Graham Greene-II
His novels are set in the region of the mind

By Ashok Chopra

Graham Green is the oldest and most distinguished contemporary English novelist. The length of his career and breadth of his interests have made Greene difficult to place. A prolific and diverse author, he has written on almost everything ranging from poetry and children's books to biography and literary criticism to theological novels, colonial fiction and much else besides. With Indian readers he has been a favourite since long and a question generally asked is what has made him so popular in our country. To my mind, it is because his novels are socio-political with a distinct left bias and are laced with a deep religiosity that some have identified with Catholicism, but is basically a fundamental humanism and a sympathy for the underdog. For the Indian readers, the mix of politics and religion goes straight to the heart of any matter, and to strengthen it further, is the fact that almost all of Greene's novels have been set in the newly mergent countries of Asia, Africa and Central America that conform to the contours of our lives squalor, deprivation and corruption.

"Haiti" was not an exception in a same world; it was a small slice of everyday taken at random," Greene says in the Comedians, as he says similar things in the The Honorary Consul set in Argentina (where his gift for dark comedy is most apparent), or The Quiet American centred on Vietnam.

Greene became a Roman Catholic in 1926. Some of his works like The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, novels of powerful sentiments of a distinctly Catholic mind, which established him internationally, made him appear as a "Catholic novelist" – a term he rejected. Subsequent novels with Catholic characters did tend to explore religious doubts and loss of faith rather than to assert Catholic doctrine. There is a school of thought that feels that his conversion to Catholicism gave him a savage sense of the universality of the human condition, but he was prudent enough to leave the Gods' eye-view to God and to accept the partiality of a narrator with English connections. "His Englishmen were often weak or venal or incompetent. They were outwitted by loud Americans or unscrupulous Third World manipulators, but they were capable of engaging, albeit in fear and trembling, with the heart of darkness.

At times, this appetite for damnation amounted almost to a craving: the prospect of hell was flavoured with spiritual solaciousness. In the Heart of the Matter, scobic flirts with damnation like a demon-lover. He takes wretched pride in being more charitable, in some sense, than the God who dies for him. Always a connoisseur of the disgraceful, "Greene had a task for three-star sinness". But the church, which liked to have known authors in its flock, as it was good for its image among the intelligentsia, condemned these three books. The church wanted writers to toe the orthodox line on waffers of faith and morals. And Greene, "had never acquired that automatic deference to clerical authority or the acceptance of sexual repression that were characteristic of British "ghetto" Catholicism".

In fact, he preached the writer's duty to be "disloyal" to institutions. His quarrel with the church — and the church's quarrel with him — resulted from his insistence that all human action and appearance are devoid of worth. "The greatest saints," he maintained, "have been men with more than a normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity."

This was not the only controversy that Greene got involved with. In fact, rarely has life — especially a writer's — taken as many turns. It is difficult to recount all the debates he was engaged in, but "it has been the fight for the underdog against the bully or to try to understand the outsider in society." Greene once said: "A writer's task is more complicated than a journalist's; it is to engage sympathy for the character outside the usual range, such as the traitor. To do this sets one a slightly more difficult task. It also makes people see, something they have failed to see, that the apparent villain is in fact human, and deserves more compassion that the apparent hero."

To understand Greene, his life and works one has to go through his book Yours etc. – Letters to the Press — 1945 to 1989 which in many ways supplements his autobiographical writing. In all these letters what emerges is Greene's attempt to live in truth and report events as he saw them or provide the correctives where they are misreported to get the record straight. And it is this search for Truth, and that Truth has many faces, all equally valid depending on how one sees it, that has been Greene's basic concern. It is conveyed with a tremendous sense of humour and an underlying sense of mischief — and for this alone one needs to read these letters.

Which is Greene's greatest work — a modern classic?

It is a question hard to answer for it may perhaps lead to a long and tiresome debate. His prolific output (49 books), his diligent professionalism was no small part of what made him admirable. And, if the quality certified his standing: its volume is the measure of his dedication. As a critic said, "Greene engaged with the business of writing, in the diligent sense... His reputation owed nothing to career management and everything to the originality of his reading of the world, the flesh and the devil." While some feel that The Brighton Rock tops the list, I would say that in the fiction list The End of the Affair and The Captain and the Enemy, are certainly the best and the greatest, while in the non-fiction list it is Reflections, published in 1991.

Unlike most rites of passage in adolescence Greene's The End of the Affair changes you for ever and you keep coming back to it again and again to confirm its irreducible greatness and its relevance for our times. "We're all unbelievers within our own faiths."Greene often said "because the human mind swings from one extreme to another." And then he had gone on to ask whether "truth lies at one extreme of the pendulum at a point where it never tests or in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another?"

In some ways, this celestial speculation so characteristic of Greene's novels where all things merge into one another — "love, sex, authority, god, the paradoxical nature of truth, honesty, strength, goodness and evil" — is Greene's final dialogue with god on the twin questions of belief and faith and whether they mean anything in a world turned upside down. The setting of the novel is typically Greeneland, drab and dreary but instead of the seedy, fly-infested outposts of colonial torpor The End of the Affair is set in blitz-torn central London. It conjures an era of shared telephone lines, private detectives and bomb-scared homes. And like typical London weather, it is always raining. The story is related by Maurice Bendrix, a middling novelist whose affair with Sarah, the wife of a civil servant, had begun in the uncertain months leading to the war. Then, one day in June 1944, Sarah breaks off the affair without any warning, and Bendrix is plunged into the hellfires of jealousy, hatred and despair. Two years later a chance encounter with Henry, Sarah's decent husband re-awakens his terrible rancour; prompted by Henry's belated suspicions and his own conviction that Sarah has a new lover, he hires a private detective to trace her. It is a depressing opening but Greene warns us at the start that "this is a record of hate more than love," and Greene confessed in the foreword that, never having attempted in the first-person narrative before, he feared the whole book might be "smoked dry like a fish with his hatred."

Indeed, at times love and hate seem more like complementary symptoms of a pathological condition that can only find solace in another's torment. Getting slowly aware of his obsession Bendrix persuades himself that the affair cannot last, so he sets about destroying it. "I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted, I was happy — I think I was even good to live with and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love was a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck."

Greene presets this study in self-abasement with a haunting and quite remorseless relish. Determined to keep his own wounds open and festering — to an extend he is helpless because memory keeps coming back in fits and starts — Bendrix draws blood from everyone he comes across; a horrible exorcist is at work like "an emotion recollected in hostility." The End of the Affair can be read as a morbid tale of adultery and revenge but in Greene's hand it becomes a mystical drama of redemption rather like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Enfolding Sarah's private journal, Bendrix discovers the reason why she renounced the affair in a terrifying moment of self sacrifice:

"Did I ever love Maurice as much before I loved you? Or was it really You I loved all the time?... Was it me he loved, or you? For he hated in me the things you hate. He was on your side all the time without knowing it. You willed our separation, but he willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for with his lore. For he gave me so much love and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left when we'd finished but You. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like you taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. What I ask you for pain you give me peace. Give it to him too. Give him my peace — he needs it more."

Greene now changes the tone and direction of the novel and the story becomes a spiritual tug-of -war. Bendrix had misjudged Sarah's rejection and her diary finally communicates to him what she had finally despaired of ever making him understand: the enduring nature of love for him. It also recapitulates, though he resists seeing it what would seem to contradict the love: the utter end of their relationship. A third truth it reveals — that he is himself perversely responsible for the end of the affair — is the one he has fought against knowing and yet had propounded earlier in the text: "My love and fear acted like conscience. If we had believed in sin, our behaviour would hardly have differed." The most crucial lesson from both the diary and the novel is that the writer who would play God winds up playing God's rules and serving God's ends: "I am beginning to doubt whether anything I can do will ever after the course of events."

Yet, for all the spiritual speculation, the novel is never a spokesman for God. With Bendrix as its controlling voice, for most of the time it is a passionate record of unbelief. "We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves." In many ways, Bendrix's own explanation for his contrary behaviour resurrects similar moments in Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, and The Heart of the Matter.

Bendrix's deepest emotions, jealousy, and range, do not begin with Sarah's loss and of the affair. From the outset, both narrative and story contain, it seems Bendrix's antipathy toward the ultimate Rival, his bitter failure to create an equivalent 'transcendent' world in either his writing or his life, and his ultimate grudging acceptance of 'the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." And by hating God and his mysterious ways, Bendrix arrives, paradoxically, at a vexed kind of faith, broken as he is by Sarah's death and at a loss as to how he can go on.

The book's closing lines, infinitely weary, are for me, among the most moving Greene ever wrote, and perhaps express something of his own ambivalent surrender to belief: "I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there besides Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to suit the winner mood: O God! You've done enough. You've robbed me of enough. I'm too tired and old to learn, to love, leave me alone for ever."

I don't know how many of you readers will agree with me when I say that The End of the Affair is Greene's most intimate novel on God and His ways.

If The End of the Affair is a modern classic, then The Captain and the Enemy is certainly vintage. Greene all over again: the same fascination with danger, the dangerous edge of things, a Third World background, love for the underdog, the seedy evocative mist of life in the underground behind which loom the bigger philosophical questions of what is right and wrong, good and evil, in a world where everything is measured in terms of money, politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery and even religion. The priest has to buy his bread and wine and the criminal his gun.

Like all his great novels, this too is set in the region of the mind where the brittleness of certainty and the queerness of fate are examined "in the vise of faith and fallibility." In fact, the epigraph of the book: "will you be sure to know the good side from the bad, the captain from the enemy?" tells us what the book is all about.

Let's first see the base bones of the story which is told by a 12-year-old boy as he is growing up and reads like an adventure story. Victor Baxter (later renamed Jim) has been "won" in a game of backgammon by a mysterious captain, from his widowed father. Jim is rescued by the captain from his school and deposited in a basement in the seedier side of North London with a young woman named Liza. The captain who is a shady character, "a bit of a liar and a bit of a cheat" in and out of various places and never to be found where he is supposed to be, had led Jim to Liza to confer a surrogate motherhood on her simply because Jim's real father had once seduced her, forced an abortion after which she lost her capacity to have a baby which she really wanted.

So it was sweet vengeance on the one hand and Liza got companionship while the captain was out on his mysterious trips. Some kind of family life starts. The captain flits in and out and provides the money to keep the home fires burning though nobody knows where it is coming from. Here Greene's descriptions of the seedy working class districts and life are simply superb.

Meanwhile, Jim goes through one kind of schooling, grows up and becomes a journalist where the Captain's lessons from the school of life and experience come in handy. Jim lands his first big story which is totally fabricated because "what counted in a newspaper was not truth but reader-interest". But he sees through the facts of cheap journalism and after Liza dies forlorn in a London hospital he pushes off to find his father. The trail leads him to Panama, "a little capitalist state with a socialist general split into two by the Americans" and drugs and gun-running amidst the squalor and poverty where life is lived in the raw. Jim discovers that the captain had been gun-running for the Sandinistas, has a show-down where the questions of honesty and truth vis-a-vis deceit and duplicity in a world such as ours are thrashed out.

The Captain walks off in a huff, crashes his plane in one of his "runs". Jim dies in a car accident as he wanted to get to the bottom of his "father's" doings and the novel ends with a series of questions to which there are no answers provided. Was the captain deliberately misdirected by American agents? Did Jim die in an accident or was he bumped off because he was getting too close to the connection between drugs and gun-running? Why did the Captain and Jim get involved in a danger zone from where there was no escape?

It is the duality of things and the illusions of appearances that the novel is basically about. Is deceit something morally wrong, especially when deceit is indulged in deliberately to help down-and-outs with no expectation of rewards in a world where life is nasty, brutish and short? Was the Captain who never even told his name to anybody, guilty in making money somehow or the other just to keep out those who couldn't possibly do so in a ruthless world where money is the final determinant? Is understanding more important than justification? And where does religion come in and does it help in understanding: "Oh, love. They are always saying God helps us. If that's love, I'd rather have a bit of kindness.
(To be continued)