A Burnt-Out Case

At the end of his new book on the novels of Graham Greene, the veteran British literary critic Bernard Bergonzi worries that his comments on the writer might be perceived as too negative. “An attempt at revaluation, such as I have undertaken, is liable in our excitable literary climate to be regarded as an ‘attack’ and welcomed or condemned accordingly. That is not what I intended; I hope people will go on reading Greene, but read him rather differently, and perhaps read him better.” But only an academic could possibly interpret A Study in Greene as an attack. The book is measured, civilized, sympathetic to its subject–as Bergonzi’s criticism usually is. It is not adulatory; some rather harsh statements are made; but Bergonzi bases his opinions on reasonable premises and makes no intemperate judgments.

What kept irking me was the sneaking suspicion that, in fact, Greene could do with an attack, or at any rate a more radical revaluation. Was he really the major writer he was considered to be during his lifetime? The very scale of the towering three-volume biography by Norman Sherry indicates his perceived stature, and at Greene’s centenary in 2004, Bergonzi points out, literary journalists by and large acclaimed him as “a great British novelist and a national asset, who had achieved a global reputation.”

Bergonzi himself disagrees, believing Greene to have been a good novelist rather than a great one. For a male novelist to be considered “great,” he says, he must be able to create convincing female characters, and here Greene fell short. This is undeniably true, but Greene’s failures go deeper than this. He certainly failed his own test, as articulated in “A Visit to Morin”: “A novel is made up of words and characters,” he wrote. “Are the words well chosen and do the characters live? All the rest belongs to literary gossip.”

Greene’s words were always well chosen–in fact, he had a real genius for setting a scene and creating an atmosphere. But his characters. . . . Bergonzi puts it well when he compares Greene’s work with that of the Jacobean dramatists, who presented “the embodied abstractions of virtues and vices rather than characters in the modern sense.” This technique has its strong points–points to which Bergonzi gives due appreciation–but it is limiting, sometimes fatally so. The characters are colorful, but they don’t live in the sense that Anna Karenina or Leopold Bloom lives, or even Scarlett O’Hara or Mr. Pooter or George Babbitt. Sometimes they embody virtues–the Whiskey Priest in The Power and the Glory, Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair–but more often they are vices of both the deadly and venial varieties: Pinkie in Brighton Rock (pure evil); Scobie in The Heart of the Matter (coruscating, arrogant pity); Alden Pyle in The Quiet American (destructive innocence); Thomas Fowler in the same novel (cynicism and accidie); Bendrix in The End of the Affair (hatred and bitterness).

Bergonzi compared Greene’s type of fiction with Dickens’s, “where the caricatures or the archetypal figures were more convincing than the attempts at realistic character-drawing.” There is some truth to this, but compared with Dickens, Greene’s novels are narrow and thin, and nowhere in their pages do we meet anyone as nuanced or developed as a Pip, for instance, or a David Copperfield. As for Greene’s women, Bergonzi is perfectly correct to divide them, by and large, into two categories: the plucky waif and the goodtime girl. I would add a couple of others: the infantile object, like Phuong in The Quiet American, and the unyielding wife, like Fowler’s faraway spouse in the same novel, or Louise in The Heart of the Matter.

Nancy Mitford once joked, “I do think Catholic writers have that advantage, the story is always there to hand, will he won’t he will he won’t he save his soul?” There is a lot of truth in that, and Greene, for one, milked the ready-made plot for all it was worth, time after time. In Brighton Rock, we can practically see the Luciferian Pinkie descend into hell and smell the brimstone; in The End of the Affair, the dead Sarah, we are asked to believe, has become a saint in heaven; The Heart of the Matter‘s Scobie walks a dangerous line, to the point that it became a bit of a parlor game for Catholic readers to debate whether or not Scobie was damned.

Greene himself claimed that, in a secular world, fictional characters were diminished as human beings. “With the death of [Henry] James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act.” This seems nonsensical–what about Joyce? Forster? Lawrence? Ford Madox Ford? William Golding? Bergonzi clearly takes issue with Greene on this subject, arguing persuasively that “there are philosophical rather than historical grounds for questioning the extent to which any religious belief, and not just Catholicism, can really be at home in the novel.” The implication of supernatural intervention, one would think, might actually diminish the importance, or at least the autonomy, of the human act. Who is guiding events: the story’s human participants, or God with his pre-ordained script?

Here Bergonzi quotes Orwell, whose thoughts are directly opposed to Greene’s on this subject. “The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is the product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual.”

Greene’s reputation as a Catholic novelist has always been a little shaky within the Catholic literary community. He clothed himself in the dogma of his faith as a dandy might clothe himself in some dramatic costume, often depicting the search for salvation as a grand melodrama in which the sinner plays quite a glamorous leading role; Hell has a sinister allure in his work, while Heaven is unknowable and therefore colorless. A devastating critique of The Heart of the Matter by Tom Burns, a Catholic publisher (later editor of The Tablet) and friend of Greene’s, says it all:

This is particularly interesting for non-Catholic readers who, I suspect, have tended to read and try to enjoy Greene while doing their best to ignore his religious agenda. Greene’s theological scruples and obsessions have often struck me as bogus and self-important; Burns’s contention that he seemed to “love the sin” is true, unfortunately.

Bergonzi’s primary aim is to challenge the standard valuation of Greene’s various novels. For decades now, the assumption has been that Greene’s later novels, because they are more serious and ponderous than the early ones, are therefore more valuable; Bergonzi disagrees, asserting that the novels and “entertainments” up to and including The End of the Affair (1951) are the most important, and that Brighton Rock (1938) was his best work.

It is a fair summation. As Greene aged, he became increasingly self-indulgent, reformulating the same old story–“will he won’t he will he won’t he save his soul?”–and even providing a more or less interchangeable hero (or antihero) for his novels, an individual Bergonzi dubs “the Greene man”: a disabused, cynical, often sexily jaded figure who has achieved wisdom but not grace. (The Quiet American‘s Fowler is a particularly egregious example of the type, so much so that by contrast, his ridiculous foil, Alden Pyle, comes to seem almost endearing.)

The later novels, Bergonzi correctly says, became little more than vehicles for the Greene man: They “contain enough mordant reflections about life and death to provide an intermittent air of profundity.” In Shirley Hazzard’s words, “Poignancy was largely subsumed into world-weariness, resurfacing in spasms of authenticity. In the later work, sheer human sympathy makes an obligatory guest appearance, like an aging celebrity briefly brought on stage.” Existential problems were left unresolved, because Greene seemed to find any attempt at resolution too much trouble; he himself had become as mentally slack as his doppelgänger, the Greene man, though he remained industrious and prolific to the end.

Early in his career, Greene, who had always entertained high literary ambitions, formed the habit of classifying his thrillers and spy novels as “entertainments” as opposed to “novels.” This was a porous, perhaps even a meaningless division, as Greene himself tacitly admitted when he discontinued its use later in life. What intelligent reader could really believe A Burnt-Out Case, for example, or The Honorary Consul, to be a better book than The Ministry of Fear or A Gun for Sale? My own opinion is that Greene’s “entertainments” were actually his best novels. I cannot agree with Bergonzi’s apotheosis of Brighton Rock, for despite its marvelous style and atmosphere, the moral situation and the characters, when stripped to their essence, are purely bathetic.

What, after all, were Greene’s strong points as a writer? His fluency; his masterful atmospherics; his ability to contrive a suspenseful plot; his flair for melodrama; his really superb eye for the telling detail. To read his early novels is to sink magically into the specificity of their time and place.

During the 1930s, as Bergonzi says, “the traditional face of England was marked by cinemas and roadhouses, petrol stations, new motor roads, and spreading suburbia. Greene was keenly interested in these innovations. He did not always like them but he did not recoil from them in horror as D.H. Lawrence or George Orwell did, and he incorporated them into his fiction.” Greene’s ability to set a scene has seldom been matched. Here, for instance, is a paragraph from The Confidential Agent. Who else could possibly have written it?

And what were Greene’s weaknesses? Melodrama again (which can be either a strength or a weakness, depending on the use to which it is put); vapid philosophizing; the inability already noted to create credible women characters or indeed any truly living characters; overt polemicism, both political and religious; an unfettered nostalgie de la boue.

All these qualities are harmful to the serious novel, but not to the thriller. A character like D. in The Confidential Agent is perfect within the pages of his genre novel; in the “serious” novels, D.’s fellow Greene men–Castle in The Human Factor, for example, or Querry in A Burnt-Out Case, or Charley Fortnum in The Honorary Consul–become mere Jonsonian “humors” rather than people.

In youth I had a great liking for Greene; his storytelling was first-rate, and the books were pretentious enough to make me assume, in my innocence, that I was reading something really deep and worthwhile. I accepted, too, the high esteem in which he was held by my elders and betters. Reading the novels again for the first time in many years, I find they seem rather a shameful pleasure. Of Greene’s great gifts there can be no doubt, but rather than expanding them, or expanding his mind, he cramped his own talent, relying more and more on the same creaky old poses and gimmicks. Nowadays it seems to me that Our Man in Havana, despite the inorganic Catholic themes which seem to be fastened willy-nilly onto the otherwise ingenious plot, might just be Greene’s best book. It is a first-rate comic thriller whose absurdities tell us many home truths about the international military-industrial complex, and it is full of good spirits, a quality Greene seldom displayed.

He was too snide and sour, for all his God-obsession, to love many of his characters. And such a lack of love keeps a novelist from being great just as surely as any technical inadequacy can do.

Brooke Allen is the author, most recently, of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.