The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  – W. B. YEATS

  WHEN, IN 1978, I went to Tabasco, retracing Graham Greene’s journey through Mexico forty years after the publication of The Lawless Roads, the then Governor of Tabasco said to me: ‘Mr Greene had nasty things to say about us; we hope his biographer will say nice things.’ The critics had nasty things to say about The Lawless Roads when it was published in 1939. ‘One tires’, wrote one reviewer, ‘of Mr Greene’s dyspeptic descriptions of the hotels, the meals, and the sanitary facilities of Mexico.’ The New York Times pointed out the strange fact that ‘wherever he went, ugliness stalked him and leered at him from things and beasts and humans’, and that he appeared to be ‘one who infallibly attracts to himself bad food and bad smells and bad people. One suspects that, even at the North Pole, Mr Greene would be harassed by mental mosquitoes.’ An anonymous reviewer, commenting on the oddity of the fact that this loveliest of all American countries should have filled Greene’s soul with rage and that he experienced little joy in travel and adventure, nevertheless concludes: ‘Yet The Lawless Roads is more worth reading than a hundred other books of travel.’

  Greene had allowed Mexico to make its own impression on him. He had undoubtedly prepared for the journey by reading and making contacts and he had not one but two purposes in going there – not only to look into the state of religion but by travelling alone, by taking the lawless roads, to enter as far as he was able into the experience of the country and its people. Joy in travel and adventure was not his object.

  What is extraordinary about The Power and the Glory is that it should have been written by a man who spent only five weeks in Mexico, one week in Villahermosa and one night in Frontera, and yet re-created the country and situation so convincingly in his novel that he won the praise of a Mexican priest. Father Munos, who knew Frontera where the novel begins, said in Mexico City in 1978, ‘I think his masterpiece is The Power and the Glory – for myself it is extraordinary. As a Mexican I travel in those regions. The first three paragraphs of [the novel], when he gives you camera shots of the place, why it is astounding. You are in the place.’ Father Munos also felt that he owed Greene ‘a great debt in [his] own religious make-up’, since he had influenced him as a Catholic priest. In 1960, a Catholic teacher from San Lorenzo, California, wrote to Greene:

  One day I gave The Power and the Glory to an even more specialized reader – a native of Mexico who had lived through the worst persecutions. She was so moved by your story that she volunteered to come into my classes with souvenirs of the period – photographs, communist propaganda, etc., to fill in the background of the story. She confessed that your descriptions were so vivid, your priest so real, that she found herself praying for him at Mass. I understand how she felt. Last year, on a trip through Mexico, I found myself peering into mud huts, through village streets, and across impassable mountain ranges, half-believing that I would glimpse a dim figure stumbling in the rain on his way to the border. There is no greater tribute possible to your creation of this character – he lives.

  Absorption of a place and its atmosphere is one thing; the creation of convincing characters within that place is another. Out of his Mexican experience came a priest, a policeman and a Judas figure, central to the theme he found in Mexico. Where did he discover them in such a short time? Their origins must go back a long way in Greene’s psyche, as far back as Berkhamsted, the villain Carter and the traitor Wheeler with himself as victim – the basic pattern established. In Mexico he found surrogate figures, to whom in some sense he could transfer his childhood emotions. He also experienced a strengthening of his own religious beliefs.

  The effect of his experiences makes The Lawless Roads his personal credo. It is significant that at the beginning of the book he quotes a poem by Edwin Muir describing a landscape in which everything is lawless, and also quotes Cardinal Newman in his assessment of the human condition – ‘a reason-bewildering fact’: ‘either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from his presence … if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.’ Not a hopeful diagnosis but probably a valid reflection of Greene’s religious views at that time. It is interesting that the title of the novel that came from his Mexican experience gives this world and the fictional world he had created back to the Creator: ‘For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory’. For Greene’s is an unstable universe – not only ‘if’ but also ‘since’ there is a God; not only is human political power a fragile matter, but glory is an even more fragile and ambiguous state – a whisky priest who dies reluctantly for his faith, a lieutenant of police who lives as a puritan with total devotion to his beliefs. On the boat Greene returned home in there were Catholic volunteers from Havana going to support the Fascism of Franco in Spain who were disconcerted by the Fascist German farmer from Chiapas who hated Christianity.1 In an unstable universe, giving back to God (if there is or since there is one) a picture of his kingdom, one can only present things as they appear to a single human observer.

  For this reason Greene has to experience the human condition at all possible levels, he has to experience hate and anger and degradation. Though, of course, it is a quest: he is not locked into a specific situation, he can and will retreat with his spoils. But his anger is always directed against what he sees as injustice – and such anger often demolishes the mask of the quiet Englishman (as opposed to the quiet American), the English upper-class civility and control. For example, he attacked Reginald Maudling, the then British Home Secretary, over methods of interrogation of I.R.A. suspects:

  If I, as a Catholic, were living in Ulster today I confess I would have one savage and irrational ambition – to see Mr Maudling pressed against a wall for hours on end, with a hood over his head, hearing nothing but the noise of a wind machine, deprived of sleep when the noise temporarily ceased by the bland voice of a politician telling him that his brain will suffer no irreparable damage … How can any Englishman now protest against torture in Vietnam, in Greece, in Brazil, in the psychiatric wards of the USSR, without being told, ‘You have a double standard: one for theirs and another for your own country’?2

  In Mexico the Roman Catholic Church was the underdog, but he was antipathetic to Mexico – its food, beggars, rats, fleas, mosquitoes and the Mexican man’s greeting – the abrazo:

  I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate. Friendship there is skin deep – a protective gesture. The motion of greeting you see everywhere upon the street, the hands outstretched to press the other’s arms, the semi-embrace – what is it but the motion of pinioning to keep the other man from his gun? There has always been hate, I suppose, in Mexico, but now it is the official teaching: it has superseded love in the school curriculum.3

  Hate and suspicion were what (among much else) he brought out of Mexico, but if you are writing a novel about religious fundamentals, and enquiring into the human soul and its manipulation by a secular power, perhaps a basis of hate and suspicion is not a bad thing, neutralising partisanship and sentimentality. The Power and the Glory, after all, deals with a cosmic war in human terms.

  Greene insisted, however, that he had no idea, even after he returned home, that a novel would emerge from his Mexican experiences or that he was seeking one: ‘do you imagine I knew I was going to write The Power and the Glory? No, I’d never consent to appropriate other people’s political sufferings for literary ends.’4 He does not mention religious sufferings, and perhaps destiny conspired to give him the inspiration for the novel, but Calder-Marshall probably had some justification in saying that Greene took the germ of a story he wanted to write about Mexico with him. Moreover, he was able to flesh it out, not simply by his own experiences, but by an interest in martyrdom that went back a long way. Mexico drew him because it had been, and to some extent still was, a battlefield where war was waged between a form of paganism and Christianity – the fiercest and most successful persecution of the Ro
man Catholic religion anywhere since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. By the time Greene arrived in Mexico the religious persecution was to all intents and purposes over, but the tradition of martyrdom was still there. One might say that in Mexico he was seeking martyrs and persecutors, but however much he brought out of Mexico, he took a lot into it.

  *

  When in 1927 the priest Padre Pro was executed in Mexico City, Graham wrote to his wife-to-be: ‘Yes I saw the article on the Mexican martyrs. I read all that number because I pulled it in pieces page by page.’ Nine years later there is an extract in his diary, probably copied from the Tablet: ‘Two priests were recently murdered in Durango. In the same town an officer knocked the Vicar of Toniola down with the butt of his pistol and ordered his battalion to shoot him … In Tacamachaleco soldiers entered the church whilst the congregation was reciting the Rosary. As the officer pulled the priest out of the pulpit, the congregation rushed to his defence; the soldiers fired into the crowd, wounding some fifty people … In general, the women show greater pluck in resisting the tyranny of the troops.’

  Greene, because he had no inclination to be a martyr himself (except perhaps when in search of material), developed a strict view of the nature of martyrdom. In his 1936 diary, under the heading ‘Notes for Mexico’, he wrote of the only martyr he could remember meeting – a Jew imprisoned by Hitler and called Lorant – at a ‘party at a female novelist’s & he was very proud of his book, very conceited about himself; a stout middle-aged man he had a great opinion of his sexual ability & martyrdom had given him no end of a kick.’ Which leads him to a consideration of the nature of true martyrdom: ‘The church’s martyrs are saved from this publicising; unless they are killed. They usually remain anonymous, & if they escape they are reabsorbed into the organisation for future use.’ There remains the question of the validity of violent response to violence, and this involves a consideration of Communism, Fascism and Catholicism. Following Malraux’s opinion in Days of Contempt, Greene sees Communism, unlike Fascism, as being based to some extent on love: ‘Comrade, the type word cf. with the leader’. Communist atrocities seem at first inevitable – ‘how can the tortured man help killing if he has the chance?’, but ‘Hate … of the oppressor & torturer: violence the result of violence: these things are not inevitable. The seventeenth-century Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion told his persecutors “to win you heaven or die upon your pikes”, and this spirit at that period did communicate itself to some laymen … The priests in Mexico & Spain who take to arms only demonstrate that the Church is out of practice in martyrdom.’ Greene’s reaction to a poster in the Catholic newspaper, the Universe – ‘Five Bishops killed in Spain’ is: ‘One feels wrong about the Catholic press trumpeting its martyrdoms. You don’t complain about a death of that kind. It should be taken for granted.’

  When he wrote The Lawless Roads he recorded the comments of a Catholic priest who was in prison at the time Padre Pro was shot, and who was later released: ‘Pro was not a solitary victim – he counted over others he had known as we went for a drive together out to Chapultepec, sitting square, talking with immense satisfaction of death. “The Church needed blood,” he said. “It always needs blood.” It was the duty of priests and bishops to die; he had no sympathy for complaint and pious horror.’5

  Greene found the nature of the true martyr in part in what his friend Herbert Read wrote:fn1 ‘Glory is now a discredited word, and it will be difficult to re-establish it. It has been spoilt by too close association with military grandeur; it has been confused with fame and ambition. But true glory is a private and discreet virtue, and is only fully realised in solitariness.’6

  The glory of true martyrdom is its influence on others – ‘when an eyewitness observed the leap of Southwell’s torn-out heart’; ‘when the spot of blood from Campion’s entrails splashed Henry Walpole’s coat, so that the course of the young man’s life changed towards Tyburn’.fn2 And, to illustrate the personally felt unworthiness of the martyr, Greene quotes a poem by Southwell, emphasising his sense of sin, unworthiness and betrayal, yet foreshadowing the whisky priest, dogged by Grace, with his ‘greatness in decay … possessed by compassion’:7

  At Sorrowe’s door I knockt: they crav’d my name:

  I answered, one unworthy to be knowne:

  What one? say they. One worthiest of blame.

  But who? a wretch, not God’s, nor yet his owne.

  A man? Oh no! a beast: much worse: what creature?

  A rocke: how call’d? The rock of scandale, Peter.

  In the same review, Greene compares the Jesuit martyrs crossing the Channel with the young soldiers from Britain who went to the battlefields in France in the First World War – lightness of spirit in both, but ‘For these recruits [the seventeenth-century Jesuits] there were no leave trains. They simply had to stay in line till death.’ The same comparison occurs in The Lawless Roads, when in the heat and darkness of a night in Villahermosa, he turned out the light and ‘as the cockchafers buzzed and beat one felt the excitement of this state where the hunted priest had worked for so many years, hidden in the swamps and forest, with no leave train or billet behind the lines.’8 His whisky priest was coming to life.

  Given his relentless pursuit of experience in Mexico, his long enquiry into the nature of glory and martyrdom, and his imaginative identification with the hunted, Greene might well have said, following Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – ‘c’est moi’, ‘the whisky priest c’est moi’.

  *

  In March 1939, a month after the publication of The Lawless Roads, Greene sat down to write his Mexican novel and he conceded, in 1980, ‘Now, of course, when I reread The Lawless Roads, I can easily detect many of the characters in The Power and the Glory.’9 Many, but not all: one wonders whether he detected himself among them. Was he, in part, ‘the small man in a shabby dark city suit, carrying a small attaché case’, a stranger without a name but with protuberant eyes like Greene, who meets, as Greene did, the dentist at the port? Greene, of course, is anything but small, but the priest’s experiences and Greene’s are very similar. When Greene wrote his novel, he probably worked with carefully documented accounts of his journey to hand – possibly a diary (now lost), from which the travel book was written up. Without these records of his experience, such a powerful and convincing novel could not have been written, for the godless land the priest travels through is the godless land Greene travelled through, and the bed-rock of the novel was to be those unplanned, perilous and exhausting journeys on muleback with inexperienced guides. Without them he could not have created his priest’s flight from the police and his discovery of his parish, his lawless kingdom. Greene was almost as lonely and lost as his hero and could pass on his physical sufferings and minor enjoyments to the priest from his own experience of the situation in Tabasco and Chiapas. There are numerous instances of Greene’s almost word-for-word transference of what he recorded in The Lawless Roads to The Power and the Glory.

  *

  The novel begins with a dentist, Mr Tench, walking into the blazing Mexican sunlight in search of an ether cylinder which should be in the cargo of the vessel General Obregón, now in port. Seeing vultures on the roof, he throws a piece of the road at them and one rises and flaps across the town, over the bust of an ex-president towards the river and the sea, but we are told that the vulture would not find anything there, ‘the sharks looked after the carrion on that side.’10 We are certainly in Frontera – Greene wrote more briefly in The Lawless Roads: ‘The vultures squatted on the roofs. It was like a place besieged by scavengers – sharks in the river and vultures in the streets.’11 The bust of the ex-president is in fact that of ex-President, ex-General Obregón, a one-armed soldier and politician, which Greene observed when walking through the town – ‘a bust of Obregón on a pillar’. He had been assassinated in 1928 and in 1931 Garrido Canabal had the bells of the Cathedral, when it was destroyed, melted down to make the bust.

  Frontera was to be re-named Obregón:
Greene re-named the Ruiz Cano, in which he sailed to Frontera, the General Obregón, but they are the same vessel – a few feet of broken rail, a bell hanging on a rotten cord, hobbled turkeys on both. Greene was told the Ruiz Cano would be safe if she did not meet a Norther, and he wrote of her fictional counterpart: ‘She looked as if she might weather two or three more Atlantic years.’ The Ruiz Cano did not in fact. She sank in the gulf a year after Greene sailed in her.

  The English dentist Tench is, of course, the American dentist ‘Dr Winter’ who practised in Frontera, was concerned about Japanese drills, not ether cylinders, who boarded the Ruiz Cano on his way to consult his doctor, and who skulked ‘abstractedly round the corner of the hotel spitting at the street corners, suddenly lost to all the world humming in the plaza, “I don’t like the food. I don’t like the food,” without a memory and without a hope in the immense heat; he loomed during those days as big as a symbol – I am not sure of what, unless the aboriginal calamity, “having no hope, and without God in the world”.’ (Note the repetition of Newman.)12

  We have yet another example of Greene’s economical re-use of his personal experience. The stained glass windows of the dentist Greene hated when he was a boy, representing the laughing Cavalier, which were passed on to Pinkie in Brighton Rock: ‘a stained-glass door (the laughing Cavalier between Tudor roses)’, becomes one of Tench’s memories of dentists’ houses in England with their stained glass – ‘it was generally the laughing Cavalier … or else a Tudor rose.’ But Tench also has a piece of stained glass obtained when the church was sacked.

  The Rasmussen family in Yajalon is reconstructed with the name of Fellows, the father still alive, returning home from the city and taking over Dr Winters’s song, ‘I don’t like the food. I don’t like the food.’13 The family’s plantation is not of coffee but bananas, Fru Rasmussen is reduced to a weakly, frightened shadow, but her elder daughter, now Coral Fellows, becomes a young heroine, unafraid. Like her source she is being taught by her mother through postal lessons (from England not America now), and is learning the poems of Victor Hugo (the younger Rasmussen child was learning ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’). She is also, like the Rasmussens’ child, coming, even at so young an age, to maturity, which worries her father as it had worried Fru Rasmussen: