The Tenth Man
Christman, Elizabeth
Commonweal: 316 Something to be ashamed of THE TENTH NAN Graham Greene Simon and Schuster, $14.95, 157 pp. Elizabeth Christman IT sounds like the beginning of a novel: an old manuscript by a...
...perhaps giving his life for her is almost like saving a part of himself...
...It was the face of failure...
...Character portrayal is sketchy...
...As retribution for some civil murders, the Germans decree that one man in every ten is to be executed...
...Graham Greene at eighty has just published The Tenth Man, written under contract for MGM right after World War II, never filmed, forgotten even by the author...
...This encounter, combined with the remarkable coincidence that M. Carosse happens to overhear on another occasion the details of the prison bargain, furnishes such an engrossing plot development that one hardly stops to question the fortuitous linking of events...
...The plot has fascinating turns and complications, managed with Greene's economical deftness...
...Like these other protagonists, Chariot finds a way to atone for the evil he committed — a drastic atonement, but then it was a drastic act, buying a man's life...
...It is one M. Carosse, hiding inside the urinal for fear of being spotted as a collaborationist, who mistakes Chariot for someone else...
...In a lottery Chavel draws the slip of paper with the cross on it...
...Elizabeth Christman IT sounds like the beginning of a novel: an old manuscript by a famous author, buried in a file'for forty years, suddenly comes to light...
...perhaps he knows he's going to die soon anyway...
...Greene might have fleshed out these hints if he had had novel publication rather than a movie in view...
...The protagonist is a hallmark Greene type, a middle-aged man weighed down with guilt and failure...
...He can't get a job...
...Greene gives no satisfactory analysis of why the middle-aged, childless widower wants so passionately to live...
...Chariot sees his own bearded face reflected in a water decanter...
...Therese Mangeot, the sister, hires him as a sort of servant, and he begins to fall in love with her...
...It's a hopeless love, however, for he cannot tell her that he is the man she hates so bitterly for buying her brother's life...
...He is poor now...
...A young clerk nicknamed Janvier sells his life so as to leave his mother and sister rich...
...This opening drama, comprising about a fifth of the novel, simply sets up the situation...
...The real story begins when Chavel goes back to Paris after the German defeat, having grown a beard and taken a new identity and a new name, Chariot...
...Though short and somewhat undeveloped, it's pure Greene...
...It is up to the prisoners to choose the victim...
...Commonweal: 318...
...Next morning JanvieiMS executed...
...like Rowe in The Ministry of Fear who has killed his wife in pity for her sufferings...
...There are some fortuitous coincidences...
...He and his sister are twins, with an exceptional bond between them...
...Once past the spare beginning, Greene unfolds more spaciously the consciousness of a man running or hiding from a disgraceful moral failure...
...He has no office, no home...
...This romantic scenario, however, is real...
...No writer is better than Greene at dramatizing moral 17 May 1985: 317 failure or at tracing its effects down the years on a man's life...
...He goes to his old home, where Janvier's sister and ill mother are now living, presenting himself as Chariot, a fellow-prisoner of the dead man...
...She keeps a gun ready to kill Chavel whenever he turns up, and she is sure he eventually will...
...For example, Chariot (as he is called from the time he changes his name) is despondently leaning against a urinal on a Paris street when he is offered a commission by a disembodied voice...
...It was odd, he thought, that one failure of nerve had ingrained the face as deeply as a tramp's, but, of course, he had the objectivity to tell himself, it wasn't one failure, it was a whole lifetime of preparation for the event...
...He remembered it as only a sketched idea, was astonished to receive the complete short novel of about 30,000 words, and even more astonished to find he liked it...
...Still more shadowy is young Janvier's motive for giving up his life to enrich his mother and sister, who are not desperately poor...
...Greene's admirers will like it too...
...It is a plotty story, of course: it was written for a movie...
...The Tenth Man is not a Graham Greene masterpiece, but it is a welcome addition to the canon...
...Immediately he offers to deed his home near Paris and all his property to anyone who will take his place...
...He is so ashamed of the way he saved his own skin that he can't look up any former friends or business associates...
...Three years ago an MGM official found it, and the studio sold publication rights to British publisher Anthony Blond...
...Janvier coughs a lot...
...like the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory who has had an illegitimate child...
...There are a couple of throwaway hints...
...Chariot is like Scobie in The Heart of the Matter who has betrayed both his wife and his mistress...
...Greene heard of the find when Anthony Blond asked him if he wanted to make any editorial changes before the book was published...
...Louis Chavel, a prosperous widowed lawyer from Paris, has been held prisoner by the Germans in occupied France...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 10
