A Master In Decline
MEYERS, JEFFREY
A Master in Decline Monsignor Quixote By Graham Greene Simon & Schuster. 221 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers Author, "Katherine Mansfield: A Biography," "The Enemy: A Biography of...
...The hero of the latter, accompanied by the village cobbler, sets out to preach Methodist gospel but meets only catastrophe and disillusionment...
...This posture was punctured a generation ago by George Orwell when he noted of Scobie, Greene's protagonist in The Heart of the Matter: "If he really believed in Hell, he would not risk going there to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women...
...The robber who appears in the car trunk is the escaped galley slave...
...Another chapter has the monsignor being led into a brothel on false pretenses and blowing up a contraceptive like a balloon...
...Now Graham Greene has self-consciously placed himself in this literary line...
...A Guardia Civil waving his arms recalls the famous fight with the windmill...
...Quixote: "I want to believe and I want others to believe...
...Chapter titles are purely derivative: "How Monsignor Quixote had A Curious Encounter," "How Monsignor Quixote Saw a Strange Spectacle...
...Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party and a nonfiction expose of governmental corruption in France, J'Accuse...
...Reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers Author, "Katherine Mansfield: A Biography," "The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis" The early 17th-century Spanish classic, Don Quixote, had a profound effect on the thematic and structural development of the English novel...
...He steers Monsignor Quixote through brief pilgrimages to the homes of Cervantes and the early 20th-century philospher Miguel de Unamuno, and to the monument to the Falange dead in the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid...
...His last major novel, The Human Factor (1978), revealed an old master still in full control of a unique wit, irony and subtle style...
...In place of Don Quixote's treasured books of chivalry, Monsignor Quixote carries theological tomes, providing the writer with a transparent excuse to hold forth on religious matters...
...Lawrence called "the spirit of place...
...God, the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception...
...Greene's wish is to give us a hero whose simple goodness-like Don Quixote's or Prince Myshkin's-makes him seem crazy to more wordly men...
...Let's leave the details to God," Quixote says...
...The flat dialogue is utterly unconvincing...
...Monsignor Quixote is a stillborn disaster, a feeble fable whose parallels to the original are heavy-handed...
...It is only in Spain and Russia that time stands still," Greene comments, disregarding the fact that the Soviet Union has experienced the most rapid transformation of any country in the world since l900...
...quips Sancho...
...Less renowned 18th-century scribes produced epics entitled Female Quixote and, reflecting the emergence of John Wesley, Spiritual Quixote...
...In 1742, the title page of Fielding's Joseph Andrews announced that the ensuing work was "Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes...
...Since then, Greene has published the second volume of his elusive autobiography, Ways of Escape, plus two distinctly minor works-the novella, Dr...
...he also listens to confession in a toilet...
...His faith, however, remains unshaken...
...And the priest-errant, as one would expect, is finally locked up as a madman...
...Rocinante's defects and the pilgrims' prodigious wine consumption are reiterated to the point of extreme tedium...
...and rolls out the familiar paradox embodied by the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory: A shadow of disbelief brings human beings together more effectively than certainty...
...The level of numinous discourse here may be discerned in the following exchange: Sancho: "You believe all that nonsense...
...The monsignor, in the manner of his predecessors, is an idealistic quester for truth and justice who becomes a victim...
...In one flaccid episode, a couple seeking a form of coitus interruptus permissible to the church arranges for their butler to enter the room during their lovemaking...
...Yet he fails to bring these settings, or the Spanish countryside, to life...
...He offers uneasy, homiletic reassurance...
...The comic heroes and loosely connected adventures in Laurence Sterne's Tristram S/iandv(1760),OliverGoldsmith's77ie Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (1771) and Dickens' Pickwick Papers (1837) owed a great deal to the same source...
...Here even the portrait of contemporary Spain is disappointing...
...His illusions are shattered...
...Greene's unusually long and distinguished career began in the late 1920s...
...One is forced to agree, and to mourn the decline of a powerful novelist...
...He is abducted, brought home by Father Her-rera, the bad bishop's evil lieutenant, and is forbidden to say mass...
...Where Cervantes explored the conflict of reality and illusion, Greene's interest is the struggle between faith and scepticism...
...And who drives...
...The Monsignor of the Sorrowful Countenance is squired on a journey to Madrid by the Communist former mayor of his hometown, El Toboso...
...Sancho's sometime paramour, Senorita Martin, is a distant Dulcinea...
...Unfortunately, in illustrating the monsignor's naivete, the novel lapses into strangely awkward, adolescent attempts at comedy...
...The author, one feels, has lost his imaginative impulse while retaining the compulsion to create...
...Entranced by what he believes to be his descent from the fictional Don, the cleric insists on calling the politician Sancho Panza and their car Rocinante...
...the truly noble man is the one who must battle for his own soul...
...Missing from Greene's latest effort are Cervantes' characterizations, humor and wisdom...
...Monsignor Quixote adds nothing to the line of Catholic fiction that runs from Ford Madox Ford through Evelyn Waugh to Anthony Burgess and David Lodge...
...He lived in a mist," we are told, "unable to see a path, stumbling...
...Elsewhere he is puzzled by a pornographic film...
...Are you sure that God has passed his driving test...
...contrasts Catholicism and the Curia with Communism and the Politburo...
...At one point when Greene's inspiration is flagging particularly painfully, Quixote observes to his traveling companion, "Your story begins to sound almost as dull as my breviary...
...The monsignor's purple pechera is implausibly likened to Mambrino's helmet...
...One of Greene's greatest strengths as a writer has been his astonishing ability to evoke what D.H...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 21
