The Year of Henry James

by David Lodge

  It was the thrill of reading this novel, Greene says, that started him on his vocation as a writer, filling exercise books with imitations ‘marked with enormous brutality and a despairing romanticism’. In adult life he never attempted to write a novel set in the same period (he went no further back in time than the early nineteenth century, in two early novels), but one can see how The Viper of Milan formed a kind of bridge in his literary formation between the ripping yarns of Henty, Haggard and Hope, and the moral or metaphysical thrillers with contemporary settings which he went on to write himself. The diabolical Visconti is, like Greene’s later anti-heroes, a negative image of the endlessly resourceful hero of adventure stories who survives all the perils he encounters – with this important difference: that Greene solicits sympathy for his characters because they are failures, whereas Visconti is flawlessly evil. He frequently seems about to be defeated in the course of the story, but always manages to wriggle out of a tight corner by committing some new act of infamy. Only on the penultimate page does he get the quittance he deserves, and it is described in a brief, almost throwaway fashion, when the hero of the tale is already dead, ‘dishonoured and a failure even at treachery’, as Greene says. Actually that is not quite accurate: della Scala is a failure at revenge rather than treachery. Della Scala betrays his cause in order to ransom his beloved wife, a forgivable motive which Greene does not mention. Visconti cheats on the deal by sending back the Duchess dead from poison, and the enraged Duke just fails to kill Visconti in revenge. Greene misrepresents The Viper of Milan, reading back into his memories of Marjorie Bowen’s novel his own obsession as a novelist with the theme of betrayal, which derived from traumatic experiences at school.

  There are formal features of The Viper of Milan which may have influenced Greene’s fictional technique. For instance, Marjorie Bowen cuts from scene to scene in an almost cinematic fashion, briefly summarising the events which connect them, and the scenes are usually dramatic rather than performative – that is, they present the characters discussing their hopes, fears and dilemmas, or confronting each other over some issue of strategy or honour. The fights and battles which are described in great detail in conventional adventure stories like Haggard’s She or Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, and which were the main source of interest and excitement for their readers, are just briefly reported or alluded to in The Viper of Milan. This displacement of emphasis from action to motive in stories of adventure was also characteristic of the novels and tales of Joseph Conrad, who later exerted considerable influence on Greene – but one that, unlike Marjorie Bowen’s, created considerable anxiety in him, because, in Bloomian language, Conrad was a ‘strong’ novelist of the preceding generation against whom the young Greene had to measure himself.

  The essays in The Lost Childhood are not arranged in chronological order, but they are dated, and the earlier ones, written in the 1930s, reveal a writer very conscious of where he is situated in the history of the English literary novel, struggling to assimilate the lessons of his admired precursors without being excessively influenced by them. Harold Bloom has a word for the generalised anxiety most young writers experience: ‘belatedness’, the feeling that it is impossible to surpass or improve on the achievements of one’s great predecessors. Greene’s generation felt belated in life as well as literature: they were born just too late to fight in the Great War, and although that war seemed more and more, in historical perspective, a shocking and futile waste of human life which they had been fortunate to escape, nevertheless they felt a kind of guilt, an obscure sense of failure, at having missed the great test of manhood, a feeling perhaps engendered at an almost unconscious level by the imperialist ethos of the juvenile fiction they read in childhood, and often reinforced by a public school education. It was a feeling which many of them, including Greene, sought to expiate or dispel by adventurous travel and exploration in adulthood. In literary terms these writers were very conscious of coming immediately after a period, extending roughly from 1890 to 1930, of great innovation and experiment in fiction and poetry, to which we now usually give the name of Modernism. This was what Greene, in a 1939 essay on Ford Madox Ford, called ‘the heroic age of English fiction’. James, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Ford himself – how was a young writer to compete with them? The answer, of course, was not to try to excel in the same kind of fiction, and Greene’s generation, which included writers like Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Christopher Isherwood and George Orwell, accordingly followed a quite different path from the great modernists, eschewing formal experiment, mythological allusion, poetic symbolism, the stream of consciousness, and emphasising story, dialogue, and the comic or realistic evocation of the contemporary public world, often with a political slant. But they never entirely escaped the sense of belatedness. Evelyn Waugh, for instance, in his transparently autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), introduces his alter ego thus:

  It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. The originators, the exuberant men, are extinct and in their place subsists and modestly flourishes a generation notable for elegance and variety of contrivance . . . Among these novelists Mr Gilbert Pinfold stood quite high.

  Graham Greene said something rather similar to Yvonne Cloetta, as she recalls in her memoirs, when he read an article in which he was described as a ‘genius’: ‘I am not a genius. I am a craftsman who writes books at the cost of long and painful labour.’6 Greene’s ‘geniuses’, we might deduce, would be the same writers that Waugh refers to as ‘the originators, the exuberant men’, the giants of Modernism.

  Although there are some respectful references to Lawrence in Greene’s early essays, there is no detailed discussion of Lawrence’s work, and this is not surprising: these two writers were very different in temperament, background, beliefs and interests. Nor does Greene seem very interested in or impressed by James Joyce, for he seldom alludes to him. He was better acquainted with Virginia Woolf, but his published remarks about her are rather prejudicial, for reasons I shall suggest in a moment. Although he experimented occasionally with passages in the stream-of-consciousness style in the early novels, It’s a Battlefield (1934) and England Made Me (1935), Greene soon abandoned the technique. Of the novelists of the Heroic Age, the two that Greene most admired, and on whom his ‘anxiety of influence’ was therefore most intensely focused, were Henry James and Joseph Conrad. They are in many ways an odd couple, as Greene himself implied in the essay ‘Remembering Mr Jones’, remarking on ‘the strange fate which brought these two to settle within a few miles of each other [in East Sussex] and produce from material gained at such odd extremes of life two of the great English novels of the last fifty years: The Spoils of Poynton and Victory’.

  At first glance, it is easier to understand the appeal of Conrad, for his work seems to have much more in common with Greene’s than does James’s, and more continuity with the fiction on which Greene’s imagination was nourished in childhood and adolescence. The ‘despairing romanticism’ which Greene discovered in The Viper of Milan, and tried to imitate in his juvenilia, is a quality to be found in many of Conrad’s tales, and he obviously showed Greene how the form of the adventure novel might be applied to the exploration of moral, psychological and spiritual themes in literary fiction. In A Sort of Life (1971) Greene himself describes his second attempt at writing a novel shortly after coming down from Oxford, in these terms: ‘Conrad was the influence now, and in particular the most dangerous of all his books, The Arrow of Gold.’ It was dangerous because it was by Conrad’s standards rather a bad book, but Greene didn’t at the time appear to perceive just how and in what ways it was bad. The background of the plot is the anti-republican Carlist movement in nineteenth-century Spain, and it concerns a group of Spanish Carlist exiles and other expatriate sympathisers in the South of France. The narrator, an Englishman, engages in gun-running f
or them mainly because, like most of the other characters, he is hopelessly in love with a woman at the centre of the Carlist movement called Doña Rita. There is actually very little action in the novel: only the faintest ghost of the traditional adventure novel is perceptible in the slow-moving and overwritten narrative. Most of the gun-running takes place offstage or is briefly summarised, while the effort to build up the character of Doña Rita into an irresistible femme fatale becomes increasingly absurd, e.g.:

  She listened to me, unreadable, unmoved, narrowed eyes, closed lips, slightly flushed face, as if carved six thousand years ago in order to fix for ever that something secret and obscure which is in all women. Not the gross immobility of a Sphinx proposing roadside riddles but the finer immobility, almost sacred, of a fateful figure seated at the very source of the passions that have moved men from the dawn of ages.7

  After transcribing those words I looked up Jocelyn Baines’s biography of Conrad to see what he has to say about The Arrow of Gold and found that he quotes the same passage to make the same point. He also says that Conrad dictated the first draft of the novel and added such purple passages later.8 Perhaps that was what Greene meant when he observes, in A Sort of Life, that The Arrow of Gold was written ‘under the tutelage of Henry James’, because James also dictated his later novels, with an effect on his style that many readers have deplored.

  The influence of the late, romantic Conrad, with its strong element of sentimental ‘love interest’ generally absent from the early work, and its self-indulgent, portentous rhetoric, is perceptible in Greene’s first three published novels, The Man Within (1929), The Name of Action (1930), and Rumour at Nightfall (1931). The last of these is actually about the same Carlist Wars in Spain that provided the background of Arrow of Gold. In A Sort of Life Greene describes how he deliberately stopped reading Conrad’s fiction in 1932 because he felt it had become an excessive and negative influence on his own work. That was at a crisis point in Greene’s career. The success of his first novel, The Man Within, had encouraged him to resign his sub-editing job on The Times and to become a freelance writer, but the next two books were critical and commercial failures, and his publisher told him he would get no more advances until he had earned out those already given to him. With his mind wonderfully concentrated by this ultimatum he wrote Stamboul Train, a slick, exciting contemporary thriller, which rescued him from financial anxiety, at least for a while, through the sale of the film rights, but he blamed Conrad, especially the Conrad of The Arrow of Gold, for the faults of his previous novels, the second and third of which he did not allow to be reprinted:

  Never again, I swore, would I read a novel of Conrad’s – a vow I kept for more than a quarter of a century until I found myself with Heart of Darkness in a small paddle boat travelling up a Congo tributary in 1959.

  That of course was the journey which produced A Burnt-out Case (1961). According to Norman Sherry, however, Greene read, or reread, one more Conrad novel in the year of 1932 before renouncing him, an earlier, better and very different novel from Arrow of Gold: The Secret Agent (1907).9 And Greene’s next novel, It’s a Battlefield (1934), is in some respects an hommage to Conrad’s. It centres on a case of murder with political implications, as Conrad’s centres on a botched act of terrorism, and cross-cuts between a variety of characters who are closely or tangentially connected to this event and its consequences. Several of these characters – for instance, the Assistant Commissioner of Police and a minister’s private secretary – correspond closely to equivalent figures in The Secret Agent. The hero, if he can be so called, of Greene’s novel, is named Conrad, after a Polish sea-captain who once lodged with his parents. These intertextual allusions are, however, in some ways misleading. It’s a Battlefield is really a very different novel from A Secret Agent: in its multiplicity of characters and cinematic cutting from short scene to short scene it is more like Greene’s own Stamboul Train, while in style and overall structure, as Cedric Watts has observed, it sometimes surprisingly resembles Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. In both novels, the characters’ paths and fortunes intersect by chance as they move around London; in both a car passes through the streets carrying royalty or some head of state, drawing crowds, causing traffic jams, exciting speculation and a variety of thoughts and emotions in those who observe it. The overt nods to Conrad in the text may be in part designed to disguise an influence that Greene was less ready to acknowledge because Virginia Woolf was closer to Greene himself than Conrad in age, and still writing.

  Greene unlearned the bad lessons he had acquired from Conrad, but in one respect the older novelist left a permanent mark on his work of which Greene himself may not have been conscious. The narrator of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes speaks of the necessity of finding ‘some key-word . . . a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages, a word which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale’.10 In Under Western Eyes that word is ‘cynicism’, but other works of Conrad have different keywords – ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’ in Heart of Darkness, for instance, or ‘material interests’ in Nostromo. As I pointed out in my first published criticism about Graham Greene,11 his novels also have their thematic keywords: trust and distrust in The Confidential Agent, for instance, good and evil, right and wrong in Brighton Rock, pity in The Heart of the Matter and love and hate in The End of the Affair. The insistent recurrence of these abstract nouns in dialogue and description is one of the signatures of Greene’s style.

  Greene’s decision to stop reading Conrad in 1932 was a drastic expression of the anxiety of influence, a kind of Oedipal violence committed against a literary father-figure. His way of dealing with the influence of Henry James was more subtle and complex. It may seem surprising that there was ever a problem for him in this respect, because there is no very obvious similarity between Greene’s fiction and James’s. The adventure story element so crucial to nearly all Greene’s fiction is absent from James’s, as is dogmatic religious belief; and the social milieux they dealt with were entirely different. Temperamentally there could hardly be two more different men: the fastidious, celibate James, and Greene with his very active sex life and fascination with ‘seediness’. Nevertheless there is no question that for Greene as a young aspiring novelist Henry James was the Master whom he both learned from and emulated. There are more essays about Henry James in The Lost Childhood, and more references and allusions to him throughout the book than to any other writer. He praises James in the highest terms: ‘He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.’ We might infer from his own novels that what Greene valued and emulated in James was his technical and stylistic virtuosity, his grasp of the fundamental importance of point of view in fiction, and his ability to convey the subjectivity of human experience without sacrificing the discipline of the well-made plot and the well-formed sentence, and there are hints and asides in the essays which imply as much. But these are not the aspects of James’s work which Greene emphasises in arguing for his greatness. He concludes the 1936 essay, ‘Henry James: the Private Universe’, by saying: ‘it is in the final justice of his pity, the completeness of an analysis which enabled him to pity the most shabby, the most corrupt, of his human actors, that he ranks with the greatest creative writers.’

  To anyone who knows Henry James’s work well this is surely a rather surprising, even eccentric comment. In fact it seems far more applicable to Greene’s own work, to what he had written by 1936 and what he aspired to write and would write in the future. At the beginning of the same essay he attributes to James a ‘sense of evil religious in its intensity’. In another essay written a few years earlier, but placed after the ‘Private Universe’ essay in The Lost Childhood, called ‘Henry James: the Religious Aspect’, Greene argued against the view of Desmond MacCarthy that the religious sense was ‘singularly absent from [James’s] work’, again emphasising James’s examination o
f evil in human behaviour:

  The novels are only saved from the deepest cynicism by the religious sense; the struggle between the beautiful and the treacherous is lent . . . the importance of the supernatural. Human nature is not despicable in Osmond or Densher, for they are both capable of damnation.

  And he goes on to quote a passage from T. S. Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire, ‘the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true that his glory is his capacity for damnation’ – a passage that several critics, including myself, have applied to Greene’s heroes, or anti-heroes. There is a certain amount of truth in these observations on James, but it is exaggerated and distorted. Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady is certainly a nasty piece of work, but Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove is weak and confused rather than evil, and full of remorse after Milly’s death for his and Kate Croy’s exploitation of her. In his essay on Portrait of a Lady Greene says of James: ‘what deeply interested him, what indeed was his ruling passion, was the idea of treachery, the “Judas complex”.’ This phrase, the ‘Judas complex’, is put inside quotation marks, but is not attributed to anybody, and I wonder if Greene himself didn’t in fact make it up. It certainly seems much more applicable to Greene’s interest in treachery and betrayal than to James’s. He says we may never know ‘what it was at the very start of life that so deeply impressed on the young James this sense of treachery’ – but he knew, and we know now from Norman Sherry’s biography, what it was in his own case. He felt he had betrayed the schoolboy ethic when he ran away from home, which led to the unmasking of the bullying from which he had suffered and his persecutor’s removal from the school.12 His first novel, The Man Within, has a hero full of self-loathing and guilt on account of having betrayed his friends, the chief of whom describes the hero as ‘a sort of Judas’. The essay ‘The Lost Childhood’ ends with lines from A.E.’s poem, ‘Germinal’: