Books: Studies in Black and Grey

COLLECTED ESSAYS by Graham Greene. 463 pages. Viking. $7.95.

It is a measure of Graham Greene’s talent as a novelist that he has personified his theological preoccupations in provocative fictions and made them seem fascinating, various and relevant to a secular age. Just how consistent and dogged Greene’s grasp upon his own certitudes is may also be observed in this collection of character sketches and literary criticism—not always in ways calculated to enhance his reputation for balanced judgment. Greene writes about the great dead, among them James, Conrad and Hardy, and steadily mines their graves for texts on death, damnation and moral corruption. By compulsively and compassionately visiting his own moral preoccupations upon the life and art of others, he often more truly reveals himself than his subject.

In an essay on the great 19th century explorers, Greene writes: “The imagination has its own geography.” It also has its own chronology. For Greene, his real world was defined by childhood and early sorrow, and nothing much has happened since he was 14. “A child knows most of the game,” he says reflectively, “it is only an attitude to it that he lacks. He is quite well aware of cowardice, shame, deception, disappointment.”

In Greene’s view, conditions do not improve as man grows up. As the most famous of the trio of British literary converts (the others: Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark), Greene is a Catholic of Augustinian severity, more conscious of evil than of grace. “Human nature,” he asserts, here as in his novels, “is not black and white but black and grey.”

It is to Greene’s credit that as a critic, he is hardly a literary man at all —in the sense that he cares nothing for fashion. He is not a tastemaker or trend spotter; he writes on Walter de la Mare but is virtually silent on Joyce; he has nothing to say to the audience of Susan Sontag, which is most unlikely to admire Robert Louis Stevenson, a Greene favorite. For him the old standbys: James’ The Spoils of Poynton and Conrad’s Victory are “two of the great English novels of the last fifty years.” James is “as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.” It is not the brilliant surface and subtlety of James that attracts Greene, of course, but the underlying anguish, the “hidden books” behind “the façade of his public life.” In an essay that no one else could have written, Greene claims James as a literary brother because, as Greene sees it, James also believed in the victory of evil in this world. Greene, in fact, almost succeeds in a posthumous conversion of the Old Master to Rome.

With similar logic he puts down Somerset Maugham, not for slickness but for lacking a religious sense. Maugham, he writes, is an agnostic “forced to minimize—pain, vice, the importance of his fellowmen. He cannot believe in a God who punishes and he cannot therefore believe in the importance of a human action.” Like Greene himself, Maugham often explored the old British theme of the Imperial dropout, the white-man-going-to-hell-in-the-tropics. But Maugham’s doomed colonials could not go to hell—they could only go to the dogs.

Meaningful Deterioration. There is never any doubt about the geography of Greene’s imagination. It is in the tropics, inimical to man, where decisive and meaningful deterioration occurs or is resisted. Greene rather blames Ronald Knox, famous convert and translator of the Bible, for having spent a cloistered life rather than dying like his obscure Anglican grandfather in “the dirty upper room of a Goanese grog shop.” Fidel Castro, as jungle hero, he finds sympathetic: “This man, so Pauline in his labours and in his escapes from suffering and death.”

Anything offensive to complacent bourgeois morality and materialism has a claim on Greene’s highly singular sympathies—a strong contributing cause to Greene’s distaste for the U.S. character, which is liable to pop up petulantly on any occasion. America, after all, is a place where leprosy, torture, martyrdoms, squalor and fear are not thought to be the common lot of man, and Americans, in their base way, are content that this should be so.

Like many an ultrasophisticated man, Greene is at his most persuasive when evoking the provocative memories of youth, particularly in a famous essay, “The Lost Childhood,” which dwells on the numerous delights of childhood reading. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Captain Gilson’s The Pirate Aeroplane, Anthony (The Prisoner of Zenda] Hope’s Sophy of Kravonia and Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan were among Greene’s favorites. The shape of villainy, the sense of impending doom soon intrude. Captain Gilson’s book was dominated by a bad “Yankee pirate with an aeroplane like a box kite and bombs the size of tennis balls.” The Viper, he admits, gave him a permanent vision of “perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done.” It was Miss Bowen too, apparently, who seduced him into writing. “One could not read her,” he remembers, “without believing that to write was to live and to enjoy, and before one had discovered one’s mistake it was too late.”