The Wearing o' the Greene
McInerny, Ralph
Ralph Mclnerny THE WEARING O' THE GREENE Graham Greene was once a Catholic writer. Graham Greene, a novelist enamored of failure, has achieved global success. His exquisitely uninformative...
...Waugh thought Greene's theology muddled and, above, this almost certainly is true...
...It is easy to imagine an earlier Greene mocking a character who preferred 'Noosphere' to 'God...
...Perhaps the greatest value of Ways ofEscape lies in the accounts and analyses Greene gives of his many and varied writings...
...He was once spoken of as a Catholic writer and this seemed apt when one thought of The Pouer and the Glory, The Ijearl of the Ralph IMcInernyj is MVlic hae P. Grac, Pr.oIessor of Jedieval Studies a': .hle University of Notre Dame...
...With that in hand, one can notice the allotment of points of view, the amount of space devoted to a given stage of the story, the disposition of time...
...He seems to have been in the Foreign Legion too long, out on patrol until he has forgotten what the struggle is about...
...He says he knows no theology but does not elaborate...
...first a quantitative analysis, then THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1981 the division of the novel into books, parts, chapters, scenes, most of the latter numbered in the text...
...Graham Greene's enormous success is doubtless due to the fact that he is technically one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century...
...But I believe in Christ," Father Leon said, "I believe in the Cross and the Redemption...
...It was with Orient Express that his writing took a turn the full significance of which he seems not at first to have appreciated...
...With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't belong-belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd...
...I believe that the day side of God, in one moment of happy creation, produced perfect goodness, as a man might paint one perfect picture...
...but Malcolm Muggeridge has said all that need be said about that...
...What a shock I felt when I first read that...
...Thirteen of Greene's twenty novels are set in foreign lands, appropriately enough for an author who is in the Foreign Legion...
...In The Power and the Glory, the whiskey priest is contrasted with the jefe, the instrument of the new order...
...Between The Man Within and Orient Express, Greene wrote two other novels which he no longer lists in the canon of his works...
...Matter, The End of the Affair, and A Burnt-Out Case...
...His Catholocism...
...Greene's craft is superb but craft is relatively impersonal...
...Here is a typical effusion...
...God is the cause of evil, yet it is the Church that has failed...
...His exquisitely uninformative autobiography, A Sort of Life, concludes with a scene in which Greene is smoking opium in Siam with an old Oxford friend...
...The ultimate villain is the U.S.A...
...These words were written and indeed already in print when the second volume of Greene's autobiography, Ways of Escape," appeared...
...Greene tells us that he (like most of the authors who occur in his novels) writes 500 words a day, a modest output...
...While it does not prompt me to alter the essential argument of the above, Ways of Escape does show a far more evenhanded treatment of left and right, even of the United States...
...Religion in Greene's view is scarcely the opium of the people...
...There is a romanticizing of the old friend here, there is the familiar concentration on the worm in the Greene apple, but there is more...
...The only witness of my Baptism was a woman who had been dusting the chairs...
...The kidnappers having also taken Plarr into custody decide they must kill the honorary consul, but iri the end it is the terrorists and Plarr who are killed...
...The Gospels, he says, make no sense to the poor-as if their original audience had been Palestinian plutocrats...
...In the early novels it is that sort of nonsense that is derided...
...The Marxist Dr...
...Doctor Edouardo Plarr, half-British, half-Paraguayan, 31, practices medicine in Argentina, just across the river from the country of his birth where his father is a political prisoner...
...Leon's closest friend in the terrorist band, Aquino, is a Marxist, but it is difficult to typify the priest...
...The first General Confession, which precedes conditional Baptism and which covers the whole of a man's previous life is a humiliating ordeal...
...As for the rest, whether or not a novel had a cleric or Catholic in it, one could sense in most of them that the failure Greene dreaded for his characters was not a worldly one...
...It's a Battlefield-that title suggests Greene's view of life, in which the ultimate condition of an immortal soul is the issue...
...Better the backwardness and ignorance and poverty of Mexico...
...Subsequently Father Trollope joined the Redemptorists...
...In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie is done in by his pity and compassion, victim of seeming virtues...
...God's good intention was for once completely fulfilled so that the night side can never win more than a little victory here and there...
...Thomas the doubter and not Thomas Aquinas...
...there seems to be a relationship between that meager production and the numerous scenes in the novels...
...The political solution takes precedence...
...But what is surely mainline Christianity is the assumption that men get themselves into difficulties from which they cannot extricate themselves...
...In the end, the priest does not kill but is killed in a quixotic effort to exercise a priestly function in which he seems no longer to believe...
...Father Leon is ready to kill Charley Fortnum for the cause, whatever it is...
...The suggestion was that a given book is only an entertainment...
...but his fundamental importance has derived from the fact that what is at stake in his novels is something a good deal more important than "what people call success...
...But what is one to make of Leon, the priest turned political activist, even terrorist...
...The politician who ran for president on the Vegetarian ticket in 1948 is treated with gentle humor yet as a symbol of ineffective, because political, solutions of man's plight...
...It is a magnificent book...
...An apprentice novelist could do far worse than devote himself to a careful analysis of the structure of Greene's novels...
...Plarr aids and abets some boyhood friends who come over the border to kidnap the American ambassador and mistakenly kidnap Charley Fortnum, the honorary consul, whose wife is Plarr's mistress...
...The Quiet American is especially adroit in the last, alternating past and present with extraordinary subtelty...
...Greene felt no joy in his conversion, only somber apprehension: What if he like Father Trollope were to be attracted to the priesthood...
...Kim Philby is still his friend, they correspond...
...So one was ready for The Human Factor, with its ritual condemnation of South Africa, romanticization of blacks, and wistfully tolerant attitude toward Russia...
...The epigraph of the novel is taken from Thomas Hardy: "All things merge into one another-good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics...
...But stay...
...Among the kidnappers is a runaway married priest...
...Later we may become hardened to the formulas of Confession and skeptical about ourselves: we may only half intend to keep the promises ve make, until continual failure or the circumstances of our private life finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens...
...I can only remember that in January 1926 I became convinced of the probable existene of something we call God, though now I dishike the word with all its anthropomorphic associations and prefer Chardin's 'Noosphere', and my belief never came by way of those unconvincing philosophical arguments which I derided in a short story called 'A Visit to Morin.'' Not exactly a road to Damascus event...
...and, of course, the ubiquitous CIA...
...He coddles up to a Panamanian martinet yet wants to condemn a Paraguayan one...
...Since the honorary consul's only fault lies in not being the American ambassador, this presents a moral dilemma...
...For a long time he distinguished between his novels proper and what he called entertainments...
...Magiot seems almost exempted from this criticism...
...In the latter, he freed himself from the baleful effects of Conrad and of Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction which elevates into dogma Henry James's theories and practices and encourages an obliquity which makes demands of sometimes dubious value upon the reader...
...That is the opening of Brighton Rock and the way the sentence ends is a sort of signature...
...If he was the American ambassador there would be no problem, since the latter is a "combatant...
...Fortnum survives to return to his wife who is pregnant by Plarr...
...Graham Greene, Nobel laureate...
...But then, in A Sort of Life, Greene's description of his baptism is curious...
...It is with The Honorary Consul that the turn in Greene's outlook becomes unmistakably clear...
...This would cap the failure he imagines his career to be...
...The United States had evolved beyond good and evil...
...now he is a political one...
...There is the vivid setting of a scene which is somehow always tawdry: a landscape of failure...
...But there is a disturbing new element in the book...
...When Greene dropped this distinction from the list of his published writings, he seems to have recognized that in all his novels he was employing those elements, of the craft which, while closer to the surface in thrillers, must sustain any fiction which hopes to engage and hold a reader...
...characters were sinners, their actions freighted with eternal significance...
...There is an old joke about the fallen-away Catholic who is asked if he has become a Protestant and replies, "I have lost my faith but not my reason...
...One might think this means that Greene is dubious about a priest turned terrorist, but there is no justification for thinking this...
...they stand in need of grace and forgiveness...
...Greene treats this heterodox gibberish seriously, though he rewards the priest with a crone for wife (remember Padre Jose' in The Power and the Glory...
...The story bears out how far Greene has traveled from the contrast of the fugitive priest and the jefe in The Power and the Glory...
...Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours...
...Greene's fundamental difficulty was to believe in God...
...Scarcely a comforting or consoling vision...
...if one entered it he might soon be swept far out beyond the sight of shore...
...Greene clearly has no sympathy with this ideology and his distrust of politicians continues as late as The Comedians...
...When I think of all the grey memorials erected in London to equestrian generals, the heroes of old colonial wars, and to frock-coated politicians who are even more deeply forgotten, I can find no reason to mock the modest stone that commemorates Jones on the far side of the international road which he failed to cross in a country far from home...
...If the Nobel Prize still meant something, I would wish to see it conferred on Graham Greene...
...Failure and treachery and the danger that innocence...
...If you take an other-worldly view and find yourself confronted by a bustling colossus, a superpower, a materialistic, moralizing, omnipresent Leviathan, you will be tempted to pass judgment on it...
...What had these monks, with an obligation to dwell in all their sermons and retreats on the reality of hell, in common with this stout and cheerful man...
...Anthony Burgess put his finger on the theological source of Greene's anti-Americanism when he suggested that Greene sees the United States as a monument to Pelagianism, a can-do society that transfers its pragmatism onto the moral and religious planes, seeing the world and mankind as malleable, shapeable into the good by merely human efforts...
...he felt that if he could accept that he could accept all the rest...
...it was the quintessence of worldliness...
...The Redemption of God as well as of Man...
...Not that grace leads to Utopia: This is the Vale of Tears...
...represents are other constants...
...The architecture of a Greene novel is given to such divisions and subdivisions...
...The meeting seems to have taken place around 1950dates like names are rare in the book-when Greene was already well-established...
...Once he was a Catholic novelist...
...It is of course contestable that a Catholic must take a negative view of the United States of America...
...Anthony Burgess first made the point that Greene's anti-Americanism is essentially theological...
...He is an overt Manichean, holding that the principles of good and evil coalesce in God...
...The same cannot be said of Greene...
...Even in its present tarnished state I could wish it for him...
...Such is Greene's artfulness that I doubt that any reader is conscious of this as he goes through the book the first time...
...Pyle, the quiet American, is dead in the first scene...
...Father Trollope, the priest from whom he took instructions, was himself a convert who discovered in himself a vocation to the priesthood...
...With our help, because the evolution of God depends on our evolution...
...The basis is no longer theological, or it is a theology which has degenerated into the most predictable kind of anti-American gobbledegook...
...This dictated Greene's view of politics and politicians...
...The faith was seen as a vast sea...
...Religion into politics...
...Greene began to write stories full of action-thrillers-and he learned : do so with unsurpassed craftsmanship...
...There is a passage in Another Mexico in which Greene looks northward to the glitter and wealth of an American border town and sees the enemy...
...it is the atmosphere of the novels that is sui generis...
...When one looks back over the novels, moreover, from Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party, published last year, to The Man Within, published in 1929, it is clear that Greene has not retained the same notions of success and failure...
...Poor Greene...
...Like the rhyming couplet ending a Shakespearean scene, one comes to expect the falling cadence of such triads...
...Father Leon has lost his faith-in the Church...
...His account of his conversion to Catholicism in A Sort of Life is startling...
...Both men are moved by compassion for the poor but while the priest is a personal failure the jefe is ascetic, riddled with what one is tempted to call Protestant virtues...
...The jefe envisages a new society, heaven on earth, the rectification of injustice by means of political techniques...
...If success is only a delayed failure, this equivocal award is overdue...
...But he seems to have done so with misgivings, somewhat sheepishly...
...For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure...
...The passages on his visits to Poland and Czechoslovakia, his compassionate account of planters in Malaya and farmers in Kenya, and above all, his moving evocation of his friendship with Evelyn Waugh, are a delight to read...
...It may be that Greene's Catholicism is a partial explanation of his anti-Americanism...
...if you wanted stronger fare you must turn to the novels...
...The faith he has apparently lost bothers him like an aching tooth...
...How very sad this is...
...south of the border there was still the sense of evil and of good...
...I took the name of Thomas-after St...
...On what basis...
...Poor all of us when you come to think of it...
...But he still considers himself, if not a Catholic writer, a writer who happens to be Catholic...
...Heaven and hell were the poles...
...Unlike myself he had accepted the idea of failure and he had discovered in lack of ambition a kind of bleared happiness and an ironic amusement when he looked at his contemporaries who had found what people call success...
...How to describe it...
...The novel was published when Greene was 70 and it is magnificently crafted...
...The second volume of his autobiography gives us the fullest picture we have ever had of Greene the artist...
...it tells us about his person only up to a point...
...There is something Manichean in what I have called the Catholic novels, a species of Jansenism that reminds one of Mauriac...
...A complete reversal has taken place...
...But the point of interest, it seems to me, is whether Greene's theological perspective has remained the same over the years...
...Every evil act of ours strengthens His night side, and every good one helps His day side . . . It is a terrible process all the same and the God I believe in suffers as we suffer while He struggles against Himself-against His evil side...
...The autobiography was published in 1971...
...The condemnation is political rather than theological, a theology become politics...
...On the end pages of my own copies of several Greene novels I have made such analyses...
...It was not argument that persuaded him...
...At Oxford he had written poetry of great promise, but for long now he had given up any attempt to write...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
