Roeping. Jaargang 30

[p. 236]

Neville Braybrooke
Graham Greene the critic

MEN travelling up to London before the first World War might lean across the carriage and, pointing, say - ‘That chap over there. He's a sort of ‘Enry Straker character’. For the Shavian impact of Man and Superman was as immediate as it was enormous. Again, a few stations later, the same man might lean across to his friend and add - ‘That fellow who's just got out. He's one of the John Tanner tribe, I should guess’. A somewhat similar impact [though less vocal] has been made by Graham Greene's work.

You go to a friend's house for dinner. In the course of conversation you discover that your hostess is a lapsed Catholic, the mistress of a rich Spaniard. Then he comes in and you realise that the whole relationship is built up of pity one for the other, coupled with a certain hatred. You sit back and ponder it. ‘Almost a Scobie dilemma’ an inner voice whispers. Again, a few days later, you are walking in the back streets of some sprawling city. The pubs are closed, there are a few ‘queers’ hanging about and a number of street-walkers stamping their feet in the drizzle. As you wander along, a raucous voice interrupts - ‘Looking for me, dearie?’ - and at the same time you hear the tinkle of a till being opened as a publican checks the night's takings. You reflect: ‘If I were Graham Greene I might link up that tinkle with the Angelus bell as a means of dramatic irony to underline the hair's breadth between damnation and salvation’. For like Shaw's characters, Greene's also recall situations. One becomes accustomed to the Shavian landscape as one becomes accustomed to Greeneland. Comparisons between these two authors stretched farther than that become exercises in ingenuity; but the comparison between Shavian landscape and Greeneland can be a valuable one. It provides a capital point of departure for an assessment of Graham Greene the critic.

In a short book on British Dramatists [1942] Greene refers to Shaw as another Irishman, like Sterne, who ‘plays the fool at enormous length, but without that little bitter core which lies hidden in Tristam Shandy’, and continues: ‘His ideas are often adopted for the sake of their paradoxes and discarded as soon as they cease to startle. He gives his audience a sense of intellectual activity - but they often imagine they have exercised their brains when they have really done no more than strain their eyes at the startling convolutions of a tumbler’.

For it is noticeable in Greene's fiction that as it has progressed it has be-

[p. 237]

come starker; neither his language nor his meaning reflect ‘the startling convolutions of a tumbler’. On the contrary in the early novels, The Man Within [1929], The Name of Action [1931] and Rumour at Nightfall [1932], when Greene attempted to write finely it was often stilted and, on occasion, the result was pure and simple verbiage. Here are some examples: a cart winds along a road ‘like a ladybird along the rim of a leaf’, or ‘Outside the door patches of fleeting blue sky [wave] in the rain and desolation like a tattered banner’. The abandonment of such similies and metaphors is all the more startling when one turns to Greene's criticism. For there simile and metaphor play a large part.

Dickens developed a style so easy and natural that it seems capable of including the whole human race in its understanding: Kipling designed a machine, the cogwheels perfectly fashioned, for exclusion. The characters sometimes seem to rattle down a conveyor-belt like matchboxes.
Then suddenly with The Pickwick Papers came popularity and fame. Fame falls like a dead hand on an author's shoulder, and it is well for him when it falls only in later life. How many in Dicken's place would have withstood what James called ‘the great corrupting contact with the public’, the popularity founded, as it almost always is, on the weakness not the strength of an author?

Perhaps these two extracts - the first taken from an essay on Saki entitled ‘The Burden of Childhood’, the second from a Preface to Oliver Twist - provide a clue to Greene's creative writing. Certainly his criticism, like that of Eliot and others, is a defence of his own range as a novelist.

In The Man Within there is a description of one of the characters which has been called near-Dickensian. It concerns Mrs Butler, a servant. ‘She was a little stout old woman who gave the impression of being very tightly pulled together by a great number of buttons that strayed from their normal positions and peeped out from interstices and side turnings in her volumnious clothes. She had small eyes and very faint, almost indistinguishable eye-brows’.

In The Ministry of Fear [1943] Arthur Rowe reads over and over again the novels of Dickens ‘because he had read them as a child and they contained no adult memories’. So it is that one finds in Greene's criticism some of the main themes of his novels, with the veil of fiction off. One is vouchsafed in his critical essays a glimpse of a novelist's journal and in his more personal pieces - his accounts of coronations and film lunches - a glimpse of the kind of raw material which a novelist stores. For Arthur Rowe's and also Greene's love of Dickens can be seen as complementary in A.E. Housman's poem, ‘Germinal’ -

[p. 238]

a poem from which Greene has chosen by means of a juxtaposition the title for one of his books of essays, The lost Childhood^*.

In ancient shadows and twilights

Where childhood had strayed,

The world's great sorrows were born

And its heroes were made.

In the lost boyhood of Judas

Christ was betrayed.

The lost childhood is the clue to Pinkie, Rowe and Scobie; there remains in them something of the boy cast adrift, endlessly attempting to re-capture and so re-live the past. Children in a world of misunderstanding is a phrase which includes them all. For it was Greene's boyhood which decided his views about reality. There has been no subsequent change, but a maturing. ‘Look at me’, says Ida in Brighton Rock (1938), ‘I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'ill still read Brighton. That's human nature’.

When still a schoolboy at Berkhamsted, Greene had read Marjorie Bowen's novel, The Viper of Milan: it gave him a pattern to life - ‘religion might explain it to me in other terms, but the pattern was already there - perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures after all in the end that justice is done’. It was his recognition of original sin, of the fact that [left to their own devices and without supernatural aid] men naturally err towards what is evil. It was his boyhood discovery of this truth from watching the natural world which led him to accept Catholicism. ‘I am a Catholic with an intellectual if not an emotional belief in Catholic dogma’. Moreover his attraction to Henry James was because he found another writer whose vision was after his own heart: ‘evil was overwhelmingly part of his visible universe’. For him other novelists who followed, with a few exceptions such as François Mauriac, suffered from believing that by mining into layers of personality hitherto untouched they could unearth the secret of ‘importance’, but in these mining operations they lost yet another dimension: the visible world ceased to exist for them as completely as the spiritual, and, when walking down Regent Street, Mrs Dalloway ‘was aware of the glitter of shop windows, the smooth pasage of cars, the conversation of shoppers,... it was only a Regent Street seen by Mrs Dalloway that was conveyed to the reader: a charming whimsical rather sentimental prose poem was what Regent Street had become’.

* The Lost Childhood [Eyre & Spottiswoode, 12/6].

[p. 239]

This was a far remove from the reality of Henry James's ‘visible universe’. For to Greene James became a social writer only when he ceased to be a religious writer. Of Daisy Miller he might observe ‘common she might be, yet what provision was made by that epiphet for her queer little native grace’. But such telling touches are the marginilia in which both the Marxist and Conservative critic find their delight. Not so Greene. To him James was essentially a revolutionary novelist whose vision was of a changing world in which people did not change, but grew older. Classes came to power and declined, while human nature remained the same. James saw the class of his own time as that which had had ‘the longest and happiest innings in history... and for whom the future wasn't going to be, by most signs, anything like so blind and benedictory as the past’. As he went on: ‘I cannot say how vivid I felt the drama so preparing might become - that of the lapse of immemorial protection, that of the finally complete exposure of the immemorially protected’. This note comes through repeatedly in Greene's essays: in fact it is hard to come upon a piece of his criticism in which he does not mention James.

Yet valuable as Greene's criticism is for the light which it throws on his own craftsmanship and for its stressing of the religious aspect of James's work, there is about some of his essays a savage cruelty. One might even say that they were distinguished by both his courage and cruelty. Whatever he elects to write upon - be it Defoe, Ford Maddox Ford or the centenary of Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son - there is always at lease one good original point: ‘Compare the careful architecture of Tom Jones: the introductory essays enable the author to put his [own] view and to leave the characters to go their own way untainted by the uncharacteristic moralising of Defoe's’; ‘Human nature in Ford Maddox Ford's books was usually phosphorescent - varying from the daemonic malice of Sylvia Tietjens to the paintaking, rather hopeless will-to-be-good of Captain Ashburnham, “the good soldier”;’ or finally this summing up of ‘Mr Cook's Century’, written in 1941.

What would they have thought - those serene men with black moustaches, and deer - stalkers for the crossing, if they could have seen in a vision the great familiar station-yard, dead and deserted as it was a few months Bomb’, casually explaining what would have seemed to them the end of back, without a cab, a porter or a policeman, just a notice, ‘Unexploded everything; no trains for France, no trains for Switzerland, none for Italy, and even the clock stopped?

Yet in other essays though there is a courage of convictions to be admired there is in those on Eric Gill and Beverley Nichols a cruelty that is distasteful.

[p. 240]

There is no doubt that the Eric Gill bubble needed pricking. He was a fine craftsman, but extravagance of praise led to his being over-rated, to his being placed beside Michelangelo and Rodin [another two who cannot be equated]. To this extent Greene's comments are a corrective. Yet in the contention that in England Roman Catholicism has been a great breeder of eccentrics, there is when he applies the thesis to Gill a certain slickness. His observation that Gill's beard and biretta were the expressions of fury against his environment is a verdict as surprisingly superficial as his last jibe: ‘That overpowering tradition of eccentricity simply absorbed him until even his most outrageous anti-clerical utterances caused only a knowing smile on the face of the faithful. The beard and the biretta won - he was an eccentric too’. For this is to see Gill as a cardboard figure in a peepshow: it is a simplification which is a distortion because in presenting only certain facets of Gill's character - and then only some of the more superficial facets - it lacks roundness as a portrait. Oftentimes in criticism, as in life, one has to be cruel to be kind: but there are different kinds of cruelty. There is that which is shot from the eye like a glance, its most common form being the snap-judgement. When it succeeds, it is deadly; when it does not, it borders on the slick. Greene's treatment of Eric Gill is a typical instance. Then there is the more calculated kind of critical cruelty - what, in comparison with the other form, one might call the cruelty of a slow time exposure as opposed to the sudden snapshot. The method is well illustrated when writing of Beverley Nichols's No Place Like Home, Greene pictures the author as ‘a middle aged and maiden lady’ and goes on to evaluate the book in such terms. The effect is calculated and, within its limits, ably executed; but out of medium. For the medium it requires is the intimate revue sketch. [An artiste of skill could put over such a number without undue maliciousness whereas printed in cold type such a number would fail - as indeed is the case with Greene's review.] The method is not suited to objective presentation and when so treated appears cruel without excuse: there is no question of its leading to kindness.

It is perhaps to be expected that Greene's writing should recall the intimate revue sketch. For the melodramatic faults which sometimes come through in his fiction manifest themselves in a different way in his criticism. There, they tend to resemble the slickness of the revue sketch, but so not succeed since the author-reader relationship on this level lacks the warm intimacy of an artisteaudience relationship in the theatre. Greene has something of a Websterian quality about his work; his fiction is shot through with it - and so is his criticism. In both there are excesses: in his fiction, melodrama and Grand Guignol; in his criticism, slickness and cruelty. Yet, these failings apart, there is in his writing a kinship with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists which

[p. 241]

makes it much nearer their Hell-haunted world than that of the Shavian landscape; much closer to Henry James's universe of evil than to Virginia Woolf's private world - seen through the french windows of one of her own secluded rooms. In short, Greene's work is a criticism of life and that section of it which falls under the appendage of ‘literary criticism’ but a defence of the characters of his own creation. The two activities are not separate for him: they are component parts of one and the same scene - different sectors of the map which makes up Greeneland.

Vignet Johan van der Bol