Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party
McConnell, Frank
Books: EVERYTHING BANISHED BUT LOVE DOCTOR FISCHER OF GENEVA OR THE BOMB PARTY Graham Greene Simon and Schuster, $9.95, 156 pp. Frank McConnell I N a rare—and rarely frank—interview with his...
...And, since his demons are so largely ours also, and since he is more honest than most of us let ourselves be, his book is not "great," but in a deep sense, essential...
...It is enough to say that Jones learns, sadly, that he cannot commit suicide, and Doctor Doctor Fischer learns, with ferocious triumph, that now he can...
...Whatever that may mean (and it may mean quite a lot), we will probably not find a better working-out of its implications than Doctor Fischer of Geneva, his twenty-third novel...
...Just as Kafka banishes all virtues but Hope from his characters' moral repertoire, so Greene banishes all but Love...
...And there is certainly a strong admixture of this kind of diabolism in the mysterious Doctor Fischer...
...But he has never, till now, shown us quite how profoundly "boredom," in his sense, is the elementary burden of consciousness itself, or how much the act of writing, for him, is, like charity, the art of moral survival...
...Rightly perceiving that the rich are not less, but more pathetically avaricious than the poor, he invites to his dinners a collection of five wealthy grotesques whom Anna-Luise calls the "Toads...
...And Doctor Fischer of Geneva is rife with such allusions and glancing, tantalizing half-references...
...C. S. Lewis observed in Perelandra that truly Satanic evil is not romantic, black-caped, and thrillingly dark, but rather moronically, cruelly mindless and petty...
...To compare great things with great, Greene's last three novels—The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, and Doctor Fischer of Geneva—can remind us of Kafka's major, unfinished books, The Trial and The Castle...
...The satanic and the blasphemous, however appealing in their Promethean grandeur, are finally not enough to make us human: and it is only in being human that we are saved, if at all...
...His "experiments," godlike in their moral autonomy, are like the tests of a vengeful Jehovah eager to see, not who might be saved, but whom he can damn...
...Indeed, he does exactly that with the figure of the millionaire "Grand Old Man" of Loser Takes All , the book closest to the parabolic economy of this one...
...But because he is those things he is also the storyteller of Doctor Fischer of Geneva, and his bitter voice is like a reluctant blessing on our common burden of charity...
...At least since Brighton Rock Greene, good Gnostic that he is, has insisted that blasphemy and despair are at least second best to love and hope...
...But if the book's exploration of "Greeneland" (the landscape of the Fall) is familiar, it is also radically innovative, discovering new and more forbidding promontories and crevasses in that landscape than he has mapped before...
...Not satisfied with this revenge, though, Fischer has become famous for his dinner parties—laboratory experiments, actually, in the depths of human greed and self-degradation...
...His wife, Anna-Luise's mother, had "betrayed" him years ago by indulging her taste for music (Fischer is unmusical) with a minor clerk name Steiner...
...Frank McConnell I N a rare—and rarely frank—interview with his old friend V.S...
...Pritchett a few years ago, Graham Greene described himself as a "Catholic atheist...
...It is the Laodiceans, from Ida Arnold to the Toads, who are really lost...
...And looking at the dead body of Fischer, Jones thinks, "this . . . was the bit of rubbish I had once compared in my mind with Jehovah and Satan...
...At the first party Jones is invited to attend, for example, the guests are forced to eat cold porridge...
...Jones, a middle-aged Englishman with a minor secretarial job in a Swiss chocolate firm, meets, falls in love with, and marries Anna-Luise Fischer, the very young daughter of the famous Doctor Fischer, who has become a millionaire many times over through his invention of "Dentophil Bouquet," the bestThe speaker of those words, the book's narrator, is Alfred Jones (Greene delights in finding the most deliberately boring names for the heroes of his parables...
...Anna-Luise dies—absurdly, the way people usually die in Greene and the way they usually die in reality—and Jones, after a bungled suicide attempt, agrees reluctantly to attend Doctor Fischer's last party...
...For the Catholic atheist, the heart of the world's mystery is that there is no mystery, and all parables point to the terrifying, difficult fact that we are counseled (never mind by whom) to love and to survive, despite the difficulty and even the agony of those two activities...
...It is simply the latest installment in this painfully honest man's fifty-year dialogue with his demons...
...Fischer lives in a towering, bitter despair...
...But there is something else...
...Very like Browning's duke in "My Last Duchess," Fischer had the clerk dismissed and then proceeded to murder his wife by repression...
...Jones, a middle-aged Englishman with a minor secretarial job in a Swiss chocolate firm, meets, falls in love with, and marries Anna-Luise Fischer, the very young daughter of the famous Doctor Fischer, who has become a millionaire many times over through his invention of "Dentophil Bouquet," the best-selling toothpaste in Europe...
...It would be reductive, even silly, to call this a "great" book...
...There the Toads are invited to open Christmas crackers, four of which contain checks for two million francs, and one of which we are told, contains a lethal charge of gunpowder...
...To say this much is to say the by-now predictable, that Doctor Fischer of Geneva is another masterwork in what has to be the most astonishing literary career in English since Joseph Conrad's...
...Greene, even ten years ago, might have been content to let things rest there, with Fischer an ambiguous symbol of our own ambiguous, troubled relationship to the moral order...
...Commonweal: 376...
...The party, in other words, is a kind of communal Russian roulette—a game to which Greene himself was addicted, he tells us, in his unhappy youth...
...There he humiliates them in various absurd, childish ways, which they gladly tolerate for the sake of 20 June 1980: 375 the expensive "presents" they know he will give them at the end of the ordeal...
...Doctor Fischer is not only a short novel, but an unsettlingly spare one...
...And in both cases, the odd and fascinating allegories that result are in fact acts of a distinctively modern, existential Faith in the very center of the abyss...
...I doubt if there is a detail in it, from lines of dialogue to what characters order for lunch, that does not contribute to the book's onrush to its final, and grim, moral point...
...Here as so often, Greene writes a kind of inverted detective story, in which the only thing we are really sure of is the final scene...
...Jones refuses, but the Toads dive in enthusiastically, convincing each other that it is only a manifestation of Fischer's wonderful "sense of humor...
...Jones is a failure (Greene has always been obsessed with failure) and, in surviving his wife, a betrayer (Greene has always been obsessed with betrayal...
...It would be unfair to reveal the details of what happens in that last party...
...The speaker of those words, the book's narrator, is Alfred Jones (Greene delights in finding the most deliberately boring names for the heroes of his parables...
...But now he takes us farther...
...Greene, who has flirted with suicide his whole life long, has frequently said that writing for him is primarily an alleviation of the great bane of existence, boredom...
...Greene has achieved the stature where his quotations from and allusions to his own earlier books are a central part of his meaning...
...And that point is articulated at the opening of the last, short chapter: "The fact that I have written this narrative tells well enough that, unlike Doctor Fischer, I never found the courage necessary to kill myself...
Vol. 107 • June 1980 • No. 12
