Monsignor Quixote
Staley, Thomas F.
Play it again, Graham MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE Graham Greene Simon & Schuster; $12.95, 221 pp. Thomas F. Staley THERE is a point, although it is not always a clear one, in the careers of important and...
...This unlikely pair encounter as many windmills as their literary ancestors...
...Chance lands a bishop from Rome virtually on his doorstep in his large stalled Mercedes...
...Their errantry has been launched...
...Such behavior, however, does not go unnoticed by the bishop, who finally confines the Monsignor to his poor rectory, thinking he has gone mad...
...This novel, however, reaches back to a dialogue of opposites and similarities between Catholicism and Marxism that has constantly absorbed Greene's work from nearly the beginning...
...Thomas F. Staley THERE is a point, although it is not always a clear one, in the careers of important and prolific living novelists when each new work becomes a piece in the larger picture of their total work, and the entire picture becomes far more important than the latest piece...
...Greene, has been attracted to both Marxism and the church, but disturbed by the authority and social apparatus in each...
...Slight, yet unerring in its theme and vision, it neither extends nor deepens Greene's constant themes, rather it gathers them up, gives distance to them through a more detached vision...
...Cervantes's masterpiece is about the transforming power of illusion and Greene's slender yet penetrating novel is about the transforming power of love...
...Paul's message on love was very clear, and so is Greene's...
...however, have changed the nature of the dialogue if not the terms...
...Monsignor Quixote, the hero who gives Greene's new novel its title, is a humble parish priest in the remote Spanish village of El Toboso...
...For Greene love lies deeper than faith...
...They leave the land of La Mancha, and their troubles begin...
...A night in a brothel, a confession of an undertaker, an X-rated movie and other misadventures never disturb, the pair's innocence...
...The church and the party have simultaneously attracted and repelled Greene throughout his life as a novelist...
...Fifty years (can it be that long that Greene has been writing...
...Well, we are inside a novel by Greene, that's how...
...With Graham Greene, I would guess it was with the publication of A Burnt-Out Case, which he thought at the time would be his last novel, a novel of self-parody with a hero of diminishing powers and wavering human response...
...Quixote's life seems settled and fixed, but fate plays it otherwise...
...They set off to purchase the purple socks and bib emblematic of Quixote's new and exalted state...
...The source of Greene's concern, however, predates The Power and the Glory...
...With Faulkner it occurred with Go Down Moses...
...Both Quixote and Sancho realize this in the end...
...Chance was what after all spurred on the priest's ancestor, Don Quixote...
...The movie's title, after all, attracted the religious Quixote, "A Maiden's Prayer...
...After the priest dies, Sancho, the avowed Communist and dear friend, says, "I wish I could come upon St...
...To see this dialectic at work, recall The Power and the Glory with the man of the new order and the man of God...
...Monsignor Quixote is at once wry, humorous, warm, and moving...
...it has its roots in that formative period for him in the thirties when Catholicism and Communism were posed as the alternative cures for the illness of an infirmed and directionless society...
...A Burnt-Out Case was Greene's sixteenth novel, and his latest, Monsignor Quixote, is his twenty-second...
...His promotion propels Quixote into a quagmire of problems with his bishop, so Quixote and his friend, now the ex-mayor, Sancho Zancas, take off on a journey in "Rosinante," not the horse but the priest's decrepit Seat 600 for Madrid...
...Diametrically opposed as they were, philosophers and political theorists in the thirties attempted to ally them...
...The shape, texture, and design have already been formed...
...Dimitry Mirsky's and Christopher Dawson's works of this period are but two examples...
...The bishop, grateful to Quixote for a fine horsemeat steak-the best steak he had ever eaten-a splendid if modest local wine, and the repair of his Mercedes, yet unaware that he had eaten horsemeat and that his car was merely out of gas, shows his gratitude to Quixote by having him promoted to a Monsignor...
...Greene's thought and formation seem to owe much to this thinking that attempted to bridge Catholicism and Marxism with their respective opportunities for belief...
...Paul now by accident and for the first time...
...Such an appointment sends the local bishop into a rage, for he sees Quixote as a stumblebum who accomplishes nothing, and worse, associates with the Communist mayor of the town...
...Through all of these adventures which have their obvious parallels with Cer-vantes's novel, there is a running dialogue, frequently softened by wine, between Quixote and Sancho contrasting and at the same time comparing Communism and Catholicism, but in the most human and personal terms, free from the intense emotional charges that we remember from Greene's earlier work...
...Their mutual ineptitude scandalizes the bishop and nearly lands them in jail...
...You ask, as the bishop did, how can he be descended from a fictional character...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 19
