GRAHAM GREENE
As a quite young boy, Graham Greene already knew that what he most wanted to do in life was write. He never wavered from that wish. But it is necessary to distinguish: it is not that he wanted to be a writer; simply, he wanted to write. His was not a journey of the self (that literary version of masturbation): rather, it was an embracing of the world and a responding to it. The result was a series of novels in which the author disappears as a presence, portraying scenes and characters remote from his own background, but immediate in their achieved humanity
To speak of Greene as a great humanist is to contradict a widely held impression of him. Some authors, though, are too easily pigeon-holed, too quickly pinned down with a slick phrase or adjective. There is more to Kafka than what is summed up in the word “Kafkaesque”, implying as it does a vision of the world narrowed down to the enigmatic abuse of power. There is more to Dickens than the “Dickensian” emphasis on colourful characters and bizarre names. And there is more to Greene than is suggested by clever quips about “Greeneland”, a squalid domicile of men and women prone to violence, morally dubious, and lost in a desert of spiritual aridity.
Certainly, Greene’s novels are inhabited by people all variously flawed, often lacking integrity, and much given to infirmity of purpose or a sense of futility. If there were no more to it than that, the picture would indeed be a bleak one. But alongside the flaws, Greene also glimpsed the traces of decency and hope that round out the picture. That Greene could discover such redeeming qualities, even though small ones, in otherwise unattractive characters demonstrates, in him, a generosity of spirit not always recognized by critics who see in him only a melancholic exclaiming, with obsessive disrelish, “God’s not in his heaven, and all’s ill with the world”. On the contrary, he looked at our fallen world with extraordinary compassion, never standing in judgment, and seeking whatever its truth might be.
And yet (there is always an “and yet”) how can one describe as a great humanist someone who was a Roman Catholic and who for ever worried at questions of faith like a dog gnawing a bone? Greene’s writing repeatedly concerns itself with the matter of God: with how the people of faith so sadly betray their faith; and how the loss of faith seems to result in a life without meaning. Nevertheless, there is no inconsistency here. In Greene, Catholicism and Humanism meet and merge. That part of him which was stubbornly Catholic, despite all the Church’s failings, was deeply imbued with the grace of Christian charity. And that other part of him which was so immersed in world affairs, in all their secular variety, was rich in impartial love of human kind. In him, creatively, the two traits worked hand in hand.
To follow this pattern through all his books would make for wearisome reading. Briefly, two books exemplify his characteristic achievement: “The Power and the Glory” and “The Honorary Consul”. As it happens, they also exemplify the two categories into which he liked to divide his fiction the serious novels, and what he described as his “entertainments”.
“The Power and the Glory”, an unquestioned masterpiece, is set in Mexico, during the period of secular revolution when priests were persecuted and the sacraments were banned. It was a world where smug monsignors had formerly held sway over superstitious peasants, and where now the same peasants, ineradicably devout, were forbidden the rites of faith by atheist policemen. Moving furtively among them is a clandestine priest, shabbily dressed, to celebrate Mass for them in secret. A far from heroic character, addicted to drink and less than celibate, he lives in daily fear of capture; and he carries on with his dangerous work, not so much out of any noble sense of mission, as out of reluctant acceptance of necessity — a priest is needed, and a priest, inescapably, is who he is. Eventually and inevitably, he is betrayed and arrested. Condemned to die, he can make little sense of his fate and cannot out-argue his interrogator, who has rejected the faith he was raised in. Frightened and confused, the priest goes to his death with none of the beatific fortitude standard in the hagiographies. But in him, Greene has drawn the portrait of a genuine saint: a flawed and hesitant one, who had no wish for martyrdom; but one who, in his human frailty, has far more convincing appeal than many of the Church’s canonized models of piety. In effect, what Greene conveys is the possibility of redemption: that even in our fallen nature, even in the most unlikely and seedy individuals, there always exists, inextinguishably, a small germ of love.
“The Honorary Consul”, a much later book, belongs among the “entertainments”. Or at least, superficially, it does so, for its attributes are those of a thriller: set in Argentina, it tells of an honorary British consul taken hostage, in mistake for the American ambassador, by terrorists seeking to secure the release of political prisoners in neighbouring Paraguay; there is violent death in the main story, and a sub-plot about prostitution. However, the work is much more than a piece of genre writing: it is shot through with the presence and absence of God; the leader of the terrorists is a failed priest, and he finds himself at odds with a comrade who is a Marxist contemptuous of religion, and with an old friend who is a lapsed Catholic still cumbered with residual scraps of a lost faith. What emerges from this nexus of disparate hopes and fears, gains and losses, is a tentative inching, in one unexpected quarter, toward a little patch of kindness.
If in these books Greene was able, through his characters, to come to terms with some of the world’s desperate evils, and with some of his own inner demons, it may be hoped that he arrived, at the end of a long and fruitful life, at a peace of mind and a serenity of heart. Whatever the truth of that may be — and he was a private man, who kept much to himself — he bequeathed a legacy of great literature which, perhaps more than any other in modern English, portrayed a time of profound alienation. If faith, throughout, was his armour, there were always chinks in it, open to doubt. But if doubt was the configuration of his intellect, faith in the end was the consolation of his soul.
Graham Greene was born on October 2nd 1904 in England. He died in Switzerland on April 3rd 1991, aged eighty-six.
