7
Greene’s earliest novels (The Man Within, The Name of Action, Rumour at Nightfall) were technically flawed in numerous ways: the descriptive passages, for example, were often romantically turgid. Then, in Stamboul Train, he achieved an effective balance of functional descriptive richness and well-paced narrative, of external and internal analyses. By the time of Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, he had attained what most writers would desire: a style memorably distinctive and even idiosyncratic, harmonising in imagery with the themes of a suspenseful and engrossing plot-sequence.
One ingredient of that ‘memorably distinctive and even idiosyncratic’ style is the presence of what he and Vivien termed ‘leopards’: images that leap out at you; similes that have a striking, even grotesque quality. ‘There was one, I remember, comparing something or someone in the quiet landscape of Sussex to a leopard crouching in a tree, which gave a name to the whole species’ (SL, p. 190). Here, from Brighton Rock, are six examples of these characteristic similes:
The sea stretched like a piece of gay common washing in a tenement square across the end of the street, (p. 111)
The sun slid off the sea and like a cuttle fish shot into the sky the stain of agonies and endurances, (p. 187)
[H]is virginity straightened in him like sex…..(p. 124)
The small pricked-out plants irritated him like ignorance, (p. 154)
The sympathy didn’t belong; it could be peeled off his eyes like an auction ticket from an ancient flint instrument, (p. 166)
His words wilted out like a line of seaweed, along the edge of the Boy’s silence, indifference and purpose, (p. 170)
Such ‘leopards’ can be found in Greene’s writing at earlier and later periods; but their use seems to be most frequent in the period 1936 to 1948. Thereafter the frequency lessens, as Greene’s style became more facile, more fluent and ‘transparent’, and less rich. In 1971, he said: ‘[It] took a great many years for me to get the beasts under control, and they growl at me yet’ (SL, p. 190). Sometimes they bring to mind the surrealistic similes of Eliot’s verse (‘the evening… like a patient etherised’), but Greene suggested that they sprang from Metaphysical poetry.
Greene knew well the ‘conceits’ of Metaphysical poetry and the grotesque, bizarre similes of Jacobean drama. Helen Gardner defines a Metaphysical conceit as ‘a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness, or, at least, is more immediately striking’ (The Metaphysical Poets, Penguin 1957, p. 19). The most famous instance is John Donne’s comparison, in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, of a pair of faithful lovers (who for a while must part) to the legs of a pair of compasses. Both are separate yet united; so the oddity of the comparison is justified by its logic, or rather by its mock-logic which yields the sense of wit. There is a related quality of the compressed riddle in John Webster’s similes: ‘I do love her just as a man pulls a wolf by the ears’; ‘like the black and melancholic yew-tree, / Dost think to root thyself in dead men’s graves, / And yet to prosper?’ In British Dramatists, Greene praised Webster and Tourneur for expressing ‘a kind of dark horror, a violent moral anarchy’ by such imagery as this: ‘We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls’; ‘What’s the flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste.’
Nevertheless, Greene’s ‘leopards’, which help to establish the atmosphere and preoccupations of Greeneland, remain distinctive. Take the first example in the list quoted above. In the Brighton vista, the sea can be seen at the end of the street, but here it is ‘like a piece of gay common washing in a tenement square’; though ‘gay’, it is ‘common’ and associated with the poverty of a tenement. The blue expanse of nature is being demeaned by association, linked to the sleaziness of Greeneland.
The second example is dramatic, even melodramatic, and visually spectacular. The setting sun, staining the night sky red, is like a cuttle-fish which ejects its black ink when assailed (a bizarre linkage of the gradual with the sudden, tenuously justified by the marine associations of sun over sea); yet the red stain is ‘the stain of agonies and endurances’. The text has recently referred to the bloody death of Kite, but now religious associations are evoked; one thinks of the tortures of martyrs and particularly of the crucified Christ. Sacred suffering oversees profane suffering. Again, the simile’s rapid linkage of concrete to abstract gives it a quality of oxymoron, or compressed paradox. (Some later editions of Brighton Rock made nonsense of the imagery by rendering the sentence as: ‘The sun slid off the sea and like a cuttlefish shot into the sky with the stains of agonies and endurances.’ The added ‘with’ hurls the sinking sun aloft.)
The third example is paradoxical by its linkage of abstract to (relatively) concrete and by its analogy between customarily opposed items: virginity and a penis becoming erect. The justification is that the repressed and virginal Pinkie feels revulsion before the sexual: perversely, his frigidity can be aroused to a passionate disgust.
The fourth example again makes the abstract-concrete conjunction (though reversing the customary order) and resembles a Jacobean riddling simile: why should plants irritate a person ‘like ignorance’? The answer is that Pinkie, who minutes ago was physically attacked, has gained knowledge of pain and fear. Hiding in a potting shed, he sees the objects around as representatives of the comfortable, harmless life of its owner: Pinkie feels the resentment of a person on the dangerous margin against someone safely ensconced in domestic normality.
Example five again links the abstract, ‘sympathy’, to the very concrete particular of the auction ticket. Both are removable: Prewitt’s sympathy is superficial, a temporary veneer; beneath it, the simile suggests, lies a hard, egoistic temperament.
The final example, appropriately enough for this novel of Brighton, once more employs marine imagery. Spicer, who has been betrayed by Pinkie and will be murdered by him, has been speaking apologetically and haltingly to Pinkie. In the simile, the failing words resemble wilting seaweed left to die; Pinkie resembles the barren and impassive shore-line.
So, looking back over this sequence, we see that the similes sometimes further characterisation, and serve to integrate characters with the marine location and with themes of morality and religion. They have a provocative, paradoxical quality; and they impart a quality of drama, even of metaphysical melodrama, to the details of the text. One adapts to such stylistic flourishes during the reading of Greene; in isolation, some of the similes may seem strained. Nevertheless, the ‘leopards’ of Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory are usually more effective in establishing atmosphere and implication than are the similes and metaphors found in the earlier novels. In England Made Me, for instance, there are some ludicrous analogies: ‘Autumn…..peeled like smoke from the naked thighs of a statue’; ‘malevolence…..lay like scurf over his overcoat’. Greene was his own best critic in this respect. Speaking of the style of The Name of Action, he said:
Here are examples of…..my terrible misuse of simile and metaphor. Even the good can corrupt and perhaps I had been corrupted by much reading of the metaphysical poets. ‘A revolver drooped like a parched flower to the pavement.’ (I like to reverse this simile – ‘A parched flower drooped like a revolver to the pavement.’) ‘The sound of far voices sprinkled over him like the seeds of a poppy bringing rest.’ And here’s a piece of pomposity which I had learned from Conrad at his worst: ‘A clock relinquished its load of hours.’
(WE, p. 18)
Yet, only eight pages after this self-criticism, Greene recalls a Norwegian visitor who brought him a measure of hope, ‘carrying it like a glass of akvavit down the muddy lane’.
The following two passages from The Power and the Glory further illustrate the pressure of paradox within Graham Greene’s descriptions. Here is Coral Fellows at work:
When she had given her orders she went to the warehouse to inspect the alligator skins tacked out on a wall, then to the stables to see that the mules were in good shape. She carried her responsibilities carefully like crockery across the hot yard: there was no question she wasn’t prepared to answer: the vultures rose languidly at her approach.
(p. 63)
Here, the first sentence is simple and factual; clear simple diction and syntax. The second sentence moves to analysis of her character; a characteristic ‘leopard’ leaps out: ‘responsibilities’ carried ‘like crockery’, suggesting deliberate care. Her forthright sense of responsibility and her honesty are noted, yet juxtaposed with the observation of the languidly rising vultures, so that again, even though there is no simile, the reader experiences that rapid juxtaposition of abstract and concrete, of internal with external. The narrator has moved with confident agility between the renderings of action, of character and of location. The style combines direct ‘unliterary’ reportage with an idiosyncratic idiom in which there is deliberation, a quest for the striking notation and the mot juste – as in that adverb ‘languidly’. The vultures are ominous familiar denizens of Greeneland: Coral’s life will be short.
The next passage is part of the description of the priest’s tedious night in a crowded prison-cell:
[H]e sat silent and rigid against the damp wall, with his feet dead like leprosy under his haunches. The mosquitoes droned on: it was no good defending yourself by striking at the air: they pervaded the whole place like an element. Somebody as well as the old man had somewhere fallen asleep and was snoring, a curious note of satisfaction, as though he had eaten and drunk well at a good dinner and was now taking a snooze.
(p. 161)
Greeneland again: the prison-cell, mosquitoes omnipresent. Clear uncluttered diction and syntax, but repeated similes. Some strain is imposed to achieve a striking abstract simile: ‘dead like leprosy’ is a contortion of ‘as dead as if they were the feet of a leper’. There is a tinge of paradox in the observation that even in this purgatorial cell, someone may not only sleep but may also, when snoring, seem to be expressing contentment. Generally, a graphically effective passage. By such close and vivid notation, Greene anchors in credible actuality the moral and theological debates and the insistent patterning of his plot-structures. Indeed, one might reflect that just as his similes often link the concrete to the abstract (usually, though not always, sharpening one’s apprehension of both), so, on a much larger scale, his narratives attempt equivalent linkages. The nervously sensuous rendering of location and action precipitates moral and theological questions.
In detail and in large conception, some of Greene’s works employ theological shock-tactics which generate a near-blasphemous dramatic effect. There was a distant but ample precedent for such shock-tactics in John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’, as when the poet implores Christ to identify the true Church:
Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights,
And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove,
Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then
When she’is embrac’d and open to most men.
Or as here, when the poet beseeches God:
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
In contrast to the degree of poise and control that the sonnet form lends to Donne’s boldness is the melodramatic prose of Scobie’s dialogues with God:
‘You have only to say the word,’ he addressed God, ‘and legions of angels …’ and he struck with his ringed hand under the eye…..
O God, he prayed, his hands dripping over the wheel, kill me now, now…..Vermin don’t have to exterminate themselves. Kill me. Now. Now. Now. Before I hurt you again. (pp. 257, 273)
Greene acknowledged the influence of Metaphysical poetry and of Conrad; but he was also strongly influenced, not always for the better, by American traditions. Hemingway’s style can sometimes be detected in Greene’s laconic passages of dialogue and description. The following passage from The Lawless Roads (pp. 94–5) is virtually a pastiche of Hemingway, with its American slang (‘got a little lit’), its simple syntax and its childish repetitions of ‘and’: ‘Then we went to the St. Regis and had Bacardi cocktails and got a little lit and talked of the American debt and the Immaculate Conception…..’ Here’s an example from The Quiet American (p. 23) :
[The] gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes…..
Certainly the Hollywood movie influenced his scenic montages, some dialogues (terse, understating) of his lovers, and the ‘tough guy’ diction and cynical jesting of gangsters in his thrillers. American crime fiction also may have contributed to the effective staccato style of his action scenes, illustrated in these two passages from Brighton Rock (pp. 151–2, 332):
Then somebody from the stand shouted ‘Bogies’ and they all moved together, coming quickly at him in a bunch. Somebody kicked him on the thigh, he clutched a razor in his hand and was cut to the bone.
The lights petered out along the road to Peacehaven: the chalk of a new cutting flapped like white sheets in the headlight: cars came down on them blinding them. He said: ‘The battery’s low.’
Sometimes the prose combines the tough style with a more ‘literary’ (perhaps latinate) diction, as when Fowler, in The Quiet American, is shown Pyle’s corpse (p. 16). Here the laconism of ‘like a tray of ice-cubes’ offsets the elegance of ‘frozen into placidity’:
They pulled him out like a tray of ice-cubes, and I looked at him. The wounds were frozen into placidity. I said, ‘You see, they don’t re-open in my presence.’
An Americanism which can be found in Greene’s writing across the decades is (in the UK at least) a solecism: the idiomatic but ungrammatical use of ‘like’ in positions where ‘as’ should be used. In Brighton Rock, for example: Cubitt moves drunkenly, ‘like a statue might move’; ‘he’d got her like you got God in the Eucharist’; ‘She was stamped with him, like his voice was stamped on the vulcanite’; ‘The woman hooked on another smile, like you hook on a wreath’. (In later editions, Greene sometimes restored ‘as’.)
Many of these illustrations show that the vivid distinctiveness of Greene’s style derives largely from its high proportion of surprising similes: they add glints of drama, even melodrama. Thus, in The Honorary Consul, ‘When he bent to kiss her cheek he could smell the hot chocolate in her cup like a sweet breath from a tomb.’ A related feature, often but not necessarily exploiting similes, is the use of aphorisms which tend to the hyperbolic; sometimes they blend the narrator with a character. Examples:
Each love affair was like a vaccine. It helped you to get through the next attack more easily.
The whole globe was blanketed with his own sin.
They were companions cut off from all the world: there was no meaning anywhere outside their own hearts.
[Peacehaven] was like the last effort of despairing pioneers to break new country. The country had broken them.
It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.
In 1921, T. S. Eliot, praising Donne and the other Metaphysical poets, had commended their ability to reconcile disparates. ‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience…..’ Greene’s prose often seeks to achieve this effect. The rapid, terse association of thought and feeling, of idea and image, is a characteristic of Greene’s mature work. ‘The orchestra began to play: he felt the music as a movement in his belly: the violins wailed in his guts.’ ‘The yellow eyeballs stared up at him like a stranger’s, flecked with red. It was as if this body had cast him off, disowned him – “I know you not.” ’ At its frequent best, Greene’s prose is never inert; ruthlessly, it shuns the easy platitude, the convenient cliché, the waffling digression. He has the knack of the mot juste, the tellingly evocative word or phrase. The girls at Roedean play hockey on ‘cropped expensive turf’; a tiny green snake ‘hissed away into the grass like a match-flame’; the shadow of a palm-tree ‘pointed at him like a zareba of sabres’; ‘the huts leapt up in the lightning and stood there shaking – then disappeared in the rumbling darkness’. When Pinkie kisses Rose’s hand, ‘the fingers were rough on his skin and tasted a little of soap’. As in Jacobean drama, so (often) in Greene’s novels: more truths in the texture than in the plot; a more searching fidelity to human experience in the captured details than in the paraphrasable story.