„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 20th 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 7th 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 16th
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.
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 20th 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 16th
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 20th 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.
