The revolutionary tumult of 1968 did not leave Claus untouched. He paid a visit – obligatory, at the time, for left-inclined European intellectuals – to the socialist utopia of Cuba, and praised its achievements, though more guardedly than some of his fellows. Back in Belgium a law court found one of his theatrical productions injurious to public morals and sentenced him to four months in prison (after a public outcry the sentence was suspended). An ill-starred love affair engendered a book of poems, Morning, you (1971), notable as much for its sexual explicitness as for its searing emotional intensity. For years thereafter Claus’s private life would be subject to the prying of the tabloid press.
While Claus has not been a political poet in any narrow sense, the poems of his first phase certainly reflect the apocalyptic mood and alienation from mainstream politics of the European intelligentsia during the darkest years of the Cold War, a war whose reality – given that Brussels was the headquarters of NATO – was hard for any Belgian to ignore. In this respect Claus is close to his German contemporary, the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. But Claus’s vision remains uniquely Netherlandic. The spirit that broods over his trampled motherland is that of Hieronymus Bosch: he harks back to the same late-medieval folk-imagination, with its bestiaries and gnomic sayings, upon which Bosch drew for his vision of a world gone mad.
In the poetry of Claus’s later phase it is the exploration of relations between the sexes, at both a personal and a symbolic level, that comes to the fore. The spirit of this work is anything but autumnal: like W. B. Yeats, Claus rages against the decay of the physical self while desire remains untamed. In these explorations Claus calls upon the resources of myth, Indian as well as Greek. His theatrical work of the same period concentrates on adaptations of Greek and Roman tragedy. It would not be going too far to say that the late Clausian universe is dominated by a struggle between male and female principles (this in spite of the poet’s own warning that he has no ‘philosophy’ to peddle).
Hugo Claus is not a great lyricist, and though his style is crisp and pointed he cannot be called a great satirist or epigrammatist either. From the beginning, however, his poetry has been marked by an uncommon mix of intelligence and passion, given expression in a medium over which he has such light-fingered control that art becomes invisible. Many of the shorter pieces in his oeuvre are merely fugitive or occasional. Nevertheless, scattered throughout in some abundance are poems whose verbal concentration, intensity of feeling, and intellectual range bring their author into the first rank of European poets of the late twentieth century.
(2005)
12 Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
TO THE WIDER world, Brighton of the 1930s presented the face of an attractive seaside resort. But behind that face lay another Brighton: tracts of shoddily built houses, dreary shopping areas, and desolate industrial suburbs. This ‘other’ Brighton bred disaffection and criminality, much of the latter concentrated on the race-track and its lucrative pickings.
Graham Greene made a number of trips to Brighton with the purpose of soaking in its atmosphere and gathering material for his fiction. This research was first drawn on in A Gun for Sale (1936), a novel in which Battling Kite, leader of a gang that extorts money from bookmakers in return for protection, has his throat slit by the rival Colleoni gang.
Out of the murder of Kite grows the action of Brighton Rock (1938), which was initially planned as just another crime novel of a kind that might easily be adapted for the screen. The book starts with the hunting down of Fred Hale, a reporter used by Colleoni as an informer, by the Kite gang. In an act that is not described, Kite’s lieutenant, a youth named Pinkie Brown, kills Hale, perhaps by pushing a stick of the hard red-and-white candy known as Brighton Rock down his throat. The body is unmarked: the doctor who conducts the post mortem concludes that Hale died of a heart attack.
But for Ida Arnold, an easygoing demi-mondaine whom Hale meets on the last day of his life, and but for Rose, the young waitress who unwittingly reveals the flaw in Pinkie’s alibi, the case would be closed. The action of the novel thus moves in two converging lines: Pinkie’s attempts to ensure Rose’s silence, first by marrying her, then by talking her into a suicide pact; and Ida’s quest, first to get to the bottom of the mystery of Hale’s sudden death, then to save Rose from Pinkie’s machinations.
Pinkie is a product of the ‘other’ Brighton. His parents are dead; the schoolyard, with its hierarchies of power and its casual sadism, rather than the schoolroom, has afforded him his education. The gangster Kite has been his adopted father or big brother, Kite’s gang his surrogate family. Of the world beyond Brighton he is utterly ignorant.
Amoral, charmless, prim, seething with resentment against ‘them’ and against the ‘bogies’ (police) used by ‘them’ to keep him down, Pinkie is a chilling figure. He distrusts women, who in his view have nothing on their minds but marriage and babies. The very thought of sex revolts him: he is haunted by memories of his own parents’ Saturday night tussle under the bedclothes, to which he had to listen from his own bed. While the men he commands now that Kite is dead have transitory relationships with women, he is locked into a virginity of which he is ashamed but from which has no idea of how to escape.
Into his life comes Rose, a plain, timid girl ready to worship any boy who takes notice of her. The story of Pinkie and Rose is the story, on Pinkie’s side, of a struggle to bar the entry of love into his heart, on Rose’s of dogged persistence in loving her man in defiance of all prudence. To preclude her from testifying against him if he is ever brought to trial, Pinkie marries Rose in a civil ceremony that both know to be an offence against the Holy Ghost. Not only does Pinkie marry Rose, he grimly goes through with the ordeal of consummating the marriage; and, before the veil of misogynistic hatred and contempt once again descends, finds that lovemaking is not all that bad, that he can look back on it with a kind of pleasure, a kind of pride.
Only one more time does Pinkie have to repulse the batterings of redemption upon his walled-in heart. As he drives Rose to the lonely spot where, if his plan works, she will shoot herself, he feels ‘an enormous emotion . . . like something trying to get in; the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass . . . If the glass broke, if the beast – whatever it was – got in, God knows what it would do.’1
What holds Pinkie and Rose together is the fact that they are both ‘Romans’, children of the True Church, of whose teachings they have the merest smattering but which gives them nevertheless an unshakable sense of inner superiority. The teaching on which they rely most heavily is the doctrine of grace, summed up in an anonymous poem that has impressed itself on the memories of both:
My friend judge not me,
Thou seest I judge not thee:
Betwixt the stirrup and the ground,
Mercy I asked, mercy I found.
God’s grace, in Catholic teaching, is unknowable, unpredictable, mysterious; to rely on it for salvation – to postpone repentance until the moment between the stirrup and the ground – is a deep sin, a sin of pride and presumption. One of Greene’s achievements in Brighton Rock is to raise his unlikely lovers, teenage hoodlum and anxious child bride, to moments of comical yet awful Luciferian pride.
Is Pinkie damned? Within the purview of the novel the question makes no sense: of what happens in Pinkie’s soul while he tumbles down the cliff at the end of the book we are given no hint. Who are we anyhow to say that, in some cases, reliance on God’s mercy may not come out of a genuinely spiritual intuition of how the mystery of grace works? For what it is worth, however, Greene did later in life put it on record that he did not accept the doctrine of eternal damnation. The world contained enough suffering, he said, to qualify as a purgatory in itself.
Brighton Rock is a novel without a hero. But in the person of Ida Arnold, the woman whom the desperate Fred Hale picks up on the last day of his life, Greene creates not only an unconventional detective, shrewd, dogged, and unflappable, but also a stout ideological antagonist to th
e Catholic axis of Pinkie and Rose. Pinkie and Rose believe in Good and Evil; Ida believes in more down-to-earth Right and Wrong, in law and order, though of course with a bit of fun on the side. Pinkie and Rose believe in salvation and damnation, particularly the latter; in Ida the religious impulse is tamed, trivialised, and confined to the ouija board. In the scenes in which Ida, full of motherly concern, tries to wean Rose away from her demonic lover, we see the rudiments of two world views, the one eschatological, the other secular and materialist, uncomprehendingly confronting each other.
Though Ida’s view seems in the end to triumph, it is one of Greene’s subtler achievements to put that view in doubt as perhaps blinkered and tyrannical. In the end the story belongs not to Ida but to Rose and Pinkie, for they are prepared, in however juvenile a way, to confront ultimate questions, while she is not.
Rose’s faith in her lover never wavers. To the end she identifies Ida, not Pinkie, as the subtle seducer, the evil one. ‘She ought to be damned . . . She doesn’t know about love.’ (p. 267) If the worst comes to the worst, she, Rose, would rather suffer in hell with Pinkie than be saved with Ida. (As we will never know the fate of Pinkie’s soul, so we will never know whether Rose’s faith will be proof against the hateful words, preserved on a vinyl disk, that Pinkie speaks to her from beyond the grave: ‘God damn you, you little bitch.’) (p. 193)
Graham Greene belonged to a generation whose vision of modern urban life was deeply influenced by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. No mean poet himself, Greene brings Brighton to life in imagery of sombre expressionist power: ‘The huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes.’ (p.252) In later books Greene tended to rein in the poetry when it became obtrusive.
Even more pervasive in his fiction is the influence of cinema. The late 1930s were a time of growth for the British film industry. By law, cinemas had to screen a quota of British films. A system of subsidies rewarded films of quality. A genuinely British school of film reflecting the realities of British life grew up, a development that Greene welcomed. In 1935 he became the film critic for the Spectator, and during the next five years some four hundred film reviews appeared over his name. Later he was to work on adaptations of his own novels, including Brighton Rock itself, filmed by Carol Reed in 1947 and distributed in the United States under the title Young Scarface.
From as early as Stamboul Train (1932) Greene’s novels had borne the imprint of the cinema: a preference for observation from the outside without commentary, tight cutting from scene to scene, equal emphasis for the significant and the non-significant. ‘When I describe a scene,’ he said in an interview, ‘I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer’s eye – which leaves it frozen . . . I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements.’2 In Brighton Rock the influence of the visual style of Howard Hawks can be felt in the handling of the violence at the race-track. The ingenious use of the itinerant photographer to advance the plot suggests Alfred Hitchcock. Chapters characteristically end with the focus being pulled back from human actors to the greater natural scene – the moon over city and beachfront, for instance.
At the time he wrote Brighton Rock Greene was also refining his narrative technique, using Henry James and Ford Madox Ford as his masters and The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock as his textbook. While Brighton Rock may not be technically perfect – there are lapses during which Pinkie’s inner narration is invaded by the narrator’s comments and judgments – it is, in its concentration on intimate evil, clearly of the Jamesian school.
The novel has other failings too. While Greene’s sympathies are clearly on the side of the demoralised, unemployed poor, the one big scene in which he might have explored the texture of their life – the visit to Rose’s parents – is less disturbing in its impact than grotesque. And the pace of the action slackens toward the end – too many pages are devoted to the individual destinies of Pinkie’s gang.
Given the taciturn ethos of his characters, Greene has little occasion in Brighton Rock to display his skill as a writer of dialogue. The exception is the lawyer Prewitt, who is articulate enough to take on a Dickensian verbal life of his own.
For the 1970 collected edition, Greene retouched the original text in places. In 1938 he had felt at liberty to use terms like ‘Jewess’ and ‘nigger’ (‘niggers’ with ‘cushiony’ lips). In the circles in which he moved at the time, such racial epithets were acceptable currency. After the war they no longer were. Accordingly he turned ‘niggers’ into ‘negroes’ and ‘Jewesses’ in some contexts into ‘women’, in others into ‘bitches’. Colleoni’s ‘old Semitic face’ becomes his ‘old Italian face’. The cushiony lips remain.
The fact that Greene thought the insult could be removed with a few strokes of the pen indicates that in his mind it belonged to the mere verbal surface of the novel, not to its underlying attitudes and ideas.
Graham Greene was born in 1904 into a family of some intellectual distinction. On his mother’s side he was related to Robert Louis Stevenson. His father was headmaster of a public school; one of his brothers became Director-General of the BBC.
At Oxford University he read history, wrote poetry, enrolled briefly in the Communist Party, and toyed with the idea of entering the spying trade. After graduating he took a night job on The Times as a sub-editor, writing fiction by day. His first novel was published in 1929; Brighton Rock was his ninth.
In 1941, after a spell as an air raid warden, Greene joined SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, where his immediate superior was Kim Philby, later to be uncovered as in the pay of the Russians. After the war he worked in publishing until his income from book royalties, screenplay writing, and the sale of film rights made it unnecessary for him to hold down a job.
Greene continued to serve SIS informally for years after the war, reporting on what he picked up on his extensive travels. To a degree he was only a dilettante secret agent. Nevertheless, the information he supplied was valued.
Brighton Rock was his first serious novel, serious in the sense of working with serious ideas. For a while Greene maintained a distinction between his forays into the serious novel and his so-called entertainments. Of the twenty-odd further volumes of fiction he published before his death in 1991, The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), A Burnt-Out Case (1961), The Honorary Consul (1973), and The Human Factor (1978) have attracted the most critical attention.
In this body of work Greene carved out a territory of his own, ‘Greeneland’, in which men as imperfect and divided as any have their integrity and the grounds of their belief tested to the limit, while God, if he exists, remains hidden. The stories of these dubious heroes are told grippingly enough and searchingly enough to engage readers by the million.
Greene was fond of quoting Robert Browning’s Bishop Blougram:
Our interest’s in the dangerous edge of things,
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist . . .
If he had to choose an epigraph for his whole oeuvre, he said, it would be that. Although he revered Henry James (‘as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry’), his immediate descent is from the Joseph Conrad of The Secret Agent. Of his progeny, John le Carré has been the most distinguished.3
Greene is often thought of as a Catholic novelist, one who interrogates the lives of his characters from a specifically Catholic viewpoint. He certainly felt that without a religious awareness, or at least without an awareness of the possibility of sin, the novelist could not do justice to the human condition: this is the essence of his criticism of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, whose worlds he found ‘paper-thin’, cerebral.4
Greene’s account of how from being a Catholic and a novelist he became a Catholic novelist was elaborated late in life and should not necessarily be taken at face value. In this account, though he converted to Catholicism as a young man,5 religion r
emained for him a private affair between the believer and God until he witnessed at first hand the persecution of the Church in Mexico and saw how religious belief could take over and sacramentalise the whole of people’s lives.
What is left out of this account is the attraction, romantic in nature and attested to in his early fiction, that Catholicism exerted on him – the sense that Catholics have unique access to an ancient body of wisdom and that English Catholics in especial, members of a once persecuted sect, are as a result inherent outsiders.
However ill educated Greene’s Pinkie Brown may be (not so badly educated, however, that he cannot compose sentences in Latin), his sense of self is wrapped up with possessing a secret knowledge, unavailable to the hoi polloi, of having a higher fate reserved for him. This sense of election, shared by many other Greene characters, gives rise to criticism such as George Orwell’s: Greene ‘appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned’.6 But such criticism is not wholly fair: if at moments Greene seems to tremble on the edge of endorsing Pinkie’s romantic conception of Catholicism as the creed of the Byronic outsider, there are other moments when Pinkie’s eschatological apparatus seems a mere rickety defence erected against the ridicule of the world – ridicule of his shabby clothes, his gaucherie, his working-class speech, his youth, his ignorance of sex. Pinkie may do his best to elevate his acts to the sphere of sin and damnation, but to the doughty Ida Arnold they are simply crimes that deserve the punishment of the law; and in this world, the only world we have, it is Ida’s view that tends to prevail.
(2004)
13 Samuel Beckett, the short fiction
Inner Workings Page 16