The sources of desire
Baumann, Paul
forcibly into his writing. "Clumsy life again at her stupid work," Greene said. A convert, he did not come to an emotional under- standing of his faith until he went to Mexico to report on the...
...Subsequently, he explored the "the mystery of 'the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God"' in much of his work...
...In Ways ofEscape, Greene wrote admiringly of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, and especially of Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life...
...But human failure is never the final measure...
...That is its very foundation...
...An opportunity for retribution did not immediately present itself...
...Intended or not--and often with the best inten- tions-the will to love and be loved, to know and be known by the world, brings suffering to those closest to us...
...I believe...
...Faith is in essence a matter of will," Unamuno wrote, "just as to believe is to want to believe, and that to believe in God is to wish, above all and before all, that there may be a God...
...For in Greene's own life the impetus to his most sincere and generous accomplishments--his greatest gifts to others----came out of his darkest temptation and sorrow...
...Greene is forever forcing our gaze toward the mad- dening paradoxes linking hate and love, destruction and creation, revenge and justice...
...the drunken priest who continued to pass it on...
...But still every few years a scent, a stretch of wall, a book in a shelf, a name in a newspaper, would remind me to lift the stone and see the creature move its head towards the light...
...A convert, he did not come to an emotional under- standing of his faith until he went to Mexico to report on the revolutionary left-wing repression of the church...
...That is our condition human betrayal, after all, is at the heart of the gospel story...
...Watson's crime was more heinous, for he betrayed Greene...
...The basic element I admire in Christianity is its sense of moral failure," Greene said...
...Catholicism's genius was that it "satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life" while recognizing that the urge to rationalize faith can never "satisfy the mind...
...As the story of Genesis implies, our humanity is predicated on our understanding that the knowledge of good and evil is the fruit of one tree: we can't know one without knowing the other...
...I wondered all the way back to my hotel whether I would have ever written a book if it had not been for Watson and the dead Carter, if those years of humiliation had not given me an excessive desire to prove that I was good at something, however long the effort might prove...
...help my unbelief," the Apostle relates, and Greene assents...
...Traditional rational proofs "prove no more than the existence of (the) idea of God," Unamuno claimed...
...In The Power and the Glory, he embodied the paradox in "the ide- alistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives...
...This kind of equiv- ocating distinction disturbed Waugh, who wrote that he found Scobie's sanctified suicide the death of a man overcome by pity--in The Heart of the Matter "totally unintelligible...
...He eventually came to call himself a "Catholic agnostic," someone who had faith but found it difficult to believe...
...At that period of my life I had very few friends," he wrote...
...As Greene has noted, these double allegiances and double suspicions were his first introduction to the ambiguities of life as a secret agent...
...Even in childhood, evil carves out its sure place in our hearts...
...His principal tormentors were named Carter and Watson...
...His father was the headmaster of the school, and this of course placed him in an insupportable position, at once complicit with the authorities and allied with those under subjugation...
...Was that a reason to be grateful to Watson or the reverse...
...Few novelists have described that spiritual predicament with more personal honesty and humility, with a more generous curiosity and understanding of human variety and need, or out of a greater desire for God than did Graham Greene...
...Or so Greene insisted...
...278: Commonweal...
...After Mexico, Catholicism was no longer "merely symbolic" for Greene, but "closer now to death in the afternoon...
...Looking back, Greene traced the origins of that compulsion to childhood...
...Barely a page long, it's titled "The Revenge" and describes how as a thirteen and fourteen-year old Greene was tormented by his peers at school...
...Alone he (Watson) would have had no power to hurt...
...On January 14, 1955, Commonweal published something Greene called "A Personal Note...
...As John Updike observed, "The world gets a grim report in his fic- tion...
...Greene tells us how he bumped into Watson nearly thirty years later, in 1951, in Kuala Lumpur...
...The greater sin--the inhuman temptation--is not in being unable to believe, but in not wanting to...
...PAUL BAUMANN Paul Baumann is the associate editor of Commonweal...
...Clearly, Greene felt the greatest affinity with this heterodox Catholicism...
...Stunned, Greene was strangely unmoved by the reappearance of his betrayer...
...Greene's Catholicism was idiosyncratic, with seemingly a strong element of Manicheism or Jansenism in his work...
...He agreed to meet with Watson again in a few days, an appointment he did not keep...
...The only change was that I looked under the stone less and less often...
...Indeed...
...This is the world in which Greene's troubled characters move, and in which their desire to live and love is in some mysterious way also their desire to know God...
...I began to write, and the past lost some of its power I wrote it out of me...
...That ardent desire--that aboriginal hunger for God even when wrapped in the most modem pessimism--is what characterized Greene's work and presumably his life...
...Carter was malicious (he devised a "system of mental torture") but honest...
...From the bringing forth of new life in sorrow to the impersonal detachment and solipsism of the artist, there is something painful and violent, something that shadows if it does not partake of evil, in all human creativity and love...
...The problem of evil, and the even more burdensome Christian notion that suffering has a transcendent meaning--that in its very negation evil somehow exposes the terrible consolation of God's presence--lies at the heart of Greene's fitful faith...
...None the less it was on Watson that I swore revenge, for with his defection my isolation became almost complete...
...For many years when I thought back on that period, I found the desire for revenge alive like a creature under a stone," Greene wrote...
...Courage and the sense of responsibility had revived with persecution," he wrote of the peasants who risked their lives to attend Mass...
...There he was struck by the "terrible paradox of human goodness," the mys- terious connection between suffering and faith...
...Greene's work is filled with the failure of faith...
...Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God Idea, not God himself," Unamuno wrote...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 9
