Floundering in the shallows
Frederic Raphael
NO MAN’S LAND by Graham Greene, with a foreword by David Lodge, edited by James Sexton Hesperus, £9.99, pp. 114, ISBN 184391414X ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a slim two-in-one offer of a pair of previously undisclosed ‘novellas’ (actually film treatments) by Graham Greene. In 1949, when they were written, The Third Man had just been a prodigious hit for the author, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. No Man’s Land the sole complete piece on parade here was an attempt to take another bite from much the same cherry (or a squeeze from the same Lime).
This time, Richard Brown, a British agent with a ‘neutral name’, crosses into the Soviet zone, in the Harz mountains, in order to find what Hitchcock called ‘the McGuffin’, that vital doesn’t-matter-much-what which serves to prime a thriller’s plot. Here it’s a coded message hidden, in extremis, by a colleague of Brown’s who didn’t survive, detailing secret Soviet uranium mines in the region. A typical Greene touch plants the coded clue in a Marian shrine, where the Virgin is said to have appeared to some young girls and which has become a place of pilgrimage.
While checking out the site where the Virgin has supposedly manifested her love for innocent faith, Brown is smitten by the earthly love incarnate (it says here) in Clara. A coup de foudre strikes simultaneously as they spot each other among the ‘holy junk, on sale to the credulous’. Who are the fools now, the faithful or the infatuated?
Brown has crossed the east/west demarcation line less out of patriotism than from professional loyalty to a dead colleague. His meeting with the beautiful Clara — the stockpot girl in the belted mac who is no kind of a virgin but stands, we are told by David Lodge’s foreword, for ‘Christian charity’— is not wholly by chance (you didn’t guess, did you?). She is on the watch for whoever comes looking for the McGuffin, although — and because? — she is already the mistress of the Russian ‘M[sic]KVD officer’ Starhov, whose name (with an ‘h’ dropped into it) Greene lifted from Turgenev’s Starov, in On the Eve, which Brown has, coincidentally, been reading. Clever stuff, you see.
With plot-forwarding improbability, the semi-tough Russian asks the arrested suspect for his parole, enabling him to have some fresh company in his château, where Brown has lucky access to Clara, and she to him. They are soon enjoying pillow-debates on timeless topics such as trust versus loyalty and all the things that once made Greene seem so grown-up.
Love decides Brown to forget honour and break parole, but the lovers are baulked in their getaway, allowing time for Brown and Starhov to debate more big issues, a brief echo of the politics v God stand-off between the lieutenant and the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory. (This, in its turn, had affinities with the dialogue between Rubashov and his NKVD interrogator in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a much more significant work published shortly before Greene’s novel.) The first two paragraphs of the second novella, The Stranger’s Hand, were entered for a 1949 New Statesman competition requesting entrants to compose the beginning of a novel by someone called Green (or Greene); but the whole of No Man’s Land, which David Lodge, in hagiographic mood, would have us believe is an important minor work, is no less second prize-worthy selfparody, whatever the parallels between Brown and the real-life Greene, who feared that his frustratedly possessive love for Catherine Walston was doomed, although the end of the affair was a long time in coming (and yielded a famous donnée).
Lodge promises that the author is ‘one of the writers of whom it can be said that almost nothing they write is without interest or evidence of a unique literary gift’. No doubt, ‘without’ is here meant to qualify both ‘interest’ and ‘evidence’, but the sentence could as well be taken to convey that ‘nothing [here] ... is evidence of a unique literary gift’. In truth, both stories prove that when a writer tries to give movie people what they want it is often sadly perfunctory and often not what they want: Reed dumped No Man’s Land, and he was no schmuck.
In the introduction, James Sexton (a professorial maître de conférences) has the pious nerve to find the characterisation ‘excellent’. Schematic might be a better term for this contrived huis clos, featuring Good Baddie, Bad Goody and Tarnished Lovely. Sexton adds, ‘In one deft phrase, “on the Nordhausen road”, Greene conveys the horror of the holocaust — the network of subterranean forced labour camps of DoraMittelbau.’ All this we glean from ‘on the Nordhausen road’?
Greene might have done better, and he never did, if he had asked himself a few tough ones about the Catholic Church’s sins of omission (and no little commission) when it came to Hitler and his henchmen. The God who breaks celestial cover to redeem sick Sarah from death in The End of the Affair seems to do it more to teach the adulterous Bendrix not to make wild promises than out of love for humanity. The same God, it seems, had no call to come between Nazis and their victims. Perhaps no one made him a sweet enough offer while on the Nordhausen road or the Auschwitz branch line.
The second novella, about a little boy in search of his (earthly) father in immediately postwar Venice (think Vienna with the sewers at ground level), lost its interest even for Greene, and had to be finished by a screenplay doctor called Guy Elmes, whose appended melodrama, with Virtue, of a kind, ironically triumphant, ends in a B-movie shoot-out on a ship in the docks of Venice. The prosthetic Greenery is seamlessly of a piece with the uncinematic confection that preceded it. Lodge promises that Greene’s panning prose, telling close-ups and terse dialogue display mastery of film notation, but that is gush without substance.
The fact, acknowledged by Lodge, that very few of Greene’s novels became good films cannot be put down to inept or venal screen adaptation. The Power and the Glory was given pious treatment, and Greene partwrote the screenplay, but it played woodenly. The odd truth is that the movies, whatever their vulgarities, systematically deconstruct pretentious texts and expose tendentious plots. If Lodge really believes that any part of these cliché-laden pieces can be ranked ‘firstclass’, or is any more worth resuscitating than was the gimcrack Tenth Man, it testifies more to his AMDG loyalty than to the accuracy of his taxonomy.
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