain’ and of the callous agent shot by Wormold in Our Man in Havana.
Another associative cluster began when, as a boy, Greene visited the dentist – ‘I have never suffered greater pain than I did then’ – whose house had ‘the stained glass window representing the Laughing Cavalier which hid the chair of torture’ (SL, pp. 35–6). For Greene, dental decay was a memento mori: ‘death was in his carious mouth already’ (PG, p. 12). Dentists as intimidating pain-inflictors feature in ‘The Lottery Ticket’, The Power and the Glory and The Complaisant Lover, and that same stained-glass window with the Laughing Cavalier has numerous re-appearances; like the shell-case used as an umbrella-stand, it is a travelling property of Greeneland. A poignant transtextual feature is the death of a child: Francis dies in ‘The End of the Party’; in Brighton Rock Annie Collins, pregnant at fifteen, commits suicide, and so does Molly Carthew; hero-worshipping Else is murdered in The Confidential Agent; Scobie’s daughter is dead in The Heart of the Matter; and, in The Power and the Glory, Tench has lost a son, a Mexican woman seeks a funeral service for her five-year-old Anita, the Indian woman loses her three-year-old boy, and Mr and Mrs Fellows lose their daughter.
When a reader identifies such recurrences in the fiction, there are various effects. In the case of the repeated location, one effect may be a gain in authenticity: repetition helps to induce suspension of disbelief. Another may be resonance and enrichment, as the recollected associations augment the immediate situation. Another may be a sense of ironic disparity, as when the benign Brighton of Travels with My Aunt contrasts with the malign Brighton of Brighton Rock. And another may be a sense of psychological intimacy with the author, as one moves with increasing familiarity through the initially private associative clusters of another person.
Of course, the recurrent use of the same real location in two or more fictional texts is not unusual, nor is the establishment of a close relationship between the author’s career and the fictional events: Wells and Golding, in addition to Conrad, come to mind. Conrad and Golding, moreover, explored the use of transtextual narratives. For example, the story of Conrad’s Tom Lingard unfolds in three texts, the story of Hamilton in two, the story of Marlow in four, and that of Golding’s Edmund Talbot in three. Greene used this technique briefly when depicting Kite, the gangster. In A Gun for Sale, we are told of the circumstances of his murder by rival gangsters at a London station: he is surrounded, his throat is cut, he is carried through the barrier and dumped. In Brighton Rock, that murder of Kite proves to be the premise of the plot: we gradually learn that Pinkie is concerned to avenge his death: hence the ensuing action.
Another category of connections is that of ‘close anticipations’: one incident or character is not the same as, but closely anticipates, one in a later text. ‘A Drive in the Country’ features a cynical young thief who invites an innocent, vulnerable young woman to join him in a suicide pact. In the car, he gives her a revolver and instructs her in the method. She, however, runs away, leaving him to die. This is clearly an anticipation of the suicide pact initiated by Pinkie with Rose in Brighton Rock. Again, Ada, the plump, promiscuous middle-aged woman of the tale ‘Jubilee’, is a close relative of Ida Arnold in Brighton Rock; in both cases, this hearty, resilient woman takes the sexual initiative with a man who finds that he has encountered more than he bargained for. The tale ‘The Lottery Ticket’ presents, in brief, a range of material to be developed in The Power and the Glory : the little Mexican port where sinister birds hover, where a bust or statue overlooks the plaza; an official whose bad tooth is being painfully drilled by a dentist, and a good man executed. A curiously specific anticipation of incidents occurs in ‘The Innocent’ (1937). The hero recalls that when he was a young lad, he left in a hiding-place in a wall a love-message for an eight-year-old girl. Now, long afterwards, he revisits the hiding-place and retrieves the paper, and finds that it bears an obscene sketch of a man and a woman. ‘I had believed I was drawing something with a meaning unique and beautiful; it was only now after thirty years of life that the picture seemed obscene.’ In The Human Factor (published forty-one years later), Castle recalls that when he was ten he left a hidden message for a seven-year-old girl whom he loved: ‘when he came back….. he found the note was still there but disfigured by a vulgar drawing’; but this time, it is the girl, not the boy, who is the cartoonist. The similarities and the peculiar specificity imply an autobiographical source.
Of the recurrent character-types, one of the most easily identifiable, as we have seen, is the type based on Graham’s brother Herbert: that of the con-man who repeatedly gets into financial scrapes through dubious schemes. Examples include Anthony Farrell (The Bear Fell Free), Anthony Farrant (England Made Me), Jones in The Comedians and the Captain in The Captain and the Enemy. Another, partly autobiographical, character is the writer who, after seeking to achieve detachment, moves towards commitment to a cause: Fowler in The Quiet American, Querry in A Burnt-Out Case. Another is the decent man cuckolded, a man who remains on civilised, sometimes even amicable, terms with his cuckolder: Demassener in The Name of Action, Henry in The End of the Affair, Victor Rhodes in The Complaisant Lover and Charley Fortnum in The Honorary Consul. In sexual triangles, Greene (guided, no doubt, by personal experience) sometimes depicts the woman as one who seeks to reconcile conflicting claims: usually the claim of loyalty to her husband with the claim of sexual adventure. Certainly Mary Rhodes in The Complaisant Lover, Sarah in The End of the Affair, Martha in The Comedians and Clara in The Honorary Consul belong to this category. The betrayal of a man by his supposed friend is a plot-device which extends from The Man Within to numerous novels and tales: ‘The Third Man’ is a famous example. Some of Greene’s heroines are ‘waifs’ whose relationship to the male partner resembles at times that of pupil to mentor: Rose in Brighton Rock, Helen in The Heart of the Matter, Marie in A Burnt-Out Case.
Greene likes to play games with names; in his texts, significant patterns or pairings of names emerge. Most obviously (echoing Jonson’s Corvino and Corbaccio in Volpone), there are the names associated with birds, usually unpleasant ones: Kite, Crowe (twice in Brighton Rock: Old Crowe and Violet Crowe), Crowe again (‘The Blessing’), Krogh (twice), Crane, Henne-Falcon, Raven, Conder; in a variant of ‘Cock Robin’, Kite is killed by Raven. (A pleasant exception is Phuong, meaning Phoenix, in The Quiet American.) The name ‘Sparrow’ in Travels with My Aunt derives, says Greene, from John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls’ at Oxford. There are aquatic names: Crab, Crabbe, Tench, Piker. Colour names: Pinkie Brown, Rose (French for pink) and Molly Pink (Brighton Rock), Rose again (It’s a Battlefield, The Living Room and Travels with My Aunt), Blacker (‘The Hint of an Explanation’), Browne (three in The Living Room) and Grünlich. Jewish names are sometimes borne by sinister characters: Kapper, Yogel, Goldstein. Some surnames are ostentatiously ordinary – Jones, Brown, Smith – and may (in the case of Jones and Brown in The Comedians) be taken for rogues’ pseudonyms: Greene recalled the duplicitous ‘Mr Jones’ of Conrad’s Victory and ‘Gentleman Brown’ in Conrad’s Lord Jim. In The Captain and the Enemy, the shady Captain is known both as Brown and as Smith. Anna Schmidt in ‘The Third Man’ is using a false name to elude the Russians. Greene seems to have liked the name Sarah: he gave it to the sanctilfiable heroine (based largely on Catherine Walston) in The End of the Affair, to the idealistic black heroine of The Human Factor, and (slightly modified as Sara) to the forbearing wife in The Potting Shed. Another name with strongly favourable associations for him was ‘Coral’ (which he associated with ‘jewellery…..suitable for young girls after their first communion’): hence the Coral Musker in Stamboul Train and Coral Fellows in The Power and the Glory; and the latter character is, of course, a communicant during the sentenced priest’s final dream. In contrast, ‘Mabel Warren’ is the name that he gave not only to the predatory lesbian in Stamboul Train but also to the intimidating thirteen-year-old in ‘The End of the Party’ who, with her friend Joyce, fills Francis with justified apprehension: ‘Their long pigtails swung superciliously to a masculine stride. Their sex humiliated him, as they watched him fumble with his egg, from under lowered scornful lids.’
Some of the linkages, whether deriving from recollection of real people or from private semantic associations, have a quality of disguised autobiography. The careful deliberation that Greene gave to such matters is evident from his remarks on the conversion of the name ‘Rollo’ to ‘Holly’ for the film The Third Man. Joseph Cotten, who was to play the character, objected to the name Rollo, which (he thought) had homosexual connotations.
I wanted the name none the less to be an absurd one, and the name Holly occurred to me when I remembered that figure of fun, the nineteenth-century American poet Thomas Holley Chivers.
(WE, p. 124)
Holly is also the name of the main character in Haggard’s She. Lime’s surname, Greene explained, was suggested by the lime (quicklime) thrown on the corpses of hanged murderers: an echo of Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Other literary associations, as we have seen, generate the names Kurtz (in The Name of Action and ‘The Third Man’) and Visconti (Travels with My Aunt). Occasionally there are sly references to personal sexual intrigues. A ‘woman called Glover’ is mentioned in The Confidential Agent ; a loving Dorothy who seeks her gloves appears in Travels with My Aunt. The situation of Harry in The End of the Affair resembles that of Harry Walston. Catherine Walston might have winced on finding that in The Honorary Consul the best brothel is run by ‘Mère Catherine’, but she might have been cheered to learn that The End of the Affair was prompted partly by Greene’s researches on St Catherine of Genoa. The hero of The Confidential Agent is called simply ‘D.’. Greene said that the advantage of using only an initial was that it saved the character from having a specified nationality; but there was a disadvantage: ‘Unfortunately, as I learnt before, if one uses an initial for one’s principal character, people begin to talk about Kafka’ (IS, p. 33).
Sometimes a name may have religious associative significance: Calver, the criminal in The Power and the Glory, has a name which seems designed to evoke ‘Calvary’ and thus heighten the analogy between the whisky-priest and Christ. Sometimes the very absence of a name may have religious significance. The whisky-priest has no name other than the common name he borrows for a while (that of a killed hostage); the anonymity is appropriate to his representative role as sustainer of the continuity of religion. Deo Gratias (‘Thanks to God’) was the actual name of an African at the léproserie visited by Greene, and in A Burnt-Out Case it has double significance: partly ironic, since the man is a leper; partly non-ironic, since caring for Deo Gratias helps to restore Querry. In turn, ‘Querry’ brings to mind the Latin verb ‘quaere’: question, search for, or seek in vain.
In idiomatic speech, the names ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’ and ‘God’ are commonly used merely as everyday oaths, as expressions of surprise or annoyance perhaps. One of the ironies of Brighton Rock is that when Pinkie uses them so, the strongly religious thematic context restores some of their force as invocations of divinity; a bridge is thus built between the sordidly mundane and the transcendent.