THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

‘Success’, he added with a characteristic note of pessimism, ‘is only a delayed failure’. By the mid-1960s, when his
novel The Comedians was published, he was able to command sales of some 60,000 copies in hardback alone (this
was at a time when more ‘experimental’ work by less established contemporaries would probably have had a print-run
of only 1,600 copies). Even though something of the commercial success of The Comedians can be put down to the
international scandal it provoked (the Haitian Government brought a case against it in France, claiming that it had
damaged the Republic’s tourist trade), Greene was already by far the best known and most respected British novelist
of his generation. Something of his international esteem can be put down to what at the time might have seemed the
‘un-English’ prejudices which were patently evident in his work. He was a devout anti-imperialist (resenting the new
American imperialism as much as he despised the crumbling edifice of the British Empire). He was also a semidevout,
but believing, Roman Catholic. Greene, who later claimed to have been powerfully drawn to Africa by reading
Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines as a boy, had, after a singularly unhappy and suicidal adolescence, been
received into the Roman Church in 1926. The themes of a colonially wounded world beyond Europe, a gloomy sense
of sin
[p. 581]
and moral unworthiness, and a commitment to outsiders and rebels, haunt his subsequent work.
Greene had published his first work of fiction, a short story, at the age of 16. In all, he wrote twenty-six novels and
nine volumes of short stories. His first novel, The Man Within (1929), bore as its epigraph a quotation from Sir
Thomas Browne: ‘There is another man within me that is angry with me.’ Many of his later protagonists reflected this
two-sidedness, complicated by a seedy and dangerous self destructiveness. The Catholic boy-gangster, Pinkie, in
Greene’s eighth novel Brighton Rock (1938) is not only fascinated by the concept of ‘Hell, Flames and damnation’ but
seemingly intent on courting his own eternal destruction in the face of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of
God’. Taken with his painful account of the career of a whisky-priest in anti-clerical Mexico in The Power and the
Glory (1940), Greene seemed to many observers to have emerged as Britain’s answer to the ambiguous, knotted, but
affirmatively Catholic fiction of his French contemporaries, Mauriac and Bernanos. The angry, self destructive, ‘other
man’ was, however, to oblige Greene’s fiction to move in a more distinctively agnostic direction. It may be significant
that the phrase ‘whisky-priest’ is Greene’s most obvious gift to the English language. The Power and the Glory was as
much about doubt and failure as it was about faith (the novel was condemned as ‘paradoxical’ by the Holy Office
which ought, given the nature of Christian doctrine, to have known better). The Catholic Christianity of Greene’s
novels, if that is what it can properly be called, seems most often to resemble a single ray of heavenly hope which
glances over dark abysses of human depravity, despair, decay, and pain. To Greene’s characters, God and his Church
seem to be as distant as they are evidently ‘appallingly strange’.
As with Bowen’s novels, the Second World War sharpened certain of Greene’s fictional perspectives and
preoccupations. Certainly, what is generally agreed to be his finest work appeared between 1940 and 1951. The novels
of this period modulate between troubled and disorienting topographies, each one of which seems to reflect the untidy
frustration of another. The twilit, blitzed London of The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The End of the Affair (1951)
opens up into the violently restless Mexico of The Power and the Glory; the precarious, ‘smashed, dreary’ and partly
subterranean Vienna of The Third Man (1950) parallels the flyblown, rat-infested, war-blighted West African colony
of The Heart of the Matter (1948). Most of the key characters in these stories are Catholics; all of them are ruins, or at
best ruinous. Scobie, the suicidal protagonist of The Heart of the Matter, accuses God of ‘forcing decisions on people’
and blames the Church for having all the answers (‘we Catholics are damned by our knowledge’). In The Third Man,
a short novel which coexists with its more brilliant variant, the film-script that Greene wrote for the director Carol
Reed in 1949, Catholic Vienna is wrecked, divided, and guilt-ridden, but then so are its citizens, its displaced
refugees, and its military occupiers. It is scarcely surprising that its sewers, rather than its palaces, figure so
prominently
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in the story. None of Greene’s sleazier and more ostensibly political later novels (The Quiet American of 1955 is set in
Vietnam, its successor, Our Man in Havana, in Cuba) has quite the same edgy power or quite the same success in
matching compromised and seedy people to compromising and mouldy places.
In the phantasmagoric world of The Ministry of Fear, the tormented Arthur Rowe recognizes the extent to which
the man and the hour have coincided (‘I’m hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically
smashing London to bits all around me ... It sounds like a thriller’). Rowe’s frenetic hallucination contrasts markedly
with the far more subdued and matter-of fact references to wartime Britain in Anthony Powell’s sequence of twelve
novels known collectively as A Dance to the Music of Time. At the opening of the eighth volume, The Soldier’s Art
(1966), Powell’s wryly observant but adaptable narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, buys an army officer’s greatcoat in a
London outfitters. It is a shop which also supplies theatrical costumes and there are two headless tailor’s dummies in
the fitting-room, one costumed as Harlequin, the other dressed in the scarlet uniform of an infantry regiment: