The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

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  The priest is being hunted not only by the police lieutenant but also by God. On two occasions he deliberately seeks martyrdom. He is to find it, not by his own will but through betrayal by a Judas for the reward. He first encounters his Judas in the town of La Candelaria: ‘a man lay in [a hammock] bunched diagonally, with one leg trailing to keep the hammock moving up and down … He had only two teeth left – canines which stuck yellowly out at either end of his mouth like the teeth you find enclosed in clay which have belonged to long-extinct animals.’43 This reflects Greene’s arrival in Salto de Agua where he passed ‘tin-roofed shacks where men lay in hammocks, drearily swinging in the great heat’. The Judas figure has his source in the mestizo clerk he encountered in Yajalon and whom he hated on sight, a clerk he ‘grew to loathe, a mestizo with curly sideburns and two yellow fangs at either end of his mouth. He had an awful hilarity and a neighing laugh which showed the empty gums.’44 He wore a white tennis shirt open at the front and he scratched himself underneath it. ‘After a week of his company I would find it impossible to abandon him forever, and so he became the Judas of my story.’45 The ‘inane laugh’ (Ways of Escape) or ‘neighing laugh’ (The Lawless Roads) becomes our recognition sign of the Judas and he is to take on some of the characteristics of Greene’s guides through Mexico. Greene’s experience of not being able to go about Yajalon without seeing ‘the mestizo looking up from his typewriter and showing his fangs as I went by’,46 becomes the priest’s inability to shake off his Judas, who immediately recognises him as a priest and follows him. When they stop to spend the night in a hut, the mestizo goes out to look after the mule and to hide the saddle in case the priest escapes him in the night and he loses much more than thirty pieces of silver.

  He tries his best to trap the priest into a confession of his calling, but the priest resists: ‘He was determined not to sleep – the man had some plan … his conscience ceased to accuse him of uncharity. He knew. He was in the presence of Judas.’47 He recalls how in Holy Week ‘a stuffed Judas was hanged from the belfry and boys made a clatter with tins and rattles as he swung out over the door’48 – a reflection of Greene’s experience at Las Casas during Holy Week when ‘the Guadalupe Christ was led in chains by two tiny soldiers … and up on the roof between the bell towers under the white dome they were hanging Judas on the cross – a hideous figure in a straw sombrero … while youths on the roof beat a tin tray and rattled wooden clappers, to tell the town that Judas … was properly hanged.’49

  The Power and the Glory is a remarkable and convincing amalgam of Greene’s researches, his experiences and his convictions, interpreted by his skill and imagination as a creative writer. One might add that without his success in writing a thriller with a strongly religious theme, Brighton Rock, this novel might not have been so successful, for on the level of plot he again uses the chase of the hunted by the hunter, but he extends it by another dimension – the hunted who wants to be caught, but cannot give himself up. The priest is hunted not only physically but also by his own conscience and by God – he has to suffer, he has to be betrayed. There is a reward on his head and he tries to persuade the villagers where his ‘wife’ lives to take it: ‘Why don’t they catch me?’ he asks, ‘I did my best … It’s your job – to give me up. What do you expect me to do? It’s my job not to be caught.’50 But the villagers advise him to go over the mountains to Las Casas where Mass can be celebrated again, not on an altar made of packing cases, but ‘a proper altar and the priest all dressed up like in the old days. You’d be happy there, father.’51 And the mother of his child saves him from the police by making sure he looks and smells like a peasant. He attempts again to bring martyrdom upon himself through the agency of others when he is in jail and confesses to the other prisoners that he is a priest: ‘The ten years’ hunt was over at last … “They are offering a reward for me. Five hundred, six hundred pesos, I’m not sure,”’ he tempts them, but ‘“nobody here,” a voice said, “wants their blood money.”’ Perhaps this is an illustration of Greene’s comment: ‘I had also observed for myself how courage and the sense of responsibility had revived with persecution.’52

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  The priest’s final meeting with the mestizo comes when he is preparing to leave the finca for Las Casas: ‘Two men waited beside the mules; the guide was adjusting a stirrup, and beside him, scratching under the arm-pit, awaiting his coming with a doubtful and defensive smile, stood the half-caste. He was like the small pain that reminds a man of his sickness.’53 He rejects the mestizo’s plea to go with him to give absolution to a dying American bandit (the one who had shot the Indian baby) for the priest knows it is a trick to betray him – only the mestizo can identify him as the hunted priest. But then the mestizo shows him a piece of paper with, ‘For Christ’s sake, father’, written on it and, knowing the man has much on his conscience, he goes willingly into the trap, and is quite cheerful: ‘he had never really believed in this peace … never really believed he would ever get back to parish work and the daily Mass and the careful appearance’s of piety.’ Seeing the schoolmaster who had railed at him, he gives him all the money he has made out of the baptisms. He begins to whistle a tune he had heard somewhere: ‘I found a rose in my field’ – a song which Greene had heard the schoolteacher in Yajalon singing as he played his guitar: ‘Have I a Rose in My Field?’54

  For the scene of the priest’s capture, Greene transferred a setting well within Chiapas and near the Indian graveyard where a priest would have been safe, to a point in Tabasco near the border with Chiapas – a setting he knew personally. ‘There are no more villages before Cancuc,’ he wrote in The Lawless Roads, ‘only occasional Indian settlements, perched on rocky plateaux … one with a little wattle watch-tower from which an Indian stared down at us as we climbed wearily upwards.’55 In the novel, the mestizo and the priest make their way to just such an Indian settlement. Its apparent emptiness makes the priest suspicious: ‘Even the look-out, the little platform of twigs built on a mound above the huts, was empty.’56 The mestizo responds typically to his questions: ‘There you go again … Suspicion. Always suspicion. How should I know where the Indians are? I told you [the American gangster] was quite alone, didn’t I?’

  The dying man is there and the priest tries to hear his confession, but the gangster only wants the priest to take his gun and escape. As he dies, the priest gives him conditional absolution and prays for him: ‘O merciful God, after all he was thinking of me, it was for my sake …’ The police are waiting and, his work done, his reward obtained, the Judas disappears from the novel.

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  Of the mestizo I heard from many people. His name was Don Porfirio Masariegos, but he was known everywhere as Don Pelito, born on 5 February 1902. He was educated at the Catholic school in Yajalon, was organist at the church and sang the Mass, which was how he earned his living. Don Pelito’s handwriting was beautiful, he was popular, always singing songs in a particularly attractive voice, was very political, articulate and knew what was going on; but then he began to show signs of mental instability, which, it was rumoured, was due to a love affair that went wrong. The first sign was when he began a massive letter-writing campaign to artists when he was twenty-five, but he was trusted in the town and was found to be absolutely reliable in delivering a message even if it involved him in a plane ride. He ran errands for the two Rasmussen daughters and some said he fell in love with Astrid; others said it was possible that he came away with the wrong idea about some relationship with the family.

  When Greene was in Yajalon in 1938, Don Pelito was working in the Presidencia as a clerk-typist (as Greene has it in The Lawless Roads) but that lasted only six months as he did not know how to type. After that he began to deteriorate and took to getting up at five in the morning, knocking on doors to collect garbage. He began to eat filth and stopped washing.

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  In 1978 Father Loren, priest at Yajalon, and I met Don Pelito. We were walking towards the Plaza and the chu
rch. Dogs slept in the shade of lime trees; in the bell tower small boys leapt up on to the bell ropes; in the church peasants sat on marble seats, white shirts hanging over white trousers, sombreros in hand.

  Don Pelito was sitting on a wooden bench. He was only 4 ft 6 in. tall. His hair was dirty; everything about him was dirty; there was soft grit on his hand. (I realised afterwards that it was excrement.) His trouser legs were rolled up. His pockets were capacious and his black coat stretched down to his knees. He had a thin black moustache. As I approached he stood up, took off his hat and bowed – no doubt recognising me as a gringo with pesos to spare. I knew he was seventy-six and although his face was deeply lined he looked surprisingly young – perhaps his layer of grime protected him. Only his turkey neck gave his age away. His ears stood out and he was toothless – no yellow fangs at each end of his mouth.

  He answered questions in a slow, mumbling, yet rather delicate voice, but nothing made sense, though about simple matters he could be lucid. When asked if he was well he replied that he was, but troubled because his feet were being bitten by rats.

  The last view of the mestizo in the novel is when the priest, now captured, with police in front of and behind him, looks back as his horse is poised for the steep descent between the rocks:

  The half-caste stood alone among the huts, his mouth a little open, showing the two long fangs. He might have been snapped in the act of shouting some complaint or some claim – that he was a good Catholic perhaps; one hand scratched under the arm-pit. The priest waved his hand; he bore no grudge because he expected nothing else of anything human and he had one cause at least for satisfaction – that yellow and unreliable face would be absent “at the death.”57

  Everyone at the mission in Yajalon had read The Power and the Glory in translation without recognising the original of the Judas figure walking in their streets, but then how could they have connected this little, innocuous, put-down and isolated man with the mestizo Graham Greene had disliked yet elevated into a prime mover in his novel?

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  The lieutenant and the priest, in spite of their total authority, come strangely together when they reach the prison. Atheist though he is, the lieutenant himself seeks out the married, cowardly priest, Padre Jose, to ask him to hear the whisky priest’s confession, but Jose cannot withstand his wife’s authority: ‘“Perhaps, my dear,” Jose said, “it’s my duty …” “You aren’t a priest anymore,” the woman said, “you’re my husband.” She used a coarse word. “That’s your duty now.’” The lieutenant breaks a second of his country’s laws when he leaves the priest a bottle of brandy, and the priest says: ‘“You’ve seen people shot. People like me.” “Yes.” “Does the pain go on – a long time?” “No, no. A second,” he said roughly and closed the [cell] door.’

  The priest spends a night of misery and drunkenness alone in the cell, condemning himself because the love he had for his sullen, knowledgeable, illegitimate child should have been felt for ‘every soul in the world’ – the lieutenant, the half-caste, the dentist he once met, the child at the banana station – they were in as much danger as his child, but always his prayers come back to her: ‘Another failure’. He complains about his coming execution: ‘“It’s all very well … for saints … How does he know it only lasts a second? How long’s a second?”; then he began to cry, beating his head gently against the wall.’58 The thought that he might yet escape death calms him and he falls asleep. He dreams of the child at the banana station. The child and the congregation are tapping along the aisles the morse code – three long and one short. He asks what it is and the child responds with her responsible gaze, ‘News’, and he awakens at dawn with a huge feeling of hope – suddenly lost as he wakes to the sight of the prison yard. It is the morning of his death and he is crouching on the floor with an empty brandy-flask. He struggles with the Act of Contrition and he realises that it will not be the good death for which he had always prayed. He catches sight of his own shadow on the cell wall: ‘it had a look of surprise and grotesque unimportance.’ He realises his uselessness: ‘I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived.’ His parents were dead – soon he would not even be a memory – perhaps after all he was not really Hell-worthy. Tears poured down his face; he was not at the moment afraid of damnation but felt only ‘an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed with nothing done at all … It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage [to have been a saint] … [he had] missed happiness by seconds … there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint.’59

  That is the reader’s last glimpse into the priest’s mind. Skilfully, Greene backs away from his torment, and his execution is witnessed by Mr Tench, the dentist, looking down into the prison yard, the chief of police in his chair crying with the pain of having a tooth out: ‘A small man came out of a side door … held up by two policemen … his legs were not fully under his control … They paddled him across to the opposite wall; an officer tied a handkerchief round his eyes … the rifles went up, and the little man suddenly made jerky movements with his arms. He was trying to say something … nothing came out except a word that sounded like “Excuse”. The crash of the rifles shook Mr Tench … Then there was a single shot … and the little man was a routine heap beside the wall.’60

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  Greene’s most personal experiences are an important ingredient in The Power and the Glory. They led to an empathy with his three major characters, the lieutenant, the mestizo and the whisky priest. They are hinted at in the Prologue to The Lawless Roads, when he returns to his school days and to Carter who ‘practised torments with dividers’. Into the lieutenant, the priest and the Judas went some of the insight into human nature gained from his experience with Carter and Wheeler, which had involved him in persecution, self-doubt, feelings of cowardice and the fear of betraying.

  The dialogue between the priest and the Judas with his constant lies and denials perhaps originates in Wheeler’s own lies and denials and his attempts to trap Greene into admissions that could be passed on to Carter. There is a certain coming to terms with each other, a certain understanding between the priest and the lieutenant which was part of the Greene/Carter antagonism: ‘there was an element of reluctant admiration, I believe, on both sides. I admired his ruthlessness, and in an odd way he admired what he wounded in me.’61

  The basic theme of the novel, the examination of the nature of goodness and evil and the conclusion that there can be no clear definition of either, is one of Greene’s strongest convictions. ‘The greatest saints have been men with more than a normal capacity for evil, and the most vicious men have sometimes narrowly evaded sanctity.’62 An extension of this is the stress in the novel on the fact that there can be a difference between a man and his vocation – they can be two entities. ‘The whole argument in The Power and the Glory’, he told an interviewer, ‘was deeply rooted in me from childhood … I remember members of my family coming back from their holidays in Spain, sometimes terribly shocked because in some little village they had come across a priest living with his housekeeper, or keeping a mistress … I found their indignation exaggerated because … I saw no reason why a man should not be different from his function, that he could be an excellent priest while remaining a sinner.’63

  Edith Sitwell’s comment to Greene was, ‘what a great priest you would have made’,64 and in Nottingham, at the time of his conversion, Greene had fears that he might discover in himself a vocation for the priesthood. Certainly there are times when he smiles, with his transparent blue eyes giving an impression of blindness, when he unquestioningly looks beatific, as if he had never experienced the corrupt reality he portrays so convincingly. But he was aware by 1938 that he would never have made a good priest for, as he once said, ‘chastity would have been beyond my powers’. Again, at the time of his conversion, there are indications in his letters to his future wife and in autobiographical pieces which suggest that, like the priest, he was f
illed with actual physical dread the first time he had ‘consumed the body and blood of God in a state of mortal sin: but then life bred its excuses’.65 Writing of the humiliating ordeal of his First Confession as a convert, he recalls that promises were then made which he ‘carried … down with [him] like heavy stones into the empty corner of the Cathedral’. Later he was to abandon Confession and Communion because of his continual failure to keep his promises.66 The guilt of the whisky priest on his last night on earth reflects Greene’s own sense of guilt: ‘I’ve betrayed a great number of things and people in the course of my life … It still torments me often enough before I go to sleep.’67

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  From Mexico City Greene had written to Hubsch of Viking Press:

  I got back here last night from Chiapas with a lot of material and a little dysentery … I feel rather tired, I never want to ride a mule again (I feel for my relative who travelled with a donkey in Cevennes) [Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 1879] – I hate this country and this people. Hatred at any rate will be a new angle for you.