Books: Shocker

(See Cover) THE END OF THE AFFAIR (240 pp.)—Graham Greene—Viking ($3).

It was one of those London cocktail parties where everybody showed up with a hangover. The host, a distinguished novelist named Graham Greene,* roamed restlessly about his book-cluttered flat, listening to the mock-tragic tales of woe. Not to be outdone, the host confessed that he too was feeling like hell: he had been up all night drinking with his priest.

It was the kind of shocker characteristic of Graham Greene—the kind of remark that induces a slight creeping of the flesh (although on this occasion it may be doubted whether the effect was either intended or achieved). Graham Greene deals in shockers.

Penny Dreadfuls, Plus. He writes about sin and God, about the presence of evil and the absence of good. And he writes about these supposedly abstract, Sunday subjects in shockingly immediate, shockingly weekday terms. His stories, as gripping as a good movie, are penny dreadfuls about moral problems—but they cannot be dismissed as penny dreadfuls.

The people who have made Graham Greene the popular success he is today are, by & large, people who like the movies —people who go for a “good thriller,” ordinary people, people who never embarrass themselves or one another by using the word “sin.” Greene himself uses the word sometimes, and the fact continually, but he manages to make it as homely and credible—and as interesting—as the neighbors’ behavior.

Like any Catholic theologian, Graham Greene thinks of sin as the normal climate of life on earth. But he translates the algebra of theology into the personal terms of stories as human as the tabloids tell—and much more convincing.

Once rated as a spinner of superior thrillers (The Ministry of Fear, This Gun for Hire), he is now seriously discussed as possibly “the finest writer of his generation.” No other writer in England enjoys Greene’s combination of popular and critical success. The Midas-movies have touched his work to gold (twelve pictures, at least three of them first-rate successes: The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, Confidential Agent). In 1948, The Heart of the Matter was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice in the U.S., and on the Continent Greene is England’s bestselling author.

In his best books—the books he has tried to make more than “entertainments” —he has written about sinners, who are last seen heading in various directions (to heaven, hell, or purgatory). It was in the cards that sooner or later he would try his hand at a story about a good person—a saint. In his latest novel, published this week in the U.S., Graham Greene shows his hand.

Better to Hate God? The End of the

Affair (the title is characteristically tricky) is—on the face of it—the story of an adulterous affair. The story succeeds in showing the fear and agony and hatred of a love affair. It fails when the author reports a miracle, and cannot prove it.

The love affair between Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix began ordinarily enough. He was a coldblooded, middling English novelist, she the warm-blooded wife of a dull, preoccupied, middling civil servant. Thanks to husband Henry’s preoccupations, the Miles marriage had come to a physical standstill. When Sarah met Bendrix at a London cocktail party, she thought him, by contrast to her husband, excitingly alive. The third time they met, they went to bed in a cheap hotel. Bendrix, who was writing a novel in which a civil servant figured, had merely intended to quiz Sarah for some facts about her husband’s habits. Before he knew it, he was in love with her—insofar as he was capable of love. For him the affair became a sexual obsession, a jealous appetite. For Sarah, a simple, faithless woman, it was honest love, marred by Bendrix’ jealous rages. Both of them tried to think of Henry Miles as merely a tiresome inconvenience who sometimes upset their lovers’ schedule.

The year was 1944. It was during a bombing raid on London that Sarah Miles first called on God. A near hit blasted the house of their assignation, and after the explosion Sarah found Bendrix’ body pinned under the blown-in door. She was sure he was dead (and perhaps he was). She went back to her room, fell on her knees and prayed that he might live. If God would answer her prayer, she promised, she would give him up forever. Before she had risen from her knees, Bendrix, only stunned, walked in. At the sight of him, Sarah realized the meaning of the hard bargain God had driven with her: “I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.”

Like the gentleman she fundamentally was, Sarah kept her promise, and with no explanations to anybody. Bendrix could only believe that she was tired of him, and had taken another lover. He began to hate her and torture himself with jealous fantasies. When her husband became suspicious of her odd behavior, and ironically turned to Bendrix for help, it was Bendrix who hired a detective to watch her. But Sarah was beyond the scope of detectives. Starting from her hysterical bargain with God, she had gone on through the loneliness of suffering, through the conviction that she was a “bitch and a fake,” to find that she not only believed in God but loved Him—even more than she loved her lover. “I believe there’s a God—I believe the whole bag of tricks; there’s nothing I don’t believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I’d believe just the same. I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.”

When she took a fever and died, it became plain to Bendrix from her diary (which he stole) that a rival had ousted him. All Bendrix would admit was that he had at last found who his rival was—and transferred his hatred from an unknown man to an unknown God.

There his creator, Graham Greene, leaves him. The end of that affair, he implies, can only be the beginning of another. And this affair will have no end. Better to hate God, much better, says Greene, than not to know Him at all. For you can hate God only when you are in pain—and if you can stand the pain without drugs, it may turn into love.

“Difficult to Swallow.” It would be a very hardened sinner who could read this love story without a pang of recognition, a momentary enlargement of the heart. But when, in the last 50 pages, the key changes from the familiar minor to an unfamiliar major—from the unmaking of a mistress to the making of a saint—even the warmest reader may feel his conviction cooling. For the machinery from which the rescuing God emerges is less the novelist’s than the churchman’s.

The End of the Affair, like all Graham Greene’s novels, is loaded with buried questions, like mines. And the terms of his story are so studiedly, elaborately mundane that at first the unwary reader is hardly aware of the muffled explosions of the answers. (One of his buried questions : Must a woman who becomes a saint necessarily think of herself as “a bitch and a fake?” Greene’s answer is yes.)

In this story, Greene apparently intended to show two things: 1) that saints are real human beings, who “happen” nowadays just as they always have and always will; 2) that no love affair, however sordid, can escape the terrible, endless implications of love. For some readers, he may have succeeded in demonstrating both; but for many his saint will seem as faraway and unreal as T. S. Eliot’s Celia in The Cocktail Party.

English reviewers of The End of the Affair have applauded Greene’s story telling (and one or two have called it his finest book), but most of them boggled over those last 50 pages. “Difficult to swallow,” said London’s Sunday Times. “Too openly schematic,” said the critic of The Listener. Said the critic of the New Statesman and Nation: “This, it might seem, is the last book by Graham Greene which a nonspecialist [in religion] will be able to review.”

Whether that jab is justified or not, this is a new departure for Graham-Greene —the first novel he has written in the first person. That fact signals a special effort, an attempt to go further than he has ever gone before. The first-person narrative is a tricky medium—especially when the person who tells the story is the somewhat seedy, not altogether admirable, Graham Greene type of “hero.” And, as if that difficulty were not enough, Greene has added a second narrator: the book is divided between Bendrix’ reminiscent story and Sarah’s diary. Only

Greene’s perfervid admirers will be completely satisfied with his handling of this double difficulty; but even his critics can admire his nerve and applaud his effort: for how else can you hope to hear the truth about human beings unless you overhear them talking to themselves?

The Unwritten Novel. There are the makings of half a dozen novels in Graham Greene’s own life story. The first of them, chronologically, would be the story of a boy’s growing up, a novel Greene has never written.

He was born (1904) in the town of Berkhamsted (accent on the Berk), about 26 miles northwest of London. Berkhamsted’s chief distinction, then as now, was the unstylish but solid boys’ public school which bears the’ name of the town. Graham’s father, Charles Henry Greene, had left Oxford in the 80s intending to be a lawyer. He came to Berkhamsted to teach for one term, and stayed at the school 38 years, the last 17 as headmaster. All six Greene children were born in Berkhamsted; Graham was the fourth. He hated the town, but not as much as he hated the school, with its harsh stone steps, its plain pine desks, the doorless cupboards with rows of dirty gym shoes, the ugly communal washbasins.

Berkhamsted’s prevailing idea, Greene remembers, was that “privacy could only be misused.” The boys slept in a large dormitory where hardly a quarter of an hour passed “without someone snoring or talking in his sleep.” The lavatories had no locks. Even solitary walks were forbidden. Yet there “one met for the first time characters, adult and adolescent, who bore about them the genuine quality of evil. There was Collifax, who practiced torments with dividers; Mr. Cranden with three grim chins, a dusty gown, a kind of demoniac sensuality; from these heights evil declined toward Parlow, whose desk was filled with minute photographs—advertisements of art photos. Hell lay about them in their infancy.”

A less sensitive boy would not have been so affected by Berkhamsted’s ugliness. But Greene was a sensitive boy: “One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell, but for a long time it was only hell one could picture with a certain intimacy.”

One way of escape was to be inconspicuous. Greene learned to drift off by himself, against the rules, to Berkhamsted’s beautiful common, a “wilderness of gorse, old trenches, abandoned butts.” (Once he ran away from home and hid out on the common; it was a deeply humiliating anticlimax when his big sister flushed him out after a few hours.) A boy could also escape by reading. Graham was 14 when he read Marjorie Bowen’s * The Viper of Milan, a melodramatic yarn about a war between the dukes of Milan and Verona, and “from that moment I began to write.”

Wrung Dry. “Imitation after imitation of Miss Bowen’s magnificent novel went into exercise books — stories of 16th Century Italy or 12th Century England marked with enormous brutality and a despairing romanticism. It was as if I had been supplied once and for all with a subject.” At 14, a story had made Graham feel what most children learn much later, if at all. “Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white, but black and grey . . . I read all that in The Viper of Milan, and I looked round and I saw that it was so.”

Before he found his future, at 14, Graham had made serious attempts at suicide. Once he drank some photograph developing fluid and a bottle of hay-fever lotion. Another time he tried eating a bunch of deadly nightshade. He can still remember “the curious sensation of swimming through wool” after swallowing 20 aspirins and jumping into the school swimming pool.

After he tried to run away from home, when he was 16, he was sent to London to be psychoanalyzed. He lived at his analyst’s house—”delightful months . . . perhaps the happiest of my life.” It is doubtful whether they were happy months for the analyst. Graham emerged from psychoanalysis “correctly oriented . . . but wrung dry.” He felt bored, and he stayed bored a long time.

Russian Roulette. At 17, he tried the most drastic cure for boredom he could think of: Russian roulette. He put a bullet in a revolver, spun the chambers, then put the muzzle to his head and pulled the trigger. “It was a gamble with six chances to one against an inquest.” He learned that he could enjoy the world again for a while by risking its total loss. But even toying with life became a bore. The fifth time he tried it, “I wasn’t even excited.” The sixth time was the last.

He went to Oxford, a tall, gangling taffy-hair of 17. He and Oxford seem to have struck up only a nodding acquaintance, and quickly forgot one another. Greene edited the literary Oxford Outlook, but otherwise slid immemorably through his three years there. He “took a second” (good, but not excellent) in modern history. One of the few people at Oxford who remember him at all is the porter at Balliol (“He lived on Staircase 20, he did”). But the porter is greatly surprised to hear that Greene has made a name for himself.

For six weeks at Oxford, as a prank, Greene was a dues-paying member of the Communist Party. When he found that party membership would not get him a free trip to Moscow, he dropped out. And at Oxford, when he was 20, he published his first book, his only book of poetry. Babbling April owed both its mood and title to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and it was pretty frail stuff.* The really big thing that happened to Greene at Oxford was meeting Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a dark, pretty girl with a flawless complexion, and a Roman Catholic.

After Oxford, Greene’s main idea was to get away from England. He took a job with a tobacco company because it promised three years in China. But he never got there. Next he tried tutoring a small boy, but that lasted only a few weeks: “I don’t particularly like small boys, and I had forgotten all my Latin.” So then he proposed to Vivien, and she accepted him. Then he got a job with the Nottingham Journal, without pay, “just for the experience.” But his prospective marriage confronted Greene with a deeper problem than the one of making a living. During the winter of 1926, he became a Roman Catholic.

Home to Innocence. Greene took his instruction from a priest named Father Trollope. For three months, he argued his uncertainties almost daily. “Riding on trams in winter past the Gothic hotel, the super-cinema, the sooty newspaper office where one worked at night, passing the single professional prostitute trying to keep the circulation going under the blue and powdered skin, one began slowly, painfully, reluctantly to populate heaven.” A few weeks after Greene completed his instruction, he and Vivien were married by Father Trollope.

He thought of his conversion as almost entirely an intellectual step (“Since I was going to marry a Catholic, I determined to learn about Catholicism”). He was later able to write about his baptism with sardonic detachment: “The cathedral was a dark place full of inferior statues. I was baptized one foggy afternoon about four o’clock. I couldn’t think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and formally done, while someone at a children’s service muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea.” Even so, he couldn’t help feeling that “I had taken up the thread of life from very far back, from so far back as innocence.”

“Pity Is the Worst.” The first novel about Graham Greene might end there. Then he turned into a writer. In 1926, full of his Nottingham knowledge of journalism, he got a job as subeditor in the letters department of the London Times. On the side, he wrote two bad novels, which publishers encouragingly rejected. In 1929, Heinemann accepted The Man Within. It was reviewed by St. John Ervine as a “remarkable first novel” by a writer who “obliges us to believe in his people, even when his people seem determined we shall not believe in them.”

On the strength of The Man Within (it was a flop in the U.S., where it sold only 2,575 copies), Greene convinced the chairman of Heinemann’s that a promising novelist should not be wasting his energies in the Times letters department, and got the publisher to subsidize him for three years. Greene’s next two novels (The Name of Action, Rumour at Nightfall) must have made his publishers think twice about their investment. Both were murkily intense, heavily plotted melodramas that Greene has since tried hard to forget. Orient Express (1932) made the publishers feel better. A tightly written suspense story, it made Greene a popular writer. Hollywood turned it into a movie.

Greene went on writing novels (It’s a Battlefield, England Made Me, This Gun for Hire), and getting more popular. But the critics didn’t take him seriously. He was too readable; whether he called them “entertainments” or not, his stories were read for sheer pleasure by people who ignored his terrifying glimpses of sin and despair. Even the chilling study of pure evil in Brighton Rock (1938) was written off by one English reviewer as “so much guff.” Nevertheless, Brighton Rock was a turning point for Greene. He had discovered that “a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone.”

It took The Power and the Glory (1940) to convince the critics that Greene had something to say—besides a compellingly cinematic way of saying it. It was—and is —his best book. Greene had taken a trip to Mexico in 1938 to investigate the government’s persecution of the Catholic Church. The hero of The Power and the Glory is a Catholic priest who is being hunted down by the police in a province where the church has been outlawed. He is a drunkard, a weak “whisky priest” who has fathered a child, and is terribly conscious of his guilt. But his love of God is stronger than his egotistic sense of sin. Starved, driven from village to village by a relentless police lieutenant, he goes on being a priest to his people until his final betrayal and capture.

The Power and the Glory brought the critics around. Even his old employer, the London Times, could not forbear to cheer: “There is no end to the subtleties of thought and feeling with which Mr. Greene has imbued his hero . . . The book . . . starts in the reader an irresistible emotion of love and pity.”

When The Heart of the Matter was published (1948), it was plain that Greene was turning from a novelist who was a Catholic into a Catholic novelist. Scobie, his Catholic hero, is a good man whose sins seem to flow quite inevitably from an unselfish sense of pity. But Greene was trying to show that pity could be “a terrible thing . . . Pity is the worst passion of all. We don’t outlive it like sex.” Pity led Scobie to commit the sin of pride, to put himself above God. Many a Catholic critic was puzzled by Greene’s sympathetic handling of Scobie’s suicide (Evelyn Waugh called it a “mad blasphemy”).*Greene himself was puzzled by the controversy. Said he: “I wrote a book about a man who goes to hell—Brighton Rock—another about a man who goes to heaven—The Power and the Glory. Now I’ve simply written one about a man who goes to purgatory. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

Spiritual Autobiographer? Like most writers, Greene would like to have it thought that there is nothing very interesting (except, perhaps, as raw material for a writer) in his own life. He simply writes, and between times travels—to get away. Last year he flew to Malaya to get a look at the life of English rubber planters in a peninsula overrun with Communist guerrillas—and while he was about it spent 2½ days in the jungle with Gurkha troops, tracking guerrillas. Late last month he went for a Mediterranean cruise on Sir Alexander Korda’s 150-ton yacht Elsewhere, with Sir Laurence Olivier, his wife Vivien Leigh, and Ballerina Margot Fonteyn for fellow passengers. Last week he was back in London—packing his bags for Indo-China.

Some of his friends insist that he has written his spiritual autobiography into his books. When they try to describe him, they usually fall back on such words as restless, troubled, intense, obsessed. But Greene is not the kind of man who makes a vivid first impression. Tall (6 ft. 3 in.), frail and lanky, he dresses like a careless Oxford undergraduate, walks with a combination roll and lope that emphasizes a slight hump between his shoulders. Physically, he is an easy man to forget (one old acquaintance remembers him simply as “badly made”), except for the face with its wrinkled skin that looks as if it had shaken loose from the flesh, and the startled, startlingly washed-out blue eyes, slightly bulging. He looks—and the phrase applies to any number of his characters—slightly seedy.

When he is in England, he lives alone in a London flat. His wife, with whom he is friendly but not on close terms, lives with their son (15) and daughter (17) in Oxford. His friends, who are few but intense, think he is the kindest and one of the cleverest of men. His acquaintances consider him reserved, with a somewhat faded charm, a subacid wit, and a ruthless curiosity about his fellow sinners.

Almost every morning he turns out 500 words on lined paper, writing in pencil—a slogging schedule that produces one of his beautifully turned books in about a year. Like most professionals, he doesn’t wait to be struck by inspiration; unlike most of them, he seldom worries about his critics, especially the unbelievers: “They’re so far from Christian thinking that they cannot enter into my world.”

. . . and Dostoevsky? How much fuss will posterity make about Graham Greene? Will it rate him as high as Hemingway or Faulkner? Will he outlast Evelyn Waugh? Will he be mentioned in the same breath as Dostoevsky? Only posterity can answer. But with these three contemporaries, at any rate, Greene can hold up his head. He is as accomplished a craftsman as they, and without the mannerisms with which the two Americans have begun to burlesque their own styles. He has neither the snigger nor the snobbery that are Waugh’s trademarks. But when Greene is compared with Dostoevsky, the great shocker of the 19th Century, all his books together would not match one Brothers Karamazov. That the comparison should even come to mind, however, suggests its inevitability. Graham Greene, like Dostoevsky, is primarily and passionately concerned with Good & Evil. There are not many competitors in that field.

*Not to be confused with other literary Greens: British Novelists Henry Green and F. L. Green. *No kin to Author Elizabeth Bowen, good friend and brilliant colleague of Graham Greene’s. Marjorie Bowen’s real name: Margaret Gabrielle Long. * The volume is now a rare collector’s item, and Graham Greene wishes it were even rarer. Sample: . . . Your eyes can bring me no such lovely joy As sudden sparks of beauty in a verse . . . And yet, your hair dusks with its strands the page, Until I’d leave the book to kiss your hair. Yet even now I’m sure that two years hence I’d curse the bitter bargain of a fool. And leave the shallowness of well-known eyes. *A Manhattan ship news reporter (so the story goes) put the heart of the matter to Waugh: “Mr. Waugh, where’s Scobie?” Said Waugh: “In hell, of course.”