The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  As she walked in front of him, her two meagre tails of hair bleaching in the sunlight, it occurred to him for the first time that she was of an age when Mexican girls were ready for their first man. What was to happen? He flinched away from problems which he had never dared to confront.14

  Just as Fru Rasmussen’s elder daughter led Greene to shelter for the night, so Coral Fellows finds shelter for the hunted priest – her independence and courage heightened for the purposes of the novel, the police lieutenant does not frighten her and she can feel sympathy for the priest’s desire for alcohol, bringing him a bottle of Cerveza Moctezuma. In the novel she dies mysteriously and her death, though alluded to, is never explained.fn3

  What Fru Rasmussen’s daughter would not have been is an atheist, but by making Coral Fellows into one Greene gives resonance to the theme of atheism in the book, strengthened by the fact that it is a young girl who says, ‘You see, I don’t believe in God. I lost my faith when I was ten’, and urges the priest to renounce his faith to save his life. She is a pragmatist: being a priest, she concludes, must be like having a birthmark, you can’t get rid of it, and when he says he will pray for her, she promises to teach him the Morse code – ‘It would be useful to you.’ But also, if his hunters kill him, she will never forgive them: ‘She was ready to accept any responsibility, even that of vengeance, without a second thought.’ Another revelation of the uncertain universe.

  The finca belonging to the Lutheran brother and sister, only a quarter of an hour out of Palenque, provides also a resting place for the priest when he is at the end of his tether, and a brief escape from persecution before he has to face martyrdom. The finca in fact and fiction is a place of peace, beauty and civilisation. Herr R. and his sister in The Lawless Roads are first seen ‘sitting side by side in rocking chairs on the veranda – as it might be the States, the woman knitting and the man reading his paper’.15 In the novel a ‘middle-aged woman sat on the veranda darning socks … Mr Lehr, her brother, read a New York magazine – it was three weeks old, but that didn’t really matter.’ In The Lawless Roads: ‘It was like heaven’; in the novel, ‘the whole scene was like peace.’ There was ‘a big earthenware jar of fresh water with a dipper beside it’ (L.R.): ‘A huge earthenware jar stood in a cool corner with a ladle and a tumbler’ (P.G.). In both, a tulipan tree dropped its blossoms at night and bloomed again next day, and there was a little stream in which to bathe: ‘and, most astonishing luxury of all, a little clear sandy stream to wash in with tiny fish like sardines pulling at the nipples … Next day I lay up at Herr R.’s – a bathe at six in the stream and another in the afternoon at five … you went to bathe in the little stream barefooted across the grass in spite of snakes.’ (L.R.): ‘“Well, I guess it’s time for a bath now. Will you be coming father?” and the priest obediently followed … Mr Lehr barefoot across … the field beyond. The day before he had asked apprehensively, “Are there no snakes?” and Mr Lehr had grunted contemptuously that if there were any snakes they’d pretty soon get out of the way … At the bottom of the field there was a little shallow stream running over brown pebbles. Mr Lehr … lay down flat on his back … Tiny fishes played over his chest and made little tugs at his nipples undisturbed.’ (P.G.)

  Herr R./Lehr had also his experiences of the revolution, losing crops and cattle – there were bullet holes in the posts of his verandah,fn4 but he used craft to avoid losing valuable land and having to pay taxes by giving over to ‘the agraristos’ 50 acres of barren land he had not the means to develop.16

  On the first leg of his mule journey to Las Casas (a place the priest desperately hopes to reach but never does), Greene and his guide, having lost their way, were forced to spend the night at a place where there were four huts of mud-and-wattle, standing black and silent in the darkness, and where an old man on the verge of starvation gave up his bed in his rat-infested hut to Greene, without payment. His hands ‘were like last year’s leaves’ and he had no food but ‘set a small boy to boiling some thick black coffee’. This becomes the priest’s experience with the addition that the priest has to hear confessions while a boy keeps watch through the night for soldiers. Both Greene and the priest ask if they can have a hammock and are told they must go to a town for that – ‘here you must take only the luck of the road’. The priest asks for spirits: Greene gave brandy to the old man.

  There were people and experiences important to the novel that Greene could not have known at first hand. Apart from his reading of newspaper accounts of the situation in Mexico, he had probably prepared for his journey by reading such works as Wilfred Parsons’s Mexican Martyrdom, Francis McCullagh’s Red Mexico and F. C. Kelley’s Blood-Drenched Altars, which recorded the persecution of the Catholic Church begun by the Mexican President Calles in 1926. This involved the desecration and destruction of churches and cathedrals and the hunting down and killing of priests – the creation of a Godless country. By the time he went to Mexico in 1938, as Greene himself admits, the Godless country had been established: ‘Calles had been flown over into exile by his rival, Cardenas’, and the period of persecution had ended. ‘The anti-religious laws were still enforced, except in … San Luís Potosí. Churches – now Government property – were allowed to open in most of the states except for the hundreds that had been turned into cinemas, newspaper offices, garages. Priests were allowed to serve (though only one priest to ten thousand people).’ Thus it could be said that since the anti-religious laws had been softened, the carpet had been taken from under Greene’s feet so far as his search for persecution and martyrs was concerned and this probably accounted for the lack of interest by publishers in articles about Mexico. It also accounted for his determination to make the dangerous journey into the two southern states, Tabasco and Chiapas, where the laws of Godlessness were still strictly maintained. Granted, ‘The world is all of a piece … engaged everywhere in the same subterranean struggle … There is no peace anywhere where there is human life.’17 But ‘where the eagles are gathered together’ we can expect to find ‘the Son of Man as well’.18

  In Tabasco and Chiapas he would reach ‘an active sector of the line’, though even then he arrived too late for the main action since the creator of the Godless state of Tabasco, Garrido Canabal, had already been exiled. So The Power and the Glory is in one sense an historical novel, re-creating vividly and convincingly, and with an atmosphere of immediacy, a period of past persecution.

  *

  In Ways of Escape Greene tells us that he had to invent ‘the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives: the drunken priest who continued to pass life on’,19 and this is true, but he found live models in Mexico on which to build. In Tabasco there was Garrido Canabal who, it was said, ‘had destroyed every church; he had organized a militia of Red Shirts, even leading them across the border into Chiapas in his hunt for a church or a priest. Private houses were searched for religious emblems, and prison was the penalty for possessing them.’20

  Who was Tomas Garrido Canabal who challenged God and made a Godless state out of Tabasco? He was born in 1890, the son of a wealthy farmer. In 1922 he was elected Governor of Tabasco and having served four years put in his place his supporter, Ausencio Cruz, and became Governor again in January 1931 and then Minister of Agriculture in President Cardena’s government in December 1934. His power did not end there. A relative followed as Governor in January 1932, and indeed Garrido’s family exercised much power throughout Tabasco – brothers, cousins, uncles and all.

  He was in some ways a remarkable leader and brought about important reforms in agriculture, but he had two hatreds: one was alcohol; the other organised religion. His hatred outdid that of all other leaders in his campaign against the Church and its priests. Before he left Villahermosa for Mexico City to become Minister of Agriculture he organised a great burning of the statues of saints from the churches by 1,000 women and there was mass singing of atheistical songs. The Red Shirts, his private army of 6,000 young men, shouted
in unison against Los Fanáticos (those who still believed in God) and searched private homes for statues of saints. Churches left standing were used for fiestas, socialist meetings, meetings for re-educating the population from their long-standing faith. A Christian burial became impossible. The New York Times of 3 June 1934 reported: ‘MEXICAN GOVERNOR BANS GRAVESTONES’ and went on to say: ‘Tomas Garrido Canabal, Governor of the State of Tabasco, has issued a decree … that all monuments on graves within his jurisdiction shall be removed and that in the future graves shall be plain earth mounds without even crosses to mark them. No names shall appear in any manner over the graves which are to be marked by numbers.’

  In the churches where once, in Communion, bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ, livestock would be exhibited (usually the fine beasts would be from the farms of Garrido Canabal). A bull would be named God, a donkey Christ, a pig the Pope, and the Virgin of Guadalupe represented by a cow. All religious observances were outlawed and a cross or religious ornament would be torn off the wearer’s throat and the wearer would at the very least be imprisoned. Greene himself recalls a story (one of many about the curious incorruptibility of Garrido Canabal) of a family friend of Garrido, imprisoned for three days for wearing a cross under his shirt.21 No favouritism was shown. One could no longer say, ‘Adios’, because it means ‘To God’.

  The ‘genuine man of the Revolution’, as he was called in songs sung by choirs of little girls, the antichrist, ‘God’s enemy number one’, as he was referred to by his critics, was conducting an experiment in Godlessness, creating a new humanity, as was also being attempted then in Spain, Russia and Hitler’s Germany. He replaced the worship of God with the worship of the yucca plant or pineapple. He named one of his sons Lenin, a daughter Zoila Libertad (I am Liberty – a humorist said she was the only free person in the state), and his nephew was Luzbel (Lucifer). In February 1925, the legislature passed a law defining the necessary qualifications for priests practising in Tabasco: they must be of Tabascan or Mexican birth with five years’ residence in the state; they must be older than forty; they must have studied in official (i.e. anti-religious) schools; and they had to marry – ‘an effort’, as Garrido described it, ‘to legitimize the existing children’. As a result, priests were hunted down and executed – Tabasco was freed from ‘clerical opium, ignorance and vice’.

  It was also freed from alcohol, and Garrido’s rule was equally without favouritism in this respect. The leader of an orchestra about to play in a concert was caught with the smell of brandy on his breath and was ducked in water and imprisoned.

  The source of such a combination of atheism and puritanism was said to be Garrido’s father. Fitzpatrick, the doctor, told Greene: ‘the priests in Tabasco were good men. There was no excuse for the persecution in this state – except some obscure personal neuroses, for Garrido had been brought up as a Catholic: his parents were pious people.’22 But a Mexican in Las Casas said that Garrido’s change to atheism began when his brother fell off his horse and broke his neck and ‘his father burned all the saints in the town because he thought the Church had failed him. They had been a religious family and look what happened to them … His father was the first to burn plaster and wooden saints.’ Also: ‘His father drank too much. Yes, there is very likely a good reason why Tomas Garrido launched prohibition. Garrido himself abstained. He couldn’t drink – it upset his stomach.’ When Garrido was interviewed by George Creel (who thought he looked like a Wyoming cattleman in town for Saturday night, though he could also be taken for a Mexican dandy), he said: ‘How can any sane person read history without coming to the fixed conclusion that religion and alcohol have ever been humanity’s greatest curses?’23 In line with his atheistical puritanism, he told his father to stop drinking or leave the country – his father left. Garrido was intense, direct, had a sense of integrity, and, uniquely, persuaded his officers to remain in office without taking bribes – something rare in Mexican public life. Garrido Canabal was exiled to Costa Rica in August 1935. He returned to Mexico in 1940, but took little part in politics and died in Los Angeles, California, in 1943. The Godless state he established and his rigorous persecution of priests and church gave Greene the material to create his martyr, the whisky priest, and he was himself the source for Greene’s Lieutenant of Police.

  Greene fleshed his man out, stressing the police lieutenant’s honesty and obsession, his disinterested ambition to catch the last hunted priest in the state, and his unbending puritanism, but he elevated his model by giving him a different religious fervour – he had ‘something of the priest in his intent observant walk’. He lived simply as a saint might: inside his room ‘there was a bed made of old packing cases’ (the kind of bed Greene slept on during his journeys). He took pleasure in ‘the cement playground where the iron swings stood like gallows in the moony darkness’, where once there had been a cathedral. Unlike the policemen Greene saw in Villahermosa with their trousers unbuttoned, he is clean, his gaiters polished. But when he looks at the photograph of the priest he is hunting with his well-shaved and well-powdered jowls (Greene may well have had a photograph of the martyr Padre Pro in mind here) ‘a natural hatred as between dog and dog stirred in [his] bowels’. The newspaper photograph is of a first communion party and ‘something you could almost have called horror moved him when he looked at the white muslin dresses’, remembering his boyhood – ‘the incense in churches, old, tired peasants kneeling before holy images, their arms held out in the attitude of the cross … a further mortification’ squeezed out by a priest from the altar steps, coming round with the ‘collecting-bag, abusing them for their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing in return – except a little sexual indulgence.’ The lieutenant ‘felt no need of women’.

  Coming from a convert to Roman Catholicism, this is strong stuff, though we have to remember that as a student Greene put forward atheistic views. But the lieutenant’s atheism is a kind of mysticism: ‘what he had experienced was a vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.’24 This philosophy seems to have been derived from a Wisconsin police commissioner with whom Greene fell into conversation on the train journey to Monterrey:

  And suddenly – I can’t remember how it happened – the old, good, pink face disclosed the endless vacancy behind. You expected somebody of his age – from Wisconsin – an honorary police commissioner with a badge – to believe in God – in a kind of way, a vague, deistic way. I had imagined him saying you could worship God as well in your own home as in a church; I had taken him already and made a character of him, and I had got him entirely wrong. He didn’t believe in any God at all – it was like suddenly finding a cruel intelligence in a child. For one can respect an atheist as one cannot respect a deist: once accept a God and reason should carry you further, but to accept nothing at all – that requires some stubbornness, some courage.25

  Another piece in the unstable universe of the novel.

  *

  It seems natural that Greene’s basic model for his priest should be Mexico’s most famous martyr, Padre Pro, who died eleven years before Greene went to Mexico and so appears in the second part of the Prologue to The Lawless Roads, ‘The Faith’, which is set against the first part, ‘The Anarchists’ which gives examples of Newman’s ‘corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion’. Greene’s account of Padre Pro is succinct, and probably derives from several sources though the main one was McCullagh’s Red Mexico. Padre Pro is not the whisky priest, though he was a martyred priest who had great courage, devotion and self-sacrifice.

  Padre Miguel Pro, a twenty-five-year-old Jesuit, returned to his own country, Mexico, from a foreign seminary in 1926, much as Edmund Campion had returned from Douai to England. President Calles began his persecution of the Church two months later. ‘The prisons were filling up, priests were being shot, yet on three successive first Fridays Pro gave the Sacrame
nt to nine hundred, thirteen hundred, and fifteen hundred people.’26 McCullagh puts it only slightly differently: ‘He gave Holy Communion to about three hundred persons daily, and on the first Friday of three months, the numbers ran successively to 900, 1,300 and 1,500.’27 It hardly needs saying that Greene’s account is briefer, more forceful, as sharp as chipped granite. Pro, never dressing as a priest, which would have led to immediate arrest, continued to hear confessions in half-built houses, in darkness, in retreats held in garages. He was an amateur actor and had a remarkable capacity for escape; finding a police officer at a house where he was supposed to say Mass, he posed as another police officer, remarking, ‘There’s a cat bagged in here.’ Greene’s account shows his skill as a journalist. It is a little too deft on occasion, terse, dramatic, like a well-made film: ‘In July 1926 Father Miguel Pro landed at Veracruz … We know how he was dressed …’ the dramatically placed contrasts: ‘They got him, of course, at last’, and he was shot wearing, as Greene writes, ‘a dark lounge suit, soft collar and tie, a bright cardigan’. Except for his fatal encounter with Calles’s regime, an ability as an actor to deceive the police and his constant need to evade them, he has only one other resemblance to the whisky priest – being revered as a martyr. One religious account of the execution states that Pro’s body was not crumpled by the bullets but retained ‘the rigid form of the Cross quite unaffected by the fall’. Photographs of Pro ‘praying for his enemies beside the pitted wall, receiving the coup de grâce’, were published by the Government, ‘but within a few weeks it became a penal offence to possess them for they had an effect which Calles had not foreseen’.28