Pretty Goes with Pretty

Graham Greene: The Lawless Roads

Maybe you haven't noticed, maybe you don't care, maybe you were silently cheering to yourself, but: my Graham Greene obsession continues on, despite the dearth of Greene-related posts lately. Since the last one I've read The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory, the latter of which I've been meaning to say... something... about. Like, for instance, that it is ridiculous that this brilliant, simple but majestic novel came from Graham Greene, whose prior ten books were mostly great but nevertheless had a real workhorse/journeyman thing going on. I love Greene as a craftsman, the way he handles plot as if it were the least mysterious thing a novelist need figure out. But The Power and the Glory is just too perfect. Prior to embarking on my quest to read all of his books in a row, in order, I'd read this novel and two others, all bona fide classics of English literature. My hope was that by reading his works straight through I might get a stronger sense of his trajectory as a writer. To some extent that's true, but the leap he took from Brighton Rock to The Power and the Glory (including the travelogue and an entertainment in between) is astounding.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be my P&G post. More of a placeholder for a Lawless Roads post. This was Greene's book of nonfiction which he wrote just prior to P&G. He went to Mexico for a month and traveled around the southern part of that country, which had just come out of some serious anti-Catholic purges. Religion was outlawed, churces were burned, priests were executed. The worst was over by the time Greene got there, though its effects were still apparent.

I bring this up because, coincidentally, The Millions had a nice review/summary of the book yesterday. My two cents: as travelogues go I found Journey Without Maps a better read. Greene went to Africa really with no expectations and frankly no ability when it came to traveling. His Mexico trip, on the other hand, while interesting, was more premeditated: he was looking for specific material. (Interestingly, however, he didn't really find it.)

A lot of people likely pick up The Lawless Roads because they read The Power and the Glory first and want to learn more about what "really" happened in Mexico in this not-too-distant past. I'm not so sure that's actually the best thing to do. For one, as Norman Sherry exhaustively illustrates in his biography of Greene, Greene pillaged his nonfiction work for scenes, characters, descriptions, and sometimes entire passages nearly word for word, to use in his fictionalized account. Since Greene's real-life experience came after all the real danger in Mexico (not to mention it is self-aware in the extreme), the nonfiction book is actually far less palpable, far less visceral, than the novel. It is therefore a more interesting companion to The Power and the Glory if you're interested in Greene as a writer and want a window into his fiction-writing process. Anyone who is truly interested in finding out more about the true story of Mexico's history would probably do better to pick up a history book. Surely there must be a well-written book that is really focused on Mexico in the early twentieth century that depicts this horrific time.

Speaking of companion reads for The Power and the Glory, try this on for size: before you read Greene's book, pick up Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter first. Urrea and Greene couldn't be more different as writers go—Urrea is this close to being magical realism—but The Hummingbird's Daughter takes place in Mexico a generation before the action of The Power and the Glory. In Urrea's novel, the government is steadily growing more and more anti-Catholic. Greene's novel picks up about thirty years later, when things have truly descended to their worst level. The two books make an interesting pair.

Numerous additional posts on Graham Greene—most of them more fully baked than this one—can be found here.

Graham Greene: The Confidential Agent

[Note: numerous other posts on Graham Greene and his novels here.]

Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene skips right over The Confidential Agent as if it were never written. But in fact this thriller cropped up in between Greene’s nonfiction account of his travels in Mexico, The Lawless Roads, and his masterpiece, also set in Mexico, The Power and the Glory. Apparently Greene was knee-deep in writing The Power and the Glory but he’d hit a wall (not sure if it was creatively or financially). By then he’d either been in Mexico, writing about Mexico, or thinking about Mexico for couple years straight. So he took six weeks off and did up his second “entertainment” (the first being the far superior A Gun for Sale). The novel follows D., a foreigner from a country somewhere in Europe mired in a civil war, who has come to London to purchase coal from an English businessman, Lord Benditch; if D.’s side can get this coal, then they might finally be able to quash the rebels. The problem is that there are other agents, representing both sides of the war, competing with D. for Benditch’s business. Before he even sets foot on English soil, D. is being observed or hunted by enemies and distrustful allies alike.

Knowing that the book was, in Greene’s mind, not meant to be “literary” (that’s how he distinguished his novels from his entertainments), and that it was to some degree a distraction from what was really occupying his creative mind, you can feel that the book was a sort of rush job. What struck me as immediately strange, decidedly un-Greenean, was the lack of detail in this book. Greene had dedicated so much effort in each of his other novels to getting the facts straight, believable, real. If Pinkie was walking down a street in Brighton, then by golly Greene had been to that street himself; the shops being described were there, the intersections were real. Hell, Greene had just spent two months in southern Mexico, where the government conducted anti-Catholic purges, in part so he could write his next novel. The man does not shirk the responsibility of detail.

In The Confidential Agent, on the other hand, we are presented with characters without real names—D., L., Mr. K.—and while the action takes place in London, these characters are concerned with a civil war happening in their home country of… somewhere in Europe. It is never specified. In the movie adaptation, it’s Spain, which would make sense given the book was written in the late 1930s; perhaps, if read at the time it was published, the country would have obviously been Spain, though Greene makes absolutely no allusions to the culture of the country, or of how the two sides of the battle differ politically. But I think, cynically, that Greene left D.’s homeland vague so that Greene would not be obligated to provide the small details that color all of his other novels—one of the very qualities of his writing that cause people to lump his novels into that category, “Greeneland.”

The result is that nearly every character and situation is two-dimensional, and the stakes don’t feel palpable. When, at the end, D. and Rose (Benditch’s daughter) are returning to his home country, it feels unreal. They are traveling to more danger. Rose, honestly, has made perhaps the most idiotic decision of her life by joining D. on the boat out of England and into a civil war—for love!, or whatever. What’s more, the pacing of this novel is not as taut as Greene is capable of. A Gun for Sale also follows a hunted man, Raven, through England as he tries to stop a war breaking out, and every element of that plot is better rendered—Raven’s motivation, his previous life, the adrenaline running through him as he is chased—all keep the energy of the plot high. (By the way, there’s more fog and another shed in The Confidential Agent, though not used to the same effect.) We run with Raven through every page. D., on the other hand, seems resigned to the chase. He would be caught, tried, and killed numerous times if it weren’t for other people, coincidentally or intentionally, intervening on his behalf. His success, at the end of the novel, is ambiguous—other than getting the girl, which seems slight, forced, and frankly unimportant in the bigger picture of his situation.

Graham Greene: England Made Me (Briefly)

I never got around to writing anything about England Made Me, which Graham Greene wrote shortly after It's a Battlefield and prior to his trip to Africa for Journey Without Maps. It was a good book, better than the flawed It's a Battlefield and dealing (more subtly) with similar themes (namely, socialism, communism, class issues), but it's not a terribly special book, either. I guess that's why I wasn't moved to say much. For the sake of completism (and my own reference, when in a year or more I'll have trouble remembering what each and everyone of these twenty-some-odd books were about), I will point to this review at Book Addicts, which happened to go up earlier this week.

I'll leave the Book Addicts to describe the book itself, but one very small point I'll make is about the ending, in which Krogh, the business man, returns to work after the denoument. This was the third time Greene employed this type of cold ending. In It's a Battlefield it was the Assistant Commissioner who returned to work; and in Orient Express, most cruelly, it was Myatt. Quite simply, despite what tragedies may have occured, life goes on. It is exactly what happens in reality, yet in all three books the mere act of going on seems heartless.

Many more posts on the work of Graham Greene can be found here.

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters

My dear, after all this time have we got to say goodbye. Harry says I am not to speak to you. Is this final? You always said you would stick to me. I don’t know what to do. For God’s sake send me a line.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Graham Greene: A Life in Letters also hits stores next week. Greene wrote thousands of letters over the course of his life, to his wife, to his mother, to his mistress, and to many others. Fans of his novel The End of the Affair, in particular, may want to pick this up, as it follows Greene’s longtime affair with Catherine Walston, who was the inspiration for Sarah Miles.

You can read an excerpt from A Life in Letters here. Terry Eagleton reviewed the book for the Guardian, and came to the curious conclusion that “Greene's life sometimes seems straight out of his fiction,” as if it weren’t quite obviously the other way around.

Many more posts on the work of Graham Greene can be found here.

Greene for the Weekend

Three Graham Greene posts in a week. Even for me that's a little much. But this morning both Maud Newton and Ed Champion noted this article in the Independent, about the discovery of audio tapes of some never-before-heard Graham Greene radio interviews. In the broadcasts Greene discusses his time in Indochina, smoking opium, and is writing habits, and also reads from a work-in-progress which eventually became The Quiet American. The broadcasts will be released in the U.K. next week as a CD released by the British Library, part of a series that also includes audio tracks by Beckett, Shaw, Wells, and others. The article includes an exerpt from the interviews, featuring Greene discussing his novel Brighton Rock.

The article also mentions one of my favorite Greene anecdotes, which relates to when he was the editor for the short-lived magazine Night and Day. Greene wrote film reviews for the magazine, and in an article about Shirley Temple, who was nine, he went on and on about how she must actually be an adult midget and fully aware of the coquettish sexuality she puts across on screen. Well, he got sued by the movie studio for libel, and lost. He heard that he'd lost the case while traveling in Mexico and wrote to a friend "Apparently I've got to apologize to that bitch Shirley Temple."

Recent posts by yours truly on Graham Greene:

Why Hitchcock and Greene never collaborated
Greene recycling his own material in A Gun for Sale
How Journey Without Maps changed Greene's writing style

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.

Journey Without Maps Addendum

A day or so after my previous post, I took up Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene, which I've been reading concurrently as I trek through Greeneland. I was pleased to see that both of my assumptions outlined in that post—that Greene's Liberian journey spawned an indeliable link for him between the acts of writing and traveling, and that the form of writing a travelogue informed his overall skill—were validated through a couple of anecdotal passages. Of the latter assumption, there was this passage:

His letters to his mother, to [his brother] Hugh, and to literary agents, his articles, book and film reviews, after he had established himself in London, all reveal a growing sense of confidence, and one wonders whether this was not in part due to the fact that he had, in Liberia, experienced what few of his contemporaries in London had experienced: he had undertaken a journey into the unknown, come close to the primitive origins of mankind, journeyed without maps and had, like those who had survived the horrors of the First World War, come through—by means of his own determination and grit. Certainly, he now had a surge of creative energy which was nothing short of phenomenal.

Of course it's not difficult to look at a list of Greene's books and see, quite simply, that all of his best-known novels followed right after Journey Without Maps—obviously something happened. But I'm encountering most of Greene's novels in succession; I've read a few of the later novels but I've been trying to put them to the back of my mind as I follow his development. So my experience of Journey was really the sense of "hey, the writer of England Made Me was developing," as opposed to the sense of "here's where the writer of The Quiet American got his shit together"—know what I mean? This passage from Sherry let's me know that I'm not imagining things.

As to the other point—that Greene essentially caught the travel bug and, consciously or not, entwined it with his fiction writing—this anecdote was both entertaining and insightful to that end. To set the scene: Greene at this point was still writing Journey Without Maps and A Gun for Sale, while England Made Me had just come out—to lackluster reception. Greene, with his agent Nancy Pearn, was soliciting numerous magazines with short stories and pitches for stories, and not always meeting with success. He was very close to finishing both his works in progress, but he also had a wife and two children and income was an issue. Pearn suggested giving a pitch for a story to the News Chronicle.

With so much on hand Greene might well have let the suggestion of a synopsis for the News Chronicle sleep awhile. Not so. The day after promising to think abut a story he produced a synopsis called “Miss Mitton in Moscow” and coupled it with the astonishing idea that he should leave for Moscow, almost immediately, his urgent deadlines for his two books notwithstanding: “Here is the synopsis of a 10,000 word story for the News Chronicle. If they feel inclined to commission it, could you hurry up their decision, as I want to get in the background and the satirical description of the tourists, as it were, on the spot. In other words, will they make up their minds so that I can book a seat for Moscow to leave in ten days!”

It is strange that on the suggestion of a commission for a serial Greene was willing to drop everything and go to Moscow. It could not be because the synopsis promised a brilliant story, yet he was prepared to follow his star to Moscow, chasing after background for a story about a bored, disillusioned journalist meeting up with an old lady’s naïvety and excitement in visiting Moscow for the first time; of how her absurdities become a topic of conversation; of how he has to help her out of the country ahead of the other tourists as she had tried the Moscow authorities too much; only to discover, when he finds himself to be a central figure in an advertised Soviet Trial that Miss Mitton was a dye expert and had carried out a smart piece of commercial espionage.

The literary editor of the News Chronicle liked the synopsis and asked the see the first instalment, which Nancy Pearn thought encouraging, but this was not sufficient for Greene: “I explained it was dependent on a definite decision within ten days. The boat’s sailed now & there’s not another till the spring. Besides it’s a costly business & I wouldn’t take the trip without a definite commission. So we’ll have to wait for another story to come to mind.

Graham Greene: Journey Without Maps

[A lot of people seem to be finding my Graham Greene posts via Google, so I hope my regular readers will forgive the repetition of this first bit (probably my regular readers just scroll past anyway—be honest, you just want me to keep writing about Feist): I've tasked myself with reading all of Graham Greene's books in succession. If you're curious to read my thoughts on any of Greene's other novels, click here and see if I've gotten to it yet. ]

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Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene's nonfiction travelogue recounting his audacious 1935 trip through Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, is like a wedge shoved deep into his oeuvre. While it is not the book that catapulted him from merely popular novelist to lasting literary influence, it nonetheless signals a shift in his ability as a writer. The seeds of his talent have been present in his last few novels, but the experience of Africa—and the way he wrote about it—feel as if someone has put those seeds in the path of direct sunlight.

Greene has come to be known for novels in which his (usually British) protagonists exist in foreign, underdeveloped—hot—beautiful landscapes: The Quiet American in Vietnam; The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case in Africa; The Power and the Glory in Mexico; The Comedians in Haiti; and so on. All of those novels came later. Prior to his trip to Africa, Greene’s first four (actually six) novels all took place in England or, I suggest, ostensible stand-ins for England. The Man Within and It’s a Battlefield both take place inside the country. Orient Express follows a largely British cast (save the Yugoslavian Dr. Czinner and the Austrian Grünlich), but the novel exists outside of any one country as it travels across Europe. The characters exist in a self-contained bubble. Likewise England Made Me concerns itself mostly with twin siblings Anthony and Kate Farrant, Brits who have taken up in Stockholm; but the majority of the action occurs in the context of the global corporation they work for, Krogh’s, a company which conducts its business in English. The Stockholm setting is largely arbitrary; Anthony’s struggle has more to do with his placement within the company than it  does within a foreign city. And of course, the title alone should tip you off that Sweden is not the country Greene is most concerned with.

It’s no surprise that Greene had yet to bring the exotic locations into his novels—though his tentative fictional forays out of England in those two novels (plus Anthony Farrant’s background as someone who had lived in Shanghai, Aden, and elsewhere) do point to some inevitable desire to place his characters outside of the familiar. No surprise, because Greene was a realist writer; from the very beginning he’s had to experience his locations in order to write about them, whether walking from the outskirts of Lewes into its center for The Man Within or taking a weekend trip to Stockholm for England Made Me; and as of 1935 that was essentially the extent of his traveling experience. Paul Theroux’s introduction to Journey Without Maps (which incidentally is a worthy read after you’ve finished the book—he calls bullshit on much of what Greene writes of) spells it out:

[Greene] had hardly traveled. He had made jaunts out of England, but in a hilarious, weekending way, and had never ventured beyond Europe. He knew nothing of Africa, had never camped or slept rough or been on a long sea voyage or a long hike of any consequence—certainly not a trek through the bush. Probably influenced by the journeys his friends and contemporaries were taking, he got it into his head to hike with porters and carriers through an unmapped part of the Liberian hinterland; he did not know exactly how many miles he would have to walk , or how long it would take, or what his actual route would be.

Much odder than this vagueness—to me, at any rate... was Greene's decision to take his young female cousin Barbara with him. She was twenty-three, she had never been anywhere, she'd had a privileged upbringing, she was not much of a walker.

In other words, Greene really had no business attempting this journey. But he did accomplish it—suffering fever along the way—and he considered it a life-changing experience.

Journey Without Maps is a dramatic act on Greene’s part to bring the far corners—the desperate corners—of the world into his realm of experience, and therefore into his writing. Besides being a realist, he was also a devotee of Joseph Conrad, and many other contemporaries (Waugh, for instance) were making similar African pilgrimages in Conrad’s footsteps. On one level, at least, Greene’s trip is a naïve rite of passage—more an attempt to acquire a level of “experience” any novelist worth his salt should have than a conscious act to “change” his fiction. In fact the Liberian trip didn’t factor into his fiction at all, other than a short story, “A Chance for Mr. Lever.” Nevertheless Greene’s subsequent travels, often as ambitious as the Liberian episode, did factor directly into his novels. Within three years he was riding a mule through Mexico, which resulted in the nonfiction Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and the Glory. Soon he would return to Africa, to Sierra Leone, where he lived for a year; here he set The Heart of the Matter. Later in life he would return to Africa a third time with the express mission of researching for A Burnt-Out Case, which takes place in a leper colony.

But I think what may separate Greene’s pre-Journey novels from those that came after is more significant than mere scene setting. Looking back at the pre-Journey novels, all but Orient Express are flawed; they each seem to occupy themselves with a preconceived theme that stamps its way across every page at the expense of realism (in The Man Within), character (It’s a Battlefield), or form (England Made Me—which includes odd forays into stream-of-consciousness interior monologues)—in other words, much of what Greene is best remembered for. Journey, by its very nature, could not suffer in the same way. Greene didn’t know what to expect. All he could do was record what he saw and reflect as went. Thus the heat of Africa and its lush greenery, the natives’ nakedness and alternately strange, stoic, or childlike behavior, became the bulk of the book’s content, colored at every turn by Greene’s very real emotions—anxiety, anticipation, exhaustion, homesickness. After reading the pre-Journey novels, where melodrama frequently forced its way into a scene to derail its believability, Journey Without Maps reads to me almost like a disciplinary exercise for Greene—he couldn’t insert melodrama; he was forced instead to rely on its more subtle cousin, tension. I’ll bet that its no accident that, regardless of their settings, Greene’s string of best-regarded novels followed nearly one after the other directly after Journey Without Maps (not including the noir thriller A Gun for Sale, which was written simultaneously with Journey)—Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American. The fact that England-set Brighton Rock was the first in that succession indicates that exotic scene setting was not the first or only lesson Greene learned through his trip or through the writing of Journey Without Maps.

New Country

This was what I carried with me into new country, an instinctive simplicity, a thoughtless idealism. It was the first time, moving from one place to another, that I hadn't expected something better of the new country than I had found in the old, that I was prepared for disappointment. It was the first time, too, that I was not disappointed.

—Graham Greene, Journey without Maps

Graham Greene: It's a Battlefield

I’ve been slow to post on It’s a Battlefield, Graham Greene’s third novel. I’ve been finished with it for about a month and am now well into his next, England Made Me. My laziness in writing about it is probably a good indication of how I felt about it. Not bad, but not great, either. The novel is conceptually interesting, but it never congeals into a successful work. Its most dramatic moments feel like rewarmed scenes from his previous novels—the love triangle recalls The Man Within, while the business-as-usual conclusion is similar to that of the far superior Orient Express.

The novel’s central character is Jim Drover, who has been imprisoned for the murder of a policeman during a riot (the policeman was going to strike Drover’s wife). However, Drover never appears in the book—not a single scene. (Interestingly, Norman Sherry’s biography implies that Greene wrote numerous prison scenes but cut them all out.) Instead the book concerns itself with all the characters who are satellites of Drover’s current situation—his brother Conrad, his wife Milly, and her sister Kay; the Assistant Commissioner of police; Conder, a reporter; Mr. Surrogate, a member of the local communist chapter (of which Drover was a member); and a few others.

So, like Orient Express, this is an ensemble novel, no one character taking control. But where that novel was so concise, so gripping, It’s a Battlefield is a muddle. It makes you wonder how Greene was able to keep things so perfectly paced and plotted in Orient Express, how he was able to keep all his characters so well-drawn, when he more or less failed in this same respect here. Perhaps it is because the very nature of Orient Express entwined with a linear progression toward a climax. The train moved forward, and characters could only enter and exit the story when the train stopped. It’s a Battlefield is much looser, more tangential. There are more characters, for one; many are given just a few pages or a single chapter, such as the policeman’s wife. But even those that are more directly tied to Drover’s fate are given a rather democratic number of pages, to the point that much of their dramatic arcs are suppressed. When the promiscuous Kay takes a date with Jules, for instance, the heart behind their engagement is deflated. The chapter is told from Jules’s perspective, an otherwise minor character whom the reader has nothing invested in.

More drama is found in the love triangle between Drover and his wife and brother, Milly and Conrad. The entire relationship reads like The Man Within version 2.0—thankfully a subplot this time around rather than an entire novel. In that book, Andrews was torn between his love for the virtuous (in his eyes) Elizabeth and his father figure, Carlyon, leader of a band of smugglers. Like Drover, Carlyon was largely offstage for most of The Man Within, as Andrews internally wrestled with whether he should love a man who represented so much that Andrews loathed about himself and his childhood—not to mention who he had already betrayed. In truth “love triangle” is not really the correct term—perhaps “allegiance triangle” would be more apt. Similarly, Conrad is drawn to Milly, who he feels is saintlike, yet is torn over his feelings for his brother, who may be sentenced to death or may be given eighteen years in prison. Conrad has always looked up to Jim, and cannot process that what Jim did was actually wrong; yet a part of Conrad wants Jim to die so that he can be with Milly forever.

Ultimately Conrad betrays his brother by consummating his relationship with Milly. But like Andrews in The Man Within, the further Conrad gets, physically, from his love, the less he feels its effects and the more his allegiance to his brother grows. The same can be said for Andrews and Elizabeth in The Man Within;  when Andrews heads for the city he quickly falls into bed with another woman, and when he returns to Elizabeth but is outside her house when the smugglers arrive, cowardice overpowers love. Likewise, in Orient Express, the romance at the novel’s center disintigrates when it is forced apart by physical separation; once Carlton and Coral are separated, Carlton simply goes on with his life.

It’s a Battlefield is full of other themes as well, not least of which is socialism and Communism. This too appeared in Orient Express, in the form of Dr. Czinner. In that novel all of Greene’s thoughts on the matter were expressed directly through Czinner. With It’s a Battlefield (and his next novel, England Made Me), Greene spends more time painting an entire landscape filled with political unrest, whether in the form of actual members of the Communist party in It’s a Battlefield or in allowing the stark class divisions in that book and in England Made Me to speak for themselves. It’s interesting that Greene would come to be known as a “Catholic writer,” for in these early books religion makes scant appearance. According to Norman Sherry’s biography, Greene did join the Communist Party in Great Britain when he was twenty years old. However he paid his dues for just four weeks before lapsing. Obviously Greene had some continued sympathy, or at least fascination, for the workers, though it’s unclear to me whether he was committed in reality or if it was simply a newsworthy issue of the day.

Graham Greene: Orient Express

At age 29, Graham Greene was already publishing his fourth novel, Orient Express (also known as Stamboul Train). Perhaps it’s no wonder that his previous three novels were not that great; broadly speaking, it’s common that a novelist in his or her early or mid-twenties might not have settled on his or her own voice or style. But as one grows older, giving one’s craft time to develop, the grasp on nuance, subtlety, and tone becomes more firm. Orient Express finds Greene taking on an ensemble cast and a third-person omniscient perspective—the opposite of his near-claustrophobic debut. Where The Man Within could work easily as a play—you’d need no more than three sets and a cast of three main players—Orient Express is decidedly more filmic, which is not surprising given Greene’s love of the cinema.

You can almost see the credits rolling at the beginning of the book, as it opens at a train station in Ostend, where a purser helps a succession of distinct character types aboard the train: a young chorus girl, a wealthy Jew, and a mysterious mustachioed doctor. We meet each of these characters—Coral Musker, Carleton Myatt, and Dr. Czinner—from the perspective of a detached character who knows nothing but what he sees. This announces a new tack for Greene and sets the tone for the rest of the book, even as we get to know the characters better: Greene paints their disposition through their actions and appearance rather than their innermost thoughts. It’s a Creative Writing 101 lesson, but Greene didn’t really seem to embrace it until now. It also suits the mystery element of the novel. Immediately there are clues to take in, about the doctor in particular. The purser is surprised to learn that the doctor has an English passport, despite a noticeable accent. When Myatt encounters him later, he notes that the man’s clothes are torn and worn—not the clothing a man of means would wear.

Orient Express is most definitely working within a subgenre, the train mystery. Think Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Putting your characters on a train just begs for mystery. But Greene’s mystery is not one of murder (though there is a murderer); it has more to do with identities, with a certain freedom from your own life you can enjoy while traveling. So long as your feet are not on solid ground, you can be whoever you like. Dr. Czinner is the first and most obvious example. He boards the train as Dr. Richard John, a schoolteacher from England. But we learn soon enough that he is actually a political exile returning to his home of Belgrade. As the train makes its three-day journey to Constantinople, stopping in Cologne, Vienna, and Subotica along the way, more passengers board the train, and each wear their masks. Josef Grünlich, who boards in Vienna, is a murder on the lam, so of course he hides his identity. The author Q. T. Savory has banked his career on appearing as a working-class Cockney, though the reporter Mabel Warren finds him transparent. Warren, who is a butch lesbian, suspects her lover, the beautiful, feminine, and fairly vacant Janet Pardoe, to be looking for a new sugar daddy (she’s tired of her sugar mommy, apparently); so Warren herself sets her sights on Coral Musker as new girl-toy. All of this speaks to an anything-goes mentality that only feels natural in the limbo of the locomotive.

This theme is played out in the relationship that serves as the heart of the novel, that of Myatt and Coral. This is the most tentative romance I’ve ever read; their entire relationship is built on mixed signals and misunderstood overtures—if ever two people fell in love, it’s these two. It is alternately awkward, sweet, creepy, noble, and cruel. Coral is a struggling chorus girl, flawed because she is “forgettable.” She is too plain to ever be a leading lady. Myatt meanwhile is a rich Jew, in an often unfortunately stereotypical sense. For reasons of both class and culture, the two should never meet nor fall in love. At first Myatt reminds Coral of any other Jew she’s ever met—they stand outside the stage door waiting to take her out; and after their first encounter Myatt has a dream in which he and a friend are driving down a boulevard looking for prostitutes and he chooses Coral. But nevertheless their lives intertwine on the train. Coral has a fainting spell so Myatt lets her sleep in his first-class berth; he sleeps in the hall. She suspects him but nevertheless takes him up on the offer. The following morning he buys another first-class berth for her out of charity. But she assumes he expects some quid pro quo. Still, she takes him up on it. When she alludes to his expectations he denies it, but now that the thought is in his mind, they do set a date for that evening after all. Both seem to approach the night with dread, despite spending the day together on the train. By the night, she’s declared her love for him; when Myatt realizes Coral is a virgin, their sexual act becomes more noble in his mind, and he too declares his love for her. They make plans to remain together once they’ve reached their destination. But of course, Constantinople is an actual place. It’s not limbo.

The other lead in the novel is Dr. Czinner, a Communist who narrowly escaped arrest and certain death five years previous and has never been heard from since. He is on his way back to Belgrade to lead an uprising. Unfortunately for him he is recognized by Mabel Warren. Warren is a fascinating character. She has the briefest ride on the train—she gets on at the second stop and is left behind at the third—yet she sets Czinner’s story in motion and plays a less direct but significant role in Myatt and Coral’s story as well. Greene has a great knack for making colorful and memorable characters out of people who occupy only a small number of pages—I’m thinking of Mr. Tench in The Power and the Glory or Albert Parkis in The End of the Affair. Warren is an alcoholic lesbian with major co-dependence issues. She’s full of spite and loathing and has the tenacity of a terrier. She is positive that Czinner is returning to Belgrade and bullies him into a story for her newspaper. He doesn’t cooperate beyond uttering a few words, but she publishes her story via phone from Vienna, and by the time he reaches Subotica the police and military are waiting.

Subotica, a town on the border of Hungary and Yugoslavia, is the penultimate chapter of the novel and is the real climax. The action leaves the train as Czinner is pulled for questioning—along with Grünlich and Coral (perhaps not incidentally, the most depraved and most pure-hearted of all the characters). This is the moment when the novel becomes a true potboiler, as the trio makes a daring escape after being found guilty of various crimes. This is also the moment where you realize Greene is better, more deft, than the preceding pages might have lulled you to believe. It is a tragedy that Coral has been wrapped up in this portion of the plot, and I didn’t realize until this point just how wrapped up I was in her story. I was screaming at her to stay put, the way you scream at characters on Lost to do the sensible thing.

This novel, like so many of Greene’s books, lives and dies by its plot twists, so forgive me if I become vague. Suffice it to say the fates of Czinner, Grünlich, and Coral are determined at Subotica. But the real tragedy of the book is its coda: Constantinople. This short, twenty-page chapter follows the remaining characters to the end of the line, and the whole thing is a brilliant dagger to the heart. Myatt, of all characters, is the ultimate embodiment of the novel’s theme. The Orient Express is a limbo where you can be whoever you want. But step off that train and your fantasies slough off like water from the shower. We are who we are: it’s a delicious tragedy.

R.E.M.'s Green(e)

Regular readers of this blog know that my attitude toward music and literature and art and everything else is one big overlap. How it all affects me is all tangled up in a web of mental associations, which in turn determines how I approach all of it.

Take my Graham Greene obsession. The first mention of it was this post, which was sparked by conversations about music, not literature. Prior to posting about it here, I'd had an email conversation with a friend where I also related my Graham Greene fancy with music. The title of that email was "Graham Greene is my R.E.M. is my Graham Greene," or something like that. I was going on about how the best thing about Greene is that he's done just short of a million books, so any time I'm in a reading funk I can go to him. It's sort of like realizing late in life that you really dig R.E.M.—there's always more back catalog, all dependably wonderful. (Not coincidentally I was picking up a bunch of R.E.M.'s back catalog at the time, thanks to Tower Records' going-out-of-business sale.) I really do think that if Greene could have a pop music equivalent, it would be R.E.M.

So imagine the kismet when, just as I'm starting in on reading everything Greene has ever done, Matthew Perpetua (a Fluxblogger) has begun a similar endeavor with R.E.M. At his new blog Pop Songs 07, Perpetua is writing about every R.E.M song ever written. If ever a band was worthy of such an effort, it's probably them.

Graham Greene: The Name of Action & Rumour at Nightfall

 
In my quest to read all of Graham Greene’s novels in chronological succession, I come immediately to a roadblock: his second and third books, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, are out of print, and have been ever since Greene’s publisher sold out of their first pressing long ago. The books have been repudiated by their author and will likely remain out of print forever. I’ve gone on, therefore, to his fourth novel Orient Express (also known as Stamboul Train). But it almost seems unfair not to at least learn about those intervening books, especially because the level of quality rises so greatly from The Man Within to Orient Express. So I sought out Norman Sherry’s biography and read up on the period of Greene’s life covering his first four novels.

Upon its publication, The Man Within was a smash, selling more than 10,000 copies—considered a best-seller at the time. Greene basked in the limelight while it lasted. One passage in Norman Sherry’s biography points to an interview in which he clearly indicated his enjoyment:

[Greene] must have felt at this time that he was on the crest of a wave. His first published novel was a runaway success and he was now known as a writer and courted—the London Evening News, which was publishing a series of interviews with clever young men and women about what they expected from life, included Graham Greene. Given his relative immaturity at twenty-five, his expectations ‘after sustained effort,’ were in part predictable: to be rich and successful and have houses in London, Somerset and Rhodes.

(As an aside, the character Q. T. Savory, from Orient Express, is a novelist full of his own success and lampooned with great humor by Greene. Greene was sued by a contemporary, J. B. Priestly, for libel. Priestly had written a critical review of The Man Within, but the two did not seem to know each other terribly well and Greene did not admit that Savory is based on Priestly—actually if you read the chapter on this in Sherry’s biography, Priestly comes off looking like a parody of Savory! At any rate, based on Greene’s enjoyment of his own success, followed by his subsequent run of flops, I’d suggest that a more seasoned and humbled Greene may very well have been lampooning his former self.)

For a moment Greene was the toast of the town, and he seemed to take for granted that that would continue, despite his own growing misgivings about the quality of the novel for which he was being celebrated. He quit his day job as a journalist for the Times and became a full-time novelist, taking a monthly salary from his publisher as an advance on royalties. It seemed a safe risk for all parties, but things took a turn.

In The Man Within, as I noted in my post about that book, Greene had yet to find his own voice. The book’s lead character, Andrews, spent more time telling the reader how cowardly he was rather than really showing it. Reviewing the novel upon its publication in 1929, the New York Times prophetically had similar things to say: “Once he achieves… a less isolated and poetic approach to the inner workings of human characters he will be a really significant novelist.” Greene might not have objected to that criticism, and probably thought he was rising above his debut with his follow-up, The Name of Action. Yet when that book was published in 1930, the reviews were nearly all bad. Sherry notes that the critics were doubly damning because they felt it was worse than his debut:

The trouble was that most reviewers compared The Name of Action unfavourably with The Man Within and at this time he had come to feel that The Man Within was more and more terrible. he admitted he was getting rather tired of kind friends who “tell me they like this but of course they much prefer the other.” He was convinced that while his first was a moderately bad book, his second was a moderately good one. Even with his mother he argued against the view that his heroine Elizabeth in The Man Within was a success: “I don’t think she’s a character at all, but a sentimental complex. But though I sez it as shouldn’t I think Anna-Marie Demassener [heroine of The Name of Action] quite adorable.”

Greene’s third novel, Rumour at Nightfall, fared no better. Based solely on the reviews Sherry reprints, I get the impression that Greene had yet to learn the lessons pointed out in the New York Times’ review of his first book. The New Statesman said of Rumour, that Greene had “a good story to tell. But he is so resolutely and laboriously romantic that one can believe scarcely a word he says. The (psychological) drama is dressed up in all the colours of carnival; the emotions of his characters are largely theatrical; he achieves definition of falsification”; and the New Republic lamented that “these characters stagger under the overwhelming weight of their own mental questionings and probings… Mr. Greene’s forte is his ability to cover places and objects with atmosphere laid on heavily, like paint.”

Both of these critiques could be leveled at The Man Within without changing a single word. Looking again at Greene’s author’s note preceding the reprint of The Man Within, his claim that an author should be granted “one sentimental gesture” to his earliest effort becomes noteworthy for the emphasis on one. All of these novels are obviously of a piece in his mind.

The two novels were not only critical failures, but commercial as well. Combined, they  sold around 2,000 copies. Greene and his wife Vivien had already been forced to leave London and move into a more affordable house in the country. While there he spent a great deal of time on a his fourth book—not a novel, but a biography of John Wilcot, the second Earl of Rochester who lived in the seventeenth century. After a great deal of research and writing, his publisher rejected the manuscript outright.

By 1932, at age 28, Greene was at his lowest point, with three failures in four years. His publisher had been paying him a monthly salary all this time, but finally threatened that if his next book was not up to their standards, their payments would stop altogether. Orient Express could not have happened at a better time. Greene had finally let go of his rudimentary psychological portraits and instead made a more realist account of his characters, allowing plot and action to tell the bulk of his story.

More on Orient Express later this week.

Graham Greene: The Man Within

As I mentioned last week, I’ve given myself the task of reading all of Graham Greene’s novels, from first to last. That’s twenty-four novels, starting in 1929 and ending in 1988. He’s also got four books of autobiography, numerous short stories, three travel books, and many plays and screenplays. I won’t commit to reading all of those as well unless they really pique my interest as I come upon them chronologically. At the rate I read, twenty-four novels is more than enough to last me a while.

So, we begin at the beginning: The Man Within. Greene started this book when he was twenty-one, and it took him a couple of years to write. Actually he had written two additional novels prior to this, neither of which were picked up by a publisher. It’s also worth noting that the next two novels of Greene’s to be published were disowned by the author, never to reprinted. This puts The Man Within in a lonely place within Greene’s oeuvre, flanked on each side by two pairs of failures. Greene himself acknowledged this up front when The Man Within was reprinted in the 1950s, noting that it really only existed for posterity, nothing more. The book was published “with inexplicable success,” he said in his author’s note. The statement sounds humble but indeed he was embarrassed by the novel within just a year or two of its publication. He goes on:

I tried to revise [the novel] for this edition, but when I had finished my sad and hopeless task, the story remained just as embarrassingly romantic, the style as derivative, and I had eliminated perhaps the only quality it possessed—its youth…. Why reprint then? I can offer no real excuse, but perhaps an author may be allowed one sentimental gesture towards his own past, the period of ambition and hope.

Greene is exactly right in his self-critique: the novel is in print for posterity, and it should be read for posterity. The whole of The Man Within feels like a first novel. The angst and self-loathing experienced by Andrews, the main character, is two-dimensional, and often Greene’s authorial voice lets that of his influences creep in. Almost nothing about this book, beyond the broadest strokes, would indicate that the same author had The Quiet American or The Power and the Glory in his future.

Picture a lesser-drawn version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man careening through Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, and you’ve pretty much got The Man Within. Lots of inner turmoil, lots of fog, lots of lousy men. The novel opens with its protagonist, Andrews, on the run through the night fog of coastal England. Andrews is a smuggler, but he’s double-crossed his crew by alerting the local authorities of the place and time at which the smuggler’s boat, The Good Chance, was to dock. In the ensuing scuffle one lawman is killed and six of the smugglers are arrested. Three get away, however, including the ringleader, Carlyon, who was a surrogate father of sorts to Andrews. Their relationship, which nearly hints at something more intimate than a father/son bond, makes Andrews’s betrayal particularly perplexing, both to Carlyon and his crew and to Andrews himself.

The betrayal is rooted in Andrews’s father issues, which is also where the book’s title comes from. The epigraph, a quote from Sir Thomas Browne, reads “There’s another man within me that’s angry with me.” Andrews recognizes an inner critic, one that sabotages every noble gesture he imagines, filling him with an unredeemable self-loathing. The voice is borne from his real father, once the leader of the band of smugglers now led by Carlyon. Andrews’s father is revered by the criminals, his reputation growing more mythic with each passing day. But in reality he was an abusive monster who bred fear and cowardice into his son and whose beastly attitude likely caused his wife’s too-soon death. Upon his death he leaves all of his possessions—most notably The Good Chance—not to Andrews but to Carlyon. So from one perspective the two could be seen as boys in competition for a father’s attention, but Andrews sees it instead as two fathers battling for the son. Carlyon, perhaps out of guilt, recruits Andrews to join his ship, and though the two develop a strong bond, the rest of the crew, the boat, the smuggler’s life in general, is a nasty reminder to Andrews of his hated father. His betrayal of the crew is an act of rebellion against his dead father, but the result is not victory but flight, cowardice. It is not so simple to destroy one’s demons.

The whole of the book concerns Andrews’s attempt to do just that. On the run from Carlyon, he breaks into an isolated cottage belonging to Elizabeth, a young woman whose own father figure has died just days earlier; in fact his corpse is still in the house when Andrews breaks in. Elizabeth has her own ghost, it seems. The man was possessive of her—like Carlyon, he is a father figure who is also nearly a spouse. The man did not want Elizabeth to be with anyone other than him; likewise Andrews is soon torn between the two “songs” of Elizabeth and Carlyon. Both Elizabeth and Andrews must acknowledge the end of their respective affairs. Inevitably they fall in love, of course. Andrews attaches an impossibly saint-like devotion to Elizabeth, largely because she offers him temporary solace from the outside world, and because he can confess his cowardice to her without fear of her punishment.

Cowardice. It is Andrews’s ultimate fault, as he constantly reminds anyone who’ll listen. Elizabeth is the only person or thing in the novel that gives him courage, and for that he regards her with ferocious religiosity. But her goodness is like a fire: it only provides warmth when nearby. The moment Andrews leaves the house—goaded by Elizabeth to see his betrayal through in order to start his life anew by heading into the city of Lewes, where the six men are on trial, to testify against them—his cowardice returns. And without Elizabeth there, we, the reader, are subject to Andrews reminding us yet again how despicable he is. Perhaps if he were to ultimately find redemption, then The Man Within could be fulfilling. But by novel’s end, while there is resolution, there is no redemption. Andrews’s cowardice destroys Elizabeth, leaves Carlyon without ship or crew (and therefore without purpose), and finally destroys himself. Greene’s novels are known for the Catholic undertones, but The Man Within shows that Greene hadn’t yet learned to grapple with those issues of his religion head on. The themes of the novel—fathers and sons, cowardice and bravery, sin and redemption—are alternatively muddled or cliché. The seeds for many of Greene’s novels are present here, such as the hunted man or the atheist/agnostic touching salvation, but Greene seems not to have known yet what he himself was getting at.

Simple Pleasures: Plot and Character, Prose and Structure

Maybe the previous post is being too reductive. Probably is. But what spurred me to post, in addition to the correspondence I mentioned there, was a second correspondence I was having with another friend, on a different subject entirely. We were talking books and I mentioned my current obsession with Graham Greene. I mean it: I am obsessed with the guy. After reading two books in the last six months I’ve become addicted to his books like they’re Girl Scout cookies. A couple chapters into re-reading The Power and the Glory, I put it down and decided to do this obsession right. I’m starting from the beginning and reading through his entire oeuvre. I may even read his three-volume biography concurrently. What I mean is, I’m obsessed.

The last time I was this obsessed with an author, I was in college and the author was Donald Barthelme. To this day it’s difficult for guests to be in my living room and not comment on the number of Barthelme books around. But how did I get from Barthelme, where concept, language, and a collagist approach to prose squash such traditional notions as plot and character, to Greene—who is known for nothing if not taut plots and the inner turmoil of his characters? I read The Power and the Glory as a freshman in college and enjoyed it, but at the time it struck me as solid but nothing special. “Special” was something like the chronologically fluid Catch-22 or Barthelme’s absurd and abstract treatment of Snow White.

There’s a parallel there with my taste in music then and now. While I was so in love with Can or even Low—groups that in their own way were deconstructing the song to reveal certain elements buried under the more obvious, more tangible ones—I was also reveling in Barthelme, the Fiction Collective, Pynchon, Sorrentino. The mechanics of writing were the thing—the means, not the ends. Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues had not a single dot of punctuation; Mark Amerika’s Kafka Chronicles was a stream-of-consciousness hail of noise. Now, whenever I pick up a novel that seems more pleased with its structure than with its story, I toss it aside. Mark Danielewski is the heir to the tradition right now. Some are touting him as a genius but I just want to throw his books across the room. It’s too labored. At least Mark Amerika realized (rightly) that his vision belonged on the web. It’s beyond print; why try to constrain your vision, so driven by typographic dances and a hyper-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure structure, to a book format?

Yes, it makes me cranky. The same way Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s new record made me cranky for its faux-experimentation. But like I said yesterday, that’s not to say I can’t appreciate it when it’s done right. Look at an author like David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas is a technically exhilarating novel, but all the bravura Mitchell displays in the actual writing is in support of a plot, of characters, of a larger theme—in other words, of telling an absorbing story. Musically you need look no further than Bjork to see someone go about as far out there as you can get yet still retain emotion, never mind a melody.

A far less extreme but much more unlikely example is the newest hot shit, Peter Bjorn & John. Who would think that a band responsible for the earworm of the year, “Young Folks,” would effortlessly drop in more cerebral tracks like “Poor Cow,” “Start to Melt,” or the album highlight “Roll the Credits” ? These guys ably demonstrate that it’s easy to have a handle on your mechanics without sacrificing heart. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but that’s the point: you don’t have to try so hard!

Which brings me back to Graham Greene. If ever there was an author who had such complete control over his mechanics, put to perfect use in support of the story he wants to tell, it’s Greene. No element overpowers the other. One of the books I read last year that has spurred me on this kick, The End of the Affair, is the perfect example. After setting up all three sides of a triangle, giving us tantalizing scenes and memorable supporting characters, Greene flips it two-thirds in and gives us a brand-new narrator. In lesser hands it would feel forced, artificial. Take for instance Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, a perfectly excellent novel that nearly derails at the two-thirds mark when it shifts from third to first person. But Greene pulls it off, leading to great emotional payoff. Thus far the books I’ve read by Greene don’t feel Big and Important—there’s no aspiration to Nobel here—but when I’m finished with the book all I want to do is go back to page one and start over. What more should a book, or a record, wish to accomplish?