Pretty Goes with Pretty

Journey Without Maps Addendum

A day or so after my previous post, I took up Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene, which I've been reading concurrently as I trek through Greeneland. I was pleased to see that both of my assumptions outlined in that post—that Greene's Liberian journey spawned an indeliable link for him between the acts of writing and traveling, and that the form of writing a travelogue informed his overall skill—were validated through a couple of anecdotal passages. Of the latter assumption, there was this passage:

His letters to his mother, to [his brother] Hugh, and to literary agents, his articles, book and film reviews, after he had established himself in London, all reveal a growing sense of confidence, and one wonders whether this was not in part due to the fact that he had, in Liberia, experienced what few of his contemporaries in London had experienced: he had undertaken a journey into the unknown, come close to the primitive origins of mankind, journeyed without maps and had, like those who had survived the horrors of the First World War, come through—by means of his own determination and grit. Certainly, he now had a surge of creative energy which was nothing short of phenomenal.

Of course it's not difficult to look at a list of Greene's books and see, quite simply, that all of his best-known novels followed right after Journey Without Maps—obviously something happened. But I'm encountering most of Greene's novels in succession; I've read a few of the later novels but I've been trying to put them to the back of my mind as I follow his development. So my experience of Journey was really the sense of "hey, the writer of England Made Me was developing," as opposed to the sense of "here's where the writer of The Quiet American got his shit together"—know what I mean? This passage from Sherry let's me know that I'm not imagining things.

As to the other point—that Greene essentially caught the travel bug and, consciously or not, entwined it with his fiction writing—this anecdote was both entertaining and insightful to that end. To set the scene: Greene at this point was still writing Journey Without Maps and A Gun for Sale, while England Made Me had just come out—to lackluster reception. Greene, with his agent Nancy Pearn, was soliciting numerous magazines with short stories and pitches for stories, and not always meeting with success. He was very close to finishing both his works in progress, but he also had a wife and two children and income was an issue. Pearn suggested giving a pitch for a story to the News Chronicle.

With so much on hand Greene might well have let the suggestion of a synopsis for the News Chronicle sleep awhile. Not so. The day after promising to think abut a story he produced a synopsis called “Miss Mitton in Moscow” and coupled it with the astonishing idea that he should leave for Moscow, almost immediately, his urgent deadlines for his two books notwithstanding: “Here is the synopsis of a 10,000 word story for the News Chronicle. If they feel inclined to commission it, could you hurry up their decision, as I want to get in the background and the satirical description of the tourists, as it were, on the spot. In other words, will they make up their minds so that I can book a seat for Moscow to leave in ten days!”

It is strange that on the suggestion of a commission for a serial Greene was willing to drop everything and go to Moscow. It could not be because the synopsis promised a brilliant story, yet he was prepared to follow his star to Moscow, chasing after background for a story about a bored, disillusioned journalist meeting up with an old lady’s naïvety and excitement in visiting Moscow for the first time; of how her absurdities become a topic of conversation; of how he has to help her out of the country ahead of the other tourists as she had tried the Moscow authorities too much; only to discover, when he finds himself to be a central figure in an advertised Soviet Trial that Miss Mitton was a dye expert and had carried out a smart piece of commercial espionage.

The literary editor of the News Chronicle liked the synopsis and asked the see the first instalment, which Nancy Pearn thought encouraging, but this was not sufficient for Greene: “I explained it was dependent on a definite decision within ten days. The boat’s sailed now & there’s not another till the spring. Besides it’s a costly business & I wouldn’t take the trip without a definite commission. So we’ll have to wait for another story to come to mind.

Graham Greene: Journey Without Maps

[A lot of people seem to be finding my Graham Greene posts via Google, so I hope my regular readers will forgive the repetition of this first bit (probably my regular readers just scroll past anyway—be honest, you just want me to keep writing about Feist): I've tasked myself with reading all of Graham Greene's books in succession. If you're curious to read my thoughts on any of Greene's other novels, click here and see if I've gotten to it yet. ]

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Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene's nonfiction travelogue recounting his audacious 1935 trip through Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, is like a wedge shoved deep into his oeuvre. While it is not the book that catapulted him from merely popular novelist to lasting literary influence, it nonetheless signals a shift in his ability as a writer. The seeds of his talent have been present in his last few novels, but the experience of Africa—and the way he wrote about it—feel as if someone has put those seeds in the path of direct sunlight.

Greene has come to be known for novels in which his (usually British) protagonists exist in foreign, underdeveloped—hot—beautiful landscapes: The Quiet American in Vietnam; The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case in Africa; The Power and the Glory in Mexico; The Comedians in Haiti; and so on. All of those novels came later. Prior to his trip to Africa, Greene’s first four (actually six) novels all took place in England or, I suggest, ostensible stand-ins for England. The Man Within and It’s a Battlefield both take place inside the country. Orient Express follows a largely British cast (save the Yugoslavian Dr. Czinner and the Austrian Grünlich), but the novel exists outside of any one country as it travels across Europe. The characters exist in a self-contained bubble. Likewise England Made Me concerns itself mostly with twin siblings Anthony and Kate Farrant, Brits who have taken up in Stockholm; but the majority of the action occurs in the context of the global corporation they work for, Krogh’s, a company which conducts its business in English. The Stockholm setting is largely arbitrary; Anthony’s struggle has more to do with his placement within the company than it  does within a foreign city. And of course, the title alone should tip you off that Sweden is not the country Greene is most concerned with.

It’s no surprise that Greene had yet to bring the exotic locations into his novels—though his tentative fictional forays out of England in those two novels (plus Anthony Farrant’s background as someone who had lived in Shanghai, Aden, and elsewhere) do point to some inevitable desire to place his characters outside of the familiar. No surprise, because Greene was a realist writer; from the very beginning he’s had to experience his locations in order to write about them, whether walking from the outskirts of Lewes into its center for The Man Within or taking a weekend trip to Stockholm for England Made Me; and as of 1935 that was essentially the extent of his traveling experience. Paul Theroux’s introduction to Journey Without Maps (which incidentally is a worthy read after you’ve finished the book—he calls bullshit on much of what Greene writes of) spells it out:

[Greene] had hardly traveled. He had made jaunts out of England, but in a hilarious, weekending way, and had never ventured beyond Europe. He knew nothing of Africa, had never camped or slept rough or been on a long sea voyage or a long hike of any consequence—certainly not a trek through the bush. Probably influenced by the journeys his friends and contemporaries were taking, he got it into his head to hike with porters and carriers through an unmapped part of the Liberian hinterland; he did not know exactly how many miles he would have to walk , or how long it would take, or what his actual route would be.

Much odder than this vagueness—to me, at any rate... was Greene's decision to take his young female cousin Barbara with him. She was twenty-three, she had never been anywhere, she'd had a privileged upbringing, she was not much of a walker.

In other words, Greene really had no business attempting this journey. But he did accomplish it—suffering fever along the way—and he considered it a life-changing experience.

Journey Without Maps is a dramatic act on Greene’s part to bring the far corners—the desperate corners—of the world into his realm of experience, and therefore into his writing. Besides being a realist, he was also a devotee of Joseph Conrad, and many other contemporaries (Waugh, for instance) were making similar African pilgrimages in Conrad’s footsteps. On one level, at least, Greene’s trip is a naïve rite of passage—more an attempt to acquire a level of “experience” any novelist worth his salt should have than a conscious act to “change” his fiction. In fact the Liberian trip didn’t factor into his fiction at all, other than a short story, “A Chance for Mr. Lever.” Nevertheless Greene’s subsequent travels, often as ambitious as the Liberian episode, did factor directly into his novels. Within three years he was riding a mule through Mexico, which resulted in the nonfiction Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and the Glory. Soon he would return to Africa, to Sierra Leone, where he lived for a year; here he set The Heart of the Matter. Later in life he would return to Africa a third time with the express mission of researching for A Burnt-Out Case, which takes place in a leper colony.

But I think what may separate Greene’s pre-Journey novels from those that came after is more significant than mere scene setting. Looking back at the pre-Journey novels, all but Orient Express are flawed; they each seem to occupy themselves with a preconceived theme that stamps its way across every page at the expense of realism (in The Man Within), character (It’s a Battlefield), or form (England Made Me—which includes odd forays into stream-of-consciousness interior monologues)—in other words, much of what Greene is best remembered for. Journey, by its very nature, could not suffer in the same way. Greene didn’t know what to expect. All he could do was record what he saw and reflect as went. Thus the heat of Africa and its lush greenery, the natives’ nakedness and alternately strange, stoic, or childlike behavior, became the bulk of the book’s content, colored at every turn by Greene’s very real emotions—anxiety, anticipation, exhaustion, homesickness. After reading the pre-Journey novels, where melodrama frequently forced its way into a scene to derail its believability, Journey Without Maps reads to me almost like a disciplinary exercise for Greene—he couldn’t insert melodrama; he was forced instead to rely on its more subtle cousin, tension. I’ll bet that its no accident that, regardless of their settings, Greene’s string of best-regarded novels followed nearly one after the other directly after Journey Without Maps (not including the noir thriller A Gun for Sale, which was written simultaneously with Journey)—Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American. The fact that England-set Brighton Rock was the first in that succession indicates that exotic scene setting was not the first or only lesson Greene learned through his trip or through the writing of Journey Without Maps.

New Country

This was what I carried with me into new country, an instinctive simplicity, a thoughtless idealism. It was the first time, moving from one place to another, that I hadn't expected something better of the new country than I had found in the old, that I was prepared for disappointment. It was the first time, too, that I was not disappointed.

—Graham Greene, Journey without Maps

Graham Greene: It's a Battlefield

I’ve been slow to post on It’s a Battlefield, Graham Greene’s third novel. I’ve been finished with it for about a month and am now well into his next, England Made Me. My laziness in writing about it is probably a good indication of how I felt about it. Not bad, but not great, either. The novel is conceptually interesting, but it never congeals into a successful work. Its most dramatic moments feel like rewarmed scenes from his previous novels—the love triangle recalls The Man Within, while the business-as-usual conclusion is similar to that of the far superior Orient Express.

The novel’s central character is Jim Drover, who has been imprisoned for the murder of a policeman during a riot (the policeman was going to strike Drover’s wife). However, Drover never appears in the book—not a single scene. (Interestingly, Norman Sherry’s biography implies that Greene wrote numerous prison scenes but cut them all out.) Instead the book concerns itself with all the characters who are satellites of Drover’s current situation—his brother Conrad, his wife Milly, and her sister Kay; the Assistant Commissioner of police; Conder, a reporter; Mr. Surrogate, a member of the local communist chapter (of which Drover was a member); and a few others.

So, like Orient Express, this is an ensemble novel, no one character taking control. But where that novel was so concise, so gripping, It’s a Battlefield is a muddle. It makes you wonder how Greene was able to keep things so perfectly paced and plotted in Orient Express, how he was able to keep all his characters so well-drawn, when he more or less failed in this same respect here. Perhaps it is because the very nature of Orient Express entwined with a linear progression toward a climax. The train moved forward, and characters could only enter and exit the story when the train stopped. It’s a Battlefield is much looser, more tangential. There are more characters, for one; many are given just a few pages or a single chapter, such as the policeman’s wife. But even those that are more directly tied to Drover’s fate are given a rather democratic number of pages, to the point that much of their dramatic arcs are suppressed. When the promiscuous Kay takes a date with Jules, for instance, the heart behind their engagement is deflated. The chapter is told from Jules’s perspective, an otherwise minor character whom the reader has nothing invested in.

More drama is found in the love triangle between Drover and his wife and brother, Milly and Conrad. The entire relationship reads like The Man Within version 2.0—thankfully a subplot this time around rather than an entire novel. In that book, Andrews was torn between his love for the virtuous (in his eyes) Elizabeth and his father figure, Carlyon, leader of a band of smugglers. Like Drover, Carlyon was largely offstage for most of The Man Within, as Andrews internally wrestled with whether he should love a man who represented so much that Andrews loathed about himself and his childhood—not to mention who he had already betrayed. In truth “love triangle” is not really the correct term—perhaps “allegiance triangle” would be more apt. Similarly, Conrad is drawn to Milly, who he feels is saintlike, yet is torn over his feelings for his brother, who may be sentenced to death or may be given eighteen years in prison. Conrad has always looked up to Jim, and cannot process that what Jim did was actually wrong; yet a part of Conrad wants Jim to die so that he can be with Milly forever.

Ultimately Conrad betrays his brother by consummating his relationship with Milly. But like Andrews in The Man Within, the further Conrad gets, physically, from his love, the less he feels its effects and the more his allegiance to his brother grows. The same can be said for Andrews and Elizabeth in The Man Within;  when Andrews heads for the city he quickly falls into bed with another woman, and when he returns to Elizabeth but is outside her house when the smugglers arrive, cowardice overpowers love. Likewise, in Orient Express, the romance at the novel’s center disintigrates when it is forced apart by physical separation; once Carlton and Coral are separated, Carlton simply goes on with his life.

It’s a Battlefield is full of other themes as well, not least of which is socialism and Communism. This too appeared in Orient Express, in the form of Dr. Czinner. In that novel all of Greene’s thoughts on the matter were expressed directly through Czinner. With It’s a Battlefield (and his next novel, England Made Me), Greene spends more time painting an entire landscape filled with political unrest, whether in the form of actual members of the Communist party in It’s a Battlefield or in allowing the stark class divisions in that book and in England Made Me to speak for themselves. It’s interesting that Greene would come to be known as a “Catholic writer,” for in these early books religion makes scant appearance. According to Norman Sherry’s biography, Greene did join the Communist Party in Great Britain when he was twenty years old. However he paid his dues for just four weeks before lapsing. Obviously Greene had some continued sympathy, or at least fascination, for the workers, though it’s unclear to me whether he was committed in reality or if it was simply a newsworthy issue of the day.

Graham Greene: Orient Express

At age 29, Graham Greene was already publishing his fourth novel, Orient Express (also known as Stamboul Train). Perhaps it’s no wonder that his previous three novels were not that great; broadly speaking, it’s common that a novelist in his or her early or mid-twenties might not have settled on his or her own voice or style. But as one grows older, giving one’s craft time to develop, the grasp on nuance, subtlety, and tone becomes more firm. Orient Express finds Greene taking on an ensemble cast and a third-person omniscient perspective—the opposite of his near-claustrophobic debut. Where The Man Within could work easily as a play—you’d need no more than three sets and a cast of three main players—Orient Express is decidedly more filmic, which is not surprising given Greene’s love of the cinema.

You can almost see the credits rolling at the beginning of the book, as it opens at a train station in Ostend, where a purser helps a succession of distinct character types aboard the train: a young chorus girl, a wealthy Jew, and a mysterious mustachioed doctor. We meet each of these characters—Coral Musker, Carleton Myatt, and Dr. Czinner—from the perspective of a detached character who knows nothing but what he sees. This announces a new tack for Greene and sets the tone for the rest of the book, even as we get to know the characters better: Greene paints their disposition through their actions and appearance rather than their innermost thoughts. It’s a Creative Writing 101 lesson, but Greene didn’t really seem to embrace it until now. It also suits the mystery element of the novel. Immediately there are clues to take in, about the doctor in particular. The purser is surprised to learn that the doctor has an English passport, despite a noticeable accent. When Myatt encounters him later, he notes that the man’s clothes are torn and worn—not the clothing a man of means would wear.

Orient Express is most definitely working within a subgenre, the train mystery. Think Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Putting your characters on a train just begs for mystery. But Greene’s mystery is not one of murder (though there is a murderer); it has more to do with identities, with a certain freedom from your own life you can enjoy while traveling. So long as your feet are not on solid ground, you can be whoever you like. Dr. Czinner is the first and most obvious example. He boards the train as Dr. Richard John, a schoolteacher from England. But we learn soon enough that he is actually a political exile returning to his home of Belgrade. As the train makes its three-day journey to Constantinople, stopping in Cologne, Vienna, and Subotica along the way, more passengers board the train, and each wear their masks. Josef Grünlich, who boards in Vienna, is a murder on the lam, so of course he hides his identity. The author Q. T. Savory has banked his career on appearing as a working-class Cockney, though the reporter Mabel Warren finds him transparent. Warren, who is a butch lesbian, suspects her lover, the beautiful, feminine, and fairly vacant Janet Pardoe, to be looking for a new sugar daddy (she’s tired of her sugar mommy, apparently); so Warren herself sets her sights on Coral Musker as new girl-toy. All of this speaks to an anything-goes mentality that only feels natural in the limbo of the locomotive.

This theme is played out in the relationship that serves as the heart of the novel, that of Myatt and Coral. This is the most tentative romance I’ve ever read; their entire relationship is built on mixed signals and misunderstood overtures—if ever two people fell in love, it’s these two. It is alternately awkward, sweet, creepy, noble, and cruel. Coral is a struggling chorus girl, flawed because she is “forgettable.” She is too plain to ever be a leading lady. Myatt meanwhile is a rich Jew, in an often unfortunately stereotypical sense. For reasons of both class and culture, the two should never meet nor fall in love. At first Myatt reminds Coral of any other Jew she’s ever met—they stand outside the stage door waiting to take her out; and after their first encounter Myatt has a dream in which he and a friend are driving down a boulevard looking for prostitutes and he chooses Coral. But nevertheless their lives intertwine on the train. Coral has a fainting spell so Myatt lets her sleep in his first-class berth; he sleeps in the hall. She suspects him but nevertheless takes him up on the offer. The following morning he buys another first-class berth for her out of charity. But she assumes he expects some quid pro quo. Still, she takes him up on it. When she alludes to his expectations he denies it, but now that the thought is in his mind, they do set a date for that evening after all. Both seem to approach the night with dread, despite spending the day together on the train. By the night, she’s declared her love for him; when Myatt realizes Coral is a virgin, their sexual act becomes more noble in his mind, and he too declares his love for her. They make plans to remain together once they’ve reached their destination. But of course, Constantinople is an actual place. It’s not limbo.

The other lead in the novel is Dr. Czinner, a Communist who narrowly escaped arrest and certain death five years previous and has never been heard from since. He is on his way back to Belgrade to lead an uprising. Unfortunately for him he is recognized by Mabel Warren. Warren is a fascinating character. She has the briefest ride on the train—she gets on at the second stop and is left behind at the third—yet she sets Czinner’s story in motion and plays a less direct but significant role in Myatt and Coral’s story as well. Greene has a great knack for making colorful and memorable characters out of people who occupy only a small number of pages—I’m thinking of Mr. Tench in The Power and the Glory or Albert Parkis in The End of the Affair. Warren is an alcoholic lesbian with major co-dependence issues. She’s full of spite and loathing and has the tenacity of a terrier. She is positive that Czinner is returning to Belgrade and bullies him into a story for her newspaper. He doesn’t cooperate beyond uttering a few words, but she publishes her story via phone from Vienna, and by the time he reaches Subotica the police and military are waiting.

Subotica, a town on the border of Hungary and Yugoslavia, is the penultimate chapter of the novel and is the real climax. The action leaves the train as Czinner is pulled for questioning—along with Grünlich and Coral (perhaps not incidentally, the most depraved and most pure-hearted of all the characters). This is the moment when the novel becomes a true potboiler, as the trio makes a daring escape after being found guilty of various crimes. This is also the moment where you realize Greene is better, more deft, than the preceding pages might have lulled you to believe. It is a tragedy that Coral has been wrapped up in this portion of the plot, and I didn’t realize until this point just how wrapped up I was in her story. I was screaming at her to stay put, the way you scream at characters on Lost to do the sensible thing.

This novel, like so many of Greene’s books, lives and dies by its plot twists, so forgive me if I become vague. Suffice it to say the fates of Czinner, Grünlich, and Coral are determined at Subotica. But the real tragedy of the book is its coda: Constantinople. This short, twenty-page chapter follows the remaining characters to the end of the line, and the whole thing is a brilliant dagger to the heart. Myatt, of all characters, is the ultimate embodiment of the novel’s theme. The Orient Express is a limbo where you can be whoever you want. But step off that train and your fantasies slough off like water from the shower. We are who we are: it’s a delicious tragedy.

R.E.M.'s Green(e)

Regular readers of this blog know that my attitude toward music and literature and art and everything else is one big overlap. How it all affects me is all tangled up in a web of mental associations, which in turn determines how I approach all of it.

Take my Graham Greene obsession. The first mention of it was this post, which was sparked by conversations about music, not literature. Prior to posting about it here, I'd had an email conversation with a friend where I also related my Graham Greene fancy with music. The title of that email was "Graham Greene is my R.E.M. is my Graham Greene," or something like that. I was going on about how the best thing about Greene is that he's done just short of a million books, so any time I'm in a reading funk I can go to him. It's sort of like realizing late in life that you really dig R.E.M.—there's always more back catalog, all dependably wonderful. (Not coincidentally I was picking up a bunch of R.E.M.'s back catalog at the time, thanks to Tower Records' going-out-of-business sale.) I really do think that if Greene could have a pop music equivalent, it would be R.E.M.

So imagine the kismet when, just as I'm starting in on reading everything Greene has ever done, Matthew Perpetua (a Fluxblogger) has begun a similar endeavor with R.E.M. At his new blog Pop Songs 07, Perpetua is writing about every R.E.M song ever written. If ever a band was worthy of such an effort, it's probably them.

Graham Greene: The Name of Action & Rumour at Nightfall

 
In my quest to read all of Graham Greene’s novels in chronological succession, I come immediately to a roadblock: his second and third books, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, are out of print, and have been ever since Greene’s publisher sold out of their first pressing long ago. The books have been repudiated by their author and will likely remain out of print forever. I’ve gone on, therefore, to his fourth novel Orient Express (also known as Stamboul Train). But it almost seems unfair not to at least learn about those intervening books, especially because the level of quality rises so greatly from The Man Within to Orient Express. So I sought out Norman Sherry’s biography and read up on the period of Greene’s life covering his first four novels.

Upon its publication, The Man Within was a smash, selling more than 10,000 copies—considered a best-seller at the time. Greene basked in the limelight while it lasted. One passage in Norman Sherry’s biography points to an interview in which he clearly indicated his enjoyment:

[Greene] must have felt at this time that he was on the crest of a wave. His first published novel was a runaway success and he was now known as a writer and courted—the London Evening News, which was publishing a series of interviews with clever young men and women about what they expected from life, included Graham Greene. Given his relative immaturity at twenty-five, his expectations ‘after sustained effort,’ were in part predictable: to be rich and successful and have houses in London, Somerset and Rhodes.

(As an aside, the character Q. T. Savory, from Orient Express, is a novelist full of his own success and lampooned with great humor by Greene. Greene was sued by a contemporary, J. B. Priestly, for libel. Priestly had written a critical review of The Man Within, but the two did not seem to know each other terribly well and Greene did not admit that Savory is based on Priestly—actually if you read the chapter on this in Sherry’s biography, Priestly comes off looking like a parody of Savory! At any rate, based on Greene’s enjoyment of his own success, followed by his subsequent run of flops, I’d suggest that a more seasoned and humbled Greene may very well have been lampooning his former self.)

For a moment Greene was the toast of the town, and he seemed to take for granted that that would continue, despite his own growing misgivings about the quality of the novel for which he was being celebrated. He quit his day job as a journalist for the Times and became a full-time novelist, taking a monthly salary from his publisher as an advance on royalties. It seemed a safe risk for all parties, but things took a turn.

In The Man Within, as I noted in my post about that book, Greene had yet to find his own voice. The book’s lead character, Andrews, spent more time telling the reader how cowardly he was rather than really showing it. Reviewing the novel upon its publication in 1929, the New York Times prophetically had similar things to say: “Once he achieves… a less isolated and poetic approach to the inner workings of human characters he will be a really significant novelist.” Greene might not have objected to that criticism, and probably thought he was rising above his debut with his follow-up, The Name of Action. Yet when that book was published in 1930, the reviews were nearly all bad. Sherry notes that the critics were doubly damning because they felt it was worse than his debut:

The trouble was that most reviewers compared The Name of Action unfavourably with The Man Within and at this time he had come to feel that The Man Within was more and more terrible. he admitted he was getting rather tired of kind friends who “tell me they like this but of course they much prefer the other.” He was convinced that while his first was a moderately bad book, his second was a moderately good one. Even with his mother he argued against the view that his heroine Elizabeth in The Man Within was a success: “I don’t think she’s a character at all, but a sentimental complex. But though I sez it as shouldn’t I think Anna-Marie Demassener [heroine of The Name of Action] quite adorable.”

Greene’s third novel, Rumour at Nightfall, fared no better. Based solely on the reviews Sherry reprints, I get the impression that Greene had yet to learn the lessons pointed out in the New York Times’ review of his first book. The New Statesman said of Rumour, that Greene had “a good story to tell. But he is so resolutely and laboriously romantic that one can believe scarcely a word he says. The (psychological) drama is dressed up in all the colours of carnival; the emotions of his characters are largely theatrical; he achieves definition of falsification”; and the New Republic lamented that “these characters stagger under the overwhelming weight of their own mental questionings and probings… Mr. Greene’s forte is his ability to cover places and objects with atmosphere laid on heavily, like paint.”

Both of these critiques could be leveled at The Man Within without changing a single word. Looking again at Greene’s author’s note preceding the reprint of The Man Within, his claim that an author should be granted “one sentimental gesture” to his earliest effort becomes noteworthy for the emphasis on one. All of these novels are obviously of a piece in his mind.

The two novels were not only critical failures, but commercial as well. Combined, they  sold around 2,000 copies. Greene and his wife Vivien had already been forced to leave London and move into a more affordable house in the country. While there he spent a great deal of time on a his fourth book—not a novel, but a biography of John Wilcot, the second Earl of Rochester who lived in the seventeenth century. After a great deal of research and writing, his publisher rejected the manuscript outright.

By 1932, at age 28, Greene was at his lowest point, with three failures in four years. His publisher had been paying him a monthly salary all this time, but finally threatened that if his next book was not up to their standards, their payments would stop altogether. Orient Express could not have happened at a better time. Greene had finally let go of his rudimentary psychological portraits and instead made a more realist account of his characters, allowing plot and action to tell the bulk of his story.

More on Orient Express later this week.

Graham Greene: The Man Within

As I mentioned last week, I’ve given myself the task of reading all of Graham Greene’s novels, from first to last. That’s twenty-four novels, starting in 1929 and ending in 1988. He’s also got four books of autobiography, numerous short stories, three travel books, and many plays and screenplays. I won’t commit to reading all of those as well unless they really pique my interest as I come upon them chronologically. At the rate I read, twenty-four novels is more than enough to last me a while.

So, we begin at the beginning: The Man Within. Greene started this book when he was twenty-one, and it took him a couple of years to write. Actually he had written two additional novels prior to this, neither of which were picked up by a publisher. It’s also worth noting that the next two novels of Greene’s to be published were disowned by the author, never to reprinted. This puts The Man Within in a lonely place within Greene’s oeuvre, flanked on each side by two pairs of failures. Greene himself acknowledged this up front when The Man Within was reprinted in the 1950s, noting that it really only existed for posterity, nothing more. The book was published “with inexplicable success,” he said in his author’s note. The statement sounds humble but indeed he was embarrassed by the novel within just a year or two of its publication. He goes on:

I tried to revise [the novel] for this edition, but when I had finished my sad and hopeless task, the story remained just as embarrassingly romantic, the style as derivative, and I had eliminated perhaps the only quality it possessed—its youth…. Why reprint then? I can offer no real excuse, but perhaps an author may be allowed one sentimental gesture towards his own past, the period of ambition and hope.

Greene is exactly right in his self-critique: the novel is in print for posterity, and it should be read for posterity. The whole of The Man Within feels like a first novel. The angst and self-loathing experienced by Andrews, the main character, is two-dimensional, and often Greene’s authorial voice lets that of his influences creep in. Almost nothing about this book, beyond the broadest strokes, would indicate that the same author had The Quiet American or The Power and the Glory in his future.

Picture a lesser-drawn version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man careening through Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, and you’ve pretty much got The Man Within. Lots of inner turmoil, lots of fog, lots of lousy men. The novel opens with its protagonist, Andrews, on the run through the night fog of coastal England. Andrews is a smuggler, but he’s double-crossed his crew by alerting the local authorities of the place and time at which the smuggler’s boat, The Good Chance, was to dock. In the ensuing scuffle one lawman is killed and six of the smugglers are arrested. Three get away, however, including the ringleader, Carlyon, who was a surrogate father of sorts to Andrews. Their relationship, which nearly hints at something more intimate than a father/son bond, makes Andrews’s betrayal particularly perplexing, both to Carlyon and his crew and to Andrews himself.

The betrayal is rooted in Andrews’s father issues, which is also where the book’s title comes from. The epigraph, a quote from Sir Thomas Browne, reads “There’s another man within me that’s angry with me.” Andrews recognizes an inner critic, one that sabotages every noble gesture he imagines, filling him with an unredeemable self-loathing. The voice is borne from his real father, once the leader of the band of smugglers now led by Carlyon. Andrews’s father is revered by the criminals, his reputation growing more mythic with each passing day. But in reality he was an abusive monster who bred fear and cowardice into his son and whose beastly attitude likely caused his wife’s too-soon death. Upon his death he leaves all of his possessions—most notably The Good Chance—not to Andrews but to Carlyon. So from one perspective the two could be seen as boys in competition for a father’s attention, but Andrews sees it instead as two fathers battling for the son. Carlyon, perhaps out of guilt, recruits Andrews to join his ship, and though the two develop a strong bond, the rest of the crew, the boat, the smuggler’s life in general, is a nasty reminder to Andrews of his hated father. His betrayal of the crew is an act of rebellion against his dead father, but the result is not victory but flight, cowardice. It is not so simple to destroy one’s demons.

The whole of the book concerns Andrews’s attempt to do just that. On the run from Carlyon, he breaks into an isolated cottage belonging to Elizabeth, a young woman whose own father figure has died just days earlier; in fact his corpse is still in the house when Andrews breaks in. Elizabeth has her own ghost, it seems. The man was possessive of her—like Carlyon, he is a father figure who is also nearly a spouse. The man did not want Elizabeth to be with anyone other than him; likewise Andrews is soon torn between the two “songs” of Elizabeth and Carlyon. Both Elizabeth and Andrews must acknowledge the end of their respective affairs. Inevitably they fall in love, of course. Andrews attaches an impossibly saint-like devotion to Elizabeth, largely because she offers him temporary solace from the outside world, and because he can confess his cowardice to her without fear of her punishment.

Cowardice. It is Andrews’s ultimate fault, as he constantly reminds anyone who’ll listen. Elizabeth is the only person or thing in the novel that gives him courage, and for that he regards her with ferocious religiosity. But her goodness is like a fire: it only provides warmth when nearby. The moment Andrews leaves the house—goaded by Elizabeth to see his betrayal through in order to start his life anew by heading into the city of Lewes, where the six men are on trial, to testify against them—his cowardice returns. And without Elizabeth there, we, the reader, are subject to Andrews reminding us yet again how despicable he is. Perhaps if he were to ultimately find redemption, then The Man Within could be fulfilling. But by novel’s end, while there is resolution, there is no redemption. Andrews’s cowardice destroys Elizabeth, leaves Carlyon without ship or crew (and therefore without purpose), and finally destroys himself. Greene’s novels are known for the Catholic undertones, but The Man Within shows that Greene hadn’t yet learned to grapple with those issues of his religion head on. The themes of the novel—fathers and sons, cowardice and bravery, sin and redemption—are alternatively muddled or cliché. The seeds for many of Greene’s novels are present here, such as the hunted man or the atheist/agnostic touching salvation, but Greene seems not to have known yet what he himself was getting at.

Simple Pleasures: Plot and Character, Prose and Structure

Maybe the previous post is being too reductive. Probably is. But what spurred me to post, in addition to the correspondence I mentioned there, was a second correspondence I was having with another friend, on a different subject entirely. We were talking books and I mentioned my current obsession with Graham Greene. I mean it: I am obsessed with the guy. After reading two books in the last six months I’ve become addicted to his books like they’re Girl Scout cookies. A couple chapters into re-reading The Power and the Glory, I put it down and decided to do this obsession right. I’m starting from the beginning and reading through his entire oeuvre. I may even read his three-volume biography concurrently. What I mean is, I’m obsessed.

The last time I was this obsessed with an author, I was in college and the author was Donald Barthelme. To this day it’s difficult for guests to be in my living room and not comment on the number of Barthelme books around. But how did I get from Barthelme, where concept, language, and a collagist approach to prose squash such traditional notions as plot and character, to Greene—who is known for nothing if not taut plots and the inner turmoil of his characters? I read The Power and the Glory as a freshman in college and enjoyed it, but at the time it struck me as solid but nothing special. “Special” was something like the chronologically fluid Catch-22 or Barthelme’s absurd and abstract treatment of Snow White.

There’s a parallel there with my taste in music then and now. While I was so in love with Can or even Low—groups that in their own way were deconstructing the song to reveal certain elements buried under the more obvious, more tangible ones—I was also reveling in Barthelme, the Fiction Collective, Pynchon, Sorrentino. The mechanics of writing were the thing—the means, not the ends. Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues had not a single dot of punctuation; Mark Amerika’s Kafka Chronicles was a stream-of-consciousness hail of noise. Now, whenever I pick up a novel that seems more pleased with its structure than with its story, I toss it aside. Mark Danielewski is the heir to the tradition right now. Some are touting him as a genius but I just want to throw his books across the room. It’s too labored. At least Mark Amerika realized (rightly) that his vision belonged on the web. It’s beyond print; why try to constrain your vision, so driven by typographic dances and a hyper-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure structure, to a book format?

Yes, it makes me cranky. The same way Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s new record made me cranky for its faux-experimentation. But like I said yesterday, that’s not to say I can’t appreciate it when it’s done right. Look at an author like David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas is a technically exhilarating novel, but all the bravura Mitchell displays in the actual writing is in support of a plot, of characters, of a larger theme—in other words, of telling an absorbing story. Musically you need look no further than Bjork to see someone go about as far out there as you can get yet still retain emotion, never mind a melody.

A far less extreme but much more unlikely example is the newest hot shit, Peter Bjorn & John. Who would think that a band responsible for the earworm of the year, “Young Folks,” would effortlessly drop in more cerebral tracks like “Poor Cow,” “Start to Melt,” or the album highlight “Roll the Credits” ? These guys ably demonstrate that it’s easy to have a handle on your mechanics without sacrificing heart. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but that’s the point: you don’t have to try so hard!

Which brings me back to Graham Greene. If ever there was an author who had such complete control over his mechanics, put to perfect use in support of the story he wants to tell, it’s Greene. No element overpowers the other. One of the books I read last year that has spurred me on this kick, The End of the Affair, is the perfect example. After setting up all three sides of a triangle, giving us tantalizing scenes and memorable supporting characters, Greene flips it two-thirds in and gives us a brand-new narrator. In lesser hands it would feel forced, artificial. Take for instance Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, a perfectly excellent novel that nearly derails at the two-thirds mark when it shifts from third to first person. But Greene pulls it off, leading to great emotional payoff. Thus far the books I’ve read by Greene don’t feel Big and Important—there’s no aspiration to Nobel here—but when I’m finished with the book all I want to do is go back to page one and start over. What more should a book, or a record, wish to accomplish?