After being suitably encouraged by the promise of the cover blurb, it was even more refreshing to discover that the book itself largely lives up to its billing. Patey possesses a firm grasp of the philosophical foundations upon which Waugh built his life and places these metaphysical realities at the center of his study. Whereas other studies would have lingered on Waugh’s evident love for gossip, Patey considers it more significant to point out, for example, that Waugh took Jacques Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy and a volume of Aquinas as reading matter during a trip to British Guiana in 1932. According to Patey, the choice of such reading material “attests a desire not only to educate himself in his faith but also to clarify his stance as a writer.” The extent to which Waugh became au fait with the Church’s philosophy can be gauged from an essay entitled “Sloth” that he wrote in 1962 for a series in the Sunday Times on the seven deadly sins. Again, it is significant that Patey considers this particular essay worthy of quotation:
What then is this Sloth which can merit the extremity of divine punishment? St. Thomas’s answer is both comforting and surprising: tristitia de bono spirituali, a sadness in the face of spiritual good. Man is made for joy in the love of God, a love which he expresses in service. If he deliberately turns away from that joy, he is denying the purpose of his existence. The malice of Sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty (though that can be a symptom of it) but in the refusal of joy. It is allied to despair.
Patey is also good at placing Waugh within a wider network of minds. The influence of Belloc, R. H. Benson and Christopher Dawson is discussed, and Waugh’s concept of Christendom and his initial attraction to Belloc’s Europe of the Faith are considered at length. Other important figures in the Christian literary revival also figure prominently as influences on Waugh, including the Jesuits Philip Caraman and Martin D’Arcy, Ronald Knox, T. S. Eliot and, of course, Chesterton.
Patey is to be commended on the whole for his treatment of Waugh’s alleged reactionary politics. Patey quotes Roy Campbell, another writer who has been vilified for his political views, who complained that “anyone who was not pro-Red in the Spanish War automatically became a fascist.” This was echoed by Waugh, who wrote of the Spanish civil war that he was “not in the predicament of choosing between two evils.” Unfortunately, Patey’s otherwise temperate discussion of this potentially volatile area is marred by an insinuation that Chesterton was a fascist or at least a fellow traveler. The insinuation arises from a selective quotation from Chesterton’s The Resurrection of Rome that overlooks the explicitly antifascist conclusion that Chesterton eventually arrives at elsewhere in the same volume. After stating his own preference for “a real white flag of freedom” in opposition to “the red flag of Communist or the black flag of Fascist regimentation”, Chesterton gives “the logical case against fascism”, namely, “that it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite”. In this pyrotechnic epigram he not only rejects fascism but gives, in a flash of inspiration, the most brilliant and pithy putdown of fascism imaginable.
Apart from this one faux pas, Patey’s study excels—particularly in placing Waugh within the wider context of the Christian literary revival. This revival spawned numerous works that were acts of subcreation reflecting the glory of Creation itself. As Waugh himself put it: “There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.” What is true of art is true of the artist. Any biographer who fails to understand this bedrock reality will fail not only to understand the life he is writing but, more crucially, will fail to understand the life he is himself living. Thankfully, Patey is very much alive and, in consequence, so is his subject.
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IN PURSUIT OF THE GREENE-EYED MONSTER
The Quest for Graham Greene
MORE THAN A CENTURY after the birth of Graham Greene, questions remain as to his enduring legacy. Although few would question his place as one of the most influential and enigmatic writers of the twentieth century, it is equally true that few would agree as to the exact nature of his influence or as to the peculiar quality of his enigma. The fact remains that Greene is not only one of the most important writers of his generation but is also one of the most elusive. Indeed, it was Greene’s view that one cannot understand a man without understanding “the man within”. As such, the quest for Graham Greene involves a pursuit of the Greene-eyed monster that haunted his luridly vivid imagination. Greene’s novels, and the characters that adorn them, are riddled with angst and anger. Simultaneously confused and confounded by a deep sense of guilt and failure, his characters are informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility. The oppressive weight of the real presence of Christian faith, or the terrible emptiness of its real absence, turn Greene’s novels into a fascinating and unforgettable conflict between the fertile and the furtive. The depiction of a drunken priest in The Power and the Glory and also in the play The Potting Shed exudes Greene’s morbid preoccupation with human folly and failure, as well as exhibits his belief in the remnants of human dignity even amid the deepest degradation. At other times, as in The Comedians, he squirms amid the squalor of sin and cynicism, or, as in Brighton Rock, he squeals in the sadistic self-indulgence of the psychopath.
Greene’s fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativistic age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene’s own tortured soul, and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own character and, in consequence, at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created.
From his earliest childhood, Greene exhibited a world-weariness that at times reached the brink of despair. In large part this bleak approach may have been due to a wretched childhood and to the traumatic time spent at Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. His writing is full of the bitter scars of his schooldays. In his autobiographical A Sort of Life, Greene described the panic in his family after he had been finally driven in desperation to run away from the horrors of the school: “My father found the situation beyond him. . . . My brother suggested psycho-analysis as a possible solution, and my father—an astonishing thing in 1920—agreed.”
For six months the young, and no doubt impressionable, Greene lived at the house of the analyst to whom he had been referred. This episode would be described by him as “perhaps the happiest six months of my life”, but it is possible that the seeds of his almost obsessive self-analysis were sown at this time. Significantly, he chose the following words of Sir Thomas Browne as an epigraph to his first novel, The Man Within: “There’s another man within me that’s angry with me.”
In later years, the genuine groping for religious truth in Greene’s fiction would often be thwarted by his obsession with the darker recesses of his own character. This darker side is invariably transposed onto all his fictional characters, so that even their goodness is warped. Greene saw human nature as “not black and white” but “black and grey”, and he referred to his need to write as “a neurosis . . . an irresistible urge to pinch the abscess which grows periodically in order to squeeze out all the pus”. Such a tortured outlook may have produced entertaining novels but could not produce any true sense of reality. Greene’s novels were Frankenstein monsters that were not so much in need of Freudian analysis as they were the products of it.
Greene’s conversion in 1926, when he was still only twenty-one years old, was described in A Sort of Life, in which he contrasted his own agnosticism as an undergraduate, when “to me religion went no deeper than the sentimental hymns in the school chapel”, with the fact that his future wife was a Roman Catholic:
I met the girl I was to marry after finding a note from her at the porters lodge in Balliol protesting against my inaccuracy in writing, during the course of a film review, of the “worship” Roman
Catholics gave to the Virgin Mary, when I should have used the term “hyperdulia”. I was interested that anyone took these subtle distinctions of an unbelievable theology seriously, and we became acquainted.
The girl was Vivien Dayrell-Browning, then twenty years old, who, five years earlier, had shocked her family by being received into the Catholic Church. Concerning Greene’s conversion, Vivien recalled that “he was mentally converted; logically, it seemed to him. . . . It was all rather private and quiet. I don’t think there was any emotion involved”. This was corroborated by Greene himself when he stated in an interview that “my conversion was not in the least an emotional affair. It was purely intellectual.”
A more detailed, though hardly a more emotional, description of the process of his conversion was given in his autobiography. “Now it occurred to me . . . that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held.” He walked to the local “sooty neo-Gothic Cathedral”, which “possessed for me a certain gloomy power because it represented the inconceivable and the incredible” and dropped a note requesting instruction into a wooden box for inquiries. His motivation was one of morbid curiosity and had precious little to do with a genuine desire for conversion. “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.”
His first impressions of Father Trollope, the priest to whom he would go for instruction, had reinforced his prejudiced view of Catholicism: “At the first sight he was all I detested most in my private image of the Church”. Soon, however, he was forced to modify his view, coming to realize that his initial impressions of the priest were not only erroneous but that he was “facing the challenge of an inexplicable goodness”. From the outset, he had “cheated” Father Trollope by failing to disclose his irreligious motive in seeking instruction, and he did not tell the priest of his engagement to a Catholic. “I began to fear that he would distrust the genuineness of my conversion if it so happened that I chose to be received, for after a few weeks of serious argument the ‘if’ was becoming less and less improbable”.
The “if” revolved primarily on the primary “if” surrounding God’s existence. The center of the argument was the center itself or, more precisely, whether there was any center:
My primary difficulty was to believe in a God at all. . . . I didn’t disbelieve in Christ—I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It was like a fight for personal survival.
The fight for personal survival was lost, and Greene, in losing himself, had gained the Faith. Yet the dogmatic atheist was only overpowered; he was not utterly vanquished. He would reemerge continually as the devil, or at least as the devil’s advocate, in the murkier moments in his novels.
The literary critic J. C. Whitehouse has compared Greene to Thomas Hardy, rightly asserting that Greene’s gloomy vision at least allows for a light beyond the darkness, whereas Hardy allows for darkness only. Chesterton said of Hardy that he was like the village atheist brooding over the village idiot. Greene is often like a self-loathing sceptic brooding over himself. As such, the vision of the divine in his fiction is often thwarted by the self-erected barriers of his own ego. Only rarely does the glimmer of God’s light penetrate the chinks in the armor, entering like a vertical shaft of hope to exorcise the simmering despair.
Few have understood Greene better than his friend Malcolm Muggeridge, who described him as “a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony”. There is more true depth and perception in this one succinct observation by Muggeridge than in all the pages of psychobabble that have been written about Greene’s work by lesser critics. The paradoxical union of Catholicism and scepticism, incarnated in Greene and his work, had created a hybrid, a metaphysical mutant, as fascinating as Jekyll and Hyde and perhaps as futile. The resulting contortions and contradictions of both his own character and those of the characters he created give the impression of depth; but the depth was often only that of ditch water, perceived as bottomless because the bottom could not be seen. Greene’s genius was rooted in the ingenuity with which he muddied the waters.
It was both apt and prophetic that Greene should have taken the name of Saint Thomas the Doubter at his reception into the Church in February 1926. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, he was always a doubter par excellence. He doubted others; he doubted himself; he doubted God. Whatever else might be puzzling about this most puzzling of men, his debt to doubt is indubitable. Ironically, it was this very doubt that had so often provided the creative force for his fiction. Perhaps the secret of his enduring popularity lies in his being a doubting Thomas in an age of doubt. As such, Greene’s Catholicism becomes an enigma, a conversation piece—even a gimmick. Yet, if his novels owe a debt to doubt, their profundity lies in the ultimate doubt about the doubt. In the end, it was this ultimate doubt about doubt that kept Graham Greene clinging doggedly, desperately—and doubtfully—to his faith.
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CROSS PURPOSES
Greene, Undset and Bernanos
A review of J. C. Whitehouse’s
Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset and Georges Bernanos+
TOWARD THE BEGINNING of this thought-provoking study of three of the last century’s most prominent Catholic novelists, Dr. Whitehouse claims that their work was informed by “that older Catholic view of man as a creature of enormous individual worth, living in a special and dynamic relationship with his Creator, taught by the Church Christ founded and moving gradually towards salvation or damnation”. Rather incongruously, he then adds that such a view “no longer seems quite relevant to the newer, post-Council and conciliatory Catholic world of community and communications”. This alleged schism between the pre- and post-conciliar Church runs through Dr. Whitehouse’s book and mars what is otherwise an intriguing study.
The vision of “vertical man”, who is principally concerned with his relationship with God, and the vision of “horizontal man”, who sees himself as part of society or the community, are perceived as distinct. The Second Vatican Council is seen as guilty of promoting the latter vision of man as opposed to the former. Perhaps, however, Dr. Whitehouse is guilty of praising vertical man to the detriment or even exclusion of horizontal man. Surely the two great commandments of Christ, that we love the Lord our God and that we love our neighbor, place the two visions in equilibrium. We cannot truly do the one without the other. They are inseparable. The vertical and the horizontal meet in the love of Christ and, in so doing, form the cross of our salvation.
Apart from this reservation, Dr. Whitehouse’s study of the vertical aspects of the fiction of Greene, Undset and Bernanos is fascinating. Of the three, Undset emerges as possibly the most profound, particularly in the poignant depiction of the soul as a fathomless sea at the bottom of which is its Creator. “Fear and uneasiness and indignation might chase each other on the surface. But love was felt as something heavy which sank down and down.” Such a view is rooted in perennial Christian mysticism. The problem arises when this is confused with, or confounded by, post-Freudian self-analysis. There are dangers in Bernanos’ view that life is an elaborate masquerade. If everyone adopts a persona that deceives as much as it reveals, there is nothing left but relativism. The lie is enshrined as the individual’s personal truth. At this stage, the perceived depths are an illusion. It is a case not of fathoming the depths of the soul but of muddying the shallows of the self.
Nowhere is this confusion more evident than in the novels of Graham Greene, a fact that Dr. Whitehouse prefers to overlook so that he can concentrate instead on the theological aspects of Greene’s work. The genuine groping for r
eligious truth in Greene’s fiction is always thwarted by his obsession with the darker side of his own character. As such, his vertical vision only rarely escapes beyond his own ego. It is only at such moments that the glimmer of God’s light penetrates the chinks in the armor, a vertical shaft of hope.
The last words belong not to Greene but to his long-suffering wife. “Many of the later Catholic writers had a dark view, whereas Chesterton had high spirits. The later writers seemed depressed in comparison. Perhaps it had something to do with what was happening in the world.” Perhaps indeed . . .
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MUGGERIDGE RESURRECTED
A review of
Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography
by Gregory Wolfe+
STRICTLY SPEAKING, GREGORY WOLFE’s biography of Muggeridge is not a new volume. It was first published in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton in the United Kingdom and, two years later, by Eerdmans in the United States. At the time of its first publication, I was living in England and was putting the finishing touches to my own first biography, a life of G. K. Chesterton, which was to be published by Hodder and Stoughton a year later. I recall that Wolfe’s biography appeared at the same time that HarperCollins published another life of Muggeridge, by Richard Ingrams. The two volumes even had very similar titles. Wolfe’s was entitled Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography, whereas Ingrams’ volume was called, more boldly, Muggeridge: The Biography. The boldness of the latter sprang from the fact that Ingrams was a well-known journalist and television celebrity and a long-standing friend of Muggeridge, whereas Wolfe was a young and unknown debutant. Ingrams had a sufficient degree of gravitas to claim the right to have written the biography of his friend. A similar claim by the young arriviste would have sounded not only absurdly precocious but absolutely preposterous. It would seem, therefore, that this battle of competing biographies was a somewhat one-sided affair. Ingrams was cast in the role of Goliath, whereas Wolfe was David. Surely there could be only one winner, as indeed there was. In conformity with the tradition established by their archetypal forebears, David triumphed unexpectedly over Goliath.
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