CHAPTER EIGHT

BUT A GLIMPSE IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR: THE UNINTELLIGIBLE NATIVE IN ’S

In his travel book Journey Without Maps, Greene describes as a country “saved from melodrama by its irony”. In an essay on Graham Greene, David Lodge notes that the same might be said of Greene’s own fiction. The Heart of the Matter, one of Greene’s most successful novels, can legitimately be classed as a melodramatic text in Lodge’s terms because it frames the tragic fall of the protagonist Henry Scobie, a Catholic Commissioner of Police in a British West African Colony, as the inevitable outcome of an almost grotesque accumulation of transgressions, such as adultery, blackmail, murder, and suicide, events dramatic enough in isolation but exacerbated in Greene’s text by their concurrence and the fact that they happen against the backdrop of the Second World War. As Lodge notes, the irony of The Heart of the Matter resides in the way Greene directs the reader’s sympathy and antipathy in the course of his narrative. As in other novels by Greene one is led to identify “not with the honest and brave, but with the criminal and cowardly; not with the rich and beautiful, but with the poor and ugly”.1 This is not absolutely clear from the beginning, though, when the central character of the novel, with whom the reader is invited to empathize, is introduced as a model of integrity and human kindness, sensitive to everyone’s problems, diplomatic in his application of authority, caring towards his dependants. Yet Scobie’s goodness proves a far more complex character trait than is apparent at the outset. This is revealed through his understanding of himself in relation to his expatriates and of their self- conscious enactment of British culture. At closer analysis one notes that it is above all by their attitude to writing in general and to British literature in particular that Greene defines each of his protagonists’ positions within the text. In so doing he accomplishes not simply a

1 As pointed out by David Lodge in “Graham Greene”, in Six Contemporary British Novelists, ed. George Stade, New York, 1976, 9. 182 The Non-Literate in Sight: Early Contacts privileging of his most literate characters, which Elizabeth Schafer regards as the main purpose of Greene’s insistent description of items containing writing and of events in which writing is produced, delivered, read, quoted, burnt, or shredded.2 In actual fact, Greene can be shown to be highly critical of the special kind of book learning displayed by his minor characters. He questions it from the point of view of Scobie, who expressly distances himself from the other Europeans in the novel and from their literary airs, declaring fairly early in the novel that he has no interest in literature and “no taste for reading”,3 least of all for poetry. All he has, the reader learns, is a “prose mind” (HM, 240) unsuited to understand his wife’s literary ambitions and obligations. Given to reading faces rather than books, Scobie knows that even if there were a book he could consult on his wife’s peculiar aspirations he would not be any wiser for it because he would never even bother to read “that sort of book” (HM, 253). On the whole, Scobie sees little use for writing other than as a means of documenting his dutiful execution of the orders he has been given. Indeed, the commissioner rarely applies his “awkward hand” outside his office. For letter-writing, he believes, does not “come easily” to him, and his police training, the reader is told, has taught him never to put even a “comforting lie upon paper over his signature” (HM, 141). Moreover, because of his open dislike, if not contempt, for any show of feelings, Scobie scrupulously avoids disclosing his own sentiments in written form. His distrust of the harmlessness of writing as a vehicle of truth is not ungrounded. As Elliott Malamet correctly points out, instances abound in The Heart of the Matter of writing obscuring and concealing, rather than revealing its own meaning:

letters are misspelled or lost or stolen; cables informing Scobie about the illness and subsequent death of his daughter are sent in reverse order; official government telegrams are contradicted by other telegrams; Scobie’s diaries are terse and cryptic; as Yusef say, “Words are very complicated”.4

2 Elizabeth Schafer, “Shakespeare in Greeneland: A Note on The Heart of the Matter”, Journal of Modern Literature, XVII/4 (Spring 1991), 590. 3 Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948), Penguin, 1962, 72. 4 Elliott Malamet, “Penning the Police/Policing the Pen: The Case of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter”, Twentieth Century Literature, XXXIX/3 (Fall 1993), 297.