The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  ‘Service’, [the driver] said, was the motto, & told of the little innocuous services done to individuals, reading to sick men in bed, the bringing of flowers, comparable to the Scout’s daily good deed … they are doing good, but it is good to the individual: they exaggerate the importance of the individual … they are as harmless and useless as their non-sectarian prayers; they have no enemies, in the same way as the devil has none.

  Perhaps Greene’s attitude comes out most strongly in Rose Macaulay’s account which appears in her Letters to a Friend: ‘Graham Greene is somewhat different! I was dining with him last Friday. An amusing little company … It was in a restaurant, and … I was upholding the Anglican point of view against Graham’s assertions that only R.C.s were capable of real sin because the rest of us were invincibly ignorant.’32 So Ida is invincibly ignorant. She has no religious sense – she is for life with a capital L: ‘Life was sunlight on brass bedposts, Ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post and the colours go bobbing up. Life was poor Fred’s mouth pressed down on hers in the taxi, vibrating with the engine along the parade.’33

  Neither has she any idea of the spiritual life, of heaven or hell. She believes ‘only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped and inept little voices speaking plaintively of flowers’. Nothing is more comic than Ida and Old Crabbe playing the board and seeking guidance as to how to act. ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors’, and Ida has gone down one of them, but she has retained a strong, pragmatic sense of Right and Wrong and so, because there is no one to see the murdered Hale off, she will go to the funeral and pay her last respects – ‘“Someone ought to be there.” “He won’t care who’s putting him in the ground,” her companion objects, but “You never know”, Ida said, remembering the ghost by the radio set. “It shows respect. Besides – I like a funeral.”’34

  There were ‘no unhygienic buryings’ in the suburb where Hale had lodged – only cremations, and for the scene at the crematorium Greene goes back to his experience of his mother-in-law’s cremation. There are the ‘Two brick towers … cloisters with little plaques along the walls like school war memorials, a bare cold secular chapel which could be adapted quietly and conveniently to any creed: no cemetery, wax flowers, impoverished jam-pots of wilting wild flowers.’35 This, of course, is not part of Brighton except in the sense that it is part of the religious dimension, or rather the unreligious dimension, of the fictional town, and leads the author into a critical assessment of the pretence at religion which smooths out the difficult facts of life and death with which true religion deals. The clergyman tells the congregation that ‘“our belief in heaven … is not qualified by our disbelief in the old medieval hell … We believe that this our brother is already at one with the One” … He stamped his words like little pats of butter’, and claimed, ‘“the certainty that our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit” … He touched a little buzzer, the New Art doors opened, the flames flapped and the coffin slid smoothly down into the fiery sea.’

  Such strong religious condemnation would seem out of place in a thriller if it were not that the religious connotations of the world of Brighton Rock are primary and that they stem from the author’s own strong convictions.

  As Ida leaves the crematorium, ‘from the twin towers … fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke … Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash … he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.’36 So here we have another ironic reversal: out of the ouija boards and table-tapping and the thinly disguised scientific and hygienic disposal of the human remains, comes Ida’s revenge, and her decision about what must be done to avenge Hale’s murder.

  It is only towards the end of the novel that Pinkie becomes aware of the potential threat of Ida: ‘The Boy looked across the tea-room and the empty tables to where the woman sat. How she hung on. Like a ferret he’d seen on the Downs, among the chalky holes, fastened to a hare’s throat.’ Years earlier, when he was researching for his first novel The Man Within, Greene wrote to Vivien about a ferret he had seen on the Downs with its teeth fastened into a hare’s throat.

  *

  Ida’s view of life and death is protected not only by spiritualism but also by sentimentality: ‘she cried in cinemas at David Copperfield … her homely heart was touched by the word “tragedy”, easy pathos touched her friendly and popular heart.’37 And she has a remorseless and dangerous optimism: ‘To lose your lover – “broken hearts,” she would say, “always mend”, to be maimed or blinded – “lucky,” she’d tell you, “to be alive at all.”’ She considered that Papists treated death with flippancy, ‘life wasn’t so important perhaps to them as what came after: but to her [in spite of spiritualism] death was the end of everything’, and so she took life with a deadly seriousness: ‘she was prepared to cause any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in.’38

  Opposed to her secular view is Pinkie’s Catholic heritage which includes a firm belief in Hell: ‘These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation … torments’, a concept which reflects Pinkie’s sadism. Heaven he does not concede fully: ‘“And Heaven too”, Rose said with anxiety … “Oh, maybe”, the Boy said, “maybe”.’39 And when his crooked lawyer says to him, quoting the dramatist Marlowe: ‘You know what Mephistopheles said to Faustus when he asked where Hell was? He said, “Why, this [world] is Hell, nor are we out of it,”’ he is obviously putting into words a further extension of Pinkie’s experience – ‘The Boy watched him with fascination and fear.’40 Pinkie shows not so much the sadness of corruption, but the vicious childishness of it and its persistence, in deliberately seeking out the worst actions for sadistic pleasure: ‘Life was good walking outside the white sun-drenched wall … towards the finest of all sensations, the infliction of pain.’41

  Today Greene would say – and has – that he does not believe in Hell, but he did believe in it, not after death, but as a condition of human life, and he believed, long before Hitler appeared, in the existence of evil. In an interview with Marie-Françoise Allain he asked, after rejecting the idea of eternal damnation, ‘How can one deny the existence of total evil?’ Pinkie’s vision of the human condition is one of evil, from birth to death, and beyond. There are and have to be, ‘Flames … damnation … torments’, or Pinkie could not enjoy his sadistic way of life or justify his existence. Rose, speaking as Ida would have spoken, says, ‘Life’s not so bad’, but the Boy’s answer is: ‘Don’t you believe it … I’ll tell you what it is. It’s gaol; it’s not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear ’em shrieking from the upper windows – children being born.’42 This probably derives from Greene’s experience on returning from Africa and hearing the wail of a child in a tenement, ‘too young to speak, too young to have learnt what the dark may conceal in the way of lust and murder, crying … because it still possessed the ancestral fear, the devil was dancing in its sleep.’43 But if so, it has become linked with a sociological explanation of Pinkie’s Satanism, the inversion of ‘I believe in one God’ to ‘Credo in unum Satanum’.

  When Pinkie returns to Nelson Place, near to where he was born, he sees children: ‘A child with a leg in an iron brace limped blindly into him; he pushed it off; someone said in a high treble, “Stick ’em up”. They took his mind back and he hated them for it; it was like the dreadful appeal of innocence, but there was not innocence; you had to go back a long way further before you got to innocence, innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats; perhaps not even that; innocence was the ugly cry of birth.’44

  Greene does explain Pinkie in sociological terms, eventually, returning to his own experience: ‘The impressions of childhood are ineffaceable’, and what is distinctive about Pinkie and Rose is that they appear to be so young, a fact commented upon by several characters. Indeed when the manageress of Snow’s
restaurant finds them together in the basement, where Rose had been tending the injuries Pinkie received in the fight at the race-course, she says, ‘Child … what are you doing here? and who’s the other child?’ ‘If you weren’t so young’, she tells Pinkie, ‘I’d call the police … You’re both too young for this sort of thing’ – implying sex, ironic given Pinkie’s hatred of it.

  Pinkie is in one sense a puritan – he doesn’t drink or bet (though he makes a living forcing bookies to pay for ‘protection’), but he has a delight in the infliction of pain and also an aversion to sex, a desire to retain his virginity that goes beyond the normal and stems from the conditions of his childhood home and the ‘frightening weekly exercise of his parents which he watched from his single bed’: ‘the stealthy movements of his parents in the other bed. It was Saturday night. His father panted like a man at the end of a race and his mother made a horrifying sound of pleasurable pain. He was filled with hatred, disgust, loneliness: he was completely abandoned: he had no share in their thoughts – for the space of a few minutes he was dead, he was like a soul in purgatory watching the shameless act of a beloved person.’45

  Greene had on several occasions watched the sexual activities of others. Moreover, his glimpse of the governess, Gwen Howell, on the beach showing a length of naked thigh becomes part of Pinkie’s experience – with a certain difference: ‘he saw the skin of [Rose’s] thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness.’46 The idea of marriage fills Pinkie with nausea: ‘He didn’t want that relationship with anyone: the double bed, the intimacy, it sickened him like the idea of age. He crouched in the corner … vibrating up and down in bitter virginity. To marry – it was like ordure on the hands.’

  Pinkie’s horror at the thought that Rose might be pregnant might derive from a totally different angle, from Greene’s own anxiety at his wife’s second pregnancy and the difficulties he felt he had in providing for a family: ‘He had never thought of that. He watched her with terror as if he were watching the ugly birth itself, the rivet of another life already pinning him down.’ We know how distressed Greene was over Vivien’s suffering at the birth of their first child.

  It is perhaps impossible to know what made Greene turn his gangster into a young sadist but we can speculate. When Greene was planning the novel he reviewed in the Spectator of 1 May 1936 a film innocuously entitled These Three, which probably opened old wounds he had received at school from his enemy Carter: ‘These three [adults] represent innocence in an evil world – the world of childhood, the world of moral chaos, lies, brutality, complete inhumanity. Never before has childhood been represented so convincingly on the screen, with an authenticity guaranteed by one’s own memories. The more than human evil of the lying sadistic child is suggested with quite shocking mastery … it has enough truth and intensity to stand for the whole of the dark side of childhood.’ Pinkie indeed stands for ‘the more than human evil’.

  There is much that is odd about this novel. It may start out as simple feuding between rival gangs but that is not how it ends. Instead of continuing the gang war Pinkie turns against his own, killing Spicer, excluding Cubitt, and cleverly devising a suicide pact with Rose, with the proviso that she shoots herself first. John Lehmann may be right to say that Greene knew very little about the mentality of gangsters, but he knew about Pinkie, because his source, in part, lies in Carter and in himself The aspect of Pinkie which reflects Carter’s character most nearly is his ability to toy with his enemies, pretend a friendship, hint a danger, humour his victim:

  ‘We’ll be going, Fred,’ the Boy said.

  Hale rose. His hands were shaking. This was real now … The ground moved under his feet, and only the thought of where they might take him … saved him from fainting. But even then common pride, the instinct not to make a scene, remained over-poweringly strong; embarrassment had more force than terror, it prevented him crying his fear aloud, it even urged him to go quietly.

  Perhaps the ground moved under Graham Greene when, as a boy, Carter approached him. Or witness Pinkie’s playing with poor Spicer:

  ‘You’ll have to disappear, Spicer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ … ‘Disappear? … You wouldn’t do anything’ …

  ‘Why,’ the Boy said, ‘what do you think I mean? I mean take a holiday’ … ‘And where will you go, Spicer?’ … His mind was quite made up, and for the second time in a few weeks he looked at a dying man. He couldn’t help feeling inquisitive.

  These are reflections of Greene’s own experiences thrown over the life of his characters, giving them credibility. It does seem that the interest in and motivation of sex in the novel stems from Greene’s own strong sexuality, as Otto Preminger has observed in his autobiography: ‘Though he gives a first impression of being controlled, correct, and British, he is actually mad about women. Sex is on his mind all the time.’47

  *

  The influence of the rites of the Roman Catholic Church and Greene’s fascination with the chastity of priesthood are also sources of Pinkie’s disgust with sex, and of his sadism and Satanism. ‘Why, I was in a choir once’, he confides to Rose, and ‘suddenly he began to sing softly in his spoilt boy’s voice: “Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.” In his voice a whole lost world moved – the lighted corner below the organ, the smell of incense and laundered surplices, and the music.’48 And he tells Dallow that when he was a kid he swore he would be a priest:

  ‘A priest? You a priest? That’s good,’ Dallow said. He laughed without conviction, uneasily shifted his foot so that it trod in a dog’s ordure.

  ‘What’s wrong with being a priest?’ the Boy asked. ‘They know what’s what. They keep away’ – his whole mouth and jaw loosened: he might have been going to weep: he beat out wildly with his hands towards the window … Married Passion, the horror – ‘from this.’49

  In plotting Pinkie’s descent into corruption Greene was assisted by his study of a failed priest, for a source for the overall conception was the life of Frederick Rolfe, self-styled Baron Corvo, who fascinated Greene. He reviewed Rolfe’s work twice in 1934 and once in 1935, and also A. J. A. Symons’s biography of Rolfe, The Quest for Corvo. Rolfe was ‘born for the Church’; he wanted to be a priest but was expelled from Scots College in Rome, from which tragedy he never recovered, for Rolfe’s vice was ‘spiritual more than it was carnal’. Like Pinkie, Rolfe loathed female flesh and took an oath to remain twenty years unmarried.

  The uniqueness of Rolfe to Greene was that he was an example of someone living life on a different, even heroic level – a return to the days of Dante or Milton: ‘Temptation, one feels, is seldom today so heroically resisted or so devastatingly succumbed to.’ Both Pinkie and Rolfe actively seek their own damnation. Through Rolfe, Greene was able to perceive that during the period of the Edwardians, ‘the age of bicycles and German bands and gold chamber ware, of Norfolk jackets and deerstalker caps’, there could be a battle for the soul, ‘of eternal issues, of the struggle between good and evil, between vice that really demands to be called satanic and virtue of a kind which can only be called heavenly.’ Compared to Rolfe, those ordinary men he had to deal with – Monsignor Benson, Mr Pirie-Gordon, the partners of the publishers Chatto and Windus – ‘beckon and speak like figures on the other side of a distorting glass pane. They have quite a different reality, a much thinner reality, they are not concerned with eternal damnation.’50 Out of this struggle Pinkie and Rose were born: ‘“You don’t want to listen too much to priests,” [Pinkie said]. “They don’t know the world like I do. Ideas change, the world moves on …” His words stumbled before her carved devotion. That face said as clearly as words that ideas never changed, the world never moved: it lay there always, the ravaged and disputed territory between the two eternities. They faced each other as it were from opposing territories.’51

  It is stressed often enough in the novel that the battle in which Pinkie and Rose are involved is not betwe
en the Right and Wrong of human justice, but the spiritual one between Good and Evil. Greene concluded his third review of Rolfe with a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘Most people are only a very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility: it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of real Good, but that at the same time they become first capable of Evil.’52

  Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire, a Satanist, suggests a further significant source for Greene’s vision in Brighton Rock: ‘Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil … which are not natural … Right and Wrong.’53 Baudelaire’s view of sex is Pinkie’s: ‘la volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal.’ (The sole and supreme pleasure in love lies in the absolute knowledge of doing evil.)54 For Pinkie, marrying Rose is simply another act of evil: ‘He had a sense now that the murders of Hale and Spicer were trivial acts, a boy’s game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led up to this – this corruption. He was filled with awe at his own powers.’55 He knows that what he had started had not ended: ‘It wasn’t only Spicer. He had started something on Whit Monday which had no end. Death wasn’t an end; the censer swung and the priest raised the Host.’56

  When Rose begins to suspect she might be pregnant – ‘“You don’t want a murderer’s baby”’, Ida says – she has a ‘sense of glory. A child … and that child would have a child … it was like raising an army of friends for Pinkie’.57 But Pinkie even then is plotting her death because she might, innocently, give him away to the police, though whether ‘she were straight and loved him’ didn’t matter – he is determined to kill again. And he decides on the means – ‘suppose she killed herself? And an insane pride throbbed in his breast; he felt inspired: it was like a love of life returning to the blank heart.’58 He persuades her to agree to a suicide pact (which he will not in fact take part in) because Ida will one day get the evidence against him and that would separate them, forever.