Darkest Greeneland: Brighton Rock 133 Darkest Greeneland
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Watts: Darkest Greeneland: Brighton Rock 133 Darkest Greeneland transformed it into Greeneland: a distinc- Darkest tively blighted, oppressive, tainted landscape, in which sordid, seedy and smelly details are Greeneland: prominent, and populated by characters who Brighton Rock include the corrupt, the failed, the vulgar, and the mediocre. In Brighton Rock, when the moon shines into Pinkie’s bedroom, it shines Cedric Watts on “the open door where the jerry stood”: on the Jeremiah, the chamber-pot.1 Later Dallow, The 1999 Graham Greene standing in the street, puts his foot in “dog’s International Festival ordure”: an everyday event in Brighton but an innovatory detail in literature. So far, so famil- On Greeneland iar. But Greene characteristically resisted the term he had helped to create. In his autobi- The term “Greeneland,” with an “e” before ographical book, Ways of Escape, he writes: the “l,” was apparently coined by Arthur Calder-Marshall. In an issue of the magazine Some critics have referred to a strange vio- Horizon for June 1940, Calder-Marshall said lent ‘seedy’ region of the mind (why did I that Graham Greene’s novels were character- ever popularize that last adjective?) which ised by a seedy terrain that should be called they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes “Greeneland.” I believe, however, that Greene, wondered whether they go round the world who enjoyed wordplay on his own surname, blinkered. ‘This is Indo-China,’ I want to had virtually coined the term himself. In the exclaim, ‘this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone 1936 novel, A Gun for Sale, a crooner sings a carefully and accurately described. I have love song featuring a flower from Greenland. been a newspaper correspondent as well as The song offers a flower; Greene offers a lyri- a novelist. I assure you that the dead child cal interlude. There the word has the normal lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the geographical spelling, but the author is canal of Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of clearly being slyly self-referential. By 1972 the water . .’ But I know that argument is Greeneland had been granted the accolade of useless. They won’t believe the world they an entry in Volume 1 of the Supplement to the haven’t noticed is like that.2 Oxford English Dictionary. There the defini- tion is this: “A term used to describe the world This passage offers a standard artistic of depressed seediness reputedly typical of defense of the strange. “I am simply being the setting[s] and characters of the novels truthful,” says the artist; “I see more clearly of Graham Greene.” You may agree that in than you.” But one objection to Greene’s numerous works of fiction that he published, defense is obvious. He has selected his particularly between 1931 and 1951, whether world. He chose to go to exceptional regions: the fictional location were ostensibly London dangerous, violent, and sometimes sordid or Liberia, Mexico or Brighton, the author regions. He repeatedly sought what others 1 The Jeremiah was widely used in England until the 1950s but was soon rendered extinct by central heating, by the elimination of the ‘outside’ lavatory, and perhaps by greater sensitivity or prudishness in such matters. 2 Ways of Escape. London: Bodley Head, 1980, p. 77. Published by Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository, 2017 1 Graham Greene Studies, Vol. 1 [2017], Art. 19 Graham Greene Studies Volume 1 134 would choose to avoid: warfare, oppression, antidote to boredom, and by “boredom” crisis, vice, and squalor. For instance, he had he often seems to mean depression. One chosen to travel to Phat Diem in Vietnam psychological explanation of Greeneland, during the war between the Vietnamese therefore, is that the vistas are partly those and the French. Greene’s journal for 16 seen by a rather depressed person, and December 1951 records that child dead in the partly those seen by a person who is seeking ditch and the canal “thick with bodies,” while danger as an antidote. bombs and mortar shells exploded nearby. To explain, however, is not to explain If you ask why he chose such regions, there away. Many people have been depressed, are many answers. One is that such regions but only Graham Greene produced that are newsworthy, so Greene was often paid abundant, brilliant and diverse array of lit- by newspapers and magazines as a reporter. erary work. In any case, in his later years, Another answer is that such regions are as his Catholicism evolved unevenly and sometimes politically important, so Greene inconsistently towards agnosticism, in might be paid by the British Secret Service 1978 he termed himself a “Catholic agnos- for investigating them. He liked being paid tic.” Greeneland gave way to a brighter, several times for the same job, and once more cheerful, even comic landscape. One remarked that the British Secret Service is reminded of the gentleman who told Dr. was “the best travel agency in the world.” He Johnson, “I have tried too in my time to be a seems to have been involved with that travel philosopher, but, I don’t know how, cheer- agency from the 1930s until the 1980s. A fulness was always breaking in.” There are third answer is that such regions provided happy endings for the heroes of Loser Takes exciting material for works of fiction. As in All, The Potting Shed, and Our Man in the case of two of Greene’s literary heroes, Havana. Some of the stage plays are replete Joseph Conrad and R. B. Cunninghame with comedy, even farce at times: notably Graham, it sometimes looks as if the adven- The Complaisant Lover, The Return of A. turous travels had literary motivation. The J. Raffles, and For Whom the Bell Chimes. need to find material for subsequent literary Some of the later novels are not only light- creation was an incentive to roam. hearted, but also revisit earlier themes A fourth answer is his imaginative and regions in a spirit of blithe picaresque responsiveness to literary works which regeneration: examples are Travels with described regions both blighted and peril- My Aunt and Monsignor Quixote. ous. Greeneland is part of a vast territory Arguably, one of the gods served by Greene that was explored by Dickens in Bleak was the Roman god Janus, the two-headed House, by Baudelaire and by British dec- god who looks in opposite directions at the adent poets of the late 19th century, by same time: the tutelary deity of January, Conrad in The Secret Agent, and by Eliot janitors, thresholds and paradoxes. Greene in “The Waste Land.” In traveling and loved paradoxes large and small. Whether as describing the world’s surface, Greene Catholic Communist, as British secret agent was extending an imaginative and cultural who aided Fidel Castro, as anti-Semite and empire. And a fifth answer is psychologi- pro-Israeli, as creator of Greeneland and its cal. In his autobiographical works, Greene mocker, he reveled in the paradoxical.3 And repeatedly claims that he found danger an no novel is more paradoxical than Brighton https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/ggs/vol1/iss1/19 2 Watts: Darkest Greeneland: Brighton Rock 135 Darkest Greeneland Rock. But perhaps I should rather say, “No be scholarly editions of his works, editions novel is more paradoxical than the novels with endnotes, glossaries, and variant read- called Brighton Rock.” ings, and the significant differences will at once become apparent. At present, readers The Brighton Rock Variations and critics may sometimes be at cross-pur- and the Vanishing Jews poses as one or another cites a phrase or passage which does not exist in the text that The first British edition of Brighton others have read. Rock has a character called Prewitt and For example, in the 1938 British text of a range of anti-Semitic details. This Brighton Rock, Colleoni, the wealthy gang- Heinemann volume is the ancestor of the boss, has “an old Semitic face;” in 1970 it British Uniform and Library Editions of becomes “an old Italian face.” In 1938 his Greene’s work. The first American edition gang was “a group of Jews;” in 1970 they of Brighton Rock has a character called not were “a group of men.” In 1938, “Down the Prewitt but Drewitt, and it lacks most of the broad steps of the Cosmopolitan came a anti-Semitic details. That Viking hardback couple of Jewesses with bright brass hair and volume is the ancestor of the Viking, early ermine coats and heads close together like Penguin, and Bantam paperbacks. For the parrots, exchanging metallic confidences;” Collected Edition, published by Heinemann in 1970, “Jewesses” became “women.” In and Bodley Head in 1970, Greene revised the 1938, while Pinkie waits to meet Colleoni at British text, removing various Jewish allu- the Cosmopolitan, “A little Jewess sniffed at sions. Later Penguin paperbacks follow the him bitchily and then talked him over with Collected Edition text. In my book A Preface another little Jewess on a settee.” In 1970, to Greene, I always quoted the British first the phrase “little Jewess” becomes “little edition texts of his novels, because it is bitch.” We can guess what is probably hap- politically and critically important to quote pening here. Probably the later Greene, the text that fits the attributed original date writing long after Belsen and Dachau, is and the majority of its early reviews; but I regretting the occasional anti-Semitism of often drew attention to significant textual his pre-war novels and is revising Brighton differences which were to appear in later Rock accordingly.5 The revision, however, editions.4 One general reflection is obvious.