Graham Greene

An Approach to the Novels

Robert Hoskins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135583040
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This study reveals Greene in a dual role as author, one who projects literary experience into his view of life and subsequently projects both his experience and its "literary" interpretation into his fiction; and it defines two phases of Greenes novels through the changing relationship between writer and protagonists. The first phase progresses from acutely sensitive, self-divided young men somewhat like the young Greene to embittered, alienated characters ostensibly at great distance from their creator. The second phase (1939) includes a series of "portraits of the artist" through which Greene confronts more directly the tensions and conflicts of his private life.

GRAHAM GREENE

CHAPTER ONE

Protagonists of the First Phase

YOUTH

Stamboul Train (1932) and It’s a Battlefield (1934) do not have single protagonists, but certain of their central characters, together with all of the protagonists of the other novels from Greene’s first-published novel The Man Within (1929) through Brighton Rock (1938) have several qualities which taken collectively distinguish them from those of the later works.

First and most obviously, they are young men. Pinkie Brown, at seventeen, is the youngest, and Anthony Farrant, at thirtytwo, seems oldest and most experienced and the only one whose character is more or less fully formed. All of the others undergo experiences that change them or at least have the potential to do so in some significant way, and even Anthony is brought to a crisis in which a single moment of the clearsightedness that characterizes his sister Kate could radically alter the course of his future. Anthony maintains wistfully and, it turns out, prophetically that he does not have a future, and the same can be said about many of the young protagonists to be discussed in these pages: Andrews, Crane, Conrad, Raven, Pinkie. The sense of doom hangs so heavily over their youth that to imagine them maturing into old or even middle age is impossible for the reader, as it seems to have been for the author. In later works Greene’s characters will age as he does (though not as much), but the first-phase novels are centered around youthful protagonists.

DIVIDED SELVES

The youthful first-phase protagonists are further characterized by the self-division that afflicts them. Most sharply defined in these terms is Francis Andrews of The Man Within, whose story is a soul-struggle between the lustful, cowardly self shaped by his previous actions and the courageous man of integrity, the “man within” longing to emerge. Andrews’s selfdivision seems traceable in part to the parents whose qualities he has inherited—a harsh, brutal father and a quiet, gentle, affectionate mother whom the father mistreated—and it extends to his own perception of other characters. Carlyon, regarded by Andrews as both friend and enemy, is also a divided self, an apelike man with a romantic soul, a brute and a poet. The saintly Elizabeth, whom Andrews loves, and the sluttish Lucy, who seduces him away from his briefly-discovered virtue and courage, are perhaps less convincing as dramatic characters than as projections of Andrews’s immature understanding of human nature, although the text does not imply that Greene intended an irony of that sort. As variations of the familiar dichotomy of woman as madonna and whore, these characters participate in the duel of angels for Andrews’s soul. Andrews’s fatal cowardice may be usefully compared with that of another Francis and a contemporary in Greene’s fiction, the boy Francis Morton who dies of fright in “The End of the Party,” also published in 1929. Indeed, the kinship among the earliest protagonists is more conspicuous as a result of Greene’s use of similar names: the first names of Francis Andrews, Francis Morton, and Francis Chase (in Rumour at Nightfall); the last names Chant, Chase, Crane.

In Oliver Chant, hero of Greene’s next novel The Name of Action (1930), the condition of self-division is less critical than in Andrews, as befits a novel in which romantic adventure is more important than psychology. Nevertheless, it is present in his mixed motives for his journey to Trier: he wants to be involved in the overthrow of a repressive dictatorship, but he also seeks to escape from boredom and to pursue his infatuation with the dictator’s wife, Anne-Marie, whom he has seen in a photograph; eventually his desire for Anne-Marie will jeopardize the very cause he has vowed to support. The duel of angels carried on through the characters of Elizabeth and Lucy in The Man Within is located more plausibly in this novel in the mind of the protagonist, who at first imagines Anne-Marie Demassener as a paragon of virtue as surely as she is of womanly beauty. His later repulsion at the discovery of her lustfulness and her infidelity to her husband is symptomatic of his own immaturity and divided aims, since on some level of consciousness these must have been the very qualities he wanted to inspire in her. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris suggest plausibly in their study of Greene that Chant’s dual nature is represented in the novel by two sharply contrasted figures, the libertine revolutionary poet Kapper, and the puritanical dictator Demassener (67).

Closer in spirit to The Man Within than to The Name of Action and less successful than either, Rumour at Nightfall (1931) is an almost allegorical treatment of the theme of selfdivision. The dual protagonists Chase and Crane are clearly two halves of a single personality: Crane, like Andrews, is cowardly and uncertain, temperamentally romantic and spiritual; his friend Chase is brave, rational, skeptical, secular. Chase has the ability to endure and to change; Crane must die, perhaps tragically and no doubt, in terms of the symbolic relationship between these incomplete personalities, necessarily: he is figuratively the imprisoned “man within” Chase who must die in order to be released. The duality of these characters extends to Eulelia Monti, the object of first Crane’s and then Chase’s affection. Known first (like Anne-Marie) through a photograph, Eulelia is initially perceived as saintly and then suspected of sluttishness; in fact, she is a complex character who is deeply religious (Catholic) and in the main virtuous, although she once gave herself to the guerrilla leader Caveda in defiance of her mercenary mother, who had expected to profit from the marriage of the beautiful and virginal daughter. Like Francis Andrews, Eulelia traces the divided qualities of her own nature to her parents, but with the qualities reversed: a good, spiritual, intellectual father; an evil, sensual, greedy mother.

Stamboul Train, the novel that followed Rumour at Nightfall, is so different from it in character, setting, pace, and narrative skill that it seems the work of another author altogether. Whereas the action of the earlier work was so internalized as to become virtually unintelligible at times, that of Stamboul Train is vivid, fast-paced, and sharply defined. The book is probably the least psychological of the first-phase novels, but it contains nevertheless an echo of the divided self in the character of Carleton Myatt, whose impulse to kindness (he gives his sleeping compartment to Coral Musker, who is ill) is at odds with his willingness to accept sexual favors in return. Myatt is genuinely charitable to Coral, yet sees her selfishly as the means of satisfying the indiscriminate lust expressed through his dream of furtive sexual encounters with women on London’s Hampstead Heath. Further acquaintance with Coral only reveals his inability to reconcile spontaneous affection with calculated self-interest. His proposal to keep her as his mistress demonstrates the former, but his eventual decision to enter a marriage of expediency with Janet Pardoe shows that the latter will determine his actions. A sense of class and propriety prevents him from proposing marriage to Coral, yet his stated desire to make her a well-kept mistress has at least a foundation in real affection. Myatt is easily dissuaded from this ambition, however, and his calculating acceptance of a marriage with Janet Pardoe, arranged as part of a business deal that will further his financial interests, testifies to his willingness to value money over human feeling.

It’s a Battlefield, with its multiple centers of interest, is closer in technique to Stamboul Train but closer in spirit to the earlier works, and it carries forward Greene’s concern with selfdivision in individuals and with paired or contrasted characters who represent opposite poles of personality. The pitiable Conder, who carries on during the day an elaborate charade of life as the father of a large family, only to return to his solitary room at night, is an example of the former. Conder’s double selfhood extends to his dual role as journalist and Communist party member; his apparent commitment to the party’s agenda masks his more important interest in getting a story, and his sense of his true identity falters in the presence of so many selves: “His personalities flickered so quickly that he was himself confused, uncertain whether he was the revolutionary, the intimate of Scotland Yard, or, a new part this, the master spy” (49). Mr. Surrogate, the Communist intellectual who is unable to unite his professed principles with his lifestyle (he writes leftist tomes and makes bold speeches but lives the life of a wealthy man of leisure and is unable to sympathize with or understand authentic working-class people), is a further example of self-division. Similarly, the young and uncertain Jules Briton recalls both Andrews and Eulelia in tracing his opposed qualities to his parents (a puritanical English mother and a supposedly libertine French father) and resembles Myatt in his subordination of his love of a woman to his love of money: Jules wants, indeed plans, to marry Kay Rimmer but changes his mind upon realizing how quickly he is spending his small legacy from his father on her.

More interesting than these single characters in Battlefield are the pairs whose contrasting qualities strongly suggest the halves of a complete individual. Jim Drover and his brother Conrad are most prominent in this regard. Jim is simple, brave, untroubled, and happily married—until his arrest for the murder of a policeman destroys his life and home. Conrad is complex, troubled, insecure, jealous; his intelligence and his hypersensitivity (connected with his name, for which schoolmates mocked him) have left him lonely and unhappy. Jim’s wife, Milly, and her sister, Kay Rimmer, form a similarly contrasted pair: Kay, a factory worker, is independent, single, untroubled, reckless in her pursuit of sexual pleasure to offset the numbing round of her work; Milly is domestic, shy, cautious, sensitive, and although she has been faithful and happy in her marriage, she eventually gives herself to Conrad out of sadness and physical desire. Kay is happily amoral and able to enjoy sexual pleasure because she dissociates it from love; Milly cannot do so and cannot take pleasure in her brief affair with Conrad, nor can he—although he loves Milly—escape sufficiently from guilt to experience pleasure.

An impossible longing for union by two incomplete characters is at the heart of Greene’s next novel, England Made Me (1935). The central figures here, the twins Anthony and Kate Farrant, are doomed to failure and unhappiness by their incestuous love which only Kate is willing to acknowledge and accept. The failure is that of Anthony, a prodigal son who in his feckless, wandering life has been unable to achieve success or stability; in spite of his failure and his incurable dishonesty, however, he retains an antiquated idealism, a shadow of Victorian morality, that makes him far less able than Kate to compete in the modern world of the novel. Anthony’s dilemma is further expressed in the symbolic opposition of the two women with whom he is involved: the worldly Kate and the provincial “Loo” Davidge, who is hopelessly innocent in spite of her willful assumption of sophisticated attitudes toward sexuality. Kate is the stronger, surer twin: steady, hard-working, with greater confidence and self-understanding, much more honest than Tony because she does not rely on fakery (the tall stories, the Harrow tie) in personal relations, and much more willing to accept the modern world on its own terms. In this last regard she resembles Anne-Marie Demassener as seen by Oliver Chant —someone who belongs to the modern age.

James Raven, protagonist of the fast-paced entertainment A Gun for Sale (1936), is more memorable as the icy assassin to whom murder “didn’t mean much” than as a serious variation on Greene’s theme of self-division. For the most part he is drawn with very broad strokes that emphasize the connection between his impoverished, brutalized childhood and his life of crime. Yet Raven is also a preliminary sketch for one of Greene’s most psychologically complex characters—Pinkie of Brighton Rock—and Raven himself calls attention to his own dim awareness of the deep conflicts of his inner life. “I was reading once…something about psicko, psicko”—he tells Anne Crowder (124), and the reader senses that within his murderous heart there is, if not the “man within” of Greene’s earlier writing, certainly a “child within” whose memory gives depth and poignancy to Raven’s situation. For Raven’s character encompasses, as will Pinkie’s in Greene’s next novel, the division between the cold-blooded murderer and the suffering child; that is why the two books incorporate Greene’s earliest ironic allusions in the novels to Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and its recollection of the paradise from which the child emerges “trailing clouds of glory”; and it is why Raven’s death, arguably the bitterest and most painful in all of Greene’s writing, is described through an elaborate simile of childbirth:

Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation. (170)

The “child within” Raven is one who loves kittens, responds with pitiful eagerness to the prospect of friendship and affection, demonstrates intense loyalty to the one person (Anne Crowder) who has been kind to him, and dreams of a quasifilial relationship with the kindly old man he has murdered: “Shoot, dear child” the victim says to him in the dream. “We’ll go home together. Shoot” (123; italics added.) While it would be easy to exaggerate the extent to which this brisk narrative reveals the potential for goodness in him, it seems true nevertheless that Raven, who was an orphaned child, occupies a symbolic middle ground between the book’s two other prominent orphans, both of whom represent, as old men, the fulfillment of their opposed natures: the Liberal humanitarian Minister whom Raven assassinates and the wicked capitalist Sir Marcus who has plotted the event in order to further his company’s interests and satisfy his own greed. It is significant that the two were friends as children and that Sir Marcus, in turning toward evil, had symbolically betrayed his childhood friend long before plotting the literal betrayal. (A similar form of betrayal will be seen later in The Third Man in the remembered pasts of Rollo Martins and Harry Lime, who were close childhood friends. Harry has betrayed his friend’s ideal, but in this case it is the virtuous Rollo who kills his old companion.)

The form of division seen in Raven—inside him is not the “man within who is angry with me” but the wounded, suffering child whose anguish has made adult acceptance of the world impossible—is given its fullest expression in Pinkie Brown of Brighton Rock, Greene’s first Catholic protagonist and his first of many characters who are failed priests. As a former choir boy who once wanted to become a priest in order to protect himself from the horror of life (especially sexual life) he fears, Pinkie has rejected the divine, heavenly Father for a criminal, earthly one, the mobster Kite. At seventeen Pinkie is a child-man, a believer who trusts no one, not even God; more than any of Greene’s characters since Andrews and Crane, Pinkie longs for peace, but he is fatally determined to attain it on his own terms before accepting the peace of God.

What distinguishes Brighton Rock as the culmination of Greene’s treatment of divided selves in the first-phase novels is the way in which various rhetorical and structural elements in the work express, develop, and parallel the polarities within the protagonist. Those polarities are expressed rhetorically by the often-discussed oxymorons that both describe Pinkie and link him symbolically with the world-view that pervades the novel: his “young-old” face, the “annihilating eternity” of his grey eyes, his “scared lust” and the “fear” that “straightened in him like lust”—all give shape to his complex and troubled inner life. When a gull sweeps through the “iron nave of the Palace Pier… half-vulture and half-dove” (131) as Pinkie thinks of his marriage, the submerged metaphor (Pier as cathedral) subtly links Pinkie’s duality (child, priest-child, dove vs. murderer, vulture) with that of the larger world of Brighton Rock. Structurally and thematically a corresponding duality is expressed in the novel in two primary ways: by the crosscutting between the world of Pinkie (Catholic, figuratively subterranean, joyless, irrational, permeated by evil) and that of his nemesis Ida Arnold (pagan and superstitious, sunny, pleasurable or fun-loving, insistent upon rational concepts of right and wrong, justice and/or revenge); and by the almost schizophrenic ordering of images, symbols, and ideas into the sacred and the profane—the lost world that was informed by the religious sense, and the modern world of secular values. Greene establishes the pattern by setting the opening action of Hale’s murder on the religious holiday Whitmonday, the bank holiday after Whitsun, or Pentecost. From this occasion and its reminder of the way in which the modern “holiday” has betrayed the “holy day” from which it was derived, Greene develops a story in which his familiar conception of self-division within the protagonist extends into a view of the world at large, a world whose outlines may be signified in a brief listing of the stated and implied contrasts through which it is revealed:

Sacred

Secular

Holy Day (Whitsun)

Holiday (Bank Holiday)

Cathedral

Palace Pier

Pinkie as choir-boy, child, priest

Pinkie as gangster, murderer

Dove

Vulture

Holy Ghost

Ida’s “ghosts”

Rose

Ida

Oil of extreme unction

Pinkie’s bottle of vitriol

Good and evil

Right and wrong

Mercy

Revenge or justice

The old priest

The old lawyer Prewitt

The youthful Pinkie and his even younger bride Rose continue Greene’s use of “two children” figures (Francis and Peter Morton, the young Anthony and Kate Farrant) and of characters who in their closeness and unique correspondence seem halves of one incomplete self. Jack Biles has commented on this aspect of doubling in Brighton Rock:

Rose and Pinkie make up the principal double [in the novel]…. Despite their having thoroughgoing antitheses of character and outlook, Greene fuses Rose and Pinkie into a modern instance of “the Platonic, or epipsychean, longing for the unification of the severed halves of man.” Rose and Pinkie are man and wife; hence, both church and state see them as one flesh. Her name-color suggests to many people pink rather than red or white, as in rosé, a pinkish table wine; the inference seems warranted, for Rose and Pinkie then have identical given names as well as the surname Brown, a condition underscoring the oneflesh conception. They even look alike in their meagerness, boniness, and shabbiness. And in the pub where they go for a drink after the wedding, Pinkie sees Rose and himself as a “double image in the mirror” behind the bar. Like all symbolic twins (doubles), they “are both divine and mortal, black and white,” positive and negative, an inversion-symbol of the alternation of light and darkness, life and death, appearance and disappearance. (34–35)

Biles further points out, as numerous commentators have done before him, the importance of Pinkie’s discovery that Rose’s goodness is somehow essential to the fulfillment of his own evil nature.

Rose’s identical slum origins and her comparably miserable family life have not weakened her obedient faith or soured her essentially hopeful view of life; in that sense she creates a counterweight to the strong pull of naturalism in the conception of Pinkie’s character; moreover, as will be discussed later, she seems capable of bringing about change in him. Her potential for doing so, and the care with which that potential is linked through the novel’s imagery with the religious themes that appear full-blown here for the first time in Greene’s work, s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Graham Greene
• Selected Bibliography
• Permissions Acknowledgements