THE FICTIONS OF GRAHAM GREENE
John Jolliffe attacks
the fantasy of the novelist's politics
GRAHAM Greene's novels have earned him a popularity and respect which are richly deserved but which become distinct- ly out of place when he turns from the Greeneland of his own creation and starts making judgments about the real world. This has happened several times lately, not least in so-called interviews, where a flabby and deferential 'interviewer' (often no more than a sounding-board, or even a doormat) greets his observations with a sycophantic silence instead of challenging them vigorously as they deserve. How can it be that such a gifted creator of charac- ters, and such a deeply concerned surveyor of good and evil, can get so hopelessly lost when he comes to take sides in real life?
For some reason this question does not seem to have attracted the attention of his spellbound admirers, but there are clues to be found, first in A Sort of Life, which deals, after a fashion, with his existence up till his late twenties. His father was a headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and when he came to board in it himself, the unfortunate little Graham found himself willy-nilly with a foot in both camps, happy family life on one side, and the rough and tumble of school on the other. Inevitably there were conflicts of loyalty, and the horror of life in the midst of strangers and persecutors, when the half-lost domain of a happy childhood was still just round the corner, never seems to have deserted him, but has permeated his subsequent work, even though a course of psychoanalysis in London appears to have restored his confi- dence and at least partially healed the trauma before his schooldays were over.
A second autobiographical book, Ways of Escape, which includes some explana- tory introductions to the collected edition of his novels, reveals rather more. Writing of The Third Man, he says that he and Carol Reed 'had no desire to move peo- ple's political emotions; we wanted to entertain them, to frighten them a little, even to make them laugh. Reality in fact was to be only the background to a fairy tale.' In some of his more recent writings, where there is a desire to move people's political emotions, reality and fairy tales still seem to occupy these same positions.
Ways of Escape does not at first explain what it was that its author was so eager to escape from. Was it just solitude, or the adolescent boredom which drove him to experiment with Russian roulette on Berk- hamsted Common? Eventually there comes a more revealing admission: 'What I was engaged in through those war years was not genuine action — it was an escape from reality and responsibility.' This pre- sumably refers to his intelligence work in West Africa, for it certainly has no applica- tion to his brave and generous activities in the London blitz. Nevertheless, we have been warned. Indeed, this may be the key to his otherwise inexplicable attitude to his old colleague Kim Philby, and his perverse and blinkered refusal to admit any harm in someone with the blood of so many brave and innocent men on his hands. Other tyrants the world over are castigated, and rightly, but for his old pal Philby, anything goes, one of his special good points being his claim that 'unlike most Englishmen he was very fond of his mother-in-law'. Well, yes, and Goring was famous for his love of animals, I seem to remember.
• Nobody would claim that opinions put Into the mouth of a character, whether Sympathetic or not, represent the novelist's own view. But it is difficult to see how the following utterance by Javitt in A Sense of Reality could have been written by an author who did not feel attracted to it. 'Be disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork.' In fact, Philby may be alive and well in Moscow but there are Plenty of brave and unselfish heroes who have survived too, and Javitt's rule of thumb has as many exceptions as confirm- ations. But there is never a glimmer of sYmpathy, let alone praise from him for the Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs of this world. What we get instead is some wishful wool-gathering about Gorbachev. The Helsinki Agreement can be broken by the Soviets into a thousand pieces, and there is never a squeak out of Greene. But give him a dismal charade like this year's .Peace Forum' in Moscow, and he is off to It like a shot, though a moment's reflection would confirm that it is only concerned With reinforcing the same old dreary party monopoly of the truth. Nevertheless his Participation no doubt gives it a spurious validity in innocent and ignorant Western eyes, which is of course the whole object of its organisers. And in his indulgence towards Castro, he carefully ignores his refusal to allow inspections by human rights groups of conditions in his jails, Where at the lowest reckoning (by Amnesty International) 436 people are held as political prisoners. Sometimes he seems to find any con- structive or creative form of normality tedious or unappealing. In the 1950s, he tells us, he 'hadn't the courage for suicide, but it became a habit with me to visit troubled places, not to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity Which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on London'. So off he would go, with fat fees from the Sunday Times, to Malaya in the Emergency, Kenya in the days of Mau Mau, a leper colony in the last gasp of the Belgian Congo, Vietnam in the war. Was it the resulting obsession with danger, terror, violence and betrayal, all wilfully sought out, that came towarp his judgment and distort his standards on real subjects, as opposed to his feelings for the characters that he has created? It is the relish with which he digs up these horrors that is suspicious, and he describes them so powerfully that the reader can almost see the sinister gleam in his eye as he does so.
Of course, the squalor and gloom are not unrelieved. Much can be forgiven a man who can describe a row of vultures perched on a tin roof as looking like 'old, broken umbrellas'. And in Indochina he can give us a glimpse of 'the tall, elegant girls in white silk trousers, by the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields, where the water-buffaloes trudged fetlock-deep with a slow, primeval gait'. But the respite does not last. Soon, back he is with 'the old feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket; the restaurants wired against gre- nades, the watch-towers with their odd reminders of insecurity.' The spirit of Berkhamsted Common is with us once again. Indeed, immaturity breaks in else- where as well, when he parades his experi- ences in brothels and opium dens a'nd his 'little cocktail shaker I had made at Asprey's to take to the Vietnam War'. Whether this is a joke or not, it is as tawdry a piece of radical chic as one could wish.
Horror and decay are revelled in, often more or less for their own sake, and not as a via dolorosa in the direction of redemp- tion. All this would be less objectionable if he did not elswhere express a variety of great truths with a clarity and a simplicity, however bleak, that is unequalled by his contemporaries. The power to express them, but not to act on them. Perhaps after all this may be for the best, since the precedents of novelists attempting to act on the truths that have been revealed to them are not exactly encouraging — Tol- stoy being the most obvious example, followed by H. G. Wells, with D'Annunzio strutting about in the background.
Perhaps, too, it is childhood, and the distorted comparison with what followed it, which contains the root of the trouble. In idealising childhood as he has done, Greene conveniently forgets the long periods of boredom, frustration and dis- appointment which any self-respecting child is prone to. But for him, as John Spurling has pointed out in an interesting study, 'Childhood is the nearest thing to heaven on earth; a time of peace, trust, confident identity, relaxed communal liv- ing, absence of those twin anxieties loss and hope.' He adds, very convincingly in my view, that 'whatever the nominal age of his central characters, they are mostly still trapped within adolescence arid its immedi- ate aftermath; they have never discovered a satisfying way out into adult life', but only `to the freedom of being a nomad, un- attached, insecure, disloyal, sometimes hunted and threatened, but alive and preferably living under an assumed or partly concealed name.'
Since Greene never appears to set him- self the task of making anything work in real life (and why should he, if he doesn't feel inclined or able to?) his strictures against those who do, whether for better or, as in the case of his American Aunt Sallies, for worse, are severely blunted. The 'moral landscape' is there in the novels all right, but in real life Graham Greene either distorts it out of recognition in favour of the Philbys of this world or else prefers to ignore it altogether, as in the case of the Solzhenitsyns. By doing so, he forfeits any claim to the exaggerated re- spect so often given to his views on the real world.
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