by John Updike
To the powerful stew of ethnic awareness and filial tension that simmered within O’Hara he added the distress of his brief marriage (1931–33) to Helen Petit, called “Pet.” She came from a well-to-do Episcopalian family in Brooklyn; her mother had not approved of her liaison with this brawling, hard-drinking Irish-Catholic journalist, and indeed his drinking helped undo them. In 1932 he wrote Robert Simonds, “I wish I could take a vacation from myself. I have, of course, taken quite a number of overnight vacations; getting so cockeyed drunk that twenty hours elapse before I recover.” Also, in these first years of the Depression, his writing career was faring little better than Julian English’s Cadillac agency; he gave Julian his own quixotic chip on the shoulder and compulsion to offend those he should court. Yet before Caroline is finally alienated in one last shouting match of sarcasms and masked pleas, she shares Julian’s terrible sudden slide, and a number of intimate touches show the tenderness that is being squandered:
He walked slowly up the stairs, letting each step have its own full value in sound. It was the only way he knew of preparing Caroline for the news of Reilly’s refusal to see him, and he felt he owed her that. It would not be fair to her to come dashing in the house, to tell her by his footsteps that everything was all right and Reilly was not sore, only to let her down.
So subtle a language of footsteps, with the elliptic conversation and the lovemaking that follow, could have been described only by a man with a marriage on his mind, and a real woman haunting it. The best passage of sociology in the book, which infuses its knowing with feeling and a remarkable empathy into female experience, is Chapter 5, telling of Caroline’s life before marrying Julian; it seems unfortunate that later in the novel O’Hara chose to foist off upon her some relatively unpersuasive Joycean stream-of-consciousness. Nonetheless, the Englishes have a heterosexual relationship beside which those in The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms are romantic and insubstantial. The repeated offense O’Hara gave to Mrs. Grundy lay mostly, I think, in his insistence on crediting his female characters with sexual appetites—with sturdy and even sweaty bodily and psychological existences independent of male desires.
For all its excellence as a social panorama and a sketch of a marriage, it is as a picture of a man destroyed by drink and pride that Appointment in Samarra lives frighteningly in the mind. Julian’s disintegration, within this society whose many parts are so zealously particularized, takes place in three days—a kind of Calvary, whose stations progress from the tossed drink that we do not see (though we experience it as a vision in Julian’s mind and then as a burst of aghast gossip in the country-club ballroom) to the almost comic drunken whirl and babble in which he spirits Helene Holman out to the Stage Coach parking lot and on to the unforgettable freak of the mammoth highball he mixes in a flower vase during his last earthly hour. When I first read this novel, as a teen-ager (because, I suppose, the scandal of it in Pottsville had stirred waves still felt in Reading, forty miles away, fifteen years later), this monstrous mad drink, and Julian’s sodden retreat to the interior of his Cadillac, seemed overwhelmingly dreadful—a liquid vortex opening a hole in the workaday Pennsylvania world about me. How surprisingly brief, on rereading, the sentences are! Dorothy Parker correctly spoke of the book’s “almost unbelievable pace.”
Julian’s choice of an automobile as his instrument of death is a brilliant stroke. In this intensely American novel, the ubiquitous automobile serves as status symbol, as love nest, as contemplation cell, as communal signal. Throughout, on these Gibbsville streets, people hear and see each other come and go in their cars. In the beginning Irma Fliegler hears the Newtons return, and at the end Julian hears Alice Cartwright leave, a sound Herbert Harley also hears. As the engines purr and the broken chain links clatter against fenders, an entire web of motion calls out to those in bed, bidding them to be out and doing, warning them not to fall behind, to miss out.
O’Hara was back in Pottsville for the Christmas of 1930, and we assume that the snowy weather is as authentic as the Ralph Barton cover on The New Yorker that Caroline is reading.a Authenticity of this small factual kind became the byword for his fiction, and something of a fetish for him; factuality was O’Hara’s gruff way of telling the world he loved it. But authenticity of a larger sort takes this novel almost, as it were, unawares: Appointment in Samarra is faithful to the way our fates sneak up on us and occur within a scattered social context that widens out to absolute indifference. In its centrifugal fashion the book is about Luther Fliegler’s promotion (it seems likely, but is not nailed down), and Mary Manners’s metamorphosis from a coal-region beauty to a New York floozy, and Al Grecco’s career as Ed Charney’s henchman, which appears to survive his failure to protect Ed’s mistress from Julian English, though Al may be henceforth more treacherous. Most events don’t come to anything much, but there is an accretion that can suddenly crush a life. O’Hara’s short stories in their drifting motion catch a moment in this almost unnoticeable process, this transformation of what we do into what we are. And what we are is seldom what we think we deserve.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, according to Thoreau. John O’Hara, as a doctor’s son, and as a newspaperman, and as a roisterer and the holder of many part-time jobs, saw exceptionally much of the seamy, disappointed side of American life, and part of his veracity was not to melodramatize it, or to forget that the human will gleams in even the dingiest folds of the social fabric. A curious cheerful toughness enlivens a loser like Pal Joey, and Appointment in Samarra does not leave us with the tragic sense of a rigorous destruction that, say, Madame Bovary does. Julian keeps a kind of jaunty, willful dignity. Caroline thinks, “He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not.” He goes out jokingly, with a last clock-smashing gesture for “the bastards.” Like his jut-jawed creator, he gave as good as he got.
To The Power and the Glory,
by Graham Greene
FIRST PUBLISHED FIFTY YEARS AGO in a modest English edition of thirty-five hundred copies, The Power and the Glory is generally agreed to be Graham Greene’s masterpiece, the book of his held highest in critical as well as popular esteem. Based upon less than two months spent in Mexico in March and April of 1938, including five weeks of gruelling, solitary travel in the southern states of Tabasco and Chiapas, the novel is Greene’s least English, containing only a few minor English characters. Perhaps it succeeds so resoundingly because there is something un-English about the Roman Catholicism which infuses, with its Manichaean darkness and tortured literalism, his most ambitious fiction. The three novels (as opposed to “entertainments”) composed before and after The Power and the Glory—Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951)—all have claims to greatness; they are as intense and penetrating and disturbing as an inquisitor’s gaze. After his modest start as a novelist under the influence of Conrad and John Buchan, Greene’s masterly facility at concocting thriller plots and his rather blithely morbid sensibility had come together, at a high level of intelligence and passion, with the strict terms of an inner religious debate that had not yet wearied him. Yet the Roman Catholicism, in these three novels, has something faintly stuck-on about it—there is a dreamlike feeling of stretch, of contortion. This murderous teen-age gang-leader with his bitter belief in hell and his habit of quoting choirboy Latin to himself, this mild-mannered colonial policeman pulled by a terrible pity into the sure damnation of suicide, and this blithely unfaithful housewife drawn by a happenstance baptism of which she is unaware into a sainthood that works posthumous miracles—these are moral grotesques, shaped in some other world; they refuse to attach to the worlds around them, the so sharply and expertly evoked milieux of Brighton, British West Africa, and wartime London.
In contrast, The Power and the Glory’s nameless whisky priest blends seamlessly with his tropical, crooked, anti-clerical Mexico. Roman Catholicism is intrinsic to the character and terrain both; Greene’s imaginative immersion in both is triumphant. A Mexican
priest in 1978 told Greene’s biographer, Norman Sherry: “As a Mexican I travel in those regions. The first three paragraphs, where he gives you camera shots of the place, why it is astounding. You are in the place.” In 1960 a Catholic teacher in California wrote Greene:
One day I gave The Power and the Glory to … a native of Mexico who had lived through the worst persecutions.… She confessed that your descriptions were so vivid, your priest so real, that she found herself praying for him at Mass. I understand how she felt. Last year, on a trip through Mexico, I found myself peering into mud huts, through village streets, and across impassable mountain ranges, half-believing that I would glimpse a dim figure stumbling in the rain on his way to the border. There is no greater tribute possible to your creation of this character—he lives.
Greene’s identification with his anonymous hero—“a small man dressed in a shabby dark city suit, carrying a small attaché case”—burns away the educated upper-middle-class skepticism and ennui which shadow even the most ardently spiritual of his other novels. Mr. Tench, the dentist, and the complicated Fellows family are English, and may have been intended to play a bigger part than they do; as it is, they exist marginally, like little figures introduced to give a landscape its grandeur. The abysses and heights of the whisky priest’s descent into darkness and simultaneous ascent into martyrdom so dominate the canvas that even his pursuer and ideological antagonist, the fanatically atheistic lieutenant, is crowded out, flattened to seem a mere foil. Only the extraordinary apparition of the mestizo, with his yellow fangs and wriggling exposed toe and fawning, clinging, inexorable treachery, exists in the same oversized realm of transcendent paradox as the dogged, doomed priest.
Edith Sitwell wrote Greene in 1945 that he would have made a great priest. His conversion, in Nottingham at the age of twenty-two in 1926, was at the hands of a priest, Father Trollope, who, after his own conversion, had been—according to Greene’s memoir A Sort of Life—“driven further by some inner compulsion to the priesthood.” But Greene was in little such danger; he was converting in order to marry a Roman Catholic, and in any case, he wrote in 1938, “chastity would have been beyond my powers.” Yet his serious novels usually have a priest in them, portrayed as fallibly human but in his priestly function beyond reproach. In his second book of autobiography, Ways of Escape, Greene writes, “I think The Power and the Glory is the only novel I have written to a thesis.… I had always, even when I was a schoolboy, listened with impatience to the scandalous stories of tourists concerning the priests they had encountered in remote Latin villages (this priest had a mistress, another was constantly drunk), for I had been adequately taught in my Protestant history books what Catholics believed; I could distinguish even then between the man and the office.” The distinction between sinful behavior and sacramental function is clear also to the debased priests of The Power and the Glory. Father José, compelled by the state and his cowardice to marry, remembers “the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation—the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God.” The whisky priest can no longer find meaning in prayer but to him “the Host was different: to lay that between a dying man’s lips was to lay God. That was a fact—something you could touch.” Greene says of his hero what he might say of himself: “Curious pedantries moved him.”
In the unrelenting succession of harrowing scenes as the hunted man tries to keep performing his priestly offices, none is more harrowing, more grisly in its irony and corrosive earthy dialogue, than the episode wherein he must watch a trio of local low-lifes, including the police chief, drink up a bottle of wine he had bought for sacramental purposes with his last pesos. But almost every stage of the priest’s ragged pilgrimage, between Mr. Tench’s two glimpses of him in the stultifying capital of the hellish state (Tabasco, but unnamed), grips us with sorrow and pity. Greene, as a reviewer, saw a lot of movies in the Thirties, and his scenes are abrupt, cinematic, built of brilliant, artfully lit images: the “big whitewashed building,” for instance, which the priest does not recognize as a church and mistakes for a barracks, at the end of Part II, and the mountaintop grove of tall, crazily leaning crosses “like trees that had been left to seed,” which marks the Indian cemetery and the boundary of the less intolerant, safe state (Chiapas, also unnamed). The preceding climb, in the company of the Indian woman carrying her dead child on her back, is as grandly silent as a pageant in Eisenstein, and there is a touch of surreal Buñuel horror in the priest’s discovery, when he returns to the cemetery, of the dead child’s exposed body, with a lump of sugar in its mouth. In A Sort of Life, Greene, thinking back upon his many novels for “passages, even chapters, which gave me at the time I wrote them a sense of satisfaction,” named “the prison dialogue in The Power and the Glory,” and indeed this scene, in which the priest, at the nadir of his abasement and peril, sits up all night in a crowded dark cell listening to the varied voices—the disembodied souls—of the other inmates, is, in its depth, directness, and strange comedy, worthy of Dostoevsky, another problematical believer.
Greene’s conversion to Catholicism, as he describes it in A Sort of Life, was rather casual. He was walking his dog past a church that “possessed for me a certain gloomy power because it represented the inconceivable and the incredible. Inside, there was a wooden box for inquiries and I dropped into it a note asking for instruction.… I had no intention of being received into the Church. For such a thing to happen I would need to be convinced of its truth and that was not even a remote possibility.” But, after a few sessions of his vigorously arguing the case for atheism with Father Trollope, something happened: “I can only remember that in January 1926 I became convinced of the probable existence of something we call God, though I now dislike the word with all its anthropomorphic associations.” Early the next month, he made his first General Confession and was baptized and received. “I remember very clearly the nature of my emotion as I walked away from the Cathedral: there was no joy in it at all, only a sombre apprehension.” The entire swift surrender reminds us of another, which occurred a bit earlier during his four months of living alone in Nottingham and being terribly bored.
Once on my free day I walked over the hills to Chesterfield and found a dentist. I described to him the symptoms, which I knew well, of an abscess. He tapped a perfectly good tooth with his little mirror and I reacted in the correct way. “Better have it out,” he advised.
“Yes,” I said, “but with ether.”
A few minutes’ unconsciousness was like a holiday from the world. I had lost a good tooth, but the boredom was for the time being dispersed.
While still an Oxford undergraduate, he had repeatedly played Russian roulette, in search of a permanent holiday from the world. The world gets a grim report in his fiction. For Pinkie in Brighton Rock, “the world never moved: it lay there always, the ravaged and disputed territory between two eternities.” In The Power and the Glory, the priest, looking at the stars, cannot believe that “this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship.” Looking at his illegitimate child, he sees that “the world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.” In the prison cell, he reflects, “This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realised that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.” An ascetic, reckless, life-despising streak in Greene’s temperament characterized, among other precipitate ventures, his 1938 trip to Mexico.
He had been angling since 1936 for a way to travel on assignment to Mexico, to write about “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth.” The persecution had peaked a few years earlier, under President Calles, elected in 1924, and the infamous atheist Governor of Tabasco, Garrido Canabal. Greene finally got his backing, from Longman’s in England and Viking in the United
States, survived his trip, and produced his book, called The Lawless Roads in England and Another Country here. (Such transatlantic title-changes were once common; The Power and the Glory was first issued by Doubleday under what Greene called “the difficult and misleading title of The Labyrinthine Ways.”) Another Country still reads well, though episodic and in spots carelessly written. Greene has a charming way of tossing into its text passages from Trollope and Cobbett, as he was reading them on the move, and also accounts of his dreams. Many elements of the novel are easily recognizable: the geography, the vultures, the layout and torpor of Villahermosa, the amiably corrupt police chief, the officious village school-teacher trying to replace the banished priest, the European finca whose proprietors bathe in the stream with nibbling fish, the lump of sugar, the fanged mestizo (encountered behind a typewriter in the village of Yajalon), and the rumor of the whisky priest, even to his drunken insistence on baptizing a son Brigitta. But in The Power and the Glory it was all marvellously transposed and edited: the priest’s mule-riding flights from capture in the Tabasco-like state were based upon agonizingly long mule-rides that Greene took in Chiapas, on the way to Las Casas, which his fictional priest never reaches. Had the air service between Yajalon and Las Casas not been cancelled by rain, his novel might have lacked its most memorable and Biblical mode of transportation.