EVELYN WAUGH, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: “THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER”.

 

EVELYN WAUGH, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: “THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER”.

When it was first published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh (Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, *1903-†1966) achieved a considerable success. Yet it was the adaptation as a television serial in 1981 which catapulted the novel to an iconic status‒worldwide. It is usually ranked as the best-ever in the UK, receiving 29 nominations and 11 awards. And it has not lost one iota of fascination and relevance ever since. A film version was released in 2008, and a new adaptation, another grandiose production, was announced in 2020, and should soon be available.

I had the privilege of being in London at the time of the first screening. It seemed as if the whole country was swimming across gentle, lukewarm waves of nostalgia and aesthetic enjoyment, lamenting the gone age of British splendour and dominance, mesmerised by the complex emotional imbroglios of a hugely-rich aristocratic Roman-Catholic family, into which the narrator in the novel (and in the film…), the atheist (or at least agnostic…) Charles Ryder gets accepted, and “adopted”, despite his agnosticism.

Winter of 1943. Charles Ryder’s battalion takes part in routine training and manoeuvres of the army in England. He will be reprimanded by his “Commanding Officer”, because of some untidiness in the barracks and surroundings.

Dialogue added by the screenwriters. Jeremy Irons as "Charles Ryder". 1981 serial.

He is going to unveil to us the “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder”, beginning in the winter of 1943. Ryder is a captain of the British army, being conveyed across the English countryside, fatigued by simulacrums of military action, exhaling a melancholic Weltschmerz, fearing that the new class of mercantile philistines, represented by Sargent Hooper, will soon take control of society and destroy beauty.

By then he had already become a successful painter– a status Evelyn Waugh secretly always wanted to achieve. Thus he will regale us with thunderstorms and drizzles of gigantic wall-frescoes, splendid oil-paintings and scintillating water-colours, capturing physical and human landscapes of a gone age, while he attempts to come to terms with his devastated personal life. And the seemingly elegant yet unstoppable meandering into self-destruction of a family which had everything to be insouciantly halcyon, everyone else’s envy notwithstanding.

Shortly after the last episode was broadcasted, I had to go to a hospital in London, to undergo minor surgery. They expected me to spend two nights in a huge hall, together with other patients. I remember the smile of a nurse who, after discovering the book I had in my bed, said loud to her colleagues: “Look! He is reading Brideshead Revisited”. It was my first encounter with Evelyn Waugh as a writer, which left me as enchanted and pensive, as moved and puzzled, as when I saw the last episode of the 1981 serial. His other novels followed later on, in particular Scoop (1938), which in 1988 almost threw me into jail in Hamburg, Germany. I was laughing uncontrollably while going through customs and police control at the airport; a zealous policeman though I was being overtly and consciously disrespectful to them. It ended with just a reprimand.

It would take decades for a thorough “revisitation”, which began in Berlin in the year 2014, including the first reading of A Handful of Dust (1934), part of his correspondence and essays.

 First "decent" encounter between Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews), 1981 serial.

Evelyn Waugh ingeniously constructed a novel which hooks the reader by a well-planned usage of “flash-back” and “flash-forward” techniques. We begin in 1943 (“prologue”), then go back to 1923, a “flash-forward” to the first visit of Brideshead, and again back to the beginning of Ryder’s sojourn at Oxford, until we retake the first “flash-forward”. The story resumes then linearly glued to Chronus, though there are several “flash-backs”, and one key “flash-forward”, to throw us again into the final years of the Second World War (“epilogue”).

And then, of course, there is Waugh’s prosa, at times reaching in this novel heights of such breathtaking beauty, such soul-stirring intensity, that the common adage, Waugh should be considered as one of the “great prose stylists of the English language” in the 20^th century, ought to be modified by adding one or two previous centuries. For example, at the beginning:

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mist, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer – such as that day – when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.”¹

Oxford, Anno 1923. An unexpected, and rather unpleasant incident, brings the undergraduates Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte, youngest son of the Marquis of Marchmain, for the first time together. They would soon become close friends, Charles being introduced to the group of aristocrats and eccentrics surrounding the ethereally handsome Sebastian, all of them engaged ad infinitum in using (or wasting) their time at Oxford “getting tight”, as Waugh himself would define his sojourn there in a noted interview with the BBC². 

 

 

Julia (Diana Quick) awaiting Charles, at the station nearest to Brideshead. 1981 serial.

 Charles is then requested during the summer to go to Brideshead, as Sebastian had a “serious accident”. He would meet for the first time Julia Flyte, the oldest daughter of the Marquis of Marchmain. The two young men manage to get to Venice, to stay at a palazzo on the Grand Canal rented by the Marquis, who lives there with his Italian lover, Cara, whom the “Byronic” looking Englishman met during his service in the First World War. The friendship will continue back in Oxford, though the first dark clouds emerge over the horizon. Lady Marchmain, the ultra-protective mother, welcomes Charles Ryder as a suitable company for her son, yet the path towards self-destruction is not to be erased, in spite of numerous efforts.

                                          "Ought we to get drunk every night?" - asks Charles Ryder.

                                             "Yes, I think so" - answers Sebastian Flyte.

Charles and Sebastian enjoying wine at Brideshead. Dialogue added by the screenwriters. 1981 serial.

Perhaps the shrewdest literary construct to appear out of Waugh’s prestidigitator’s hat, superbly amalgamated within the unfolding of the core of the novel, is that of introducing two “exotic outsiders” (albeit at the time of events very much “in”). They are two “unmistakable foreigners”, who are commanded to act as perspicacious, sharp-edged decoders of the “unmentionable” hidden, deep-sea currents in the ocean of feelings and secrets of the soul. Two souffleurs, who, although “whispering” to the other figures, are giving the readers the clues to unveil the concealed maelstrom leading to self-destruction and emotional disaster. 

                                Sebastian and Charles being enchanted by Venice. 1981 serial.
 

The first one is Anthony Blanche, the exotic “world-citizen”:

“You must remember I am not English you know. I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals...”³

First appearance is almost a shock to Charles Ryder:

“He had on a smooth chocolate brown suit with loud white strips, suede shoes, a large bow-tie and he drew off yellow wash-leather gloves as he came into the room, part Gallic, part Yankee part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic.”⁴...”the aesthete par excellence, a byword of iniquity, from Cherwell Edge to Summerville.”⁵

"You don't know Charles Ryder..."-says Sebastian. "No, but I have the most delicious feeling I am going to...", says Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace), 1981 serial. Dialogue added by the screenwriters.

Anthony Blanche keeps bouncing between Argentina, France and England, likes to pose as a homosexual, befriended by Jean Cocteau and André Gide. Albeit he is rather keener on appearing as a mannered flamboyant aesthete and haughty provocateur, whose penetrating eyes were tantamount to x-rays, seeking without the slightest compassion the recondite layers of the most innermost of those unfortunate enough to stumble upon him. Perhaps the figure who most exults with Schadenfreude, when stumbling onto personages getting drown in the whirlpool of emotional malheurs and personal limitations.

In a long conversation with Charles Ryder, drink after drink, he would throw his diagnosis of the “Marchmain family” onto the perplexed Charles:

-“Sebastian has charm, but no brain”,

- His brother (Brideshead) “...something archaic, out of a cave that’s been sealed for centuries. He has the face as though an Aztec sculptor had attempted a portrait of Sebastian; he is a learned bigot, a ceremonious barbarian, a snow-bound lama…”

-”And then Julia… a face of flawless Florentine quattrocento beauty...all she wants is power…”

-“There is another sister (Cordelia), too, I believe in the schoolroom. Nothing is known of her except that her governess went mad and drowned herself not long ago. I am sure she’s abominable”.

- (Lady Marchmain) “… she meanwhile keeps of small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive enjoyment. She sucks their blood. You can see the tooth marks all over...They never escape once she’s had her teeth into them. It is witchcraft. There is no other explanation.”⁶

Then comes the “Lady in Venice”, Cara, a former “highly talented dancer”, the Italian lover of the Marquis of Marchmain, who in a dialogue with Charles Ryder in Venice would sum up in an offhand, courteous but lethally precise way the affective quicksand at whose borders everyone lingers, and which may swallow her too. While Blanche’s autopsy of the Brideshead set-up is malicious and intends to spread venom, Cara’s confession is a cold x-ray, displaying the bare bones. No illusion, no self-delusion.

“-I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin.”⁷says Cara (Stephane Audran). 1981 serial. On Sebastian: “-Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.”⁸

“-...they are full of hate – hate of themselves, Alex and his family...”⁹ “Alex (Marquis of Marchmain) does not love me. But not the littlest piece. Then why does he stay with me? I will tell you; because I protect him from Lady Marchmain. He hates her, but you can have no conception of how he hates her.”¹⁰ Again, on Sebastian:  “- Sebastian drinks too much.- I suppose we both do (says Charles).- With you it does not matter, I have watched you together. With Sebastian is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him. (...)Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me; it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your way.”¹¹

A question mark has been raised from the publication of the novel, and still hangs around: That of the true nature of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian, that “romantic friendship”, and whether it has a more concrete sexual connotation. Waugh himself was quite clear, placing that friendship in a rather airy sphere:

"Charles's romantic affection for Sebastian is part due to the glitter of the new world Sebastian represents, part to the protective feeling of a strong towards a weak character, and part a foreshadowing of the love for Julia which is to be the consuming passion of his mature years."¹²

Sex plays almost no role in the whole novel, although metaphors and allusions abound. It appears only once as a possibility, at the first encounter between Charles and Julia, “I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me”¹³, and brief hints towards the act itself being enacted appear very late, in the ship bringing Charles, his wife, and Julia, from New York to England. The links between Charles and Sebastian are better placed in that other world conceived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wahlverwandschaft, usually (and not-quite-correctly) translated as “elective affinities”. It is a spiritually (in the German sense of geistig, not geistlich) being together, chosen not by primaeval blood, or by attraction to flesh, but by the inner will of the soul. The two young men live for a long time in sand-castles and air-balloons. Hence the harshness of the awakening, due to arrive sooner or later.

Politically “incorrect”

Evelyn Waugh would nowadays be tagged as a very much “politically incorrect” writer, and not only because of the novels which deal with Africa (Scoop, 1938 and Black Mischief, 1932). He never did eschew controversy, persisted on being iconoclast, irreverent, using satire and all the scales of humour to capture his epoch. Conservative, traditionalist, a converted and vociferous Catholic, he was disparaged for being out of touch with the Zeitgeist. He answered to the latter onslaught that he certainly wished he had been born some centuries earlier.

Lady Marchmain (Claire Boom) reading a story by G.K. Chesterton, “The Queer Feet”, to the family (plus Charles Ryder) assembled at Brideshead, whilst Sebastian gets drunk – again. The moral of that short-story will appear later, in a conversation in London, between Charles and Cordelia, after the death of Lady Marchmain.

 

 Julia admiring a small turtle engraved with diamonds, present of Rex (Charles Keating) to Julia, in front of Cordelia (Phoebe Nicholls). In the background, Mr. Samgrass (John Grillo), the Oxford don who will be “hired” by Lady Marchmain to “straighten-up” Sebastian.1981 serial.

Brideshead Revisited has been debunked, and “written-down”, by some as:

“A hedonistic portrayal of aristocratic purveyors and seekers of leisure, escorted by bourgeois arrivists, swimming in a sea of by-gone belle époque, exhibiting elegant decadence as ennui supérieur and extracurricular relationships as a mark of distinction, of a seducing yet bound-to-disappear uniqueness, swallowed by the relentless dynamics of capitalism, et cetera, et cetera...”

That is how the author signing these lines would summarise the objections, and perhaps at times also the dégout, coming above all from the non-conservative milieus.

Nota bene: Such a depiction may have more to do with the 1981 serial than with the novel as such. Waugh himself confessed that the emphasis on gluttony and wines, and champagne, in the novel, had to do with the privations endured during the Second World War. The film-version, which does not sully the original text (quite the contrary), may however give the impression, in particular to those who had not read the novel as such, of an excessive display of insouciant leisure by the very-well-to-do, and of a feverish aestheticism. No one ever seems to dress gauchely in the film, not even the members of the working-class.

Such a socially-aware appraisal of the novel would be considered as not quite compatible with the definition of its theme by the author himself as:

“the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters...”¹⁴

Sebastian convalescent in a hospital run by a Catholic mission in Fez, Morocco. He has just received the news of the death of his mother, transmitted by Charles.

This is indeed a Catholic novel, and it has a theological theme‒at least one. Waugh himself hinted at the last dialogue between Cordelia and Charles, and the reference to a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet“, by K.G. Chesterton":

„I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.[7]¹⁵

Yet even those who despair at Waugh’s “incorrectness”, and at what they call “old-fashioned” aesthetic values, cannot fail to be at least slightly subjugated by a prose which, no forced orfèvrerie at all, carries a magic of its own, unfolding clouds of soothing incense, embracing us, promising us a red-wine, like the Burgundy eulogised in page 163, which will regenerate our hearts:

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.Those memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons at St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in a little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their neck, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until suddenly the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time.”¹⁶

An artistry which gets enhanced by the unforced introduction of those minuscule pleasures of daily life, crowning the candour of a young-lady, and counterpointing the serendipity and arrogance of an agnostic artist who elevates himself above the other mortals, as when Cordelia explains to Charles her possible vocation to become a nun, and says:

-...But I don’t know now. Everything has changed so much suddenly.”

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon. I had had my fingers in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening – of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech. 

“You’ll fall in love”, I said. 

“Oh, pray no. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?”¹⁷

 

The Marquis of Marchmain (Laurence Olivier) in Venice, 1981 Serial“-It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling block to my own party.”¹⁸ 

                                    Charles Ryder seeking new "light" in Mexico. 1981 serial.

A crucial question: Where did all that malheur come from? Where and how did all those dislikes and hatreds arise, all that intra-family turmoil, all those disaffections? Perhaps the desire to control the other one, the seeking of brutish (emotionally) power over the nearest-ones as the raison d'être, a luxurious indifference to the ways-and-means of ordinary life. It seems as if almost everyone chooses the wrong partner, the inadequate spouse. Every single marriage collapses. Even second attempts. Julia will marry a Canadian-born adventurer and truculent money-seeker, who is discovered–too late–to have been already married once, hence divorced, and hence also forced to conduct the religious ceremony almost on the sly, in a modest Anglican chapel. When she meets Charles on the ship leaving New York, years afterwards, she is a total wrack‒just about half-camouflaged.

1981 serial -You have changed, Charles. So lean and grim, not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him. Harder too.- And you are softer.- Yes, I think so… and very patient now.-And sadder too.-Oh yes, much sadder.”^{19  1}

The eldest son of the Marquis of Marchmain, Lord Brideshead, will marry a middle-aged widow with children, and it appears also past breeding-age, to the utter disgust of his father, who thus proceed to disinherit him, depriving him of the possession of the Brideshead castle, which is given to Julia.

Is it just the erosion produced by a life of leisure, breeding boredom, deviant conducts, and a blasé Weltgleichgültigkeit (world-indifference), as a sign of distinction, and separation from the “lower” classes?

On top of the role played by the two “sophisticated foreigners” (Anthony and Cara), the atmosphere at home becomes certainly unbreathable. Charles Ryder abandons the study of history at Oxford, to become a painter and thus goes to Paris. The Marquis of Marchmain never comes back from the war, “exiles” himself in Venice, with his lover, and only returns to England because a new war is approaching. Sebastian Flyte would choose Morocco as the “real” home and site of seclusion, as well as new drinking-hole. The now matured painter Charles Ryder extricates himself from a doomed marriage and an adulterous wife by going to Mexico and Central America, to find a “new light”, and, finally, his own approach to painting. Cordelia go to Spain during the Civil War, to nurse wounded combatants, on the “national side”, we assume, and will stay in that country after the military conflagration ended. “Epilogue”, early 1940s, Julia and Cordelia go to Palestine, to contribute “their part”.

Was it then that difficult to be a happy English citizen in England?

I happen to believe that this novel has not yet distilled all its wisdom, all its secrets. That they were hidden ex professo in the text, left there to await the passage of time, time alone will be asked to decode them. Perhaps a new reading, decades henceforth, will accomplish that task.

The former agnostic Charles Ryder kneels down in the chapel of Brideshead, at the end of the novel, adhering at last to Catholicism. Is that the only way to survive and look forward, when one happens to stand upon the ruins and ashes of a devastated personal life?1981 serial.

It has to do with the prevalence of the “Spirit” against “Matter”, the triumph of “Spirit” over “Flesh”:

“…a small red flame...burning anew among the old stones.”²⁰

Graham Greene, shortly after the death of Evelyn Waugh, stated that the author of Brideshead Revisited was the:

“….greatest novelist of my generation…” ²¹

Had Evelyn Waugh survived Graham Greene, he would have said the same about his colleague and friend.

1Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited, Modern Classics, Penguin, (1945), 2000, p. 17.1981 television serial Granada-Television, ITV, directed by Charles Sturridge, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

2“Face to Face” series conducted by John Freeman, 26 June 1960.

3P. 253.

4P. 27.

5Ibid.

6PP. 44-50.

7P. 93.

8P. 93.

9P. 92.

10P. 92.

11P. 95.

12Waugh, Evelyn. "Brideshead Revisited" (memorandum). 18 February 1947. Reprinted in: Forden, Giles. "Waugh versus Hollywood" (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/may/22/classics.film). The Guardian. 21 May 2004.

13P. 68.

14Preface, IX. 1959

15P. 206.

16P. 211.

17P. 208.

18P. 89.

19P. 223.

20P. 326.

21 Stannard, Martin (2011) [2004]. "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (1903–06)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. Vol. II p. 492

GRAHAM GREENE: THE POWER AND THE GLORY (THE “MEXICAN” NOVEL).

„Graham Greene, the novelist of the (his) 20th century” 

GRAHAM GREENE: THE POWER AND THE GLORY (THE “MEXICAN” NOVEL).

 

 

 

Graham Greene (*1904‒†1991) is one of the English authors whose entire work (novelistic) I had the pleasure to visit, at least once. Only a few of such visitations were of a “courtesy” category, most did entail a concentrated and annotated reading. Such a long acquaintance, initiated some time in the early 1970s in South America, includes his autobiography, in two parts, A Sort of Life (1971), Ways of Escape (1980), but only few of his short-stories, and a tiny fragment of his voluminous correspondence. None of his plays, as far as I can remember, perhaps a minuscule part of his other essays and writings.  I did start the large biography, The Life of Graham Greene, by Norman Sherry, Volume One 1904-1939 (1989)[1], in 2016 (7), but stopped half-way in the second volume, 1939-1955, published in 1994, as the vicissitudes of his private life, late 1930s, early 1940s, occupied too much of a space ‒ not a fragrant one.

 

Yet I am always under the impression that most of the stories in his novels seem to disappear from my mind too quickly, to the point that, a few years after closing the last page, I would be at a loss to just vaguely describe the setting. Except, of course, those linked to iconic film-versions, like The Third Mann (1949), still considered by many as the greatest British film of the 20^th century[2], or Our Mann in Havana (1958)[3], The Quiet American (1955), thanks to the second film-version with Michael Cain in the main role[4], perhaps also Brighton Rock (1938), as this one of his “Catholic novels” does engrave scars upon the soul[5].

 

A more identifiable aftertaste (still very much ethereal) seems to persist out of his novels that carry a “South American” background, like Travels with my Aunt (1969) and The Honorary Consul (1973), read in Spanish while we were still living in that continent.

 

Nonetheless, I might be judging too superficially when I state that Greene’s novels appear to fade away too quickly. At a deeper level in the subconscious they are still very much radioactive, emitting invisible clouds transpiring that unique grahamgreenish ambiance. Walking decades ago through Bloomsbury, in particular around the British Museum and the Senate House of the University of London, as well as through Chancery Lane, a frisson would assail my body, as my self-constructed images of The Ministry of Fear (1943) reappeared, asking myself: “Are they watching me from that tall building, there, to the left?”

 

          Graham Greene, circa end of the 1980s, aquarelle, by Johann Sanssouci, Berlin, © 2020.

While preparing for my journey from Berlin to Mexico (the second such a visit, first one in 1971), early January 2016, I was then in a doubt as to whether I had already read his “Mexican novel”, The Power and the Glory (1940), decades ago, and almost entirely forgotten it, or whether it was the only major novel of Graham Green which I was yet to tackle in earnest.  Ex post, I realised it was the latter case, as one could not possibly forget such a literary achievement. 

 

A friendly hand in London sent me a Penguin edition of that Greene’s opus[6], which safely traversed the Atlantic and landed, albeit very tardily, on my desk at a university in Monterrey, on the 7^th of April. As I had professional duties to perform, the reading went lento, also because I wanted to inhale every single paragraph at full, looking for signals both inside the book, and outside, on the streets of Mexico, importing images and events of today’s Mexico into the novel. And exporting the substratum (or at least fragments of it…) of the novel into the daily life on the streets and valleys of the north of Mexico, albeit the scene of the opus is much centred on the South-East of Mexico, the state of Tabasco.

 

Would a novel written in the late 1930s contain at least the seeds of potential decoders of today’s Mexico, of its gigantism and unpredictability, its blatant contradictions always aflame, its ethnic volcano, forever fuming, at times lava ejecting, its seedy and aleatory violence, a certain gusto for death as a banality?

 

That’s too much to ask from such a novel, or from any of them. Yet, having established an intellectual kinship (rather a Wahlverwandtschaft) vis-à-vis Graham Green since my late teens (myself well down the scale), I was hoping in secret that he might provide me with answers that social scientists have been looking, in vain, over the last decades.

 

Only on Friday the 16^th of May, while waiting at the airport of Houston, Texas, did I manage to revisit the book, on page 44. Plenty of time had been granted upon this humble correspondent, thanks to the lottery of international aviation. I had decided to go first to Andalusia, to tackle pending business, before returning to Berlin. The original flight from Houston to Washington, and from then to Madrid, having been cancelled, I had to wait hours for a flight from Houston to Munich, and then for another to Madrid. Myself and the book landed properly in the Spanish capital ‒not so my luggage, lost somewhere in the firmament. A train to Málaga, whose reservation was changed three times, threw me into the hotel bed in La Cala del Moral, early Saturday evening.  On Sunday, thanks to an enterprising Chinese shopkeeper, I could buy essentials to survive, waiting for my suitcase to arrive.

 

It did reach my hotel late evening, the handle had gone, as well as the two wheels, the padlock had been broken, put inside with a “courtesy-note” of the U.S. Customs, (“we had to carry an aleatory search...”) It all meant that my piece of luggage transited “unlocked”, with no security at all, through at least two continents and three countries (plus the Atlantic Ocean).

 

Not the slightest doubt shall be tolerated: the forces of Evil had detected that I was on my way to – finally – decipher secret codes in the novel of Graham Greene, and decided to put an end to my life, by throwing me into oblivion, at best into the waters of the Atlantic—with no replacement clothing, no razor. Or at least my suitcase, hoping that a malefic hand would stick a dangerous “package” inside it, hence this modest writer being detained, on landing, accused of “drug-smuggling” or “terrorist courier”.

 

To no avail: I had finished my first reading through the long-voyage, and I was about to embark on the second.

 

We are at some time in the 1930s, in the state of Tabasco, still

transpiring the aftermath of the Cristero War (1927-1929), or Guerra Cristera. Named as such out of the slogan of the Catholic combatants “Viva Cristo Rey!” (long live Christ the King), which caused at least 100,000 deaths (a lower-bound estimate), and more than 250,000 “Catholics” fleeing to the United States. In The Lawless Road, Graham Greene described it as:

 “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth”[7].

The corpses of hanged priests and “Cristo Rey” combatant s were exhibited, for months, alongside roads and railway lines.

 Another blood-spitting chapter in the long-running feud between the “revolutionary” Mexican state and the Catholic Church, the cruellest, absurdist and most persistent of such an enmity in the whole history of independent Latin America.

 

Even after a truce was signed, Catholicism was still banned, though some sort of permissiveness was enacted in given regions. In others they kept forbidding church services, forcing priests to marry, persecuting (and shooting) those who refused to obey the rules imposed by the “anti-crusaders”. At times there was too “alcohol prohibition”, tolerating occasionally beer, but no wine, above all, as it was required for the Celebration of the Sacrifice of the mass.

 

The furious persecution of the Catholic Church, particularly in Western Mexico, and at the time of the Cristero War, would also provide the setting for one of the finest and most innovative novel of the Spanish language in the 20^th century: Pedro Páramo (1955), by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo (*1917-†1986).

What do we have in this novel? Our first acquaintance is Mr. Tench, a stranded English dentist in a remote part of Mexico, a port in the State of Tabasco. He had run away from some vague matrimonial quarrels, and is waiting for the exchange rate to improve, his savings to become robust, in order to return to England. In the meantime, he had deprived half of the native-population around of its original teeth. Greene is one of the few writers who can introduce sublime humour at the most unexpected time. Page 2:

 

“Mr Bench heard a revolver holster creak just behind him and turned his head. A customs officer was watching him angrily. He said something which Mr Tench did not catch. “Pardon me,” Mr Tench said.

“My teeth”, the customs man said indistinctly.

“Oh,” Mr Tench said, “yes, your teeth.” The man had none: that was why he couldn’t talk clearly. Mr Tench had removed them all.”[8]

 

He is soon to bump onto a “stranger”, a Mexican man evidently under stress, who wants to leave the port on the next boat (which he expects will take him to Veracruz, but he will miss it, as a woman was ill, hence he feels the need to give her spiritual assistance…). The Mexican “stranger” is well-educated; he speaks some English.  Mr Tench invites him to wait at his home, where they could enjoy the (illegal) bottle of brandy the priest was carrying. He would soon discover that the “stranger” is a “priest-on-the-run”, hastily camouflaged, as he opens the book left by the priest, and is shaken to see that the content is written in Latin. The priest, who remains unnamed, will soon carry the label, created and made immortal by Graham Greene, of the “whisky-priest”

 

He is being persecuted by the Lieutenant, and his cronies, a ruthless apparatchik of the regional state government, seeking to eradicate all type of Catholic devotion. In his room, swamped by heat and populated by black-beetles:

 

“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 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 have evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.”[9]

 

He received orders from the governor to find the “priest-on-the-run” and execute him, as the fugitive is one of the few who has not been shot dead, or forced to abandon his priesthood.

 

It is thus how we begin the long-voyage, at times directionless, through the tropical version of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, amidst the woods, the swamps, the plateaus of southern Mexico, having become, seemingly, at that time, “God’s forgotten land”. Pigs, vultures, rats, beetles, spiders, snakes, they all become uninvited companions. Celebrating mass or organising a baptism could mean a death sentence, yet there were people who seemed not to be afraid. But there were also cowards and traitors.

 

There is, for instance, Captain Fellows, “His big sunburned face was like the map of a mountain region – patches of varying brown with two small blue lakes that were his eyes.”[10], an English owner of a plantation, who reluctantly accept to hides the priest in a stall. Yet the women, as throughout the novel, are the only reliable source of salvation in a land swept by perfidious winds. It is the daughter Carol, who helps him, brings a bottle of beer, Moctezuma, and says to him, he can always come back, even if his father would not like it:

“I shall teach you the Morse code. It would be useful to you”.

“How?”

“if you were hiding in the plantation I could flash to you with my mirror news of the enemy’s movement”[11]

 

After miles of walking, by all, purposes barefooted (“He wore what used to be town shoes, black and pointed; only the uppers were left...[12])  the “stranger” arrives, looking to pass the night in a hammock, in a miserable bunch of derelict cottages, a few pigs routing round. The natives did want religious services, some comfort. An old man, who warned him that the soldiers had been there the previous night:

“The boy, father, has not been baptised. The last priest who was here wanted two pesos. I had only one peso. Now I have only fifty cents.”

“Tomorrow,” the priest said wearily.

“Will you say Mass, father, in the morning?”

“Yes, yes”.

“And confession, father, will you hear our confessions?”

“Yes, but let me sleep first.” He turned on his back and closed his eyes to keep out the smoke.

“We have no money, father, to give you. The other priest, Padre Jose...”

“Give me some clothes instead”, he said impatiently.

“But we have only what we wear.”

“Take mine in exchange.”[13]

 

The “priest-on-the-run” will have time to think and to reflect on his destiny, escaping on a mule:

 

“He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for this kind – a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret – the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart.”[14]

 

At other times he would remember his ambitions, before becoming a “bad priest”, of collecting enough money among the parishioners, to repair the cathedral, built a new school.

 

He finally manages to get into the village where the woman whom he gave a baby lived, together with his daughter, Brigitta. Miraculously, he survived the very search of the Lieutenant in the village, who inspected his hands and sniffled at his breath:

 

Before continuing the escape, he speaks to his daughter:

 

“I love you. I am your father and I loved you. Try to understand (…), try to understand my dear, that you are – so important.” That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.”[15]

 

The “mestizo”, the “half-cast” appears, who guesses the “stranger” may be the priest-on the-run, as he speaks “too well”, “a man of education”. The priest does not take long to realise that “he was in the presence of Judas”.[16]

 

At that time, in a land and where the churches had been demolished, robbed or closed, the greater proportion of the rural population had also been deprived of an orderly way of measuring time:

 

“One of the oddest things about the world these days was that there were no clocks – you could go a year without hearing one strike. They went with the churches, and you were left with the grey slow dawns and the precipitate nights as the only measurement of time.”[17]

 

A last, transitory relief would be provided by Mr Lehr, a widower, and his sister, Ms Lehr. Although Lutherans, barely hiding no great esteem for the Catholics, they live on a neighbouring state to Tabasco, and would offer him refuge for a while, at least to recover his breath. Some days afterwards:

“The Indians have heard you are here”, Ms Lehr said. “They walked fifty miles.  - I shouldn’t be surprised”[18]

 

He does indeed say mass before he leaves:

“little group of Indians passed the gate, gnarled tiny creatures of the Stone Age.” 

 

After living the Lehrs, the Judas (the “half-cast”) reappeared, setting the trap. “The Yankee is dying; he needs Sacrament...”. On two mules, they need between four-five hours to reach the place, back in Tabasco, where the Yankee, (James Calver, the Gringo, an American fugitive, wanted for robbery and murder) is dying. He has enough courage to warn the priest:

“Beat it, father.”

“You wanted me, didn’t you? You are a Catholic, you need a confession” (….) “that bastard...”, “beat it out of here quick, father, I didn’t know...”[19]

 

He would even offer his gun, and his knife, to the priest, so that he could shoot his way out of the coming arrest. There was no use.

 

After arresting, and transporting him to the nearest city, the Lieutenant said in a tone of fury:

“Well, you are going to be a martyr – you’ve got that satisfaction.” ”Oh no, Martyrs are not like me. They don’t think all the time – if I had drunk more brandy I shouldn’t be so afraid”.[20]

 

 

 

The “whisky-priest” had fallen into the trap, because he could not refuse to give the last Sacrament to a dying human being, albeit he suspected it right from the beginning. He manages to extract from the Lieutenant the permission of him receiving that last Sacrament from one of those priests who had been forced by the government to give up his soutane, and marry a woman, Father José. A last recourse for a Catholic, allowed perhaps “in extremis”. Yet the “wife” of Father José refuses to allow him to go to the prisoner.

 

The final pages described a woman explaining to a boy why those priests were executed, and why they had become heroes. Later at night, the boy would hear someone knocking on the front-door. He sees in the dark a “stranger”, who ask for his mother:

 

“You see, I am a priest, I wonder…, my name is Father...”:

 

“But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hands before the other could give himself a name.”[21]

 

The novel began to take shape during a long, perilous and almost lethal journey to Mexico, final destination Tabasco and Chiapas, from January to March 1938, which he intended would help to provide a non-fictional report on the persecution of the Catholic Church. The account of the trip was published in 1939, The Lawless Road, printed in the US as Another Mexico. A detailed, crude, sometimes angry chronicle of such an adventure, which will contribute to slander Graham Greene as having been perverted with a robust “anti-Mexican” flavour. Indeed, Greene does write down outbursts of a sort of a “pathological hatred” of the country, however, one should not forget that Greene was living at the time in the U.S., and did take “refuge” in Mexico, because of dangerous legal repercussions of one of his film-reviews concerning a soon to be famous Hollywood female child-prodigy. He may have “transferred” his personal ordeal in the original country, to the one he was visiting.

 

Yet the novel does not transpire the sort of raw-nerve exasperation one encounters, at times, in the travel-book. I read the latter much later, in July 2016, and I was delighted to find out that his first town-sojourn in Mexico, coming by train from San Antonio, was Monterrey, on his way to Tabasco and Chiapas:

 

“The hotel was American, the rooms were Americans: it was less foreign than San Antonio. This was a luxury town run for Americans on their way to Mexico City.”[22]

 

I did not know, on the 16^th of January, after just one week living in Monterrey that the pictures I took that day (with a modest mobile phone), in the centre of the city, were to capture the very building which would assuage the soul of the English writer:

 

“I walked down a kind of Tottenham Court Road (…), and then, most lovely in the dark, across a leafy square, from under a white moony colonnade, the cathedral, …”

 

 

Cathedral of Monterrey, Mexico. 16.01.2016.  ©

“… bells rising in dark metallic tiers towards the enormous sky, silence and dripping leaves.”[23]

 

 

Cathedral of Monterrey, Mexico. 16.01.2016.  ©

 

But who is really the “bad priest”, the “whisky-priest”?

 

“who combines a great power for self-destruction with pitiful cravenness, an almost painful penitence, and a desperate quest for dignity”[24]

 

Is the “whisky-priest” a mirror image of Graham Greene himself?[25] Yes, though camouflaged. It functions as a “proxy” for the other side of the writer, as a “bad catholic”, a “bad husband”, yet still struggling to live his faith, constantly looking for ways to break away from sin. Or at least, to hide them as decorously as possible. I am almost sure that Greene soon realised that the only way in which he, as a Catholic, could get some “absolution”, was through his writing.

 

The earthly absolution, from us, readers, can be taken for granted. The other one is beyond our feasibilities and knowledge.

 

 

"For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen."

 

The title refers to the doxology often recited at the end of the Lord's Prayer:

 

"For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen."

 

“Quia tuum est regnum, et potestas, et gloria, in saecula”.

 

In German, following on the steps of Martin Luther, the translation is “Kraft und Herrlichkeit”. “Kraft” being translated into English usually as “strength”. The word “Gloria” does exist in the German language, indeed, yet it had three possible meanings. Nowadays “die Gloria” or “die Glorie””, mostly feminine, to indicate rather “splendid notoriety”, “das Gloria”, neutrum, to refer to the celebratory passage praising God the Father and Christ in the musical celebration of the Christian mass. And then “der Gloria”, masculine, a sweet stark coffee-drink with a small spoon of flambé cognac.

 

We do not know whether Graham Greene was aware of that particular echo of the word “Gloria”, at least in the German-speaking countries.  Yet his “whisky-priest” would have been relieved to know that, at least in moderate quantities, a bit of brandy can help one to reach “Gloria”.

 

Does he reach “holiness”? Indeed he does, a modest one, nonetheless very much real. Above all -  a very unexpected one.

 

In 1983, Greene said that he first started to become a Christian in Tabasco, where the fidelity of the peasants:

 

 "assumed such proportions that I couldn't help being profoundly moved."[26][18]

 

He would be very happy to know, eighty years after the publication of The Power and the Glory, that his novel could well be said to be performing, even in our epoch “unkind to poetry”, that very role of comforting Christians, and even converting unbelievers into Catholicism. One of those who earlier on detected the diamonds hidden underneath the layers of detritus was Pope Paul VI, who years before accessing to Papacy was already promoting Greene’s Mexican novel, at the beginning on the sly. Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, as he was known before, blocked an attempt by some in the Church hierarchy to put Greene’s novel in the Index of forbidding readings (Index Librorum Prohibitorum)[27]. As he said to Greene in the famous encounter in The Vatican in 1965:

 

 “some aspects of your book are certain to offend Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.”

 

There are old film versions of the novel[28], with very resounding-names in terms of actors and directors, yet I have felt, up to now, no need to see them. It should not be understood as a derogatory attitude.  Rather, the text is so dense and rich, that only a fraction of it could be re-enacted on the screen. A similar spell of magic became my companion after reading The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway.

 

Graham Greene’s novel is one of the most original eulogies of the “imperfect human being” to be encountered in the literature of the 20^th century. Albeit “imperfection” should be considered as a “synonym” of “human being”.

 

Let me reproduce herewith a letter I sent to a correspondent, end of May 2016, which attempted a succinct summary, to which I added, ex post, just a few complementary comments:

 

“I finished the first reading of "The Power and the Glory" on the plane from Munich to Madrid, then on the train from Madrid to Málaga, and the second one finally in a bar in "La Cala". What do we have here? There is a stranded English dentist in a miserable place in the South of Mexico, who while waiting for the exchange rate to improve, and hence go back to England, has deprived half of the surrounding population of its original teeth; a "whisky-priest" on the run, still struggling for dignity and salvation despite his many peccadilloes, being persecuted by the tropical version of "sansculottetism", preposterous apostles of the tabula rasa,  that you can construct a "better" world by simply destroying everything that existed before; a starving and bar-footed "Judas", who wants to get the ransom money for the priest, some wonderful female characters, who try to save whatever is possible in the middle of a God-forgotten land. To a large extent, this novel is a eulogy of the beauty of imperfect human beings. It is also a reminder that in the middle of the whole excrementum you can find that tiny diamond, still glittering away, and signalling the place where hope may yet prevail: gloria in excelsis deo.

 

Just imagine: a run-away Yankee robber and murderer, dying, yet offering his gun and knife to a Mexican “priest-on-the-run” so as to allow him to escape from the trap set up by Judas… This is indeed holy alchemy: there is always the possibility of gold, coming out of the soul of a very much imperfect human being.

 

A great comfort.

 

Technically it is a very well-constructed, tensely developed novel, with an unexpected, original and wonderful ending. Some paragraphs should be memorised by any serious student of world literature.

 

I wrote in my diary, just after turning the last page: "A provisional report (still subject to revision and looking forward to a third reading): perhaps one of the most relevant and finest novels of the twentieth century. In any language."

 

All the best,

J.C.“

 

postscriptum: Hiermit sei mein Dank, dem „Herrn Minister“, J.S., in Moabit, Berlin, ausgedrückt. Die Biographie von Graham Greene, und andere Quellen, Zeitungsartikeln und Bücher standen mir zur Verfügung, dank seiner Hingabe zur Relevanz der heutigen Exegese der englischsprachigen Literatur. Dazu die bereichernden Gespräche.

 

 

---

[1]London, Jonathan Cape, 1989.

[2]Directed by Carol Reed, 1949, screen-play by Greene himself, with Joseph cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trewor Howard.

[3]Directed by Carol Reed, 1959, screen-play by Greene himself, with Alec Guinness, Maureen O’Hara, Noël Coward.

[4]Directed by Philip Noyce, 2002, Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser.

[5]Directed by John Boulting, 1948, screen-play by Greene and Terence Ratting, with Richard Attenborough, Hermione Baddeley.

[6]Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory, Penguin 1976 (1940).

[7]The Lawless Road, 1939 (1976, Penguin), p. 19.

[8]P..  8.

[9]P.  24.

[10]P. 31.

[11]P. 41.

[12]P. 42.

[13]P. 44.

[14]P. 60.

[15]P. 82.

[16]P. 91.

[17]P. 100.

[18]P. 175.

[19]Pp. 187-88.

[20]P. 196.

[21]P. 222.

[22]Lawless Roads, p.  38.

[23] Lawless Roads, p. 38.

[24]"Book Review: The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene". Christopher Adam.

[25]It has been pointed out already by Sherry, Norman, p.  700, The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. I, 1904-1939, London, 1989.

[26]The Uneasy Catholicism of Graham Greene". New York Times. 3 April 1983.

  Retrieved 5 January 2014.

[27]Peter Goman, “Graham Greene’s Vatican Dossier”, The Atlantic, July-August 2001.

[28]As The Fugitive, directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as the priest, 1947. A 1961 US television version, featured Laurence Olivier in the same role.