The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  In 1934, Greene had reviewed Eliot’s After Strange Gods and cautiously affirmed the superiority of moral over aesthetic criticism: ‘To be a Catholic (in Mr. Eliot’s case an Anglo-Catholic) is to believe in the Devil, and why, if the Devil exists, should he not work through contemporary literature, it is hard to understand.’4 He is not talking in loose secular terms about an ethical approach to literature – he is talking about spiritual warfare on the page.

  After about 1948, Greene would occasionally trot out a passage from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University: ‘I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man. You may gather something very great and high, something higher than any literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not literature at all.’ Newman’s comments here and elsewhere contributed to a literary revival among Catholics by giving them leave to render characters who were sinful, even depraved, and by sparing novelists the duty to be relentlessly uplifting.5 Newman may have also had that liberating effect on Greene, but then Greene was never tempted to write uplifting tales about pure men and women, whatever his fellow Catholics may have longed for. As the years went by, Greene would simply quote Newman’s words to shut down discussion of the Catholic content of his work, but as one of Newman’s biographers, Ian Ker, points out, Greene has entirely distorted Newman’s point since the section opens with: ‘One of the special objects which a Catholic University would promote is that of a Catholic Literature in the English language.’6 In the lines that Greene so often quotes, Newman was merely arguing against the notion that one could study Catholic writers and exclude pagans. Greene has badly misread Newman.

  And indeed, Greene himself was explicitly struggling with the problem of how a Catholic sense of the soul and of providence altered the craft of fiction, specifically in terms of character and plot, and how a sense of mortal sin required a focus on objective acts performed by characters rather than on mental process. Greene’s sense of craft is shaped by his faith – the faith and the craft are not separate. To put it another way, a good writer who happens to be a Catholic is going to be different from a writer who happens to be something else. Many years later, Margaret Drabble would have a character in her novel The Dark Flood Rises dismiss Greene’s turn of phrase as ‘casuistry’.7

  In 1936, Greene wanted to write another entertainment along the lines of A Gun for Sale, delving again into the world of racetrack gangsters that formed the background of The Green Cockatoo. He liked writing melodrama, and such a book would make money. Brighton was a town Greene had known since childhood and continued to visit, since his parents lived in nearby Crowborough. He had already set one novel, The Man Within, in Sussex – this one, eventually entitled Brighton Rock, would be set in the present day. His portrait of Brighton in that book offended local authorities and led him one day to ask, ‘Would they have resented the novel even more deeply if they had known that for me to describe Brighton was really a labour of love, not hate? No city before the war, not London, Paris or Oxford, had such a hold on my affections.’8 And, in fact, Greene went to Brighton frequently over the years, usually checking quietly into a hotel and setting to work on whatever novel or film script he had at hand. There were few places where he found it easier to write.

  And yet it had more than its share of troubles. Although it had long been popular for its pier, beach, and entertainments, Brighton was a fairly bloody place: in June 1934, the torso of a woman was found in a trunk in the railway station there and her legs at King’s Cross Station; a few weeks later, in an unrelated crime, a murdered dancer was discovered rotting in a trunk in a house in Brighton. Trunk murders occurred from time to time in Britain and the United States – Greene had described one in It’s a Battlefield – but to have two occur in a popular resort in a single summer was shocking. That was not all: at the time of the second discovery, a skull washed up on the beach.9

  The early pages of Brighton Rock are dedicated to the murder of Fred Hale, which Greene recalled, many years later, as being inspired by an actual crime: ‘a man was kidnapped on Brighton front in a broad daylight of the thirties, though not in the same circumstances as Hale, and his body was found somewhere out towards the Downs flung from a car’.10 This would have been the murder in 1928 of Ernest Friend-Smith, a retired chemist, who was attacked near Palace Pier, dragged into a car, robbed, beaten, and dumped on the downs. He managed to find his way home but was so battered his wife did not recognize him, and he died a few weeks later. He had fallen into the hands of a mob that specialized in sexual blackmail, charging victims as much as £500 for their silence about illicit trysts on lonely stretches of the beach – the police knew of their operation but could not persuade victims to come forward. Three men were convicted of murder, and while an appeal was pending their accomplices, very much in the style of Graham Greene’s Pinkie, tried to procure alibis for them by blackmail and threats of violence.11

  Brighton was close enough to London to be drenched in its criminal culture. The races drew tens of thousands of punters; on their approach to the track they might be greeted by the towering Ras Prince Monolulu of Abyssinia in his ostrich-feather headdress – his real name was Peter McKay and he came from the Caribbean island of St Croix – selling sheets of race tips and crying ‘I gotta horse!’12 But the fun was superficial: gangs controlled the betting and they were not to be trifled with.

  Their territorial wars were notorious – for example, in 1924–5 a series of ‘outrages’ culminated in a fight at a tavern on the corner of Aldgate and Middlesex Street in London involving a total of fifty gangsters slashing at each other with razors.13 These wars continued into the next decade, and there was plenty of violence in the vicinity of Brighton. In the summer of 1936, about thirty men, seeking to avenge a razor attack on one of their own, descended on two bookmakers at Lewes racecourse, beating them nearly to death with hammers, pieces of iron, lead pipes, lengths of wire, and knuckledusters. Sixteen of these men were apprehended by detectives and uniformed constables on the scene.14 Twenty-nine-year-old James Spinks of Hackney, notionally a ‘French polisher’ of furniture, led the attack; later, while on bail, he was heard to say menacingly to one of the injured bookmakers, ‘You don’t recognize me, do you?’ That bookmaker tried to disappear before the trial, and when finally brought into the witness box he claimed he did not see Spinks at the scene and had no quarrel with him – this despite Spinks having struck him in the head with a hatchet. The judge and jury could see that the witness had been intimidated. All sixteen were convicted, with Spinks sentenced to five years of penal servitude. Greene began writing his novel just after the trial, and Spinks clearly provided the inspiration for Pinkie.15

  Of course, the police did not just happen to be present in large numbers at Lewes racecourse. Spinks and his cronies were members of the Hoxton Gang, and their great enemy was Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini, who is well known to viewers of Peaky Blinders as the boss of a large gang in the south of England. It seems that he led the Hoxton Gang to expect a pitched battle, but someone tipped off the police and they were marched away in handcuffs. Having disposed of so many rivals at once, Sabini’s own power soon slipped away as he was interned as an enemy alien at the beginning of the war.16 In its heyday in the 1920s, the gang was a loose alliance of Italian and Jewish criminals, so when Greene created the character of Colleoni, modelled on Sabini, he made him an Italian Jew – a decision he later regretted.17

  The public had a boundless appetite for stories of gangsters, and the popular newspapers catered to it with lurid tales of beatings and murders. The papers also engaged in stunts to increase their circulation. The Daily News sent its ‘1 £ Note Man’ into the streets of various towns to give a pound to anyone who showed him a copy of the paper.18 For a number of years, the Westminster Gazette sent a character called ‘Lobby Lud’ to various seaside towns to walk
along an announced route; a person presenting a copy of the newspaper and saying, ‘You are Mr Lobby Lud. I claim the Westminster Gazette prize’ would receive £50. Greene based his character Fred Hale ‘directly’ on Lobby Lud – posing as ‘Kolly Kibber’, the journalist leaves cards along his route which are worth ten shillings each, and there is a £50 prize for anyone who holds up the newspaper and makes such a challenge.19

  In all of this Greene, was struck by how entertainment, sex, poverty, brutality, and desperation were bound together in Brighton and so searched out the slums around Carlton Hill, where a number of streets were soon to be demolished. From Nelson Place comes the character Rose, and from nearby Paradise Piece the mysterious and despicable Pinkie Brown. In the Brighton of Rose and Pinkie the human heart is open to view. Or, as Pinkie remarks, ‘I suppose I’m real Brighton’.20

  Beginning as genre fiction, the story turns towards something uncategorizable. Pinkie kills Fred Hale for having betrayed the gang’s leader and then tries to silence the one person who can break down his alibi, Rose, by marrying her. Meanwhile, a bar singer named Ida, having had a brief encounter with Hale, decides that his death was murder and that she must solve the case since the police seem uninterested. Both Pinkie and Ida are trying to get control of Rose. However, there is a bond between Pinkie and Rose: they are both ‘Romans’, and see the world not as a matter of right and wrong as the secular and ultimately sentimental Ida does, but as a spiritual battle between good and evil. Pinkie says: ‘These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course, there’s hell.’21 It is the hell that has formed him – the tenements, the violence, the privation, the sound of his parents having sex in the bed beside him.

  Greene claims for Catholicism the power of naming truthfully what is worst in life. As an old man he would drop his belief in a Hell beyond this world, but he continued to regard the life we are born to as hellish, or at least purgatorial. Although he yearns for the priesthood, Pinkie commits various mortal sins, including murder, and then in his civil marriage to Rose he is guilty of sacrilege. An embittered virgin, he finds that sex with Rose softens his attitude towards the world and the body; it makes him vulnerable to a pity that nearly leads to repentance ‘between the stirrup and the ground’.22 Still, he continues with a plan to kill Rose and is himself killed. What he may have thought at the end, the reader does not know. Greene refuses to leave us with the sense that Pinkie had a kind heart or that he was simply the victim of circumstance. Earlier in the story, the affectionate Rose had asked him, while they are walking on the pier, to make a gramophone record in a booth, hoping he would speak of his love for her. Instead he whispered a message of hate that she will find after his death. Greene needed to present a life that failed utterly, and came up with Pinkie, who could do great harm even when he is dead.

  At the end, Rose makes her confession to an elderly priest. Throughout the novel she has spoken of her ‘responsibility’ towards Pinkie and is willing to go with him into ‘the country of mortal sin’.23 She is willing to be damned too, if that is his fate, and so believes she should not now ask for forgiveness. The priest tells her the story of the French poet Charles Péguy. Choosing to be on the side of the damned, Péguy refused the sacraments and eventually died at the Front in 1914. The priest adds: ‘You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.’24 This is a theme that sentiment could only obscure.

  ‘The novel in its last 5000 words has turned round and bit me,’ Greene wrote to his agent David Higham in January 1938, putting the difficulty down to having been unable to work at it without interruption.25 In the course of writing it, the novel had changed from a topical thriller into something like a morality play, in which the large gestures of melodrama are absorbed into allegory.26 The original plan for a straightforward detective story can only be seen in the first fifty pages, and Greene wondered whether he ought to have rewritten that section.27 At the time he was particularly pleased with the title, referring to a stick of rock, in which the words ‘Brighton Rock’ remain legible right to the end. However, there was no time for further revision. He delivered the manuscript and prepared for Mexico.

  15

  THE LAWLESS ROADS

  Greene’s decision to visit Mexico was hardly fashionable. Many writers of his generation had involved themselves in the Spanish Civil War. Even his brother Herbert, who had been deceiving the Japanese intelligence service with false information for pay and would later write a book about it, had gone to Spain. In an episode that is more amusing than probable, Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have pointed to Herbert in Madrid and said he was going to execute him as a spy, but Claud Cockburn intervened: ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s my headmaster’s son.’1

  Graham Greene did not like Franco, but as a Catholic could hardly come out in favour of the Republicans. It is universally acknowledged that the Nationalists were guilty of more atrocities, but the Republicans had on their hands the murders of seven thousand secular priests, monks, and nuns – most of them in the first weeks of fighting.2 Greene’s sympathies were actually with the Basques, who supported the Republicans in exchange for regional autonomy, and in the late spring, at the time of the bombing of Guernica, he had an opportunity to fly into Bilbao as it prepared for a Nationalist assault.

  Carrying an introduction from the Basque delegation in London, he flew at short notice to Toulouse, where he was to board a small plane. There are two accounts of what happened next. Greene told his mother that the government had commandeered the plane and that another would not be available before he had to return to London so he spent a short time in Paris with Clarouin and came home.3 The other, more picturesque, version, written years later, is that he found his contact, a café owner, shaving in the corner of his restaurant at 6 a.m., and despite the ornate letter of introduction he presented the man refused to attempt another flight past Franco’s gunners.4

  Greene’s plan to go to Mexico had been on a slow boil for a year and a half. The idea began with the Catholic publisher Frank Sheed, who proposed it to Father Miguel Darío Miranda as head of the Secretariado Social Mexicano and a key figure in the church’s struggle against an anticlerical government. He embraced Sheed’s plan of sending an important British novelist to write about the persecution and consulted with the apostolic delegate in Mexico City, who was also delighted.5 So it was that Greene’s proposed visit had the support of the highest level of the Mexican church.

  Although Sheed commissioned him and promised an advance of £500 in August 1936, the plan languished as Greene went about his other projects. At the end of 1937 Sheed backed out, so Greene pitched the book to Heinemann, but, as he observed, it was not a good fit for a firm that marketed even the Bible as literature.6 His friend and fellow Catholic Tom Burns was a publisher with Longmans, and, after drinks with Greene, he commissioned The Lawless Roads.7

  The persecution Greene was to investigate had long, tangled roots.8 In colonial times the church had enormous power, but after independence in 1821 many leaders, including some Catholics, favoured a separation of church and state. The constitution adopted in 1857 took power and property away from the church while Porfirio Díaz, dictator from 1876 to 1911, kept things quiet with the church, paying no attention to the anticlerical constitution so long as the church steered clear of politics. However, Pope Leo XIII’s call for social reform in the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) led to the establishment throughout Mexico of labour and civic organizations with a Catholic identity and this proved a serious provocation. Having been on the side of landowners, Díaz lost power in a peasant uprising that turned into a civil war between 1910 and 1920. Anticlericalism revived among the revolutionaries, especially the constitutionalists, who saw the church as counter-revolutionary and its social organizations as a sham. From 1914 to 1919, there were many attacks on Catholic churches, schools, and institutions, with about five hundred priests, nuns, and bishops driven out of the country.9

  The new const
itution of 1917 was much harder on the church. It denied it legal personality; allowed the government to intervene in its affairs; empowered governors to limit the number of priests in their states; banned religious orders and the taking of vows, church education, and foreign priests; forbade comment by priests on political matters; prohibited religious worship in public places; and nationalized all church property.10 Even so, harassment remained a local affair; gradually, exiles returned and some Catholic activism resumed. Church piety often focused on the figure of Christ the King, signifying a legitimate authority to set against the claims of the government.

  A new president, Plutarco Elías Calles, a hardliner, brought laws into effect on 31 July 1926 stipulating fines and imprisonment for those who violated the constitutional bans. Although divided, the bishops endorsed a national economic boycott, and, surprisingly, a suspension of all religious services in Mexico – a sort of ecclesiastical strike.11 That autumn saw the beginning of the first Cristero War, which was actually many small uprisings throughout the country, but especially in the states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacán to the west of Mexico City.12 In a conflict that killed ninety thousand combatants and an unknown number of civilians,13 the Cristeros did battle with federal troops and paramilitaries called agraristas (in reference to the cause of land reform). Although the Cristeros were guilty of some excesses, the federal forces were butchers, often forcing suspects to walk on feet that had been flayed and blowtorching bare skin. They took and killed peasant hostages, and there were many mass executions. After battles, they usually killed their prisoners.14

  The war went on until June 1929, when a peace was agreed between the government and representatives of the Mexican and American churches and the American ambassador, while in the background the Vatican gave its approval. Although they controlled a great deal of territory, the Cristeros were left out of the negotiations; still, they laid down their arms by September. The government then embarked on terrible reprisals, and over the next six years five thousand Cristeros were hunted down and killed.15 The government renewed its pressure on the church by imposing a specifically anticlerical and revolutionary scheme of education on children, so the Cristeros commenced their second war but it was disorganized and enjoyed less support from the bishops, many of whom were now inclined to conciliation. Indeed, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, Acerba Animi, in September 1932, affirming that the government had grossly violated the 1929 agreement, but mapping out, nonetheless, how clergy might adapt themselves to evil laws in order to serve their parishes and dioceses.16 The fighting continued, on and off, until the end of the decade.