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.
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