Features

I. OUR MAN IN NOTTINGHAM

In every photograph of Graham Greene, the author seems slightly startled, his eyes staring out into some distant beyond or into his own soul. A biographical sketch of his early life takes shape as a litany of failure: a miserable boarding school education during which he was bullied for being the headmaster’s son; afternoons spent spinning the cylinder in solitary games of Russian roulette; half a year of psychoanalysis at age sixteen; unsuccessful attempts at poetry and journalism; an unhappy marriage and a series of affairs; a libelous review of a Shirley Temple film for which the magazine in which it was published was forced to fold. Despite this last setback, it was film—the money he brought in as a critic, as well as the royalties from adaptations of his own novels—that made up a large part of his livelihood, enabling him to write. (The other source of income was his espionage work as a double agent for the British M16, an excuse to travel to other parts of the world as material for his fiction.) Pinballing back and forth between the extremes, Green swung from the heights of exhilaration to the depths of depression. He wrote bleak dramas set against a landscape of sin as well as lighthearted parodies of the intelligence community; sought baptism to become a Roman Catholic like his wife, renounced it, and claimed it again; and embraced Castro’s communism with sudden ardor at the end of his life after a career of lampooning it. Medical diagnosis would identify this condition as bipolar disorder—yet his depressed, conflicting tendencies also hint at a more metaphysical malaise.

More than perhaps any other literary form, the novel depends on the prolonged contemplation—and often melancholy—of its author. But the Catholic novelist is more than unhappy: he writes as a way of knocking against the gates of heaven, to which he has been denied entrance. His writing is a transcription and translation of his despair. To make God a mere character is already a transgression, a source of guilt and shame; to write with sincerity about the evils in His world one must have struggled with His absence. “Being a member of the Catholic Church would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty,” Greene once wrote. “If my conscience were as acute as Francois Mauriac’s showed itself to be in his essay God and Mammon, I could not write a line.” The example was not a particularly accurate one, for Mauriac himself struggled with his dual identity as religious man and writer. To be a truly good Catholic and dissolve oneself in its dogma, he said, “one would have to be a saint. But then one could not write novels.”

Seeking to define himself as a novelist first, Greene rebelled against the label of Catholic writer and all the heavy-handed religious expectations that accompanied it. His prose takes on a self-lacerating quality, rubbing at the raw wounds of skepticism, rather than soothing characters with the swaddling clothes of prayer. (The reader too suffers: how often can one read of doubt without coming to embrace it as a reality above faith?) In The Power and the Glory—chronologically the second of the four books most critics consider his “Catholic novels,” which also include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair—a lieutenant lies in his squalid, beetle-infested lodgings and thinks with disdain of the priest he is trying to capture:

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

Greene’s most convincing characters are—like the lieutenant—not those who dutifully recite their Hail Mary’s, but instead those who suffer painfully from uncertainty, or do not believe in God at all. The author’s split consciousness, his divided loyalties, brought him intense misery during his life. But it also allowed him to hear other frequencies, dimly sensed yet ignored by so many.

II. THE FULL WORLD

Classical Hindustani ragas begin with the drone of a tanpura, a long-necked lute with four strings. This one note, sustained by an apprentice for whom such monotony is an honor, sounds throughout the entirety of the performance. It enters before the plucking of the sitars, the drumming, the vocals that build into a complex wave of sound and subside into nothingness; it is what remains when the musicians cease playing at last.