Pretty Goes with Pretty

Graham Greene: A Gun for Sale or, Mining the Archives

[Note: if you're looking for more posts on the novels of Graham Greene, click here.]

Reading A Gun For Sale, Graham Greene’s first “entertainment”—a self-categorized segment of his oeuvre that describes straight-up thrillers supposedly with no real “literary” ambition—I’m reminded of Alfred Hitchcock once more. Not in the way I’ve already described, but in Greene’s recycling of his own material. Just as Hitchcock had numerous shootouts in crowded theaters (The 39 Steps, Saboteur, The Man Who Knew to Much), or placed his climaxes atop tourist attractions (Saboteur again, and North by Northwest), A Gun For Sale sees Greene revisiting two of his own more thrilling scenes. Approaching the novel’s climax, Greene starts an integral chapter by replicating a scene from Orient Express, and concludes the chapter by revising the best moment in The Man Within.

In A Gun for Sale, Anne—a second-rate chorus girl—is mixed up with Raven, a mercenary killer whose recent job may spark a world war. On the run from the police, the two hole up in a shed in the middle of the night. The shed is filled with sacks of grain, which they use to keep warm in the cold night.

Raven groped through the dark of the small shed till he had found the sacks. He piled them up, shaking them as one shakes a pillow. He whispered anxiously: ‘You’ll be able to rest there a bit?’ Anne let his hand guide her to the corner. She said, ‘It’s freezing.’

The scene is set up almost exactly as one from Orient Express, in which Coral—a second-rate chorus girl—is mixed up with Dr. Czinner, a political exile hoping to return to Hungary to lead a revolution. On the run from authorities, the two hole up in a shed in the middle of the night, fallen snow all around outside. Czinner has already been shot. The shed, as in A Gun for Sale, is filled with sacks of grain, which Coral “pulled… down from the pile and made a kind of cave large enough to shelter them, piling the sacks at the entrance, so that no one could see them from the door.”

In both books, the authorities are not far off. They circle Raven’s shed but refrain from storming the entrance for fear of harming Anne, who they view as a hostage and don’t realize she sympathizes with Raven. Instead, they choose to wait them out, forcing the two to remain in the shed overnight. In Orient Express, the authorities pass torches through the shed but see no one, moving ahead in their chase. Coral remains with Czinner in the shed overnight, waiting for him to die from his gunshot wound. Czinner, hot with fever, hallucinates his way through the night:

His mind became confused, and soon it was falling through endless space…. His mother and father bobbed at him their seamed thin faces, followed him through the ether, past the rush of stars, telling him that they were glad and grateful, that he had done what he could, that he had been faithful. He was breathless and could not answer them, tugged downward in great pain by gravity. He wanted to say to them that he had been damned by his faithfulness, that one must lean this way and that, but he had to listen all the way to their false comfort, falling and falling in great pain.

“Damned by his faithfulness”: it’s a pretty good summation of the core of many of Greene’s novels—an anger at one’s inability to reject one’s own beliefs, one own choices. In Czinner’s case it his faith in his political beliefs. For Coral, it is her love of Myatt, the businessman she met on the train, who had failed to rescue her but did manage to rescue Grünlich, the murderer.

But she knew too well that it was her nature, she was born so and she must make the best of it. She would be a fumbler at the other game; relentless when she ought to be weak, forgiving when she ought to be hard. Even now she could not dwell long with envy and admiration at the thought of Grünlich driving away into the dark beside Myatt; her thoughts returned with stupid fidelity to Myatt himself… But she was aware all the time that there was no quality in Myatt to justify her fidelity; it was just that she was like that and he had been kind. She wondered for a moment whether Dr. Czinner’s case was not the same; he had been too faithful to people who could have been served better by cunning. She heard his difficult breathing through the dark and thought again without bitterness or criticism, it just doesn’t pay.

Stuck in their own shed, Raven and Anne have a conversation that tackles similar themes:

Anne said: ‘I’m awake.’ She said defensively, ‘I was just praying.’
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anne said. ‘Sometimes maybe. It’s a habit, praying. It doesn’t do any harm. It’s like crossing your fingers when you walk under a ladder. We all need any luck that’s going.’
Raven said, ‘We did a lot of praying in the home. Twice a day, and before meals too.’
‘It doesn’t prove anything.’
‘No, it doesn’t prove anything. Only you get sort of mad when everything reminds you of what’s over and done with. Sometimes you want to begin fresh, and then someone praying, or a smell, or something you read in the paper, and it’s all back again, the places and people.’

Both Czinner and Raven feel a kind of anger that their choices have led to this point—here in a shed, in the cold, with an innocent chorus girl by their side, and the realization that they are condemned.

Finally Czinner dies, and at daybreak the innocent Coral walks out of the shed with little left to fear. Raven and Anne’s story is not so easily resolved, however. The police are stationed outside, waiting for them to exit. Lucky for them, a heavy fog sets in. Greene allows Raven to escape his captors by returning to the single most effective scene in his otherwise flawed debut, The Man Within.

In that book, the traitorous Andrews is on the run from his fellow smugglers, led by his father-figure, Carlyon.

He had been walking uphill and now emerged from the thickest fog as from a tunnel. It stood concrete at this back like a white wall…. It was not, however, the mere abstract fear of light which startled Andrews. A tall man, with dark hair uncovered by a hat, stood in the middle of the road. His back was turned and his hands were clasped behind him. Andrews could not mistake the light poise of the legs and shoulders that seemed to symbolize a spirit on tiptoe…. Andrews half shifted a foot and the shoulders in front of him stiffened. He remembered a remark that Carlyon had once made to him, prompted by sudden friendliness, ‘I’d know your step, Andrews, in a thousand.’

The scene is one of the most tense and most thrilling Greene has written. Andrews is standing just a few feet from his pursuer, masked simply by a thick fog. All he can do is remain silent and hope that Carlyon and the nearby crew do not realize he is there.

Andrews, moving as softly as he was able, took three steps backward and was swallowed in the mist. He waited listening with a racing heart: the sound of its beats he felt would drown any noise there might be. He could no longer see Carlyon and therefore he was certain that Carlyon could not see him. The anxiety that pecked at his nerve was the uncertainty whether or not Carlyon had recognized his tread.

The silent standoff goes on for pages. Carlyon does sense that Andrews is there and calls his name, but Andrews remains silent. Finally, Andrews senses that Carlyon and the others have moved on, and he stands alone in the fog.

Greene must have thought highly of this scene, which stands out as a truly gripping moment in an otherwise terrible novel. Perhaps, himself disliking his debut novel, Greene felt the need to rescue this scene from its original, overwrought plot. Thus a fog rolls in to surround Raven and Anne’s shed, clouding the vision of Saunders, who leads the many policemen who have been camped outside of the shed since the night before, waiting for Raven to emerge. With the fog as their cover, Anne dons Raven’s trench coat and runs out of the shed, drawing the police to the dark shape passing through the fog so that Raven escapes in the dense soup without notice.

‘The door’s opening.’ Saunders put his whistle in his mouth and lowered his safety catch. The light was bad and the fog deceptive; but he recognized the dark coat as it slipped to the right into the shelter of the coal trucks…. It was impossible to see at all more than twenty feet ahead. But Saunders kept doggedly just in sight blowing his whistle continuously…. They had him cornered, and this Saunders knew was the dangerous moment.

Except that the reader knows that this was not a dangerous moment, for we already know that the dark coat is Anne. There is an artificial thrill of wondering whether the police will inadvertently kill Anne, but simple knowledge of how rote thrillers work tells us that she will not be hurt.

Thus the scene, unfortunately, hardly works as well as in The Man Within—chiefly because it is told from the point of view of Saunders, who only sees Anne. Raven, who is in much greater danger and must move through the scene with delicacy and daring, is absent from the scene altogether. All of the tension that made Andrews’s escape so thrilling in The Man Within is deflated in A Gun For Sale, since the reader knows from the get-go that Saunders has been duped.

Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock: It Wasn't Meant to Be

Readers of pgwp know of my ongoing obsession with Graham Greene—I’ve been working my way through his bibliography for the better part of 2007—but did you also know that I’m equally obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock? Slowly but surely I’ve been watching all of his movies—not in order, though one day I’d like to. So you can imagine I was quite excited by AMC’s “7 Nights of Hitchcock” last week. I was able to catch many that I hadn’t seen before (Saboteur, Marnie, Frenzy, and Torn Curtain) as well as revel in my old favorites (among others, Vertigo and Rear Window—by the way, I have a similar must-see-everything obsession with Jimmy Stewart).

I’ve been thinking about both Greene and Hitchcock together lately. The more Greene novels I read, the more I think Hitch might have done something great with one of them. I’ve already noted that the atmosphere of The Man Within reminded me of Jamaica Inn, an early Hitchcock (made in 1939, ten yeas after The Man Within was published). Likewise Orient Express was positively cinematic in its execution—and I don’t think it takes much effort to imagine that Hitchcock could have made a fantastic mystery-on-a-train with that material.

Wishful thinking aside, many of Greene’s “entertainments” really do seem to have very Hitchcockian plots. A Gun for Sale, for instance, is about a hired killer who is exposed by the very people who hired him, so he’s on the run from the cops while hunting the “real” criminals down—looking for personal justice but also uncovering more nefarious plans. Of course, a beautiful woman gets involved, and the novel reaches its climax during a town-wide safety drill which requires every citizen to wear gas masks. It’s a brilliant set piece Hitchcock could have had a blast with. (Instead, it was butchered in the 1942 noir This Gun for Hire, which transplanted the action from England to California and from a small town filled with gas-masked citizens to an employee drill in a Los Angeles factory. How a director could reject the opportunity to show a young paperboy riding his bike up a desolate street, wearing a gas mask, I'll never understand.)

But apparently Greene thought Hitchcock was tremendously overrated. Greene actually met Hitchcock while Hitch was making Sabotage—a movie based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which is possibly noteworthy since Conrad was one of Greene’s favorite novelists, and The Secret Agent influenced Greene's own writing.  According to Norman Sherry's biography, Greene wrote his brother Hugh,

I had to see Hitchcock, the other day... A silly harmless clown. I shuddered at the things he told me he was doing to Conrad's Secret Agent.

Upon the movie's release, as a film critic for The Spectator, he elaborated on his feelings for the director:

His films consist of a series of small “amusing” melodramatic situations: the murderer’s button dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist’s hands prolonging the notes in the empty church; the fugitives hiding in the bell-tower when the bell begins to swing. Very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them: they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.

Greene apparently found Hitchcock’s lack of subtlety to be akin to a lack of real talent. There’s no real arguing that many of Hitchcock’s movies are designed to end in stunning set pieces—look no further than North by Northwest, the entire plot of which was apparently written with the express purpose of reaching its climax atop Mount Rushmore. Yet the same could be said for A Gun For Sale—let's face it: filling a town with men, women, and children in gas masks is no more of a "'tricky situation" than hanging Cary Grant from George Washington's nose. It's obviously an image devised at the expense of naturalistic plot.

It's too bad, because I really can't think of a novelist and filmmaker better suited for each other. And perhaps their similarities are no accident. Their careers both started in the 1920s and lasted into the 1970s, and they both hit their creative and commercial peaks at the exact same time. On one level or another, it’s quite possible that Greene influenced Hitchcock, despite Greene’s own dislike of the director’s work. Indeed, at some point—I assume in the early 1960s, shortly after the novel’s release—Hitchcock apparently tried to get the rights to A Burnt-Out Case, but Greene wouldn’t allow it, according to this Times article from the 1980s:

“I have not got all that much admiration for Hitchcock. He was offering a rather derisory sum and announced that he had bought it so I said no,” Mr Greene confessed.

Assuming that had happened in the early 60s, and compounded by Greene’s reviews of Hitchcock’s early films, it might explain Hitchcock’s awkwardly mum answers to questions by Bryan Forbes in this interview from 1967:

BF: Am I right in saying that you have never worked with Graham Greene?
AH: No. Never.
BF: Do you regret that?
AH: I don't know. It's very hard to say until you put the thing into practice. It's very difficult to tell.
BF: I think he has so many affinities with you that I'd love to see you two come together.
AH: Yes.
BF: I think he's such a superb craftsman.
AH: Oh yes, he is.
BF: And he writes on the page. He visualises so well. All his sentences just grip you. I'd love to bring you together. If you ever come to ABC, it's you and Graham Greene.
AH: Right. Good.

Based on such taciturn answers, it's hard to really know what Hitchcock thought of Greene—though he had to have known what Greene thought of him.

Watching Psycho this weekend, however, I couldn’t help but see a connection. Psycho is, incidentally, one of my least favorite Hitchcock movies; I think it’s terrifically overrated, except for the one specific thing the movie is hailed for—Hitchcock’s move to set Janet Leigh up as the protagonist, only to kill her off in the first act and flip the story to follow Anthony Perkins. It’s an ingenious move—and by the way, one that Greene had already done at least twice in his novels. Most explicitly is Brighton Rock, which from page one seems to be about Hale, a reporter who immediately realizes he is being hunted in Brighton. He meets a nameless boy early on who threatens his life, then disappears. The rest of the chapter is all Hale, looking for a way to evade the mobsters gradually surrounding him. He befriends a woman, Ida,  so that he won’t be found alone. It all seems like the classic setup for a Greene entertainment—or, for that matter, a Hitchcock flick—until Ida wanders off to the bathroom and Hale is never heard from again. From chapter two onward, the book belongs to that boy, Pinkie, the villain—just as Psycho belongs to Norman Bates. Greene employed the same trick (though in a less sinister fashion) in The Power and the Glory, which begins as if it will be about Mr. Tench, the dentist. The first chapter is his star turn, as he looks out at the pier and wiles away his time in desolate southern Mexico. Like Hale, he encounters a nameless man—this time a priest—who quickly disappears. When chapter two begins, it’s the priest, not Tench, who the cameras, as it were, have chosen to follow.

Hitchcock’s film is regarded as a classic in large part because he dared to do something that hadn’t been done in film before (actually, Antonioni’s L’Avventura does the same thing, but it came out the same year as Psycho so couldn’t have been an influence), but it’s precisely something Greene had dared to do in fiction, more than once, more than twenty years earlier.

Ultimately I find it downright bewildering that Greene and Hitchcock never came together. Greene's distaste for Hitchcock is particularly strange given his own willingness to write what he called "entertainments," as opposed to those works he felt had more literary aspirations. He clearly wasn't too good to write novels that hinged on gunplay and chorus girls rather than larger, philosophical themes, and he was certainly not above cashing a paycheck. To know that there was even a glimmer of a chance in the 1960s for Hitchcock to actually make a film based on one of Greene's novels is all the worse. Greene has gone on record as being disappointed by most of his film adaptations, including those by filmmakers he admired (see Otto Preminger's The Human Factor). Who knows: maybe Hitchcock would've been just what Green was looking for.