Grham Greene Heartof The Matter
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CHAPTER – IV
THE HEART OF THE MATTER – PURGATORIO
In Greenes early fiction along with a definite but notably uneven development of style and vigour, there was an apparent failure to distinguish between various functional genres. Even Brighton Rock betrays an initial confusion between what Greene calls an “entertainment” and what he finally offered as a tragedy. Prior to Brighton Rock we observe an uncertainty of artistic purpose that led to an unstable treatment of the basic elements of fiction , setting character and action.
Part of the success of Brighton Rock, The Power And Glory and The Heart Of The Matter is due to the preliminary sketching of elements in each of them – a process that as it turned out, managed to release the special energy and vision that would characterize Greene as a writer of stature. It can be said about the earlier novels then that the confusion of purpose and the blurry handling of the
elements are rooted in a failure to disentangle the mystery of mystery , to separate it out from the contingencies of melodrama and staged surprises of the brain twister.
The disentanglement followed, as it seems upon the Liberian experience for after that the plot and the action of Greenes novels are increasingly given their meaning by the religious motif – a motif which, since it cannot always be Christian, can scarcely be always called Catholic, a sort of shocked intuition of super nature. It is when the religious motif takes charge that Greenes resources including his nervous highly pressured style and his uncommon talent for narrative become ordered and controlled and his artistic power fulfills itself.1
The three novels published between 1938 and 1948 are
1This notion has been developed in ” The Trilogy” from The Picaresque Saint by W.B Lewis ( Philadelphia, Penn J.B Lippincott Co. 1954).
sometimes taken together as a trilogy; but the word should be
enclosed in quotation marks, for the trilogic pattern, if it existed in Greenes awareness took hold only belatedly. But it is worth juxtaposing the three books, to observe several striking aspects of Greene. All three show his affection for the primitive.
Greene often turns away from the relatively civilized to inspect human life in its cruder and more exposed conditions: in a dark corner of Brighton ,
the jungles and the prisons of Tabasco, the coast of West Africa – all places where as Scobie tells himself in The Heart Of The Matter , ” human Nature hasnt had time to disguise itself ; places where there openly flourished that which, elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up, ”
In these primitive scenes, we encounter the dramatis personae of Greenes recurring drama and of his troubled universe: the murderer, the priest, and the policeman, who are the heroes
respectively of the three books. All three figures, in different
embodiments, appear in all three novels, and they tend more and more to resemble each other. The murderer, Pinkie, is knowingly hideously inverted priest, the policeman, Scobie, becomes involved with crime and criminals; the officer in the, The Power And Glory has ” something of a priest in his intent observant walk.” While the priest in turn has queer points of resemblance with the Yankee killer whose photograph faces his in the police station.
The three figures represent, of course, the shifting and interwoven attributes of the Greenean man: a being capable of imitating both Christ and Judas; a person who is at once the pursuer and the man pursued ; a creature with the splendid potentiality either of damnation or salvation. The activities of their fate exhaust apparently, the major possibilities. These novels are respectively Greenes most strenous, his most satisfying and artistically his most assured.
END OF CONCLUSION
The Catholic Novels of Graham Greene
Last year, Graham Greenes centennial prompted a major reconsideration of his work. His publishers brought out a new edition of his novels, the third and final volume of Norman Sherrys biography appeared, and all the major literary reviews ran retrospectives on his life and work. The consensus from writers as disparate as James Wood, Christopher Hitchens, and John Updike was that Greene is still very much worth reading.
The Catholic element in Greenes work also received a fair amount of attention, and nowhere more provocatively than in a review of Sherrys book by the English writer Simon Heffer, who argued that for non-Catholics Greenes faith is “simply irrelevant” or, worse, “an exposition of hypocrisy.” Taking into account the novelists chronic adultery, his inveterate absence from the communion rail, and his own admission that he was what he called a “Catholic agnostic,” Heffer concluded that Greenes religion was “a posewhich he turned into a series of money-making opportunities.” Such charges prove that Greenes faith remains a contentious issue, but to see whether they survive scrutiny, we need to revisit Greenes four Catholic novels–Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951)–and relevant aspects of his life.
One measure of the boldness of Greenes achievement is how persistently it has been misunderstood. The knuckle-rapping from the English reviewer recalls George Orwells famous review of The Heart of the Matter. There Orwell upbraided Greene for perpetuating “the ideafloating around since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distinguй in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty.”