
A fairly large proportion of the distinguished novels of the last few decades
have been written by Catholics and have even been describable as Catholic
novels. One reason for this is that the conflict not only between this world
and the next world but between sanctity and goodness is a fruitful theme of
which the ordinary, unbelieving writer cannot make use. Graham Greene used
it once successfully, in "The Power and the Glory ," and once, with very
much more doubtful success, in "Brighton Rock." His latest book, "The Heart
of the Matter" (Viking) , is, to put it as politely as possible, not one
of his best, and gives the impression of having been mechanically constructed,
the familiar conflict being set out like an algebraic equation, with no attempt
at psychological probability.
Here is the outline of the story: The time is 1942 and the place is a West
African British colony, unnamed but probably the Gold Coast. A certain Major
Scobie, Deputy Commissioner of Police and a Catholic convert, finds a letter
bearing a German address hidden in the cabin of the captain of a Portuguese
ship. The letter turns out to be a private one and completely harmless, but
it is, of course, Scobie's duty to hand it over to higher authority. However,
the pity he feels for the Portuguese captain is too much for him, and he destroys
the letter and says nothing about it. Scobie, it is explained to us, is a
man of almost excessive conscientiousness. He does not drink, take bribes,
keep Negro mistresses, or indulge in bureaucratic intrigue, and he is, in
fact disliked on all sides because of his uprightness, like Aristides the
Just. His leniency toward the Portuguese captain is his first lapse. After
it, his life becomes a sort of fable on the theme of "Oh, what a tangled web
we weave," and in every single instance it is the goodness of his heart that
leads him astray. Actuated at the start by pity, he has a love affair with
a girl who has been rescued from a torpedoed ship. He continues with the
affair largely out of a sense of duty, since the girl will go to pieces morally
if abandoned; he also lies about her to his wife, so as to spare her the
pangs of jealousy. Since he intends to persist in his adultery, he does not
go to confession, and in order to lull his wife's suspicions he tells her
that he has gone. This involves him in the truly fearful act of taking the
Sacrament while in a state of mortal sin. By this time, there are other complications,
all caused in the same manner, and Scobie finally decides that the only way
out is through the unforgivable sin of suicide.
Nobody else must be allowed to suffer through his death; it will be so arranged
as to look like an accident. As it happens, he bungles one detail, and the
fact that he has committed suicide becomes known. The book ends with a, Catholic
priest's hinting, with doubtful orthodoxy, that Scobie is perhaps not damned.
Scobie, however, had not entertained any such hope. White all through, with
a stiff upper lip, he had gone to what he believed to be certain damnation
out of pure gentlemanliness.
I have not parodied the plot of the book. Even when dressed up in realistic
details, it is just as ridiculous as I have indicated. The thing most obviously
wrong with it is that Scobie's motives, assuming one could believe in them,
do not adequately explain his actions. Another question that comes up is:
Why should this novel have its setting in West Africa? Except that one of
the characters is a Syrian trader, the whole thing might as well be happening
in a London suburb. The Africans exist only as an occasionally mentioned background,
and the thing that would actually be in Scobie's mind the whole time - the
hostility between black and white, and the struggle against the local nationalist
movement - is not mentioned at all. Indeed, although we are shown his thoughts
in considerable detail, he seldom appears to think about his work, and then
only of trivial aspects of it, and never about the war, although the date
is 1942. All he is interested in is his own progress toward damnation. The
improbability of this shows up against the colonial setting, but it is an
improbability that is present in "Brighton Rock" as well, and that is bound
to result from foisting theological preoccupations upon simple people anywhere.
The central idea of the book is that it is better, spiritually higher, to
be an erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan. Graham Greene would probably
subscribe to the statement of Maritain, made apropos of Léon Bloy,
that "there is but one sadness - not to be a saint." A saying of Péguy's
is quoted on the title page of the book to the effect that the sinner is "at
the very heart of Christianity" and knows more of Christianity than anyone
else does, except the saint. All such sayings contain, or can be made to contain,
the fairly sinister suggestion that ordinary human decency is of no value
and that any one sin is no worse than any other sin. In addition, it is impossible
not to feel a sort of snobbishness in Mr. Greene's attitude, both here and
in his other books written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint. He appears
to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that
there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort
of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only,
since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like
the beasts that perish. We are carefully informed that Catholics are no better
than anybody else; they even, perhaps, have a tendency to be worse, since
their temptations are greater. In modern Catholic novels, in both France and
England, it is, indeed, the fashion to include bad priests, or at least inadequate
priests, as a change from Father Brown. (I imagine that one major objective
of young English Catholic writers is not to resemble Chesterton.) But all
the while -drunken, lecherous, criminal, or damned outright - the Catholics
retain their superiority, since they alone know the meaning of good and evil.
Incidentally, it is assumed in "The Heart of the Matter," and in most of
Mr. Greene's other books, that no one outside the Catholic Church has the
most elementary knowledge of Christian doctrine.
This cult of the sanctified sinner seems to me to be frivolous, and underneath
it there probably lies a weakening of belief, for when people really believed
in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink.
More to the point, by trying to clothe theological speculations in flesh and
blood, it produces psychological absurdities. In "The Power and the Glory,"
the struggle between this-worldly and other-worldly values is convincing,
because it is not occurring inside one person. On the one side, there is the
priest, a poor creature in some ways but made heroic by his belief in his
own thaumaturgic powers; on the other side, there is the lieutenant, representing
human justice and material progress, and also a heroic figure after his fashion.
They can respect each other, perhaps, but not understand each other. The
priest, at any rate, is not credited with any very complex thoughts. In "Brighton
Rock," on the other hand, the central situation is incredible, since it presupposes
that the most brutishly stupid person can, merely by having been brought
up a Catholic, be capable of great intellectual subtlety. Pinkie, the racecourse
gangster, is a species of satanist, while his still more limited girl friend
understands and even states the difference between the categories "right
and wrong" and "good and evil." In, for example, Mauriac's "Thérèse"
sequence, the spiritual conflict does not outrage probability, because it
is not pretended that Thérèse is a normal person. She is a
chosen spirit, pursuing her salvation over a long period and by a difficult
route, like a patient stretched out on the psychiatrist's sofa. To take an
opposite instance, Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," in spite of improbabilities,
which are traceable partly to the book's being written in the first person,
succeeds because the situation is itself a normal one. The Catholic
characters bump up against problems they would meet with in real life; they
do not suddenly move onto a different intellectual plane as soon as their
religious beliefs are involved. Scobie is incredible because the two halves
of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of
mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really
felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted
in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in Hell, he would not
risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women.
And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is - that
is, a man whose chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain - he would
not be an officer in a colonial police force.
There are other improbabilities, some of which arise out of Mr. Greene's
method of handling a love affair. Every novelist has his own conventions,
and, just as in an E.M. Forster novel there is a strong tendency for the characters
to die suddenly without sufficient cause, so in a Graham Greene novel there
is a tendency for people to go to bed together almost at sight and with no
apparent pleasure to either party. Often this is credible enough, but in
"The Heart of the Matter" its effect is to weaken a motive that, for the
purposes of the story, ought to be a very strong one. Again, there is the
usual, perhaps unavoidable, mistake of making everyone too highbrow. It is
not only that Major Scobie is a theologian. His wife, who is represented as
an almost complete fool, reads poetry, while the detective who is sent by
the Field Security Corps to spy on Scobie even writes poetry. Here one is
up against the fact that it is not easy for most modern writers to imagine
the mental processes of anyone who is not a writer.
It seems a pity, when one remembers how admirably he has written of Africa
elsewhere, that Mr. Greene should have made just this book out of his wartime
African experiences. The fact that the book is set in Africa while the action
takes place almost entirely inside a tiny white ,community gives it an air
of triviality .However, one must not carp too much. It is pleasant to see
Mr. Greene starting up again after so long a silence, and in postwar England
it is a remarkable feat for a novelist to write a novel at all. At any rate,
Mr. Greene has not been permanently demoralized by the habits acquired during
the war, like so many others. But one may hope that his next book will have
a different theme, or, if not, that he will at least remember that a perception
of the vanity of earthly things, though it may be enough to get one into Heaven,
is not sufficient equipment for the writing of a novel.