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Comic Characterization In The Fiction Of Graham Greene
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Comic Characterization In The Fiction Of Graham Greene
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Xerox University Microfilms
300 North Zeeb Road
Ann Arbor. Michigan 48106
I
I
74-28,448
LATTINVILLE, Ronald Edward, 1940-
COMIC CHARACTERIZATION IN THE FICTION OF
GRAHAM GREENE.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1974
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan
© 1974
RONALD EDWARD LATTINVILLE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN M ICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED.
COMIC CHARACTERIZATION IN THE FICTION
OF GRAHAM GREENE
by
Ronald Edward Lattinville
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1974
U N IVER SITY O F S O U TH E R N C A L IF O R N IA
T H E GRADUATE S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y PARK
LOS ANGELES, C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
.............. RQnald.Ed5 Kax.d.IvaJttin.vilIe.................
under the direction of his..... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Date.
DISSERTATION C O M M ITTEE
\Cha
.
Chairman
DEDICATION
To my wife Darlene with love and thanks, and
especially to Kathleen, our daughter, who has the gift of
laughter.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ............................................ 1
Chapter
I. THE WORLD OF GREENE'S FICTION.................. 20
II. INNOCENT C LOWNS .................................. 84
III. INCOMPETENT CLOWNS ............................... 126
IV. COMEDIANS........................................ 173
V. THE GLASS OF S ATIR E............................. 219
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 281
INTRODUCTION
"Contrary to common belief the truth is nearly
always funny," says Dr. Humphries, the thin and hopeless
English professor, in The Honorary Consul.1 "It's only
tragedy which people bother to imagine or invent" (p. 28).
Graham Greene's writing of nearly fifty years suggests that
he agrees with Humphries, himself a sadly comic creation.
Greene is basically a realistic novelist, one to whom truth,
that is, an accurate representation of life, is vitally
important, but his experience has led him to conclude that
life is ironic, grotesque, pathetic, and never really
tragic.
Just before the climax of The Honorary Consul, Doc
tor Plarr, who seems to speak for the author, glances around
the hut where he and Charley Fortnum are held by a sorry
group of Paraguayian kidnappers.
Doctor Plarr thought: the desperadoes 1 That is
what the papers would call them. A failed poet, an
excommunicated priest, a pious woman, a man who weeps.
For heaven's sake let this comedy end in comedy. None
of us are suited to tragedy. (p. 277)
This key passage shows Greene's view of human affairs as
essentially comic, for the feeling is that human beings are
simply not worthy of tragedy. Humans have not a tragic flaw
but an absurd one; they behave foolishly and act out a
1
script written by Chance, based upon a chain of errors.
Moreover in this case the cast of characters is seen as one
of ridiculous failures. The kidnappers' abduction of
Charley Fortnum rather than the American ambassador who was
their intended victim only shows their failure to be pathe
tic and clownlike.
Nor is Dr. Plarr's sentiment a new one in Greene's
work, for it echoes a remark the novelist made in a movie
review of 1936. Pointing out that a certain play by John
Van Druten is silly because it shows adolescence as digni
fied and tragic, he wrote:
The truth is seldom tragic, for human beings are not
made in that grand way. The truth may be sad but truth
is nearly always grotesque as well.2
It is that term grotesque which is most significant in
understanding Greene's handling of character, for many of
his memorable characters have been grotesques. And the
grotesque in Greene is usually comic.
Greene's recent best seller, The Honorary Consul,
illustrates his comic handling of story and character. The
plot of that book is basically absurd, even frankly laugh
able, human error. The central figure is Dr. Edwardo Plarr,
an Anglo-Argentinian outsider, convinced by old friends, now
Paraguayian rebels, to help kidnap the visiting American
ambassador to be used as hostage to force the Paraguayian
government to release political prisoners, among them
Plarr's aged father. As the novel opens Plarr is waiting to
hear how the planned abduction has gone. Late at night he
answers a mysterious telephone summons from the kidnappers
who have need of Plarr's professional skill to rouse their
victim from his drugged sleep. After he arrives at the hut
where the kidnappers are staying, Plarr goes into the room
where
He bent down and looked closely at the flushed face.
For a long moment he couldn't believe his eyes. Then
he laughed from the shock of what he had seen. "Oh
Le6n," he said, "You have taken up the wrong profes
sion." (p. 40)
When no one in the hut understands, Plarr explains that they
have kidnapped the wrong man— Charley Fortnum, the British
Honorary Consul. Since he is not even a real diplomat,
Charley is entirely useless for the conspirators' purpose.
"It's really rather comic," Doctor Plarr said,
"when you think of it" . . . He looked from one face
to another, but no one smiled in return. (p. 41)
Plarr assumes that they will now simply release Charley and
the whole affair can be forgotten like a gag that failed to
come off. But it is not, of course, to be that easy. The
conspirators, devoted as they are to their own conceptions
of freedom and dignity, decide to bargain for the release of
prisoners with poor old drunken Charley-nobody. (It is sig
nificant that the rebel kidnappers value Charley more as a
human being than either the Establishment or Plarr does.)
Much less idealistic than the criminal kidnappers, Plarr
immediately realizes that Charley is doomed because no one
will lift a finger to save him. Thus he and Charley and all
4
the conspirators are trapped in an absurd situation from
which there is no escape.
The novel returns to this point of absurd inevita
bility near its conclusion as Fortnum, now knowing that
Plarr was his wife's lover and that her unborn child is
Plarr's, awaits his death with surprising dignity.
"I know you think I'm a coward, Plarr, but I'm not
much afraid of dying now. It's a lot easier than going
back and waiting at the camp for a child to be born with
your face, Plarr."
"It's not how I intended things," Doctor Plarr
repeated. He had no anger left with which to defend
himself. "Nothing is ever what we intend. They didn't
mean to kidnap you. I didn't mean to start the child.
You would almost think there was a great joker somewhere
who likes to give a twist to things. Perhaps the dark
side of God has a sense of humor. (p. 280, italics
mine.)
This notion of God as Supreme Joker surfaces visibly in
Greene's later novels. In The Comedians,3 for instance,
when the narrator, Brown, is asked why he is returning to
Haiti, now a land of torture and repression, he declines to
confide his reasons because they are "too personal and too
serious. If one can describe as serious the confused comedy
of our private lives" (p. 27, italics mine). But he thinks,
much as Plarr seems to do in The Honorary Consul, that
error, humiliation, and absurdity seem so clearly a part of
life that even God must have a connection with it.
Surely there must be a power which arranges things to
happen in the most humiliating circumstances. When I
was a boy I had faith in the Christian God. Life under
his shadow was a very serious affair; I saw Him incar
nated in every tragedy. Now that I approached the end
of life it was only my sense of humour that enabled me
sometimes to believe in Him. Life was a comedy, not the
tragedy for which I had been prepared, and it seemed to
me that we were all . ! ! . driven by an authoritative
practical joker toward the extreme point of comedy.
(p. 28, italics mine.)
Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his New York Review of
Books discussion of The Honorary Consul (significantly
titled "A Funny Sort of God") parallels the long careers of
Greene and P. G. Wodehouse. He recalls Evelyn Waugh's feel
ing that God was as essential to Greene's work as Jeeves was
to that of Wodehouse, and he notes that over the years Wode
house 's famous valet had grown "rather less funny and Mr.
Greene's God rather more so."1 *
If Mr. Greene and his God often seem cruel as well as
funny it is that they are interested in producing
humiliation, a cruel process, and also funny, when
neatly done, as done by Mr. Greene . . .5
Of the recent trend in Greene's fiction O'Brien notes:
The series of novels that opened in 1955 with The Quiet
American and that includes The Honorary Consul is free
from overt apologetics, crisp and increasingly irrever
ent in tone, often apparently cynical, preoccupied with
the absurd, and especially the cruel absurdities of
politics.6
O'Brien is on target in this last paragraph. Greene has
often placed his characters in absurd political situations,
but this tendency certainly does not begin in 1955, as shown
by such early books as The Name of Action (193 0), Stamboul
Train (1932), or even the later The Power and the Glory
(1940) and The Third Man (1950). Furthermore, character,
not philosophy, not apologetics, nor even politics, is
central to Greene's fiction. That is not to claim that his
attitude toward Catholicism, as much debated as that is, is
irrelevant to his work, but it is to assert that we come to
grips with Greene's world picture only through an appre
ciative understanding of his individual creations. He has
never allowed his faith to color his view of real people;7
he refuses to let it affect his fictional portraits.8
Adhering to the classic formulation that comedy
deals with the follies of ordinary men, Greene creates no
heroes in the mold of traditional tragedy. Being human, his
people are creatures of vanity and error, unexceptional,
subject to temptation and vice. By the same token, few of
his characters are beyond Greene's sympathy or ours. Sig
nificantly such worldly "successes" as Erik Krogh (England
Made Me) and the symbolically crippled Sir Marcus (This Gun
for Hire)— both industrial magnates and both in early books
— are beyond redemption in a way that neither Simon Raven
nor Pinkie Brown is. But these two men have such minor
roles that they seem more like symbolic presences than fully
developed humans. In general Greene's characters define
their humanity by their flaws, their grotesque qualities,
and the author allows their reality to show in some surpris
ingly comic detail which can have no other function than
humanizing them for the reader. The pathetic daily routine
of Ferdinand Minty, one of Greene's earliest grotesques,
serves as an example. Another is the naive but frankly
loveable priest in the leper colony who finds pictures of
much needed "foot baths" in a mail order catalog. When he
7
asks his wealthy patrons to donate some of them to his hos
pital, no one has the heart to tell him that he has
requested a number of bidets. Then he shows us the whiskey
priest with his "buffoon's face, good enough for mild jokes
to women, but unsuitable at the altar rail," so drunk on one
occasion that he christens a little boy Carlota instead of
Pedro as his parents had wanted.9 Why these sudden comic
shocks in the midst of serious novels? The answer is that
for Greene such touches make the characters more realistic.10
Greene's serious concern with reality— and its con
stant association with the comic— is further illustrated in
The Honorary Consul. One of the important minor characters
in the book is a novelist, Jorges Julio Saavedra, the latest
of many writers in Greene's fiction whose "art" is obviously
satirized. Saavedra's books are literary as well as popular
failures. Early in his career he had enjoyed some acclaim
from a novel that had exalted a formulaic heroism based upon
the taciturn masculine virtue called in South America—
machismo. Since that early moderate success Saavedra has
never broken away from the hold which machismo has upon his
writing. His novels, therefore, absolutely lack realism.
Dr. Plarr finds Saavedra's novels irritatingly unreal and
boring. (He even uses them to put himself to sleep.) Plarr
argues with Saavedra on occasion when the writer is carried
away with his ideas of quiet masculine devotion to heroic
ideals and finally tragic death. Plarr (like Greene) is
disgusted by Saavedra’s ponderous pseudo-seriousness, for it
is entirely clear that Saavedra is a fool because he never
writes of real people or events.
Saavedra's plots are formula-perfect. They are
heroic, epical. Thus when Plarr is confronted with the
absurd situation of finding that Rivas and the others have
mistakenly kidnapped Charley Fortnum he thinks
the plot would have been better written by Saavedra.
Ingenuity, if not machismo, was distinctly lacking.
(p. 37)
But the point is that the error did occur in reality, even
if it would not be possible in Saavedra's fiction. Further
more, the mistake is, in a grim way, funny.
Plarr, speaking again for Greene, I think, delivers
his main blast against Saavedra's sad, silent hero (for vir
tually the same character appeared again and again in his
books) and against the glorification of machismo.
Life isn't like that. Life isn't noble or dignified.
Even Latin American life. Life has surprises. Life
is absurd. Because it's absurd there is always hope.
Why, one day we may even discover a cure for cancer
and the common cold. (p. 23)
Greene's objection here, like his objection to earTier
writers dealt with in his books, is that the writing is not
real or truthful. Furthermore, it is unreal because life
simply is not heroic or dignified as Saavedra presents it.
Moreover Greene focuses primarily upon fully human charac
ter. Nothing in human life is foreordained; free will is a
fact. Since nothing is inevitable, but rather the result of
9
human folly, traditional concepts of tragedy are virtually
impossible. We shall see that Greene has stated that indeed
life is sometimes sad, but always grotesquely comic as well.
Plarr expresses what might be called the essentially optim
istic Comic Spirit especially well here, for he finds the
absurd, the surprising element in life not at all depressing
but instead rather encouraging. Since there is no sense to
existence, we cannot assume that all things must end unhap
pily for us; good or positive results may obtain ultimately.
This sentiment is finally a secularization of the one which
ends Brighton Rock in which the priest tells Rose that one
may not judge Pinkie because we cannot know precisely the
"terrible mercy of God." In essence, Plarr— and Greene, too
— suggest that where there is absurdity, there is hope. No
greater expression of Comic Spirit is possible.
While The Honorary Consul can be viewed as a late
definitive statement that life is in reality often more
grimly comical than fiction, it is by no means a new state
ment. Greene has made it again and again throughout his
career. But it has been primarily during the last few years
that critics have begun to write about his comedic inter
ests, softening their former insistence that Greene saw all
men as hopelessly fallen and that he viewed the world as a
garden long gone to seed. For the most part Our Man in
Havana (1957), was dismissed as an aberration, but critics
began taking the writer's comic bent seriously when he pub-
10
lished The Comedians (1966) and May We Borrow Your Husband?
and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life (1967) whose titles
suggest an interest in at least the dark side of the world
of comedy. By 1970, when he produced Travels with My Aunt,
one reviewer wrote that "Greeneland has its summer regions."
In his later years, critics decided, Graham Greene had
become a comedian.11
This study focuses upon Greene's treatment of char
acter in relation to his comic-realistic view of life
throughout his career. We will see that his world picture
is the nightmare, often a vision of nonsense, grimly comic
in its refractions of reality. Striving to exist in that
threatening vision of madness are two kinds of characters
associated with the universe of comedy: clowns and comedi
ans. Greene has his own definitions for each of these
flawed, rather pathetic character types, but the chief dif
ference between them is in the differing degrees of aware
ness shown by each. The clown is characterized by his lack
of awareness, by his innocence, and his ineptitude. He may,
in fact, be one of two sub-types, depending upon which of
these characteristics dominates the figure. Clowns in whom
innocence is the stronger trait are naive saints, misguided
do-gooders, who, like Alden Pyle, ought to carry bells
around their necks like lepers to warn the unsuspecting of
their dangerous innocence. The other kind of clown is
recognized by his glaring incompetence. A figure constitu-
11
tionally unfit for the role he plays, the inept clown is
i .
exemplified in Greene by certain detectives and criminals
who are physically and intellectually unqualified for their
jobs.
The comic figures who are aware or self-conscious
are the comedians, and they too are of two kinds. The first
is the comedian who affects a disguise or wears a mask of
some sort in an attempt to fool others. He is a stock fig
ure of traditional comedy who becomes ridiculous because he
fails in his attempt. VMajor" Jones represents this kind of
comedian. Greene also deals with another sort of comedian,
one who "writes" or creates roles for others around him.
Both the jealous Maurice Bendrix and the warm, life-giving
Augusta Bertram are comedians of this latter type.
Finally some of Greene's characters are used for
comedic satire. They are usually minor characters who are
figures of fun not because they have real, human flaws but
because they are representatives of groups which Greene
never fails to use for satiric purpose. Three kinds of fig
ures are targets for his satire: bad writers, literary
critics, and Americans. The last section of this study
deals with them.
Comedy then is not a new element in Greene's writing
at all. It has been there from the beginning, even in the
most serious novels, bearing witness to the truth in all
human situations. As the epigraph for his first successful
12
"entertainment," Stamboul Train (1932), Greene significantly
chose this sentence from George Santayana:
"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence;
tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."
It is with the truth, the reality of existence that Greene's
writing has always been most concerned.12
In an oft-quoted remark Horace Walpole declared "the
world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those
that feel."13 While associating the two great literary
modes with two basic attitudes toward human experience, Wal
pole's memorable dichotomy seems an oversimplification.
Graham Greene is surely a writer vnv> thinks and evaluates
his characters critically; thus he can see the profound
ironies of life. At the same time he hardly wants feeling.
Indeed Greene sees clearly, as Wylie Sypher has written,
that today "comic and tragic views of life no longer exclude
each other . . . that comedy and tragedy are somehow akin
. . . that comedy can tell us many things about our situa
tion even tragedy cannot."11* Greene puts some of this in
the mouth of Clive Root, "the complaisant lover," in his
1959 stage comedy of that name.
We aren't allowed a tragedy nowadays without a banana
skin to slip on and make it funny. But it hurts just
the same. (p. 48)
Life, then, is a combination of pain and comedy but charac
ters (and authors, too) have a choice about the attitudes
they will adopt toward it. Man is flawed, fallen, in need
of redemption. Greene has said that for him
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how
all those who do not write . . . can manage to escape
the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is
inherent in the human situation.15
In one's writing or one's life one may choose the attitude
which will help him "escape the madness" and face life as
best he can. In the previously quoted section from The
Comedians Greene wrote of the Christian God: "Life under
his shadow was a very serious affair." As a comment upon
this thought in another context Greene wrote further, "In
the enormous shadow of the cross it is better to be gay."16
14
Footnotes
xThe Honorary Consul (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1973). All quotations from the novel are followed by page
numbers from this edition.
2The Pleasure Dome (London: Seeker & Warburg,
1972), p. 45. (A review of the film Reifende Jugend.) The
context is as follows: Greene compares the film "with that
embarrassing play, Young Woodley. Mr. Van Druten put an
exaggerated value on adolescent emotion; it was a play about
adolescence written by an adolescent, and he tried to make
the boy's passion dignified and tragic. But the truth is
seldom tragic, for human beings are not made in that grand
way" (italics mine).
3The Comedians (New York: Viking Press, Inc.,
1966). All quotations from this novel are followed by page
numbers from this edition.
‘ 'Conor Cruise O'Brien, "A Funny Sort of God," The
New York Review of Books, XX, No. 16 (October 18, 1973), 59.
sO'Brien, p. 56.
60'Brien, p. 56.
7Greene's letter to the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris
("Colette's Funeral Rites," in The Portable Graham Greene
[New York: Viking Press, 1973], p. 596) illustrates this
point. In the piece Greene remonstrates against the offi
cial church position which denied the French authoress—
because of her three marriages— a Catholic burial. While
sympathizing with the church in its attempts to protect sim
ple souls from scandal, Greene warns of "another risk, which
is to scandalize the enlightened."
eThe Whiskey Priest, Sarah Miles, and Henry Scobie
exemplify unconventional Catholics who have caused a flurry
in the world of religious letters. Evelyn Waugh, most
notably, condemned Scobie to Hell although he doubted that
Greene had sent him there. ("Felix Culpa?" Commonweal,
XLVIII (July 16, 1948), 322-325. (Reprinted in Graham
Greene, ed. Samuel Hynes [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1973), pp. 95-102.)
9The Power and the Glory (New York: Viking Press,
1962), p. 37.
10Greene provided the "real" antecedent for the
Whiskey Priest's mistaken christening in his travel-autobi-
ograhy, Another Mexico, which was published a year earlier
15
than The Power and the Glory.
[One man] "had taken one of his sons to be baptised,
but the priest was drunk and would insist on naming
him Brigitta." (Another Mexico, p. 144)
Nor is this an isolated case. This comic scene comes early
in The Comedians. Before the last night party aboard the
Medea, Brown visits the purser who significantly questions
him about the government of Papa Doc and about Major Jones,
two prime focuses of the novel. When Brown enters, he finds
the officer "blowing up a French letter till it was the size
of a policeman's truncheon." His desk is "littered with
swollen phalluses." He explains that there were no balloons
aboard for the ship's concert, and Major Jones, who will
come to be the supreme "comedian," had suggested that he
substitute the inflated prophylactics. Giggling with
delight the purser uses colored crayon to decorate the
sheaths with comic faces. He explains apologetically:
"We have only one lady [Mrs. Smith] on board . . .
and I do not think she will realize the nature . . .
"You forget she is a progressive."
"In that case she will not mind. These are
surely symbols of progress." (p. 26)
Here the purser displays a most unusual wit, playing upon
the term "progressive" to make a slightly unwholesome joke
in relation to the incongruous use of rubber prophylactics.
The germ of this scene is found clearly in this
passage from the 1961 non-fiction commentary In Search of a
Character.
Then down to the stewards to help with Christmas decor
ations, developing into a party that only finished at
2:00 a.m. French letters blown up to size of balloons
and hung over the captain's chair. (p. 86)
That Greene adds comic word play and uses real events in a
symbolically suggestive way clearly shows that reality is
indeed the ultimate basis of his humor.
11Wilfred Sheed, for example, in his review for the
Book of the Month Club (BOMC News, Special Fall, 1973)
refuses to call Graham Greene's "special turf" Greeneland,
but he puns more’violently if more subtlely with the auth
or's name when he divides his career into three phases:
Greene I, II, and III, obviously deriving them from Reich's
The Greening of America with its Consciousnesses I, II, and
III. After a brief review of the plot of The Honorary Con
sul, Sheed writes
16
The early Greene would have turned all this into a
gloomy indictment of fallen human nature, and the
later Greene might have used it for a giggle, but
Greene III has found a new tone smack between sad
and funny. (p. 3)
I am far less certain than Sheed that all Greene can be
divided into three parts. If it were divided at all, it
would almost certainly not fit into the neat temporal stages
Sheed suggests. Sheed continues— ". . . here [in The Honor
ary Consul] the drama has magically absorbed the comedy
. . . ," suggesting that not until now had Greene been able
to combine tragic and comic themes successfully. This dis
sertation is a refutation of that assumption.
Closely related to this notion of segments of
Greene's career as writer is the problem generated by
Greene's early and arbitrary division of his books into
"novels” and "entertainments." It is easy to assume that
the comic aspects of Greene would be found mostly in the
entertainments, but this is not the case. Since many crit
ics still find the division useful, it deserves some consid
eration in a study which deals, at least indirectly with
Greene as a comic writer and thus as an "entertainer."
In the opening chapter of Graham Greene, The Enter
tainer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1972) , entitled "The Entertainer's Art," Peter Wolfe
describes a "typical Greene entertainment," summarizes crit
ical opinion on the form, and then, taking his cue from
Allott and Farris (The Art of Graham Greene), decides that
melodrama is the key element in the entertainment:
Greene's entertainments do achieve both the subtleties
and depths of the novels, and moreover, achieve them
with less toil. What shortens thematic distances and
cuts dramatic corners for Greene is melodrama. (p. 23)
But melodrama is not peculiar to Greene's entertainments.
It abounds in the novels as well. Furthermore, in his allu
sive discussion of Greene's division of his fiction into
"novels" and "entertainments," Wolfe has, strangely enough,
left out Evelyn Waugh's well-known remarks on the arbitrary
genres which Greene created. Waugh wrote, "Superficially
there is no great difference between the two categories.
There is no Ruth Draper switch from comic to pathetic.
'Novels' and 'Entertainments' are both written in the same
grim style, both deal mainly with charmless characters, both
have a structure of sound, exciting plot. You cannot tell
from the skeleton whether the man was baptized or not. And
that is the difference; the 'Novels' have been baptized,
held deep under in the waters of life." ("Felix Culpa,"
17
Commonweal, XLVIII (July 16, 1948), 322-325.
In any case, Greene himself refuses to repudiate the
entertainment or melodrama. In 1956 when asked about his
use of the thriller format, he wrote that the melodramatic
mode reflects modern life:
I couldn't help smiling to think of the many readers
who have asked me why I sometimes write thrillers, as
though a writer chooses his subject instead of the sub
ject choosing him. It sometimes seems as though our
whole planet had swung into the fog belt of melodrama.
("The Catholic Temper in Poland," Atlantic Monthly
[March, 1956], p. 59.)
The early entertainments were, to be sure, less concerned
with religious questions than the novels of the middle
period, but then so were the early novels, The Man Within,
the two withdrawn novels, Rumour at Nightfall and The Name
of Action, etc. The publication Brighton Rock ought to have
settled the issue. Obviously Greene used certain trappings
of the thriller in that book (as he does in others, includ
ing The Honorary Consul), but there is also deep treatment
of character. Wolfe writes:
The book, called by Kunkel "a supernatural 'cops and
robbers' story" first came out in the United States
as an entertainment; later, when it became popular,
Greene decided to call it a novel. The change has
proved wise. (Wolfe, p. 8, italics mine)
Wolfe tries to show Greene's "wisdom" by claiming that the
book contains an "urgency absent in Orient Express and This
Gun for Hire, the two earlier entertainments" (p. 7). He
seems to suggest that without the word "novel" printed upon
the title page the book would have lost a good deal of its
power. The whole debate is far less important than many
commentators have made it seem. There is no classic divi
sion in fiction into entertainment and novel. It is, or
was, Greene's division. It need not, I think, be taken any
more seriously than any other manifestation of an author's
intentions (cf. Wimsat and Beardsley "The Intentional
Fallacy"). I have not differentiated between these two
forms of fiction; my study of Greene's character is more
profitably carried out by treating it all of a piece.
l2It is surprising that commentators have written so
little about Greene's sense of comic irony which is evi
denced in both his private life and in his books. Time mag
azine (October 8, 1973) says:
His private life . . . has been colored with a sort of
18
irony that has suffused his work. For example there is
another Graham Greene. Not a Doppelg^nger but an actual
person who has crossed the writer's tracks for years
without confrontation. Once a girl friend of the other
Greene phoned him for a date, which he broke after send
ing an intermediary to see what she lookedlike. Then
there was the time that Greene entered a London weekly's
competition for parodies of his style and won only sec
ond prize. (p. 59)
A careful reader soon becomes aware of Greene's lit
erary playfulness. Solemn protests from the author are most
likely to be distrusted. In the dedication to The Comedi
ans , for example, he writes:
A word about the characters in The Comedians. I am
unlikely to bring an action for libel against myself
with any success, yet I want to make it clear that the
narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not
Greene.
Now comes a fairly long paragraph discussing the similari
ties between author and character: (So Brown, like Greene,
is Catholic? "It is often forgotten that, even in the case
of a novel laid in England, the story when it contains more
than ten characters would lack verisimilitude if at least
one of them were not a Catholic. The ignoring of this fact
of social statistics sometimes gives the English novel a
provincial air.") Why this lengthy, serious denial of so
harmless a thing as the assumption of identity of character
and author when in virtually all writers autobiography plays
a good part in creation?
Greene obviously has a wonderful time with names,
including his own. Indeed A. A. Devitis (Graham Greene [New
York: Twayne, 1964], 8) had suggested that a whole study of
these might be worthwhile. In partial answer to that Philip
Stratford in "Unlocking the Potting Shed," (Kenyon Review,
XXIV [Winter, 1962], 129-143) focuses upon Greene's hobses-
sion" with his own name (especially his first given name,
Henry) and with the color green (as a pun on his name) in
his work. But Stratford does not deal extensively with
Greene's word play in general. Gwen Boardman (Graham
Greene: The Aesthetics of Exploration [Gainesville, 1971])
points out many of the author's humorous uses of language.
For example, "In one novel [The End of the Affair] Greene
ironically juxtaposed cabinet pudding, a tasteless dessert,
and a cabinet meeting, a meaningless event." She also
touches upon sexual jokes such as Greene's "extended bawdy
pun involving a 'cocksure' French letter (actually a letter
about an inheritance from a French father)." Nor does she
fail to catch such phrases as "heads or tails" in the
19
context of the two homosexual seducers of the young bride
groom in "May We Borrow Your Husband?"
A few name jokes seem to have gone unnoticed.
Anthony Farrant's girl friend in England Made Me is nick
named Loo, and several remarks show the intended pun on the
British equivalent of "john." Saavedra, in The Honorary
Consul, came too late to be caught by Ms. Boardman, and the
irony of naming a writer dedicated to modern romance and
machismo after the greatest debunker of romance is perhaps
too obvious for comment. More subtle, however, and also
suggestive of Greene's comic literary allusiveness is his
handling of Augusta Bertram in Travels with My Aunt. On
several occasions the marvelous lady is called "Aunt Augus
ta," and lest the allusion be missed, Henry Pulling
recounts:
"The question of names," my aunt said [to him], "is
an interesting one. Your own Christian name is safe
and colorless. [Greene's own first name, we recall.]
It is better than being given a name like Ernest, which
has to be lived up to." (p. 48, italics mine)
So much for the importance of being Henry.
13Letter to Sir Horace Mann [1769].
14"Our New Sense of the Comic" in Comedy (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1956), p. 193.
15"Introduction" Collected Stories (New York:
Viking Press, 1973), p. xii.
16"An Indochina Journal," Commonweal, LX (May 21,
1954), 172.
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD OF GREENE'S FICTION
Graham Greene's fiction reflects his ironic view of
the modern world, a world in which carefully laid plans
usually go awry while foolish schemes come to fruition
almost as a consequence of their haphazard planning. Put
most simply, life is unreasonable. Since a rational assess
ment is not possible and since any attempt to make sense of
it is doomed, Greene feels that some alternative, perhaps
inverted view is needed to present a truthful picture of
modern life. Such a world view functions through distortion
and illogic, having all the qualities of nightmare.
This topsy-turvy view is needed especially in the
twentieth century, for only in modern times do we have the
potential for total annihilation without personal contact.
It is largely because of our dependence upon and reverence
for giant machines, huge bombs, and political abstractions
instead of individuals that our writers need this cruelly
comic view.
Chapter One divides in two sections. The first
treats the grotesque horror of the nightmare wonderland
which Greene has used in many of his works. It will show
that while that world is painful to view, Greene's is also a
20
21
comic treatment of the dehumanized twentieth-century world
we inhabit. What is wrong, of course, is that the twentieth
century has abandoned faith in God, has created new pagan
values to take His place. These new values produce a crazy
hell on earth whose falseness can be perceived, if in no
other way, by making it seem ludicrous.
The second section of the chapter looks at Ida
Arnold, a superb comic figure and at the same time a sinis
ter representative of all that Greene detests most about the
modern secular world. Ida's relentless pursuit of Pinkie
Brown in Brighton Rock, is a comic parody of a time-honored
British literary genre, the detective story, a form based
upon ratiocination in a world where everything must make
sense or the denouement would not be possible. The deduc
tive, reasoning faculties which one loves in Sherlock Holmes
are ridiculously reduced to haphazard whimsicality in the
case of Ida Arnold. They are so altered because the visible
world which supplied clues to Doyle's hero is no longer to
be trusted. Ida is comic because she functions perfectly as
a part of the senseless nightmare world in which she lives.
Again and again Greene emphasizes that Ida is "at home in
the world." She is a clear parody of the Life force itself,
and her tippling laughter echoes throughout the book like
that of the mechanical (therefore lifeless) fat lady who
screams hysterically outside the fun house at an amusement
park. The world is a nightmare; Ida is not warmth and love
22
but rather a complacent grotesque whose gargoyle-like fea
tures we come to perceive only when we fully understand her
position in Brighton Hock.
Three Greene Decades:
Nightmares in Wonderland
In his article entitled, "Our New Sense of the
Comic,"1 Wylie Sypher discusses the peculiar qualities of
twentieth-century notions of the comic as opposed to those
which prevailed in the nineteenth century and which are the •
subject of the famous essays on comedy by Bergson and Mere
dith. Sypher maintains that nineteenth-century comedy was
essentially comedy of manners and that it looked at man from
the outside. He continues
For us, today, comedy goes a great deal farther— as it
did for the ancients with their cruel sense of the
comic. Indeed, to appreciate Bergson and Meredith we
must see them both in a new perspective, now that we
have lived amid the "dust and crashes" of the twentieth
century and have learned how the direst calamities that
befall man seem to prove that human life at its depths
is inherently absurd.2
Comedy and tragedy, continues Sypher, are no longer mutually
exclusive concepts. Indeed "perhaps the most important dis
covery of modern criticism is the perception that comedy and
tragedy are somehow akin, or that comedy can tell us many
things about our situation even tragedy cannot."3
The key ideas in these passages seem to be that
"comedy and tragedy are . . . akin" and that this kinship
suggests that human life is at its base "inherently absurd."
The most serious problems which humans face may therefore be
23
viewed as lying completely outside their control. The
notion that there is a God above whose eye is even "on the
sparrow" may be a vain dream. Blind luck seems the only
factor in determining patterns of life. Order and degree
are long gone, replaced by chaos and chance.
What has forced the change is our awareness of the
confusion and senselessness of the modern world itself.
Nineteenth-century comedy of manners as discussed by Mere
dith, for one, was seen as a
game dealing with human nature in the drawing room
"where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no
mire, no violent crashes."1 *
But it is precisely because of the prevalence of the mires
and violent crashes of the twentieth century that the change
has occurred. "Our comedy of manners is a sign of despera
tion,"5 growing from the awkward, helpless outsider exempli
fied by the hero of Kafka who "transforms comedy of manners
to pathos by looking, or feeling, from the angle of the
alien soul."6 Graham Greene draws heroes who are shown in
much the same fashion.
Our new appreciation of the comic grows from the
confusion in the modern consciousness, which has been
sadly wounded by the politics of power, bringing with it
the ravage of explosion, the attrocious pain of inquisi
tions, the squalor of labor camps and the efficiency of
big lies.
We have, in short, been forced to admit that the
absurd is more than ever inherent in human existence:
that is, the irrational, the inexplicable, the surpris
ing, the nonsensical— in other words— the comic.7
This passage, written by Sypher to explain a twentieth-
24
century literary trend, might well have been written as an
introduction of much of Greene's fiction. We will see that
according to Greene there is no rational way for the human
being to relate to "the politics of power," no way for him
to deal with the destructive potential of the modern war
machine (after all, the expression of power politics). In
quisitions and labor camps are beyond analysis by reason
able men, and the cesspools of mendacity which have charac
terized even the most benevolent governments of our time
have made us only too aware of the seriocomic quality in
"the efficiency of big lies."
How is the artist to reflect a world in which the
abstractions of the so-called Great Powers become more
instead of less important? How does the artist treat these
intangible threats so that they retain their horrific quali
ties while at the same time freeing the reader, by distanc
ing him, to allow him to see the absurdity inherent in these
situations? One device is satire, pure and simple, but that
device must have as a necessary part of its effectiveness a
constantly implied standard of what is right against which
the reader may gauge the measure of what is wrong. And that
is just the trouble, for in an era which seems to have
turned irrational, no standard of this sort exists. Instead
the artist casts a surreal light upon everyday events. By
doing this, he hopes to make the reader sensitive once more
to the profound horror of those events to which he has
25
become hardened. At the same time the surreal treatment,
especially of setting, gives a work of art a dream-like,
even nightmarish quality. As Sypher comments upon this
quality of modern art in general:
Guernica is like a bad dream: and Kafka's novels
are nightmares. The dream is nonsensical and free, hav
ing none of the logic and sobriety of our waking selves;
the very incongruity of the dream world is comic.8
In the Introduction to this study I suggested that
Greene's most common mode of literary expression is irony.
As Dr. Plarr observed in The Honorary Consul: "Nothing is
ever what we intend . . . You would almost think that there
was a great joker somewhere who likes to give a twist to
things." The world in Greene's books often seems to be
working backward, illogically; the focus is upon distortion;
the atmosphere is tense. In place of order there is madness
and violence and sudden death, all the threatening features
of a nightmare. Three books— one from each of three decades
since Greene's reputation became clearly established— illus
trate that aura of comic terror especially well: The Minis
try of Fear (1943), Our Man in Havana (1958), and The
Comedians (1966).
Among the common qualities which one finds in these
three nightmare novels are comical incongruities, with pain
ful, even deadly twists. As often as the actions are incon
gruous (to underscore the illogical qualities of those
actions) they are confused, speeded up. Coincidences are
incredibly frequent, but as we have seen earlier Greene
26
believes that coincidence is often less strange than fic
tion. Mistakes and misunderstandings, especially about the
identities of characters, are common. In each of the books
there is an increasing concern with the almost supernatural
political forces controlling the situations, a force
referred to as "they." As one progresses from The Ministry
of Fear through twenty-three years to The Comedians, this
vaguely identified force becomes more concretely sinister
and inhuman in character.
Probably the most significant similarity which these
three books share is in the character of their "heroes." In
each work there is a single, alienated figure, a man neither
distinguished nor especially successful, who is drawn by
pure chance into the politically absurd world which we have
inhabited since the First World War.9 Each of these figures
is, to begin with, quite naive,10 an attitude which is
necessary for Greene's artistic expression in these three
novels. We said earlier that an author who wishes to write
a satiric or even an ironic criticism of his world, must
have a norm against which his readers may measure his crea
tions. The problem in our time, an era without an accepted
spiritual or ethical code, is to establish that norm. One
technique is suggested by Albert Cook in his useful comments
on Lewis Carroll's Alice books in his study of comedy, The
Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean.11 Basically the narrator's
(or the controlling) view in the Alice books is that of
27
the child or naif. The child expects the world to run in a
"probable"12 manner, but Carroll "is always presenting man
ners as absurd and confusing to the child."13 Carroll, it
seems, uses the supposedly clear vision of childhood to make
the adult, who is enslaved by received opinion, "see" the
absurdity of some Victorian conventions. Although it takes
a bit of Wordsworth to make sense of it, Greene, in his own
way, uses a technique similar to Carroll's.
The central figure in each of the three works to be
discussed cannot cope with the "real" world, and so he per
ceives it as a mad house. In fact metaphors of madness and
violence form almost a leit motif throughout these books,
and at the end of each, the "hero," although less naive than
he was at the beginning of the book, has clearly failed to
adjust to the insane norms of the world, a failure so com
plete that there is a question as to his continued survival
in the modern nightmare.
Underlying Greene's horror-comic picture of the
world is his conviction that our world has lost its sense of
values. In the three books discussed below, the apparent
culprit is that abstraction: power politics. Of course
Greene is far from being a partisan political novelist,
advocating one side over another. He seems rather to say
that when any authoritarian system, political or social,
imposes itself upon human beings, the result is absurdity,
and this is true, not because one system is clearly bad and
28
another good, but rather because Greene is primarily a
humanist. He believes in individual freedom, in loyalty
based upon love between individuals. When a human being is
asked or forced to give up his individuality and to pay hom
age to some abstraction, the result is chaos.11*
In the books treated in this chapter the political
abstractions are easily identified: Nazism creates a web of
madness for Arthur Rowe as it creates, in fact, the Ministry
of Fear; the opposing super powers of the paranoiac fifties
nearly crush Jim Wormold in Our Man in Havana; and the queer
combination of voodoo and government by terror drives Brown
to new awareness in The Comedians.
In the second section of this chapter we see much
the same sort of nightmare atmosphere created in Brighton
Rock by Ida Arnold's notion of Right and Wrong (purposely
capitalized here). These terms, too, are abstractions, and
Ida becomes a comic fury because she is dedicated to them as
she perceives them. She is willing to injure and maim for
them; she usurps God's place as the taker of vengeance.
That is why she is unsympathetic within the context of
Brighton Rock. Greene rejects Right and Wrong as purely
secular values, but he believes in the reality of Good and
Evil (especially Evil, the realization of which "proves," he
claims in several places, the reality of Good). As facile
as it sounds, Good, for Greene is manifested in human terms
by love and trust. Thus the crux of all Greene's writing is
29
betrayal. It is the only evil, and it is invariably done in
the service of some abstraction which the betrayer feels to
be more important than a single human being.
All modern political systems are shown to be crazy
in Greene's fiction, and he uses the same pattern to illus
trate their insanity as he uses to indicate the ironic lim
itations of his characters. In modern political systems
everything goes wrong. Machines, bureaucracies, plans fail
to work. The world itself is tcj-sy-turvy like- Carroll's
wonderland, but in these novels Greene's focal characters
approach such awareness that the wonders threaten to become
terrifying nightmares.15
The Ministry of Fear (1943)
Although Greene described The Ministry of Fear when
it was published as an "entertainment," he did not dismiss
it as critics have tended to do,16 and a careful reading
shows it to be indeed a complex, rewarding piece of fiction.
It focuses upon Arthur Rowe, a man ironically just released
from an asylum (a place for legally "mad" men) to which he
had been sentenced for giving a lethal overdose of sleeping
tablets to his painfully cancer-stricken wife. Immediately,
the "normal" world outside the asylum seems confusing and
threatening. This is partly because Rowe carries a dark
burden of guilt which colors his perceptions, but it is also
because the world is a hellishly unreal one: London during
the Blitz. The fire and ruin of wartime London serve
30
initially as an appropriate backdrop for Rowe's personal
agonies as he inadvertently falls into the midst of a Nazi
Fifth Column operation, but the bombed out landscape comes
ultimately to suggest even more— a moral waste land.
The opening episode sets the tone for the entire
book. Tortured by guilt, Rowe seeks to return to the peace
and innocence of his childhood. Ironically it is his pas
sionate desire to regress that precipitates (in a manner not
unlike Alice's fall into the rabbit hole) a series of near-
mad adventures.
The f£te called him [Rowe] like innocence: it was
entangled in childhood, with vicarage gardens . . .
and security.17
Thus it is doubly surprising when Rowe experiences the oppo
site of that expected security when he "stepped joyfully
back into . . . childhood," for right away there is a queer
feeling that things are wrong, distorted. He compares the
feelings he had when he was a child with the peculiar ones
he experiences now.
He came to these festes every year with an odd feeling of
excitement— as if anything might happen, as if the fa
miliar pattern of life that afternoon might be altered
forever. (p. 4)
These premonitions will prove quite accurate, for his life
will change greatly as result of an unpredictable and rather
silly coincidence.18 Rowe is soon roused out of his reverie
by the invitation of a clergyman to toss pennies. He loses
an unlucky thirteen pennies, and moves on, consoled by the
clergyman who assures him that this is not his "lucky day."
31
Rowe now comes upon a booth which offers an appetizing cake
to the one who comes closest to guessing its weight.' Per
suaded to try, Rowe guesses . . . incorrectly. Before leav
ing Rowe decides to go to the fortune teller's booth. He
receives the standard patter until he accidentally spouts a
formulated phrase "'Don't tell me the past. Tell me the
future'" (p. 8).
In the context of the book these are magic words:
"It was as if he had pressed a button and stopped a machine.
The silence was odd and unexpected." Mrs. Bellairs speaks;
her tone has changed entirely. She orders Rowe to return to
the raffle and give a new weight for the cake. When the
confused Rowe asks if that is the right weight, he is told,
"'That is immaterial.'" He is then dismissed.
The bewildered Rowe leaves the fortune teller think
ing that by some supernatural means he has perhaps been
selected to win a tasty dessert. He returns to the cake
booth and guesses four pounds eight and a half ounces, which
is clearly far too heavy. There is a sudden, unexplained
silence "as if all afternoon they had been waiting for just
this," but this tense quiet is shattered by the laughter of
a stout woman ridiculing the guess. Yet, he learns, he has
won. Noting again the peculiar silence as he takes the
cake, Rowe thinks he would welcome the critical laughter of
the stout woman as something normal. The crowd about him is
too intense.
32
It was as if the experience of childhood renewed had
taken a strange turn, away from innocence . . . He felt
so conscious of being surrounded that he wondered
whether anyone would step aside and let him out. (p. 9)
From the moment of strange alteration in the attitude of the
fortune teller, supposedly a woman named Mrs. Bellairs, Rowe
begins to sense something distorted, threatening in the
atmosphere of the fete. It takes on truly sinister and
absurd proportions when, just as Rowe reaches the gate, he
is stopped. Suddenly now everyone wants Rowe's cake back.
After playing on Rowe's charity (asking him to re-donate the
cake), the lady at the booth now decides that his guess
about the weight was wrong, and that the guess of a new,
later arrival is closer to the actual weight. Pointing out
that his original estimate was still closer than the other
man's, Rowe hurriedly departs.
The cake goes home with Arthur Rowe, and of course
it is clear to the reader that there is something of great
importance inside. The people at the f§te do not intend to
lose it, and just as Rowe gets to his flat he finds that he
has a new neighbor, a curiously deformed figure named Poole.
The ugly little man strikes up a political conversation, and
Rowe invites him in and generously offers him some cake/ a
luxury during the blitz. While this strange man is eating
his second piece of cake, Rowe notes that he "had a curious
way of crumbling" each slice. In the background, the
nightly bombing roars on. At last the weird little stranger
tells Rowe frankly that he was not meant to win the cake.
33
"They've sent me here to get it back.
We'll play in reason."
"Who are they?" (p. 17)
In the nightmare— fiction which Greene creates this vague
enemy, "they," will recur. "They will grow more powerful
and frightening, but at this point Rowe does not see any
thing to fear.
But he knew who they were: it was comic; he could see
the whole ineffective rabble coming across the grass at
him: the elderly woman in the floppy hat who had almost
certainly painted water colours, the rather intense
whimsical lady who had managed the raffle and wonderful
Mrs. Bellairs. (p. 17)
The description suggests a mad incompetent mob moving like
figures in a dream, less menacing than silly. Rowe quickly
learns how menacing "they" are, for as he sips his tea, he
recognizes the taste of hyocine, the drug which he had given
to his wife. Before he can speak, however, the distant
bombs close in with insane speed, and Rowe finds himself
lying, overwhelmed with confusion, in the cellar of his own
bombed apartment building.
Wanting to know why the people at the fete had tried
so desperately to regain their cake, Rowe employs the comic
detective, Rennit (cf. Chapter III), and he is finally led
to the London office of the sponsors of the fete, the
Mothers of the Free Nations. Here he meets Anna Hilfe and
her brother Willi, apparent refugees from Nazi Germany, who
agree to help Rowe solve the mystery of the cake. Willi
Hilfe (ironically, German for "help") takes Rowe to the home
of Mrs. Bellairs, the fortune teller, but instead of resolu-
34
tion Rowe finds himself more deeply involved in a growing
comic nightmare.
Mrs. Bellairs's house is strangely old, unrenovated,
"standing behind its little patch of dry and weedy garden
among the 'To Let' boards on the slope of Camden Hill"
(p. 36). When they enter the house, Rowe notes that there
are "black out globes" which made the room dim like an ori
ental cafe. He is just in time for a seance. The cast of
characters already assembled is strange, except for one man,
named Cost, who stands apart from the crazy-looking crowd.
Half a dozen people were in the room, and one of them
immediately attracted Rowe's attention— a tall broad
black-haired man; he couldn't think why until he real
ized that it was his normality which stood out. (p. 38,
italics mine)
The other members of the seance include Miss Pantil, with
her "black beads and a hungry eye," Mr. Newey "who wore
sandals and no socks," Mr. Maude, "a short-sighted man who
kept as close as he could to Mr. Newey and fed him devotedly
with thin bread and butter."
In the midst of this curiously threatening scene
Rowe receives a telephone call from Anna Hilfe, Willi's
sister. Anna warns Rowe to leave the house. "They'll try
to get you in the dark," she says before ringing off.
Rowe resolves to leave before the seance, but as he
tries to get out, Mrs. Bellairs prevails upon him and Willi
to stay. Ominously she locks the door and drops the key
inside her blouse. Rowe draws a mental comparison between
35
the unreal scene and the world of nightmare.
In a dream you cannot escape: the feet are leaden
weighted; you cannot stir from before the ominous door
. . . (p. 41)
When the darkened ceremony begins, Rowe finds himself and
his guilty secret past exposed to the whole mad mob. Rowe
rises angrily, breaking the circle, and when the lights go
up, the one "normal-looking" man, Cost, who had been seated
next to Rowe, is found on the floor, stabbed to death. It
is clear that all the other strange characters blame Rowe
for the murder. Feigning illness, Rowe asks to go to the
lavatory. There is no objection if Hilfe goes with him.
Once away from the others,
"I'm all right," Rowe whispered. "But Hilfe, I didn't
do it."
There was something shocking in the sense of exhil
aration Hilfe conveyed at a time like this. "Of course
you didn't," he said. "This is the real thing ..."
"Only, old fellow, you must be out of this. They'll
hang you if they can. Anyway they'll shut you up for
weeks. It's so convenient for them."
"What can I do? It's my knife."
"They are devils, aren't they?" Hilfe said with the
same lighthearted relish fie might have used for a chil
dren's clever prank. CpT 45^ italics mine)
Hilfe's attitude, which Rowe finds remarkable, fits into the
weird nightmare which becomes Rowe's reality. It seems as
if Hilfe is about to giggle. At this point the attitude is
incongruous, but we learn at the end of the book that Hilfe
is a Nazi and the whole affair of Cost's "murder" is a
frame-up to silence Rowe. The scene ends in a nearly farci
cal melodramatic situation. When the desperate Rowe asks
36
what he can do. "'Oh just go underground,1 Hilfe said
casually."
Hilfe continues to accept the insanity of the situ
ation with such ease that to Rowe he seems to be joking.
"This isn't a joke."
"Listen," Hilfe said, "The end we are working for
isn't a joke, but if we are going to keep our nerve
we've got to keep our sense of humour. You see they
have none. (p. 46)
The irony here is that Hilfe is one of them, that is, a Nazi
spy, and he suggests a ludicrously melodramatic escape, one
which is nearly a parody of the cloak-and-dagger thriller
formula. Rowe must hit him on the chin "good and hard" and
dash through the window. Rowe follows Hilfe's suggestion
and climbs out the lavatory window into what he thinks is
the life of a fugitive while his escape is covered up by the
sound of a flushing toilet.
Thinking himself a wanted man, Rowe searches his
past for somebody who might help him in a world from which
he is now permanently alienated. He remembers an old
acquaintance, Henry Wilcox, and goes to his home. Once
again the pattern of coming into a strange situation and
having to evaluate and adjust to it (like Carroll's Alice)
is repeated. Unfortunately he arrives in the midst of
funeral arrangements for Wilcox's wife, Doris, who was
killed in a bombing raid while playing hockey to entertain
the troops. Wilcox's mother proudly presides over the
arrangements and she tells Rowe that they have decided "to
37
lay her [Doris's] uniform— her clean uniform— on the cof
fin." She even goes so far as to suggest that "we ought to
lay a hockey stick beside the uniform." Furthermore, the
clergyman will read the well-known verse about "Greater love
hath no man ..."
When Henry Wilcox, who blames himself for allowing
his wife to play, shows any emotion, he is assured that
"'she was playing for England,'" by his duty-conscious
mother. At last the funeral procession ("a rescue party and
four salvage men— and the police band") arrives. "Mrs.
Wilcox said, 'If only Doris could see it all'" (p. 65). As
the party leaves the consoling mother is heard.
"Wny, Henry," Mrs. Wilcox said, "she's not just your
wife any more. She belongs to England." (p. 65)
In this scene once more madness and death come together
unexpectedly. Henry intrudes upon someone else's sorrows,
but from his vantage point we can see how ridiculous the
affair is. Doris's death while playing hockey is absurd,
but the lugubrious funeral preparations make the situation
utterly mad. When Henry's mother suggests that Doris be
laid out with her hockey stick, Greene seems to foreshadow
the biting comedy of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One in which
one formerly gossipy lady is shown to her "waiting ones"
with a telephone in her hands.
Rowe thinks that Henry has been entirely altered by
his experience in a manner very like his own transformation
since the cake incident. War and death and madness change
38
everything.
War was like a bad dream in whicli familiar people appear
in strange and terrible and unlikely disguises. (p. 66)
These three early scenes, then, illustrate the air
of comic distortion which one finds throughout The Ministry
of Fear. Throughout the book Arthur Howe repeats the pat
tern of the guileless child who must grapple with the behav
ior of a world whose manners are utterly puzzling to him.
He seems unrealistically naive in the opening sequences, for
example, since he cannot guess— as we feel any fool would—
that there must be something hidden inside the troublesome
cake. We must, however, recall that in these scenes Rowe is
miserably obsessed by his own guilt. The first book of the
novel is appropriately called "The Unhappy Man," and beyond
his tormenting guilt, Rowe is made more unhappy because he
is "sane" in a crazy world made by the London Blitz and his
increasing, though ignorant, involvement with a rather
eccentric ring of spies.
Odd characters literally teem through the pages of
the work. Toward the end of Book One, for example, Rowe is
asked by a strange bookseller with very bad teeth to deliver
a suitcase of books to a man named Travers. Travers, it
turns out, does not exist. And when Rowe opens the suitcase
it explodes in his face.
Instead of literally dying, however, Rowe has only
lost his memory, which means that his sense of guilt has
"died," and the second book of the novel, entitled "The
39
Happy Man," shows us the new Rowe who has totally changed.
He looks younger because he is free of guilt and does not
feel pursued. He is in a private asylum, once again
"insane," if we may so term his memory loss. Even his name
has changed; he is now Richard Digby. Digby's insights are
simpler, purer than Rowe's had been, and the rest of The
Ministry of Fear deals with a successful resurrection and
fusion of the sensitive unhappy man, Rowe, with the happier,
more objective Digby.
Later, as the realization of truth and his memory
flow again into Arthur Rowe, he recalls Digby, his other,
happier self, as now "a stranger— a rather gross complacent
parasitic stranger whose happiness had lain in too great an
ignorance." And he decides that "Happiness should always be
qualified by a knowledge of misery" (p. 145). It is this
realization which allows Rowe in the final section of the
book to endure the misery of the world around him. In the
furious confusion of the last two sections of the book as
Rowe begins to regain his sanity (memory), he also learns to
love Anna Hilfe. When he relearns the truth about his past,
he does not regress to the naive, miserable state he was in
at the beginning but instead he becomes a whole, integrated
man because he also has human love. At the same time that
Rowe loses his innocence, he, of course, loses his happi
ness. The final scenes of the novel deserve a close look in
relation to this point. For the question of the possibility
40
of human happiness in the modern world is central.
In the denouement of the book Rowe discovers that
Willi Hilfe is the head of the Nazi spy ring which has
caused all of his recent trouble. When Rowe confronts Willi
and Anna Hilfe, he is not entirely sure that she will be
loyal to him. He gambles on her love for him and assumes
correctly that she will choose to help him. She does, how
ever, allow her brother to escape. Rowe pursues Willi into
a subway men's room. With Anglo-Saxon decency Rowe offers
assurance to Willi that he will not be tortured as a cap
tured agent; Willi does not believe him. In a mixture of
hatred and glee Hilfe now reveals to Rowe, whose memory of
his former life is not yet complete, that he had been tried
and punished for killing his wife. Hilfe then steps into a
lavatory cubicle and shoots himself, satisfied that his
final act has been to inflict pain upon an enemy.
When Rowe returns to Anna Hilfe, he realizes that
she has known about his guilty past, that she wanted him to
be happy, free of the memory of his guilt. The last page of
the novel recalls the last, equivocal page of Conrad's Heart
of Darkness, for when Anna asks if Willi had told Arthur
anything before his death, he lies: "'He was dead before I
could reach him.'" Thus the mature Rowe allows Anna the
luxury of the secure feeling that he still has the compla
cent happiness of Digby. Man, having guilt as part of his
nature, cannot, perhaps ought not to be happy in a nightmare
41
world. Love makes existence bearable, maybe even more than
merely bearable. He realizes that Anna would keep the
burden herself rather than give it to him because she loves
him.
He felt an enormous love for her enormous tenderness,
the need to protect her at any cost . . . She had wanted
him, innocent and happy at any cost. (p. 174)
When Arthur lies— to protect Anna— he has substituted her
protection for his innocent happiness. "It seemed to him
after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness
. . ." (p. 175). Happiness is like innocence. In the mod
ern world neither is as valuable as Rowe had thought at the
beginning of the book. Perhaps pain— even guilt— are neces
sary to live a life which is fully sane, fully aware in the
contemporary world.
Our Man in Havana (1958)
In Our Man in Havana, doubtless because it is so
clearly a farce, the nightmare, still a complex interaction
of madness and death, is seen as a political game, but it is
a game in which the successful players have to be mad, one
in which the losers pay violently with their lives. The
game is of course utterly evil, for when a game like inter
national politics becomes more important than humans, it is
one which the sane man must refuse to play.
The plot of Our Man in Havana is basically a crazy
practical joke, so simple in its execution as to defy credi
bility. Jim Wormold, a moderately successful vacuum cleaner
42
salesman, is recruited by Henry Hawthorne, the very carica
ture of a British secret service agent. In turn Wormold is
to recruit underlings to report on "things" in Havana, but
the nature of the desired information is never clarified by
Hawthorne or his home office. After much wavering and some
discussion with his old friend, Dr. Hasselbacher, Jim
decides to invent agents, collect money to pay them, and
live well at the expense of Her Majesty's government. At
first it seems to Jim a wonderful game, the fulfilled dream
of every "unknown citizen," to put one over on the big boys
at the top.
The whole business is quite laughable, until, drunk
with the success of a pulp novelist, Wormold sends the Lon
don office some mysterious drawings of weapon-like installa
tions hidden in the Oriente Mountains of northern Cuba.
These drawings, he claims, were rendered by one of his
"agents," a Cubana Airways pilot named Raul. Actually the
drawings— by Wormold himself— are blueprints of his newest
vacuum cleaner, ironically called the Atomic Pile.
Sending the drawings is a reckless move, but the
Secret Service accepts them as genuine. Even the Prime
Minister learns about the installations. Wormold, now con
sidered an important agent, is given a beautiful secretary,
Beatrice Severn, whom he will come to love.
But Jim's fortune is about to change; everything
begins to go wrong— because, it turns out, everybody: "the
43
other side," the Havana police, and the British Secret Ser
vice believe Wormold's mad fiction. Reality now threatens
to invade Jim's private unreality with very serious, painful
consequences.
We saw earlier that the last, not entirely satisfy
ing pages of The Ministry of Fear seem to suggest that a man
cannot be happy when he is fully aware of the horror in the
world around him. Reality is a nightmare from which we are
trying to awaken (even if ironically, as in Rowe's case,
this means by going to "sleep"— mentally— through amnesia).
In Our Man in Havana, Greene raises this suggestion to
statement, for early in the book the pathetic, displaced Dr.
Hasselbacher tells Jim Wormold:
You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our
century is not something to be faced.1-9 (p. 7, italics
mine)
Hasselbacher thinks that he has learned how to sur
vive amid the treachery of modern political systems by sim
ply ignoring them and by living in and for a private dream.
Soon after Wormold is recruited as an agent for the British
Secret Service, he asks Hasselbacher for advice. The old
doctor sees this as an opportunity for Wormold to create a
dream world and populate it with fictitious characters and
to profit from the scheme besides. He urges Jim to take
"their" money and make up lies to earn it.
"Just lie and keep your freedom. They don't deserve
the truth."
"Whom do you mean by they?"
"Kingdoms, republics, powers ..."
44
"But remember as long as you lie you do no harm."
"I take their money,"
"They have no money, except what they take from men
like you and me." (p. 63)
The doctor's attitude here deserves some consideration.
Clearly something has gone wrong with traditional standards
of morality in our time; they are precisely the reverse of
ethical Christian standards. The lie, not truth, it seems,
will keep one free. More surprisingly, the lie is seen as
an instrument that protects one from harm. Again we seem to
have stepped into a looking-glass world where all assump
tions are reversed. Furthermore the giant abstractions
("they" again . . . kingdoms," etc.) that run and ruin our
lives have done nothing to deserve loyalty. When Jim sug
gests that these institutions will pay for the lies he
sells, Hasselbacher quite logically assures his friend that
the money he is paid is stolen from common people like him
self anyway.
Unfortunately Dr. Hasselbacher is not entirely cor
rect in his analysis of the modern world, for he fails to
consider the insane possibility that "they," the faceless
bureaucracies, might believe Jim's lies and act upon them.
It would then no longer matter that Wormold's reports were
only fiction, only his "dream." It is because Hasselbacher
is a rational being, that he assumes that no harm could come
to "real" people because of what was only a silly joke.
Ironically, if fittingly, the first victim of Wormold's
45
false reports is Hasselbacher himself.
i .
The first realization that his mad practical joke
may have painful consequences comes to Wormold when one
evening he is summoned to the apartment of his friend. Dr.
Hasselbacher. As he enters, Jim notes that his friend's
appearance has altered. Hasselbacher had always been a jok
ing optimist, a living model of the reproduction of "the
Laughing Cavelier" which graced his wall, but he "had grown
suddenly old . . . a whole mood of life had suffered
violence" (p. 78).
Jim soon learns the reason. The sitting room is
destroyed "as though a malevolent child had been at work
among the tubular chairs, opening this, upsetting that,
smashing and sparing at the dictation of some irrational
impulse" (p. 78, italics mine). Debris is everywhere and
Greene, by emphasizing the irrationality of the scene,
underscores the meaninglessness of the chaos in Hassel-
bacher's apartment. Now Wormold. learns that a pet science
project, which had literally given meaning to his old
friend's life by allowing him to escape the cruelty of real
ity, has been maliciously destroyed. With us moved by the
pathos of the old man's situation, Greene now undercuts the
scene with a cruelly comic detail.
[Hasselbacher] sat heavily down on a tall tubular
adjustable chair which shortened suddenly under his
weight and spilt him on the floor. Somebody always
leaves a banana skin on the scene of a tragedy. (p. 79,
italics mine)
46
Like the final spasm after an orgy of destruction in an ani
mated cartoon, Hasselbacher's pratfall amid the chaos has
the effect of emphasizing the reality of the violence that
has been done to him, for neither man was present when the
apartment was ransacked. The painful spectacle of the old
man as he picks himself up and dusts off his trousers is
needed to force Jim to realize fully how dangerous it is to
play the insane game he is involved in.
Hasselbacher tells Wormold that "some people" are
trying to force him to spy and report on Wormold. Of
course, Jim neither does nor knows anything worth reporting,
and he has been manufacturing information largely at the
suggestion of Hasselbacher himself. For the first time Jim
feels guilt, sees that in part he has caused this pain to
his old friend.
People similar to himself had done this— men who allowed
themselves to be recruited while sitting in lavatories,
who opened hotel doors with other men's keys and
received instructions in secret ink and in novel uses
for Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. (p. 81)
In this seriocomic reflection, Jim recalls all the utterly
absurd events which led him into the British Secret Service.
Even though it was all meant as a joke, he now realizes
"There was always another side to a joke, the side of the
victim" (p. 81). Furthermore, he understands that the
guilty ones are the zealous minions of the major powers,
those who cause pain from a distance in the name of some
sacred abstraction which they place far ahead of any human
47
being.
Hasselbacher is finally blackmailed into reporting
to "the other side" upon Wormold's activities ("No one's
life is quite clean, Mr. Wormold" (p. 80]) and ultimately
his reports upon the entirely fictitious pilot, Raul (who
supposedly had supplied those interesting drawings of secret
weapons) leads to the death of a real Cubana pilot named—
Raul. Wormold learns of this betrayal from a Havana police
captain named Segura, who, like everyone else, believes that
Jim is a real secret agent. Segura does not object to his
activities, but he demands that Jim supply to him all the
information he gives to the British Office. By now the mad
situation has progressed to the point of undeniability, and
Wormold knows how truly insane one must be to function in
the world outside his vacuum cleaner shop.
He wants to talk to Hasselbacher, however, he cau
tiously climbs up to the doctor's balcony and enters his
apartment in a manner that parodies the cloak-and-dagger
formula, for as Greene writes, "He was beginning to learn
the tricks of his unreal trade" (p. 156).
Inside sits Dr. Hasselbacher, once again stunned and
depressed. But he is dressed ludicrously in a military uni
form obviously out of date, obviously too small. He wears a
sword and looks absurdly "like an extra in a film studio"
(p. 156). In a moving speech Hasselbacher explains his
ridiculous costume. He had been dressed in the same uniform
48
when he killed a thin Russian near Tannenburg during the
First World War. In his whole medical career, says Hassel
bacher, he has never been sure that he saved a man, but he
is certain about the one he killed. He has dressed like a
soldier-killer again because tonight again he has caused a
man's death.
"We were both responsible for his death, you and I,"
Hasselbacher said. "I don't know who trapped you into
it or how, but if I had refused to help them they would
have had me deported."
"Please go away, Mr. Wormold. Who knows what they might
do to me if they knew you were here?
"Who are they?"
"You know that better than I do, Mr. Wormold. They
don't introduce themselves." (p. 159)
The joke here is that Jim has not the slightest idea
who "they" could possibly be. Clearly "they" have great
power, and "they" use it ruthlessly to achieve their ends.
The saddest thing that these vague persons do, however, is
to create distrust between friends like Wormold and Hassel
bacher, for at this point Jim protests that Raul did not
even exist.
"You advised me to lie and I lied. They [the agents]
were nothing but inventions, Hasselbacher."
"Then you invented him too well, Mr. Wormold.
There's a whole file on him now." (pp. 159-160)
Here is an openly comic attack on the existence of dossiers,
records, and files, for indeed the file is one on a mere
figment of Wormold's imagination.
Wormold insists that everything— agents, drawings of
49
secret installations in the mountains— all of these had come
from his imagination. And he explains that he did it all
because he needed the money. In the face of these claims
Hasselbacher points out that Wormold changed his codes and
has increased his staff. And he ends with the pathetic
question:
"The British Secret Service would not be so easily
deceived as all that would it?” (p. 161)
Hasselbacher/ however, does not know Henry Hawthorne, nor
does he know of Hawthorne's crazy recruiting methods. He is
a basically rational man; he cannot believe that a whole
agency of the British Government could be fooled. That is
because he does not know, as Greene does, from his own expe
rience in the secret service, that an agency is as limited
as the humans in it and that the irrationality of the
bureaucracy increases in direct proportion to the number of
madmen who compose it.
The most telling incident in the whole mad game
comes when Hawthorne suddenly, unexpectedly summons Wormold
to Jamaica. The insignificant vacuum cleaner salesman
assumes that his trickery has at last been discovered, and
he prepares resolutely for his inevitable punishment. Of
course, Wormold's fears are groundless? the Secret Service
is far from suspecting his duplicity. Hawthorne confesses
his own initial doubts about Wormold's drawings and wishes
that they might have been actual photographs.
"Don't get me wrong, old man. You've done wonders,
50
but, you know, there was a time when I was almost sus
picious ."
"What of?"
"Well, some of them sort of reminded me— to be parts
of a vacuum cleaner." (p. 180)
Jim senses now that for some reason Hawthorne's suspicions
are allayed, and can even venture a half-hearted jocular
reply:
"You thought I'd pulled the leg of the Secret Ser
vice?"
"Of course it sounds fantastic now, I know. All the
same, in a way I was relieved when I found out that the
others have made up their minds to murder you." (p.
180)
It seems incredible that any sane man could be "relieved" to
know that another human was singled out for murder, and Haw
thorne's glee about this development is a trump card in
Greene's technique of black humor.20 Hawthorne goes on to
explain his relief: "'You see, that proves the drawings are
genuine'" (p. 180).
The murder is to be attempted at an upcoming busi
ness lunch at which Jim Wormold is to be a guest speaker.
The method used will be poisoning, but Hawthorne tosses the
whole affair off lightly with a couple of tricks of the spy
trade designed to frustrate the attempt. The basic tech
nique: don't eat a thing.
When Wormold persists in questions about his immi
nent demise, he irritates Hawthorne into questioning Jim's
courage. Obviously one is to take threats to life in one's
stride. But clearly anyone who could be so quietly casual
about such threats is at least partially mad.
51
As Wormold enters the business luncheon, Dr. Hassel
bacher risks his life by telling Jim that "they are planning
to poison you in there" (p. 189). Wormold stays alive
through the dinner, but Hasselbacher, who had proved his
loyalty to Jim, pays with his life for warning him. So the
poor old man who had assured Jim that lies could do no harm
dies as a direct result of the stories Wormold has invented.
Hasselbacher's death is the culmination of events for
Wormold. He decides that he must confess his duplicity to
Beatrice, revenge the death of his friend, and leave Havana
for good.
First he tells Beatrice of his immense practical
joke on the Secret Service. Hasselbacher and the pilot,
Raul, have been killed for no reason, he assures her. When
she asks about various details of his deception, he explains
each one in the simplext terms. Clearly it is because
bureaucracies want to believe the maddest and most threaten
ing things about potential "enemies" that they find the
silliest claims creditable. Beatrice asks him about the
diagrams.
"I drew them myself from the Atomic Pile Cleaner.
The joke's over now. Would you like to write out a
confession for me to sign? (p. 213)
Her reaction is surprising, but it marks her as one of the
few people in the book with a sense of humor, a sign of her
sanity and of her salvation.
She began to laugh. She put her head in her hands and
laughed. She said, "Oh how I love you."
52
"It must seem pretty silly to you."
"London seems pretty silly. And Henry Hawthorne."
(p. 213)
Beatrice's reaction here irritated reviewers. Greene, they
had maintained, was too obvious in oversimplifying the
absurdity of bureaucracies and their servants, but Beatrice
goes further, admitting that it is because Jim has made a
fool of the Secret Service that she loves him.
"Do you think I would ever have left Peter [Beatrice's
ex-husband] if once— just once— he's made a fool of
UNESCO? But UNESCO was sacred . . . He never laughed."
(p. 213)
Now Jim tells Beatrice of his feeling that he is disloyal.
She insists on the contrary that he is loyal— to Milly— to
the only thing in the world worth loyalty.
"I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to peo
ple who pay them, to organizations . . . I don't think
even my country means that much. There are many coun
tries in our blood— aren't there?— but only one person.
Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to
love and not to countries?"
Jim proves himself unable to play the crazy game
into which he has been drawn when he tries to take revenge
against the agent of "the other side" who had killed Hassel
bacher. He tricks the man, Carter, into meeting him, after
he has already obtained a revolver, by another trick, from
the Police Captain Segura.
Unfortunately as Wormold moves in toward the killing
of his enemy, an enemy he had created out of the unreality
of his invented reports to his own government, he sees how
pathetic Carter is. Carter, for example, is homesick for
53
Nottwich. "A murderer had no right to be homesick; a mur
derer should be a machine/ and I have to become a machine/
too/ Wormold thought ..." Later he learns Carter has no
friends and that he is painfully shy of women. As the even
ing wears on Jim thinks/ "But how could one shoot a man at
whom it was so easy to laugh?" Carter was fast becoming too
human, "a creature whom one might pity or console, not
kill."
Throughout the evening Jim's essential sanity, in
contrast to the irrational behavior around him, emerges.
Finally Wormold forces himself to brandish his stolen gun.
He forces Carter to admit killing Dr. Hasselbacher. Carter
whines that Wormold "got too dangerous."
"Me dangerous? What fools you people must be. I
have no agents, Carter." (p. 228)
Like Beatrice, Carter questions the drawings of the mountain
construction, and he is told they were really of parts of a
vacuum cleaner. When Carter reaches into his pocket, Worm-
old fires. By crazy chance Jim manages only to shatter
Carter's favorite Dunhill pipe.
Jim is so happy not to have killed Carter that he
exclaims '"Beginner's luck.'" Carter responds in confusion
"You— you clown."
How right Carter was. He [Wormold] put the gun down
beside him . . . Suddenly he felt happy. He might have
killed a man. He had proved conclusively to himself
that he wasn't one of the judges; he had no vocation for
violence. l p ~ . 229, italics mine)
Greene at the same time proves to us that Wormold, lacking
54
the "vocation for violence," is preeminently a sane man.
Greene later tells us that Carter then fired and that Worm-
old had the third shot. Carter is shot to death; Jim drives
away before he gets sick. In the scene Greene does not
emphasize the killing but instead focuses upon Jim's relief
when he finds how difficult it is for him to be cruel and
violent. That repulsion marks him as one of the few who are
saved in a nightmare world. Death is the end of the insani
ty in the nightmare; Jim has the ability to escape it all
through his humanity, and that humanity manifests itself in
a sense of relief when he cannot kill even his enemy.
Now it remains only for Jim to face Her Majesty's
Secret Service. He expects some kind of punishment. But
the final scene at headquarters is the maddest of all. The
Havana office is to be shut down and the only question
remaining is: what is to become of Wormold?
It was coming now. Judging from the face of the colonel
who had been one of his judges he felt that what came
would not be pleasant. (p. 214)
But once again the completely unexpected comes to pass.
"We thought the best thing for you under the circum
stances would be to stay at home on our training staff.
Lecturing. How to run a station abroad." (p. 241)
Obviously this assignment is the least appropriate that
Wormold could get. One feels that Jim must be repressing a
giggle, but the Chief of the Secret Service is not finished:
"Of course as we always do when a man retires from a
post abroad, we'll recommend you for a decoration. I
think in your case— you were not there very long— we
can hardly suggest anything higher than an O.B.E."
55
(p. 241)
That is all. Jim leaves with a governmental decoration/ the
whole business designed to protect the reputation of the
crazy secret service. The final scene gives the reader
another "lucky Jim" (Wormold, in this case) who has suc
ceeded in coming through all the madness and death of the
Cold War, having won his lady and the O.B.E. to boot. Even
Milly, a convinced Catholic who openly welcomes the marriage
of Wormold and Beatrice, although it violates her Catholic
standards, comes to realize what her father and Beatrice
have learned. As Beatrice finally articulates it: "I can't
believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer
than a human being" (p. 244).
As the book ends, Beatrice and Wormold realize their
happy insularity.
"What are we going to live on?" Wormold asked.
"You and I can find a way."
"There are three of us," Wormold said, and she real
ized the chief problem of their future that he would
never be quite mad enough. (p. 247)
The final clause suggests that the worldly happiness of the
Wormolds (when Beatrice joins the family) is going to be
limited because Jim is not mad enough to play the games
required for getting by in the nightmare of the modern
world.
The Comedians (1966)
The action of The Comedians can be seen as an
increasingly violent danse macabre in which the recurrent
56
themes of death and madness are skillfully interwoven.
Death is a palpable theme even before the main char
acters arrive in Haiti. While still aboard the Medea, Brown
has to explain to other passengers the nature of the Tontons
Macoute, that cruelly elite Haitian secret police who tor
ture and enforce the law. Behind them, of course, is the
curious figure (as a presence whom we never really see in
the novel) of Papa Doc, Frangois Duvalier, the President of
the Republic of Haiti. But, while Duvalier is powerful and
frightening, he is also ludicrous. The Captain of the ship
asks Brown about "the baron," the nickname given by the suf
fering Haitians to their leader.
We dignified his shambling shabby figure with the title
of Baron Samedi, who in voodoo mythology haunts the
cemeteries in his top hat and tails smoking his cigar.21
Duvalier does "haunt" the graveyards because he has caused
so many men to go to their graves before their time. Where
his figure "walks," death follows. Yet even so, he is seen
as an absurd presence— a black stereotype with top hat and
2 2
cigar.
If Duvalier is associated with the black clown,
Baron Samedi, a death spirit, death is also a seriocomic
reality which surfaces throughout the novel. Just as Brown
returns to his hotel in the midst of the nightly blackout,
he misses a favorite paperweight— ironically a small leaden
coffin engraved R.I.P. His bartender, Joseph, then summons
him to the drained swimming pool where Doctor Philipot, the
57
Minister of Social Welfare has cut his wrists and throat.
Just after Brown discovers Philipot, Martha, who had
driven Brown home, and the Smiths, who had been invited by
Brown to stay at the Trianon, arrive. Now Brown hopes that
the electricity blackout will last so that neither his lover
nor the Smiths will see the corpse in the empty pool. But,
of course, nothing goes right in a nightmare. Suddenly all
the lights flash on. As Brown physically turns Martha
around and rushes with her to turn the pool lights out, Mr.
Smith comes out onto the balcony to request a blanket. Just
as Brown reaches for the light switch, Mr. Smith calls out:
"Mr. Brown there's someone asleep in your pool."
Ip. 55)
Brown answers that it must only be a beggar. Mrs. Smith now
comes out to look, and Mr. Smith suggests that he take the
man some money but decides that this might only wake him.
Brown finally succeeds in getting the lights out, hoping to
shield the body from further comment. But Brown cannot
escape the corpse. Martha comments that she had not seen
the beggar. Brown pretends to look for his paperweight. It
is later discovered that the paperweight is under Phili-
pot's body. This corpse will be pushed about the island in
an unseemly fashion, climaxing in the funeral scene which
the Tontons Macoute interrupt (cf. Chapter II). After they
absurdly attack the hearse, breaking glass and insulting the
mourners, they claim that the coffin contains rocks instead
of Philipot's body. The last view we get of Philipot is
58
when the hearse drives hurriedly off with the coffin hanging
half-way out of the back of the vehicle.
The madness of Duvalier's Haiti is manifested
through the totally irrational policies of the government
itself, policies which are realized in torture and repres
sion. Papa Doc's regime is all-powerful and can alter real
ity in much the same way that Orwell's Ministry of Truth
could do. After Philipot's suicide, discovered as soon as
Brown returned to Haiti, Brown and his servants move the
body so that it cannot be associated with Brown's hotel
Trianon and so that no one will call Philipot's death a
murder. When the rational Mr. Smith suggests that no one
could think of an explanation other than suicide, Brown
replies
"They can make it out to be whatever suits them . . . Do
not deceive yourself." (p. 96, italics mine)
The "they," who never really become more than bumbling Nazi
spies in the madness of the Ministry of Fear, and who grow
to terrifying proportions softened by facical overtones of
power in Our Man in Havana, have become truly sinister
manipulators of a modern hell in The Comedians. In each of
these books "they" are powerful, faceless makers of anti
human policies. As we have seen Greene utterly rejected,
those guardians of international power balance at the end of
Our Man in Havana opting for the "philosophy" which many
critics find too facile: we must love only humans and dis
regard all political or even religious abstractions. But
59
while he chooses to reject them, he cannot ignore them.
' ‘"They" run the prisons, the torture chambers, the jails;
"they" ignore the poor, "they" murder, maim, and suppress
all truth. They would control the human mind. In The Come
dians "they" are made concrete in the mechanical, inhuman
Tonton Macoute whose appearance makes all those who know
them cringe because they are the visible presence of pain
and of death.
Surely the most shocking recurrent horror of the
surrealistic picture of Haiti is the use of horrible beggars
who move about the main characters like swarming vermin.
They are not so much threats as part of the circumambience
of Duvalier's hell. They are a presence, usually unseen but
often felt, the objective correlatives of Papa Doc's regime
as experienced by common Haitians. They are the people whom
the Smiths, as American Vegetarians, want to help. After a
week in Haiti, Mr. Smith has his first encounter with the
Haitian people when he insists that Brown, his host, drive
him to the post office for stamps. Brown gives this
account.
I had lost him momentarily in the crowd . . . Two one-
armed men and three one-legged men hemmed him round
. . . A man without legs had installed himself between
his knees and removed his shoe laces preparatory to
cleaning his shoes. (p. 166)
Soon others were fighting to crush in upon the amazed
American.
A young fellow, with a hole where his nose should have
been, lowered his head and tried to ram his way through
60
towards the attraction at the centre. A man with no
hands raised his pink polished stumps over the heads of
the crowd to exhibit his infirmity to the foreigner.
(p. 166)
As Brown fights his way through the grotesque crowd toward
Smith, his hand once encounters "a stiff inhuman stump, like
a piece of hard rubber" (p. 166). It takes five minutes of
struggle to clear Mr. Smith from the melee. And Brown tells
us, when Smith got back to the car, "he had lost his shoe
laces."
The most terrifying scene involving a beggar comes
during Mr. Smith's tour of Duvalierville which was to be
Haiti's answer to Brasilia. In the deserted, twisted proto
city with houses "built with tilted wings like wrecked but
terflies" (p. 165), officially there lives only a caretaker
— Justice of the Peace, but like an insect also there is
already the ubiquitous Haitian beggar who "came seesawing"
toward the touring party. He had "very long arms and no
legs and he moved imperceptibly nearer like a rocking horse"
(p. 177) . This ruined human begins to murmur, whine, while
holding out a small statuette. Shen Smith calls him a beg
gar, his host claims instead that this pathetic creature is
an artist, and he seizes the statuette as a gift for Smith.
No pay is necessary of course since "the Government looks
after him." But apparently this support is unknown to the
beggar.
The beggar rocked to and fro, making sounds of melan
choly and desperation. No words were distinguishable;
. . . he had no roof to his mouth. (p. 177)
61
Smith pays the terrified cripple anyway while the Secretary
for Welfare talks of the future plans for developing great
art in Haiti. As soon as he has the money/ the pathetic
cripple "with enormous effort began to rock back" to some
hole where he might hide his money. Turning away Mr. Smith
smiles with pleasure, having helped one of the lame and
halted. But Brown is not so naive as Smith.
I looked back. The justice of the peace was running
fast on long loping legs . . . and the cripple was rock
ing back with desperation toward the pit; he reminded me
of a sand crab scuttling to its hole. He had only
another twenty yards to go, but he hadn't a chance.
(p. 178)
The crippled beggars in The Comedians are not heart-breaking
because the author-narrator refuses to dwell upon their sad
condition. They represent all Haiti, tortured and abused by
Duvalier and his henchmen, the Tonton Macoute. The detach
ment (from grisly details) which Greene forces us to feel by
focusing upon the violence of the scene or upon the reac
tions of others, especially Mr. Smith or Brown, remind the
reader of those explorations of Hell which Nathanael West
created in his disturbing comic novels.
At one point in The Comedians Brown, the narrator,
writes that he would expect journalists visiting Haiti in
the early '60's "to write a report on what they would
undoubtedly call 'The Nightmare Republic.'" We have seen
already that throughout the book the nightmare suggestion is
carried in interwoven themes of madness and death. But as
in earlier novels the atmosphere is one in which the illogi
62
cal and the incongruous are to be expected.
Haiti— especially Port-au-Prince ought to be a
tropical paradise; instead it is a writhing, malfunctioning
inferno. Due to insufficient electric power (Haiti is a
veritable land of insufficiency in The Comedians), there is
a nightly, though irregular, blackout which is symbolically
effective. On Brown's first evening back in Haiti he notes:
In the public park the musical fountain stood black,
unplaying. Electric globes winked out the nocturnal
message: "Je suis le drapeau Haitien Uni et Indivis
ible. Francois Duvalier." (p. 45, italics mine)
Only Papa Doc's egocentricity remains brilliant through the
blackout. But then, Duvalier's republic is a crazy place
where nothing can be expected to work. Toward the end of
the book Brown sums it up as he recalls "the darkness and
the terror of the curfew . . . the telephone that didn't
work . . . the Tonton Macoute in their dark glasses . . .
violence, injustice, torture" (p. 304). At another point
Brown talks about the lack of skilled workers in the island.
One could not find anyone capable of making a car run and he
presents this comic picture.
The roads around Port-au-Prince were littered with
abandoned cars and overturned buses; once I had seen a
breakdown van with its crane lying sideways in a ditch
— like . . . a contradiction in nature. (p. 280)
This scene has the comedy of the improbable as it presents
an image of what seem to be dead vehicles, turned like
insects upon their backs with their wheel-legs up. The
phrase "contradiction in nature" suggests the illogical
63
nightmarish quality of the picture.
If the whole island of Haiti seems to be a weird,
broken-down torture chamber, then Brown's hotel, The Tria
non— which serves as the setting for much of the action in
The Comedians— carries out the impression of disproportion
and the unexpected. Brown had incidentally inherited the
place from his wonderfully madcap mother, whose amorous
escapades in old age (she expired in ecstasy in the arms of
her youthful black lover) prepare the way for the even more
robust Augusta Bertram. The building itself suggests a pri
vate insane asylum, incongruous in its appearance as it is
in its name.
With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork dec
orations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams
house in a number of The New Yorker. (p. 46)
Brown emphasizes the comic horror quality of the building
further. When the door was opened, "you expected a witch
. . . or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from a chan
delier behind him." Even in the light of common day "it
seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illus
tration from a book of fairy tales." This strange decaying
Victorian building is ludicrously misnamed the Trianon after
one of the palaces of Louis XIV. The hotel recalls the
English Gothic house in Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust where
bedrooms were ironically named for Arthurian characters.
Brown's mother had named rooms— such as the John Barrymore
suite— for their grander occupants in happier days.
64
Throughout these three books Greene increasingly
suggests the nightmare is the general condition of our
world. The melodramatic nightmare of war-torn London in The
Ministry of Fear which became farcically absurd in Our Man
in Havana grows very sinister by the time Greene writes The
Comedians. Essentially the same large political forces lie
menacingly below the outward appearances of a Caribbean
vacation spot, but in this novel Duvalier's Haiti has a sur
realistic, threatening quality which far outdistances its
forerunners. Furthermore, while Greene has given this 1966
vision of hell a local habitation and a name, he goes
farther in The Comedians to suggest that Haiti is a micro
cosm of the modern world than he had done in either Ministry
or Our Man in Havana. The book opens, for example, aboard a
Greek-named ship whose captain is Dutch. The passengers and
crew, in the tradition of the ship of fools, comprise a
variety of nations and races. Indeed Haiti itself is
clearly not the only small dictatorship whose existence
depends upon the self-interests of contemporary political
giants. The situation is duplicated in Cuba and various
African, Asian, and South American nations.
Even in the final pages of the novel, after Brown
"escapes" to comparative peace in the neighboring Dominican
Republic, the two themes of madness and death continue to
reverberate. The only job that Brown can get in his new
homeland is as a mortician's assistant, picking up corpses
65
for the embalmer. Before he takes up his new duties, howev
er, he meets young Philipot and other Haitian guerrillas who
arrive after suffering many setbacks fighting in the hills
of the hellish nation. Brown watches a considerate Domini
can lieutenant as he receives the exhausted Haitians:
"We have made a comfortable camp for your people near
Santo Domingo. In an old lunatic asylum.
Philipot began to laugh— "A lunatic asylum1 You are
right"— and then to cry. He put his hands over his eyes
to hide them. (p. 301, italics mine)
In the midst of his agony Philipot can laugh at the brutal
irony of housing his men in a real madhouse after all the
time they have spent in Papa Doc1s Haiti, a barely metaphor
ical one. But it is appropriate also that his laughter
chokes in tears as he remembers his home, a place about
which Brown had earlier said:
"Only the nightmares are real in this place . . . More
real than ourselves." (p. 173)
At the end of The Comedians, the reader is not at all con
fident that he can set firmly the geographical boundaries of
"this place."
"It's a Good World If You Don't Weaken"
In one review of The Comedians Conor Cruise O'Brien
wrote, "All his life Graham Greene has been looking for
hell. Now at last he has found it in Haiti." But Greene
had found hell long before that novel was published. It was
revealed to him early and often, and as we have seen, it
seems to manifest itself as a surreal-comic vision almost
66
derived from Hieronymus Bosch. The nightmare elements
appear as early as the descriptions of the atmosphere in The
Man Within, , and facets of the hellish dream are clear in
sections of Stamboul Train and This Gun for Hire. But
Greene's first full vision of hell comes in that amazing
193 8 novel/ Brighton Rock. The world which Greene created
in Brighton Rock is a combination of the violent nightmare
and the hysterical amusement park. Brighton Pier is a
microcosm of the horror and emptiness of the thirties/ a
proper setting for the struggle between the Satanic Pinkie
Brown and Ida Arnold/ that great comic fury, that long
decline from the pagan Earth Mother whose easy philosophy of
life is summed up in her tag line: "It's a good world if
you don't weaken."21*
Ida is one of Greene's superb comic creations, com
bining the blindly inept qualities of the clown (cf. Chap
ters II, III) with those of the comedian (cf. Chapter IV).
Utterly cursed with serendipity, Ida pursues Pinkie Brown by
a course of pure chance, although she behaves as if all her
actions were consciously planned. All her plans work out
for the wrong reasons. Indeed she is the embodiment of Suc
cess itself in a nightmare-comic world. She holds all the
cards in a game which has no real meaning because it is a
particularly limited secular game.
The "problem" in reading Brighton Rock is to under
stand why Greene seems to detest Ida who, after all, is led
67
to avenge what she intuitively feels is the wrongful death
of "Fred" Hale, a cowardly betrayer whom she has met only
once— just before his death. We will see that it is because
she is so well-adjusted to a basically senseless world that
Ida is finally one of the lost.
As the novel opens, Hale is poised between the two
forces which are in contention throughout the book— Life vs.
Death. These are represented on the one hand by Ida Arnold,
the blousy, warm, human "Smother" Earth and on the other by
that ascetic child of Hell, Pinkie Brown. Hale responds
sentimentally to Ida as a "winy voice singing, singing of
brides and bouquets, of lilies and mourning shrouds, a Vic
torian ballad." And Hale returns to her as one lost "in a
desert makes for the glow of a fire."25
Pinkie on the other hand has a "face of starved
intensity" showing a Hideous and unnatural pride." As he
moves malevolently in upon Hale, he is seen as a hunter
closing in on his prey, contemplating the kill. Then Ida
starts singing, and Pinkie feels the natural antipathy to
her which will develop as her secular life force pursues and
ultimately destroys him. Pinkie watches Ida "with an
expression of curious distaste." He is disgusted by her
bibulous singing of the saccharine romantic song which deals
with white wedding dresses, orange blossoms, and love.
When Pinkie leaves, Hale knows that he is under sen
tence of death, but he consoles himself that "they" won't
68
kill him if he remains in the company of others. Hale
watches Ida "as if he were gazing at life itself in the pub
lic bar." At first opportunity she seizes upon Ida: "She
could save my life . . . if she'd let me stick to her."
That Ida is the symbol of a modern secular Life
Force is reinforced in the careful description Greene gives
of her in her first appearance. She makes her "big blown
charms" apparent to everyone. She is not old— "late thir
ties or early forties"— and of her body:
You thought of sucking babies when you looked at
her, but if she'd borne them, she hadn't let them pull
her down: she took care of herself. Her lipstick told
you that, the confidence of her big body. (p. 6)
Allot and Farris point out that Ida's literary antecedents
go back to the Wife of Bath, and they also point out that
her appearance recalls the description of Mae West in an
early film review.26
If she seems a mere caricature in her first appear
ance, the second time that Greene focuses upon Ida, he shows
her to be what he would eventually call the supreme "come
dian." For Ida vacillates between self-centered absorption
and a pseudo-altruistic script (written by her imagination)
which allows her to cast herself as an avenging angel.
Ida had been abandoned by "Fred" Hale while she had
gone to the ladies' room. She dismissed him from her
thoughts when— she assumed— she was stood up. Later, in
Henneky's bar when Ida learns that Kolly Kibber, the prize-
giver from a London newspaper, has died, she mistakenly
69
assumes that Hale was "that little rat" who had collected
,£10 for finding Kolly Kibber's corpse.
But when she discovers that the dead man was
actually "Fred," she suddenly decides he was a true gentle
man. Ida then colors Hale's last few moments with her sen
timental but ludicrous imagination. She "sees" him dying
while she was in the Ladies' room.
A sense of tears came to her now in Henneky's; she mea
sured those polished white steps down to the wash basins
as if they were the slow stages of a tragedy. (p. 39)
Instantly Ida casts herself in a tragic pagan situation; she
sees herself descending the classic steps of the Greek
amphitheater, forgetting that they led in reality to the
toilet. Suddenly Fred is worth a few tears, although when
she works up her sympathy, she cannot recall his name.
Interestingly, however, Ida's "instincts" be' -n to gnaw at
her consciousness, telling her that the account in the news
papers is wrong. With no effort Ida is back at Brighton,
suffering for "Fred."
. . . he must have been dying, walking along the front
to Hove, dying, and the cheap drama and pathos of the
thought weakened her heart toward him. (p. 41)
Sitting in a bar, brooding over Hale's death, Ida
decides to attend his funeral. "It's not every day you lose
a friend," she explains to her bar mate. Thinking herself
probably the only person giving Hale a thought. Leaving the
bar for the cemetary, Ida explains that she is going to
Hale's funeral because "it shows respect. Besides I like a
70
funeral." Ida is attending primarily because it is fun, and
that is her reason for almost everything she does in life.
Ida is late for the service, and just before her
entrance she hears the slick speech of the preacher who
sounded like a voice on the National Programme. Entering,
she is surprised to find that the sounds come from a man
instead of a machine.
"We believe," he said, glancing swiftly along the smooth
polished slip way towards the New Art doors through
which the coffin would be launched into the flames, "we
believe that this our brother is already at one with the
One." He stamped his words, like little pats of butter,
with his personal mark. (p. 46)
The non-denominational preacher continues to talk about
truth, beauty, and the universal spirit in a way that looks
forward to passages of Waugh's The Loved One. When he
finishes, the speaker ends the affair with neat dispatch.
He touched a little buzzer, the New Art doors opened,
the flames flapped, and the coffin slid smoothly down
into the fiery sea. The doors closed, the nurse rose
and made for the door, the clergy man smiled gently from
behind the slipway, like a conjurer who has produced his
nine hundred and fortieth rabbit without a hitch.
(p. 46)
The style of the passage above underscores the comedy
intended in the scene— a series of independent clauses
separated by commas rather than stronger punctuation which
suggests the nearly slapstick speed of the action. The
final simile— that of the successful slight-of-hand tricks
ter— leaves one waiting for a burst of applause.
Ida was not applauding. To her the eulogy was mean
ingless .
71
Death shocked her, life was so important . . . Let
Papists treat death with flippancy: Life wasn't so
important perhaps to them as what came after; but to
her death was the end of everything. (p. 46, italics
mine)
To Ida, life means "sunlight of brass bed posts," good wine,
winning at the track. To her, life is carnal, sensory,
filled with frankly cheap sentiment. Ida is dedicated to
the rightness of this viewpoint, and it is the assurance
that she is dedicated to what is right that motivates her
throughout the book.
Greene, of course, parts company with Ida here. We
are reminded over and over again during the course of
Brighton Rock that she is "at home in the world." But this
world is senseless, hopeless, in short, a nightmare. One
who is at home in it is part of that nightmare, and there
fore that figure is lost. We note here that Ida shares with
the other furious oppressors of Greene's later nightmare
worlds a total dedication to forcing others into her way of
seeing things. She is the instrument of her own view of
what is "Right" and "Wrong," and Greene makes clear from the
beginning that he finds her obsession distasteful.
There was something dangerous and remorseless in her
optimism, whether she was laughing in Henneky's [a pub]
or weeping at a funeral or marriage. (p. 47)
As Ida leaves the crematorium, there fumes from the twin
towers above her head "the very last of Fred."
Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink
blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over
London, and Ida wept. (p. 47)
72
Greene's curiously flip treatment of Hale's final remains
leads the reader away from any truly emotional feeling
before we learn that "Ida wept." Ironically that tiny
phrase is an echo of the shortest verse of the King James
Version of the New Testament (John 11:35), when after the
Savior learns of Lazarus' death, we are told simply, "Jesus
wept." But unlike Jesus who was moved by pity enough to
recall Lazarus from death, Ida's tears signal the growth of
another, more secular and more typically contemporary feel
ing— the desire for vengeance.
Ida believes in Justice (as she interprets it) and
that means an eye for an eye. The worst that could befall a
man was death. Someone, she decides, is responsible for the
death of Fred Hale, a "friend," and it is up to Ida to set
it right. The secular world with which Ida is in harmony
requires it. Thus as she leaves the cremation, weeping, her
determination grows. "With the simplicity and regularity of
a sky sign," Ida's mind works furiously all the way to her
favorite bar. The sense of life's rhythm, which Ida repre
sents, demands that someone pay for making Hale unhappy, a
demand that is entirely mundane and secular.
If you believed in God, you might leave vengeance to
Him, but you couldn't trust the One, the Universal
Spirit. Vengeance was Ida's, just as much as reward was
Ida's, the soft gluey mouth affixed in taxis, the warm
handclasp in cinemas, the only reward there was. And
vengeance and reward— they both were fun. (p. 48,
italics mine)
The key to Ida's motivation, then, is the purely
73
physical, secular criterion that whatever she does must be
fun. Her pursuit of Hale's "killer" will be viewed as a
hunt or a game. While the game itself may be fun, the
reward of evening the score will be as enjoyable as anything
in life.
Enjoyment of the chase is a necessary part of the
amateur detective's character. And in the traditional
mystery story— in Arthur Conan Doyle's writing or in that
of, say, John Buchan— the detective is a brilliant, logical
thinker who finds some piece of a puzzle which a nearly
equally intelligent criminal has forgotten. The traditional
mystery, then, is a game of skill which pits two sharp
intellects against one another. The reader's pleasure comes
from watching for clues— errors, in effect— left by the
criminal and pieced together by the detective. While there
is often cliff-hanging melodrama, one could never describe
the typical detective story as a game of chance. In Ida
Arnold's case, however, Chance is precisely the force which
controls, for Ida's pursuit of Pinkie Brown is a parody of
the detective formula.27
In place of cold logic and clear thought, Ida begins
with a head full of alcohol. Then maudlin sentimentality
moves her onto the trail of Hale's "murderers." She needs
no clues because she has her Ouija board (which she uses
with the help of the pathetic Old Crowe, her erstwhile Dr.
Watson). When that dubious oracle provides her with an
74
alphabetical garble, Ida "interprets" its message with
amusing skill derived from sheer intuition. Throughout
Brighton Rock Ida's determination feeds on itself; she never
doubts her "methods," and the greatest irony in the book is,
of course, that Ida is right about Hale's death as well as
about the identity of his "killer."
It is important to see that Ida is not pursuing
Pinkie because she really had any regard for Hale. She has
stated her reason: it is fun. Nor is she doing a good ser
vice for the world in general by ridding society of a kill
er. Notwithstanding her insistence that she "knows what's
right," Greene paints her in the least attractive tones
possible. Having decided that Pinkie is her target, she
decides to pick at Rose, who loves him:
"I'm going to work on that kid every hour of the day
until I get something." She rose formidably and moved
across the restaurant like a warship going into action,
a warship on the right side in a war to end wars, the
signal flags proclaiming that every man would do his
duty. (p. 172, italics mine)
Greene shows his distaste for her "merciless compassion"
(p. 172) several times by using absurd metaphors of the hunt
or of war when describing Ida.
Greene undercuts Ida's determination to do what's
right, when a little later she takes time out from the chase
to jump into bed with her old friend, Mr. Corkery. While
he pays for the bedroom, Ida tests the bed springs and plans
"the evening's campaign." (The war metaphor is used for
love making here to suggest that Ida is equally determined
75
when it comes to another way of having fun.) And she for
gets about her great goal
If somebody had said to her then: "Fred Hale," she
would hardly have recognized the name; there was another
interest; for the next hour let the police have him.
(p. 211)
After all, thinks Ida, sex is nothing much, only part of
human nature. Lest we think of her any longer as a real
Earth Mother, however, Greene writes: "She bore the same
relation to passion as a peep show" (p. 212). As she awaits
Corkery, she thinks of herself, nude on the bed, "just a
great big blossoming surprise" (p. 212). The contrasting
fact is that Ida is a dizzy, malicious, middle-aged whore.
It is in her final confrontation with Rose, now
Pinkie's wife, that Ida most clearly shows her purely physi
cal, secular limitations. Ida lacks the spiritual dimension
that the sixteen-year-old Rose has and Ida's lack, even her
stupidity, show through the scene. She appears initially as
"a wall at the end of an alley" on which an enemy has
scrawled obscenities; later her face is seen as an idiot's
staring "from the ruins of a bombed home." Rose, who loves
Pinkie, argues that Pinkie may change, repent.
"That's just religion," [Ida] said. "Believe me. It's
the world we got to deal with." (p. 291, italics mine)
Ida's easy dismissal of religion and her insistence that
human nature cannot change are repugnant to Greene. When
she asks Rose to leave Pinkie because she does not want the
Innocent to suffer, we are told that "the aphorism came
76
clicking out like a ticket from a slot machine" (p. 292).
In the end, therefore, Ida is precisely non-human, the
opposite of the Life Force which she initially appears to
be.
She represents all that Greene clearly deplores not
simply because her idea of Right and of Wrong are purely
secular, but also because she stands like T. S. Eliot's
Madame Sosostris for a modern corruption of what once was
divine. In Eliot's Waste Land, the fake medium with the bad
cold is all the twentieth century can offer to replace
religious revelation. Ida Arnold with her narrow, mundane
sense of Justice is our contemporary sense of redress, of
conscience, and she is a far cry from the "appalling . . .
strangeness of the mercy of God" (p. 357).
77
Footnotes
xWylie Sypher, "Our New Sense of Comedy" in Appen
dix to Comedy [An Essay on Comedy by George Meredith:
Laughter by Henri Bergson] (Garden City: Doubleday & Co.,
Inc., 1956), pp. 193-214.
2Sypher, p. 193.
3Sypher, p. 193.
‘ ‘Sypher, p. 193.
5Sypher, p. 195.
6Sypher, p. 194. Sypher elaborates upon the absurd
in modern literature, especially as it affects the charac
ters of Dostoevsky and Kafka. Thus he seems to be laying
the groundwork for a theory of existentialism in modern lit
erature derived from the alienated "hero." Critics have
often pointed out the existential elements in Greene's
novels, basing their arguments squarely on such a foundation
as Sypher lays. Cf. Sean O'Faolain, "Graham Greene: I
Suffer; Therefore, I am," in The Vanishing Hero: Studies of
the Twenties (London: Eyre and Spotswoode, 1956).
7Sypher, p. 195.
0Sypher, p. 198.
9This statement is not meant to suggest that polit
ical and bureaucratic absurdity came into being with World
War I. One recalls that Dostoevsky, perhaps the father of
the alienated hero, wrote in the Nineteenth Century. So
indeed did Dickens whose satiric treatment of the wheels of
justice in Bleak House and whose picture of the Marshalsea
in the center of a circular inferno-like London in Little
Dorrit are both well known.
1°Both Arthur Rowe and Jim Wormold are certainly
naive men. Greene takes time to show us the way that Rowe
perceives those around him. Even the style is curiously
naive, suggesting that Rowe forgets there is a war on. At
the same time we bear in mind that he is tormented by guilt
for the mercy slaying of his wife. While* this explains his
slowness to respond, it is also only the more reason to see
him an innocent alien in the world of war and Nazi spies
into which he accidentally steps.
Wormold's naivete is clear from the moment he
dares to send in false reports to the British Secret Ser
vice. The irony in the book is that Jim's innocence (like
78
that of another "clown," Alden Pyle) is what makes him so
dangerous.
It might be argued that Brown in The Comedians is
not naive. Brown is a more self-conscious man; he is a
"comedian," a player of parts. But he does not fully under
stand himself or the people around him, especially his
lover, Martha, and the mysterious "Major" Jones. He knows
enough to protect himself from the brutal forces around him,
but he does not understand those forces and ultimately he
tries vainly to escape them.
11Albert Cook, The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean:
a Philosophy of Comedy (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.,
Inc., 1966) .
12The word "probable" is a key term in Cook's analy
sis of comedy. Its meaning is close to the dictionary mean
ing, i.e., the expected, the normal, the usual. According
to Cook's study comedy arises whenever there is a departure
from the probable. The nonprobable stimulates amusement and
pleasure.
Man desires change because it is pleasurable . . .
Novelty is always surprising, therefore unpredictable,
therefore nonprobable. (p. 5)
The comedy in Carroll's Alice books comes about because the
child expects the adult world to behave in a predictable,
therefore probable way. When the adult world turns out to
be improbable in its behavioral patterns, it is absurdly
puzzling to the child. In other words Greene's characters
are something like the little boy who defies convention by
declaring that the emperor's new clothes do not exist.
13Cook, p. 126.
1 **A clue to the reason for Greene's handling can be
found in his essay "The Virtue of Disloyalty," only recently
reprinted in The Viking Portable Graham Greene. In this
piece Greene is moved rather daringly to condemn Shakespeare
because he was the "one supreme poet of conservatism,"
because he was in effect a poet of the Establishment. He
does allow that Shakespeare might have changed if he had
lived longer. He praises Pasternak, Ginsburg, Solzhenitsyn,
George Seferis, for their refusal to serve their govern
ments .
If only writers could maintain that one virtue of
disloyalty— so much more important than chastity—
unspotted from the world . . . the writer should always
be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He
79
stands for the victims and the victims change. Loyalty
confines you to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids you
to comprehend sympathetically your dissident fellows;
but disloyalty encourages you to roam through any human
mind: it gives the novelist an extra dimension of
understanding.
The Viking Portable Graham Greene, p. 609.
Far from a "poet” of the establishment/ it seems
almost as if Greene travels the world over to find new
"Establishments" to oppose. Of course he knows that no sys
tem can be supported. All of them strive to steal man's
individuality. Writing, he tells us has the job of preserv
ing liberty as religion does. The world, in which Ida
Arnold is so very much at home, is in fact a cheap amusement
park (metroland) in which most the rides are broken down and
most of the "games" are rigged against the individual.
While we should not be led too far into the trap of
Allott and Farris that the portrait of the fallen world is
Greeneland, the fact is that this world is unredeemed by any
worldly political system. Everywhere that Greene goes (and
he has travelled about more than almost any writer one can
name) he sees real evidence to validate his artistic view
that the material world is a madhouse. The best way to ren
der a madhouse in literature is through comedy, comedy that
is blackened by real clouds, but comedy nonetheless. If one
cannot ridicule the abstract political madness of our time
there would be no point in writing at all, for one could
never truthfully write in vigorous defense of any of the
systems which Graham Greene has touched upon in his career.
150ne of the special recurrent expressions of the
comic nightmare which one finds in Greene's work is that of
the frightening amusement park. It appears as a fun fair in-
England Made Me, where Anthony Farrant wins a toy tiger (in
an ironically inverted echo of Blake's wonderful, burning
creature) and it forms the fun house-horror backdrop
(Brighton Pier) for Ida Arnold's relentless pursuit of
Pinkie in Brighton Rock. The opening scene of The Ministry
of Fear is another fete, one which Rowe mistakenly hopes
will be a real fun fair. In later books the image of ruined
metroland underscores the scene. The Great (Ferris) Wheel
dominates post-War Vienna in The Third Man:
only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over
the foundations of merry-go-rounds like
abandoned millstones . . . (p. 2)
80
Even in The Quiet American the yearly Coadaist festival is
viewed as a crazy sort of amusement for spectators at a
fair:
A pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette.
Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from
the roof of the cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of
the East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor.
(pT 103, italics mine)
There are other non-comical visions of hell found in
Greene's books. The prison in It's a Battlefield, for exam
ple, is described as a series of circles which suggests
Dante's Inferno. The rotting jungle which one finds in The
Heart of the Matter and a Burnt-Out Case also carry more
than a suggestion of hell.
16 In several interviews (most recently in regard to
his latest novel, The Honorary Consul) Greene himself has
admitted a real fondness for The Ministry of Fear. It is
the only "entertainment" he singled out.
17The Ministry of Fear in Three by Graham Greene
(1957), p. 3. (All quotations from The Ministry of Fear
will be followed by page numbers from this edition.)
18The word "f§te" neatly puns on the word "fate"
which in turn suggests one's fortune or destiny. Ironically
it is through Rowe's chance entry into the f£te that his
fate is ineluctably set.
19Our Man in Havana (1958). (All quotations from
the novel will be followed by page numbers from this edi
tion.) P. 7.
20A s an added note of visual dark comedy, Greene,
who wrote the screen play for the film based upon Our Man in
Havana, focused the camera upon Jim Wormold during this
speech. As Noel Coward (the perfect Hawthorne) speaks to an
astonished Wormold (played by Alec Guiness) the camera picks
up an overwhelming spray of calla lilies just over Wormold's
head and shoulders.
21The Comedians (New York: Viking Press, Inc.,
1966), p. 3^ (All quotations from this novel are followed
by page numbers from this edition.)
22The clownish figure of Baron Samedi is associated
with the danse macabre, or "the dance of death which accord
ing to OED was a "symbolic dance in which Death, represented
as a skeleton, leads people or skeletons to their grave."
81
2 3New York Herald Tribune Book Week, February 6,
1966, p. 54.
2l*Brighton Rock (New York: The Viking Press, 1962),
p. 23. (All quotations from the novel are followed by page
numbers from this edition.)
25Ida's apparent maternal qualities have been com
mented upon thoroughly in Gwenn R. Boardman, Graham Greene:
The Aesthetics of Exploration (Gainesville: University of
Florida Press, 1971).
Greene has created Ida as a cheap, shallow, and
ignorant mother image to serve as a fitting goddess for
our corrupt civilization.
Ida "the old and vulgarized Grecian name" (p. 17),
suggests the myth of Leus1 wet nurse (Z6n) or one of
Rhea's names (yn np 'C6n) « • Greene's Ida is also a Freud
ian mother-image, with big breasts and moist mouth, a
woman who makes Hale think, "Back to the womb"; but for
Hale she is also a symbol of "darkness" and of "knowl
edge" (p. 9). But her heart is of the empty sentimental
kind. (p. 45)
Ms. Boardman, whose useful work was done originally as a
dissertation, has done a good deal of research upon the sig
nificance of characters' names. She suggests that Ida's
surname— Arnold—
. . . recalls the many allusions Greene makes to Arnold
of Rugby . . . Presumably Matthew Arnold's Christianity
would be a further source annoyance to Greene. (p. 32n)
Thus Ida's insistence that "It's a good world if you don't
weaken" is clearly meant to be a stupid claim. As Boardman
put it,
Such easy optimism is indeed satirized in the person of
Ida Arnold, Greene's delightful composite of ancient;'
superstition (the Greek goddess yri np ’ £<$n) / Victorian
self-righteousness and contemporary colorless Christian
ity. (p. 32)
26In reference to Ida Arnold's vengeance for Justice
and Graham Greene's tendency to parody the detective story
we have these domments from Leon Rivas, the ex-priest turned
to revolutionary kidnapper in The Honorary Consul. To Dr.
Plarr's question about what he is reading, Rivas replies
"Only a detective story. An English detective story."
82
"A good one?"
"I am no judge of that. The translation is not very
good, and with this sort of book I can always guess the
end." (p. 247)
Plarr (in good company of Mr. Edmund Wilson, by the
way) asks the priest who has renounced his vows where the
interest is in reading such a story.
"Oh, there is a sort of comfort in reading a story
where one always knows what the end will be. The story
of a dream world where justice is always done. There
were no detective stories in the age of faith— an inter
esting point when you think of it. God used to be the
only detective when people believed in Him. He was Law.
He was order. He was good. Like your Sherlock Holmes.
He pursued the wicked man for punishment and discovered
all." (p. 247)
Part of the irony implicit in the passage lies in
the contrast between the mistakes and confusion that charac
terize life in reality and the neatly tied-up nature of the
detective story. Art is a comfort to the man who demands
sense from life. But Rivas's comments throw light upon the
reasons for Greene's view of Ida's monstrous nature. Ida
had taken upon herself the attributes of God. (Even if
Sherlock Holmes had also done this, he was at least like God
since even in Holmes's day [according to Greene], the world
had faith in order and the reasoning processes of the mind).
But in the senseless, shallow days of the 1930's (and
after), one has faith in nothing, not even in the processes
of reason. When Ida pursues Pinkie, she does it because the
chase is fun and also because, as she iterates several
times, she knows "what's Right." Ida's ideas of rectitude
are purely mundane ones, and they represent the values of a
secular nightmare world. People like Ida are the pursuers
in this brave new world. As Rivas put it about another
zealot of this secular modern hell, the enemy "General":
But now people like the General make law and order.
Electric shocks on the genitals. Aquino's fingers . . .
I prefer the detective. I prefer God. (p. 247)
Here a political force is possessed of the awful determina
tion to make people do its bidding. How often is the modern
political philosophy kill or cure? And is not Ida's secular
righteousness of the same order if only different in degree?
27Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris, The Art of
Graham Greene (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), pp. ISO-
151.
83
In this study Ida's comic qualities receive some
attention. The authors quote from the descriptions of Ida's
overtly feminine charms. She "recalls Greene's description
in an early film review of Mae West . . . The men she be
friends, Phil Corkery, Hale, and the rest belong to the same
bowler-hatted tribe that Greene visualizes lined up behind
Mae West in the homely rowdy world of smoke-filled bars and
Guinness advertisements."
We are fortunate to have many of Greene's motion
picture reviews (originally in Spectator) reprinted in The
Pleasure Dome (London, 1972). Here xs some of Greene's com
mentary on Miss Mae West's performance in Klondike Annie,
clearly the source of Allott and Farris's remarks.
The big busted carnivorous creature in tight white
sequins sits as firmly and inscrutably for inspection as
the fat tatooed woman in the pleasure arcades.
I enjoy every one of her [Mae West's] films, aware all
the time . . . of that bowler-hatted brigade gathered
invisibly like seraphs about her stout matronly figure,
(p. 75)
CHAPTER II
INNOCENT CLOWNS
The last chapter showed how Greene creates his own
peculiar nightmare world from an interaction of the elements
of madness and death. Having fashioned the comic milieu, he
has to create characters who function within and realize
themselves through that essentially unreal, absurdly gro
tesque world. In a seriocomic world the two chief types of
inhabitants are either clowns or comedians, a dichotomy pro
vided by Greene himself and one which will prove useful in
illuminating some of the characters which he has created
throughout his career. This study will treat these two
kinds of characters in detail, the clown first, the comedian
in a later chapter.
m
The clown is a figure always associated with the
universe of comedy, but usually the term is not defined nar
rowly enough for clarity. One description of the type
offered by Ruth Nevo in her essay "Toward a Theory of Com
edy" is suggestive:
He represents, first of all, a distortion or aberration
or deformity of the normal human. With his grotesque
grease-paint and his clumsy movement he is in the last
degree undignified; and he is also unfortunate in that
circumstances are constantly getting the better of him
. . . He enters the ring cock-a-hoop; he fancies him
self, with his jokes and his antics, king of his little
84
85
sawdust universe. Suddenly, there is an oversight, a
blunder; he does not notice the bucket of whitewash
fatefully in ambush for him as he tumbles and gesticu
lates; into it he falls to emerge a moment later a
whitened apparition. But— and this is important— he
does emerge. No real harm has come to him, nor, of
course, if he involves others in his antics, does he
cause them any real harm.1
Greene himself defines the clown as a human-type in his 1958
entertainment, Our Man in Havana.2 Early in that book, Jim
Wormold, an Englishman selling vacuum cleaners in Havana, is
approached by a clearly comic figure named Henry Hawthorne
who recruits him as a secret agent for the British Govern
ment. Wormold refuses at first because he knows that he is
eminently unqualified to be a spy, but he finally decides to
work for Hawthorne solely for the money.
Wormold needs money to buy a beautiful horse for his
sixteen-year-old daughter, Milly. His loyalty to her is far
greater than that which he feels to his country, for to him
Milly is real, England a mere abstraction. But to Jim spy
ing seems a cruelly childish manifestation of the silly mis
trust which has made the mid-twentieth century so nightmar
ish. When he thinks of the Secret Service in terms of
childish behavior, he remembers the cruelties that other
youngsters inflicted upon him.
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were
curelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost
the remembrance of pain through inflicting it. But
somehow, through no virtue of his own, he had never
taken that course. (p. 31)
"Schools" he thinks "were said to construct charac
ter by chipping off the edge." In his case when the edges
86
were gone there was no character "only shapelessness, like
an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art."
From this passage we see that Jim Wormold somehow
has not learned how to defend himself but reamined innocent
through and despite his childhood. Although he cannot (and
could not) inflict pain, he has the keen memory of it, and
his instinctive response to life's cruelties has been to do
what Christ advised, to turn the other cheek. Furthermore
he sees himself as ineffectual and absurd, and his failure
to learn the lessons of life (in schools) has made him a
shapeless, even repugnant, figure such as those one finds
created by a modern artist.
But this gentle man, who sees himself as not quite
formed, is still a loving man. He loves Milly; he loves,
respects, and trusts his friend Dr. Hasselbacher, and he
comes to love Beatrice. Greene tells us "he couldn't afford
the time not to love," a nearly Christ-like statement of
pure affection. As he looks at his beautiful daughter on
the verge of womanhood, all the monstrous, and absurd cruel
ties of the modern world seem vaguely unreal to him. Milly
alone has a chance of survival in this modern nightmare and
therefore only to her he owes allegiance.
The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and
powers, leaving their ruins behind them. They had no
permanence. But the clown whom he had seen last year
with Milly at the circus— that clown was permanent, for
his act never changed. That was the way to live; the
clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and
the enormous discoveries of the great. (p. 32)
87
The clown, it seems, is the only figure who may have perma-
nance in our turbulent times. His position, as a survivor,
is therefore enviable. Actually making himself into a
clown, Jim begins to grimace and wiggle his ears at his mir
ror "to make himself laugh," as he asks his daughter:
". . .Do you remember the clown last year Milly?"
"He walked off the end of the ladder and fell in a
bucket of whitewash."
"He falls in it every night at ten o'clock. We
should all be clowns, Milly. Don't ever learn from
experience."
"... God doesn't learn from experience, does He, or
how could He hope anything of man? It's the scientists
who add the digits and make the same sum who cause the
trouble. Newton discovering gravity— he learned from
experience and after that— "
"I thought it was from an apple."
"It's the same thing. It was only a matter of time
before Lord Rutherford went and split the atom. He had
learned from experience too, and so did the men of Hiro
shima. If only we had been born clowns, nothing bad
would happen to us except a few bruises and a smear of
whitewash. Don't learn from experience, Milly. It
ruins our peace and our lives." (pp. 32-33, italics
mine)
While the "philosophy" here is anti-intellectual, it cer
tainly agrees in most particulars with the description of
the clown given earlier by Ruth Nevo. The clown is usually
grotesque, and Wormold, we have seen, views himself as an
unattractive, formless mass. Moreover Wormold describes
precisely the nature of the clown he would like to be: one
who never changes because he never learns, one who remains
eternally innocent. Closely related to his inability to
learn from experience is the comic error, a repeated mistake
which the clown pathetically makes (in this case, the
88
nightly fall from a ladder into a bucket of whitewash). The
clown manifests his invincible innocence through repeated
acts of bumbling incompetence.
Thus innocence and ineptitude are the two dominant
characteristics of the comic type referred to as the clown.
If the quality of innocence, the refusal to learn from expe
rience prevails, the character may be admirable in many ways
indeed. On the other hand if ineptness dominates a Greene
character, he is shown to be a fool.
The totally admirable clown figure is really an
ideal type, for almost every character discussed in this
chapter does learn something during the course of the book
in which he appears. But his essential characteristic is a
lack of awareness, and it is clearly his inability to per
ceive his own limitation that makes him a clown. The only
Man who ever succeeded in combining the qualities of inno
cence demanded of the clown by Greene (or described through
Jim Wormold) was Christ. In His case, of course, open,
loving innocence was His ineptitude. Because Christ failed
to perceive His enemies and to protect Himself from them
when all the power of the Universe was at his command, He
was the epitome of innocence. But Christ is also the great
comic hero, for He alone triumphed over Death. As Nelvin
Vos observed in his book, The Drama of Comedy:
What is characteristic of the action of the clown is
analogically related to what takes place within the
structures of various kinds of dramatic comedy and vari
ous understandings of the action and passion of Jesus
89
Christ. (p. 21)
In each of the three "admirable" clowns that follow
there is a suggestion of Christ-like gualities. A close
scrutiny of their roles, however, shows that despite their
dedication, their high-sounding goals and their clearly
delineated innocence, they are hardly to be seen as unquali
fied saviors.
Significantly the most successful are the least
ambitious— Mr. and Mrs. Smith in The Comedians. As the par
ticular goals of the character become larger, as they do for
Dr. Czinner and Alden Pyle, the admiration which Greene has
for him diminishes. It does this because those characters
undervalue humans while they devote their energies to their
ideals. Greene uses comedy of character to undercut these
high-sounding (and well-intentioned) social reformers and, I
think, to suggest that for him a modern Christ would be a
humanist rather than an idealist.
Inept Reformers
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Graham Greene's admirable clown is a zealous ideal
ist, led through life by a belief in a system that is for
him near obsession. As Sanford Sternlicht has expressed it,
. . . the man who accepts and believes in a system,
which may in itself be logical or illogical, historical,
metaphysical, social and/or absurd (e.g., Communism,
Socialism, "Innocencism") is in himself never reduced to
the absurd state and to the loss of his human dignity.3
But Sternlicht is wrong in assuming that Greene favors
belief in these "isms" above everything, for nowhere does he
suggest that dedication to any idea outside one's self is in
itself insurance against absurdity. The admirable clown may
have a "cause," and he may continue to support that system
which is directly connected to the improvement of man's con
dition no matter how many times he is defeated in his
attempts to bring his schemes to fruition. Moreover he
never loses faith that his cause is right and will ulti
mately triumph. This very inability to learn that most
schemes to help man are doomed because of man's selfish
human nature suggests a kind of limitedness, an ineptness of
the understanding which is directly connected to the "inno
cence" of such a character. Furthermore, this essential
integration of ineptitude and innocence suggests a Christ-
like quality.
The openly comic yet sympathetic treatment of Mr.
and Mrs. Smith separates them from most other characters in
The Comedians. The reader sees the aging American couple
through the eyes of the cynical, self-conscious, and yet
perceptive narrator, Brown. In many ways the Smiths contin
ue Greene's satiric criticism of creeping Americanism since
the Second World War which one sees in The Quiet American a
decade earlier. But while the Smiths have a cause— vege
tarianism— and although they pursue their cause tirelessly,
they are basically concerned with bettering the human condi
91
tion in practical terms. They never abandon that goal, no
matter what defeats they suffer. And they demonstrate great
courage in their convictions, courage which often derives
from their inability to learn to distrust man. (In this
regard they are like God in Jim Wormold's clown speech.)
Because the spectator is always a necessary part of
the clown's situation, Greene always provides the clown
character a physical description from the viewpoint of an
outside observer who sees the character as ridiculous. This
first picture of Mr. Smith comes while he is still aboard
ship before reaching Haiti:
Mr. Smith, who wore a shabby raincoat turned up to guard
his large, innocent, hairy ears, was pacing the deck
behind us, one lock of white hair standing up like a
television aerial in the wind, and a travelling rug car
ried over his arm. I could imagine him a homespun poet
or perhaps the president of an obscure college, but
never a politician. (p. 4)
Incongruity, always the mark of the comic, is obvious in
this description. Clearly Smith does not appear to be what
he has been and what he continues throughout the book to be
called— the Presidential Candidate. Indeed the description
of his "innocent, hairy ears" (italics mine) suggests a
rabbit-like quality while the comparison of his unruly hair
(childish although white with age) to a TV antenna is ludi
crous. There could be no mistaking the comic intent here,
and the comic simile alone is significant in this regard for
as L. J. Potts has stated: "It is in the style of a play or
novel that we first recognize comedy; and that is probably a
92
surer touchstone than any theory."1 1
Nor is the later description of the courageous Mrs.
Smith any less comic. Even after some time in Haiti during
which she has been struck by one crude Tonton Macoute, Mrs.
Smith rushes to the defense of her terrified host, Mr.
Brown, while he is being tormented by this same group of
Duvalier's storm troopers. Brown, so frightened that he
"pissed in [his] pantalons," recalls the incident.
"Degoutant," a voice said. "Tout-a-fait degoutant."
I was as astonished as they were. The American
accent with which the words were spoken had to me all
the glow and vigour of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's "Battle
Hymn of the Republic." The grapes of wrath were
trampled out in them and there was a flash of the ter
rible swift sword. They stopped my opponent with his
fist raised to strike.
Mrs. Smith had appeared at the opposite end of the
verandah behind Captain Concasseur, and he had to lose
his attitude of lazy detachment in order to see who it
was who spoke, so that the gun no longer covered me and
I moved out of reach of the fist. Mrs. Smith was
dressed in a kind of old colonial nightgown and her hair
was done up in metal rollers which gave her an oddly
cubist air. She stood there firmly in the dawnlight and
let them have it in sharp fragmented phrases torn out of
Hugo's Self-Taught. She told them of the bruit horrible
which had roused her and her husband from their sleep;
she accused them of lcichete in striking an unarmed man;
she demanded their warrant to be here at all— warrant
and again warrant; but here Hugo's vocabulary failed
her— "Montrez-moi votre warrant"; "Votre warrant ou est-
il?" The mysterious word menaced them more than the
words they understood.
She said in her atrocious accent, "You have searched.
You have not found. You can go." Except for the
absence of certain nouns the sentences would have been
suitable ones for the second lesson. (pp. 199-200)
Mrs. Smith is acting out of innocence to the point of sheer
madness, for the man to whom she addresses her "atrocious"
93
French is the very one who had already hit her in the face
on an earlier occasion when her humanity made her speak out.
Yet here she is again, not having learned to be quiet in the
face of brutal Haitian injustice, completely incompetent in
her French, utterly unable to enforce her demands should her
bluff fail (although she hardly sees it as a bluff at all),
standing like a cubist version of Barbara Fritchie. In
creating the tone of the passage Greene takes advantage of
certain obvious American echoes. Those from "Battle Hymn"
are clear, but we can also see her as the Star-Spangled Ban
ner still standing firmly in the dawn's early light. Like
an American Boy Scout, Mrs. Smith is always prepared, and
the scene ends with her going to fetch her trusty Listerine,
that utterly American antiseptic, for Brown's facial cuts.
Laughable as it is, the description of Mrs. Smith
emphasizes her bravery, and we must note that it is when her
American sense of fair play is offended that she becomes
most outraged. The very expectation that the entire world
observes fair play indicates her innocence and goodness.
These qualities show in her character throughout The Come
dians, and are perhaps even more apparent in her husband.
Thus, shortly after the Smiths leave Haiti, Brown and Jones
talk about the Smiths.
"I wish I'd seen more of them," Jones said.
"There's something about him ..." He added surpris
ingly, "He reminded me of my father. Not physically, I
mean, but . . . well, a sort of goodness."
"Yes I know what you mean." [Brown replied.]
(pp. 208-209, italics mine)
94
Both these cynical "comedians," themselves deceivers, wear
ers of masks, recognize some quality of saintly innocence
about Mr. Smith although they have known all along that his
scheme is hopeless and that his trust in the goodness of man
is sadly comic.
Sternlicht suggested in his article "The Sad Come
dies" that it is the Smiths' belief in vegetarianism that
makes them valid, admirable characters. On the contrary, if
they really had worked solely to establish a vegetarian
center in a land of starving people, they would have earned
only our contempt. Rather it is their compassion and will
ingness to involve themselves in the affairs of other human
beings that gives them dignity. It is their courage and
readiness to sacrifice for others that makes them seem
ultimately heroic rather than merely comic.
Two instances illustrate their unselfish innocence,
as well as their human competence in relating to the night
mare government of Haiti. When Mr. Smith discovers that his
"friend," Jones, is in prison, he decides that he must do
something to free him. Unable to imagine that Jones would
be imprisoned falsely, or maliciously, Smith says over and
over again: "There must have been a foolish mistake some
where." When he and Brown go to the office of the Secretary
of State there is a farcical scene which shows how little
Smith grasps of the horror that governs Haiti.
While Brown and the Secretary of State talk on a
95
level of diplomatic courtesy. Smith roughly pushes his way
into the conversation, demanding to know what charge Jones
is held on. "Charge?" questions the amazed Secretary.
"Charge."
"Oh— charge."
"Exactly," Mr. Smith said. "Charge."
"There will not necessarily be a charge ..."
(p. 116)
Still unable to comprehend the Haitian police state, Smith
now demands that bail be set for Jones's release.
"Bail?" the Minister said, "bail?" He turned to me
[Brown] with a gesture of appeal from his cigar. "What
is bail?"
"You've heard of Habeas Corpus, I suppose," Mr.
Smith said.
"Yes. Yes. Of course. But I have forgotten so
much of my Latin. Virgil. Homer. I regret that I no
longer have time to study." (p. 116)
In an exchange that might have been written by Lewis Carrol,
Smith shows that he expects the law works in all instances
the way it "ought" to work, the same way that Mrs. Smith
expects "fair play" from everyone. It is clear that the
Minister has never heard of the legal terms Smith uses, nor
does he really care about them. His answer to the question
about Habeas Corpus is simply mad. It is as though Habeas
Corpus were a well-known Roman epic, and he suggests that if
he had time to read, Homer would become for him one of the
great treasures of Latin literature. Yet in the end Smith
gets his way, for Brown and Smith get in to see Jones. If
the diplomacy of Brown alone had been trusted, they very
likely would not have.
96
An even more dramatic instance of the Smiths' coura
geous innocence is shown at the funeral of Dr. Philipot,
former Minister for Social Welfare. Brown warns Mr. Smith
against going to the funeral and especially objects to Mrs.
Smith's attendance because of "the kind of country this is
. . . Anything can happen1 ' (p. 125) . But they do not see
the danger, and thinking only of the deceased and his wife,
they do attend Philipot's funeral, which turns out to be a
slapstick nightmare.
The first sign of the funeral was its sound, but
this was "not a normal funeral," thinks Brown. There is the
sound of wailing, cursing, and arguing.
Before I could attempt to stop them Mr. and Mrs. Smith
were running down the drive. The Presidential Candidate
had a slight lead. Perhaps he maintained it more by
protocol than effort, for Mrs. Smith certainly had the
better gait. (p. 125)
To add to the cacophony and the farcical running of the
Smiths, suddenly the hearse containing Philipot's body backs
into the hotel driveway and stops. The undertakers refuse
to move the body further. Chaos reigns. Imprecations in
French and English. Then the undertakers are gone; Madame
Philipot, the Smiths, and Brown are left alone with the
hearse and coffin. In the silence Mr. Smith, by now totally
confused though not frightened, asks, "What happens next?"
The Tonton Macoute drive up suddenly, and the place
is active again. One policeman begins smashing the glass of
the hearse methodically. At that point "Mrs. Smith darted
97
forward and seized the Tonton Macoute's shoulder,"
He shook himself free from her grip and, putting his
gloved hand firmly and deliberately against her face, he
sent her reeling back into the bushes of bougainvillaea,
(p. 130)
But even this cruelty fails to educate the Smiths, for later
back at the Trianon hotel both Smiths dismiss the incident
as unimportant. Mrs. Smith insists she is perfectly all
right; she will cover her eye with cheap sunglasses. There
is no reason to judge ill of the black Haitians; after all,
they assert, Mrs. Smith had been given a black eye by a
white policeman in Memphis.
The significance of the scene, however, lies in Mrs.
Smith's foolhardy willingness to stand up for what she
believed to be the rights of Dr. Philipot and his wife whom
she really did not even know. Her attack upon the huge,
begoggled Tonton Macoute reminds one of the cartoon mouse
who plagues the monstrous cat. Her pratfall into the bou
gainvillaea is like the violence of a cartoon, for like such
a character she is ready to come back for more.
Through such incidents and despite the visual evi
dence that Haiti is an island hell, Mr. Smith remains
devoted to his idea— to build the vegetarian center. As he
presents the idea to the Minister of Social Welfare, Brown
reacts silently:
I listened to him with astonishment. The dream was
intact. Reality could not touch him. . . . The Hait
ians, freed from acidity, poverty, and passions, would
soon be bent happily over their nut-cutlets. (p. 167)
98
Mr. Smith is deeply hurt when he learns that his schemes
were tolerated by the Minister only as an opportunity for
graft, graft in which he was expected to share gleefully.
Even after the Smiths leave Haiti, however, they have not
abandoned their plans; they now plan to set up their vege
tarian center in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Thus
they have not learned to distrust their fellow men. They
truly love their neighbors and continue to pursue their
particular dream of helping those neighbors. They remain
vulnerable because they trust and believe in people. People
like the Haitian Minister of Social Welfare find them incom
prehensible because they are not corruptible. Even Jones,
as we saw earlier, found "a certain goodness" in Mr. Smith
and when Mr. Smith asks Brown (just before they leave
Haiti) if they seem comic figures to him, the reader joins
in Brown's response. "Not comic," I said with sincerity,
"heroic" (p. 205). But Greene also leaves the reader with
the disturbing question: How much distance is there between
the fool and the saint?
Dr. Czinner
Stamboul Train, an early book, has several clown
figures,6 but only one of them is truly admirable. That is
Dr. Czinner, the Socialist who after posing for five years
as a British schoolmaster, is returning to his native Bel
grade with hopes that he will be able to help his people in
their struggle for freedom.
99
As we have seen earlier in Greene's writing, the
first signal that a character is a clown figure is something
grotesque or out of place about his appearance. When
Czinner first appears, the reader sees him through the eyes
of the purser and the head steward on the boat train from
London to Ostend. We learn that "the old fellow with the
moustaches . . . , was ill all the time" (p. 5) during the
sea trip to the Continent. The two trainmen had made a bet
about the nationality of Czinner, and the steward, betting
Czinner was English, had won. Says the purser
"Go on, you could cut his accent with a knife."
"I see his passport. Richard John. School
teacher."
"That's funny," the purser said. And that's funny,
he thought again, paying the ten francs reluctantly and
seeing in his mind's eye the tired grey man in the
mackintosh stride away . . . (p. 5)
Richard John seems incongruous to the purser who "wondered
momentarily whether something dramatic has passed close by
him, something weary and hunted and the stuff of stories"
(p. 5) .
A bit later, on the train Coral Musker, an enter
tainer on her way to a job in Constantinople, faints from
hunger. When Czinner, a former physician, revives her,
Coral "thought it was she who was bending over a stranger
with a long shabby moustache . . . Never, she thought, had
she seen a man who needed more help" (p. 19). Czinner is
trying to return to Belgrade incognito, but he looks pathe
tic, out of place, and he attracts a great deal of attention
100
from everybody.
j L
The real comedy of his inept disguise explodes after
Mabel Warren's entrance into the story. This Lesbian jour
nalist easily spots him in the railway station at Cologne,
and her nose for a big story causes her to board the train
suddenly and comically and then to begin her quite nasty
pursuit of Dr. Czinner. Mabel focuses upon details of his
appearance: his old mackintosh and his glasses, "the grey
hair and shabby moustache, the small tight tie" (p. 5). Her
view of Czinner is obviously colored by her contempt for
him, but the features which Mabel does notice show him to be
among the least likely of men to spark a revolt. After so
much attention has been focused upon Czinner, doubtless to
heighten suspense, it must be apparent to the reader that
Czinner is foolish to hope to get away with whatever plans
for revolution in Belgrade he has.
Mabel Warren sees Czinner as prey in her hunt for "a
grand story," but she also views him with brutal contempt,
largely because as a male he rivals her attraction for other
women.
Did the poor fool, she wondered, think that he would
stand between her and another four pounds a week,
between her and Janet Pardoe? He became, old and stupid
and stubborn on the opposite seat, the image of all the
men who threatened her happiness . . . But the image was
in her power; she could break the image. (p. 57)
Unless this old man who "reeked to her nose of failure"
(p. 57) gives her his full story, she will threaten to pub
lish what she knows and ruin his planned uprising. Although
101
he knows instinctively that he must avoid her, Czinner is
too innocent to perceive Mabel as a real threat, nor can he
understand her hatred of him because he cannot feel hatred
for people himself.
When Mabel shows him the newspaper account of the
repression of the Belgrade uprising, he remains unruffled.
"Dr. Czinner explained: 'They were three days too early'
(p. 59). Mabel asks what he could have done if he had been
there. "The people would have followed me" (p. 59), he
answers simply. Mabel thinks:
"He's trusting the people perhaps. He was always popu
lar in the slums, but he's a fool if he thinks they'll
remember him. Five years. No one's remembered for so
long." (p. 42)
She now leaves Czinner alone. He is angered because his
chances for a successful revolution are spoiled. At this
point Czinner chooses to carry through his original plans
even though he secretly agrees with Mabel that in reality he
is only seeking "to return to a sentient life after five
years of burial." Significantly, now Czinner reads on in
the newspaper, and he envies the dead Belgrade heroes.
He could not hate [the blunderers] when he remembered
details no newspaper correspondent thought it worth
while to give, that the man who after firing his last
shot was bayoneted outside the sorting room had been
left-handed, and a lover of Delius's music, the melan
choly idealistic music of a man without a faith in any
thing but death. And that another, who leapt from the
third floor window of the telephone exchange had a wife
scarred and blinded in a factory accident, whom he loved
and to whom he was sadly and unwillingly faithless.
(pp. 61-62)
It is important to note that Czinner, the Socialist, relates
102
to the socialist victims of the recent revolt as individuals
with peculiarities, wives, human preferences. How much this
concern separates him from a self-centered Communist like
Mr. Surrogate in It's a Battlefield.7
Czinner now weighs the choices open to him. The
safety of teaching in England or
If I give myself up and stand my trial with them, the
world will listen to my defense as it would never listen
to me, safe in England . . . the people, he thought,
will rise to save me, though they did not rise for the
others . *. . I am alive again, he thought, because I am
conscious of death as a future possibility, almost a
certainty, for they will hardly let me escape again,
even if I defend myself with the tongue of an angel
. . . I am afraid, he told himself with triumph, I am
afraid. (pp. 6 2-63)
So Czinner, tired, silly old man chooses to face what he
hopes will be a heroic death because he hopes that he will
achieve his goals by dying for them.
At this point in the book Czinner has opted for
death and martyrdom. Greene lets him echo I Corinthians:13
("even if I defend myself with the tongue of an angel
. . .") to suggest that the motives which underlie Czinner's
sacrifice are associated with the concept of perfect charity
as articulated by St. Paul in his epistle.0 Ironically
Czinner has worked so very hard to reject Christianity and
all belief in favor of Socialism while he actually has
internalized the spirit of love which characterizes pure
Christianity. When Greene joins the ideas of triumph and
fear in the last line of the quotation above, it seems clear
that it is the triumph of a martyr's death that he antici
103
pates here.
While the train is stopped at Subotica, Greene picks
up this theme again when guards come to bring Czinner,
Coral, and Grttnlich in for trial. As they go out into the
snow, Coral asks why Czinner is smiling.
"I don't know. Was I smiling? It is perhaps because I
am home again." For a moment his mouth was serious,
then it fell into a loose smile, and his eyes as they
peered this way and that through his frosted glasses
seemed moist and empty of anything but a kind of stupid
happiness. (p. 140)
But the private court martial is disappointing to Czinner
who would have liked a public spectacle in Belgrade.
Besides it is a mockery of real justice. Although Czinner
fights without hope, he points up many illegal features of
the "trial." Accused of having a false passport, Czinner
remarks that the judges must prove he is not a naturalized
British subject, and so the court decides to waive that
issue entirely.
. . . said Major Petkovitch, "I think it would be more
correct to postpone trial on the small charge until
sentence— that is to say, a verdict— has been declared
on the greater. (p. 149)
The slip of Petkovitch's tongue is reminiscent of a line
spoken by the Queen of Hearts at the trial of Alice in Won
derland.9 And this slip is succeeded by a debate about
changing one of the terms of the indictment, arbitrarily,
from "conspiracy" to "treason." Greene does all of this to
suggest the absurdity of much formal justice, one of the
most highly valued systems in our time. The members of the
104
court martial are merely human and they become comic because
they seem to believe in their roles as purveyers of Absolute
Justice. Lest we miss the absurdity of this particular
scene, Greene focuses several times upon one of the judges—
a fat officer who spends much of the trial either nodding
sleepily or hiccuping.
At the end of the sham trial Czinner simply pleads
guilty and asks to address the court. Surprisingly, permis
sion is granted. As Czinner addresses the court, brandish
ing the sword of his rhetoric, he falters as he becomes
"conscious of the artificiality of his words which did not
bear witness to the great love and the great hate driving
him on" (p. 151). Czinner says that the ideas of national
boundaries are outdated in the age of airplanes and interna
tional financiers. He talks on, referring to each of his
guards as "Brother," but even he feels that the speech
sounds hollow. And Greene undercuts all of Czinner's points
by shifting the focus suddenly to Haretep, one of the
judges.
Colonel Haretep lost interest. Dr. Czinner was losing
the individuality of the grey wool gloves and the hole
in the thumb; he was becoming a tub orator, no more.
(p. 152)
As narrator, Greene rejects sentimentalism in this scene,
and he comments on the directly emotional appeal of Dr.
Czinner, never allowing the reader to think that this speech
is to be read like one of a heroic saint. For if that hap
pened the character would lose his humble reality; the scene
105
would move toward the tragic and the unreal.
When it is over, Czinner calls his trial a mockery,
but he says that by dying he will be of greater use to his
cause. "But while he spoke, his clever mind told him that
the chances were few that his death would have any effect"
(p. 152). Czinner no longer cares, however.
His enemies were offering him the one thing he had never
known— security. There was no need to decide anything.
He was at peace. (p. 154)
The relief Czinner feels is that of responsibility which has
been removed: "The world was out of joint, and he had done
his best to set it right, but that was over" (p. 155). He
was "powerless and happy." About this David Pryce-Jones
claims:
Czinner is aware that idealism is heroic in a world
composed of Hareteps . . . His self-awareness redeems
his idealism.10
Doubtless Pryce-Jones is correct here, but Graham
Greene, it must be noted, will not leave Czinner to the
peace of even an unsung martyrdom. Instead of leaving
Czinner to die with private nobility, he lets him partici
pate in a last, surprising escape. A fellow prisoner,
Grtinlich, obsessed by his own image as a criminal who has
never been caught, urges Coral Musker and Dr. Czinner to
break out of the shed in which they have been locked. In
the mad dash through the snow Czinner is seriously wounded.
Coral gives up her chance to escape to help Czinner, and
together they crawl through the snow to an old barn.
106
As Czinner's breathing becomes more labored and as
he loses consciousness, Coral thinks about her relationship
to others, and she compares her own sense of responsibility
to Czinner's. "She wondered whether Dr. Czinner . . . had
been too faithful to people who could have been served bet
ter by cunning" (p. 172). There is the feeling that Czinner
was incompetently faithful because he was too innocent for
this world.
In the early hours of the day while Coral is asleep,
Czinner dies. When she awakens, it takes her a few second
to recognize that he is dead. She studies his face
. . . the face was remarkable for its lack of humour
. . . If he had lived with somebody who had laughed at
him a bit, she thought, he would not be here like this;
he wouldn't have taken things so seriously; he'd have
learnt not to fuss, to let things slide; it's the only
way. (p.•175)
In a sense these are the lessons that Coral has learned from
her journey by the Orient Express and especially from
observing the extreme seriousness of Dr. Czinner. Coral
(and Graham Greene, we suspect) does not fully approve of
dedication to the degree that Czinner exemplified it
although he becomes a kind of secular saint because of it.
To the degree that he lacks humor, he also lacks humanity.
It is that very quality which is missing also in Alden Pyle,
a later dedicated reformer who is clearly in the same non
human (saint-like?) mould as Czinner.
The reader's last impression of Czinner is again
that of the fool:
107
She [Coral] touched the long moustaches. They were
comic; they were pathetic; they could never let him seem
tragic. (p. 175)
It seems likely that this final note on Czinner's moustaches
might signal the response one is meant to have to him. He
is a pathetic clown, idealistic and innocent, but humorless
and incomplete as well.
Even though his final "triumph" is undercut by
melodrama, Dr. Czinner, whose name is an obvious play on the
word "sinner," becomes a secular saint because he chooses to
die rather than abandon his innocence and his idealism. He
is aware that he cannot effect social change by himself. He
sees that even his death will not have the impact he would
like it to have, but he is tired and disappointed by life.
Alden Pyle
Like the Smiths, Czinner learns that good intentions
alone are not enough to alter society. But Alden Pyle, a
later Greene reformer, in some ways the most innocent and
inept of them all, does not experience such a recognition
and dies without realizing that his ideals are in any way at
variance with reality and probability.
Alden Pyle is already dead before The Quiet American
begins. The reader is never allowed to hear or see him
except as he is recalled and recreated by Thomas Fowler, the
British journalist who narrates the story. A good deal
older than Pyle, Fowler is his antithesis in many ways. The
Englishman prides himself on his complete detachment just as
108
the young American believes in absolute commitment. It is a
case of age versus youth, cynical experience opposed to
enthusiastic innocence. But Fowler is an acceptable observ
er of Pyle because even though he sees Pyle's naivete and
condemns the American for his blind spots, Fowler can criti
cize his own shortcomings as well. During the novel Fowler
finds that he cannot remain detached no matter how he has
tried to do so. By giving the reader these and other
insights into himself, Fowler builds a confidence that what
he is telling us is the "truth" as far as he knows it.
Fowler stresses Pyle's clown-like qualities— his
innocence and his ineptitude— throughout his recollection.
On the night of Pyle's murder, the French inspector, Vigot,
sends for Fowler to ask about the American. His immediate
reply is "objective."
"... you know all I can tell you about Pyle. Age
thirty-two, employed in the Economic Aid Mission,
Nationality American." (p. 11)
He goes on to describe Pyle as "a good chap in his way.
Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards in the Continen
tal. A quiet American" (p. 11). Fowler (and Greene, for
that matter) takes the first possible opportunity to disso
ciate Pyle from the so-called average American who is
satirized throughout the book by the Economic Attache known
only by his abbreviated Christian name, Joe. When Inspector
Vigot asks how Fowler met Pyle, the journalist does not
answer, but the novel moves into Fowler's mind where the
109
initial meeting is recreated. Pyle had met him . .
coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental:
an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a
dart" (p. 12). Fowler stresses Pyle's youth and his inno
cence in the first pair of adjectives used to describe him,
and the violent metaphor "flung like a dart" suggests the
danger of Pyle's inexperience. The description continues:
. . . With his gangly legs and his crew cut and his wide
campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm . . . [Seating
himself at Fowler's table] he had folded himself around
a chair and ordered a beer. Then he looked quickly up
into the noon glare. "Was that a grenade?" he asked
with excitement and hope.
"Most likely the exhaust of a car," I said, and was
suddenly sorry for his disappointment. (p. 12)
All the terms here underscore Pyle's youth and awkward ado
lescent body. The "campus gaze" suggests the idealism of
the college student. And Pyle, at 34, is surely too old to
be described this way. He is looking for something to
become involved in; for him the sound of a grenade promises
hope of excitement. Fowler registers Pyle's disappointment
that he will be unable to be a romantic hero on his first
day in Indochina.
The Englishman now speculates about Pyle's back
ground and his intentions.
. . . he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of democ
racy and the responsibilities of the West; he was deter
mined— I learned that very soon— to do good, not to any
individual person, but to a country, a continent, a
world. (p. 13)
These are the views of the not-so-objective Fowler upon
Pyle's ambitions. The phrases "dilemmas of democracy," and
110
"responsibilities of the West" typify the abstract phrases
that may lead an idealist to become, as Pyle is, "determined
to do good" (italics mine). But it is significant that Pyle
differs from both Dr. Czinner and the Smiths in that he is
not interested in helping people as individuals but rather
in saving abstract entities— countries, continents, the
world. In Graham Greene's books it is those characters who
are most interested in individuals who achieve real good
ness. Greene never smiles upon a character who is devoted
to abstract good. At the end of the section quoted above
Fowler adds a note of sardonic humor when he thinks about
the now-deceased Pyle: "Well, he was in his element now,
with the whole universe to improve" (p. 13).
When Fowler has to identify Pyle's body, he thinks
how out of place the young man looks on the slab in the
morgue. He had always been out of place in Indochina, but
never realized it. Pyle seemed to misunderstand human
nature completely and one of the most serious barriers to
his communication with any other person was his lack of
humor. Again and again in the initial passages about Alden
Pyle, Fowler employs the adjectives "quiet" and "serious."
Indeed he displays his earnestness very soon by asking
Fowler if he had read a writer named York Harding. When
Fowler admits not knowing Harding, he is informed that Hard
ing is the author of The Advance of Red China, "a very pro
found book."
Ill
This casual reference is the first inkling of the
way that Pyle will relate to his Asian "special duties." He
asked Fowler about Indochina; he liked to hear what the man
on the spot was thinking. But the real experience was less
important to him than the theory expressed about those expe
riences by York Harding. All real experience was measured
against York Harding's theory. As they continue to talk,
discussing the various forces in Indochina, Pyle mentions
that York (his dropping of the last name implies annoying
intimacy) "'wrote that what the East needed was a Third
Force'" (p. 23). Fowler now writes:
Perhaps I should have seen that ranatic gleam, the quick
response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth
Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us
all a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realized the
direction of that indefatiguable young brain. (p. 23)
All this adds up to the trouble caused by commitment— com
mitment not based upon real experience but upon knowledge
derived from books, based upon theory. And there is no lack
of evidence that literally everything Pyle thought and did
was based upon theory alone. After his death Fowler and
Vigot go into Pyle's apartment. The two rows of books that
composed his library tell much about the man. As Fowler
views "the complete works of York Harding," some Congres
sional reports, Vietnamese phrase books, a Modern Library
Shakespeare, he wonders: "'On what did he relax?'" (p. 28).
It seems that Pyle never did relax; his mission in life was
all too clearly prescribed for him. But there were some
112
lighter books including a poetry anthology and
Tucked away behind the anthology there was a paperbacked
book called The Physiology of Marriage. Perhaps he was
studying sex, as he had studied the East, on paper. And
the key word was marriage. Pyle believed in being
involved. (p. 28, italics mine)
Fowler's observations upon the relationship between Pyle's
attitudes toward sex and politics (both theoretical) is
probably true. Later on Fowler tells us Pyle confesses that
he is a virgin. Clearly his approach to human relationships
is not successful. For Pyle the symbolic treatment of sub
jects as touchy as sex or international relations was the
same as really having had experience in those endeavors.
Leaving the morgue after he identifies Pyle, Fowler
meets the obnoxious American Economic Attache who wants to
know if Fowler has any "hunch" about why Pyle was killed.
I said, "Yes. They killed him because he was too inno
cent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and
he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of
you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him
money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go
ahead. Win the East for democracy.1 He never saw any
thing he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers
and lecturers made a fool of him. When he saw a dead
body he couldn't even see the wounds. A red menace, a
soldier of democracy." (p. 32)
Here Fowler has said too much, and the effect of the speech
is simply to confuse poor Joe. But essentially the passage
presents Pyle as he has behaved since his arrival in Viet
nam. One notes the descriptive adjectives "too innocent,"
"young," "ignorant," and finally "silly." Pyle acted only
upon textbook theory; he could not see reality as it was
before him. Finally Fowler declares the voices of Pyle's
113
education "made a fool of" him. And the illustration which
Fowler immediately chooses to illustrate his foolishness is
Pyle's inability to see pain when it was in front of his
eyes. All Pyle could ever see was one less Red Menace
because he could not relate to the suffering and loss of a
dead individual.
One ghastly illustration of precisely that blindness
in Pyle follows the bombing in the Boulevard Bonnard. After
the blast Fowler, thinking that Phuong has probably been
hurt, tries desperately to get into the bombed area. He
meets Pyle who admits his part in the bombing when he says
he had warned Phuong not to go to the milk bar— as she
usually did— that day. Both Pyle and Fowler look upon the
devastated sqaure: a woman holds what was left of her baby;
a legless torso still twitches at the edge of a garden; all
is silence.
Pyle said, "It's awful." He looked at the wet on his
shoes and said in a sick voice, "What's that?"
"Blood," I said. "Haven't you ever seen it before?"
He said, "I must get a shine before I see the
Minister." (p. 214)
Obviously Pyle does not reply in this way out of cruelty.
He simply sees the reality of war for the first time, and he
is viewing it now becuase as Fowler tells us: "I forced
him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around ..."
(p. 215). Pyle explains it was all a mistake; there was to
have been a military parade. Fowler's rage and disgust are
increased by Pyle's weak defense— that he "didn't know."
114
"You've got the Third Force and national democracy
all over your right shoe." (p. 215)
But then Fowler nearly regrets his anger at Pyle:
What's the good? He'll always be innocent. You can't
blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you
can do is control or eliminate them. Innocence is a
kind of insanity. (p. 215-216)
At this point Pyle might have changed and realized his
errors, but instead he finds excuses for his Third Force
hero, General The. Pyle cannot learn: "He was impregnably
armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance" (p. 216).
The scene above is grimly humorous, but its chief
value lies in establishing Pyle's absolute inability to
learn or to change. Throughout all the violence of the
novel he remains invincibly ignorant. Pyle refuses to
relate to people instead of abstractions, and therefore he
is a foolish reformer. Greene seems to feel that in a given
situation the abstraction does not exist at all; only people
do. The realization that human beings are more important
than "isms" saves the Smiths and even Czinner from contempt.
Pyle is a supreme idealist, but because he roots his social
idealism entirely in theory he is also a damned fool.
Pyle remains obdurately convinced of his own recti
tude. Because Pyle refuses to see the truth about Indo
china, Fowler decides to take a direct hand in stopping him.
It is this very incident which proves to Fowler that Pyle is
not "involved" at all in humanity. And it causes Fowler to
become involved, to take sides.
115
Even after Fowler has conspired to "retrain" Pyle,
Pyle comes to Fowler's apartment once more. He says he has
"dealt severely" with General The
He spoke like the captain of a school team who has found
one of his boys breaking training. All the same I asked
him with a certain hope, "Have you thrown him over?"
"I told him that if he made another uncontrolled
demonstration we would have nothing more to do with
him." (p. 232)
The simile of the school team underlines Fowler's observa
tion that Pyle sees the whole Vietnamese affair as an inter
national game with only the consequences of a game. Pyle's
willingness to give one more chance to the general in whom
he wishes to believe shows what a dangerous egotist he is.
Pyle knows best. Pyle will decide which direction Indochina
must take no matter how those decisions hurt individuals.
In the service of the Word according to York Harding, Pyle
is willing to risk himself and gamble "any minor lives as
well."
Pyle emerges through Fowler's narrative as a young
man almost totally innocent and completely inept. He was
unable to see the differences between the theory of Harding
and the reality of the Vietnamese situation. He is in
effect the dupe of General The but because of his fatuous
idealism he is unable to see that he is being used. In all
his political thinking Pyle is involved in abstractions not
with human beings. Greene is especially concerned that the
reader understand this human failing of Alden Pyle, and so
he has him fall in love with Phuong who has been Fowler's
116
mistress for several years. Pyle's handling of love is
incredible from Fowler's viewpoint, and indeed the scenes
in which Pyle relates to sex and love are pathetic and often
funny.
Alden Pyle's love for Phuong is a strange one. The
reader sees that he loves her out of the same sense of com
mitment to abstraction that governs his political views,
that is, he must marry Phuong and assimilate her into his
culture. Sexuality is plainly not central in the affair.
Pyle is embarrassed or disgusted by sex; only the commitment
of marriage has importance for him.
Without a doubt Pyle is attracted to Phuong because
of her grade and beauty. At the same time it is hard to
believe that such a passive girl as she appears to be (to
Fowler, at least), could have the overwhelming effect Pyle
claims. Phuong's ambitious sister has shrewdly discerned
Pyle's weak point; she has made Phuong seem to need a pro
tector. Pyle sees himself as Lochinvar; Miss Hei (the sis
ter) senses this, and thus the love affair springs into
life. He tells Fowler later that he was moved by his desire
to protect Phuong. But Pyle's first concern as his "love
grows is that he be fair to his rival, Fowler." To be com
pletely honorable, Pyle braves the dangers of a river trip
to the North where Fowler is on assignment. He enters
Fowler's tent at about three in the morning
"I had to tell you I've fallen in love with Phuong."
117
I laughed. I couldn't help it. He was so unex
pected and so serious. (p. 68)
Even Phuong does not yet know; to court her before letting
Fowler know would not be "honorable." After Pyle has told
Fowler he feels much relieved, he has no doubt that he will
"win" the contest for Phuong's love. And now that he has
declared himself, it is all right. For Pyle the affairs of
the human heart are just that simple— a game. Pyle carries
through the game metaphor later on back in Saigon:
"I think I ought to put all my cards on the table. I'm
not rich. But when my father dies I'll have about fifty
thousand dollars. I'm in good health— I got a medical
certificate only two months old, and I can let her know
my blood group." (p. 96)
This series of qualifications receives an appropriate reply
from Fowler: "'Is that how you make love in America— fig
ures of income and a blood test?"' (p. 96).
The truth is that Pyle is, as he says, a "'little
lost in this situation.'" For all he knows these data are
important in a marriage proposal. At the end of the even
ing, Pyle can do nothing more original than offer a toast to
the victory of "the best man."
Perhaps one of the best comic scenes in Graham
Greene's writing is the three-way declaration of Pyle's love
for Phuong, a confrontation which occurs as soon as Fowler
returns to Saigon. Pyle, of course, speaks French so badly
that he cannot be understood, and so Fowler volunteers to
interpret. To Pyle it is not ludicrous to use one's rival
for a go-between in this helpless fashion; instead it seems
118
a fine, open, honest thing to do. Clearly this act shows
only that he is a trusting fool. When Fowler asks if they
would rather be alone, Pyle answers
"I want you to hear everything I have to say. It
wouldn't be fair otherwise, ..."
He said solemnly, as though this part he had learned by
heart, that he had a great love and respect for Phuong
. . . I was reminded of a little butler showing a party
of tourists over a "great house." The great house was
his heart, and of the private apartments where the fam
ily lived we were given only a rapid and surreptitious
glimpse. I translated for him with meticulous care— it
sounded worse that way— and Phuong sat quiet, with her
hands in her lap, as though she were listening to a
movie. (p. 94)
Even as he translates, Fowler is not really playing "fair,"
because the game is to him less important than keeping
Phuong. Because he knows that Pyle sounds like a fool, in
translation, Fowler obeys Pyle's specific request that he
just translate. When Fowler asks if he should "add a little
fire to it," Pyle says with his usual seriousness, "'Oh, no
. . . just translate. I don't want to sway her emotion
ally,'" (p. 95). This remark is funny because as she is
presented to us Phuong is almost incapable of emotion.11
Also we are told in the passage above that Phuong sits
quietly through his performance as if she were watching a
film— perhaps Abbott and Costello? It is also comic because
the statement assumes that Pyle is capable of stirring Phu
ong's emotions if Fowler were to speak with greater empha
sis. We are told in Fowler's view above that the speech is
like only a tiny glimpse of the human heart. "'Tell her I
119
want to marry her,'" says Pyle.
I told her
"What was that she said?"
"She asked me if you were serious?"
"I told her you were the serious type." (p. 95)
The word "serious" is used here in two different senses, of
course. When Phuong uses it, she wants to know if the pro
posal is real. When Fowler calls Pyle "the serious type,"
he implies that Pyle is incapable of humor. He is, as we
recall, determined in all his commitments. When Fowler asks
if he should tell Phuong that Pyle cannot live without her,
Pyle replies: "No that's too emotional. It's not quite
true either" (p. 95). Why must this declaration of love be
unemotional for the American? Fowler, in a way, does need
Phuong to keep his life balanced. Plainly the "love" which
Pyle feels is not the "ordinary corrupt human love" that
Graham Greene's fully human characters are blessed with.
Greene's attitude toward Pyle is a complicated one.
Arnold Hinchliffe12 is essentially correct in asserting that
to Greene (through Fowler) Alden Pyle xs_ innocent and good.
The problem is that the natures of innocence and goodness
in the mid-twentieth century pervert those "virtues" into
vices and make them luxuries which no truly human being can
afford. This is made clear throughout the novel.
At the beginning of the book when Inspector Vigot
reveals Pyle's murder, he reveals that Pyle "was doing a
lot of harm." Fowler, in tacit agreement, replies, "God
save us . . . from the innocent and the good." We recall an
120
exchange between Fowler and the American Economic Attache in
which Fowler called Pyle "too innocent to live." And near
the end of the book when Fowler confronts the Young American
with his knowledge of Pyle's involvement in Vietnamese
affairs, Fowler tells him
"I hope to God you know what you are doing there. Oh, I
know your motives are good; they always are." He [Pyle]
looked puzzled and suspicious. "I wish sometimes you
had a few bad motives; you might understand a little
more about human beings." (p. 173)
Here Fowler indicates clearly that human nature is
not pure and that in order to understand other humans it is
necessary to be flawed, to have some bad motives oneself.
There is a suggestion that Pyle's goodness is nearly super
human and that he is paradoxically limited b£ that superior
ity. Pyle is not cynical; he believes in the word of York
Harding. He is devoted to his cause. We recall that his
love is devoid of sexuality. He seems to be a sort of mod
ern Christ.
Curing the drive back from the Caodaist festival in
Tanyin, when Fowler and Pyle are under Vietminh fire, Pyle
saves the older man's life. Fowler is shot in the leg and
Pyle literally carries him to safety— almost against Fowl
er's will. Later, back in Saigon, Fowler records a meeting
between the two and at that time Fowler calls Pyle "my
savior." Nor is it only Fowler's body which Pyle saves.
Ironically by forcing Fowler to make some commitment—
although it is to stop Alden Pyle from further bombing like
121
the terrible incident in Boulevard Bonnard— he changes the
older man from a completely detached being to one who real
izes his involvement with mankind. And it is Fowler who
experiences that true involvement on a personal level which
signals the rejuvenation of his soul. This is clear at the
very end of the book when Fowler pities the drunk American,
Granger, and hopes sincerely that Granger's polio-stricken
son will recover. In feeling pity for a man he has de
spised, Fowler comes to see that he himself may, like Pyle,
need to have his feet thrust into pain in order to see it
clearly. This insight, however, shows his spiritual growth.
On one level, then, Pyle is a contemporary Christ
figure for whom the modern world is simply too corrupt.
Since the world cannot tolerate him, it demands that he be
sacrificed instead. But in Graham Greene's view Pyle must
be seen in an entirely different light. Sternlicht main
tains that Pyle is "a man positively if naively committed to
life."12 But unless the word is abstracted and spelled with
capital L, that is, in the light of careful reading, simply
not the case. Pyle was committed to do good, to improve a
country, the world, or even civilization. He is an ironic
Christ really because his eye was clearly not on the spar
row. He fails entirely to realize as did the whiskey priest
of The Power and the Glory that
Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to
invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was
for this world that Christ had died . . . it was too
easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or
122
children or a civilization— it needed a God to die for
the half-hearted and the corrupt."11*
Pyle had lived and would have died for "what was good or
beautiful." "The half-hearted and the corrupt" would have to
be changed. And Pyle would have been innocent enough to
think that he could change them.
Dr. Czinner's image as the martyr is undercut by
melodrama and Coral Musker's final thoughts about him. Pyle
fails, specifically because he is really egocentric enough to
think that he knows how to reform the world and because he
cannot relate successfully to other people to be able to do
it.
One "heroic" minor figure whom Greene sets up as a
contrast to Alden Pyle is Dominguez, a journalist who works
under Fowler and who appears only twice in the novel.
Although Fowler thinks he is a Catholic, Dominguez was born
in India, and from that culture he seems to have derived
many qualities of the Hindu. Fowler never says openly that
Pyle suffers from the sin of pride, but circumstances show
that Pyle's pride in his own reason makes him blind to human
suffering. Of Dominguez, however, Fowler says
. . . his pride was deeply hidden and reduced to the
smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human
being. All that you encountered in daily contact with
him was gentleness and humility and an absolute love of
truth; you would have had to be married to him to dis
cover the pride. Perhaps truth and humility go togeth
er— so many lies come from our pride— in my profession a
reporter's pride, the desire to file a better story than
the other man's, and it was Dominguez who helped me not
to care— to withstand all those telegrams from home ask
ing why I had not covered so and so's story or the
123
report of someone else which I knew to be untrue.
(p. 158)
Pyle's pride has led him to lie to himself. He is clearly
taken in by General The, and worst of all Pyle is willing to
kill if the ideal he supports will be furthered by that
means. In direct contrast Fowler focuses upon Dominguez's
unwillingness to harm a fly or mosquito. In an interview
with Dominguez just before Pyle's murder Fowler tells us:
I hit out at a mosquito which came droning at my ear and
saw Dominguez wince instinctively at my blow. "It's all
right, Dominguez, I missed it." He grinned miserably.
He could not justify his reluctance to take life; after
all, he was a Christian— one of those who had learned
from Nero how to make human bodies into candles.
(p. 231)
This passage suggests the real savior of the East will be an
Easterner like Dominguez whose Spanish name suggests the
Latin cognate Dominus or "Master," the word used to refer to
Christ. The comment about the cruelty of Christians seems
to suggest contrast between the innocent and inept goodwill
of Alden Pyle, and the absolute tranquility and honesty of
Dominguez. We must note that it is Dominguez who has helped
Fowler to care more about truth than about filing a great
newspaper story. Pyle, for all his innocence, was after
all, a secret agent and thus even a liar (we never really
learn the nature of his "special duties"). One last point—
Dominguez is certainly not a clown. Fowler (and, I think,
Greene) suggests that his respect for all life is based upon
some nearly mystic understanding of the whole life
process.15
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Footnotes
*The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXII
(Spring, 1963), 328.
20ur Man in Havana (1958), New York. (All quota
tions from Our Man in Havana will be followed in parentheses
by page numbers from this edition.)
3,lThe Sad Comedies: Graham Greene's Later Novels,"
Florida Quarterly, 1:4, p. 65.
1 1 Comedy. Capricorn Books Edition (1966), p. 64.
5It is interesting in regard to Smith's identity as
a saint that Brown uses the word to describe him in mental
response to Jones's declaration that he (Jones) felt that he
had much in common with Smith. "What could a saint possibly
have in common with a rogue?" (italics mine). Clearly the
rogue here is Jones.
6Stamboul Train. (All quotations are followed by
page numbers from the Bantam edition under the American
title Orient Express, 1970.)
7The selfish Mr. Surrogate is treated fully in
Chapter IV, "Comedians."
8"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels
. . . and though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand
all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all
faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not chari
ty, I am nothing" (I Corinthians 13:1,2).
In the Greek the word which is translated "chari
ty" was agape which means really something like "attitude of
loving." According to Dummelow's Bible Commentary:
The Greek word "charity" does not exist in classical
Greek. It is first found in the Septuagint. (Second or
third century A.D.] The corresponding verb means to
desire the good of one whom you esteem: and the noun is
appropriately applied to the spirit which seeks not its
own but others' good, and sacrifices itself for others.
From this analysis we may conclude that the Pauline term
contained notions of good will, brotherly love, and sacri
fice. This broader concept of charity really did not exist
until it was exemplified by Christ himself. Paul puts this
attitude as the first among those which a true Christian
must manifest.
1-25
9"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King
said, for about the twentieth time that day.
"No, no!" said the Queen. "Sentence first— ver
dict afterwards." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, XII.
10Graham Greene. London (1963), pp. 19-20.
11Fowler speaks frequently of Phuong's passive
nature. He tried to "understand" her for many months but
she remains unmoved even during sexual intercourse: "Even
my desire had been a weapon, as though when one plunged one'
one's sword towards the victim's womb she would lose control
and speak" (p. 175).
12"The Sad Comedies: Graham Greene's Later Novels,"
Florida Quarterly, 1:4, p. 69.
13The Power and the Glory. Viking Compass (1962),
p. 131.
1‘ *In keeping with his ability to accept life as it
is, it is interesting that Fowler describes Dominguez in the
attitude of Buddha.
Sometimes one of his Indian friends was there, sitting
beside the narrow iron bed in the lodgings Dominguez
shared in one of the meaner streets off the Boulevard
Gallieni. He would sit up straight in his bed with his
feet tucked under him, so that you had less the impres
sion of visiting a sick man than of being received by a
rajah or a priest. Sometimes when his fever was bad his
face ran with sweat, but he never lost the clarity of
his thought. It was as though his illness were happen
ing to another person's body. His landlady kept a jug
of fresh lime by his side, but I never saw him take a
drink— perhaps that would have been to admit that it was
his own thirst, and his own body that suffered. (p. 159
italics mine)
CHAPTER III
INCOMPETENT CLOWNS
Greene's clowns are characterized by the qualities
of ineptitude and innocence. The last chapter focused upon
figures in whom the latter quality was dominant. Innocence
to Greene is almost the inability to learn from experience.
It is like simple ignorance in many ways and therefore it
can be a dangerous quality. In most clown characters/ while
there is a sort of innocence, the focus is upon ineptitude
or incompetence. When the pathetically sad-faced, usually
mute, little figure walks across a stage, he slips on the
inevitable banana peel. Struggling awkwardly to his feet,
he brushes himself off, reassumes whatever dignity he can
muster, turns, and in his walk back along the same route
across the limelight, slips and falls again. The outward
sign of the clown therefore is incompetence; he will always
make any task as difficult as it can be. If he has to do
anything twice, it will be done at least as badly the second
time as it was the first. The clown's behavior is predict
able therefore. He never changes, never grows. He only
goes on as life itself does. If we often find his limita
tions pathetic, we are gratified and amused that despite
every expectation to the contrary, he survives. Many of
126
Greene's sympathetic characters are obviously physically or
intellectually unqualified for the tasks they try to per
form. Despite their ineptitude they stumble ahead/ and set
backs along the way seem to teach them nothing. For example
the Smiths in The Comedians have suffered defeats, they are
often derided (even by the author), but they do have a cause
or a mission— vegetarianism— and they never consider chang
ing their views on it. The Smiths are often disappointed
but never shaken, and at the end of the novel they are
searching for a new place to win their victory. To look
ahead, Holly Martins of The Third Man is broke, bereaved by
the loss of his best friend, alone in a foreign city which .
he is ordered to leave— but driven by his completely absurd
faith in Harry Lime, a man whom he has trusted wrongfully,
he stays on until his zeal betrays this very man. Holly
finally "solves" the "mystery" of Lime's criminal life in
Vienna, but his clumsiness ultimately causes Lime's death
and inflicts suffering upon Anna Schmidt.
Another essential aspect of the situation of
Greene's clown is that he needs a spectator to view his
absurdity and his clumsiness. We recall that in Jim Worm-
old' s description of the type, the clown "goes on stepping
in the bucket of white wash every night." It is clear that
there is a real audience in front of which this nightly act
is performed. In the same way Greene's "clowns" are watched
(by us, of course, but also by the author and at times by
128
other characters). The clown is presented externally, and
he is ultimately judged on the basis of outward behavior
rather than upon inner speculation. He is distinguished by
what he says and does and the way he functions rather than
by what he thinks or feels. So that the clown is likely to
be involved in physical humor or "slapstick" comedy. Often
the descriptions of the characters, usually from the point
of view of a critical character or omniscient narrator, are
ludicrous. There are times when Greene allows the reader to
"hear" what a clown figure is thinking, but next he presents
a dramatic (objective) scene which points up the absurdity
of the appearance or thoughts of the character. In the
cases which follow, the clowns are for the most part not
aware of the inadequacies which are apparent to the reader
or other characters.
Both this chapter and the last show that Graham
Greene views many kinds of characters— idealists, reformers,
detectives, spies, and even criminals— as clowns. Why, one
may ask, does a serious author approach his creations in
this way? Part of the reason is to be found in that epi
graph by Santayana which precedes Greene's first entertain
ment, Stamboul Train.
"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence;
tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."1
The stuff of which the literary artist must forge character
is the common clay of everyday existence. People usually do
not participate in things grand enough to be called tragic;
129
rather most of them awkwardly survive in the continuing flux
of life which Susan Langer has called the comic rhythm.2
Moreover the everyday world is composed of characters who
have developed mental quirks and physical habits which
appear peculiar, even laughable to the outside observer.
Greene has stated that one of his primary objectives as an
artist is to preserve the individuality of human beings when
he writes about them, and close attention to comic detail is
for him a good way to achieve that end. People in reality
are basically funny, and so he shows them in his work as
they are: sometimes ridiculous, often absurd, frequently
pathetic, but always completely human.
Greene expands upon this attitude in the two let
ters which he contributed to the slender volume Why Do I
Write? Greene stresses the modern writer's involvement in
everyday life, regardless of his artistic position. Fur
thermore he sees only two real duties of any literary
artist— "to tell the truth as he sees it and to accept no
special privileges from the state."3
"One of the major objects of [the writer's] craft is the
awakening of sympathy." Now the State is invariably
ready to confuse like a schoolmaster, justice with
retribution, and isn't it possibly the story teller's
task to act as the devil's advocate, to elicit sympathy
and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside
the boundaries of State sympathy?1 1
Greene continues his discussion of sympathy and discusses
the writer's virtue of "disloyalty," a term which for him
means open-mindedness:
130
loyalty forbids us to comprehend sympathetically our
dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages us to roam
experimentally through any human mind: it gives to the
novelist the extra dimension of sympathy.
The very act of recreation for a novelist entails sympa
thy: the characters for whom he fails in sympathy have
never truly been recreated" I I the novelist1s task is
to draw his own likeness to any human being, the guilty
as much as the innocent. Isn't our attitude to all our
characters more or less— There, and may God forgive me,
goes myself?5 (Italics mine)
And Greene does not stop with this discussion of villains
alone.
If we can awaken sympathetic comprehension in our
readers, not only for our most evil characters (that is
easy: there is a cord there fastened to all hearts that
we can twitch at will) but of our smug complacent, suc
cessful characters, we have succeeded in making the work
of the State more difficult— and that is the genuine
duty we owe society to be a piece of grit in the State
machinery.6
We must note how often in the passage Greene uses the word
"sympathy," for if characters are not portrayed with sympa
thy and humanity, they will not be rendered truthfully.
Greene has said that the "truth" in creating the individual
in literature is one of its prime requisites: "For the
writer, just as much as the Christian Church, is the
defender of the individual."7
Arthur Rowe, the alienated "hero" of The Ministry of
Fear, outlines this attitude toward individual humans in a
scene that will be further examined later. After listening
to the absurdities of Mr. Rennit, the private detective whom
he employs to protect his life, Rowe thinks—
You couldn't take such an odd world seriously, though
all the time he did in fact take it with a mortal
131
seriousness. The grand names stood permanently like
statues in his mind: names like Justice and Retribu
tion, though what they both boiled down to was simply
Mr. Rennit, hundreds and hundreds of Mr. Rennits. But
of course if you believed in God— and the Devil— the
thing wasn't quite so comic. Because the Devil— and God
too— had always used comic people, futile people, little
suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve His
purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of
Nobility, and when the Devil used them Wickedness; but
the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in
either case.8
This passage suggests that all abstractions are meaningless
and reducible to a common denominator— "comic people, futile
people . . . the maimed and warped." All the great notions
upon which our civilization seems to depend, shrink to
"hundreds and hundreds of Rennits" (a name which suggests
something oddly rodent-like), each scurrying about convinced
of the importance of his daily tasks. But the sensitive
character (as well as the good writer) values even a silly
individual above an abstraction.
For Greene the individual is all important. As
Francis Kunkel points out the arch-villains Willi Hilfe and
Harry Lime put no value on human life, and thus they are
damned.9 But it is also true that when one loves abstrac
tions and places them above individuals as Alden Pyle does,
then that character is also, notwithstanding his good inten
tions, held to be reprehensible. In the discussion of crim
inals and detectives that follows in this chapter, one might
do well to bear in mind this passage from the brief Intro
duction to The Spy's Bedside Book which Greene compiled with
his brother Hugh in 1957. Here he talks about the very few
132
real spies he has known.
Of one spy, however, I have reason to be certain: he
had hardly the qualification . . . for he was illiter
ate, he couldn't count above ten, and the only point of
the compass he knew was the East, because he was a
Mohammedan. I was reminded of him in recent years by
the report of a divorce case in which the judge
expressed severe criticisms of a private detective. The
detective too was illiterate, he rode to his work on a
bicycle and dictated his reports to his landlady who was
stone deaf. Life is strange.10
But Rennit, the private detective of The Ministry of Fear
would not have agreed with Greene's three-word conclusion.
For to Rennit (and many other characters in these novels)
life seems dull and predictable. Life, for Greene on the
other hand, provides more incongruity and comedy than a
writer's imagination. The spy and the detective above for
example are more fantastically inept than any Graham Greene
himself has created.
Inept Detectives
Part of Chapter I treated Ida Arnold, one of
Greene's superbly baleful comic creations. Her role in
Brighton Rock is that of the bumbling amateur detective, and
she becomes the obvious forerunner of other detectives, both
private and amateur, discussed in this section. The detec
tives whom Greene shows as incompetent clowns are clearly
distinguished from professional policemen. While the writer
is willing to admit that the "unofficial" investigation
(including that of the licensed private detective) has cer
tain advantages over the professional policeman, he never
133
satirizes them like Conan Doyle's Inspector LeStrade. The
policemen in The Ministry of Fear, Vigot in The Quite Ameri
can, even those in Travels with My Aunt are presented as
efficient, sympathetic, and unusually intelligent people.
In fact, it is Captain Calloway in The Third Man, himself a
methodical professional, who lists the dubious advantages of
an amateur detective like Holly Martins.
Why does Greene use comedy in his treatment of
detectives? His handling of Ida Arnold suggests the reasons
are the same ones which cause him to caricature Rennit and
Savage. That is, generally private detection— professional
or amateur— is the business of betrayal, a secretive occupa
tion which injures human relationships and damages lives.
Most of the money earned by private detectives comes from
prying into the intimate lives of human beings. Detectives
are the agents of deception, the feeders of suspicion; their
services are never needed until human communication (usually
between people who are supposed to love each other) has
broken down. As Bendrix put it in The End of the Affair
It isn't, when you come to think of it a quite respect
able trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren't
lovers nearly always innocent?11
Rennit
Mr. Rennit (The Ministry of Fear) mistakenly assumes
that it is for just such spying upon lovers that Arthur Rowe
has come to seek his services. Indeed much of Greene's
comic portrait in Rowe's initial interview with Rennit grows
134
from the detective's tendency to jump to conclusions and
A
from his continual misunderstanding of the nature of the
case he is being asked to accept.
Greene characterizes Rennit even before Rowe meets
him, by focusing upon messy physical details of his office.
"A half eaten sausage role lay beside an open phone direct
ory," and the whole place has an air of "sudden abandon
ment." Suddenly the balding, unkempt Rennit rushes in.
Irritated to be caught off guard by a potential client, he
quickly replaces a bottle of liquor in his file cabinet.
When Rowe mentions the man who recommended him as a detec
tive, Rennit cannot remember the name. To cover his incom
petent memory, the obviously unemployed investigator angrily
interrupts Rowe: "You should have made an appointment"
(p. 20) .
Disgusted by Rennit's belligerence, Rowe rises to
leave, and the detective changes his tone. He now stresses
how busy he is, and thus the consultation must be brief.
Clearly Rennit is a complete fake. He had obviously been
enjoying a nip when Rowe entered his unkempt and unprosper-
ous-looking office. He is the least likely looking man for
the job Rowe has in mind— to find out why someone should try
to do him any injury.
He looked abandoned like the other room; his collar was
a little frayed and his shirt was not quite clean.
Like a man who deals in something disreputable— porno
graphic books or illegal operations— he treated his
135
customer with a kind of superior contempt, as if it were
not he wanted to sell but only the other who wanted to
buy. (p. 20)
Much of the comedy of this interview derives from the frus
tration of the reader's expectations about the way such a
scene ought to go in detective literature. In every way
Rennit is the laughable antithesis of the tough private eye.
Finding that he is wrong in assuming Rowe or a wife guilty
of some sexual misconduct, Rennit again protests how busy he
is.
. . . but never had anyone been so palpably unemployed.
There were two trays on his desk marked In and Out, but
the Out tray was empty and all the In tray held was a
copy of Men Only. (p. 21)
By concentrating upon the setting and suggesting the connec
tion between it and Rennit1s real financial condition,
Greene makes it clear that the man resents most that he has
not been allowed time to set the stage, to pretend to be a
successful investigator. Rennit is therefore guilty of
obvious affectation and he has been caught at it. For Ren
nit has no "work" to do; the pulp magazine in his In tray is
one whose lurid photos and stories represent the kind of
"peeping Tom" attitude which Rennit has toward the people he
investigates. Now he offers Rowe a chair and "fumbled in a
drawer and hastily tucked back again what he found there; at
last he discovered a pad and pencil." Rennit does not seem
familiar even with his own supplies because of lack of busi
ness, and all his fumbling and stammering makes him the more
laughable.
136
Moved, mainly by the pathos of the man, Rowe finally
breaks through Rennit's veneer, finding him a sadly comic
figure. When Rowe talks about the blitz and how the air
raids get on one's nerves, Rennit— whose horizons are lim
ited to investigations, usually of adultery— replies
"War plays hell with the business like this . . . the
reconciliations— you wouldn't believe human nature could
be so contrary." (p. 21)
This sentence is nearly worthy of Oscar Wilde. In the case
of a Wilde it would be consciously witty because it presents
an unexpected and incongruous violation of a social norm.
That norm demands that everyone should favor reconciliation
as being in keeping with human nature are really only senti
mental. That Rennit speaks the line out of business-like
sincerity without any conscious attempt at wit makes it
even funnier. And he continues the thought, looking forward
to peace: "Then there'll be such a crop of divorces,
breaches of promise ..." (p. 22). The unintended humor is
not wasted on Rowe, however:
Listening, Rowe thought, as he often did, you couldn't
take such an odd world seriously . . . The grand names
stood permanently . . . in his mind . . . though what
they boiled down to was simply Mr. Rennit, hundreds and
hundreds of Mr. Rennits. (p. 22)
With the ice broken, Rennit feels close enough to Rowe to
fetch the liquor from the file and offer him a drink. He
pours Rowe's drink into a convenient tea cup and settles
back to hear Rowe's incredible tale.
Rennit's reaction to Rowe's story is utterly obtuse.
137
He refuses to believe what Rowe claims is happening to him.
Indeed he makes up his mind that Rowe is mad without
actually weighing the evidence. Like Ida Arnold before him,
he is very much at home in the world, a plodding realist,
and he has never come across a murderer in his career.
"Life isn't like a detective story. Murderers are
rare people to meet. They belong to a class of their
own."
"That's interesting to me."
"They are very, very seldom," Mr. Rennit said, "what
we call gentlemen. Outside of story books. You might
say that they belong to the lower orders."
"Perhaps," Rowe said, "I ought to tell you that I am
a murderer myself."
"Ha, ha," said Mr. Rennit miserably.
"That's what makes me so furious," Rowe said. "That
they should pick on me— me. They are such amateurs."
"You are— a professional?" Mr. Rennit asked with a
watery and unhappy smile.
Rowe said, "Yes, I am . . ." (p. 24)
Rennit cannot believe Rowe even after he confesses that he
is himself a "murderer." (Rowe is a convicted mercy
killer.) Rennit now is frightened; he thinks Rowe is
insane; and he pretends to make a phone call to a theatre
for tickets for his wife. Rennit obviously is no judge of
character at all. Greene continually breaks the tension of
this first scene in which the reader learns of Rowe's
"guilty" past, by having Rennit behave in ways that distract
the reader's attention from the seriousness of Rowe's con
fession. The whole affair is plainly more than Rennit wants
to take on, but when Rowe offers more money, he accepts the
job.
What is most amusing in the scene above is that Rowe
138
himself is obviously a far more perceptive man than Rennit.
He can see that Rennit is using a lame excuse to make a call
to the police or a doctor. It is comic too that Rowe is so
much more courageous than the private investigator he
employs. This is clear a bit later in the novel when Rowe
telephones Rennit for help. Rowe explains his latest pre
dicament (he thinks he is suspected of murdering a man at a
seance), and Rennit is quite shaken.
There was another wail up the line. The small shifty
man was being carried out of his depths: all through
his life he has swum safely about among his prickly lit
tle adulteries, his uncompromising letters, but the tide
was washing him out to where the bigger fishes hunted.
He moaned, "I never wanted to take up your case ..."
(p. 53)
Again we have the humor of the'unexpected. Conventional
literary detectives do not wail and whine like Rennit, but
then he is a limited, entirely disreputable man as the
author conceives of him. Greene will show as the novel pro
gresses that Arthur Rowe, despite loss of memory and the
torture of his past guilt, is a far better detective than
either Rennit or his legman, Jones.
Why does Greene show Rennit in so critical a light?
First Greene makes Rennit rather dull because he wants to
use the detective as a sounding board who will show the
reader precisely how fantastic Rowe's story would seem even
to a professional investigator. Thus Greene will be able to
suggest how alienated Rowe feels throughout The Ministry of
Fear. But it is clear also that Greene has contempt for
139
Rennit's "profession" because it makes money from the
betrayal of human beings. Rennit is contemptible but also
pathetic in Rowe's (and Greene's) eyes because he views
human relationships and human communication not as precious,
delicate things but rather as potential sources of income.
Savage and Parkis
In The End of the Affair (1951) there are two detec
tives— the head of the inquiry agency, Mr. Savage, and his
underling, Parkis, who does the legwork. In The Ministry of
Fear, Greene drew a caricature of one detective— Rennit and
gave us almost no information about the ill-fated Jones. In
the later novel Greene (through his narrator) again creates
a caricature when he recounts the single interview which
Bendrix had with Mr. Savage, but in his longer, more sympa
thetic treatment of Parkis, Bendrix-Greene has etched a fine
comic character.
In drawing both Rennit and Savage, Greene carefully
creates characteristic settings. How strangely different is
Savage's office from Rennit's earlier den. This time the
office has two waiting rooms to insure complete confidence
and privacy. The one Bendrix waits in combines the musti
ness of a solicitor's office with the modish reading matter
of a dentist's. During the "consultation" Savage's manner
is cast by Bendrix-Greene entirely in the metaphor of a
doctor's manner.
He pulled me a chair to the fire and closed the door
140
with great care. I felt like a patient, and I suppose I
was a patient sick enough to try the famous shock treat
ment for jealousy. (p. 20)
Savage is a smooth businessman— old school tie, special
handshake of some organization which Bendrix does not know.
To all of Savage's smooth, sympathetic, almost soothingly
omniscient behavior, Bendrix reacts clearly with disgust.
For while Savage saw his profession in much the same light
as legal medicine, Bendrix seems to feel more as though he
is making a deal for an abortion. "I felt embarrassed and
bitter," he writes. When Bendrix asks about fees:
Mr. Savage gently stroked his striped tie. He said,
"don't worry about that now, Mr. Bendrix. I charge
three guineas for this preliminary consultation, but if
you don't wish to proceed any further I make no charge
at all, none at all. The best advertisement, you know"
— he slid the cliche in like a thermometer— "is a satis
fied client." (p. 21, italics mine)
The metaphor here is amusing not only because it reinforces
the medical imagery which laces the whole interview (cf.
Savage's use of "consultation") but also because the trite
phrase is turned by Savage so neatly that it seems appro
priately scatological to put it where it belongs— in a
rectum. Over and over again in the passage jealousy is
called (by Bendrix) a "disease," the job of detection termed
"treatment." The comedy arises from the incongruity of the
sordid nature of the whole business and the terms in which
it is couched. In the end Bendrix writes
I suppose I was lucky to have Mr. Savage to deal with.
He had been recommended as being less disagreeable than
men of his profession usually are, but nevertheless I
found his assurance detestable. (pp. 24-25)
141
Bendrix is repulsed by the whole business, and when Savage
i
suggests that his man, Parkis, come to Bendrix's house, Ben
drix agrees but "immediately felt as though I were admitting
some infection to my own room" (p. 24, italics mine). As
disgusting as Mr. Savage and the whole dishonorable trade
are to Bendrix, however, the detective who watches Sarah and
comes to Bendrix's home is not at all like an infection.
Indeed Parkis is a fully drawn, moving, human character
capable of loving and being loved.
Parkis is an amiable man who tries to do his job
well and even takes pride in it. He even seems intent on
bringing his young son into the field of private investiga
tion after him. Parkis is a likable character, and he is
certainly a plausible human being. He takes his work seri
ously, and even though he may like the person he is watch
ing, he is intensely loyal to his employer. But at the same
time Parkis is surely a clown. He is shown to be clearly
not at all suited for his job. Certainly ordinariness,
ne.arly invisibility is necessary in a private detective (as
it is in a secret agent or a criminal), yet the first time
that Parkis comes on the scene, even before the reader is
introduced to him, he is shown to be a highly visible atten
tion getter. It is a luncheon at which Sarah and Maurice
have a reunion after a year and a half:
Perhaps we were looking strained in our manner,
because I noticed we had attracted the attention of a
little man who sat on a sofa not far off. I tried to
outstare him, and that was easy. He had a long mous-
142
tache and fawnlike eyes, and he looked hurriedly away;
his elbow caught his glass of beer and spun it onto the
floor, so that he was overcome with confusion. I was
sorry then, because it occurred to me that he might have
recognized me from my photographs; he might even be one
of my few readers. He had a small boy sitting with him,
and what a cruel thing it is to humiliate a father in
the presence of his son. The boy blushed scarlet when
the waiter hurried forward, and his father began to
apologize with unnecessary vehemence. (p. 34)
Could anyone handle the situation more clumsily? Parkis's
staring, fawn-like eyes and long moustache make him extraor
dinary, the company of the small boy makes him more obvious,
and when Maurice tries to outstare him, he upsets a glass of
beer and draws more attention to his own confusion and in
competence. The very fact that Maurice noticed Parkis at
all shows him to be a very unskilled detective indeed.
Later in the book the reader learns that Sarah
noticed Parkis when he followed her after this same lunch
into church (p. 140). Even Richard Smythe, the strawberry-
marked rationalist, recognizes Parkis's boy when he accom
panies Bendrix to the Smythe apartment on a ruse to discover
what relationship exists between Sarah and Smythe (p. 97).
Parkis ought to blend into the surroundings in order to
function well, but instead stands out glaringly.
Parkis's failure to blend into his surroundings is
hardly his only fault. For while he is entirely visible
(and memorable) to the people he is paid to watch, he does
not scrutinize them closely enough to recognize one of them
when he talks to him face-to-face. When Parkis comes to
Bendrix to make his first report on Sarah, Maurice recog-
143
nizes the detective almost at once by his "gentle apologetic
eyes" and "that long out-dated moustache-damp with the
climate." The interview becomes quite funny from Bendrix's
point of view (which the reader shares since we see Parkis
through Bendrix's narrative) because Parkis fails entirely
to recognize him although he was part of the very scene
Parkis is describing. The detective delivers his report
with a humble-formal tone that only adds to its humorous
effect. Parkis is quite pained when Bendrix suddenly
reveals himself in a manner like a practical joke. His
hangdog attitude: "I've made a fool of myself . . . and
I've got to face it" (p. 46), only makes him more comic and
pathetic. The sorry detective is most concerned that the
silly error will cause him to lose some of his son's
respect.
"It's my boy. He started with great ideas about me
. . . You know the kind of reading they do, sir. Nick
Carter and the like." (p. 46)
We recall that Greene uses setting and action to show how
different Rennit is from the conventional, literary detec
tive. Here again the writer underscores the contrast
between Parkis and the usual literary detective. In this
case that contrast arises because Parkis's boy reads myster
ies which give him glamorous notions about what an investi
gator does. The relationship of Parkis and his son touches
Bendrix who regrets his handling of the joke on Parkis. The
delicacy, honesty, mutual regard of the inept father-and-son
144
detective team is comic and pathetic.
Greene uses the love Parkis has for his son to char
acterize him throughout the novel. The boy is always with
Parkis. At their second meeting in an A. B. C., Parkis
informs Bendrix that Sarah frequently visits Richard Smythe;
Parkis's boy is seated at another table scrutinizing every
one who enters in miniature imitation of his father. When
Bendrix wants to see Smythe, he immediately asks to borrow
Parkis's boy, and Parkis agrees as long as nothing "unpleas
ant" is to happen. Bendrix plans to get into Smythe's
apartment by claiming the boy is ill. Parkis agrees because
playing sick is "in the boy's capacity . . . and nobody can
resist Lance" (p. 92).
"He's called Lance, is he?"
"After Sir Lancelot, sir. Of the Round Table."
"I'm surprised. That was a rather unpleasant epi
sode surely."
"He found the Holy Grail," Mr. Parkis said.
"That was Galahad. Lancelot was found in bed with
Guinevere."
Mr. Parkis said sadly, looking across at his boy as
though he had betrayed him, "I hadn't heard." (p. 93)
As usual Parkis is sadly amiss in his information. In this
case he has named his only son after an adulterer, usually
the target of his professional investigations, rather than
after the knight who was pure enough to find the Holy Grail.
The whole reference to the Round Table is ironic for it
implied contrast between the contemporary period and that
during which knighthood was in flower. The comic quality is
145
most evident, however, in Parkis's reaction and the tone of
his reply. He feels that he has really done a disservice to
his boy by naming him after a less than perfect man, and his
final "I hadn't heard," sounds like the reaction to a piece
of important contemporary news, as if Sir Lancelot has some
how let Parkis down personally.
When Parkis acquires Sarah's diary, he feels his job
is done, but he is obviously reluctant to leave Bendrix
alone to read it. He shifts from foot to foot and topic to
topic while Maurice is itching to get into Sarah's journal.
Finally Parkis produces a memento for Bendrix— a cheap ash
tray marked "Hotel Metropole, Brightingsea." Bendrix does
not know how to react. It turns out to have been in the
room of a sensational sexual murder case, and the ashtray—
silly as it is— has great value to Parkis.
"I'll certainly treasure the memento," I said.
"If ash trays could speak, sir."
"Indeed, yes."
But even Parkis, with that profound thought, had
finished up his words. A last pressure of the hand, a
little sticky— perhaps it had been in contact with
Lance's— and he was gone. He was not one of those one
expects to see again. (p. 106)
The reader feels the sense of amused confusion and perhaps
some warmth in Bendrix's lines above. The exchange is one
of meaningless, embarrassed words, but Parkis rewards Ben
drix 's sometimes cruel jokes with a gesture of human affec
tion. His comment about the profundity of Parkis's line
about talking ash trays is impatient, and his final touch of
Parkis's sticky hand recalls the little boy who is the only
146
thing outside Parkis's "profession" that matters to him.
His sticky hand reminds the reader again of his absolute
incompetence as a smooth, tough private eye.
Holly Martins
Holly Martins is the best example of the clown-
detective who "wins" the game he is playing through the
interaction of chance and his own innocent tenacity. But
his "victory" has results entirely unexpected by him or any
one in the novella. The Third Man is narrated by the calm
and rational British ex-policeman, Captain Calloway, but
many of the details are in direct quotations from Holly.
Much of what Martins does and says is obviously foolish, but
Greene refracts the tale through the lens of Calloway's
rational observation which adds greater comic irony to the
Holly character.
In the opening paragraphs of The Third Man, Callo
way,refers back to the notes he "made for this] security
files."12 His initial impression was that Holly was a
"cheerful fool in normal circumstances," one who had "never
really grown up" (p. 1). After the supposed funeral of
Harry Lime, "the tears ran down his thirty-five-year-old
cheeks" (p. 1). These first impressions suggest that Holly
is childlike; one quality of the child is innocence, and we
recall, for Greene, childlike innocence can be both undesir
able and dangerous, especially in an adult whose behavior
ought to have been formed by experience.
147
Holly is and always has been a trusting soul. He
wholeheartedly believes in Harry until Calloway convinces
him with irrefutable evidence that his trust has been
abused. Holly is then enraged to the point of betrayal by
the loss of his innocence, but he emerges from the book hav
ing learned very little, and with his simple-minded view of
people largely intact.
For Holly's ineptitude runs from his physical ina
bilities to cope with the role of amateur detective to his
incapabilities at comprehending what kind of world he was
living in. His behavior, although vapid and sentimental, is
really admirable according to Boy Scout standards. Holly's
innocence renders him incapable of comprehending the hellish
post-war world of Vienna. But it also gives rise in his
mind to a romantic notion that he would "solve" the "murder"
of Harry Lime, a murder which he alone believes has
occurred. Unlike the active, tough-minded hero of the
1930's detective novel, Holly Martins is the least likely
man around to cope with murderers and black marketeers.
Following the funeral which opens the book, Calloway
takes Holly to a bar where he drinks too much and becomes
maudlin in his reminiscences of his deceased pal, Harry
Lime. He is absolutely unable to perceive the hatred that
Calloway had for Lime or the suspicion that he must have of
Holly himself. Holly innocently assumes that Harry really
was (and is) the man (or boy) that he perceived him to be.
148
Clearly Calloway has brought Holly to a small bar in the
K&rtnerstrasse t o ' ' pump him for information. When Martins
sentimentally claims Harry was the "best friend I ever had,"
Calloway, purposely trying to irritate him because one can
learn more from an irate man, insults him by saying "that
sounds like a cheap novelette." But Holly, incapable of
perceiving ill-will or guile, replies, "I write cheap novel
ettes" (p. 12) .
As he talks, giving Calloway the history of his
relationship with Lime, Martins fails entirely to notice the
attitude of his inquisitor.
He [Harry] put me wise to a lot of things.
He was a wonderful planner. I was far better at
subjects like History and English than Harry, but I was
a hopeless mug when it came to carrying out his plans.
He laughed: . . . I was always the one who got caught.
(p. 13)
Even when Calloway calls Martins1 being blamed for childhood
pranks "convenient for Lime," Martins still fails to hear
the tone of Calloway's comment or to see the motive behind
his questions. "Harry liked me," says Martins who blames
himself for being just not bright enough to carry out Lime's
plans.
"One of the things I liked about Harry was his
humour." He gave a grin which took five years off his
age. I'm a buffoon. I like playing the silly fool, but
Harry had real wit. You know, he could have been a
first class light composer if he had worked at it.
He whistled a tune— it was oddly familiar to me. "I
always remember that. I saw Harry write it. Just in a
couple of minutes on the back of an envelope. That was
what he always whistled when he had something on his
149
mind. It was his signature tune." (p. 14)
After Martins whistles the tune a second time Calloway
recognizes it, a piece surely not by Harry. But a sort of
humane pity prevents Calloway from destroying the dream of
Martins who would probably disbelieve Calloway anyway.
This conversation shows Martins to be off-guard in
the nightmare city of Vienna, a world of smugglers, vio
lence, and death. We see that he drinks more than he
ought, trusts everyone readily, and therefore talks openly.
And the history he gives himself indicates that innocence
(gullibility about Harry Lime) has been a repeated, deep-
rooted part of his personality. That is, he has failed to
learn from experience. He has always followed Lime who
taught him to cheat and then left him to receive the blame.
He had believed Lime when he claimed to have written a song
which is familiar even to an ex-policeman. One recalls
Dennis Barlow's similar use of poetry on the obviously dim-
witted, innocent Aimee Thanatogenos in Waugh's The Loved
One.
Even if Martins was supposed to be no scholar of
music history, and even if one argues that it becomes him to
trust his friend, Greene continues to illustrate his total
incompetence for the job of caring, romantic detective in
the rest of the scene.
After another sentimental regret about Lime's death,
Calloway inserts the verbal dagger he has played with
150
throughout the conversation: "It was the best thing that
ever happened to him" (p. 14).
He didn't take my meaning at once: he was a little hazy
with the drinks.
"The best thing?"
"Yes."
"You mean there wasn't any pain?"
"He was lucky in that way too."
It was my tone of voice and not my words that caught
Martins' attention. He asked gently and dangerously:
"Are you hinting at something?" (pp. 14-15)
Martins's response, once Calloway's "hit" gets to him, is to
plan to punch Calloway. Before he tries this, however, he
makes yet another discovery: "'You are policeman?' he
asked." Martins becomes enraged, but he is no match for
Calloway. He claims he hates policemen because they are all
crooked or stupid. "'Is that the kind of books you write?'"
asks Calloway.
Martins said gently and brought out a surface smile:
"I have to call them sheriffs."
"Been in America?" It was a silly conversation.
"No. Is this an interrogation?"
"Just interest."
"Because if Harry was that kind of racketeer, I must
be one too. (p. 15)
The conversation shows Calloway's control of the situation
and it exposes more of Martins's foolishness. Martins, we
learn, writes Westerns (with titles like the horrid but pro-
leptic The Lone Rider from Santa Fe) in which sheriffs are
stupid and the "good guys," amateurs like himself, are
heroic and intelligent. Intellectual debate is clearly not
Holly's strong point. He sees the world in terms of black-
white oppositions with simple, direct solutions to problems
151
— such as those found in the conventionally unrealistic
formulaic Westerns which he himself writes. It is signifi
cant that Holly has n^ver been in America; thus he writes
about an area and a myth (the individualism of the American
West) which he cannot possibly know first-hand.
The ultimate absurdity is his upside down "admis
sion" of guilt. The logic of his final sentence is if Harry
were criminal, then I must be also because guilt dLs trans
ferred by association. That statement is ridiculous in it
self, but what Holly tries limply to suggest here is the
obverse proposition: I am obviously not guilty of any crim
inal activities; therefore, Harry cannot have been guilty
either. Innocence by association, but a far cry from the
deductions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Holly has so far shown himself to be (and always to
have been) sentimental and imperceptive. He now demon
strates that his thoughts operate entirely on the plane of
romance rather than reality, and thus his mental processes
can arrive at absurd conclusions. Neither Coriolanus nor
Othello was intellectually gifted, however, and perhaps
Holly can still stand for what he believes like the hero he
would like to be.
When Calloway accuses Harry Lime of murder, Holly
loses control, lashes out with one hand overturning the
table, sending glasses and drinks crashing to the floor in
his attempt to hit Calloway. He misses.
152
Before he could try again my driver had his arms around
him. I said, "Don't treat him roughly. He's only a
writer with too much drink in him." "Be quiet, can't
you sir," my driver said. (p. 16)
In defense of Harry's memory Martins now says he will make
"Calloghan" (he misappropriates the name, irritating the
English Calloway who protests he is not Irish), look like a
"bloody fool."
"There's one dead man you aren't going to pin your
unsolved crimes on."
"I see. You're going to find me the real criminal?
It sounds like one of your stories." (p. 17)
And that is exactly the way Holly sees the whole affair. He
is the Lone Rider from Santa Fe who will trek in the danger
ous wilds of old Vienna searching for truth and justice.
Before the interview is over, Martins tries one more punch
at Calloway. Again he misses, but this time he is hit in
the mouth by Calloway's driver.
I said, "I thought you promised not to fight."
He wiped some of the blood away with his sleeve and
said, "Oh no, I said I'd rather make you a bloody fool.
I didn't say I wouldn't give you a black eye as well."
(p. 18)
Tired of Holly, Calloway simply dismisses him in the care of
the driver whom he tells not to hit Holly again "if he
behaves."
Calloway now expects Holly to leave Vienna; he has
no money to stay. But by blind chance and a comedy of mis
taken identity, Holly's bill is to be paid by Mr. Crabbin
who takes him for another novelist with a name very close to
Holly's pseudonym. All Holly has to do to remain in Vienna
153
is speak at a meeting of the British Cultural Relations
Society. The "lecture" which Holly gives to this group is
hilarious, and it will be treated fully in a later chapter
on satire.
Ironically it is Holly's past misunderstanding of
Harry Lime that leads him into an investigation of Harry's
death. He creates a murder and a plot because he frankly
wants to believe that Harry's death was not accidental.
When a Mr. Kurtz telephones to say that he had been with
Harry when he died and that his last words were about Holly,
Holly decides "that there was something wrong about Lime's
death."
Something the police had been too stupid to discover.
He tried to discover it himself with the help of two
cigarettes but he fell asleep without his dinner and
with the mystery still unsolved. It had been a long day
but not quite long enough for that. (p. 25)
Even here, the narrator (Calloway) is commenting humorously
upon Holly Martin's ambition to "solve" the Lime mystery.
The tone suggests that from Holly's viewpoint the inability
of the police was understandable because it is a "given"
that they are stupid.
An amateur detective like Holly has several advan
tages over the professional, Calloway tells the reader:
Holly has no set hours, he can cover ground quickly, he can
get into many places easily because he was Lime's friend.
"The amateur has another advantage over the professional:
he can be reckless" (p. 39). And reckless is the word for
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Holly's behavior. He is so convinced that he is "right”
that he rushes ahead like one of his own Western heroes— or
like an innocently destructive child. He badgers Mr. Kochs,
the manager of Harry's hotel, until the old man agrees to
tell Holly something later that night. But when Holly and
Anna Schmidt return, Kochs is dead— his throat cut. No one
is sure whether it was suicide or murder. No one, that is,
except a small boy named Hansel who tells his father a long
story of what led up to Koch's death.
"When I looked through the grating, I could see some
blood on the coke."
"What a child you are. How could you tell it was
blood?" . . . the man turned to Martins and said, "The
child has such an imagination. Maybe he will be a
writer when he grows up." (p. 59)
One can hardly miss the implied comparison of little Hansel
and Holly. The father's speech above suggests that it is
the mind of a writer which makes mystery out of everyday
events— clearly what Holly has done in the case of Lime's
death. In the screen play for The Third Man (also written
by Graham Greene) Hansel recognizes Holly as someone who
visited Herr Kochs earlier in the day. He therefore begins
to call Holly Koch's murderer. In a sense Holly is the
murderer; his own innocence indirectly caused Koch's death.
Hansel's outcry is therefore ironically no more dangerous
than Holly's own.
Ultimately everything that Holly has planned to
prove goes wrong. The whole book functions as an ironic
dark comedy. When Holly finally see through Harry he asks:
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"Was he laughing at fools like us all the time?" (p. 82) .
The answer is that, without a doubt, he was. When
Holly meets Harry for the first time after his "resurrec
tion," the pair of them go up in a single car of the giant
Ferris Wheel which carries them high into the silence above
the city of Vienna. At that meeting Harry shows himself to
be an opportunist and a cynic. He is one of Greene's least
sympathetic creations (notwithstanding Orson Welles's mem
orable screen performance) because he is utterly without
human compassion. He has even turned in his mistress, Anna
Schmidt, for having counterfeit papers which he himself
forged. When Holly finally sees through Harry
For the first time [he] . . . looked back through the
years without admiration, as he thought: "He's never
grown up." Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to
their tails: evil was like Peter Pan— it carried with
it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.
(p. 100)
Here Greene through Holly very clearly associates the world
of childhood with the world of evil. But although Holly
has learned to see through Harry Lime, has he himself really
changed significantly by the end of the book? I think not.
Holly finally agrees to deliver Harry into the hands of
Calloway and the four-power police. Calloway has calmly,
relentlessly, worked on Holly's sympathy by showing him
photographs of the children who had been victims of Harry's
penicillin racket. This is not to imply that the pictures
should not move Holly, but it is important to note that when
the same photos are used in this way to try to get Anna to
156
betray Harry, the device does not work.
In the final pursuit sequence of the novel, Holly is
again the "Lone Rider from Santa Fe," this time hot on the
trail of. a former sidekick who has failed to "play by the
rules of the game." When Harry is cornered in the sewers
under Vienna, Holly, confident that "he won't shoot at me,"
calls out
"Harry, I'm going to shine the torch. Play fair and
come out. You haven't got a chance. (p. 112, italics
mine)
But Harry does not "play fair," and instead shoots at the
light when it is turned on. The bullet misses Holly but
kills one of Calloway's policemen. So because Holly still
thinks of the violent world of Vienna in terms of a kind of
Western game, he costs a man his life.
Holly continues to bungle things. Calloway writes:
Martins stood dithering there above Bates' body . . . We
couldn't shoot for fear of hitting Martins. (p. 112)
As Harry makes an attempted escape, Holly is ordered to
shoot at him. He blunders and shoots inaccurately, only
wounding Harry, who continues to run and then crawl toward
the daylight. Holly chases him, finally catches him, and in
the end "puts a bullet" through Harry Lime. Holly later
tells Calloway Lime's last words were "Bloody Fool" . . . I
don't know whether he meant that for himself— . . . or was
it for me . . . with my imaginary cattle rustlers who
couldn't shoot a rabbit clean" (p. 114).
Harry's judgment of Holly Martins is left open to
157
speculation, but Calloway's opinion is not.
He was a bad shot and a very bad judge of character, but
he had a way with Westerns (a trick of tension) and with
girls (I wouldn't know what). (p. 46)
For Calloway, Holly remains the cheerful fool whom he had
first seen at Harry's spurious funeral, at the beginning of
the book.
Criminal Clowns
The use of comedy in portraying criminals and
villains is hardly a new thing in literature. Indeed minor
devils, sins personified, and even Satan himself were often
figures of fun in medieval drama. The same is true of many
well-known arch-villains of historical or Biblical record.
Any student of the mystery play recalls the fun which "The
Play of Herod" has at the expense of its title character—
and all to the great delight of its audiences. By the early
Tudor period this kind of stage figure had solidified into a
dramatic type— the Vice. According to Allardyce Nicoll the
exact attitude of the Tudor dramatic Vice is difficult to
analyze. For although most scholars feel that he derives
from the Seven Deadly Sins of the morality tradition (to be
seen, for a late example in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus), he is
soon in the development of English drama closely associated
with the comic braggart or miles gloriosus of Roman comedy.
In some plays he is dressed as the Fool.12
The critic D. H. Monro writes: "Not every comic
character in fiction or drama is either an eccentric or a
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villain but a fairly large proportion of them are." Monro
goes on to say that these characters are comic because they
are guilty of a "breach of order and rule" as well as of "a
forbidden breach of the usual order of events." That is, by
violating social norms or "breaking the rules" (or laws)
they become funny because by viewing the villainous charac
ter and realizing our moral superiority to him, we experi
ence a reinforcement of our social norms and thus a feeling
of comic pleasure (since the existence of social norms com
forts us) .1 5
Or as Albert Cook has stated it:
In comedy, almost never does a character represent the
norm, which laughs at him and expels him as it [the
norm] implies it by his abnormality.
For the comic abnormal hero is always a type— country
bumpkin, boaster, ironist, middle-aged cuckhold . . .
They are all funny because their abnormality implies and
strengthens the norm . . .16
"The view of comic vice affords the clearest possible case
of comic characters who are laughed at, and not with,"
claims D. H. Monro.17 Of course, that is because such fig
ures represent qualities that the reader wishes to keep out
of his own life. Theoretically to laugh at folly and wrong
doing is a way of reassuring ourselves that we have nothing
to fear from these vices. In The Power and the Glory Greene
himself suggests similar reasons for making fun of villains.
The whiskey priest recalls that during Holy Week "a stuffed
Judas was hanged from the belfry and boys made a clatter
159
with tins and rattles as he swung out over the door" (p.
123). When staid members of the church objected to this
supposed blasphemy, the priest let it continue because
. . . it seemed to him a good thing that the world's
traitor should be made a figure of fun. It was too easy
otherwise to idealize him as a man who fought with God—
a Prometheus, a noble victim in a hopeless war.
(p. 123)
The rise of British fiction tended to change the
treatment of the criminal from the comic vice to a more
serious symptom of social problems. From Robert Greene's
coney-catching pamphlets of Elizabethan times up through
Dickens the features of the grotesque and the clown are kept
alive in criminal portraits. Fagin, for all his horror, is
also a darkly comic figure. But there was a change with the
rise of the detective thriller. In many crime stories since
the late nineteenth century the criminal is shown to be one
of two interesting but unbelievable types. He is, like Fu
Manchu or Dr. Moriarty, a brilliant, all-powerful underworld
figure whose intellect has somehow been perverted and there
fore whose talents have been siphoned off into the evil
enterprises which make these characters worthy adversaries
of even more brilliant detectives. Or on the other hand the
criminal may be a gifted amateur whose single foray into the
field of crime may be extremely clever and as blood-curdling
as any arch-villains. In either case these characters are
far from the kinds of criminal portraits Greene wants to
draw. As we have seen Graham Greene is mainly interested in
160
creating characters whom we can recognize as real and with
whom we can sympathize. Bearing this in mind we can see why
he uses grotesque humor to sketch some of his villains for
us. Their very absurdity makes them more credible.
Josef Grtinlich, Raven and
"Cholmondeley" (Davis)
Greene makes many of his criminals into clowns,
demonstrating their complete ineptitude despite their own
assurance that they perform their tasks to perfection.
Alienated, physically grotesque, these criminals are not
treated hatefully by Greene. By making them comic, he makes
them human and comprehensible to the reader. Thus even
though they are "cold-blooded killers," they have enough
sympathy to be both realistic and pathetic.
Josef Grtinlich (Stamboul Train) is an early example
of this type. The whole section of the book in which Grtin
lich is introduced is one long farce in which Grtinlich is
the central figure of fun. Greene shifts the narrative to
Grtinlich's point of view just as the Orient Express
approaches Vienna. He is crouched during a snowstorm on the
icy roof of a house he intends to burglarize. He has made
arrangements to be admitted to the place by a love-starved
old maid, and so the burglary should be duck soup. He
thinks proudly about his long unlawful career: "I can't be
caught, I've never been caught, it doesn't happen to me"
(p. 72). Throughout his characterization, Grtinlich reas
161
sures himself of his invincibility and cleverness, and this
assurance becomes comic because Greene gradually allows us
to see that Grtinlich is clearly not the man he thinks him
self to be. This treatment associates him plainly with the
traditional braggart of dramatic comedy.
Physically, Grtinlich is a gross, fat man, far from
the cat burglar who makes his living prowling on roof tops.
Once while he is waiting, he slips and nearly falls off the
roof; he is very unsteady on the slippery, snow-covered
slanted surfaces. He finally makes his way to the right
window and taps on it. After a slight delay, Anna opens the
window to admit her portly lover.
When the window was raised he showed great agility for a
man as fat as he in stepping from the escape to the
sill, but he found it difficult to squeeze into the
room. "Can't you raise it another inch?" [asked Josef],
(p. 72)
Greene misses no opportunity to focus upon Grtinlich's corpu
lence. He pleads for one more inch of space so that he can
"squeeze" into the room. The scene which follows is openly
comic as Josef plots his way around the absurd Anna in an
attempt to get into the next room to blow open her master's
safe. Now Greene focuses upon the grotesque Anna whose
"modesty was transformed into horrible middle-aged coquetry
to which he was forced to respond" (p. 73). Grtinlich talks
baby talk to the woman, "casing" the room with his eyes. He
is relieved to find the door to the master's room unlocked;
now Anna comes at him.
162
"One moment," he said, "one moment" raising his hand
defensively, aghast at the antique lust he had aroused.
Neither of us are beauties, he thought and the presence
of the pink Madonna [on the wall] gave the whole situa
tion a kind of conscious blasphemy. (p. 73)
Poor Anna is almost out of her head with desperate, oft-
frustrated passion. He orders her to undress and get into
bed; then he "skipped gaily through the door and closed it
behind him." He wedges a chair under the knob and starts to
work on the safe.
Anna waits.
Finally she tries the door. Grasping Grtinlich's
intention, she confesses that her master will be back sooner
than she had claimed. Obviously the master criminal has
made one miscalculation; he trusted a lovesick old cow.
Just then Anna's employer, Herr Kobler, enters with his
pistol drawn and a farcical interrogation ensues. Kobler at
first suspects Grtinlich of theft, but not noticing his
damaged safe, he accepts the story of the love tryst. As
soon as he can, Grtinlich tricks Kobler into looking away,
pulls the gun he is wearing between his legs, shoots the
master, takes the money, and threatens to kill Anna unless
she remains quiet for ten minutes.
He then walks slowly out into the snowy night, con
gratulating himself on the expertise with which he had
handled the brutal murder.
I am clever, he thought. Why should I hurry like a
sneak thief to the station, skip inconspicuously through
door ways, hide in the shadow of sheds. (p. 80)
163
To show his nonchalance, he sits to have coffee thinking,
"Josef Grtinlich, the man of destiny" (p. 81). He nervously
awaits Anna's screams, but he affects perfect self-contain
ment, finishing his coffee. As he casually walks away from
the table,
Something struck the pavement with the clink of metal,
and Josef looked down. It was a copper coin . . . he
saw at intervals all the way from the cafe, copper and
silver coins lying in the center of the pavement. He
felt in his trouser pocket and found nothing but a hole.
My goodness, he thought, have I been dropping them ever
since I left the flat? And he saw himself standing at
the end of a clear trail that led, paving stone by pav
ing stone, and then stair by stair, to the door of Herr
Kobler's study. (p. 82)
Once more Greene makes this villain ludicrous, bursting the
bubble of affectation by juxtaposing Grtinlich's self-congra
tulatory thoughts and his sudden realization that he has
left a highly visible trail leading from his crime directly
to himself. At the same time he has lost all the money for
which he had killed Kobler. His only thought is a hilarious
underreaction— "My goodness." He dashes back to the scene
of the crime, cramming coins into his overcoat pocket. As
he reaches the apartment, Anna begins to scream. The crime
is discovered. Now Grtinlich has almost no money, and to
escape the police he has to catch the Orient Express which
has just arrived in Vienna. From this point on "the man of
destiny" is instead the victim of pure chance. He must
escape. The only way that he can get money is to snatch a
purse, and this is what he does, all the while continuing to
congratulate himself for being clever enough to elude the
164
police. The big burglary which he had planned has gone
awry. Desperate for money he steals Mabel Warren's purse
while she is telephoning from the railway station. The
small crime of purse-snatching is one for which he is more
suited, but his success even here causes further self-
congratulations. He must keep his image as the invincible
master criminal, even when he has succeeded at only a petty
crime.
Once aboard the Orient Express Josef GrUnlich feels
secure, but as he speeds toward Istanbul he begins to worry.
They can tell miraculous things nowadays from a scratch
on the bore. Crime grew more unsafe every year; he had
heard rumours of a new fingerprint stunt, some way by
which they could detect the print even when the hand had
been gloved. But they haven't caught me yet with all
their science. (p. 93)
The above passage illustrates a technique which Greene fre
quently uses in drawing his early clown characterizations.
We have observed that ordinarily the clown figure is seen
from outside, and therefore third-person narration is used.
In this passage, however, the viewpoint shifts from third to
first person from one sentence to the next. GrUnlich's
thought that crime is getting more unsafe every year is a
deliberately humorous understatement which is written as if
one were talking about rising taxes— as though society is
somehow unfair to Josef's profession.
This device is used again in the opening lines of A
Gun for Sale when Greene begins to draw the character Raven.
Murder didn't mean much to Raven. It was just a new
165
job. You had to be careful. You had to use your
brains . . .
The cold wind cut his face in the wide Continental
street. It was a good excuse for turning the collar of
his coat well up above his mouth. A harelip was a seri
ous handicap in his profession . . . (p. 3, italics
mine)
It was in this 1936 "entertainment" that Greene
first showed his hand for moving directly into the action of
a book/ catching the reader's attention with an almost
shocking sentence.10 And he accomplishes this as he did in
the GrUnlich portrait by moving the reader to Raven's point
of view. The short sentences and the use of the second per
son in the third and fourth sentences indicate the movement
into his mind itself. Like GrUnlich/ Raven sees his crimes
as "a job." Also like GrUnlich, Raven feels that he must
use his brains in carrying out his job. Throughout the book
he protests over and over again that he is an educated man.
In the opening paragraphs Greene conspires with
Raven's consciousness to let the reader "see" him as Raven
would be seen.
He carried an attache case. He looked like any other
youngish man going home after his work; his dark coat
had a clerical air . . . An economical young man, you
might have thought, saving money for his home. (p. 3)
But if Greene conspires with his character to take us in, he
also shares a cruel joke with us at the expense of his char
acter. He uses comic understatement when he points out that
a harelip is a handicap in the profession of murder. Could
anything be less fitting to a murderer than this obvious
166
mark in plain view for anyone to see? If anything, Raven is
less suited to killing than fat Grtinlich was for scaling icy
roofs.
And Raven, like his German predecessor, is almost
immediately the victim of chance— in the forms of mistakes
and misunderstandings— despite all his carefully laid plans.
After cutting the old minister's telephone wires, Raven is
admitted to the dingy apartment of his intended victim by an
old secretary who ought (according to Raven's information)
to have left half an hour before his arrival. The old Min
ister is boiling a four-minute egg as Raven enters, and when
the egg timer bell rings, the secretary runs in to answer
what she thinks is the telephone. Everything is going
wrong. Raven thinks, "My God, what a household. They won't
let a man do things tidily" (p. 5). Grtinlich had complained
that crime becomes less safe every year; Raven would add
that victims are less cooperative too. The reader cannot
miss the grim comedy of the line which arises out of the
tension between the moral norm of society (which is supposed
to value human life) and the completely "objective" view
which Raven takes toward the efficient execution of his pro
fessional duties.
The insights to Grtinlich and Raven show them to hold
unexpected and incongruous attitudes toward murder. In a
sense they are behaving in a non-human or mechanical
fashion. Bergson points out that reducing humans to the
167
mechanical is comic device. On stage a performer may act
like a machine, but the novelist is hampered in a way the
dramatist is not. Because visual effects are not available
to him, the novelist must employ devices that will suggest
the mechanical. Two are open to him: (1) he may use
mechanical metaphor which compares the character or parts of
him to machines; or (2) he may create an attitude which
seems analogous to the mechanical. In the opening of A Gun
for Sale we must admit that a real "murder machine" would
really have reacted as coldly as Raven does to the "untidy"
way things go at the Minister's flat.
As a matter of fact despite their mechanical quali
ties and their "professional" attitudes neither Raven nor,
as we have seen, GrUnlich is very efficient. When the
secretary reacts to Raven's harelip, he coldly shoots both
the Minister and the old lady— and he had planned only the
man's murder. He has been instructed to leave the weapon at
the scene of the crime, but he decides on the spot to keep
it with him. In the first few pages of A Gun for Sale
Greene adumbrates the pattern for the whole book. Except
for the Minister's death absolutely nothing has worked
according to plan, and through the rest of the novel the
plans of every criminal character are doomed to frustration.
Nor is Raven the only criminal character in the book
for whom this is the case. The man who hired Raven to mur
der the socialist foreign minister is an immensely fat man
named Davis who (in the course of the novel) uses the pseu
donyms Cholmondeley and Davenenant. Unlike Grtinlich and
Raven, Davis is patently "unprofessional," and in many ways
he is the most absurdly incompetent of Greene's criminal
clowns. Notwithstanding his size, Davis is a fairly small
man in the criminal hierarchy. He has been commissioned by
the ancient Sir Marcus, a physically handicapped industrial
magnate to pay a "streetman" to assassinate the socialist
minister, and the motive for this killing, which rests
ultimately upon a member of the peerage, is pure greed. Sir
Marcus is not a fool.' He is barely human since he lacks all
feeling except for increased profit. He is, furthermore,
confined to a wheelchair and is so ill that he can barely
speak. He is surely not funny, being the embodiment of evil
and ultimately the symbol of death. But Davis, his hench
man, has comic qualities.
After the assassination Davis meets Raven at an ice
cream shop named the Corner House. He approaches Raven,
picking his way carefully between the tables. Raven immedi
ately wants the money for the murder he has just committed,
but as soon as they are seated, the mountainous man begins
to pour over the menu. Ignoring "business" he talks almost
lustfully about various kinds of ices: "They do a very good
Maiden's Dream . . . Alpine Glow . . . Knickerbacker Glory."
(The names themselves have comic qualities as types of sun
daes.) Even while he pays Raven the money for killing the
169
Minister, "his eyes softened as they rested on a Raspberry
Split at the next table."
His wide square face fell in folds over his collar. He
looked like a . . . man more than usually successful in
selling women's belts.
His great white open face was like a curtain on which
you can throw grotesque images: a rabbit, a man with
horns. His small eyes twinkled with pleasure at the
mass of ice cream which was borne towards him in a tall
glass . . . He was fat, he was vulgar, he was false, but
he gave an impression of great power as he sat there
with the cream dripping from his mouth.
Greene uses comic juxtaposition throughout the scene, con
trasting the blood money payoff with the ice cream delights
which concern Davis far more than the murder of a fellow
human. The whole effect is that of a comical Sydney Green-
street, and, of course, it recalls the inappropriately obese
Joseph GrUnlich in Stamboul Train.
One device used to deflate this perfectly monstrous
man is provided by his selection of a pseudonym and by
Raven's clear ridicule of the name. For purposes of the
bloody business he does with Raven, Davis assumes the name
Cholmondeley, pronounced "Chumley." Raven ridicules the ob
viously phoney name and irritates the fat man by continually
pronouncing every syllable in the name as it is spelled—
"Chol-mon-deley." Another device is focusing upon Davis's
continual eating which results in his absurd obesity.
Traditional thriller novels have pay-off scenes in
dark cellars or any number of dens of iniquity. The selec
tion of an ice cream parlor is amusing enough. Davis's
170
refusal to talk about money until he finishes his rather
messy sundae (to which, we see above, he relates with near-
sexual desire) adds to the comedy of the scene. But the
topper is that when he finally hands Raven his <£5000 he pays
him in counterfeit money.
In cheating Simon Raven (who is near to the pure
evil that will govern the later Pinkie Brown) Davis shows
his stupidity. When Raven discovers that, in a sense, the
"joke" has been on him, he is determined to kill not only
Davis but the fat man's boss as well. From this point on
(as with Raven) nothing will go as Davis has planned it.
Throughout This Gun for Hire, Davis is thoroughly
repulsive, but Greene never treats him without focusing upon
his ridiculous physical bearing, his sloppiness, or his
gross incompetence. The final effect of all these is com
pletely to undermine his sinister qualities and render him
laughable. During the course of the book he kidnaps Anne
Crowder, the "heroine," but because he "detests violence" he
is unable to kill her. (In one scene he gags and binds her
and stuffs her in a closet.) He is a lecherous man, but be
ing physically repulsive he becomes a parody of the sexually
normal male. In every scene in which he appears Greene
makes him absurd by telling us that his breath smells like
"sweetish chocolate," or that he is stuffing his mouth with
lemon drops.
Even near the end of the book, when he is truly
171
frightened, realizing that Raven is on his heels he takes
time out for a quick but fulsome meal:
Mr. Davis made a hasty breakfast: two pieces of toast,
two cups of coffee, four kidneys and a piece of bacon,
sent up by lift from the restaurant, some sweet silver
shred marmalade . . . He had paid for the breakfast so
on the second piece of toast he piled up all the remains
of the butter and the marmalade. A little of the marma
lade fell off onto his tie. (p. 130)
If this immense breakfast is "hasty," we can imagine the
size of his usual morning fare. Davis devours all the food
quickly, and Greene's final remark is a comic note about the
marmalade on his tie. From start to finish Davis is a slob.
But he remains too ridiculous to be truly despicable. Davis
is a gross, rather dull man who bungles his job and pays for
it with his life. Bungling, in fact, is the chief charac
teristic of Greene's criminals. And the pathos of the gro
tesque is never far away from Greene's handling of bunglers.
172
Footnotes
^tamboul Train (1932) (Bantam edition under Ameri
can title Orient Express/ 1970.)
2Susan K. Langer, "Great Dramatic Forms: The Comic
Rhythm" in Feeling and Form, p. 331. (Cf. Eric Bentley who
says in The Life of the Drama [1964], p. 306: "The comic
sense tries to cope with the daily, hourly, inescapable dif
ficulty of being.")
3Why Do I Write? An exchange of views between
Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and V. S. Pritchett (1948),
p. 30.
^Why Do I Write?, p. 46.
5Why Do I Write?, p. 48.
6Why Do I Write?, p. 48.
7Why Do I Write?, p. 48.
aThe Ministry of Fear in Three by Graham Greene
(1957), p. 22. (All quotations from Ministry of Fear will
be followed by page numbers from this edition.)
9Francis L. Kunkel, The Labarynthine Ways of Graham
Greene (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1859), p. 38.
1°The Spy's Bedside Book (1957), p. 11.
11The End of the Affair (1951), Compass Paperback,
p. 25. (All quotations from The End of the Affair will be
followed in parentheses by page numbers from this edition.)
12The Third Man (1962), Bantam Paperback, p. 1.
(All quotations from The Third Man will be followed in
parentheses by page numbers from this edition.)
13British Drama (1962), pp. 54-56.
1 * * Argument of Laughter (1963), p. 53.
1sArgument of Laughter (1963), pp. 53-57.
16The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean (1949), p. 43.
17Argument of Laughter, p. 56.
10Compare with the gripping opening sentence of
Brighton Rock two years later. "Hale knew they meant to
murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours."
CHAPTER IV
COMEDIANS
Not all of Greene's comic characters are clowns
characterized by innocence and incompetence. There is
another character-type whose name suggests his integral con
nection with an overall comic characterization— the "come
dian." The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the term
comedian derives from the French word comedien, meaning
originally "one who plays in comedies/ a comic actor— some
times a player in general, a stage player." Early in its
use, this sense of the term broadened to include "one who
acts a feigned part in real life." It is this broader sense
of the term which Greene uses in creating his comedians. A
second but related meaning for the word listed in the OED is
"a writer of comedies, a comic poet."1
Graham Greene has defined his own use of this kind
of character in his 1966 novel, The Comedians, and it is
noteworthy that his "comedians" are of both sorts. They are
people who play parts or wear masks to disguise the reality
of self, but they are also people who "write" or. in some
sense create a comedic fiction using the real people around
them.
Thus the term comedian primarily suggests a charac-
173
174
ter in which some form of artificiality is present. Such
artificiality may be termed affectation which, as many
critics point out, is laughable. In his Preface to Joseph
Andrews (1742), for example, Henry Fielding commented upon
the nature of the ridiculous in literature.
The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to
me) is affectation . . . Now affectation proceeds from
one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy: for as
vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order
to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeav
or to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an
appearance of their opposite virtues.2
Fielding goes on to point out that it is from the discovery
of affectation that the ridiculous arises, and this discov
ery (in the active sense of revelation) "always strikes the
reader with surprise and pleasure." It is the task of the
writer then to discover for the reader the affectation in
his characters.
Much of The Comedians concerns the almost universal
human trait of playing roles in what Yeats would have called
a casual comedy. "Major" Jones, who may be a "good" man, is
obviously a poor comedian because Brown points out the in
consistencies in Jones's performance from the beginning of
the book. The ongoing revelation of Jones's affectation
makes him appear increasingly ridiculous. But Brown, too,
plays the various parts which one must in order to survive
in the horror of Haiti under Duvalier. Indeed one of the
ways to survive is by assuming a safe mask, thereby becoming
a comedian. In one key scene, a gathering of characters at
175
the Pineda Embassy, Brown, Pineda, and Martha discuss the
nearly universal comedian r6le.
The ambassador [Pineda] said, "We mustn't complain too
much of being comedians— it's an honorable profession.
If only we could be good ones the world might at least
have a sense of style. We have failed that's all. We
are bad comedians, we aren't bad men. (p. 141)3
This claim irritates Martha who objects that she shares the
real pain of her child; she is not playing a part she in
sists; she is no comedian. She weeps and her husband com
forts her. Brown, the narrator, watches them both— knowing
he has made the ambassador a cuckold and seeing that Martha
has, of course, played the part of faithful wife while she
is really a willing adultress. Her show of emotion embar
rasses young Philipot, but as Martha turns to leave the room
"her heel came off on the edge of the carpet and she stum
bled and nearly fell in the doorway." Thus within the scene
Greene uses physical comedy to undercut Martha's emotional
appeal so that the reader will not respond fully to her as
the utterly truthful heroine at this point. A moment later
after she and Brown have left the room, she explains why the
discussion of play-acting irritated her.
"It made everyone of us seem cheap and useless and self
pitying. Perhaps we are but we needn't revel in it. At
least I do things, don't I, even if they are bad things.
I didn't pretend not to want you. I didn't pretend to
love you that first evening." (p. 142)
One of the questions presented by the novel, howev
er, is whether or not pretending is so very bad. Maybe the
mask, the performance is not without good cause. At any
176
rate the whole book seems orchestrated to show the distance
between the reality and the mask of each character. Near
the end of the novel Brown concludes that it may well be
good to be a comedian because such people— troubled, often
alienated— are more human, more committed to the world of
both good and evil (the world as it really is) than the
idealists who give all their energy to belief in a political
of even a religious faith.
Performing Comedians of Three Decades;
Wearers of Masks
The characters treated in this chapter— "comedians"
— are quite different from the ones I have designated as
"clowns" in several important respects.
The clown was characterized by his innocence and his
incompetence. The comedian is usually a proficient schemer,
not necessarily corrupt, but far from innocent, and he is
often skillful rather than inept, especially at manipulating
people and situations. His behavior can be understood in
terms of experience. The comedian has learned from his
experiences? he has lost his innocence and probably suffered
from the loss. The suffering has taught him how to live in
the world without risking pain again. Experience has taught
the comedian to act or react defensively; he must protect
himself from human involvement or even self-realization
because he has learned that he has to do so or he will
suffer.
177
For example/ Andrews (The Man Within) dramatizes his
own situation ludicrously because he cannot stand to look
at his true inadequacies and his actual cowardice. He cre
ates for himself a romantic r61e and then tries to convince
himself that he is that r6le. For similar reasons "Major"
Jones (The Comedians) tries to make others accept him as a
romantic war hero. It is sadly comic that both attempts
fail.
The clown, as we recall, was laughably lacking in
self-awareness. All Greene's comedians— even when they are
basically likable— are essentially self-conscious beings.
And they are motivated by their self-concern even when they
perform acts which may be "heroic" (Jones's heroism at the
end of The Comedians, for instance). The usual pattern of
these characters is that they adopt a pose, don a mask, put
on a whole personality— one often at variance with what
Greene shows their personalities to be— either to
get attention from others (Surrogate, Jones) or just to live
another more interesting mental existence like Walter Mitty,
(Conder in It's a Battlefield, and at times Anthony Farrant
in England Made Me).
Doubtless the essential quality of the comedian is
theatricality. The comedian must, by definition, be in the
process of acting out a part. Or in a special sense he is
"writing" a part for himself and sometimes for others to act
out in his mind as well. We see Mr. Surrogate (It's a Bat-
178
tlefield) rehearsing crowd-rousing gestures before a mirror;
Jones (The Comedians) has obviously learned the lines he
delivers from a slightly dated script and his tiny mistakes
in tone show. The clown, we saw, was also theatrical in
that for Greene to make use of him, an audience (outside
narrator usually) was needed. The difference, however, is
that while the clown— because of his lack of self-awareness
— does not realize his theatricality, the comedian is a con
scious performer. Even when the audience is only the char
acter himself (i.e., Andrews, Bendrix) the reader is invited
to see what the character thinks he has suffered or endured.
In terms of Greene's writing technique, therefore, there is
a difference between clown and comedian also. While we see
most of the clowns from the outside, we usually move inside
the minds or the motivations of the comedians. A good deal
of the comic pathos in a reading of the books arises from
our ability to see the differences between the thoughts of
the comedian and reality as perceived by other characters or
by the omniscient narrator.
Although he does not use the term until his 1966
novel, Greene put the comedian figure even in his earliest
published work. Andrews, the main character of The Man
Within (1929), wears various "masks" to deceive others and
even to console himself." In fact the title of the book
suggests that every man is made up of two persons— an outer
man (the face presented to the world) and the inner self, or
179
as Andrews terms it, "the inner critic." In some ways this
inner man is a conscience, for throughout this first novel
it is "the man within" which reminds the self-conscious
Andrews that he is a coward and also "criticizes" his behav
ior. But the outer man, or the series of outer men are
really comedic masks.
It is psychologically interesting that Andrews
glories in his own wrong-doing and basks in his sufferings.
In the opening scene of the novel we are told that Andrews
is "engaged in the favorite process of dramatizing his
actions." Thus Andrews is a fine example of the theatrical
comedian.
"Out of the night," he said to himself, and l:king the
phrase, repeated it, "out of the night." "A hunted
man," he added "pursued by murderers," but altered that
to "by worse than death, , . ." (p. 4)
In the passage Greene takes the reader into the conscious
mind of his protagonist, showing the emergence of what in
written form one would call Andrews's "style." It is as if
Andrews is writing bad melodrama as he lives through it.
The dramatic phrase "out of the night" has a romantic (in
all the worst senses of that adjective) ring, but Andrews
likes the sound and the suggestion it provides, and he
repeats it. It is quite true that Andrews i£» a hunted man,
but he glories in that predicament as well, changing the
concrete phrase "pursued by murderers" to the vague and
silly "by worse than death."
He imagined himself knocking on that door. He saw it
180
opening, and there would appear an old white-haired
woman with the face of a saint. She would take him and
shelter him. She would be like a mother to him and bind
his wrist and give him food and drink, and when he had
slept he would tell her everything— "I am a hunted man,"
he would say "pursued by worse than death." (p. 4)
Again Greene allows the reader to see the impractical and
silly imaginings of the character. • The sainted old lady who
will mother him is a nearly mythic figure, and her simple
healing actions recall medieval poetry dealing with wounded
knights (which Andrews clearly is not) who are restored to
health by motherly ladies with magic powers. Greene uses
polysyndeton and simple constructions to heighten the mythic
or Biblical quality of the sentence which leads up to his
restorative sleep. And when he wakes he will tell the lady
"everything"— a carefully-chosen, melodramatic, highly self-
conscious word.
As this passage continues, Andrews becomes fright
ened by the phrase "worse than death" which we have seen him
invent. And he has grave doubts about the cottage.
The vision of the white-haired old mother had been
effaced very completely. He fumbled at the door, but he
was unprepared for it to swing readily open, and he fell
on his knees across the threshold in a silly sprawl.
(p. 5, italics mine)
What a fall was there— from his romantic "vision" to the
awkward "silly" heap he makes in reality. Greene makes use
of physical humor hardly less effective than slipping on a
banana peel to reduce and ridicule Andrews; what could be
more incongruous than juxtaposing Andrews's notions and this
reality? And to top the scene— instead of the white-haired
181
matron willing to help, he is greeted by a young girl who
has him in the sights of her rifle, hammer raised.
Examination of the dialogue which follows this comic
entrance and Greene's commentary upon it shows how com
pletely the girl's view of Andrews differs from his own.
"I say," he said. "I say." He was displeased at
the sound of his own voice. It should be full of the
mingled pathos of weariness and appeal. "You needn't be
afraid," he tried again. "I'm done in." (pp. 5-6,
italics mine)
After he explains to the girl that he is on the run, she
decides to throw him out.
"For the love of God," he said. He had picked that
expression also from the stage, but the girl could not
be expected to know it. It sounded genuine . . .
"If you are being followed," she said, as though
speaking to a very stupid child, "you are wasting your
time here." (p. 6, italics mine)
This passage is quoted at length to show how the
author has indulged his character's self-awareness. The
entire first chapter is filled with the highly-charged melo
drama of a tormented man. What little Andrews actually says
is rather dull, and what he does is quite silly. The color
and action are all in his imagination, for it is there that
Greene lets us see him as his own ideal hero of a great pur
suit. The phrasing above suggests the theatricality of
Andrews's self-consciousness. He is trying to act in a cer
tain way, and he is disappointed when his talents fall short
of his hopes. And clearly he is not a very good actor
because the girl, named Elizabeth, sees him initially as a
182
"stupid child" and later as we shall see as an amusing fool.
Suddenly Andrews changes his "act." He tushes
Elizabeth and grabs at the gun. In the struggle she manages
to retain it and to rebuff his attack but not before he
pulls the trigger. No explosion. The girl had held him,
frightened him, with an unloaded weapon. This final irony—
that Andrews, the betrayer, has proved an even greater fool
and coward— undercuts all the self-dramatizing that Andrews
has done throughout the chapter.
Andrews is far too self-absorbed for any healthy,
satisfying human relationship. He has betrayed his best
friend, Carlyon, before the novel began; he will betray this
woman Elizabeth, whom he comes to love; and in the end his
indecisive behavior will cause her death as well as his own.
Throughout the novel Andrews continues to cast himself in
various r6les in relation to Elizabeth and Carlyon. The Man
Within is Greene's earliest published novel and there are
peculiarities in it which make it less satisfying than his
later books. Much of the motivation is left vague as indeed
is much of the action. The character of Andrews is com
pletely central and his point of view is so exploited that
some of the "events" of the story are obscured. Throughout
the novel, however, Greene returns again and again to the
contrast between the inner critic and the surface character.
In the end Andrews successfully resolves this basic and
rather common conflict, but only as he dies.
183
The purely theatrical qualities of the comedian
character emerge clearly in Greene's treatment of Mr. Surro
gate, the sophisticated Communist of It's a Battlefield.5
Like Andrews before him, Surrogate, whose name literally
means "substitute," is completely self-conscious; he writes
a part for himself and he plays that r6le under his own
careful direction and especially to himself as appreciative
audience. But unlike Andrews he lacks an inner critic which
makes Andrews less self-absorbed and more likable.
Surrogate prfetends (and even makes himself believe)
that he is a dedicated, sincere reformer whose whole life is
devoted to the betterment of mankind. Indeed the first word
the reader gets from Surrogate is the word "Sacrifice."
Sacrifice, Mr. Surrogate thought, as he stared from the
window of his bare and tasteful room into the wide blue
pool of Bloomsbury square. The plane trees spread pale
palms in the lamplight and the postman went knocking
door to door. Sacrifice. Mr. Surrogate strode to the
door and back again to the window, pausing for a moment
at the mirror over the Adam mantel to catch himself
warily unaware, mouth a little too resolute. But he
corrected that, self-conscious for a moment when he
caught the insolent Tartar eyes of Lenin in the plaster
bust. Comrade Drover's sacrifice, knowing, knowing—
back to the window, a turn on the heel, and again the
bourgeois face with its insolent stare. (pp. 29-30)
Ironically the sacrifice Surrogate speaks of is not to be
his own. He is composing a speech to praise the sacrifice
and martyrdom of James Drover who killed a policeman in a
union row. The word sacrifice appears again and again as he
rehearses his performance for a Drover rally. Most of the
other characters in It's a Battlefield, including Drover's
184
wife and brother are trying to save Drover from hanging.
Surrogate does not really try to save Drover because he does
not care about individual humans? for him Drover is merely
part of a "cause."
In juxtaposition to the speech he is rehearsing
comes one of the truly comic scenes of this otherwise fairly
serious novel. As Surrogate tries out proper expressions on
his mirror, seeking the precisely desired balance of pride
and humility, he hears a cracking sound. He stands very
still. Silence. When he begins to walk again, the sound is
repeated— "unmistakably the cracking of a nut." Surrogate
cautiously approaches his bookcase;— all along one shelf
stood "the record of his intellectual progress." All his
own books, in several foreign translations line the shelf.
His eye followed with pride [italics mine] the record of
his increasing humility: The Nationalization of Indus
try, with an Appendix on Scales of Compensation was fol
lowed by the brief triumphant title No Compensation.
Mr. Surrogate stooped and put his ear against The Capi
tal Levy; a nut cracked boisterously in the darkness
behind. (p. 31)
Now Surrogate carefully removes three editions of No Compen
sation and discovers "surprised in the act of dining, a nut
between its paws, . . . a mouse." The man and the mouse
stare at each other, frozen. The debris around the rodent
makes clear that this spot is a favorite of his. Suddenly
the mouse darts into the darkness behind The Capital Levy.
With his hand already outstretched to rob it of that
refuge, Mr. Surrogate became compassionate. His whole
185
face softened and relaxed. "Poor little mouse. . . .
Poor, poor little mouse." He thought of the great
Russian novelist comforted in the Siberian prison by the
nightly visitation of a mouse. "I too, the prison of
this world," and his eyes filled with tears . . . He
went to the side board and found a little bit of cheese,
(p. 32)
Greene emphasizes Surrogate's ridiculous sentimentalism
because it so well illustrates the pattern of his concerns.
He is capable— for a time— of pitying a mouse. But we soon
find that it is not at all the mouse he is touched by.
Rather he now sees himself as the martyr-Siberian exile
Dostoevski! "comforted . . . by the nightly visit of a
mouse." He is so moved by his own mental comparison that
his eyes fill with tears. If he feels any sympathy for the
mouse, it is because the rodent provides another opportunity
for him to see himself in another important r61e. And he
likes the image of himself pitying.
But Surrogate's sympathy with his fellow "prisoner
of this world" does not last long. The mouse refuses to
come out and eat in front of Surrogate. When he toasts the
cheese over a gas fire, the mouse emerges, grabs the cheese
and retreats. Surrogate is no longer compassionate, for
"the tedium of Siberia came terribly home to him when he
thought of anyone depending for amusement on a mouse." Soon
it is time for Surrogate to leave; he calls for his cab,
fetches his hat, looks back.
The mouse was still hiding. It had nibbled a corner off
The Dictatorship of the Worker and it had certainly not
used the bookshelf only for meals. (p. 33)
186
Greene ends the scene as Surrogate leaves the house, saying
to his manservant abruptly "'Davis, . . . set a mousetrap by
the bookcase.1”
The mouse episode underscores Surrogate's shallow
sentimentalism, and it is an amusing incident in itself.
Greene's use of the titles of Surrogate's books is clever.
The mouse hides itself behind The Capitalist Levy for a
time, which irritates Surrogate, and when he finds that the
mouse has "nibbled" at The Dictatorship of the Worker, he
decides the mouse must be expunged. It is almost as if the
mouse were a capitalist, firmly opposed to the ideas which
Surrogate cherishes above all.
Let there be no mistake about that. It was "the
abstractions [Mr. Surrogate] loved: Social Betterment, The
Equality of Opportunity, the Means of Production." This
devotion to abstraction, especially at the expense of
humans, is what Greene finds chiefly objectionable and even
pitiable in Surrogate. Surrogate lives utterly in an inhu
man world. Over his bed hangs a large oil painting of his
dead wife. He wakes up to her critical gaze each morning,
and he often imagines she gives him advice which he decides
she would have given to him.
Surrogate cannot relate to humans. James Drover is
not real to him. Neither is Drover's sister-in-law, Kay
Rimmer, who goes to bed with Surrogate in order to procure
his favor in Jim's behalf. Even after he has slept with
187
Kay, Surrogate decides that he is really faithful to his
wife and cannot trust Kay. He cannot trust anyone like her
— a live worker— although in cheory, that is, in the
abstract, such workers are the ideal.
For years now, passing through every stage of socialism,
he had believed with complete sincerity that he would
get in touch with the worker. (p. 40)
But he never really has.
Personalities! Mr. Surrogate shuddered. They had
always betrayed him.
He could live in a world of religions, of political
parties and economic creeds; he would go mad rubbing
shoulders at every turn with saviors, politicians, poor
people begging bread. (p. 41)
For human beings and emotion Mr. Surrogate substitutes (as
his name suggests) his books and rhetoric to keep him from
the "unwashed masses." Greene makes clear Surrogate's
dependence upon rhetoric in a technically well-handled
scene— when Surrogate delivers his speech before the Drover
rally. We have seen him rehearse this speech earlier, try
ing one expression after another ultimately modeling his
facial mask after that of a bust on Lenin on his mantel.
All this has been preparation for that moment when he will
rise to proclaim his own glory by talking about someone else
who must be sacrificed to their (and especially his) common
cause— the advance of Communism.
"There is no one here," Mr. Surrogate said, "who
would not gladly change places with Comrade Drover, no
one so vile who would not with a joyful heart have
struck the same blow against capitalist oppression."
(p. 38)
188
The meaningless political jargon is deceptive, for very few
would willingly change places with the condemned man. The
joke here is partly on Surrogate, however, because he really
does believe— >at least on an intellectual level— that he is
telling the truth. And this is time-worn political rhetor
ic. Lest any reader miss the clear echo of Julius Caesar,
Act III, Greene continues:
At the sound of his own voice realities receded like
tides; he had no picture in his mind of the condemned
cell, the mask, the walk to the shed; he saw Caesar fall
and heard Brutus speak. He called out with a breaking
voice across the top-up seats and green faces, over the
disused cinema, to Antony standing against the far wall:
"Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any
sipeak; for him have I offended." (pp. 38-39, italics
mine)
After all the rehearsal Greene moves into Surrogate's mind.
His voice, we are told, drives all concretions out of his
thoughts; abstractions rush like foam to the shore. In Sur
rogate's mind he is actually present at the funeral of
Julius Caesar. In this scene it seems clear that he has
cast himself as Brutus— "the noblest Roman of them all."
For he sees Antony over the upturned theatre seats and
speaks a line which Shakespeare gave to a better man.
(There is some confusion in that phrase "he heard Brutus
speak," but it seems that in the passage he sees the scene
as soon as he forgets the reality of Drover's execution, and
then after seeing it in his head, he becomes one of the
characters.)
This palimpsest effect is skillfully used to show
189
this comedian's fullest theatricality. He is completely
false, self-conscious, and defensive. Without a blush he
casts himself as the liberator, slayer of tyrants, and he
wants his audience to view him that way. Had Surrogate sym
pathized with the common man, he would have been less likely
to dramatize himself at all; and if he had to dramatize, he
would have chosen a different r6le, one requiring a less
perfect mixture of the elements. Surely the last thing that
Nature would ever call Surrogate is a Man.
In the cases of Andrews and Surrogate the comedy
arises when Greene— to use Henry Fielding's terminology—
exposes their affectation to the reader by contrasting their
thoughts on the one hand and with an objective account of
what they look or act like. Both characters have themselves
as their primary audience and relate very little to other
people; they are comic because they see themselves romantic
ally, even heroically, when in fact they are both intro
verted, isolated human beings. They are the self-deceivers.
A second kind of comedian— whom we might call the
actor— in Greene's writings is one who puts on a mask or an
act to protect or to glorify himself. Usually the charac
ters who fall into this category are those whose "inner"
lives are not shown to the reader at all. They put on an
act mainly to fool others although ironically they finally
fool only themselves. These characters are especially
pathetic because they fail to fool others and because they
190
never realize that they did not have to make the pretense.
They are sad comedians indeed.
If one takes "Major" Jones in The Comedians (1966)
to represent this type/ one can also see that Greene has
created similar comedians before him. In It's a Battlefield
(1934) both the Police Inspector, whose mind is constantly
fixed upon past exciting assignments in the Indian jungles
in contrast to the boredom of crime detection in London, and
Condor, the reporter who lives one life while creating other
more adventurous lives to talk about to his comrades, fit
the category as well. Generally these characters are amus
ing, harmless souls. They are rootless, alienated, longing
for love from their fellows. And usually Greene shows sym
pathy for them, sympathy which is manifested not only in his
treatment of them but by the attitudes of other characters
in the novels in which they appear. Basically they are lik
able men whose pathos derives from the foolish assumption
that they must pretend to be men they clearly are not.
There are parallels between Major Jones and an
earlier character, Anthony Farrant, in England Made Me and,
I think, they indicate Greene's interest in the type from
his early career up through the 'sixties. In both cases the
falseness of the comedian is detected by other characters
although in neither case does this result in their being
ostracized. Ultimately the author comes to approve both
characters quite strongly even though they are fakes.
191
Performance— before a real audience— is a part of
the actor-comedian's character. In the cases of both Far
rant and the later Jones there are countless references to
their abilities as entertainers or at least to their good
company. Their ability to entertain seems a delicate, per
sonal mixture of wit, charm, and the bold-faced lie.
Anthony Farrant1s stories about his adventurous past
are enhanced by a tiny scar which he had as a little boy
when he accidentally cut himself under his left eye. We
first see him in action only two hours after he has arrived
in Gothenburg, Sweden. Farrant's sister Kate finds Anthony
already entertaining a party in a local restaurant. He has
passed himself off as an old resident of the city who could
serve as guide. When Kate enters, he is finishing his
exciting tale about the revolution in which he got his scar.
"Why here's my sister," Anthony said. She was five min
utes early; some easy adventurer's phrase withered on
his lips as he saw her. Even his courtesy momentarily
deserted him, so that while the three strangers rose; he
remained seated. He was screened out from her by out
stretched hands and polite expressions and shifted
chairs. (p. 21)
Anthony's timing here is off. His story is meant only for
the strangers, and when Kate, who knows the truth about
him, enters, he loses his sense of stage presence. The
adventurer's "easy . . . phrase" would have to be a lie and
so, of course, it fades. Kate notes that his face is "sul
len and defensive and momentarily robbed of charm."
"Mr. Farrant's been kindly showing us Gothenburg"
the elderly woman said.
192
"He's taken us all over the port," the old man said.
"He's shown us all the warehouses." "And he's just been
telling us" the girl said, "How he got that scar."
"We thought," the elderly woman said, "that it might
have been the war."
"But a revolution's much more exciting," the girl
said. (p. 21)
Kate loves her brother, and her first reaction to his suc
cessful pose as a qualified guide is to judge his listeners
to be rather foolish. Indeed she can hardly control her
ironic response to the breathless admiration of the young
girl seated with Anthony.
"They ought to have given him a decoration," the
girl said, "saving the Minister's life like that."
"Kate smiled at Anthony shifting on his chair. "But
didn't he tell you? He's too modest. They gave him the
order of the Celestial Peacock Second Class." (p. 22)
Kate's obvious irony goes unnoticed by Tony's audience who
take everything he says about his past perfectly seriously.
From the moment Tony comes into the novel, his words and
behavior show him to be an adroit liar. He lies with charm
ing assurance, taking advantage of any situation so that he
seems almost to defy one who knows the truth to intrude upon
the fictive world he weaves constantly about himself. Kate
knows that by every worldly measure, Tony is, and has always
been, a failure, but none of his failures has ever dampened
his style.
It was nearly admirable the way in which misfortune had
never modified his slight pomposity; it would have been
expelled from a man more self-conscious, less resilient,
by the sense of inferiority; in him disaster had only
193
strengthened it. {p. 25)
There is something reckless and childish about Tony, but
there is also something grand too. He spends money more
freely than he should, and in every instance he "had behaved
with a pomposity and a propriety that would have been
applauded in every club from which he had been excluded."
Although Kate sees him as a lovable ne'er-do-well, Tony
never believes himself to be that, for to him there is
always something remarkable just around the corner. By the
end of the novel, Greene will convince us that Tony's "fail
ure" is preferable to the kind of success enjoyed by a more
sinister comedian in the same book— Erik Krogh, the million
aire. Krogh is very conscious of his origins in poverty and
ignorance; he surrounds himself with "the best" and the most
expensive works of "art." Everything he owns, from his
buildings to his ashtrays, bears his initials. All of these
outward signs of money and power constitute Krogh's "dis
guise." Tony's comic pretensions will lead him to an act of
gallantry for which ultimately he is unable to bear the
consequences. Krogh, whose comedic mask is that of the
industrial tyrant, is led by the part he sets for himself to
the destruction of human beings.
When we turn to "Major" Jones, in The Comedians, we
find another apt entertainer. Like Anthony Farrant, Jones
tells his past adventures to many fascinated listeners.
Quite significantly Jones's stories of his glorious past
194
make his current status more impressive. When Brown takes
Mr. Smith to visit Jones in his Haitian jail cell, Smith
finds Jones's behavior remarkably brave and stoic.6 Mrs.
Smith, we are told has a "high opinion" of the "Major"
(p. 223). During the time that Jones lives as a political
refugee in the Pineda Embassy, Brown grows jealous of him.
While there Jones plays war games with Martha's son Angel
(p. 264), and on several occasions Brown, the narrator,
talks with envy of the way that Jones can make Martha laugh
— a thing which he seems unable to accomplish. Brown's
jealousy at last forces him to trap Jones through his mili
tary boasts by offering him a chance at heroism in the
struggle against Papa Doc. When Jones melodramatically
asks the very skies for "another opportunity" to prove his
valor, Brown, who has been waiting for just this moment
offers to arrange that very opportunity.
Jones now made some obvious joke— for he was unaware
that the trap had really closed— which set Martha
laughing, and I comforted myself that the days of
laughter were numbered. (p. 260)
Another necessary element of the performance of this
kind of comedian is that of theatrical costume or disguise,
a term used very broadly here to mean more than appropriate
clothing;-it also implies, for instance, a military title in
which one may clothe himself or even a studied way of speak
ing or behaving.
Anthony Farrant is less concerned with outward
appearances than he is with creating a personality for him
195
self out of the stories he tells and of his pretensions to
taste and decorum. But he uses disguise on occasion. Very
early in England Made Me Kate scrutinizes her brother and
notices that he has changed his old school tie.
"What is that tie?" she asked. "Surely it's not— "
"No, no," he said, flashing the truth at her so
unexpectedly that she was caught a victim to the charm
she hated. "I've promoted myself. It's Harrow."
(p. 13)
He wears the tie to get him in where otherwise he might be
excluded. .This tie will result in Anthony's close relation
ship with Ferdinand Minty, the displaced English journalist,
who had attended Harrow. Minty, himself one of Greene's
early grotesques, is not long deceived by the tie because
Farrant has no knowledge of Harrow. He has been foolish
enough to assume that clothes do make the Harrovian. Greene
shows the reader that the comedian does not succeed in car
rying out his masquerade, and his failure is what makes him
ludicrous.7
In the opening passages of The Comedians Greene
again devotes attention to clothing which is somehow not
quite right:
Jones was a small man very tidily dressed in a pale
grey suit with double-breasted waistcoat which somehow
looked out of place away from elevators, office crowds,
the clatter of type-writers— it was the only one of its
kind in our scrubby cargo-ship peddling the sullen sea.
He never changed it, I noticed later, not even on the
night of the ship's concert, and I began to wonder
whether perhaps his suitcases contained no other clothes
at all. (p. 5)
More significant than Jones's clothes, however, is
196
the quality of his speech about which Brown remarks in the
L
opening section of The Comedians. "His [Jones's] slang, I
was to find, was always a little out of date, as though he
had studied it in a dictionary of popular usage, but not in
the latest edition" (p. 6, italics mine). "I had the
impression that English was a language he had learnt from
books— perhaps on this occasion from the works of Dickens"
(p. 13). Like his clothes, his moustache, his stories, even
his name— Jones— the very style of the man's language does
not ring true. Brown's remarks suggest the outdated quality
of Jones's speech and convey the impression of a man who has
set out to construct an image for himself.
Another element of the comic "performance" which
both Farrant and Jones share is the false assumption of
military rank as well as a glamorous military history. In
English society— one which since the nineteenth century has
revered military rank as a sign of the upper-class life— a
military officer might well be highly regarded. Thus an
incident in the history of Anthony Farrant and part of
Jones' ongoing mask is that of military rank. Although
Jones is introduced as "Major" when the reader first
encounters him, the narrator, Brown, emphasizes his own
skepticism about this rank, "Somehow I couldn't bring myself
to think of him as Major Jones" (p. 6).
Both Anthony Farrant and "Major" Jones are very
close to the braggart figure of traditional comic drama.
197
One of the important ways in which each shows this tendency
is by constructing a bogus military past for himself. And
although the posturings of both men are shown eventually to
be absurd, neither is despicable, for both of them possess
real humanity and courage while many "better" men really do
not. No character around Farrant or Jones really detests
either of them.
As we have seen, Anthony Farrant's boasts are not
limited to conventional military ones. His heroics derive
directly from the imagination of John Buchan, and he uses
the scar under his eye to lend validity to claims that he
participated in a revolution (p. 22) or that he was a hero
during the panic which occurred while his ship sank in the
Indian Ocean (p. 116). Early in England Made Me Farrant
reveals that he had tried to pass himself as an army captain
and had been caught. (In effect "Major" Jones is caught
too, for Brown, the narrator is never convinced. Thus
neither is the reader.)
Throughout The Comedians Jones continually talks
about prior heroics which earned him a great military repu
tation in Burma during World War II (p. 11). Because of his
continued boasting about his leadership ability he becomes
an important symbol for the resisting Haitian guerrillas
under young Philipot to rally around. Thus it is that after
he becomes dangerous to Duvalier, he is spirited into the
Pineda Embassy where he is safe from the Tontons Macoute.
198
Brown finally connives to get Jones out of the Embassy, and
in their escape they are suddenly ambushed and pinned down
in a graveyard.
During what both men feel may be their last moments,
Jones confesses his masquerades to Brown including the lack
of any military experience.
"Old man, I've never been in a jungle in my life—
unless you count the Calcutta Zoo."
"Were you never in Burma?"
"Oh, yes, I was. Or nearly. Anyway I was only fif
ty miles from the border. I was at Imphal, in charge of
entertaining the troops. Well, not exactly in charge.
We had Noel Coward once," he added with pride and a
sense of relief— it was something true he could boast
about. (p. 284)
# # • • # • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
"But you were in the army?"
"No, I was rejected. Flat feet." (p. 284)
Suddenly the impossible absurdity of the whole
situation rushes in upon Brown.
I flashed my torch around the acre of tombs. I
said, "Why the hell are we here then?" (p. 285)
A nearly farcical passage in The Comedians spot
lights the unique combination of wit, charm, disguise, and
finally even claim to military rank which makes Jones the
supreme entertainer. It is the crucial scene in which Brown
smuggles Jones into the Pineda Embassy to keep him from
falling into the hands of the cruel Tontons Macoute.
Brown had brought Jones back to the Medea, that ship
on which both had entered Port-au-Prince. The captain
refuses to take Jones aboard because, "I had too many
inquiries about you," and he suggests that Jones go to the
British Embassy. At that moment the Haitian forces arrive
at the gangway; Brown writes with steadily increasing admir
ation of Jones's calm in face of this catastrophe.
At this point the purser who had been sleeping "with
a lubricious smile on his face" wakes cheerfully from his
sleep and saves the situation. Brown will be able to leave
the ship untouched, he says, but Jones must leave disguised
as a woman. It even happens that Jones has a choice: the
dress pf a Spanish sehorita or a peasant-costume from Vol-
lendam. Of course Jones must shave off his moustache.
Neither the Spanish costume, which was designed for a
flamenco-dancer, nor the elaborate headgear of the Dutch
peasant was inconspicuous. We tried our best to make an
unobtrusive mixture of the two, jettisoning the Vollen-
dam headgear and the wooden sabots of the one and the
mantilla of the other, as well as a great many under
skirts in both cases. (pp. 232-233)
The transvestite disguise is a traditional comic device
(e.g., Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor), and nearly any
time in traditional literature that a man wears female
clothes in drama or fiction it is for comedic purposes. In
this instance the extreme nature of each feminine disguise
makes it doubly absurd. Brown, of course, feels that this
change is only a different disguise for Jones, because he
has always felt the essential phoniness in Jones's appear
ance and behavior.
Oddly enough he looked more reliable without his mous
tache; it was as though he had been wearing an incorrect
uniform. . . . Odder still, when once the sacrifice had
been made, he entered with a kind of expert enthusiasm
into the spirit of the charade.
"You have no rouge or lipstick?" he asked the
200
purser. (p. 233)
The farce continues as Brown and his hastily-thrown-to-
gether companion leave the ship. Jones leaves the ship on
Brown's arm gathering his long skirts "in one hand like a
Victorian lady picking her way across a muddy street."
After they make a shockingly easy escape under the
noses of the Haitian officials/ Brown and Jones head for
Brown1s car.
"You're holding your skirt too high," I warned him.
"I was never a modest woman, old man." (p. 234)
Now Brown takes his charge to the only place he can think of
to go, the Pineda Embassy, where he must ask his mistress's
husband to help Jones. It is only when Brown tries to "see"
the situation as Pineda must, that Jones's appearance may be
fully appreciated.
The ambassador watched with despairing incredulity the
appearance of Jones . . . In a nightmare anything, how
ever cruel or grotesque, is possible and to him this was
certainly a nightmare. First out of the car came the
heavy rubber-soled shoes, a pair of socks striped in
scarlet and black like a school tie worn in the wrong
place, the fold after fold of blue-black skirt, and last
the head and shoulders wrapped in a scarf, the [pow
dered] white face and the provocative brown eyes. Jones
shook himself like a sparrow after a dust-bath and
advanced rapidly to join us. (p. 236)
Pineda, somewhat rattled, grants the request for
political asylum. Just as the three men enter the embassy,
Martha, who has been awakened by the hubbub, comes out upon
the second floor landing.
"My dear," the ambassador said, "let me introduce
you— this is Mr. Jones. Our first refugee."
"Mr. Jones 1" [exclaims Martha.]
201
"Major Jones," Jones corrected them both, lifting
the scarf from his head as though it were a hat. Martha
leant over the banisters and laughed; she laughed till
her eyes filled with tears. (p. 237)
The situation is basically very funny. The ambassa
dor is quite proud to introduce "his first refugee."
Jones's gallant doffing of his scarf as he absurdly (and
untruthfully) reasserts his military rank is comic. His
clothes are so ridiculous that Martha laughs hysterically
when he announces that he is a major. Into her laughter
Jones good-naturedly "smiled up at her and said, 'In the
women's army of course.'"
The ultimate impression with which one is left by
Farrant and Jones is a sense of surface wit and charm. Very
frequently each of these "comedians" is charming because he
senses that he must flatter others in order to protect him
self.
Farrant for example can serve as a sort of companion
for Eric Krogh, one with a modicum of taste which he uses to
guide the tasteless billionaire whose office is ludicrously
furnished in the most expensive stuff he can find. But Far
rant is shown to be basically a decent chap in comparison
with Krogh.
Throughout The Comedians Jones is a bit too obvi
ously "charming" for Brown. We heard Brown already comment
upon the false quality of Jones's military title and upon
the peculiarly inappropriate nature of Jones's speech. He
seems to be masquerading as a gentleman of higher rank than
202
he has. The irony here is that in nightmarish Haiti social
rankings do not exist anyway.
Despite Brown's immediate distrust of Jones, howev
er, he never really dislikes the man. The Smiths respond to
Jones warmly, and Martha Pineda (Brown's mistress), when
Jones takes political asylum in the Pineda Embassy, utterly
enjoys Jones's presence in her home. On several occasions,
she tells Brown that Jones "made her laugh." In the horror
of the situation in which Jones finds himself that ability
to make others laugh is not to be underrated.
Farrant and Jones, like many other characters of
Graham Greene, are victims of their romantic imagination.
But they are not to be despised, and like that prototypical
figure who searches for a way to realize his romantic self-
image— Conrad's Lord Jim— these "comedians" ultimately earn
our sympathy rather than our contempt. Despite obvious per
sonal flaws neither of them is truly disliked by another
character in either book. In fact, after each has died, the
character who seems to have been most antagonistic to him—
Minty who had seen through Farrant's pretenses and Brown who
had immediately called Jones a phoney— each of these finds
the world a lot darker for the loss of a good comedian.
Both Farrant and Jones finally do "the right thing,"
in each case a gratuitous act which costs the character's
life. Here one can see clearly the influence of Conrad upon
Greene's comedians, for many of Conrad's figures are forced
203
by one act into a pattern of behavior which ironically
defines them as humans while it also leads them to their
deaths.
Anthony Farrant, employed as a favor to Kate as a
"culture guide" and companion for Erik Krogh, at one point
tells Kate about Krogh "'I'll make him human'" (p. 160).
But he finds Krogh unredeemably repulsive after he sees the
brutal treatment of the young union idealist, Anderson, whom
he, Farrant, had brought to meet with his employer (p. 208) .
Having made up his mind to leave Sweden, Farrant also
decides to give Minty a news story that will embarrass
Krogh, the story that Krogh intends to marry Kate Farrant.
Krogh, by now clearly shown to be a megalomaniacal tyrant,
is annoyed by the story and distressed because of Kate's
concern that her brother, Anthony, plans to leave Sweden.
Krogh plans to lure Farrant into a poker game, have him to
lose heavily, and retain him to please Kate and also to keep
the rebellious young man under his thumb where he poses no
threat.
Farrant enters the poker game, and plays with the
open good nature that has earned him the affection of most
characters in the book. He plays very conservatively, and
through pure chance, Farrant wins. Kate can't help being
pleased, and she thinks "He's beaten them after all" (p.
230). And indeed he has; since Farrant cannot be stopped by
losing the poker game, he must now be stopped altogether
204
from threatening Krogh. When Farrant happily leaves the
game, he is accompanied by Fred Hall, one of Krogh*s brutal
henchmen, a man utterly devoted to his employer. Although
Greene keeps the reader from the scene, we later learn that
Hall drowned Farrant.
When Hall returns to the poker game, his actions
betray some stress. Somewhat concerned, Kate telephones
Anthony at his hotel.
"No," the voice ton the telephone] said, coming up
the wire, "Captain Farrant*s not come in."
"Tell him I'm waiting up to speak to him."
She excused herself to them . . . She said with sad
affection, "It beats all. He's calling himself a cap
tain now." (p. 236, italics mine)
We learned earlier that Farrant has used this false military
title before; Kate once more realizes that despite his
basically decent actions, Anthony remains a charming liar.
Greene leaves us with her sad, affectionate statement rather
than showing us his death. Since our last view of Anthony
is the same old entertainer, he remains that way in our
mind, and in the funeral scene that ends the book we feel
the great loss that Minty and Kate feel. A basically good,
limited, although deeply human being has been lost. And for
that loss, the poor earth is poorer.
"Major" Jones's death is inevitable after he is
forced to make good on his military boasts and after the
graveyard scene [between him and Brown] when he confesses
205
that all his stories are lies. Greene does not show Jones's
death just as he did not let us see Farrant's end. We hear
a vague report which implies Jones's death. When Brown is
safely in the Dominican Republic about to take up his posi
tion as an undertaker, young Philipot and his ragged band of
fugitives cross from the mountains of Haiti. Thinking of
Jones, Brown asks if all the survivors have arrived.
"There's no one else."
I said to Philipot, "And Jones— is he dead?"
"By this time."
"Was he wounded?"
"No, but his feet gave out."
I had to drag the information out of him. I thought
at first that he wanted to forget, but he was just pre
occupied. I said, "Was he all that you hoped?"
(P. 302)
One senses Brown's nervousness in his queries because he
knows the "truth" about Jones's non-heroic past. But he is
relieved to learn that Jones has lived up to his own image.
"He was a wonderful man. With him we began to
learn, but he didn't have enough time. The men loved
him. He made them laugh. (p. 302, italics mine)
Once more as with Martha and others, Jones had the gift of
bringing happiness to the Haitian guerrillas. And he
inspired their love.
Perhaps it is fitting that The Comedians ends with
Brown's dreaming about lying next to Jones who is dying in a
wasteland.
I said to him, "Why are you dying, Jones?"
"It's in my part old man, it's in my part.
But I've got this comic line— you should hear the whole
theatre laugh when I say it."
206
"What is it?"
"That's the trouble. I've forgotten it." (p. 309,
italics mine)
In his dream Brown has Jones "explain" his death. It was
necessary to his comedic role. Brown also urges Jones to
remember the great comic line; it becomes almost the key to
making life bearable.
"I've got it now. I have to say— just look at these
bloody rocks— 'This is a good place,' and everyone
laughs till the tears come. Then you say, 'To hold the
bastards up?' and I reply "I didn't mean that.'"
(p. 309)
Jones's line about the bloody rocks, the wasteland as a
"good place," shows his optimism, but clearly the audience
in the surreal vision finds this line an hysterically funny
one. It is significant, I think, that Brown's ultimate view
of Jones— like the impressions of others— Martha, Philipot,
to name two— is that Jones had the ability to make laughter,
to entertain. Our final view of Jones is certainly a
positive one.
We are left with the question: why does Greene show
sympathy for the comedian? Near the end of The Comedians
Greene gives some insight into his favorable treatment of
the self-conscious masquerader like Farrant and Jones.
Brown, clearly realizing the similarities between himself
and the deceased Jones (at one point he comments upon the
interchangeability of the names Jones and Brown), speaks a
word for the rootless player of parts.
The rootless have experienced . . . the temptation of
sharing the security of a religious creed or a political
207
faith, and for some reason we have resisted the tempta
tion. (p. 300)
One recalls the "moral" of Our Man in Havana; one cannot
believe in anything vaguer than a human being or bigger than
a home. Brown finishes:
We are the faithless; we admire the dedicated . . . for
their courage and integrity, for their fidelity to a
cause, but through timidity, or through lack of suffi
cient zest, we find ourselves truly committed— committed
to the whole world of evil and of good, to the wise and
to the foolish, to the indifferent and to the mistaken,
(p. 300)
The comedian then is a more valuable human being than the
clown whose innocence, while it makes him pure, also makes
him blind and therefore dangerous. In the final analysis,
the comedian is committed to all aspects of life; the clown
is unable to bend as he is unable to learn from his contacts
with others. The clown may be consoled by his beliefs, but
Greene suggests that his commitments steal his humanity from
him and limit his vision and involvement with others.
Greene is not on the side of the angels when there is a real
human being present.
Creators of Comedy
A related definition of "comedian" listed in the OED
is "one who writes comedy." Some of Greene's characters
whom we might call comedians are persons who create or
"write" extensive fictions in which they themselves and
others have key parts. Because this denies the real
dynamism of human interrelationship, it can be seen as
208
absurdly silly but also very dangerous. Maurice Bendrix, in
The End of the Affair/ for instance/ jealously creates a
totally false love life for his ex-mistress and then tor
tures himself with the details of love trysts that have
never occurred. In many ways Brown, the narrator of The
Comedians, is similar to Maurice Bendrix in terms of his
jealousy about Martha, for both men assume their lovers to
be guilty of infidelity— and each defines the woman's infi
delity as even having sexual relations with her own husband.
At one point after they have made love, Brown accuses Martha
of sleeping with Jones who has taken asylum in her embassy
home. Martha answers Brown:
"You should have been a novelist . . . Then we would all
have been your characters. We couldn't say to you we
are not like that at all, we couldn't answer back. Dar
ling don't you see you are inventing us?"
"You won't listen if what we say is out of character
— the character you've given us." (p. 245)
Martha seems to identify correctly the neuroses within Brown
that make him relate to her in the stormy, jealous way he
does throughout the work. These thoughts reflect the cyni
cism of a man who has been hurt by experience and the omni
potence of his assumption that he is correct in classifying
people. At first Martha is truly angered, but when she
finds that he really believes what he is saying, she is
moved to tenderness.
She said, "My darling be careful. Don't you understand?
To you nothing exists except in your own thoughts. Not
me, not Jones. We're what you choose to make us.
209
You're a Berkeleyan. My God, what a Berkeleyan. You've
turned poor Jones into a seducer and me into a wanton
mistress. You can't even believe in your mother's
medal, can you? You've written her a different part.
My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren't there.
We're independent oi you. Mone o± us is like you fancy
we are. Perhaps it wouldn't matter much if your
thoughts were not so dark, always so dark." (p. 246,
italics mine)
Martha is undoubtedly right about Brown's misperceptions of
others, misperceptions which amount to writing r6les for
other people grows from a pathetic distrust of them. Brown
and the earlier Greene hero, Maurice Bendrix, are classic
ally comic figures because they pridefully think themselves
omniscient. In effect they usurp the r6le of a god, "creat
ing" the characters of the people around them. But they go
even further because they refuse to allow their creations
free will. Like the characters of much classical comedy the
experiences of these figures is not funny. They are, howev
er, ridiculous because they are possessed by an idee fixe, a
rigid notion to which they cling despite all rational evi
dence to the contrary. They pay for their folly in suffer
ing, but the overall thrust is still comic for we see a
fool, who deserves it, brought down by his folly.
Ironically the most destructive of all Greene's
"writers" or creators of comedy is also the most innocent
and well-intentioned— Jim Wormold in Our Man in Havana.10
Pre-Castro Havana, as we saw in Chapter One, is
viewed as an insane nightmare world in which the unexpected
is likely and the impossible is to be expected. When the
210
Chief of British Secret Service, noting Wormold's increasing
demands for money, insists that he recruit agents, Wormold
simply invents them. Moreover, in a reckless attempt to
please his London superiors Wormold has one of his "agents,"
a Cubana pilot named Raul, "discover" mysterious weapon-like
constructions in the Oriente Mountains of Cuba. For this
report he used a map of Cuba, Time magazine, some government
publication, and "above all . . . the help of his imagina
tion" (p. 113). "Raul" even supplies drawings of those
machines, drawings which Wormold himself makes of his newest
sales item— the Atomic Pile vacuum cleaner.
When "Raul's money" arrives a week later, Wormold
again thinks about him as a character in a "comedy" which he
has been rewriting like a daily TV serial.
Wormold thought of Raul driving out to the airport to
embark on his dangerous flight. The story was not com
plete. Just as in real life, accidents could happen; a
character might take control. (p. 119, italics mine)
While he and his secretary, Beatrice, are out for the even
ing- , Wormold continues to think of all possible turns which
the character of Raul might take, but while he toys with the
notion that "a character might take control," he never real
izes the implications of his thought. At one point Wormold
looks up and remarks how solitary Raul must feel on his
mission.
"You talk like a novelist," [Beatrice] said.
He stopped under a pillar and watched her with
anxiety and suspicion. (p. 121)
211
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, nothing in particular. Sometimes I think you
treat your agents like clay figures, people in a book.
It's a real man up there— isn't it?" (p. 121)
Each line in this exchange compounds the ironies. What Bea
trice says is a comic inversion of Martha Pineda's claim to
Brown that he creates lives for the real people around him
as if he were a novelist. Wormold is a "novelist"; his
characters are "people in a book," even if that book con
sists of coded messages to the London office. Wormold's
concern that Beatrice may guess the truth is unfounded be
cause when Beatrice seems to criticize Wormold for his cal
lousness, his distance from his "agents," she really thinks
him superbly and coldly "professional" as a secret agent.
But the greatest irony is yet to come. That very evening
they learn that a Cubana pilot is "accidentally" killed.
His name was Raul. Now Wormold realizes fully the madness
of the Cold War World whose game he has been playing.
In a looking-glass world, where everything is back
ward Wormold finds he cannot uninvent his beautifully drawn
secret agents. The madness of the real world takes over;
through perverse chance his characters come to a life of
sorts. In the end three men die because Wormold had acci
dentally written a disastrous comedy without realizing that
his audience (the British Secret Service and "the other
side," to name two groups) would be able to respond only
within the humorless context of an insecure world gone mad
with power, a world whose only response is destruction.
212
Not all creators of comedy are destructive, however.
At least one character who creates fables bountifully is a
constructive comedian, or to use the terminology of the QED,
a "poetess of comedy." She is Augusta Bertram, the memor
able septuagenarian of Greene's comic masterstroke, Travels
with My Aunt.11 Indeed the intricate tapestry of that novel
is largely woven from the delightful fabric of her lengthy,
amusing anecdotes. Basically factual, we learn that al
though her stories are not, in the strictest sense, com
pletely true, they are still "good" because they give life
to characters whom she has known, and they do no one harm,
including herself. The stories typically revive the remote
or middle-distant past. Indeed they are loving anecdotes
recalled in tranquility which add the dimension of her style
to characters and events which otherwise might be unexcep
tional. In reading Travels we see that Augusta has always
made the most of life. She still does. The trip she takes
with Henry aboard the now decadent Orient Express is uncom
fortable, unglamorous, but she still lives life fully and
even melodramatically. Augusta has always been a creative
comedian. Not only does she know it; she glories in it.
Greene draws attention to Augusta's skill as an
entertaining story teller very early in the novel when,
after she has given a blackly humorous account of the prema
ture cremation of a "famous man of letters," Henry thinks:
I wondered if the funeral had ever really taken place,
though in the months that followed I was to realize that
213
my aunt's stories were basically true— only minor
details might sometimes be added to compose a picture,
(p. 15, italics mine)
Henry outlines Augusta's technique here. She takes the raw
material of reality and paints with her own bold brush
strokes in the colors (or style) that best highlight her
version of the tale. The phrase "to compose a picture" sug
gests that she is viewed as a creative artist, after all.
And like all comedians, Augusta is at heart an entertainer.
In a later discussion Augusta talks about Henry's
father, a man who grows much more fascinating to Henry with
each new and startling revelation from this strange, elder
ly, still sophisticated aunt. Realizing that the most
salient feature of Augusta's stories is not their content—
amazing as that might be— but her style or delivery that
makes them live, Henry says
I wish I could produce more clearly the tones of her
voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a
story. (p. 47, italics mine)
Augusta's merry vitality comes through most clearly in all
the beautifully woven tales she tells. They are carefully
hewn works of oral art.
She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer
who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides
his pen toward it. Not for her the broken phrase, the
lapse of continuity. There was something classically
precise or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old
world, in her diction. (p. 47, italics mine)
The italicized phrases indicate the rare quality of pre
planning in oral expression that one associates with the
creative writer. Nothing in Augusta's stories lacks its
214
point, nothing in her tales recalls the senile teller of
uninteresting, disconnected anecdotes.
Shortly after Henry abandons his quiet life to
accompany Augusta on her travels, he has a chance to visit
his father's grave in France. There they meet a Miss Pater
son— apparently the last lover of Henry's father. Henry is
amazed by Augusta's cruel, prr .-mg questions although he
later thinks to himself that as usual his aunt had treated
Miss Paterson as if she were a character in a piece of fic
tion that she (Augusta) had written. But he later thinks,
under Augusta's stinging assault, Miss Paterson had grown
more alive, more real than she had initially seemed. Now
Henry has a new insight into his aunt's fabulous gift for
vitalization of other humans whom she has talked about.
I thought of Curran, and Monsieur Dambeuse and Mr. Vis
conti— they lived in my imagination as though she had
actually created them . . . she was one of the life
givers. CpI 143, italics mine)
That is the full statement of Augusta's powers. All the
characters whom Henry and we as readers find interesting
have in a real sense come to life out of her imagination.
We never see most of the people she talks of, but both Henry
and the reader have heard fascinating accounts of these
characters. Henry continues on a rather sober but pathe-
tically self-revealing note:
Perhaps if she ever talked about me to another— I could
well imagine what a story she could make out of my
dahlias and my silliness for Tooley and my stainless
past— even I would come to some sort of life, and the
character she drew, I felt would be much more vivid than
215
the real I. (p. 143, italics mine)
What Henry overlooks here is that Augusta's talent lies not
only in story telling. In the real sense, too, she is a
life giver, a secular miracle worker for she actually gives
Henry an interesting life to lead, long after he had settled
into his disappointing retired life.
We watch Henry Pulling change— at first subtly and
then more obviously— under the vital influence of his aunt
as she seems almost to bring him into existence for the
first time. In an early scene Henry has occasion to speak
acidly to a policeman. He writes: "It was almost as though
my aunt were speaking through me" (p. 42).
Traveling aboard the Orient Express with his aunt,
Henry changes further. He begins to think in new and, for
him, unusual ways about his relations with others. He finds
that he loves his new life— and his aunt too. After an
embarrassing, rapid expulsion from Turkey, Henry does not
hear from Augusta for several months.
I was left with the sad impression that my aunt might be
dead and the most interesting part of my life might be
over. I had waited a long while for it to arrive, and
it had not lasted very long. (p. 165)
Here Henry clearly suggests his indebtedness to the older
generation for giving him vigor and purpose. Thus it is
that he decides without hesitation to leave for South
America the very day he receives a letter from his aunt.
In regard to the revitalization of Henry Pulling,
one might examine the word " . . . ./el" in the context of the
216
title of the novel and its metaphorical use in the history
of literature. "Travels/" after all, are broadening/
instructive, real experience. Furthermore as Joseph Camp
bell points out in his book. Hero With a Thousand Faces,12
the hero is often reborn through a fabulous journey or
voyage. Henry has never traveled in his life, and he now
takes a series of journeys in middle life, travels which
take him really into a new, meaningful existence. In tradi
tional literature the traveler often has an experienced
guide. Augusta Bertram is a fabulous and effective one for
Henry Pulling. We see evidence that she gives vitality to
Henry Pulling from the moment she meets him at the funeral
of the woman he had thought to be his mother.
Henry is a fifty-six year old, unmarried ex-bank
executive who admits as the book opens, "I found it diffi
cult to occupy my time" after two years of raising dahlias
in retirement. In a curiously candid moment Henry even con
fesses that he had looked forward to the funeral of his
mother with "agreeable excitement." He responds positively
to all the invitations of his Aunt Augusta because although
she is a generation older than he, she represents all the
vitality which he has missed. When Henry accompanies
Augusta on her various travels through Europe to the Near
East and finally to South America, he is making a voyage
which is the inverse of the voyage into darkness taken by
Conrad's Marlow; Henry's travels with his amazing aunt are a
trip into the sunlight, into the center of life itself. By
the end of the novel Henry seems twenty years younger; he
has had real adventure; and he is preparing to marry a
lovely Paraguayian teenager. He has repudiated his life of
dahlias and regimentation in London along with the long-dis
carded ashes of the rather dreary woman whom, for so long,
he had thought his mother. One of the side goals of Henry's
travels is interestingly a search for his mother. Long
before Henry completes it, the reader is certain and
delighted that the vital Augusta is that mother.
218
Footnotes
1Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1970).
Comedian
la One who plays comedies, a comic actor. Some
times 'a player in general, a stage player.'
b One who acts a feigned part in real life.
2 A writer of comedies, a comic poet.
2Henry Fielding, "Author's Introduction" to Joseph
Andrews in Joseph Andrews and Shamela (London: Methuen &
Co. Ltd., 1961), p. 10.
3The Comedians (New York: Viking Press, Inc.,
1966), p. 141. (All quotations from this novel are followed
by page numbers from this edition.)
* * The Man Within (New York: Bantam Books, 1971).
(All quotations from this novel are followed by page numbers
from this edition which is a revised edition of the book
originally published in 1934.)
5Cf. Chapter II for an analysis of this scene.
GWe must again recall Fielding on this point:
From the discovery of . . . affectation arise the Ridic
ulous— which always strikes the reader with surprise and
pleasure . . . for to discover anyone to be the exact
reverse of what he affects, is the more surprising, and
consequently more ridiculous . . .
"Author's Introduction" to Joseph Andrews
7Our Man in Havana (New York: Viking Press, 1958).
(All quotations from this novel are followed by page numbers
from this edition.)
BTravels with My Aunt (New York: The Viking Press,
19 70). (All quotations from this novel are followed by page
numbers from this edition.)
9Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
(Princeton, 1971). (Bollinger Series XVII). Especially
useful to the student of the "hero" archetype is Part I,
"The Adventure of the Hero," containing three chapters,
treating the three stages of the mythic adventure: Depar
ture, Initiation, Return. These chapters illuminate the
process of rebirth into a new life, usually after a journey
to the lower world or a very high place.
CHAPTER V
THE GLASS OF SATIRE
We have seen that Graham Greene’s predilection for
comic characterization has evolved from his peculiar view of
the twentieth century. The modern world is absurd and
nightmarish, and the people who inhabit his fictional
reflection of it are comic creations— clowns or comedians—
because only by being such can they keep their humanity.
But reading through Greene's work, one finds another kind of
comic character, namely, the satiric.
"Satire," writes Meyer Abrams, "is the literary art
of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking
towards it attitudes of amusement, contempt, or scorn."1
Furthermore while the end of comedy is laughter in itself,
satire "uses laughter as a weapon against a butt outside the
work itself."2 But one of the most difficult problems one
faces in treating satire is discovering the nature of that
butt outside the literary work. That is, formal criticism
alone cannot fully explain how satire works. To make a
competent evaluation of satire one must wherever possible
determine how an author really feels about a topic. In this
Chapter I have, therefore, investigated much of Greene's
non-fiction— travel, autobiography, criticism— and drawn
219
220
some conclusions about his "real" attitudes.
While no one of Greene's books is a satire, parts of
several of his works can be said to be satiric. As Abrams
points out: "Satire is frequently found as an incidental
element in many works whose over-all form is not satiric, in
a certain character, or situation or passing reference."3
The satiric passages in Greene stand out because they are—
in the sense in which Leonard Feinberg uses the term—
unfair.1 * That is, the passages approach comic caricature,
and one is aware that a comic distortion is used to throw a
corrective light upon some kind of behavior or attitude.
That leads directly to Feinberg's working definition of
satire: "a playfully critical distortion of the familiar."5
The characters discussed in this chapter are usually
types rather than fully-developed individuals. Furthermore
they are often identifiable by profession or some super
ficial characteristic. For example, the popular writer or
the American abroad are criticized by ridicule every time
they appear in Greene's fiction. Thus the targets of his
satire are predictable. But these types of characters are
not satirized because of their profession or because they
are American. They are satirized primarily because they are
egocentric and insensitive to other humans and in Greene's
experience some types are more guilty of these than the
norm. Every one of them is ridiculed to some corrective
end. Their treatment runs from light comedy to sarcasm,
221
but the character's faults are always clearly delineated.
One can deduce the right way to behave because Greene shows
the foolishness of the wrong one. Moreover these characters
are always set apart by their treatment rather than inte
grated into the action of the novels in which they appear.
Since most do not add to the plot of a story, the clear rea
son for their appearance is satiric. In most but surely not
all cases the subjects of this chapter are flat characters,
even caricatures. They are not fully developed simply
because they appear briefly, and often their characteristics
are grossly exaggerated and therefore laughable.
Among the most noticeable targets for Greene's
satire are three: the bad writer (whose egocentricity keeps
him from performing his duties as a writer), the bad critic
(amateur or professional, who takes himself more seriously
than the literature he reads) and the "Ugly" American (who
typifies the obtuse vulgarity of the American abroad).
Nearly every time one of these three types appears he is
treated in a playful but critical way— and sometimes the
criticism is harsher than it is comic.
The Egotistical Writer
It is not unusual in English literature for a writer
to satirize his own profession, especially when he feels
that many of the most widely-read and rewarded authors are
videservedly successful. One of the best ways to satirize
any writer is to show that he is stupid or entirely insensi
222
tive. This tradition can be seen even in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century writers/ and it comes to fruition in the
poetic satires of Dryden and Pope. In The Dunciad Pope pil
lories many of his "enemies," lesser poets who had achieved
more worldly success than he, as servants of the goddess
Dullness. Dullness to Pope is a moral limitation which
implies not merely lack of intelligence but also an unre
sponsive heart, a dullness of emotion as well.
The targets of Dryden and Pope in their famous
attacks were men, like Shadwell or Colley Cibber, who had
become poets laureate because they were willing to pander to
the whims of the ruling powers of their own times and so to
obtain political favors. And, of course, in both versions
of the Dunciad literary critics receive their blows; in fact
Pope made Lewis Theobald, who had criticized his 1725 edi
tion of Shakespeare, the Dunce of the earlier three-book
version of his vituperative poem.
Greene uses the same weapon— critical ridicule—
against much the same kind of target as the eighteenth-
century satirists. He is just as disgusted as Pope was by
stupid writers who produce banal or propagandistic books;
and he has praise only for the literary critic who is him
self a writer.
In Why Do I Write? Greene states that the two duties
— and he suggests they are moral imperatives— which a novel
ist ought to have are "to tell the truth" and "to accept no
223
special privileges from the State." He defines the first as
a matter of style—
. . . By truth I mean accuracy . . . It is my duty to
society not to write: "I stood above a bottomless gulf"
or "going downstairs, I got into a taxi," because these
statements are untrue. My characters must not go white
in the face or tremble like leaves, not because these
phrases are cliches, but because they are untrue. This
is not only a matter of the artistic conscience but of
the social conscience too. We already see the effect of
the popular novel on popular thought. Every time a
phrase like one of these passes into the mind uncriti
cized, it muddies the stream of thought. (p. 30)
It is clear that he is here talking about the quality which
Pope would have termed "true wit." That is, one must render
truly the essence of experience in his writing. To fall
back upon cliche or to be inexact or inappropriate in word
choice is not merely artistically poor but also immoral
because it falsifies ("muddies the stream of thought").
The second duty of a writer is to resist the pres
sure which may be put upon him by "his political or his
religious group, even it may be his university or his
employers" (p. 31). Greene states that a writer has to be
disloyal, and he illustrates this point with an anecdote:
I met a farmer at lunch the other day who was employing
two lunatics; what fine workers they were, he said and
how loyal. But of course they were loyal; they were
like the conditioned beings of the brave new world.
Disloyalty is our privilege. (p. 31, italics mine)
For Greene therefore "disloyalty" is the mark of a thinking
human being. Furthermore, a man's work presents a personal
moral instead of serving as propaganda for any group. It is
therefore an obligation that the writer owe nothing to any
224
group; his only obligation has to do with his "truthful"
rendering of situation and character. Thus in order to
remain free of obligation to the state, the writer must
accept no privileges from it. Perhaps Pope’s epigram, "For
One who would not be buried in Westminster-Abbey" expresses
Greene's attitude as well as anything he himself has said.
Heroes, and Kings I your distance keep:
In peace let one poor Poet sleep,
Who never flatter'd Folks like you:
Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.6
In his writing Greene frequently undercuts the
intellectual powers of the professional writer. The first
evidence of his can be seen in his treatment of newspaper
reporters, for although he tells us in the middle chapters
of A Sort of Life that he learned much about writing from
journalists and that he had great affection for them, one
surely could not deduce that attitude from his early
writing. Oliver Chant (The Name of Action), Mabel Warren
(Stamboul Train), and Ferdinand Minty (England Made Me) all
present a negative picture of the journalist because all
these reporters alter truth to fit their selfish ends.
So one must conclude that Greene is resolutely
against the writer whose ego hides him from the truth about
life or about himself. A writer whose moral blindness lim
its him is doing more harm than good, and the "popular"
writer is, for Greene, most likely to suffer from such
myopia. He makes that contention clear in his first enter
tainment, Stamboul Train, through the character of Quin
225
Savory, his first full treatment of the "popular" novelist,
in this case one who sees himself as a public figure as
well.
In his often wrong-headed survey of Greene's work,
John Atkins mistakes the author's treatment of Quin Savory
for an attack on cheerfulness in the contemporary novel.
A cheerful outlook never stood much chance with him but
it was worth knocking down. This act was performed
through the medium of Mr. Quin Savory, a popular author.
Greene loathes him. He is a cheery, cheeky cockney who
has done well with romantic novels and is an unbearable
extrovert.7
But Atkins fails to notice that Quin Savory is shown to be
an egocentric and stupid man. He pretends to be interested
in people, who after all, are the stuff of which his fiction
is made, but he is really concerned only with himself. It
is true that he has raised himself from a cockney back
ground, but he still purposely drops his h's so that he may
be seen as a member of the lower class while he is concerned
only with associating with the "best" people. Because he is
so self-centered, he is insecure and not at all extroverted.
Clearly Savory is a financial success. His most recent book
sold 100,000 copies, yet a shrew like Mabel Warren can still
intimidate him— and she does.
Savory's stupidity is obvious throughout the book.
When we first meet him, it is through a spurious interview
which Mabel Warren conducts to conceal her real interest in
the peregrinations of Dr. Czinner. She has just stolen some
evidence from Czinner's room, and in order to avoid meeting
226
the Doctor, she suddenly remembers that Savory is, after
all, her assignment, and she decides that now is the perfect
time to interview him.
Quite oddly Savory is not in the first-class car
riage which he could afford. Mabel finds him nearly hiding,
"his chin buried in his overcoat, one hand round the bowl of
a pipe," in a second-class sleeper. By this time the reader
is well-acquainted with Mabel's nastiness. She enters and
sits down without an invitation.
She felt that she was offering this man something he
wanted, publicity, and she was gaining nothing commen
surate in return . . . she could insult him with impun
ity, for the press had the power to sell his books.
"You Mr. Quin Savory?" she asked . . . "I represent the
Clarion. Want an interview." (p. 50)
Savory is surprised by her, and he is also a bit
intimidated.
"No need to be nervous," said Miss Warren mechanic
ally. She fetched her notebook from her bag and flipped
it open. "Just a few words for the English public.
Traveling incognito?" (pp. 50-51)
Savory protests that he is not doing so, and he begins to
explain his itinerary when Mabel asks where he is going.
"Why, first of all," said Mr. Savory brightly, as if
pleased by Miss Warren's interest, which had already
returned to the Baedeker and the scrawl of geometrical
figures, to Constantinople, Then I may go to Angora,
the Far East. Bagdad. China."
"Writing a travel book?"
"Oh, no, no, no. My public wants a novel. It'll
be called Going Abroad. An adventure of the Cockney
spirit. These countries, civilizations," he made a cir
cle in the air with his hand, "Germany, Turkey, Arabia,
they'll all take a second pew to the chief character, a
London tobacconist. D'you see?" (p. 51, italics mine)
Savory brightens when he can talk about his own projects.
228
think it fatal.'1 1 Now that he is on his favorite subject,
he begins to talk faster and faster about the "r6le" of the
novelist.
"I'm not a poet. A poet's an individualist. He can
dress as he likes; he depends only on himself. A novel
ist depends on other men; he's an average man with the
power of expression. 'E 'as to see everything and pass
unnoticed. If people recognized 'im they wouldn't talk,
they'd pose before 'im; 'e wouldn't find things out."
Miss Warren's pencil raced. Now that she had got him
'started, she could think quickly: no need to press him
on with questions. Her pencil made meaningless symbols,
which looked sufficiently like shorthand to convince Mr.
Savory th5 *4 * his remarks were being taken down in full,
but behind tue deceiving screen of squiggles and lines,
circles and squares, Miss Warren thought. (p. 52)
Savory's ego has taken over completely now-, much to Mabel
Warren's relief. Now we learn exactly why Savory was
crouched in the second-class compartments. In order to
"catch" the "average man" in his natural habitat, a novelist
must be a bit of a spy he claims. As he begins to act out
his r6le for Mabel (who is not listening), he assumes a
ludicrous Cockney accent, making himself seem to be a member
of the unwashed masses whom he spies upon. (Greene has lit
tle sympathy with the writer who sees himself as a social
character— as one can surmise by his own habit of shunning
publicity.) We have no sympathy for the deceptive Mabel
Warren, but we also feel that if Quin Savory were a really
sensitive, intelligent.observer of human nature, he would
not be taken in so easily by Mabel's obviously uninterested,
meaningless questions. Mabel is quite right in assuming
that he will believe her "squiggles and lines" are shorthand
229
transcription of the pearls that he is casting. Suddenly
Savory irritates Mabel by interrupting her thoughts about
her own important story.
"You do follow these views?" Mr. Savory asked
anxiously. There're important. They seem to me the
touchstone of lit'ry integrity. One can have that you
know and still sell one hundred thousand copies."
(p. 52, italics mine)
Savory's self-absorption is made clear in these claims. His
views constitute the "touchstone" of literary integrity, and
he is proud to be a great as well as popular writer. Mabel
responds absentmindedly, "'Very interesting,'" and then,
feeling that the answer will give her more- time to think
about Czinner, she asks him what he considers his contribu
tion to English literature.
"Surely that's for somebody else to state," said Mr.
Savory. "But one 'opes, that it's something of this
sort, to bring back cheerfulness and 'ealth to modern
fiction. There's been too much of this introspection,
too much gloom. After all, the world is a fine adven
turous place." (p. 52)
Although he says that he will leave his contribution for
others to decide, he goes ahead and tells Mabel (a reporter)
what their decision should be. Quin Savory will have
restored "'ealth" to modern fiction. This is the passage on
which John Atkins bases his claim that Greene attacks Savory
because of his cheerful outlook. Atkins, of course, is one
of the chief exponents of Greene's supposed obsession with
seediness and pessimism. But if Greene actually objects to
Savory's "health theory" of literature, we shall see that it
is first because such a preconceived view of life is untrue
230
and second because Savory himself does not really believe it
anyway. That is, he is a dishonest writer.
As Savory continues to develop his theory, the nar
rative moves from Mabel's into his controlling conscious
ness .
The bony hand which held the pipe beat helplessly
against his knee. "To bring back the spirit of Chau
cer," he said. A woman passed along the corridor, and
for a moment all Mr. Savory's attention was visibly
caught up to sail in her wake, bobbing, bobbing, bobbing
like his hand. "Chaucer," he said, "Chaucer," and sud
denly before Miss Warren's eyes he gave up the struggle,
his pipe fell to the floor, and stooping to find it, he
exclaimed irritably, "Damn it all. Damn." He was a man
overworked, harassed by a personality which was not his
own, by curioisities and lusts, a man on the edge of a
nervous breakdown. (pp. 52-53)
Clearly Savory is not at all extroverted as John Atkins
claims. He is "harassed by a personality" of his own crea
tion, and while he talks of a literature of health, he is
himself plagued by lust, driven nearly to mental collapse.
Notwithstanding his "cheery" theories, his own life is far
from healthy. At this point the reasons for Greene's choice
of the name, Savory, becomes clear. It means "wholesome or
pleasant," and thus it seems perfect for the man with his
theories of "health and lit'ry integrity." The irony of
course is that the poor man is really insecure, and many of
his concerns, as we have seen, are unsavory indeed.
To make fun of Savory, Mabel Warren picks up on his
health phrase. "'Health,' she said 'That's your mission.
None of this "adults only" stuff. They give you as school
prizes.'" As Savory agrees gleefully with her derisive
231
statement ("The younger generation's being brought up on
'ealthy traditions."), Mabel notes his lascivious squint
toward the woman passing in the corridor. Suddenly Mabel,
whose mind is on Dr. Czinner and the mystery of his Bae-
decker guidebook, figures out Czinner's plan, and like
Archimedes she exclaims
"My God!" . . . "I've got it."
Mr. Savory jumped. "What have you got?" he asked.
"Toothache?"
"No, no," said Miss Warren. She felt grateful to
him for the illumination which now flooded her mind with
light, leaving no dark corners in which Dr. Czinner
might hide from her. "Such an excellent interview, I
meant. I see just the way to present you." (p. 53)
The irony in Mabel's last sentence is clear to the reader,
for time spent in the interview has cleared up her problem
because she did not listen to Savory at all. One can imag
ine Savory's shock at her ejaculation and his bewilderment
at her sudden departure just after she has worked him up to
the point of giving up all his literary insights. Far from
really cheerful and confident, Savory is seen as an insecure
fool though, I think, a not thoroughly despicable one.
John Atkins is the only critic thus far who has
discussed Greene's treatment of Savory,, and he feels that
Savory is not a successful creation because Greene's own ego
is too involved with him: "There is no doubt that Greene
had made a fairly prolonged attempt to become a flattened
version of him."7 That is, Greene envies Savory while
loathing what he makes him stand for. This seems a need
lessly contorted way of dealing with Savory, and indeed it
232
is not necessary if he is seen as a satiric portrait.
Atkins continues.
Some years later, in The Third Man, he [Greene] could
consider the popular writer with greater detachment, and
the result involved less venom. Rollo Martins was not a
rival to be envied and therefore hated. His popularity
was that of the adventure writer, not the man with a
cheery message. By then Greene himself was a popular
author, and yet something more— he was admired by the
intellectuals. A new Conrad had arrived. He could
afford to look at the writer of Westerns, patronize him
slightly and at the same time treat him like a human
being.8
There is no reason to explain the treatment of Holly Martins
in terms of Greene's involvement with the concept of the
popular writer. Clearly Martins is a writer who is ridi
culed as an artist— but he is not as financially successful
as Savory. Furthermore Martins' rdle in The Third Man, as I
have shown in Chapter III, is that of clown detective. That
he writes Westerns, with the simple moral polarities that
the genre implies, contributes comically to that r6le. If
Holly is treated more "like a human being," it is because he
is fairly well-developed while Savory is after all a minor
character.
Greene's treatment of Savory is easily explained if
he is seen as a satiric portrait first of a type (which has
been discussed) and then as a possible caricature of contem
porary writer— J. B. Priestley. And we have reliable evi
dence that the portrait was intended as a satiric attack.
Priestley himself saw it as one, and he threatened a libel
action if Stamboul Train was published in its original form.
Greene's values remain constant. In a recent short story,
included in his 1967 collection, May We Borrow Your Hus
band? Greene again satirizes the qualities— egocentrism and
its resultant emotional insensitivity— that he had ridiculed
in Quin Savory thirty-five years before. "The Invisible
Japanese Gentlemen," like most of the stories in the collec
tion, is narrated by a professional writer, and it focuses
upon a pretty but empty-headed girl who aspires to be a
novelist and upon her unhappy fiance. The narrator devotes
the opening paragraph to a description of the "eight Japan
ese gentlemen having a fish dinner at Bentleys." He tells
us they spoke rarely and only in Japanese; when they spoke
they smiled and bowed. "All but one of them wore glasses."
In the second paragraph the narration turns away from the
Japanese gentlemen and focuses upon the pretty blonde. She
announces to her distraught companion that they might marry
next week. "'They are giving me an advance of five hundred
pounds, and they've sold the paperback rights already"1
(p. 108). The young man, fragile, good-looking, is obvi
ously opposed to the girl's writing career. He wants to
support his own wife, and in his protestation he unfortun
ately calls writing "a crutch." But the girl returns
brightly that five hundred pounds is a pretty good crutch.
"Do you know what Mr. Dwight said?"
"Who's Dwight?"
"Darling, you don't listen, do you? My publisher.
He said he hadn't read a first novel in the last ten
years which showed such powers of observation."
(p. 108)
236
The young man says weakly that Mr. Dwight's attitude is won
derful. She tells him that this same publisher wants her to
change the title of her novel from The Ever-Rolling Stream
to The Chelsea Set, and she has agreed. She now points out
that "'really, he's going to pay for our marriage, isn't
he?'" The girl fails to see the pain that her remarks are
causing in her fiance, but the narrator does not.
In a fairly rare and revealing passage for Graham
Greene, the narrator describes some of the hardships of the
professional writer. Obviously the girl has never thought
of writing as being anything but glamorous fun.
I wanted to say to her: Are you quite sure your
publisher is telling you the truth? Publishers are
human. They may sometimes exaggerate the virtues of the
young and the pretty. Will The Chelsea Set be read in
five years? Are you prepared for the years of effort,
"the long defeat of doing nothing well?" As the years
pass, writing will not become any easier, the daily
effort will grow harder to endure, those "powers of
observation" will become enfeebled; you will be judged,
when you reach your forties, by performance and not by
promise. (p. 109)
As an almost ironic counterpoint to his seriousness the girl
bubbles on about her next novel. It is now clear that she
is simply a pretty girl who has been flattered by her pub
lisher, who is willing to lose a young man's love because of
her "career," a career which the narrator calls into ques
tion altogether in the final passages of the story.
"I've got a title for the next book— 'The Azure
Blue.'"
"I thought azure was blue."
She looked at him with disappointment. "You don't
really want to be married to a novelist, do you?"
(p. 110)
237
Her irritated companion protests that she is not yet a
novelist.
"I was born one— Mr. Dwight says. My powers of
observation— "
"Yes. You told me that, but, dear, couldn't you
observe a bit nearer home? (p. 110)
At this point the young lady snatches up the bill to pay it
as a celebration of her first novel. The narrator considers
the couple once more, hoping that The Chelsea Set will prove
a disaster and save her from the writing profession. "I
could already imagine the blurb . . . [her publisher] would
have written about her 'abrasive powers of observation."'
The story ends:
I could hear them talking while they found their coats
at the back of the restaurant. He said, "I wonder what
all those Japanese are doing here?"
"Janpanese?" she said. "What Japanese, darling?
Sometimes you are so evasive I think you don't want to
marry me at all." (p. Ill)
This finish undercuts all reference to the girl's
powers of observation," for she has utterly failed to notice
the Japanese gentlemen at all. The failure is all the more
apparent because the narrator of the story has paid close
attention to them from his first paragraph on. The girl
suffers from an emotional blindness which grows from her
self-centeredness. Even her pedestrian suitor has noticed
that other people exist in the restaurant; she is so self-
absorbed that she cannot feel or even see the life about
her, which has to be the subject of any writer.
The great— even disabling— flaw which any writer may
238
possess is extreme egocentrism which may manifest itself
either as a tendency to comment at too great length upon the
"duties" of a writer, especially in terms of social obliga
tions or it may be seen simply and ironically as stupidity
in which case the ego prevents the writer from seeing human
ity outside himself.
Even those letters which are included in Why Do I
Write? carry the suggestion that to answer the question in
the title is really pretentious, that any writer who spends
time defining his role in society is overrating his impor
tance and taking himself as seriously as Quin Savory. Very
early in his first letter Greene restates his ostensible
subject.
"The relation of the artist to society": it's a ter
ribly vague subject, and I feel . . . embarrassment and
resentment . . . when I encounter it. (p. 28)
Throughout the paragraphs that follow there is an ironic
distance as if Greene feels uncomfortable considering the
question at all. Certainly his points are at variance with
those of V. S. Pritchett who advocates governmental support
of the "artist."
Ultimately Greene spends a good many words charac
terizing the kind of writer who would "explain the whole
thing to us," that is tell us about the role of the artist
in society.
I picture him a member of the PEN Club, perhaps a little
out of breath frcm his conference in Stockholm where he
has been discussing this very subject (in pre-war times
he would have returned from the Adriatic— conferences of
239
this kind were never held where society was exactly
thick). Before sitting down to add his signature to an
appeal in The Times (in the thirties it would have
proudly appeared with Mr. Forster'S/ Mr. Bertrand
Russell's and perhaps Miss Maude Rayden's), he would
find an opportunity to tell us what society is and what
the artist. (p. 28)
The tone of the passage is clear enough. The "great" writer
of the '30's (and some are named for us) who is so "busy"
that he can scarcely exercise his craft would find the time
to tell us all what art owed to society. Greene is glad
that this kind of writer is no longer with us.
His letters confirmed the prejudice I felt against the
artist (there the word is again) indulging in public
affairs. His letters— and those of his co-signatories—
always seemed to me either ill-informed, naive or un
timely. There were so many petitions in favour of the
victims of arbitrary power which helped to knot the
noose sound the poor creatures' necks. So long as he
had eased his conscience publicly in print and in good
company, he was not concerned with print and in good
company, he was not concerned with the consequences of
his letter. No, I'm glad we've left him out. He will,
of course, review us . . . (p. 28, italics mine}
Thus writers who take themselves overseriously and
who comment complacently upon all social issues are con
demned for overstepping bounds of their own areas of compe
tence just as critics who make their livings! by criticizing
the art which they themselves could not produce.
To Criticize the Critic
Graham Greene himself is a direct, insightful
critic,11 but it is clear that he has no fondness whatever
for those who make a living as professional critics. Appar
ently he believes only a practicing novelist can justly
240
criticize a novel, and he is currently engaged in writing
critical introductions to a fifteen-volume Bodley Head edi
tion of his own fiction along the same lines as the prefaces
of Henry James.12 Of those prefaces Greene thinks very
highly:
This is the chief importance of James's prefaces: that
they have made future novelists conscious: that the
planned effect has been substituted for the lucky stroke
(and Hardy shows seldom even genius can depend on the
lucky stroke). But to the common reader they should
have an almost equal value, for our enjoyment of a novel
is increased when we can follow the method of a writer
1 3
• • •
Often Greene has answered critics of his work by referring
to the artistic theories expressed in James's prefaces. For
example, when many critics had identified Thomas Fowler, the
journalist/narrator of The Quiet American, with Greene him
self, he denied this identity referring his critics to the
James's prefaces which discuss the possible uses of a nar
rator whose credibility is not entirely unequivocal.114
Greene seems always to have reacted negatively to
his own critics. He derides especially those who, in the
light of his so-called preoccupation with religious themes,
find religious significance and symbol everywhere in his
work. In A Sort of Life Greene tells of a mongrel dog,
called Paddy, given him by "a girl with bobbed hair who
wanted a hotel flirtation" (p. 158). This white-haired
terrier, described as "the bane of my life" by the author,
"later played an offstage part in a play of mine, The Pot
ting Shed, and Mr. Kenneth Tynan, for reasons which remain
241
mysterious to me, believed that he represented God" (p.
159) . Still later in that book Greene reitfinisces about the.
origin of that play. He tells of adapting an idea for a
novel "into an unsatisfactory play, The Potting Shed, in
which I gave an off-stage part to my unsatisfactory dog"
(p. 173). But Greene pretends once again to be amazed at
the hypersensitive reading of the play which would attribute
supernatural significance to this especially annoying dog.
"No, whatever Tynan might think, Paddy was never intended to
be God. He was just himself."15
Greene derides exactly such symbol hunting as this
in the prologue to his last play, Carving a Statue.16
Instead of shedding light upon the work, the author once
again attacks one of his critics for being concerned about
the wrong things in a work of literature.
. . . the faults the reviewers find in it [the play] are
curiously different from the faults I find, which are
harder faults to defend, and I may be forgiven perhaps
for not pointing them out. (p. 7)
The use of the phrase "curiously different" suggests that
only a playwright can truly criticize a play (his own or
another's). Greene continues, cautioning the reader not to
see all the characters as symbols by commenting upon the
absurdity of symbol-happy critics
I was accused of over-lading the play with symbols, but
I have never cared greatly for the symbolic and I can
detect no symbols in thir play . . . (p. 8)
And he elaborates at amusing length about this kind of
critical symbol hunting in an earlier work.
242
I remember that when my film The Third Man had its
little hour of success a rather learned reviewer
expounded its symbolism with even less excuse in a
monthly paper. The surname of Harry Lime he connected
with a passage about the lime tree in Sir James Frazer's
Golden Bough. The "Christian" name of the principal
character— Holly— was obviously/ he wrote, closely con
nected with Christmas— paganism and Christianity were
thus joined in a symbolic dance. The truth of the mat
ter is, I wanted for my "villain" a name natural and yet
disagreeable, and to me "Lime" represented the quick
lime in which murderers are said to be buried. An asso
ciation of ideas, not, as the reviewer claimed, a sym
bols As for Holly, my first choice of name had not met
with the approval of the American "star" who considered
that the name had (by God knows what association of
ideas) a homosexual ring. So I looked through an an
thology of bad American verse in search of a preaame,
and found Holly— Thomas Holly Chivers had some renown in
the nineteenth century. So much for symbols.17 (p. 8)
The over-all suggestion here is that much literary commen
tary is too precious, and that unfortunately most "serious"
readers suffer from an overexposure to this kind of criti
cism. Fortunately most producing writers seem not to have
been trained in various schools of aesthetics. For the art
ist the story comes first, and in Greene there is always a
thread of melodrama (and even comedy) which is more impor
tant than purity of form.
In one of his best-known essays, "The Lost Child
hood," Greene admits that his initial interest in writing
came from reading such melodramatic "popular" novelists as
H. Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, and Marjorie Bowen. In A
Sort of Life he reiterates his debt to them. Greene himself
has often been treated as only a half-"serious" writer
because he has continued to write "entertainments" through
out his career.
243
That is probably why Greene seems to show little
patience to the so-called literati. In his books he almost
never shows anyone whose literary taste he would consider
impeccable. Louise Scobie, for example, whose chief pastime
is reading, has a shelf of Virginia Woolf's novels and for
Greene, Louise's choice of that writer suggests her own lim
itedness . In an essay on Francois Mauriac he talks of the
loss to the English novel after Henry James's death.
It was as if the world of fiction had lost a dimension:
the characters of such distinguished writers as Mrs.
Virginia Woolf and Mr. E. M. Forster wandered like card
board symbols through a world that was paper thin.18
Louise Scobie and the critic, Waterbury (The End of the
Affair) who seems to like Forster very much, are both, it
seems, rather thin, unappealing characters. I can think of
no Greene character who reads Henry James or Conrad or even
Ford Maddox Ford or Trollope, whom Greene found such a con
solation in his travel books. He seems especially irritated
by those "serious" readers and amateur critics who derive
their literary opinions and standards of taste from the
classroom or from the lecture platform. In a sense these
people force a writer to take himself too seriously as a
public figure and with their breathless worship they actual
ly take away the writer's autonomy and spoil his art.
Greene's reaction to such people is seen in The
Third Man when Holly Martins appears before the Vienna chap
ter of the British Cultural Relations Society. Through an
unlikely coincidence of first initials and surnames, Holly,
244
who writes Westerns under the pen name Buck Dexter, is
mistaken for a "serious" novelist named Benjamin Dexter.
When Mr. Crabbin, the president of the Society, offers to
pay him for a lecture, Holly accepts eagerly because he
needs the money to remain in Vienna.
Having accepted Carbbin's hospitality, Holly forgets
about his obligatory "lecture," in his preoccupation with
the mystery he sees surrounding the death of Harry Lime in
the streets of Vienna. In Chapter III we saw that The Third
Man moves through a complex pattern of pursuits. Holly and
Anna are pursued by the police; Holly is followed by Harry
Lime's friends; Holly is after the mysterious third man and
the killer of nis friend Harry; and Holly is pursued all
over Vienna by Mr. Crabbin (p. 47). Comically it is Crabbin
who succeeds first in capturing Holly and whisking him mys
teriously through the night to the lecture at the Cultural
Relations Society.
Herr Koch, about to reveal something about Lime's
death, has been murdered, and Holly expects to be picked up
and questioned by the police. As he steps out of his hotel,
"a man came forward touched his cap and said firmly,
'Please, sir.'" Assuming the man comes from Calloway, Holly
"surrendered without protest," and soon finds himself racing
through the dark streets of Vienna, "where he lost all sense
of direction." When they stop, the driver leads Holly up
two flights of stairs, rings a bell, and before the confused
245
writer can ask a question, his escort has disappeared and
"already the door was opening."
His eyes were dazzled from the darkness by the
lights inside: he heard but he could hardly see the
advance of Crabbin. "Oh, Mr. Dexter, we have been so
anxious, but better late than never. Let me introduce
you to Miss Wilbraham and the Gr&fin von Meyersdorf."
(p. 62)
When the redoubtable Crabbin rushes forward to greet Holly,
the reader experiences a comic sense of relief. Holly
expected to be taken to the police; the reader suspects the
driver serves a more sinister organization. This scene is a
fine illustration of Greene's technique of building suspense
and using that suspense for comic purpose.
The scene continues to carry out the suggestion of a
trap in which Holly is caught. He sees before him a steam
ing coffee urn and the people of the Society:
. . . two young men with the happy intelligent faces of
sixth formers, and huddled in the background, like faces
in a family album, a multitude of the old-fashioned, the
dingy, the earnest and cheery features of constant
readers. Martins looked behind him, but the door had
closed. (p. 62)
The gathering above does not look like a diverting group.
Indeed they look like either enthusiastic students
(of whom there are few) or faded wall flowers (of which
there are many). The "constant reader" for Martins (and
possibly for Greene) is "dingy," unattractive, and faded—
not at all the sort of person one would choose to spend an-
evening with. But if the last sentence above suggests that
Holly has a sudden urge, to turn and flee, he finds the trap
246
door has closed behind him. He is caught for the evening.
Now the literary fans swoop down upon him. One
young man hands him a cup while another "shovelled in sugar
before he could say he preferred his coffee unsweetened."
Yet another asks if he would mind autographing one of his
books later. "A large woman in black silk bore down upon
him," announcing that she does not like his novels. Crabbin
interrupts her.
"Now Mrs. Bannock, wait for question time."
"I know I'm downright, but I'm sure Mr. Dexter val
ues honest criticism."
The stress which Mrs. Bannock lays upon the term "honest"
suggests that she feels it is a rarity; in fact, only she is
able to provide it.
As Holly's head spins about in a miserable attempt
to respond to a barrage of questions, Crabbin bids him fin
ish his coffee (which he has not been able to taste yet) and
then hustles him into an inner room "where a number of
elderly people were sitting . . . with an air of sad
patience" (p. 63).
Greene's technique in the scene is like high speed
photography. The bewildered author is nearly attacked by
culture hounds, pulled in several directions at once, never
allowed to respond to anyone because these people are really
less interested in Benjamin Dexter than they are in drawing
attention to themselves. Through all this unreal chatter,
Holly is preoccupied by the murder of Herr Koch, and so he
247
misses Crabbin's introductory speech— a handbook coverage of
contemporary literature. Calloway, always aware of every
one, tells the reader how Crabbins usually conducts his
meetings.
Apparently Crabbin opened the proceedings, and knowing
Crabbin I am sure that it was a very lucid, very fair
and unbiased picture of the contemporary English novel.
I have heard him give that talk so often, varied only by
the emphasis given to the work of the particular English
visitor. He would have touched lightly on various prob
lems of technique— the point of view, the passage of
time, and then he would have declared the meeting open
for questions and discussions.
Martins missed the first question altogether, but
luckily Crabbin filled the gap and answered it satis
factorily. (p. 64)
Calloway's assurance that this "talk" is given over and over
again with slight variations in emphasis suggests that the
whole affair is an exercise in meaninglessness. The sugges
tion that Crabbin "touched lightly" upon the technical prob
lems of the novelist indicates how very perfunctory such
coverage is— even in the classroom. Apparently Rollo is
lulled nearly to sleep by the introduction so that he misses
the first question addressed to him, but when a woman asks
"with passionate interest" if he is writing a new book Rollo
is able to respond with some vigor.
Asked what writer had influenced him most, Martins
replies "Grey." He means the writer of Westerns, but the
answer satisfies everyone except an old Austrian who asks
"Grey. What Grey? I do not know the name."
Martins felt he was safe now and said, "Zane Grey— I
don't know any other," and was mystified at the low sub
servient laughter from the English colony.
248
Crabbin interposed quickly for the sake of the Aus-
trians: "That is a little joke of Mr. Dexter's. He
meant the poet Gray— a gentle, mild subtle genius— one
can see the affinity."
"And he is called Zane Grey?"
"That was Mr. Dexter's joke. Zane Grey wrote what
we call Westerns— cheap popular novelettes about bandits
and cowboys." (pp. 64-65)
The joke here is that both the Austrian and Holly Martins
are ignorant of literature to some degree. Martins really
does not know the poet Gray, but the English think that his
claim must be some kind of joke. Crabbin, thinking Martins
is joking, wants to clarify the matter for the non-English
members of the Society. Now the Austrian asks if Grey is a
great writer.
"No, no. Far from it," Mr. Crabbin said. "In the
strict sense I would not call him a writer at all . . .
He was just a popular entertainer." (p. 65)
Throughout these remarks by the self-confident, bespecta
cled absurd Crabbin, Holly Martins becomes increasingly ir
ritated. He had never thought of himself as a "writer," and
he sees nothing wrong with being a "popular entertainer."
He now explodes at Crabbin; after all, he asks, what was
Shakespeare if not a popular entertainer? And someone
answers "A poet." These very questions are, I think, impor
tant to Greene. From his own early reading and from his use
of melodrama, murder, and pursuit, Greene is clearly an
entertainer. He has even committed the crime of being popu
lar. But is also clear that he would not go so far as to
put Zane Grey or Dorothy Sayers in the same class as Shake
speare merely because they all entertained people. The
249
brief description of Shakespeare as "poet" and Graham
Greene's own affection for Henry James tell us that he con-
t iers it very important that a man have a literary sense ab
about him even if he entertains.
Rollo Martins, still smarting under the attack upon
his hero, snaps at Crabbin:
"Have you ever read Zane Grey?"
"No, I can't say . . ."
"Then you don't know what you are talking about."
(p. 65)
What we find laughable here is, of course, the gross and
obvious ignorance which D. H. Munro describes as one of the
"types of humor" in his Argument of Laughter.20 But even
greater comedy arises from a false social pressure which the
Cultural Society feels when a "great writer" says he has no
knowledge of Joyce. Like the characters in Anderson's fair
tale who convince themselves that the Emperor was wearing
clothes, all of them know that this writer must be avant
garde, and it behooves them to get "with it" fast. Even
Crabbin has been put in his place and indicates that he may
reconsider the literary reputation of Zane Grey.
Greene now returns to the suggestion of attack by
the literati.
A number of names were simultaneously flung at
Martins— little sharp pointed names like Stern, round
pebbles like Woolf. A young Austrian with an ardent
intellectual black forelock called out "Daphne du
Maurier," and Mr. Crabbin winced and looked sideways at
Martins. He said in an undertone, "Be kind to them."
(p. 66, italics mine)
Here the author has skillfully chosen the metaphor of ston
250
ing to indicate the desperation of their attack. The vowel
sounds in Stein and Woolf seem to have the qualities Greene
suggests and as in the scene which followed Holly's
entrance, we can imagine the bewildered writer hopelessly
bobbing and ducking the literary allusions. When Martins is
asked about Virginia Woolf's poetic style, Crabbin whispers,
"You might say something about the stream of consciousness."
"Stream of what?"
A note of despair came into Crabbin's voice,
"Please, Mr. Dexter, these people are your genuine
admirers. They want to hear your views. If you knew
how they have besieged the Society." (p. 66)
Again Crabbin seems to think that Martins is purposely being
obtuse in order to make fun of the Society. He begged
Holly's indulgence above ("Be kind to them.") with the sug
gestion "they know not what they do." Now it seems that
Crabbin believes the stream of consciousness is a technique
either so dated or so commonplace that a writer of "Dex
ter's" status would never condescend to talk of it. The
truly comic thing of course is that Martins does not know
what the literary term means. Again he lapses into near
trance, thinking only about Harry Lime and the mystery sur
rounding him. The narrator describes the conclusion of the
meeting as an "outburst of angry twitterings" in which vari
ous names are "flung to and fro." The suggestion here is
that of silly, violent birds. As the squawking continues,
Martins' attention leaves the room entirely.
As final evidence of their idiocy, Greene ends the
251
scene with Holly's autographing of Benjamin Dexter's novels.
As he is led to a table stacked with books, he asks "What
have I got to do?"
"Just a signature. That's all they expect. This is
my copy of The Curved Prow. I would be so grateful if
you'd just write a little something. ..."
Martins took his pen and wrote: "From B. Dexter,
author of The Lone Rider of Santa f£," and the young man
read the sentence and blotted it with a puzzled expres
sion. As Martins sat down and started signing Benjamin
Dexter's title pages, he could see in a mirror the young
man showing the inscription to Crabbin. Crabbin smiled
weakly and stroked his chin, up and down, up and down,
(p. 67)
If Crabbin and his Society suggest Greene's feeling
for the literary amateur, what is his attitude toward the
professional critic? In the last section of The End of the
Affair, Bendrix nearly misses Sarah's funeral because he has
consented to an interview by a critic named Waterbury who
writes for "one of the little reviews." We see Waterbury
from the point of view of Maurice Bendrix, himself egocen
tric and at times unreliable. But he Ls a good writer, and
throughout the novel he develops new sensitivity and a
deeper humanity. Thus his view of Waterbury is probably
very close to Greene's own.
Waterbury's chief "sin" is, quite predictably, ego
centrism and although Bendrix's satiric treatment is abra
sive, the critic seems to deserve it. Waterbury is a vain,
insensitive man whose preoccupation with the cliches of the
literary elite glorify only himself. Even before he meets
Waterbury, Bendrix thinks:
252
I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the
buried significances he would discover of which I was
unaware, and the faults I was tired of facing. Patron
izingly, in the end, he would place me probably a little
above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not
yet committed that crime— not yet, but although I retain
a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little
reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.
(p. 184)
While this is indeed a prejudgment, it proves only too true
of Waterbury. It also indicates that this critic is a
"type" which writers meet fairly frequently and with much
regret. When Bendrix finds Waterbury in a Tottenham Road
Court sherry bar, he has with him a disciple, a beautiful
girl named Sylvia who emulates him by wearing the same black
corduroy trousers and smoking the same cheap cigarettes as
her mentor.
Bendrix immediately sees the interview as a sort of
contest with the fair Sylvia as the prize. "He [Waterbury]
was so proud now, so patronizing to both of us, but he was
on the losing side" (italics mine). From Bendrix's view
point Waterbury has nothing to be proud of or patronizing
about "yet, poor devil, poor pimply devil, he had the nerve
to snub her when occasionally she made a simple human unin
tellectual comment" (p. 185). As the interview opens, Ben
drix announces that he cannot stay long because he has to
attend a funeral at Holders Green.
"A funeral in Golders Green1" Waterbury exclaimed.
"How like one of your own characters. It would have to
be Golders Green, wouldn't it?"
"I didn't choose the spot."
"Life imitating art."
"Is it a friend?" Sylvia asked with sympathy, and
253
Waterbury glared at her for her irrelevance. (pp. 185-
186)
Ironically it is only Sylvia who is both relevant and human.
Waterbury's gleeful exclamation indicates his complete
insensitivity to the human sorrow that a funeral suggests.
For him Sarah's funeral is summed up in the neatly turned
cocktail phrase, "Life imitating art." Bendrix is grateful
for Sylvia's sympathy.
For I was a human being to her and not a writer, a man
whose friends died and who attended their funerals, who
felt pleasure and pain, who might even need comfort, not
just a skilled craftsman whose work has greater sympathy
perhaps than Mr. Maugham's, though of course we cannot
rank it as high as . . (pT 186, italics mine)
Here Bendrix is satirizing the tone and style of the usual
review article. He wishes that the no-nonsense critic might
relate to him as a human being; in fact Greene would view
this inability on the part of a reviewer as a limitation on
his competence as critic. It is strange that the reviewer
talks about Bendrix's "sympathy" while his insensitive
behavior proves that he himself has no comprehension of the
term.
The three-way conversation which ensues underscores
Waterbury's obtuseness.
"What do you think of Forster?" Waterbury asked.
"Forster? Oh, I'm sorry. I was just wondering how
long it took to Golders Green."
"You ought to allow forty minutes," Sylvia said.
"You have to wait for an Edgware train."
"Forster," Waterbury repeated irritably.
"You'll have to take a bus from the station," Sylvia
said.
"Really, Sylvia, Bendrix hasn't come here to talk
about how to get to Golders Green."
254
"I'm sorry, Peter, I just thought— "
"Count six before thinking, Sylvia," Waterbury said.
"And now can we get back to E. M. Forster?"
"Need we?" I asked.
"It would be interesting, as you belong to such dif
ferent schools."
"Does he belong to a school? I didn't even know
that I did. Are you writing a textbook?"
Sylvia smiled, and he saw the smile. I knew from
that moment he would grind sharp the weapon of his
trade. (pp. 186-187)
Everything that Waterbury says in this exchange alienates
Bendrix, and the reviewer is either too stupid to realize
that or too vain to care. On the other hand Bendrix
responds warmly to Sylvia's humane sympathy and he uses that
sympathy to "win" her away from her mentor. Waterbury's
attitude becomes intolerable when he snaps at Sylvia,
insinuating that she has no business thinking at all.
Soon Bendrix, obviously bored by the trite queries
and nasty egotism of his interviewer, decides to leave.
"But you've only been here five minutes. It's
really important to get this article right."
"It's really important for me not be late at Golders
Green."
"I don't see why." (p. 187)
Of course Waterbury really cannot imagine anything more
important than his review, and in short, that attitude, all
too common among professional critics, is precisely what is
wrong with them.
Sylvia now says she lives near Golders Green, and
she decides to leave with Maurice. Waterbury, perceiving
Bendrix's "victory," is clearly irritated. As they rise to
go:
255
"You used the stream of consciousness in one of your
books," Waterbury said with desperate haste. "Why did
you abandon1 ' the method?' *
"Oh, I don't know. Why does one change a flat?"
"Did you feel it was a failure?"
"I feel that about all my books. Well, Good-bye."
"I'll send you a copy of the article," he said as
though he were uttering a threat. (p. 187, italics
mine)
Even when he senses his defeat, Waterbury cannot abandon the
hackneyed literary questions, nor the reviewer's ultimate
weapon, the veiled threat. Doubtless Greene finds him petty
and absurd, but there is genuine desperation and the sugges
tion of pain that he cannot understand people, both of which
make him pitiable. His insensitivity is important at this
point in The End of the Affair because it contrasts with
Bendrix's own increasing humanity. Although Waterbury's
egoism is a matter of deadly seriousness, Greene chooses the
device of comic satire to show how ridiculous such self
absorption is and to allow us to judge how much Bendrix has
grown during the novel.
The Ugly American
With the American publication of The Quiet American
in 1956, Greene acquired a reputation as an unfair critic of
the United States. After fifteen years the novel proves to
have been painfully prophetic in its analysis of American
attitudes toward Southeast Asia, and while the book is anti-
American, it is hardly an attack by a pro-Communist writer
under capitalism. Furthermore it is neither the first nor
the only example of anti-Americanism one finds in Greene.
256
Indeed this survey will show that it is a less "vicious"
treatment than Greene had given America and Americans in
earlier work. Ore can trace a softening of his attitude
toward Americans actually beginning with The Quiet American
and continuing through his later books, The Comedians and
Travels with My Aunt.
Satirizing Americans and American institutions puts
Greene into a fair-sized group of modern British writers.
But his approach is somewhat different from those of many of
his contemporaries like Aldous Huxley ^After Many a Summer,
Ape and Essence), Evelyn Waugh (The Loved One), and even
Kingsley Amis (One Fat Englishman) who set their satiric
novels in the United States. Greene seems to be content to
leave Forest Lawn and American kitsch alone upon the North
American continent, where he wishes they would stay. Al
though he deplores their values generally he attacks Ameri
cans when they meddle in foreign countries and especially
when they apply their double standards of morality in deal
ings with these nations. Thus he ought not to be accused of
writing unfairly about American institutions that he does
not understand. He knows more about the situations he
writes of than do his American intruders.
The Quiet American certainly shows Greene's anti-
Americanism. The major figure is Alden Pyle who was treated
extensively in Chapter II. Pyle is atypical, however, sim
ply because he is a quiet American. Greene portrays most of
257
the Americans in Indochina as loudmouths, heavy drinkers,
and whoremongers. Pyle is too serious, too dedicated really
to fit into the mold of the American abroad. Although
Greene finds Pyle's naivete irritating, he does allow him
the virtue of sincerity. He spotlights Pyle's virtues by
introducing a minor American character against whom Pyle can
be measured— the American Economic Attache, known only by
the abbreviated and nearly archtypically American Christian
name "Joe." Joe is never fully developed as a character,
and his sole function seems to be to serve as a representa
tive of the money-oriented but hypocritically puritanical
American presence which Greene makes the reader feel
throughout the novel. Joe is a fool, but he has a sinister
predecessor who is even more of an American caricature than
himself. That is the cynical Mr. Crane who appears in
Greene's second published novel, The Name of Action (1931).
The situation in that early book is curiously paral
lel to the one in The Quiet American which would come a
quarter century later. There is a similar conflict between
Idealism and Pragmatism, but in the earlier novel the roles
are reversed; the cold pragmatism of the American is part of
his characterization. Oliver Chant, the idealistic hero of
The Name of Action is a romantic British journalist who has
come to Trier in central Europe to help defeat General
Demassener, the dictator of that country. Chant's revolu
tionary "side" must have weapons for a planned revolution,
258
and he must buy them from an unscrupulous American gentleman
who has been supplying arms to Demassener as well.
The "American gentleman" [Greene's quotation marks] was
named Crane . . .
How shabby, Chant wondered, was the underside of even
the most selfless success. For Mr. Crane, the man so
essential to arms hidden in dark barges slipping through
the night . . . had a fat face and small eyes and was
dressed in a mustard-coloured suit with brown shiny
shoes and trousers that bagged at the knees. (p. 190)
Chant is disgusted at Crane when the latter extends his
"warm hand stained yellow with nictone" and ushers him into
a small tasteless office. Ironically as he gestures for
Chant to sit down, Crane says "'When you sit here you sit in
America. Have a whiskey?"' (p. 191). (Throughout his char
acterizations of Americans Greene focuses upon "vices."
Most Americans partake of vulgar sex and smoke and drink too
much, but the more innocent seem to live almost exclusively
on chewing gum and Coca-Cola.)
Chant refuses the whiskey which Crane pours for him
anyway— into an unwashed glass— while telling him about the
curse of prohibition: "'Boy, could I tell you a few funny
stories about prohibition"' (p. 192). Of course such stor
ies are out of place, for Chant has come to buy weapons.
"Ah, you are trying to hustle me, Mr. Chant." With
magniloquent gesture he drained his whiskey . . . "Oh,
boy," he said, "until you've seen me hustle, you don't
know what hustling is." (p. 192)
Greene captures the "Boy-oh-boy" flavor of American slang in
the dialogue he gives to Crane, but as a matter of fact
259
Chant wants many more revolvers and machine guns than Crane
can readily supply. Crane does not want to be rushed
because he just does not feel that the revolution is a good
enough "investment" for him to chance anything on it. When
Chant reminds Crane that he has supplied Demassener, Crane
says that he was "willing to take a risk there," partly
because of the dictator's beautiful wife. Now he talks of
Anne Marie, Demassener's wife, not knowing that Chant is in
love with her.
Mr. Crane leant forward and not noticing the set face
opposed to him, moulded a body in the air with his
hands. (p. 196)
As he watches Crane's lecherous hands and hears his obscene
words, Chant winces, thinking of this woman whom he loves.
"Say, she's a prize bitch," said Mr. Crane his fingers
building up a body from feet to knees, from knees to
breasts, while Chant, in spite of anger and disgust and
a sense of slow stain watched his hands with fascina
tion. (p. 196)
"And I don't believe she'd be too difficult either," he
added, his eyes brooding moistly on impossible scenes,
but never resting on his own fat, yellow hands, soiled
coat, and bagging trousers. (p. 197)
Crane is an insensitive, physically repulsive slob, and it
is not accidental that he is American; the choice of nation
ality helps to characterize him as a cheerfully vulgar man
who is at the same time ruthlessly motivated by a desire for
the "quick buck." His attitude toward sex— a beautiful
woman viewed as "a prize bitch"— is central to his thorough
ly disgusting portrait.
260
By the time that Greene writes The Quiet American
Crane, the vicious American profiteer, has metamorphosed
into the middle-aged boy, Joe, the American Economic Attache
in Saigon. The figure is somewhat funnier now and he is not
utterly beyond hope of salvation.
Although he is comic, Joe is never a sympathetic
character. The quintessential American representing his
people in a foreign, even hostile, land, he is a servant of
his own government and basically a stupidly jingoistic one
who invokes all the proper cliche phrases about freedom and
democracy without ever falling under the spell of those
words as Alden Pyle does. The reader's first view of Joe is
reminiscent of the physical description of Crane in the
earlier book
He was a stout middle-aged man with an exaggerated bot
tom and a face that looked as if it had never needed a
razor. (p. 30)
The description suggests flabbiness— both physical and moral
— and at the same time immaturity in that Joe seems not to
need to shave. Joe is an anonymous figure remembered only
as negative presence, for whenever he enters, Fowler men
tions all his unattractive features. Joe has no positive
description and no last name.
He was a man one always forgot. To this day I can
not describe him, except his fatness and his powdered
clean-shaven cheeks and his big laugh; all his identity
escapes me— except that he was called Joe. There are
some men whose names are always shortened. (p. 149)
Fowler notices Joe first on the night that Pyle
261
first met Phuong. Pyle had invited Fowler and Phuong to
come to his table, and as they approach, the Economic Atta
che beams "a great warm welcoming smile, full of confidence,
like the man who keeps friends because he uses the right
deodorants" (p. 34). He makes a noisy show of pulling out
chairs and calling waiters. Fowler perceives him in terms
of vulgar commercialism suggested by allusion to American
deodorant ads. This.impression is borne out later when
Fowler writes that at a certain tasteless remark: "The Eco
nomic Attache gave a loud commercial laugh. He looked like
a face on television" (p. 34).
In his handling of Mr. Crane, Greene suggested vul
garity by showing his attitude toward sex. Americans in his
fiction generally talk big, perform badly, and boast fantas
tically of their sexual prowess. At the dinner above a loud
American journalist jokes with Joe about going to a broth
el," The House of Five Hundred Girls." Behind much of their
conversation there seems to be meaning conveyed by a leer or
a nudge in the ribs. Much later in their relationship the
naive Pyle asks Fowler about the memory of his deepest
sexual experience, and the Englishman tells very simply of a
surprisingly unexciting, poignant moment. Pyle consciously
contrasts this with another answer he has received.
"Joe said it was being in bed with a Chink and a
Negress at the same time."
"I'd have thought that one up too when I was twen
ty ."
"Joe's fifty."
"I wonder what mental age they gave him in the war."
262
(p. 131)
Fowler is obviously repulsed by this boastful locker-room
talk from an aging, literally ugly, large-bottomed American.
One might expect Joe's answer from a Marine recruit, but
Greene clearly shares Fowler's disgust that it comes from a
middle-aged representative of the U. S. government. Fowler
suggests that the experience never occurred, and he finds it
pathetically immature that Joe felt the need to invent the
story. The reader feels Fowler's pity for anyone who would
believe that such a cheap sexual encounter could be profound
in any case.
As Fowler sees him, however, Joe is always careful
about his language even though he is a bit too effusive. He
avoids all profanity; he speaks of "this darned driver" or
"these darned Vietnamese," as if he were afraid to say
"damned." About sex Joe holds to a double standard. He can
leer and joke with other men about women, but although he
has no real respect for women, he holds to the archaic
notion that one must never allude to sex in their presence.
The most extended treatment of Joe comes when Fowler
goes to the American Legation to find Pyle. Instead, in
Pyle's office he finds Joe and with him, his secretary,
Phuong's sister. Joe's greeting is overwhelming:
"Come in, come in, Tom," Joe called boisterously.
"Glad to see you. How's your leg? We don't often get a
visit from you to our little outfit. Pull up a chair.
Tell me how you think the new offensive's going. Saw
Granger last night at the Continental. He's for the
North again. That boy's keen. Where there's news,
263
there's Granger. Have a cigarette. Help yourself. You
know Miss Hei? Can't remember all these names— too hard
for an old fellow like me. I call her 'Hi/ there1'— she
likes it. None of this stuffy colonialism. What's the
gossip of the market, Tom? You fellows certainly do
keep your ears to the ground. Sorry to hear about your
leg. Alden told me— " (p. 192)
Once again, as with Crane, Greene has captured American
jargon almost embarrassingly well. Joe calls Fowler "Tom"
throughout the conversation, and these two are hardly
friends. (Fowler's calling him "Joe" is entirely different
of course because he does not address the American in that
way. Fowler tells us that he remembers only the short first
name earlier in the book and he suggests the reason is that
Joe is so typical and nondescript.) Joe's tone throughout
is much too familiar; the speech seems nervously packed with
questions and offers. ("How's your leg?" and "Have a cigar
ette. Help yourself.") But these brief sentences seem to
fend off communication rather than invite it. At the begin
ning Joe asks about Fowler's injured leg but gives him no
time to reply. Then, amid offers of seats and smokes, he
changes the subject six times, climaxing with a pointlessly
silly pun on his secretary's name— "Hei." He ends with
another reference to Fowler's leg— a perfectly absurd circu
lar monologue, one whose rapid-fire pace alone makes Joe
sound ridiculous.
Fowler interrupts Joe's stream of talk to ask
briefly for Pyle.
"Oh, Alden's not in the office this morning. Guess
he's at home. Does a lot of his work at home."
"I know what he does at home."
"That boy's keen, Eh, what's that you said?"
"Anyway, I know one of the things he does at home."
"I don't catch on, Tom. Slow Joe— that's me. Al
ways was. Always will be." (pp* 192-193)
Fowler is sarcastic in his innuendo here, but Joe seems
unable to understand what he is saying. One can imagine his
Babbitt-like grin as he merrily speaks his sing-song rhyme
Slow
Joe—
That1s me
Always was.
Always will be.
But Fowler is not amused. He makes himself perfectly clear:
"'He sleeps with my girl— your typist's sister.'" Now Joe
is embarrassed; one just does not talk about such things in
a business office, especially "with a lady in the room."
But Greene makes it clear that Joe has no respect
for Oriental women, in fact, he considers them inferior
people. After Pyle's death, Joe refers to the relationship
between Pyle and Phuong as "that unfortunate business." And
he continues, "I don't mind telling you I had a long talk
with him about the girl. You see, I had the advantage of
knowing Professor and Mrs. Pyle— " But here Fowler, dis
gusted by the American's insensitivity, interrupts Joe; he
cannot bear to ar about how "unfortunate" it was for an
American to be involved with an Oriental. Fowler should
detest Joe but he does not; he finds him only pitiful:
When I looked back at him he was watching me with pained
perplexity: an eternal elder brother who didn't under
stand. (p. 33)
265
Even in this observation one can detect a changing of
Greene's attitude toward Americans in his fiction. Before
looking at his later Americans, however, let us survey what
Greene has said about the United States in his commentary—
fictional and nonfictional. We recall that in his fiction
he has not attacked Americans in their homeland. In his
non-fiction he is quite willing to do so. One can find
occasional references to America from the 'thirties onward,
and as his sympathy for American characters has increased
over the years, his view of Americanism, especially of the
presence of the central government, has darkened.
While Greene was reviewing films for the Spectator
in 1936— before he had ever been to the Western hemisphere—
he reviewed an American film version of Crime and Punish-
ment, which starred Peter Lorre and which was in every way
unsuccessful. In his estimation the film suffered by com
parison to a French version of the same work done earlier
the same year. But significantly Greene, the movie review
er, seems to find the chief thing wrong with the film is its
pervasive Americanism.
This gleaming lunch-bar-chromium version which opens
at the university with Raskolnikov receiving his degree
and listening to the Vice-chancellor's earnest American
abstractions about Youth and Alma Mater and the Future—
is vulgar as only the great new world can be vulgar with
the vulgarity of the completely unreligious of senti
mental idealism of pitch pine ethics, with the hollow
optimism about human nature of a salesman who has never
failed to sell his can of beans.21
This quotation— realy superfluous in the review— contains
elements of all that Greene (and other European critics)
found wrong in America. "Earnest American abstractions"
would ultimately lead the innocent Pyle to his disastrous
"do-gooding" in Indochina. The term "hollow optimism" sug
gests the pragmatic commercialism which both Mr. Crane and
Joe have already exhibited. Vulgarity is always— in things
American— expressed in terms of bigness and newness— hence
the "chromium/" cheap metallic touch which Greene detests in
a film as well as a drugstore lunch counter. Greene espe
cially hates the vulgarity of "unreligion" and "sentimental
idealism"— even as early as 1936.
Greene again hits at the "pitch pine" ethos of Amer
icans in the brief sections about the United States in his
fine 1938 travel book. The Lawless Roads. The folksy Ameri
can Westerner repels him as we see in this account of one
whom he met.
In the train from New Orleans a Texan in the car talked
continuously in the Will Rogers voice, the commercial
drawl/ the small-town complacent wisdom. All through
the night the proverbs welled out full of fake kindli
ness and superficial truth— a Metro-Goldwyn philosophy.22
Greene picks up on that "Metro-Goldwyn philosophy" in a
brief piece called "Film Lunch" included in the essay col
lection, The Lost Childhood. In it he recounts a dinner
speech by Louis B. Mayer, a talk whose only real subject was
money. He numbers the stars and film workers (from Alexan
der Korda to Robert Taylor) and describes their hushed piety
in the presence of L. B. Mayer whom they seem to consider a
267
deity. Greene, in fact, couches his description of the
luncheon in terms that suggest something between a religious
revival and a boxing match, a combination which spells out
the peculiarly commercial nature of the American film indus
try. Mayer was supposed to speak only five minutes:
He has spoken for forty minutes: for forty minutes we
have listened with fascination to the voice of American
capital itself: a touch of religion, a touch of the
family, the mixture goes smoothly down.22
Certain nearly comic "symbols" of Americanism are
sprinkled throughout Greene's novels. The American sector
of Vienna in The Third Man, for example, stands out because
on every street there is an ice cream parlor. And there is
the ubiquitous Coca-Cola. Coke is a really wonderful Ameri
can symbol. First of all it is now world-wide and it is
unarguably American. Like many American values (to Greene)
Coke is sweet, fizzy, universally well-liked (almost habit
forming). It is also fairly cheap and not really the pro
duct of skilled hands or aging like, say, champagne. But
coke is also without any real nutritional value; it is fat
tening; it ruins your teeth. It promises to be "the real
thing," but is in fact only foamy carbohydrate. Finally
Coca Cola, Inc., actually sets up companies within foreign
nations— seeming to give real help— but instead creating a
sweet and sticky satrapy.
Francis Wyndham21* seems to sum up Greene's attitude
toward America, at least through the 'forties. It was,
after all, "just the drugstore and the Coca-Cola, the ham-
268
burger, the graceless sinless empty chromium world" (p. 15).
We will see that the image of America in later books is less
this one of flimsiness than it is one of sinister power. In
the 'sixties, political interference from the United States
was far more deadly than the spread of Coca-Cola.
Those Americans who appear in Greene's two most
recent novels— The Comedians (1965) and Travels with My Aunt
(1969) are still clearly satirized, but there is a -hange in
tone and treatment. Greene's criticism seems to focus now
upon the government of the United States and less upon indi
vidual Americans who are as much the victims of this evil
monolith as are other people of the world.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, are objects of satire, of
course, but as I have indicated in Chapter III, they are
warmly regarded by their creator because they are themselves
sympathetic, basically good people. In Travels with My Aunt
two more Americans— Lucinda and James O'Toole— illustrate
Greene's change of sentiment. These "recent" Americans dif
fer from Mr. Crane and Joe, their earlier counterparts, in
that they seem really to care about other people in the
world. Both Mr. Smith and Mr. O'Toole use their influence
to get British citizens out of Latin American jails where
they are being kept without good reason, taking real risks
to help others without ulterior motives.
At the same time the intrusive government of the
United States lies behind the scenes. In The Comedians the
269
spector of Washington, D. C., haunts the pages much as sug
gestions of death which run throughout that novel. Most of
the serious discussion of the American position in Haiti
consistently comes from that very serious character, Dr.
Magiot. During one discussion between him and the narrator,
Brown, he suggests that "Papa Doc" is seen by America as "a
bulwark against Communism. There will be no Cuba and no Bay
of Pits here."25 Magiot goes on to tell of the CIA betrayal
of any anti-Duvalier forces in Haiti, and he seems to have
Greene's endorsement from his declaration that to Americans
Haiti is "an evil slum floating a few miles from Florida"
(p. 249). In the last pages of the novel Dr. Magiot's fare
well letter to Brown brings the horror of American power to
a climax. Soon, writes Magiot, the Americans will return to
Haiti and the Duvalier government will have to show its
gratitude by producing some dead Communists. His death will
be painfully slow of course, but the victim is sardonic:
A few Communists can always be found, like Jews and
Catholics. Chaing Kai-shek, the heroic defender of
Formosa, fed us, you remember, into the boilers of rail
way engines. God knows for what medical research Papa
Doc may find me useful. (p. 307)
Thus it is the giant American government which is condemned
in these later books. Mr. Smith has tried to make himself
felt in that system, but being a humane idealist, he has no
real chance to succeed. When we meet Mr. Smith he has had
nothing to do with American power politics since 1948. We
recall that the Haitian officials expect that he will take
270
graft; their expectation is doubtless based upon experience.
At any rate it is his peculiar distance from current U. S.
foreign policy (the American government would hardly be
interested in his vegetarian centers) that clearly distin
guishes Mr. Smith from Joe in The Quiet American.
At the very end of The Comedians when Brown, now an
exile from Haiti, seeks employment in the Dominican Repub
lic, he is interviewed by a curiously familiar figure. As
Brown climbs the steps of the large American building:
A large fat man with an anonymous face shaved as smooth
as marble stood at the top. He might have been a city
mayor waiting to deliver a freedom. (p. 291)
This time his name is Schuyler Wilson. He too is smooth-
shaven— like Crane and Joe— but this time the face has an
inhuman qu&lity— marble. Quite predictably his first words
to Brown are "'Have a Coke.'" Although he is unappealing,
Wilson is not corrupt or stupidly insensitive as earlier
versions of his type are. If he is not fully human, it is
because he behaves in a mechanical, bureaucratic fashion,
and thus he represents the new "official" American.
The two Americans who appear in Travels with My Aunt
are quite likable. They are "Tooley," Lucinda O'Toole, the.
attractive college girl on the Orient Express in the middle
chapters of the book, and her father, James O'Toole, the CIA
agent who crops up by laughable coincidence in the final
section.
Tooley is majoring in English literature, and her
271
giddy, half-baked intellectualism quite effectively satir
izes the typically liberated "Eng. lit." type of the late
1960's. Tooley has a "literary" sense which manifests it
self in her stories, especially in comically inappropriate
quotations and fictional parallels. When Tooley reveals
that a "fabulous" black man, known as Zack, supplied her
marijuana, Henry realizes that the man is his aunt's ex
lover, Wordsworth. Says Tooley, "'Now isn't that the wild
est sort of coincidence? Like something in Thomas Hardy.'"
In comic ignorance Henry replies, "'You seem to know a lot
about literature.'" Actually what she knows are all the
cliches from the college classroom. The coincidences in
Thomas Hardy (which have the effect of dramatic irony in
tragedy) are really not at all like the absurd coincidences
that both Tooley and Henry should know the comic Wordsworth.
Tooley explains that her father wanted her to major
in social science to serve in the Peace Corps, which shows
his concern for others, but they do not agree on most things
since "he sees the world horizontally, I mean that's super
ficial . . . I want to see the world vertically."
"In depth," I said.
"These help," she said, waving her cigarette. "I
feel a bit turned on already. It's your fabulous way of
talking. I feel I sort of met you in the English lit
erature course. As a character. We did Dickens in
depth." (p. 87)
Of course she is silly to relate to people as one might to
the material in a seminar, but Tooley's trouble is that she
has been too closely involved with phony artists and profes
272
sional (in her case, classroom) literary critics. At heart
she is a warm, responsive human being; that is her salva
tion. She is also a young American. That Greene finds her
attractive despite all her "kookiness" indicates, I think, a
shift in his view of Americans.
Henry Pulling meets James O'Toole in South America
while travelling up the Plato River into Paraguay where his
Aunt Augusta has journeyed to join her lover, Mr. Visconti.
At their initial meeting Henry notes how un-American O'Toole
seems to him.
He wore an English tweed coat and a pair of grey flannel
trousers: thin and melancholy, he looked as English as
I did . . . like a man who has lost his way, he had a
habit of looking this way and that with anxiety. He had
nothing in common with the Americans whom I had met in
England, noisy and self-confident, with the young
unlined faces of children romping and shouting to one
another across the nursery floor. (p. 174)
In focusing upon O'Toole's pathos, upon his thinness and
melancholy, Henry dissociates him entirely from the loud,
vulgar commercialism which typified Joe and Granger in The
Quiet American. O'Toole specifically lacks self-confidence,
and Greene finds that good because the confidence of Ameri
cans, in his experience, is the careless, insensitive confi
dence of an indulgent child. That is the significant change
in James O'Toole, a change even from Mr. Smith as -decent as
he was; O'Toole is an American who has grown up. No longer
is "the American" sure that he can save the world like Alden
Pyle or that he can "hustle" better than anybody else like
Crane. Henry realizes that this American must be Tooley's
273
father when he hears the American refer to himself by that
same nickname. When he makes this association, Henry also
remembers Tooley's claim that her father was in the CIA, but
when he tells O'Toole about his daughter's claim,
O'Toole denies any affiliation with the American security
organization.
The father and daughter relationship between the
O'Tooles is quite special. James O'Toole is very concerned
about his daughter; she loves him too. In the final pages
of Travels O'Toole mentions his daughter several times, and
there is a suggestion that Henry has bridged a generation
gap between them. The American says that the one reason he
helps Henry is that he is "a friend of Lucinda's." He tells
Henry the latest news about her whenever they meet. (Hen
ry's cementing of the relationship between the two "Tooleys"
parallels that between Henry and Augusta whom he discovers—
in perfect comic pattern— to be his own mother.) It is sig
nificant that while Greene passed up the opportunity to
ridicule the breakdown of the American family (by now a
standard anti-Americanism) and chose to show real concern on
the part of an American father for his daughter. And
although she has been spoiled by materialism, particularly
his money, and while she stood in danger of "corruption"
from her mother who was bringing home boyfriends before
O'Toole divorced her, Tooley is shown as a warm and good-
humored girl.
274
There is no question that James O'Toole is a member
of the American CIA. Moreover, by further absurd coinci
dence he happens to be on the trail of Mr. Visconti, Augus
ta's octogenarian lover.
Through an absurd error Henry is thrown into jail,
and when O'Toole comes to see him, the American admits that
he is trailing Augusta to find Visconti. Henry asks sarcas
tically
"Is that part of your social research?" . . .
"I guess I sort of lied to you, Henry," he said,
looking ashamed again.
"Are you in the CIA, like Tooley told me?"
"Well . . . kind of . . . not exactly," he said,
clinging to his torn rag of deception like a blown out
umbrella in a high wind. Cp^ 213, italics mine)
Greene suggests that O'Toole is really sorry for trying to
deceive Henry (although Henry has not been fooled of
course). O'Toole's "job" is to capture Visconti, but he is
not willing to sacrifice his humanity to achieve that end.
When Henry remains loyal to Augusta and Visconti even after
O'Toole hints that he and the CIA can get him out of jail if
he cooperates:
O'Toole sighed, "Henry," he said, "I want to help you.
Any friend of Lucinda can count on me. We can have this
whole thing tied up in a few hours. Visconti's not
important, not like Mengele or Bormann." (p. 214)
Thus O'Toole places value on live individuals instead of
-isms or his own self-interest. He is clearly only a half
hearted CIA agent, but he must finally perform his duty.
There are still suggestions of an insidious American
presence in this novel, of course. Before he gets Henry out
275
of prison, O'Toole explains why he has more power than Henry
in Paraguay (in a passage reminiscent of some in The Come
dians) .
"Your people don't count for very much here, I'm afraid.
We provide their arms— and then there's the new hydro
electric station we are helping them to build . . . not
far from the Iquazu Palls. It will serve Brazil too—
but Brazil will have to pay them royalties. Great thing
for the country." (p. 213)
The mention of arms is a sinister one, of course,
and one which goes as far back as The Name of Action in
Greene's handling of Americans. The Economic Aid by which
the conservative government will profit by capitalistic sale
of electric power to Brazil— is also a trump card in the
official American hand. O'Toole's final assurance that all
this "progress" represents a "great thing" is not entirely
certain. Henry's reply is an unenthusiastic "'Very inter
esting .' "
The questions remain: how enthusiastic a CIA man is
James O'Toole anyway? And what is his attitude toward his
job?
When Henry first notices O'Toole's notebook he asks
if the Americcin is figuring the speed of their boat; so
O'Toole explains his "research" which he has usually kept
secret because it "would seem kind of funny to most people":
"The fact is I count while I'm pissing and then I write
down how long I've taken and what time it is. Do you
realize we spend more than one whole day a year piss
ing? "
"Good heavens," [Henry] said. (p. 182)
O'Toole now describes how temperature and liquid intake can
276
cause extreme variations, and Henry asks if he is drawing
any conclusions.
"That's not my job," he said. "I'm no expert. I
just report the facts and any data— like gins and the
weather— that seem to have a bearing. It's for others
to draw the conclusions." (p. 183)
Clearly Greene is here satirizing the secret agent in the
computer age. He is merely the data gatherer. O'Toole has
developed a fondness for record-keeping for its own sake.
His choice of data is very funny, and Greene uses it as such
to deride this sort of scrutiny of oneself or the personal
habits of others— which are often the substance of FBI and
CIA reports.
Despite O'Toole's apparent enthusiasm in the speech
above, the fact is that he is not a good CIA agent. The
"mystery" which surrounds his secret service affiliation is
treated comically— as a recurring tagline which Henry throws
out to him when they meet. The sinister-sounding "special
duties" of Alden Pyle have become only a source of embar
rassment to O'Toole, as we have seen when O'Toole finally
admits that he does belong to the CIA.
O'Toole has been trained to be thorough, to keep
careful notes, and to analyze his data minutely. In the
hinterlands of South America (and anywhere else that CIA
agents go), there are really not many subjects for all this
close scrutiny. And so O'Toole has turned inward. Instead
of profound meditation, however, O'Toole times and keeps
scrupulous accounts of the time he spends urinating each
277
day.
Yet, despite his unusual interest in his own urina
tions, James O'Toole is a good man. He has moved a long way
from the duplicity and commercialism of Mr. Crane; he dis
plays none of the loud vulgarity or the bigotry of Joe, the
American Attache in Indochina. O'Toole is sensitive to
other people; his actions are governed not by cold self-
interest but by his heart.
278
Footnotes
1Meyer H. Abrams, from A Glossary of Literary
Terms, in Satire: Theory and Practice, ed. by Charles A.
Allen and George D. Stephens (California: Wadsworth Pub
lishing Company, Inc., 1962), p. 43.
2Abrams, p. 43.
3Abrams, p. 44.
‘ ‘ Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire (Ames,
Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1967), p. 13.
sFeinberg, p. 19.
eAlexander Pope, "Epitaph. For One who would not
be buried in Westminster-Abbey" in The Poems of Alexander
Pope, ed. by John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1967) , p. 827.
7John Atkins, Graham Greene (London: Calder and
Boyars, 1957), pp. 32-371
8Atkins, p. 33.
9Atkins, p. 33.
10Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1971), p. 216.
11Here is a sample of the folksy, anecdotal charac
terization by J. B. Priestley.
"Tarts or booze— or both," said Joby reflectively,
"that's where the bother begins. You wouldn't be 'aving
to mend that stall now if it 'adn't been for a tart.
I've 'ad a pal with me lately— Tommy Muss they call 'im.
Silly name, isn't it? Clever little feller, though,
Tommy. I've known 'im years. 'E used to go round with
Oxley's Circus, one time, then 'e ran a little ball-on-
a-string game— one o' them where you gets a watch, that
is if you're lucky and the feller that's running the
game don't 'appen to lean on the board when you're
'aving your go, see— but 'e wasn't good at it, wasn't
Tommy. So 'e come round with me. You can manage by
yourself at this, but it's better with two. Booze isn't
Tommy's trouble, though he can shift it as well as the
next. It's tarts. Can't keep away from the women, and
they can't keep away from 'im." (J. B. Priestley, The
Good Companions [New York: Harper & Brothers Publish-
ers, 1929], pp. 133-134)
279
^Greene's criticism— both literary and cinematic—
is nothing if not straightforward. One feels the thrill of
common sense when he writes in British Dramatists that Mar
lowe is better read than seen. And the student of litera
ture is grateful for such unequivocal remarks as: "Roger
Boyle, Earl of Orrery, is one of the great bores of litera
ture" ("An Unheroic Dramatist," The Lost Childhood, p. 153).
Greene is afraid neither to priase highly such minor writers
of mysteries as John Buchan nor to denigrate such sacred
cows as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Foster.
12This uniform edition from Heinemans is not yet
complete. For the same publisher Greene has also written
introductions to a recent five-volume uniform edition of the
novels of Ford Maddox Ford.
13"The Lesson of the Master," in The Lost Childhood,
p. 50.
11#See, for example, Anthony T. Bouscaren, "France
and Graham Greene versus America and Diem," Catholic World,
CLXXXI (1955), 414-417, which treats The Quiet American as
propaganda and sees Fowler as^ Greene himself. In answer see
Riley E. Hughes, "The Quiet American: The Case Reopened,"
Renascence, XII (1959), 41-42, 49.
15Whether or not an author is entitled— across the
board— to say that his work is utterly free of symbols is
debatable. The rhythmical recurrence of the unseen dog in
The Potting Shed does invite speculation upon its possible
"meaning" within that play. Tynan is not unjustified in
finding possible religious significance in the animal; but a
dog is not the clearest of all avatars. The important point
is that in A Sort of Life Greene twice singles out Kenneth
Tynan for rebuke, and nor'ne could conclude he did so to
show his respect for that noted drama critic.
16Carving a Statue (London: Bodley Head, 1964),
Preface.
17This article is "Symbolism in The Third Man" by
Lawrence Alloway, World Review, new series, No. 13 (March,
1950), pp. 57-60. It is an irresponsible piece of criti
cism. In it the writer assumes that Greene uses Eliot's
Waste Land and Frazer's Golden Bough as a guide in his crea-
tion of every character and scene. It is a piece which
irritates the student, obfuscates the work, and quite under
standably makes the author wonder about the uses of literary
(or cinematic) criticism.
18"Francois Mauriac," in The Lost Childhood, p. 69.
280
19D. H. Monro, Argument of Laughter (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), p. 50.
20The Spectator, CLVI (March 20, 1936), 520.
21 The Lawless Roads, p. 16.
22The Lost Childhood, p. 181.
23Graham Greene, Writers and Their Work No. 67 (Pub
lished for The British Council and the National Book League
by Longmans, Green & Co., 1962).
2ltThere are, according to Magiot, also other reasons
for American interests to return to Duvalier's Haiti:
"Papa Doc's lobbyist in Washington is the lobbyist-for
certain American-owned mills (they ground flour for the
people out of imported surplus wheat— it is astonishing
how much money can be made out of the poorest of the
poor with a little ingenuity). And then there's the
great beef racket. The poor here can eat meat no more
than they can eat cake, so I suppose they don't suffer
when all the beef that exists goes to the American
market— it doesn't matter to the importers that there
are no standards here of cattle raising. It wouldn't
affect the Americans if this trade ceased, but it would
affect the particular Washington politician who receives
one cent for every pound exported." (p. 249)
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
281
i.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, Meyer H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957.
Allott, Kenneth, and Miriam Ferris. The Art of Graham
Greene. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951.
Alloway, Lawrence. "Symbolism in The Third Man," World
Review, new series, No. 13 (March, 1950), 57-60.
Atkins, John. Graham Greene: A Biographical and Literary
Study. London: John Calder, 1957.
Bergson, Henri. "Laughter." Comedy. Edited and Introduced
by Wylie Sypher. Garden City, New York: Doubleday
& Company, Inc., 1956.
Blistein, Elmer M. Comedy in Action. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1964.
Boardman, Gwen R. Graham Greene: The Aesthetics of Explor-
ation. Gainesville: University of Florida Press,
1971.
Bouscaren, Anthony T. "France and Graham Greene versus
America and Diem," Catholic World, CLXXXI (1955),
414-417.
Butt, John, ed. The Poems of Alexander Pope. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1963.
Cook, Albert. The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1966.
DeVitis, A. A. Graham Greene. New York: Twayne, 1964.
Evans, R. O., ed. Graham Greene: Some Critical Considera
tions . Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky
Press, 1963.
Feinberg, Leonard. Introduction to Satire. Ames, Iowa:
Iowa State University Press, 1967.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New
York: Atheneum, 1967.
282
283
Greene/ Graham. Another Mexico. New York: The Viking
Press, 1967. [English title: The Lawless Roads.]
_______________ . Brighton Rock. New York: The Viking
Press, 1956.
_______________ . A Burnt-Out Case. New York: The Viking
Press, 1961.
Carving a Statue. London: Bodley Head,
1964.
_______________ . Collected Stories. New York: The Viking
Press, 1973.
_______________ . "Colette's Funeral Rites: An Open Letter
to the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris," The Portable
Graham Greene. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.
_______________ . The Comedians. New York: The Viking
Press, 1966.
_______________ . The Confidential Agent. Three by Graham
Greene. New York: The Viking Press, 1957.
_______________ . The End of the Affair. New York: The
Viking Press, 1951.
_______________ . The Heart of the Matter. New York: The
Viking Press, 1948.
_______________ . The Honorary Consul. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1973.
_______________ . In Search of a Character: Two African
Journals. New York: The Viking Press, 1961.
"An Indochina Journal," Commonweal, LX
(May 21, 1954), 170-172.
_______________ . It's a Battlefield. New York: The Viking
Press, 1962.
_______________ . Journey without Maps. New York: The Vik
ing Press, 1961.
_______________ . The Lost Childhood. New York: The Viking
Press, 1951.
The Man Within. New York: Bantam Books,
1964>
28.4
Greene, Graham. The Ministry of Fear. Three by Graham
Greene. New York: The Viking Press, 1957.
The Name of Action. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1931.
______________ . Orient Express. New York: Bantam, 1970.
[English title, Stamboul Train]
_______________. Our Man in Havana. New York: The Viking
Press, 1958.
The Pleasure Dome: The C’ y . : .acted Film
Criticism 193 5-40. London: Seckc - --burg, 1972.
The Potting Shed. New York: ' . " . * n e Viking
Press, 1957.
The Power and the Glory. New York: The
Viking Press, 1962. [English title, The Labyrin
thine Ways]
_______________. The Quiet American. New York: The Viking
Press, 1955'.
The Shipwrecked. New York: The Viking
Press, 1953. [English title, England Made Me]
_______________. A Sort of Life. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1971.
The Third Man. New York: Bantam, 1950.
______ . This Gun for Hire. Three by Graham Greene.
New York: The viking Press, 1957.
. Travels with My Aunt. New York: The
Viking Press, 1969.
______ . Twenty-One Stories. New York: The Viking
Press, 1962.
______ . "The Virtue of Disloyalty." The Portable
Graham Greene, edited by Philip Stratford. New
York: The Viking Press, 1973.
______ , Elizabeth Bowen, and V. S. Pritchett. Why
Do I Write? London: Marshall, 1948.
, and Hugh Greene, eds. "Introduction," A
Spy's Bedside Book. London: Hart-Davis, 1957.
2 85
Hughes, Riley E. "The Quiet American; The Case Reopened,"
Renascence, XII (1959), 41-42, 49.
Hynes, Samuel, ed. Graham Greene: a Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hal1, 1973.
Kunkel, Francis L. The Labyrinthine Ways of Graham Greene.
New York: Sheed & Ward, 1959.
Meredity, George. "An Essay on Comedy," Comedy. Edited and
Introduced by Wylie Sypher. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1956.
Monro, D. H. Argument of Laughter. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1963.
Nevo, Ruth. "Toward a Theory of Comedy," The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXI (Spring, 1963) ,
328.
O'Brien, Conor Cruise. "A Funny Sort of God," The New York
Review of Books, XX, No. 16 (October 18^ 1973), 56-
60.
O'Faolain, Sean. "Graham Greene: I Suffer; Therefore, I
Am." The Vanishing Hero: Studies in Novelists of
the Twenties. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956.
Pearce, Richard. Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Mod
ern Fiction from Dostoyevsky to Beckett. Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1970.
Potts, L. J. Comedy. London: Hutchinson University
Library, 1949.
Priestley, J. B. The Good Companions. New York and Lon
don: Harpers & Brothers Publishers, 1929.
Pryce-Jones, David. Graham Greene. Edinburgh and London:
Oliver and Boyd, 1963.
Sternlicht, Stanford. "The Sad Comedies: Graham Greene's
Later Novels," Florida Quarterly, I, No. 4, 64-71.
Stratford, Philip. Faith and Fiction: Creative Process in
Greene and Mauriac. Notre Dame and London: Univer
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1964.
Sypher, Wylie. "Our New Sense of the Comic," Comedy. Gar
den City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1956.
28 6
Turnell, Martin. Graham Greene. William B. Eerdmans, 1967.
Vos, Nelvin. The Drama of Comedy: Victim and Victor.
Richmond: John Knox Press, 1966.
Waugh, Evelyn. "Felix Culpa?” The Commonweal, XLVIII
(July 16, 1948), 322-325.
Wolfe, Peter. Graham Greene: The Entertainer. Carbondale:
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of Supplements to British Book News on "Writers and
Their Work," No. 67) London: Longmans, 1955.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Lattinville, Ronald Edward
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Core Title
Comic Characterization In The Fiction Of Graham Greene
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Doctor of Philosophy
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English
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University of Southern California
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committee chair
), Casson, Allan Perham (
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