The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  In Vienna, he wanted assurance that Catherine had got him a flat for he was determined not to return to Gordon Square: ‘I hope all goes well about 5 St. James. It’s like a promise of peace & life.’45 In a letter written the next day, whilst describing in detail life in Vienna, he returned to the subject of the flat: ‘I would love to walk bang into the flat on arrival and find you and a bottle … I long to be back, but now I wish that I had cleared the decks completely [with Dorothy] before I left, so that there would be nothing to dread.’46

  Four days later he sent a telegram to Catherine: ‘Arriving Northolt 8 pm Thursday will go straight St James’s.’ He had made his second escape – the first from Vivien and now from loyal Dorothy. Without a promise from Catherine to leave her husband, Greene had succeeded in removing two obstacles to their love and at just the right moment. With the publication of The Heart of the Matter, Greene was suddenly the most famous and most pursued writer in England.

  * * *

  fn1 It is possible that Catherine was still in New York and had Greene’s letter returned to his wife or left instructions to return any mail to the sender. This certainly would have brought matters to a head.

  fn2 Greene is being unfair to himself here. His disease was genuine. He had been a depressive, with all that entailed, from the age of thirteen.

  20

  A Vulgar Success

  Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.

  – ALEXANDER POPE

  THE BEGINNING OF The Heart of the Matter contains the following disclaimer: ‘No character in this book is based on that of a living person … I want to make it absolutely clear that no inhabitant, past or present, of that colony appears in my book.’ However, as if to distance himself further from his characters, Greene also made an unusual statement (quoted by Waugh in his review): ‘These characters are not my creation but God’s. They have an eternal destiny. They are not merely playing a part for the reader’s amusement. They are souls whom Christ died to save.’

  This statement is not specious, yet it must be stated that Scobie is, to a great extent, Greene’s emotional and psychological double. Scobie’s problems – his love entanglements and serious religious commitment – reflect Greene’s own, and by treating his life as fiction, Greene was able to disguise his torment.

  Oddly enough, The Heart of the Matter may have had its origin in a dream Greene recalled twenty-two years prior to the publication of the novel. He was then in his twenty-first year and courting Vivien:

  Oh my dear I had such bad dreams … We were on a platform and you were going away, and you laughed in the most heartless manner at my misery, and I grew furious and you got cold and taunting and the train came in, and an awful looking bounder ‘considerably older than yourself,’ came along to the carriage door and started talking to you, and you were fearfully affectionate, and gave him your photo. And then I began really to hate you, and I pushed the man away, and took hold of you, by the shoulders and forced you to look at me. And you twisted yourself away, very white and contemptuous and said ‘I won’t have this. I’m sick of you.’ So I got hold of you again and I wasn’t furious, I simply hated you. And I said that I’d make you understand how miserable I’d been for 9 months because of you. And you struggled and I hit you … And then I thought of a revenge far better. And I said ‘I suppose you are going to marry that man?’ And you smiled and said ‘Yes, I certainly am.’ And I let go of you and said ‘Then I’m done with you and everything’ and rushed away to shoot myself. Not through love of you, but through hate. Because I felt you’d never get over the thought of having made a Catholic kill himself.1

  There is something about Greene’s mood: ‘I’ll undo / The world by dying,’2 which indicates that suicide was never far from his mind. Whenever Greene felt cornered and deeply melancholic about his grotesquely complicated life, suicide seemed the only way out. Harried by his sense of responsibility to both Vivien and Dorothy, Greene’s dilemma is faced by Scobie – how to fulfil his promise of love to both wife and mistress. After much personal conflict, Scobie accepts the possibility of his soul’s eternal damnation and decides to commit suicide. This is the denouement of the novel.

  Edward Sackville-West, a friend of Greene’s, reviewed The Heart of the Matter in the New Statesman. The review explains for the non-Catholic reader the terrible implications of suicide for a Catholic: ‘You may be maimed, bankrupt, deprived of friends, relations and all support, broken in health, persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, but there is one reprisal you must never take: suicide. To the non-Catholic it must seem that there are many worse – less pardonable – sins: relentless cruelty, for instance, and treachery, and meanness. To which the Church replies that whereas cruelty and treachery can be wiped out by repentance … the wretch who takes his own life has no time in which to repent of his sin. Suicide is unpardonable, quite as much because it is final, as because it is the goal of despair, than which no insult to God can be more profound.’3

  Inevitably, the novel caused uproar among its readers and critics. However, Greene’s letters reveal nothing of this or that he had an extraordinary bestseller on his hands: ‘The Catholic Press are beginning to come out. A long article by Evelyn [Waugh] in the Tablet followed by silly little theological note by a complacent Canon. Catholic Herald [a] long, good but cautious review. A nice Elizabeth Bowen which I enclose. The non Catholics are going to like the book better.’4 On the back of the envelope of a 21 June letter, Greene wrote: ‘Nice long piece by Eddie Sackville-West in New Statesman.’ Greene’s references to the reviews are modest, but the reviews themselves show that a furore was rapidly developing.

  It was the review by his friend Evelyn Waugh in the Tablet (5 June 1948) which initially helped the controversy along. Waugh began his review with a splendid accolade: ‘Of Mr Graham Greene alone among contemporary writers one can say without affectation that his breaking silence with a new serious novel is a literary “event”. It is eight years since the publication of The Power and the Glory. During that time he has remained inconspicuous and his reputation has grown huge.’

  But Waugh was at pains to stress that ‘thousands of heathens will read it with innocent excitement, quite unaware that they are intruding among the innermost mysteries of faith’. Waugh’s review was full of praise, and he made two points which were taken up by others and became the basis for many letters to the press. First, ‘the reader is haunted by the question: Is Scobie damned?’ Second, he spoke of Scobie’s ‘sacrilegious communions’ and of his suicide: ‘He dies believing himself damned but also in an obscure way … believing that he is offering his damnation as a loving sacrifice for others.’ Waugh felt it essential to state that ‘the idea of willing my own damnation for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a mad blasphemy’.

  In the same issue a letter appeared from Canon Joseph Cartmell. Cartmell responded both to the novel and Waugh’s review of it:

  Mr Evelyn Waugh’s comments on the theology of this book are, in my view, unimpeachable. Father Rank, to console the widow, expressed his opinion that Scobie really loved God. He could hardly mean it in the literal sense, unless he was assuming that Scobie’s sins were undeliberate, the involuntary acts of a warped mind – an assumption which is against the whole tenor of the book. Scobie is a deliberate sinner up to and including the taking of the poison. Whether he was damned is another question, to which we do not know the answer …

  Making his first bad communion, he prayed: ‘O God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them [Louise and Helen].’

  With a fierce sense of his own theological superiority, Cartmell went on: ‘I do not think that Mr Greene means to assign any real value to this offering. You cannot do evil that good may come of it. Such an offering could have no worth with God. It is, as Mr Waugh says, a mad blasphemy. Indeed, no positive good came of Scobie’s death … The only good was a negative one, the removal of himself as a source of sin to them. Scobie was in fact a very bad mor
al coward. He could have escaped from his entanglement by a comparatively simple resolution. He would not take it. His attempt to give an air of moral respectability to his sins and his suicide, as though they were helping others, was, objectively, pure sham.’

  Greene wrote privately to his friend Bishop Butler (who had written in support of Greene to the press): ‘I find Canon Cartmell’s rather textbook statement of when the love of God is possible and when it is not a little lacking in reality.’ And he ended a letter to Evelyn Waugh: ‘I thought the Canon rather complacent. Can’t one write books about moral cowards?’ The letter was undated, but must have been written about the middle of June 1948 as it is full of joy over Waugh’s review: ‘You’ve made me very conceited. Thank you very very much. There’s no other living writer whom I would rather receive praise (& criticism) from.’

  Waugh’s thoughtful praise for his friend’s book was tempered by the belief that:

  Many Catholics … will gravely misunderstand [the novel], particularly in the United States … where its selection as the Book of the Month will bring it to a much larger public than can profitably read it. There are loyal Catholics here and in America who think it the function of the Catholic writer to produce only advertising brochures setting out in attractive terms the advantages of Church membership. To them this profoundly reverent book will seem a scandal. For it not only portrays Catholics as unlikable human beings but shows them as tortured by their Faith. It will be the object of controversy and perhaps even of condemnation.5

  *

  Greene’s ‘profoundly reverent book’ scandalised many Catholics. The controversy raged in the letter columns of leading Catholic newspapers. One Captain Stanley Norfolk thought it incredible that any Catholic could approve of the novel or that it could have been written by a Catholic: ‘Faith, Hope and Charity – all are conspicuously absent, and the whole story is permeated with the stench of the latrine … no good whatever can result from publicising it, while the book’s potentiality for harm is immense … If ever there was a book that should be banned surely this is it.’6

  The editor of the Catholic Herald, whilst disagreeing with such a response, admitted that many of his readers supported Norfolk. Subtler minds than Captain Norfolk, such as a certain Ronald Brownrigg, also argued for its suppression:

  Great minds think differently on the subject of Mr Greene’s latest opus. This fact is, to my mind, a strong argument against its publication … I wonder if your correspondents can conceive, as I most certainly can, of mentalities that will be muddled by The Heart of the Matter into thinking that what Christ said was ‘If you love me, break my commandments’?7

  Bishop Brown, writing to the Universe, attacked The Heart of the Matter’s portrayal of adultery: ‘Adultery is adultery whatever attempts may be made to disguise it by not using the hard word.’ But his argument was similar to Brownrigg’s. ‘No doubt many could read it without it making much impression on them but there will be others on whom it will act as a bad book.’ Brown’s condemnation belongs to a world which died before the First World War: ‘There is also a painful want of reticence about things which modesty teaches should not be mentioned.’8

  Another writer, Denys Blakelock, suggested that he had taken to hiding from his Anglican friends books like Greene’s which portray sinful Catholics while upholding the truth of God and of the Church he founded. A person who signed her letter ‘Irishwoman’ had the perfect answer: ‘Mr Blakelock might as well hide the New Testament from his Anglican friends because it shows that the first Pope told three cowardly lies and disowned his Lord.’9

  Evelyn Waugh, Edward Sackville-West and Raymond Mortimer had attached much importance to the probability of Scobie being a saint. This idea was intolerable to some readers as a letter from William Goodger shows: ‘Scobie commits adultery, sacrilege, murder (indirectly), suicide in quick succession. In three of these cases he is well aware of what he is doing … he takes communion in mortal sin because he can’t bear to hurt his wife’s feelings. This isn’t the way a saint behaves … According to all the rules (accepted without argument by all Catholics, including Greene and Scobie himself) Scobie is bound for Hell as he has deliberately denied God.’10

  The Reverend John Murphy’s unfavourable review is disturbing, for by reducing the novel to simple terms his argument strikes home:

  [The] vortex [of plotting] sucks poor Scobie down at last … Scobie is a Catholic with a conscience of the highest sensitivity and insight whose weak will ultimately leads him to adultery, sacrilegious Holy Communions, responsibility for a murder [in the novel Scobie’s faithful servant Ali is murdered because Scobie no longer trusts him] … and for full measure, to a suicide … To be precise, he fears woman more than he fears God – two women, his wife and his mistress, and what he really fears is hurting them. He is afraid to tell his wife that he has a mistress, not knowing that she knows it; and he is afraid to tell his mistress that he must give her up … How can you account for the fact that a man commits suicide in order, among other things, to avoid making any more bad Communion? But the answer is obvious: Because he despaired where he should have repented.11

  The captivating simplicities expressed here were challenged by the brilliant Jesuit, C. C. Martindale. The question Martindale wished to raise was whether we could say that Scobie finally despaired: ‘No one doubts that Major Scobie committed many sins, suicide included: but did he “finally despair”? … The poison took long to act: during that time what was truly in his “heart,” the real man fought its way through the clouds of his tortured mind … and he avowed that he was sorry and that he loved.’ And then Martindale made a sensitive distinction. In speaking of Scobie, he was also, though perhaps not deliberately, speaking about Greene’s affair with Catherine Walston which he was privately aware of: ‘Its essence is that an honest but rather superficial Catholic [Scobie] finds that in proportion as he sins, his faith in Him against Whom he sins is intensified.’ This is the basic irony of Greene’s affair with Catherine Walston.

  In dealing with the question so many readers raised in their letters to the press – does Scobie go to Hell because of his suicide – Martindale wrote: ‘Only when he reaches the peak of wrongdoing does the vision of God’s holiness fully dawn.’ And finally, though speaking of Scobie, Martindale came to a conclusion about Greene which he hinted at in his private letter to Vivien: ‘Priests surely often meet the enigma of the co-existence of seeming contradictories in one man – of evident innermost righteousness with the apparent committing of mortal sins.’

  Martindale’s peroration is moving:

  I am glad that prudent priests and experienced laymen think as I do – that this is a magnificent book, both theologically accurate and by a layman who ‘knows as much as any man can know about human nature.’

  I know one, a hard-headed man to whom this book has given the last necessary stimulus to becoming a Catholic, and many who, like me, will continue to draw from re-reading it a deeper love of suffering distraught humanity and of God.12

  So Greene had the spirited support of various Jesuits and laymen, as a letter from M. M. Farr suggests: ‘I should like to put on record the fact that one great sinner was so moved by Mr Greene’s last book that he has completely changed his way of life and returned to the practice of the Faith.’13

  But Murphy and other like-minded Catholics were not alone: there was at least one famous writer whose review reflected his nature; a clear, unambiguous mind fitted to a clear, unambiguous style. To George Orwell, Scobie was incredible because the two halves of him did not fit together:

  If [Scobie] were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it … If he believed in Hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And … if he were the kind of man we are told he is – he would not be an officer in a colonial police force.14

  What
a simple, straightforward, absolutist mental world George Orwell lived in. Our betrayers are often not outside ourselves, but within. It was not Stalinist dictatorships which troubled Greene, it was the hounds of Heaven. Like Scobie, Greene felt he was the source of suffering in those he loved most.

  It was Canon Cartmell who responded, as we have seen, to Scobie’s communion when he prays: ‘O God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them’: by suggesting that Mr Greene did not mean to assign any real value to this offering. ‘You cannot do evil that good may come of it.’ Indeed, in his letter to Waugh, Greene denied this reading of Scobie’s actions: ‘I did not regard Scobie as a saint, & his offering his damnation up was intended to show how muddled a mind full of good will could become when once “off the rails”.’15

  But Greene may have had a curious notion about prayers, seeing them as a sort of brokering with God, and his answer to Evelyn Waugh smacks of special pleading. In The Heart of the Matter, Greene has Scobie, in a scene of great imaginative power (the first hundred pages of this novel are the most moving he ever wrote) visit a makeshift hospital that housed the survivors from a ship sunk by a German submarine, who had endured forty days in an open boat. At one point, Scobie is with a dying child, and again his prayers take the form of bargaining with God. Scobie’s first prayer is that nothing should happen until Mrs Bowles, a missionary’s wife acting as nurse, returns. He listens to the child’s heavy uneven breathing, as ‘if she were carrying a weight with great effort up a long hill’. He longed to be able to carry the weight for her:

  He thought: this is what parents feel year in and year out, and I am shrinking from a few minutes of it. They see their children dying slowly every hour they live. He prayed again, ‘Father, look after her. Give her peace.’ The breathing broke, choked, began again with terrible effort. Looking between his fingers he could see the six-year-old face convulsed like a navvy’s with labour. ‘Father,’ he prayed, ‘give her peace. Take away my peace for ever, but give her peace.’16