Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature the Spiritual and Mental Torment of Characters In

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Martina Korytarová The Spiritual and Mental Torment of Characters in Graham Greene's 'Catholic Core' Novels Between 1940-1951 Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D. 2015 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Martina Korytarová I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. for his patient council. Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 5 1 Graham Greene’s First Attempts at Escape ........................................................................ 12 2 Influential Figures on Greene the Novelist ......................................................................... 33 2.1 Joseph Conrad the Literary Influence - A Heart of Darkness in ‘Greeneland’ ............ 34 2.2 The Catholic Revivalists and Greene’s Faith ............................................................... 44 2.3 The Disturbed Theists in Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh the British Catholic Literary Contemporary ............................................................................................................ 58 3 Duty and Guilt in The Power and the Glory ......................................................................... 63 4 Responsibility and ‘Pity Love’ in The Heart of the Matter .................................................. 74 5 Vows and Doubts in The End of the Affair .......................................................................... 82 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 89 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 93 Resumé ........................................................................................................................................ 94 Résumé ........................................................................................................................................ 94 Introduction Graham Greene is a well-known British novelist, essayist, critic, journalist, short story writer, screenwriter, travel as well as children’s book writer with a career stretching from the 1930s until the early 1990s. In genre, his novels range from thrillers – the so-called ‘entertainments’ – travel literature, ‘Core Catholic’1 novels, spy novels and political works all partly based upon his own foreign and domestic experiences. According to Mark Bosco, an acclaimed Graham Greene expert and author of Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, one of the divisions critics use for Greene’s work is into Catholic and post-Catholic works.2 Nevertheless, even though Greene tried abandoning his ‘Catholic imagination’3 for his writing later in his career, it appeared even in his more political and secular work. For instance, William Igoe, Greene’s priest friend notes, in The Quiet American (1955), a novel Greene tried to write without any Catholicism in it,4 the main character Fowler, after having the American Pyle killed, wishes he could confess to someone. The Catholic frame of mind makes up the psychology of Greene’s characters, even though it is never simple nor do the characters always proclaim themselves faithful Catholics. Greene’s half-believing characters are always atypical almost heretic in the dogmatic sense of what it means to be a Catholic, but at the same time the motives of their actions, their self-hatred and their urge to sacrifice themselves for others make them much more righteous than any ‘pious’ figure among them in the novels. Greene endows some of his characters with psychological and spiritual suffering, bringing it 1 A phrase encompassing Graham Greene’s four Catholic-in-the-core novels Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951) which are all reflective stories of human suffering and sacrifice within a Catholic viewpoint 2 Bosco 11 3 Bosco’s term 4 Igoe in The Graham Greene Trilogy – The Dangerous Edge 44:36 5 into extremes, Michael Meyer, Greene’s friend recalls, due to his own inner lifelong sense of an ever-present Hell on earth.5 The “sinner at the heart of Christianity”6 is at the heart of Greene’s ‘Core Catholic’ novels – a character suffering through his as if God-given fate finding the only possible escape in death. This thesis focuses on the basis of the inner torment of such figures in Greene’s novels between 1940-1951. The characters the thesis is concentrated on are the so-called whisky priest in The Power and the Glory (1940), a novel depicting the 1930s Mexican religious persecutions, Major Henry Scobie in The Heart of the Matter (1948), a story of choosing loyalties in a British West African colony, and Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair (1951), torn between love and hate for two men and God. In order for the reader to understand the work of Graham Greene more deeply the thesis is going to firstly look at the Greene’s beginnings as a person and then as a starting writer. The first chapter is dedicated to Graham Greene’s childhood, where the young Graham built up his personal and creative mental environment of ‘Greeneland’7 – a place of conflicting loyalties, betrayal, and lack of trust and safety. This state of mind Greene felt very deeply and which stayed with him throughout his whole life was partly caused by his alleged bipolar disorder leading him to several suicide attempts. These deadly experiences as well as his frequent travels and eventful love life are Greene’s attempts at escape from “boredom,” which he said, “perhaps drives one to creativity, to escape it.”8 The first chapter also encapsulates Greene’s Oxford studies, beginnings as a Catholic convert, a married man, and journalist turned novelist. 5 Meyer in The Graham Greene Trilogy – England Made Me 16:03 6 Péguy in Bosco 50 7 A term meaning the specific “existential and religious geography of Greene’s novels” (Bosco 24) 8 Greene in The Graham Greene Trilogy – England Made Me 17:41 6 The second chapter touches upon some of the literary and religious influences on Graham Greene as a novelist. Joseph Conrad, a novelist of Polish descent who settled in England, like Greene, travelled the world and wrote of struggles and darkness within a human mind, for instance in his famous novella The Heart of Darkness (1900), which shall be examined in comparison to Greene. According to Mark Bosco, the French Catholic Revivalists León Bloy, Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, Francois Mauriac as well as the British cardinal John Henry Newman played an important role in the formation of Graham Greene’s understanding of what it can mean to be a Roman- Catholic (convert) at the time and how self-sacrifice can work within a novel. The second chapter on the figures which influenced Greene’s writing and imagination finishes with Evelyn Waugh, Greene’s contemporary that was also a Catholic writer and promoter of the Catholic Literary Revival in Britain, who wrote of Roman-Catholics in a more upper-class setting. Waugh, in his acclaimed novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) portrays different faces and sorts of Catholic belief, in an aristocratic family, narrated by, for the most part, agnostic Charles Ryder, featuring two characters Julia and Sebastian Flyte who, similarly to Greene’s characters this thesis focuses on, struggle with their faith. Further, the thesis goes on to selectively describe the concrete triggers of inner torment within each concrete character separately in each of the novels. Chapter three is focused on the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, the last serving vicar in the state during the religious persecutions, always on the run from the lieutenant hunting him down, trying to ‘save’ as many souls on the way as he can while fighting his internal sense of unworthiness of his position. One major trigger of his misery is his duty as a priest, to serve the people and try to ‘save’ souls, in a state where anything religious is banned, where he chose to live a life of austerity, insecurity, and sacrifices, 7 dragging his mistakes – ‘sins’ – with him, unable to confess to anyone and relieve himself of their burden. His guilt for being a ‘bad priest’ – having seduced Maria in his moment of weakness who gave birth to a child, being an alcoholic and having been proud and materialistic before the persecutions – constantly haunts him, making him feel undeserving of being the last of his trade the people have to disburden their souls to. The whisky priest, while on the run from the authorities, is always torn between wanting to flee the country to where religion is allowed, between doing his duty and serving his people as he has been preordained to do, and escaping the situation from having himself caught by the lieutenant and executed for treason. Chapter four turns to Greene’s novel inspired by his beginnings in MI6 in Sierra Leone during World War II – The Heart of the Matter. Major Henry Scobie is a deputy- commissioner at the police in a West African colony. He is chronically truthful, even though he is threatening his credibility and putting his loyalty in question. This does not apply to his wife Louise Scobie and later mistress Helen Rolt to

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