Patterns Of Evil And How To Break Them
“Milly, dear Milly. Beware of formulas. If there’s a God he’s not a God of formulas.”
Our Man in Havana “You try too hard to make a pattern, father.”
A Burnt-Out Case
It is tempting to let Graham Greene’s characters speak for their creator, to say that they summarize the theme of his long writing career. But of course review of a career spanning forty years and thirty works is not that simple. In the first place, there is a sort of formula in what critics like to call Greeneland: settings tend to be foreign (to English-speaking readers) places like Africa, South America, Viet Nam; main characters tend to be whiskey priests, revolutionaries, atheists, juvenile delinquents, and the like. But the people expound the evidence of Greene’s pattern-breaking. It is his conception of God that defies easy formulation—and invites particular interest.
The break from pattern reaches a peak in Greene’s 1973 novel, The Honorary Consul, where a priest-turned-revolutionary suggests that God is evil as well as good:
If I kill him it will be God’s fault as much as mine.… He made me what I am now. He will have loaded the gun and steadied my hand [Simon and Schuster, 1973, p. 261].
Another rather unexpected idea appears in A Burnt-Out Case, where an atheist who is a doctor in a Roman Catholic leprosarium muses about the place of Christianity in human evolution:
We are riding a great ninth evolutionary wave. Even the Christian myth is part of the wave, and perhaps, who knows, it may be the most valuable part. Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done. In isolated cases it may have done, in the saints … if the man really existed, in Christ … [Viking, 1961, p. 153].
It would be all wrong to assign the characters’ beliefs to their creator, but one can scarcely avoid wondering about Greene’s relation to the Roman Catholic Church he embraced. His own description of his early life and conversion appears in A Sort of Life (Simon and Schuster, 1971). He was the fourth of six children of a schoolmaster—the branch of the family known as the “intellectual Greenes.” Certainly his was not a religious family, although he had a grandfather who was a clergyman. Graham Greene’s own interest in Catholicism stemmed not from any interest in spiritual things but from his interest in a woman.
It occurred to me … that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held. It was only fair, since she knew what I believed—in nothing supernatural.… I didn’t disbelieve in Christ—I disbelieved in God [pp. 164, 165, 167].
Clearly something happened that winter of 1925–26 or the young man fresh out of Oxford would have gone on to write very different books. There was no blinding light, as he tells it, and his description of his conversion sounds appropriate for someone who writes as Greene does about God:
My friend Antonia White many years later told me how, when she was attending the funeral of her father, an old priest who had known her as a child tried to persuade her to return to the Church. At last—to please him more than for any other reason—she said, “Well then, Father, remind me of the arguments for the existence of God.” After a long hesitation he admitted to her, “I knew them once, but I have forgotten them.” I have suffered the same loss of memory. I can only remember that in January 1926 I became convinced of the probable existence of something we call God, though now I dislike the word with all its anthropomorphic associations and prefer Chardin’s “Noosphere,” and my belief never came by way of those unconvincing philosophical arguments [pp. 167, 168],
He says little else about his faith or his church in his autobiography except to remark that the church with all its answers couldn’t always meet his needs—much as the organization called church is rarely the source of hope in his books.
For him, intellectual and anthropomorphic conceptions of God fall meaningless before the gracious love of God. When that love somehow gets to a Greene character, people change. Querry, in A Burnt-Out Case, is one who changes. Bombarded by pompous chatter about the love of God, haunted by the outside world’s pursuit of scandalous stories, Querry comes to feel interest in other people and to laugh. Small signs, to be sure, like negative skin tests signaling the reversal of leprosy in a patient. And of course there isn’t anything uniquely Christian about either interest in others or laughter.
Querry’s genuinely Christian act was his containment of evil. The natural human reaction to ill treatment is to get revenge, or, if that is impossible, to mistreat someone else. But that is doing unto others as we have been done unto, and the avenger falls into the same pit as the initial wrongdoer. The more noble, loving—and difficult—reaction is epitomized in the crucifixion: when evil is absorbed or contained it is stopped, and good is done instead of evil. The Golden Rule is in effect.
In Querry’s case the harm he had inflicted in his life before retreating to the leprosarium had involved women: one had even committed suicide when his interest in her waned. But one noon, lying on his bed in the African heat, he found he could promise “never again from boredom or vanity to involve another human being in my lack of love. I shall do no more harm, he thought, with the kind of happiness a leper must feel when he is freed at last by his seclusion from the fear of passing on contagion to another” (pp. 142, 143). Ironically—or perhaps with some justice—Querry’s death comes at the hand of a jealous husband enraged by his wife’s false claim that Querry fathered the child she is expecting. Querry had kept his promise.
Greene stated the problem of revenge in his earlier book, Our Man in Havana (Viking, 1958). He labeled that book an “entertainment”—ostensibly, at least, treating less serious matter than a novel, which is how he describes A Burnt-Out Case. Perhaps there are—or were—some distinctions (though the list of his books in a recent novel is not divided between “Novels” and “Entertainments”), and there might be some academic interest in pursuing them. But a writer of Greene’s ability is bound to put some meaty chunks in his gravy. “Childhood was the germ of all mistrust,” he writes in Our Man in Havana (p. 31). “You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”
Many inhabitants of Greeneland are children (most of the rest are fathers—biological or clerical) but not naïve innocents. Having apparently been “joked upon” particularly cruelly, they respond as children typically do, imitating what they see. Greene seems to imply that hope lies in maturity: when one grows up he will be less inclined to pass on the cruel jokes done to him. It may be more precise to say Greene wishes that were true but believes there’s more involved than aging. In Brighton Rock (Viking, 1938) a young girl has been badly mistreated by a boy she thought loved her. Planning her death, he had convinced her to join him in a suicide pact. As it turned out, he died and she lived, and Rose, feeling guilt for Pinkie’s death, goes to confession to repent for not dying with him, to wish herself damned with him, even though she suspects she is pregnant with Pinkie’s child.
“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone—the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God,” the priest tells her (p. 357). “The Church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy.… We must hope, … hope and pray.”
“I want to hope,” Rose responds, “but I don’t know how.”
“ ‘If he loved you, surely,’ the old man said ‘that shows … there was some good.…’ ”
Rose leaves, promising to return, and Greene writes, “A sudden feeling of immense gratitude broke through the pain—it was as if she had been given the sight a long way off of life going on again” (p. 358). It will not be an easy life, as Greene suggests in the final words of the book, but the reader feels as though Pinkie’s child will grow up with less pain inflicted on him than his father felt.
Not all the childish characters in Greene tales are teen-agers. Many are adults who have not grown up to the desire not to hurt others. Dr. Edward Plarr, in The Honorary Consul, is one of those. Content to while away his time amusing himself, he is little concerned about the effect of his actions on others. And then he finds himself in the unlikely position of having helped a band of revolutionaries kidnap, instead of the American ambassador, a relatively unimportant British honorary consul named Charley Fortnam.
Throughout the book Plarr exhibits, subconsciously, an almost filial attitude toward Fortnam. A psychiatrist might have a field day with the father-son imagery in this novel, but Greene seems less interested in the psychological implications than the spiritual ones. On the one hand is Fortnam, who calls himself the father of the child his wife is carrying, although, as he learns in his captivity, his friend Plarr is actually the father. On the other hand is the revolutionary leader Rivas, who is called Father by his companions although he has married and turned from the priesthood. On the one hand, Charley Fortnam accepts the baby as his own, and on the other, Father Rivas accepts to say mass and hear confessions before the police arrive at the hideout.
But Plarr is the one who turns around: “He wondered … about his child. The child too was the result of an error, a carelessness on his part, but he had never before felt any responsibility” (p. 251). And with his last breath the doctor who believed he retained none of his childhood faith offers absolution to the priest who had been his childhood friend.
Graham Greene writes compellingly about the “strangeness of the mercy of God”—mercy that rises above formulas and patterns to great heights of beauty:
“Christ was a man,” Father Rivas said, “even if some of us believe that he was God as well. It was not the God the Romans killed, but a man. A carpenter from Nazareth. Some of the rules he laid down were only the rules of a good man. A man who lived in his own province, in his own particular day. He had no idea of the kind of world we would be living in now. Render unto Caesar, but … our Caesar uses napalm and fragmentation bombs.… The Church lives in time too. Only sometimes for a short while, for some people.… I think sometimes the memory of that man, that carpenter, can lift a few people out of the temporary Church of these terrible years, … into the great Church beyond our time and place, and then … those lucky ones they have no words to describe the beauty of that Church” [The Honorary Consul, p. 261].
JANET ROHLER GREISCH1Janet Rohler Greisch is a free-lance writer who lives in Ames, Iowa.
Newly Pressed
Take Me Back, Andraé Crouch and the Disciples (Light, LS-5637). This album adds two new members to the group, Fletch Wiley and Bill Maxwell. Most of the songs have the sound normally associated with Andraé, close harmony and lots of soft back-up. But “It Ain’t No New Thing,” the best cut on the album, is straight Dixieland jazz, with lots of trombone, clarinet, trumpet both muted and unmuted, and piano. Even the vocal harmonies sound brass-like. It’s a unique center for the lyrics, “You may think the Jesus movement/And the Jesus revolution/Is a new thing/But Jesus started moving, a long time ago.” An album of Andraé performing nothing but Dixieland would be worth owning.
I Have Returned, Marijohn (Myrrh, MSA-6537), and Roy Clark Sings Gospel (Word, WST-8654). Those who like country and Western music will want these two albums. Marijohn avoids the hard, nasal quality of too many big-name country female singers; her voice is low-pitched and rich. She seldom sings with a twang, except when the effect of the song depends on it, as in “God Is Love,” which has the best lyrics on the album. Roy Clark mixes new and old gospel songs. His rendition of “Why Me,” from Gospel Road, isn’t as moving as Kris Kristofferson’s arrangement of it. “Jesus Is the Bridge Over Troubled Water”—it’s not the Simon and Garfunckel song but a weak one that appropriated the idea from S & G.
Sorrow Come Pass Me Around: A Survey of Rural Black Religious Music (Advent [P.O. Box 635, Manhattan Beach, Calif. 90266], Advent 2805). An unusual collection of privately recorded rural black music for anyone interested in primitive American religious music, and for historians in several fields. Includes a ten-page booklet providing dates for the recordings and the background of songs and performers. Primitive, but moving.
A Concert of the Russian Synod Choir in Jerusalem (The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, 1190 Park Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10028). Beautifully sung and directed. The music is all Orthodox liturgical sacred music, both ancient and modern, all sung a capella. Two songs were written by the choir’s director, Boris M. Ledkovsky, and one by Sergi Rachmaninoff. An insert provides translations. A good addition to any person’s religious music record library.
CHERYL FORBES
