1 INTRODUCTION
The three novels by Graham Greene (1904 1991) analysed in the thesis are The Ministry of Fear, The Heart of the Matter and Our Man in Havana . Although I am aware of the importance of the political, religious, social, humorous and absurd aspects of these novels, I decided to examine them from another point of view. It seems that in these three novels the relationship of the main male hero to his wife, lover, daughter or female friend and later lover is extremely strong, devoted and of overall importance to the development of the plot. It is a relationship full of responsibility on the man´s side. I chose three novels with different settings: London, Cuba and West Africa. The male characters in these novels are also very different and there are a variety of relationships to the female characters – a friend and later a lover, a father, and a husband and lover. Even though the settings and relationships differ, the notion of responsibility is present in each relationship. In this thesis, firstly the way how Greene became a writer and how he wrote the three novels will be looked at. Secondly, in each of the chosen novels the protagonist and the kind of responsibility depicted for his female counterpart will be examined. The main question is what the responsibility is based on. Graham Greene, a deep Christian, concerned with his belief or doubt in God, is, as well as his male characters, concerned with well being of ‘his’ women. Questions arise, what are the women characters like? Are they worth such concern? Are they beautiful and loving, deserving the affection and sacrifice? On the other hand, do they just take the love and affection shown to them for granted? Is it, at all, love that the male heroes give the women or is he just extreme weakness and disability to oppose them? Thirdly, throughout the thesis, Greene’s life – his autobiographies, biographies, his dream diary and pre faces to his books will be examined to determine if there is any resemblance between the author’s own life and the attitude of male characters to ‘their women’ in his works.
1 Abbreviations used in the text: WMO = A World of My Own SL = A Sort of Life WE = Ways of Escape OMH = Our Man in Havana MF = The Ministry of Fear HM = The Heart of the Matter BR = Brighton Rock
2 2 LITERARY CAREER OF GRAHAM GREENE (TOLD BY HIMSELF) Graham Greene liked reading in his childhood and early youth and on his many escapes from boarding school, he carried books to read. Due to truancy and problems caused by his unwillingness to share sport games with classmates, he was sent to a psychologist. His problems resulted from the conflict between the two worlds he had been flung into one of them home and the other school which did not give him enough privacy and where his father was a headmaster. During his stay at the psychoanalyst in London, which he described as the happiest time of his childhood, he had to keep a dream diary – this may be considered as the first stepping stone to writing. Later in his life, he also kept dream diaries a selection of which was published after his death in 1992 and was titled A World of My Own . Dreams seem to have played an important role in his writing. As Yvonne Cloetta mentions in the foreword to this book, he used dreams when he suffered a block in his creativity. He used to reread the five hundred words he had written before he went to bed and sometimes the subconscious helped him find continuation of a story or a novel or it gave him material for a new piece of writing. (WMO, 2001, 8, Czech edition, my translation) When Greene returned to school, now with a feeling of superiority because, unlike his schoolmates, he was knowledgeable about Freud and Jung, he wrote a poem that appeared in a school magazine and then he sent it to an evening paper. They published it and it was the first time he experienced the sense of an author’s success: Now, I told myself, I was really a professional writer, and never again did the idea hold such excitement, pride and confidence; always later, even with the publication of my first novel, the excitement was overshadowed by the knowledge of failure, by awareness of the flawed intention [] The sense of glory touched me for the first and last time. (SL, 1999, 80) Already at this young age, he knew that success was a short lived thing. Rather than success, failure was what interested him. Unsuccessful characters that he depicted were astonishingly convincing and one would almost sympathise with the loser, as e. g. later in A Gun for Sale (1936), the character of Raven. Raven was a hired assassin with a deformed face, betrayed by being paid with false money for his job. He wanted to take revenge and kill the man who ordered the murder, on his escape he takes a dancer Anna as a hostage with the intention of killing her. But then, as she is open and starts to win his affection, his determination weakens. At the end, Raven is shot but the reader feels sympathy towards him.
3 While at Oxford, Greene was writing poetry and completed a novel that had not found a publisher. After graduation from Balliol College, he spent some time in Nottingham where he worked for the Nottingham Journal unpaid because he could not find an apprenticeship in any newspaper in London. The fact that he had a volume of verse published and was asked to review a novel occasionally was the advantage of this employment. However, he had to look for more profitable employment because he wanted to marry. He found it as a subeditor for The Times: I was happy on The Times, and I could have remained happy there for a lifetime, if I had not in the end succeeded in publishing a novel, but not the one I was about to finish when I left Nottingham. (SL, 1999, 124) The time spent at The Times was an excellent practice for his future profession of a writer and it influenced his style that became clear and free of useless words. It seems as if his life and writing career had started properly at The Times. The years of truancy at school were gone and for some time he forgot about the boredom, which had been hunting him throughout his life. He was happy there. And while the young writer is spending these amusing and unexacting hours, he is learning lessons valuable to his own craft. He is removing the clichés of reporters; he is compressing a story to the minimum length possible without ruining its effect. A writer with a sprawling style is unlikely to emerge from such an apprenticeship. It is the opposite training to the penny a liner. (SL, 1999, 129) In 1926, Greene sent his second novel to Heinemann´s publishing office. He did not receive an answer from them and so he decided to write a third novel and if this had not been successful, he would have stopped writing. In two years, the break came when another publisher accepted his novel The Man Within (published 1929), which sold 8,000 copies. It was his first published novel. Even though his boss argued with him to think properly about leaving the secure and promising job in the paper, Greene insisted on leaving The Times so that he had time for writing. Nevertheless, the warning his boss gave him proved to be true later: In the years to come I was bitterly to regret my decision. I left the Times the author of a successful first novel. I thought I was a writer already and that the world was at my feet, but life wasn’t like that. It was only a false start. (SL, 1999, 142)
4 Even though work on the next novel was very difficult, dissatisfying and frustrating, he learned even more skills that were important for his writing. He learned how to write about a scene of action, how to make it lively and exciting, yet simple: Now I can see quite clearly where I went wrong. Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn’t be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm – little else. Even an adjective slows the pace or tranquillizes the nerve. (SL, 1999, 145)
Greene found himself in a difficult situation. He was married and, according to his autobiography, happy in his private life but badly in debt and with little hope of producing a good novel. The money he got for reviewing novels in the Spectator was not sufficient. He did not trust himself anymore and at the same time was pressed by contracts for further novels with two publishers. As the years of contracts were passing and no novel worth publishing was on its way, he became extremely worried. Between The Man Within and Stamboul Train Greene wrote two dissatisfactory novels The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932) which he later disowned and forbade their republishing. The sense of failure and nightmares were present when suddenly the success of Stamboul Train came in 1932. As fast as the good news arrived, there was also bad news. A character from the novel resembled a contemporary author too much and this author threatened with libel action if the book was published. Greene had to make alterations and cover a part of the cost for the already printed and bound books. Greene, again, acknowledged the short life of success. For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure. And it is incomplete. A writer’s ambition is not satisfied like the business man’s by a comfortable income, though he sometimes boasts of it like a nouveau riche . (SL, 1999, 156) [] Knowing the unreality of his (an author’s) success he shouts to keep his courage up. There are faults in his work which he alone detects; even his unfavourable critics miss them, dwelling on obvious points which can be repaired, but like a skilled intuitive builder he can sniff out the dry rot in the beams. How seldom has he the courage to dismantle the whole house and start again. (SL, 1999, 156) The above quotations were taken from Greene’s early autobiography A Sort of Life . It stops at the moment Stamboul Train appears, at the time when the author was about 27 years old and it mainly covers his life up to his 25 th year. Greene published it in 1971, at the age of sixty seven. He wrote it mainly for therapeutic reasons. As for relationships he described in A Sort
5 of Life , Greene reported about his childhood, about his rather distant mother and a squad of nannies that substituted her. His father seemed to be even more remote than mother. It concentrates on his childhood, the happy period of psychoanalysis he underwent in London where he was able to escape the terror of school. Important moments are feelings of failure, fear, boredom, fighting boredom by playing Russian roulette as an adrenalin sport, first sexual excitements, first writing experience, publishing first works and poverty resulting from insufficient sales of his books. Further, there is a momentary feeling of success of the first novel that was accepted by Heinemann publishing office, suspicion of epilepsy, engagement, marriage and happy moments at The Times. In 1980, Greene continued his autobiography with the title Ways of Escape . It deals with novels and writing much more than A Sort of Life . It looks critically at some of the novels, mentions political events, years of wars, the author´s approach to Catholicism, fascism and his war job in the Secret Service, his mission to West Africa etc. Here, he often mentions people who served as models for characters in his books, quotes passages that went wrong, scenes that worried him or ones that he cut out from his novels for another edition. He also compares the numbers of copies issued of his novels or judges the reviews he received from other authors. He even complains about insufficient authenticity in some of his works: The other scene which has always worried me, with which I could only tinker, altering phrases and cutting wherever possible, is the meeting of a Communist Party branch attended by Mr Surrogate, an intellectual member. I had only once in my life attended a large Communist meeting, and that was in Paris in 1923, at a time when I held for four weeks a Party card at Oxford, and this experience was totally insufficient as a basis for a scene which now to me lacks authenticity. (WE, 1999, 33) The author explains the way he was writing scenes and developing characters in Stamboul Train , how he was learning to create the tension as if on a theatre stage and how he conducted the characters like puppets: The young dancer Coral Musker had surely appeared at he Theatre Royal in Nottwich, like a character in a later book, Anne in A Gun for Sale , and I can detect in both books the influence of my early passion for playwrighting which has never quite died. In those days I thought in terms of a key scene. [ ] Often these scenes consisted of isolating two characters – hiding in a railway shed in Stamboul Train , in an empty house in A Gun for Sale . It was as though I wanted to escape from the vast liquidity of the novel and to play out the most important situation on a narrow stage where I could direct every movement of my characters. A scene like that halts the progress of the novel with dramatic emphasis, just as in a film a close up makes the moving picture momentarily pause. (WE, 1999, 29)
6 Many travels and various experiences gave Greene material and inspiration for his books. When he was thirty one, he travelled to Liberia with his 23 year old female cousin. The outcome was a travel book called Journey without Maps (1936). It is quite interesting to compare his point of view and his cousin’s perceptions of the journey which he mentions in his autobiography. He suffered from fever at one moment and his cousin thought he would die. She logically thought about continuing the journey, organizing Greene’s burial etc. But he, who had always seen death as a positive thing, as one of possible ways of escape from boredom and failure, experienced a ‘conversion’ – he wanted to live at once and succeeded in surviving. I had made a discovery during the night which interested me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable. (WE, 1999, 54) However, Graham Greene had not yet got so far. The Ways of Escape not only tell about travelling or intelligence experience where Greene gathered substance for his writing. He also reviewed hundreds of films, which sometimes even brought problems. He was sued by Shirley Temple, a child actress, through Twentieth Century Fox for accusing them of using Shirley Temple as an allurement for middle aged men. But as Greene says: ‘From film reviewing it was a small step to scriptwriting’ (WE, 1999, 64). A worthwhile script was certainly The Third Man (1950). Even today audiences may be lucky to see the film in film club projections. It depicts a criminal trafficking a diluted medicine, causing crippling illness to adults and children in post war Vienna hospitals. The story is about friendship and loyalty, disillusionment of friendship and a sense of responsibility. There is a clear distinction between good and evil, a lot of tension and the film appeals to morals and conscience. It is a drama which keeps the audience curious until the end whether conscience wins over loyalty to an old friend who has turned into a ruthless mass murderer. In the Ways of Escape Greene also reflects rather negatively on his being labelled as a Catholic writer: [] but now I was discovered to be – detestable term! – a Catholic writer. Catholics began to treat some of my faults too kindly, as though I were a member of a clan and could not be
7 disowned, while some non Catholic critics seemed to consider that my faith gave me an unfair advantage in some way over my contemporaries. (WE, 1999, 74) He disagreed with being called ‘a Catholic author’, he just claimed to be ‘a writer who happens to be a Catholic’ (WE, 1999, 74). It was the time of religious oppression in Mexico and Franco's attack on republican Spain. Greene writes: ‘I think it was under these two influences – and the backward and forward sway of my sympathies that I began to examine more closely the effect of faith on action.’ (WE, 1999, 75) Therefore, he went to Mexico in 1938 to write about religious persecution and proofread Brighton Rock (1938) there. He explains what had made his book The Lawless Roads (1939) about Mexico a ‘Catholic’one: It was in Mexico too that I discovered some emotional belief, among the empty and ruined churches from which the priests had been excluded, at the secret Masses of Las Casas celebrated without the Sanctus bell, among the swaggering pistoleros, but probably emotion had been astir before that, or how was it that a book which I had intended to be a simple detective story should have involved a discussion, too obvious and open for a novel, of the distinction between good and evil and right and wrong and the mystery of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’ – a mystery that was to be the subject of three more of my novels? (WE, 1999, 76 77) Greene also complains that critics introduced the term ‘Greeneland’ for ‘a strange violent ‘seedy’ region of the mind’ (WE, 1999, 77) but he only described what he had seen in Indo China, Sierra Leone or Mexico. The critics did not consider Greene´s depictions of the dead and the poor, cruelty and injustice a truthful picture of the world. The dirty, immoral and illegal that he had been experiencing on his travels mirror in his works. In 1938, Greene, like most men in England, became scared of having to leave his family for war one day. The family would stay without support so Greene decided to provide money by writing two books at the same time. One of them was the already mentioned The Power and the Glory (1940). Greene thought it would not sell well and his family would suffer in poverty. Therefore, he decided to write an entertainment called The Confidential Agent (1939). He worked in an office away from home. The mornings were devoted to The Confidential Agent and afternoons to The Power and the Glory . Greene’s usual daily assessment was five hundred words for the latter and unbelievable two thousand for the former. To achieve this, he used a stimulant called benzedrine:
8 I fell back for the first and last time in my life on benzedrine. For six weeks I started each day with a tablet, and renewed the dose at midday. Each day I sat down to work with no idea of what turn the plot might take and each morning I wrote, [] (WE, 1999, 88). Greene concedes that The Confidential Agent ‘is not really one of his’. It was as though I were ghosting for another man. D, the chivalrous agent and professor of Romance literature, is not really one of my characters, nor is Forbes, or Furtstein, the equally chivalrous lover. The book moved rapidly because I was not struggling with my own technical problems: I was to all intents ghosting a novel by an old writer who was to die a little before the studio in which I had worked was blown out of existence. (WE, 1999, 89) Here, Greene admits that his six benzedrine weeks were just an emergency and an unrepeated action. It also had devastating consequences on his nerves and relationship with his wife. At the time of writing The Confidential Agent , he had not been working for any intelligence service yet. It was in 1941 that he joined the Secret Service in West Africa and started gathering ideas for The Ministry of Fear (1944). He also used the experiences from the blitzed London for this novel. The war caused a short pause in his writing career and after it, he published The Heart of the Matter (1948). After the Second World War, Greene was asked to write a film about post war Vienna divided into four zones. So he went there and collected ideas for the script of The Third Man, which was made in 1949 . On his way from Vienna to Italy, he stopped in Prague, where the Communist revolution was just about to start. ‘The fifties were for me a period of great unrest’, Greene says in Ways of Escape (139). He published The End of the Affair (1951) which reflects problems in his love life and his manic depressive temperament. He tried to escape life and therefore sought danger and worked as a correspondent in foreign countries suffering political and military unrest: I hadn’t the courage for suicide, but it became a habit with me to visit troubled places, not to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on London – 1951, three months of travel in Malaya during the Emergency as a correspondent of Life ; 1951 – 1955, four winters in Vietnam reporting the French war for the Sunday Times and Figaro ; in Kenya reporting the Mau Mau outbreak for the Sunday Times ; 1956, a few weeks in Stalinist Poland []; 1958, the furthest escape of all (I don’t mean geographically), to a leper colony in the last days of the Belgian Congo. (WE, 1999, 140)
9 In Vietnam, apart from the fights and battles, he recalls his many experiences with smoking opium in fumeries . Otherwise, this part of Greene’s life was full of danger, misery, death and pain. In 1955 he finished The Quiet American in which he applied his dislike toward the Americans and his experience of Vietnam (French Indo China). After those miserable and tiresome years he went to Monte Carlo for a few weeks and produced a novella called Loser Takes All (1956).
Further, Greene describes his theatre and playwrighting career. He says: ‘Like the Mau Mau and the wars in Malaya and Vietnam, the theatre offered me novelty, an escape from the everyday.’ (WE, 1999, 230) To name some of his theatre plays: The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), The Complaisant Lover (1959), Carving a Statue (1964), The Return of A. J. Raffles (1975) and a farce For Whom the Bell Chimes (1983). The following statement about For Whom the Bell Chimes concludes the chapter about theatre: ‘The fate of the play is not important – the fun of testing the spoken word, of cutting and altering and transforming, of working with a group, of escaping solitude is everything.’ (WE, 1999, 238). Here, the reader can see the ageing author feeling lonely. To link to the chronology again, it has to be said that Greene went to Cuba in 1957 but he had already started preparing material for Our Man in Havana (1958) in 1939. In 1957 Cuba was under Batista’s reign, Castro was operating from the mountains and Havana was full of Batista’s spies. In January 1959, Greene continued his adventurous travels to the Belgian Congo. Four months after coming back, he wrote A Burnt-Out Case (1960). In 1963, he travelled to Haiti for the third and the last time in his life. The previous two visits in the fifties had been quite happy. Nevertheless, the year 1963, when Dr Duvalier, known as Papa Doc was ruling, surprised him badly. Dr Duvalier fostered a personality cult, imposed a reign of terror, there were demonstrations and riots, imprisonments, corruption at the highest levels and poverty – all this appears in The Comedians (1966). In 1966, Greene made the decision to move to France. He comments on his manic depressive state: I had finished A Burnt-Out Case with the depressing certitude that this would be my last novel. My depression was caused in part by living for several years in company with my characters. [] What swung me out of the depression into the manic condition in which I wrote most of the stories in May We Borrow Your Husband? and then started work on Travels with
10 my Aunt ? I can only suppose it came from making a difficult decision in my private life and leaving England to settle permanently in France in 1966. (WE, 286, 287) May We Borrow Your Husband? appeared in 1967 and Travels with my Aunt in 1969. The last two novels mentioned in the Ways of Escape are The Honorary Consul (1973) and The Human Factor (1978).
11 3 NOVELS VS. ENTERTAINMENTS
Greene subdivided his writings into novels and entertainments. Entertainment is a thrilling story with a touch of the detective genre. Greene used this term to distinguish from more serious writings. A quote by Čulík shows that this distinction sounds simple, yet is incorrect and has something to do with Greene being marked as a ‘Catholic writer’ . The name entertainment is not correct. Greene, in a way, tried to deceive the readers by it. That is, if he wanted to ensure by this term that there is nothing important, no ‘message’ and that reading is only fun. This is true to the extent that Greene is always fun to read, but not fun only. He uses conventional forms of a sensational novel and by means of sophisticated technique, he changes it into an unconventional item, expressing by different means and tools the religious reason of existence. (Čulík, 2002, 208, my translation). A concise quote by Allott supports this view well: ‘It is melodrama rather than farce that characterizes Greene’s pre war and wartime entertainments. The total impression remains sombre even when a happy ending is squeezed out.’ (Allott, vii). He continues: ‘A novel makes stricter demands. Violence is not excluded from the action, but the problem as Greene has said apropos of Henry James – is ‘to admit violence without becoming violent’; the novelist must not ‘let violence lend the tone.’ (Allot, viii). Thornley and Roberts are looking at the characters in novels and they stand for the opinion that the characters in novels are failures unable to achieve their goals but they are closer to God than those who succeed (Thornley, Roberts, 151). Rogers views Greene´s writing and characters as follows: Greene is essentially a popular novelist, the nearest thing to Dickens that twentieth century English literature can offer. He tells a good story, enjoys melodrama and sentiment, and loathes do gooders. Of course, everything moves at a quicker pace than in Dickens, and there are no expansive sub plots. His central characters are complicated, haunted by guilt and failure, questioning their own ability to feel love, never quite sure that they are in the right. (Rogers, 407)
In contradiction to Allot, Alexander (351) labels entertainments as non intellectual pieces of writing that are suitable for film scripts. Novels are, in his opinion, the distinctive part of Greene´s work with an emphasis on Catholicism where a person who might be a Catholic and commits a sin might be forgiven by God. As already mentioned in chapter two of the thesis, Greene did not like to be called a Catholic writer. Nevertheless, many reviewers labelled him as such from Brighton Rock (1938) and
12 The Power and the Glory (1940). Almost any reviewer is at least tempted to play with the notions of Catholicism and Christianity in connection with Greene. E.g. in The Short History of English Literature , we read that ‘The Catholic Christianity of Greene’s novels, if that is what it can properly be called, seems most often to resemble a single ray of heavenly hope which glances over dark abysses of human depravity, despair, decay, and pain. To Greene´s characters, God and his Church seem to be as distant as they are evidently “appallingly strange”.’ (Sanders, 583) The characters in Greene’s novels and entertainments have various origins. Greene’s explanations about getting models for his characters are not surprising – he gained them on travels and by meeting different kinds of people. Sometimes, as he mentions, the characters did not even need ‘touching up’ (WE, 1999, 83). For The Power and the Glory , he named two characters of this kind: a drunken priest and a dentist, Mr Tench Greene lists the peculiarities of the models in detail. At other times, he used one model for more characters in different books, e.g. the dentist in The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory (WE, 1999, 84). Greene sums up the creation of characters: ‘[] when I came to write I was handing out alternative destinies to real people whom I had encountered on my journey’ (WE, 1999, 84). This line is true for his stay in Mexico but I think it can be applied even to other travels, meeting other people and building up other characters. It seems that Greene did not create the characters but they simply entered his life. Greene reflects: ‘[], and as I read on I encounter more and more characters whom I have forgotten, who beckon to me from the pages and say ironically, “And did you really believe you had invented me?” ’ (WE, 1999, 84). Greene uses not only other people for characters but also himself. On the one hand, Čulík (39) warns that ‘the author’s earthly more or less embarrassing existence should not be compared to his works very much’ and says that ‘the artist’s life does not in one hundred per cent overlap with the results of his writing’. On the other hand, he also admits that ‘A work of art has to be perceived as a personality projection: with its features, peculiarities, inclinations and psychological and physical problems. A novel is an author’s mask, a field where conscious and unconscious functions of his mind meet.’ (Čulík: 2002, 38, my translation) The characters and their fates are partly taken from Greene’s life, partly from the lives of others and there is always some value added or alteration. To make a character live, Greene
13 had to sympathise with them. Greene had a problematic relationship with his male characters, he did not always sympathise with them as a result they refused to come to life. The characters are often losers, the scene is a bad place and the character’s fate is predestined to failure. In any case, in his novels, Greene does not moralise, does not judge the characters and does not write to give men a lesson. The next part of the thesis introduces the novels analysed, looking at circumstances in which Greene wrote them. The Ministry of Fear (1944)
The Ministry of Fear was written in Freetown, Sierra Leone, considered a backyard of the British Empire, where Greene, recruited by his sister Elisabeth, was placed as an agent of the Secret Service from 1941 to 1943. He would decode telegrams and reply to them or write reports. Greene had read a good thriller before and wanted to write one himself. This is what he says about the circumstances that made him think of the novel: I developed the ambition to write a funny and fantastic thriller myself. [] Perhaps it was the circumstances of the time December 1941, Japan had just struck at Pearl Harbor, the German armies were smashing their way towards Moscow – we listened every night to the news on the steward’s radio – that made the plot I chose for The Ministry of Fear seem to me a funny one: a man acquitted of the murder of his wife by a jury (though he knows his own guilt) who finds himself pursued for a murder of which he is entirely innocent but which he believes he has committed. (WE, 1999, 94) Maybe surprisingly, the novel is not situated in Freetown; full of vultures, flies, swamps and slums but in London. In the following quotes, Greene explains that: . Life was very different from the blitzed London of my story, but it is often easier to describe something from a long way off. (WE, 1999, 95) Perhaps all this may have helped to rob The Ministry of Fear of what I intended to be carefree humour, and yet I can swear that in those first six months I was a happy man I was in land I loved. [] At thirty one in Liberia I had lost my heart to West Africa. (WE, 1999, 97) The book tells a story about a man called Rowe who once killed his wife out of pity because she was ill. The second murder in his life is only a made up as a means to make him afraid. He knows he did not commit the second murder but is afraid of being punished, so he tries to
14 escape. Anna Hilfe, a sister of his pursuer and a German spy tries to help him and they fall in love. There is the aspect of responsibility of one towards the other, since, at the end, each of them wants to protect the other from such harmful knowledge that they both have. In his autobiography Ways of Escape , Greene does not give much information about The Ministry of Fear , even though he admits: I have written little here about the novel itself though it is my favourite among what I called then my ‘entertainments’ to distinguish them from more serious novels. (WE, 1999, 100) Greene had terrifying memories of air raids in blitzed London of 1941. However, these air raids are not the only material he used in his novel. Having experienced many totalitarian systems – from Nazi to Communist, which started long ago and continued during the Cold War, he was able to entangle the fear they produced into his writings. Through his many travels, mainly to countries where some undemocratic political changes were happening, he knew about internment camps, political imprisonments, oppression and murders. He knew the world of collaboration and systems where opinions could not be stated openly. Greene is known for his extra sensory perception, for his mental archive where he stored facts, developed possible further scenarios, and guessed what might happen in the future.
The Ministry of Fear is an example of an entertainment which is not merely meaningless reading.
The Heart of the Matter (1948) As already mentioned, Greene loved Africa. This is also where his novel The Heart of the Matter is set. He had already thought about writing it during the Second World War, as he said in Ways of Escape (113). He also stated that when making the notes, he was not aware of Major Scobie, the main male character, but he was rather interested in the fate of a young priest inquiring into the suicide of a young police officer. So, by choosing Scobie and his serious story he made this piece of writing into a novel, not another entertainment. In Ways of Escape, he presents readers with the notes he did not include in the book. He also complained that his style had become rusty and that he had not been able to continue the story and progress with the characters as he normally did:
15 My experiences in Sierra Leone were rich enough, but I have never been satisfied with what I made of them. My critics have complained, perhaps with justice, that ‘I laid it on too thick’, but the material was thick. The real fault, as I have written, lay in the rustiness of my long inaction. What I was engaged in throughout the years was not genuine action – it was an escape from reality and responsibility. To a novelist his novel is the only reality and his only responsibility. Like the man suffering from ju ju I had to go back to my proper region to be cured. (WE, 1999, 118) The above quote could at first be understood as a desire to escape from the reality of everyday family life he would have lived at home but the second sight is clearly more explicit; Greene had to get back to proper writing. At this stage, he was unhappy in his private life. What his private life meant to him is open to question. He cannot have had any private life in a sense of living with his wife and children because he was away most of the time. His private life was filled with mistresses and complicated affairs. Greene actually hoped for death to solve his inner problems for good: Work was not made easier because of the booby traps I had heedlessly planted in my private life were blowing up in turn. I had always thought that war would bring death as a solution [] but here I was alive, the carrier of unhappiness to people I loved, taking up the old profession of brothelchild. So perhaps what I really dislike in the book is the memory of personal anguish. (WE, 1999, 119). The above quote is supported by what Čulík says about the material and grounds for working with the topic: [] it is noticeable at first sight, that The Heart of the Matter mirrors personal problems. It is an anatomy of his own emotional relationship with his wife, a swan song of a love that is breaking down. Scobie’s experience is doubtlessly Greene’s own experience. (Čulík: 2002, 263, Czech edition, my translation) Greene disliked the book because it enabled critics and Catholics to examine it thoroughly from their point of view and call him a Catholic writer since the end of the book was unclear and ambiguous and gave space for Catholic speculation as to whether Scobie at the end of the book wanted to finish ‘Dear God, I love …’ by saying ‘You’ or by saying something else. What he would or wanted to say was a matter of much analysis. To return to Greene’s ‘personal anguish’ it is important to remember that he was considering killing himself. ‘I was even contemplating one night the first move to suicide when I was interrupted in that game by the arrival at ten in the evening of a telegram [] from someone
16 whom I had made suffer and who now felt anxious about my safety’ (WE, 1999, 119). And again, it can only be suspected that it might have been a telegram from his wife. Or perhaps a mistress. Where The Heart of the Matter was still devoted to Greene’s wife and children, the following book, The End of the Affair definitely marks the break up with his wife and is already dedicated to another woman he loved. In the end, ‘The carrier of unhappiness to people I loved’ can be ascribed to Greene as well as Scobie. We have Greene admitting his own escapism and his character avoiding responsibility by committing suicide from today’s atheistic point of view on the one hand, on the other hand the character having so much responsibility towards God and the two female characters that he kills himself. After many years Greene in old age summarizes the meaning and impact of the book it was supposed to have on readers and critics as follows: It ( The Heart of the Matter ) was to prove a book more popular with the public, even with the critics, than with the author. The scales to me seem too heavily weighted, the plot overloaded, the religious scruples of Scobie too extreme. I had meant the story of Scobie to enlarge a theme which I had touched on in The Ministry of Fear , the disastrous effect on human beings of pity as distinct from compassion. I had written in The Ministry of Fear : Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling round. (WE, 1999, 120)
Our Man In Havana (1958) Greene already had the intention of writing this entertainment in 1939. However, since the main character was supposed to be an agent committing treason, Greene suspected it would not be the right time for a humorous story and the character would not have been accepted by readers. He visited Cuba several times and was enchanted by the totalitarian leaders, first Batista and later Castro. One might be surprised by this fact, even though Greene was inclined to socialism. But why did he look up to violent communism? His Communist party membership in his youth at Oxford cannot be taken seriously. He joined mainly to be able to visit Russia. Greene grew up in freedom, democracy and a western liberal tradition. He tended to side with socialism and Catholic ideology toward which he had a more or less intellectual approach. He did not have sufficient personal experience with the harsh conditions in which people lived in totalitarian regimes. What he knew were charismatic leaders to whom he felt unjustifiable and sentimental admiration. Greene was usually a visitor, an interested traveller,
17 an observer and a reporter, sometimes even a prominent guest, mostly in Latin America. The totalitarian systems there combined totalitarianism with Catholicism in order to be more popular with people who traditionally believed in God. It may be assumed that if Greene had a more direct and painful experience of such a system, he would have abandoned his socialist ideals. In Our Man in Havana the plot seems to be far less serious than in the two previous books. As already said, it was marked as an entertainment, even though Greene abandoned this term in the 1960s. The entertaining aspect of the book is the chain of useless underemployed agents recruiting, even made up, subagents to satisfy the bosses in London. One of them is a Mr Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman. Because he needs more money to please his spoilt daughter, he pretends to engage in the activities of an agent and fabricates a strategic weapon plan based on the blueprint of a vacuum cleaner: Greene’s own wartime relationship with British Intelligence, and his lifelong comradeship with its most famous traitor Kim Philby, evidently conditioned him to view ‘the Service’ as a place of collapsing scenery and low comedy, populated by a cast of jaded misfits. Thus he presents Wormold’s fraud and dishonesty in a sympathetic light: the mandarins of MI6 are eager to deceive themselves, and to be deceived, and they get no more than what they ask for. (Hitchens, xi) Looking away from the entertaining part, the book has its serious and horrifying side, too. A character called Dr Hasselbacher, who is entangled into Worlmold’s world of fake agents, is killed. Another character, Captain Segura ‘torturer and mutilator and sex maniac’ (Hitchens, xii) who was ‘evidently appropriated from the dictator Batista’s dreaded ‘enforcer’ Captain Ventura’ (Hitchens, xii) comes to the scene. And Hitchens (xii) continues: ‘Greene offers a foretaste of the ‘death squads’, with their dark glasses and special unmarked automobiles, who were to terrorize Latin America and horrify the world in the succeeding decades.’ Here, the story stops being funny and entertaining but leads the reader to deeper thoughts about evil, cruelty, torture and injustice. In a way, Captain Segura’s opinion that ‘Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal’ (OMH, 2006, 155) is terrifyingly similar to what Milly, Wormold’s daughter, says after having set fire to a Protestant boy when she was twelve: ‘[] Earl was a Protestant and if there was going to be a persecution Catholics could always beat Protestants in that game’(OMH, 2006, 12). So we can see not only the violent and cruel aspect, but again a sign of the religious.
18 4 THE THREE NOVELS OF MALE RESPONSIBILITY
At the beginning it was said that the question of responsibility of men towards women is crucial in the three Graham Greene novels. Man in Greene’s view can be a pitiful companion at the hour of death (The Ministry of Fear), ‘a carrier of unhappiness’ (The Heart of the Matter) or a sympathetic father trying to do his best for the spoilt daughter (Our Man in Havana). 4. 1 The Bad Conscience of Arthur Rowe
The Ministry of Fear starts as an absurd comedy but develops into a tragedy with a bitter sweet ending which is more bitter than sweet. It was intended as an entertainment. The main character, Arthur Rowe, kills his terminally ill wife out of pity. The jury finds him not guilty, because they see the crime as a mercy killing, nevertheless Rowe knows he has committed a crime. He feels the responsibility of the deed and keeps questioning the justification for it: He told himself, leaning over the wall, as he had told himself a hundred times, that it was he who had not been able to bear his wife’s pain – and not she. Once, it was true, in the early days of the disease, she had broken down, said she wanted to die, not to wait: that was hysteria. Later it was her endurance and her patience which he had found most unbearable. He was trying to escape his own pain, not hers and at the end she had guessed or half guessed what it was he was offering her. [] But he could never know whether the fear had been worse than the pain, and he could never tell whether she might not have preferred any sort of life to death. (MF, 2006, 89 90) By killing his wife he not only protected her from suffering and pain but he also protected himself. He could not bear other people suffering. As a young boy, he killed a dying rat out of pity and also because he did not want to suffer. Pity is typical of his character and Rowe is a typical character for Graham Greene. Pity was characteristic for Greene’s writings in the 1940s and Rowe is said to be a foreshadow or a study for Scobie. Rowe is a loser on the run who seemingly sacrificed his clear conscience for the good of his wife. In any case, he tries to escape from something and he is predestined to suffer. After unconsciously getting involved in a German spy game, Rowe is accused of another murder. This time, he is completely innocent but nevertheless is he afraid being punished. Before that happens he meets Anna Hilfe who is trying to keep him away from her brother, who is a German spy and who suspects Rowe might know something about them. Anna tries
19 to help Rowe from the beginning although she is supposed to be a trap for him and so putting herself in danger and risking her own life. Her brother would not hesitate to kill her, if necessary. Anna is the only female character who cares for her male counterpart and who is genuinely concerned for him. The hoax murder that Anna´s brother Hilfe misused to make Rowe feel guilty made Rowe try to escape in the streets of London. Through a series of ‘coincidences’, probably prepared by the German side, Rowe comes to a hotel room, where he is supposed to deliver some books, finds Anna there and they know that there is an immediate danger for both. Then, there is a bomb blast. When Rowe loses consciousness and memory Anna even tries to protect him from finding out again that he has murdered his wife and so to keep his mind in peace and ensure he is able to love again. In return, Rowe pretends that he does not know about the murder even though he does to keep Anna happy and make her believe his mind is finally freed from the burden of his own guilt and therefore he would be able to love again. Rowe found out about having murdered his wife from Hilfe, before Hilfe killed himself: [] He said gently, ‘Your brother is dead. He shot himself,’ but her face didn’t alter. [] She asked with terrible anxiety, ‘What did he say to you?’ Rowe said, ‘He was dead before I could reach him. []’ The anxiety left her face: all that remained was that tense air he had observed before – the air of someone perpetually on guard to shield him… He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘my dear. How much I love you.’ He was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that. (MF, 2006, 221) Before Hilfe shot himself, he had blackmailed Rowe. He threatened with Anna’s interrogation, imprisonment and later even deportation for being a spy if Rowe took him to the police: ‘Well,’ Hilfe said, ‘if it’s your idea of revenge, I can’t stop you. I thought perhaps you wouldn’t want Anna dragged in. She let me escape, you remember…’ [] Hilfe said, ‘they probably wouldn’t hang her. Of course that would depend on what I say. Perhaps it would be just an internment camp till the war’s over – and then deportation if you win. From my point of view,’ he explained dryly, ‘she’s a traitor, you know.’ (MF, 2006, 213) This, of course, did not leave Rowe much choice. He wanted Anna to stay with him.
20 So in the end, in Rowe’s case, it was not only the man who had the responsibility for the fate of his woman. Here, she deserved it. They both pretended happiness to keep the other satisfied. Maybe in Rowe and Anna’s case it was real love. Overall, the relationship was more balanced; the measure of feelings on both sides was more even than in the two following books. Rowe fought an inner fight, the same as Mr Wormold or Scobie and kept losing. Rowe did not grant his new woman financial security but rather shared loneliness with her. Only Anna, out of all the women mentioned, gives her male counterpart something in exchange for concern. 4. 2 Responsibility as a Sack of Bricks (poor God, poor Scobie, poor Greene)
In this novel, Greene reflects on his dying relationship with his wife Vivian. Frustration and problems in his personal life and his escapes to foreign countries are reflected here. Wood, in his preface to the novel, says: ‘Greene makes much symbolic use of sweat; as soon as Scobie and his wife, Louise, touch, sweat starts up. Sweat, often a mark of sexual desire or activity, painfully substitutes for the lack of it in Scobie’s loveless marriage’ (Wood, vii, HM). The approach of Major Scobie, stationed in Sierra Leone, West Africa, to his wife is overprotective and over responsible. He is a police officer, honest, immune to bribery, he believes in God and a clear conscience. Scobie’s ageing wife Louise is tired with life in the hot, humid and black West African state and wishes to leave it. She hopes for Scobie’s promotion and when they pass him over she is unable to cope with the embarrassing social situation and forces Scobie to do something about it because of her: ‘Yes, I’ve known it for weeks. It doesn’t matter, dear, really.’ Louise said, ‘I’ll never be able to show my face at the club again.’ (HM, 2004, 15) [] ‘I was so upset I came out of Mass before the end. It’s so mean of them, Ticki. You can’t take it lying down. You’ve got to think of me.’ (HM, 2004, 15) Louise is generally not liked in the town and Scobie is aware of her lack of social contact. Responsibility and guilt are the key words that describe his relationship with her.
21 ‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor Louise, if I had left it to her, where should we be now? And he admitted straight away that they wouldn’t be here – somewhere far better, better climate, better pay, better position. She would have taken every opening for improvement: [] I’ve landed her here, he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee.’ (HM, 2004, 17) ‘The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness.’ (HM, 2004, 13) Louise does not give anything in return for Scobie’s efforts, she only demands. She is not beautiful anymore but this is something Scobie loves in her. Sympathy and pity are probably the only ways of love he can feel after fifteen wasted years of marriage. He is aware that he had an immense impact on her life, that he created her: Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face. (HM, 2004, 7 8) After Scobie falls in love with Helen, a young widow who lost her husband on the sea, his sense of responsibility divides between her and Louise, even though Louise leaves for South Africa. Wilson, another character in The Heart of the Matter , falls in love with Louise and now, through his eyes, the reader can see her more positively. Similarly to Wormold in Our Man in Havana , Scobie decides to get himself involved in a conspicuous business to satisfy his wife’s needs. He borrows money from an infamous local trader. Although he first tries to persuade his conscience that there is nothing wrong with the loan, he finds himself in a trap later. Louise, in the end, pretends the love less than he does; in fact, she is more sincere and realistic: ‘I’d miss you,’ he said. ‘No, Ticki, you wouldn’t,’ she said, and surprised him by the range of her sad spasmodic understanding. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘there’s nobody to save for.’ (HM, 2004, 34) Louise reveals Scobie’s purpose. She is able to admit easier than he that his feelings for her are just responsibility and that it is only his clear conscience and peace of mind that matter to him:
22 ‘That’s your conscience,’ she said, ‘your sense of duty. You’ve never loved anyone since Catherine died.’ (HM, 2004, 49) Louise said with the old tenderness, ‘Poor dear, you wish I were dead like Catherine. You want to be alone.’ (HM, 2004, 50) To compare Louise with Helen, his point of view has to be mentioned. Scobie is looking at Louise through the eyes of a 15 year tiresome marriage, uses the word ‘darling’ all the time even though it has no real meaning. At Helen, he looks with eyes full of love, so she has an advantage. In the end, to fulfil his duty to both women and to God, since he does not want either one to suffer because of him, Scobie commits suicide. Finally, he has peace, he can face God, Helen and Louise. Even though he commits suicide, Scobie still demonstrates his sense of duty and organizes the suicide so that it looks like a normal death, so that Louise can get the money from his insurance. The reason for Scobie feeling responsible for Louise was the long term commitment, the feeling of guilt and pity. With Helen, it was a different relationship he felt tender youthful love and a sense of protection. However, he could already foresee how this might change into the same kind of relationship he had with Louise later. Scobie’s main goal is to protect both women: ‘I don’t want to plan any more,’ he said suddenly aloud. ‘They wouldn’t need me if I were dead. No one needs the dead. The dead can be forgotten. O God, give me death before I give them unhappiness.’ (HM, 2004, 189) It seems that Scobie wanted all parties to be satisfied and the only way to do this was to die, even though in his discussion with God, God seemed to give him other options that would be more acceptable for Him (God), but probably not for Scobie’s conscience: [] I (God) have been faithful to you for two thousand years. All you have to do now is ring a bell, go into a box, confess… the repentance is already there, straining at your heart. It’s not repentance you lack, just a few simple actions: to go up to the Nissen hut and say good bye. Or if you must, continue rejecting me but without lies any more. Go to your house and say good bye to your wife and live with your mistress. If you live you will come back to me sooner or later. One of them will suffer, but can’t you trust me to see that the suffering isn’t too great? The voice was silent in the cave and his own voice (Scobie´s) replied hopelessly: No. I don’t trust you. I’ve never trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling of responsibility that I’ve always carried about like a sack of bricks. [] I can´t shift my responsibility to you. [] I can´t make one of them suffer so as to save myself. (HM, 2004, 242)
23 To summarize The Heart of the Matter , Scobie and his responsibility towards Louise and Helen, Scobie was definitely overprotective and pitying of the two women. In fact, he was a weak person whose acts were also influenced by his belief in God. 4. 3 The Loving Fathers in the Rocket Age In a way, Major Scobie and Mr Wormold, the tragic comic hero of Our Man in Havana , are similar. They both care very much for the happiness of the wives, daughters and lovers. Milly, Mr Wormold´s daughter, and Mrs Scobie are similar in their selfishness which they seem to abandon at the end of the book. Helen is at first sweet and innocent, but Scobie can see the grown up complaining woman of the future. Both Wormold and Scobie sacrificed themselves. Partly because of the women and partly to clear their conscience. In Our Man in Havana , there is Milly, the main character’s daughter. The protagonist´s name is Wormold and he bears Milly in mind from the start of the book. After the readers know about Wormold, they find out what Milly looks like and what she did in her childhood: [] for even by the high Havana standard Milly was beautiful. She had hair the colour of pale honey, dark eyebrows, and her pony trim was shaped by the best barber in town. She paid no open attention to the whistles, they only made her step the higher – seeing her walk, you could almost believe in levitation. Silence would have seemed like an insult to her now. [] The complaint was of a serious nature: she (Milly) had set fire to a small boy called Thomas Earl Parkman, junior. [] Milly´s only defence of her conduct had been that Earl was a Protestant and if there was going to be a persecution Catholics could always beat Protestants at that game. (OMH, 2006, 11 12) This quote gives a picture of a cunning, clever, selfish little girl, later woman, who is aware of her beauty and who is far from being an innocent angel. Her belief in God is based on prayers for things, she scores well in Dogma and Morals – here Greene might want to show us the discrepancy between her setting a living creature on fire and now being excellent in Catholic theory. Therefore, one can assume that her religion is only a formality that she can profit from. Also her friendship with captain Segura, a sadist who has a cigarette box made of human skin (at the end of the book the reader finds out the skin belonged to his father’s torturer, the question is if this can be understood as extenuating circumstances) does show that she is either an opportunist or just an immature girl. She misuses the Catholic tools, like prayers especially to get her father where she needs him. She misuses tears and knows that her father does not want to disappoint her and will try to do his best to please her. She does
24 not even hide that she brings troubles to him. Her character shows selfishness and self contentment of the highest rank. The following quotes show the lack of care or ruthlessness with which she treats and blackmails her father: Two tears chased each other with a kind of elegance round the curve of a cheek bone and glittered like the harness on the wall; they were part of her equipment too. (OMH, 2006, 18) ‘I give you (Wormold) a lot of trouble,’ she said meaninglessly. Then she sighed with content, pulling the sheet up to her neck. ‘It´s wonderful, isn´t it, how you always get what you pray for.’ (OMH, 2006, 31) Mr Wormold is an ordinary English expatriate businessman, a vacuum cleaner salesman. His wife left him because he had been too indecisive and passive. He, as the quote illustrates, was not able to behave in a manly way when he was supposed to: Wormold felt an enormous bewilderment. He wondered why he had not stopped all this nonsense at the beginning. No wonder Mary had left him. He remembered one of their quarrels. ‘Why don´t you do something, act some way, any way at all? You just stand there…’ (OMH, 2006, 27) And so he was left by his wife, whom he still loved and whom he made promises concerning Milly’s education and Catholic upbringing. Unachievable promises and hopes seem to play a big role in Our Man in Havana the same as in The Heart of the Matter . However, the male hero tries to stick to these promises as much as he can even though they are completely unrealistic or illusive and tries to keep them alive for ‘his’ woman. So, Wormold’s responsibility towards Milly was partly based on promises and the fact she was his only child and connection with the outer world. Apart from Milly, he did not have real friends and felt like a stranger in Cuba even though he had been there for years. Milly takes Wormold’s concern for granted and knows how to get what she wants from him. Wormold, on the other hand, is a weak person who, instead of opposing his daughter’s extravagant requests, accepts the cooperation with the secret service and even frauds it in order to fulfil his daughter’s wishes and secure her future. He is afraid of breaking the father – daughter bond: [] She shovelled on to his shoulders all the disappointment in the old familiar magic. It was all very well talking about the easy tears of a child, but if you are a father you can’t take risks as a
25 schoolteacher can or a governess. Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes for ever, like making a face when the clock strikes? (OMH, 2006, 18) In the foreword to Our Man in Havana Hitchens (xii, xiv) hints at the incredibility of such a character as Wormold: In the novel, Greene makes his creation Wormold behave in a manner that is absolutely out of character. (It is plainly outside the credibility, given his aching feelings for his vulnerable daughter, that he would permit her to continue an association with a policeman whose cigarette case is upholstered with human skin). (Hitchens, xii, xiv) If we take into consideration the combination of Wormold being too mild and meek at one side, with him being prepared to enter the service, fake reports, plans and agents and kill a person on the other, we must admit Hitchens is right in saying that his character was highly fictional. Nevertheless, he behaved responsibly towards Milly. It was caused by fear that he might lose her. So, at first sight he seemed to be a loving father but on the other side, he was a weak person who, instead of stricter upbringing let himself to be blackmailed by his own daughter.
26 5 FICTION OR MIRRORING FACES OF GRAHAM GREENE In each of his novels, Graham Greene deals at least with a bit of his personal problems. The question is whether in The Ministry of Fear , The Heart of the Matter and Our Man in Havana the progress of relationships has a connection to Greene’s own experience or his perception of man woman relations. The Ministry of Fear was the first of the three books compared and Greene was already forty when he completed it. It means that he was an experienced man and may not have had any youthful, unrealistic nor romantic ideas about a relationship anymore. This presumption is also supported by publishing The Heart of the Matter only four years later, when Greene was forty four years old. In this book, the relationship to the wife seems to be much more realistically drawn and the main character foresees the similar development in the relationship with his lover. The Heart of the Matter is still dedicated to his wife and children, whereas the following novel, The End of the Affair (1951) is dedicated to C., which means Catherine Walston. Our Man in Havana , which came into existence when Greene was another ten years older, i. e. when he was fifty four, looks at a different kind of relationship, a father – daughter relationship. At this age, he could have been influenced by his own experience in such a relationship having a 25 year old daughter.
The Heart of the Matter and Our Man in Havana came to life later and the viewing of women is much more critical than in The Ministry of Fear . In The Ministry of Fear , Rowe has a supportive woman, whereas in the following two books, the main characters have only burdens. To support the idea that the older the writer became, the worse the women characters were, a greater number of novels would have to be taken into account. One example of an even worse relationship between a man and a woman is e. g. in Brighton Rock from 1938 . There, the main hero called Pinkie, perceives the woman as an intruder who came into his room and life and reorganised it and therefore affected it and Pinkie’s authenticity and integrity. The woman was a violator who had to be hated. At this moment, it is necessary to point out that Pinkie himself was a highly disturbed person. However, the notion of hate does not appear in the three analysed books. A woman is indeed labelled unflatteringly (in The Heart of the Matter and Our Man in Havana ) but certainly not as sharply negative as in the Brighton Rock . The presumption that female characters are worse and worse with Greene growing older, is therefore wrong. Some of the characters had a bad fate already in 1938.
27 It has to be said that in Our Man in Havana the models of Mr Wormold and Milly were in fact not a father and a daughter but a husband and a wife: The first version written in the forties was an outline on a single sheet of paper. The story was laid in 1938, in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a reasonable enough setting for espionage. The English agent had nothing at this stage in the story to do with vacuum cleaners, and it was the extravagance of his wife and not his daughter which led him to cheat his service. (WE, 1999, 239 240) There is a resemblance to Greene’s life since his marriage collapsed too. He may have been as indecisive as Mr Wormold. Greene had always respected the privacy of people around him and neither in his autobiographies A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape nor in his dream diary A World of My Own does he give us many intimate details about his wife, children, lovers and friends. Therefore, it is difficult to say with certainty, based on his own autobiography writings, whether, and if yes, to what extent and which characters are inspired by these people. Maybe it is rather the situations connected with these people, e. g. in The Heart of the Matter the relationship with a wife that is declining to its end, that are described. In The Heart of the Matter a new lover is already there and God advises the male character to leave one of the women. In the book the male character chooses probably the least harmful solution for both of the women – his own death. He does not want to hurt people so he hurts God instead. If this was Greene’s idea, and it could have been because in bad times he was often thinking about suicide, then accomplished his visions in the book instead of in his life. It is in biographies by other authors, e. g. Norman Sherry´s The Life of Graham Greene , where some facts about Greene’s private and intimate life can be found. As for Greene’s responsibility to women in real life, the material worries he had during the Second World War when he was writing two books at a time to provide money for his wife and children in case he had to leave were already mentioned. The fact he left his copyrights and money to his family also speaks for his responsibility to them. Many of Greene’s relationships with women seemed to be pathological in a way, be it his own marriage which lasted but had not worked for 40 years or relationships with his lovers. Before getting married, he had to ‘hunt’ his wife, sending several letters a day and converting to
28 Catholicism because this was her wish. However, Vivian had not shown very passionate or warm feelings towards him as she probably had an offer of a richer suitor in stock. Thus, it was an unbalanced relationship, where Greene tried hard but probably not because of love but rather because of some pitiful reasons like dependence or obsession. In A Sort of Life , on about 150 pages the reader is unable to find substantial information about his wife, because he mentions her only a few times and each time devotes not more than three to five lines to her: ‘[] I lay in bed with a bad attack of flu, listening to my wife in the kitchen washing up the breakfast things’ (SL, 1999, 138). He also wrote ‘I was married and I was happy’ (SL, 1999, 138). As he then continues writing about his professional life, his audience cannot infer that he was happy because he was married. He might have been at a young age. The lack of information in A Sort of Life may not be because his wife was unimportant or because he did not love her but because he wanted to protect her privacy and also because the autobiography ends only at Greene’s 25 th year. Greene must have been interested in her and surely loved her and he sometimes hints at the fact by unobtrusive remarks so she surely must have occupied his mind a great deal. In Ways of Escape , he compliments his wife’s understanding and courage in the years of financial troubles before publishing the Stamboul Train . Greene stopped living with his family around 1943. In 1942 he was already living away from his family with a lover, having an apartment on his own to be able to write. This is what Norman Sherry says about Vivian´s hopes for ‘normal’ family life: On VE Day, 8 May 1945, after Germany´s unconditional surrender, Greene and Dorothy (lover) observed the subdued celebrations, an experience he gave to Sarah and Henry Miles in The End of the Affair . To make it up to Vivien for not being with her at this time, he took her on holiday. Knowing that her marriage was on shaky ground, Vivien was looking forward rather desperately to setting up housekeeping as a family again, now that the war was over. This was not to be. (Sherry, xxx) The reader can see that even though he had not lived with his wife anymore and had a lover, he still felt some responsibility or maybe pity and tried to substitute for not being with her at an important moment. This shows, again, a similarity with Scobie in The Heart of the Matter . Greene´s affairs very often overlapped in time and intensity and this overlapping took months or years, all the affairs being framed by the marriage which officially never ended.
29 Concerning non marital relations, not taking into account numerous prostitutes, various biographers say there were five other important women or intimate friends in his life. Probably really important and influential for his works were the second and the fifth one. The second lover was Catherine Walston, an extravagant American who was married in England. She enjoyed shocking and challenging the cold English society. Greene was obsessed with her and followed her around London when moving houses. She let herself be hunted by Greene but was not prepared to divorce her well to do husband, who also pursued a political career, because of a writer with a lack of secure income. She also felt loyal to children and husband who pursued a political career. The relationship with Catherine started in 1948. This passionate affair, which later changed into unsatisfying martyrdom, went on for more than ten years. The End of the Affair is generally understood as a parallel to this relationship, even though Monica Ali, in her preface to the novel, questions this hypothesis. Having spoken about overlaps, during his 10 year relationship with Catherine, Greene loved other women. One of the important ones was a Swedish actress Anita Björk. Here is a parallel to Helen in The Heart of the Matter because Anita was young and she also lost her husband and Greene felt a mixture of love, protection and pity and was unable to stop the affair at the beginning even though he tried. At that time, Greene was in love with two women. However, he knew Catherine would never really belong to him, neither would Anita because he did not want to follow her to Sweden. Greene was again struck by his life long sense of unhappiness. At this point, it has to be said that The Heart of the Matter was published in 1948 whereas Greene started the affair with Anita in 1955. Therefore, this affair cannot be the experience Greene used for the novel even thought the story of life resembles the story in the book very much. It can be rather taken as a proof of Greene´s general way of behaviour towards women. In the following quote, Greene, in a letter to Catherine, explains how he feels and proves his weakness and inability to choose one of two women, again, similarly as Scobie in The Heart of the Matter: I have no confidence in myself anymore. I´ve kept this dark too long because I don´t want to lose either of you. I think it would be worse to lose you (like losing a world), but I flinch too at losing her. I don´t know what to do, darling. I hoped so much it would die out before you
30 got to know, & that I´d tell it to you one day as something dead. [] I love her too & mucked her up. That´s why the death wish came back – I hadn´t had it for years. (Sherry, 62) The fifth intimate friend was the at the beginning of the thesis mentioned Yvonne Cloetta. Greene first met her in 1959 in Cameroon. The relationship lasted for about 30 years and it is said to be the happiest probably because Greene spent his older age with her, he was more stable and had different expectations of a relationship than before. Nevertheless, Yvonne Cloetta was also married and never divorced. Overall, Greene’s relationship towards women was problematic. His approach to himself was difficult, too and it mirrors in a way in his novels and his male characters, though not exclusively and not perfectly. He was an unsettled, dissatisfied person who could never reach what he desired in his intimate life. Nothing can be said about his relationship with his children from his own autobiographies. It is known that a daughter, Lucy Caroline, was born in 1933 and a son, Francis, in 1936. Due to his many travels and separation from his wife in about 1943, Greene had not spent much time with them. We also know that the daughter together with Yvonne Cloetta, were at his deathbed in Swiss Vevey in 1991. As already mentioned, at the end of his life, Greene left money and copyrights of his books to his family and not to lovers which means that in the end, the family were important to him or at least he felt a duty and responsibility to them. This shows parallels to male characters in the three novels.
31 6 CONCLUSIONS To summarise, there were three completely contradictory novels in which three different types of men appear, dealing with their responsibility to three various types of women in three diverse situations and settings. Arthur Rowe (The Ministry of Fear ) was a young, psychologically unstable man, Major Scobie ( The Heart of the Matter ), a man whose dissatisfactory marriage was on the brink of collapse and Mr Wormold (Our Man in Havana ), a father who is being wrapped around his spoilt daughter’s finger. All the men in these three novels were protective and responsible to their female counterparts; some of them were weak, like Mr Wormold, who did not fight as much with his conscience as Major Scobie did. In addition, Major Scobie felt not only responsibility for his wife and lover but also to God. Rowe had to fight his conscience too but he was not as weak as Wormold and Scobie. He dared to kill his wife to relieve her pain, not only his. On the scale of weaklings, Wormold ranks the top position, followed by Scobie and Rowe. Concerning real love, the winner is Rowe, then Scobie and Wormold is only a weakling. Looking at the female characters, the worst was probably Milly, the most selfish one. She was followed by Mrs Scobie and Helen would reach Mrs Scobie´s negative qualities after some time. Anna Hilfe was the only good woman who really deserved the concern of her male counterpart. If the relationships to women in novels are compared to Greene’s relationships to women in real life, concerning responsibility, we will find some contradictions. Even though Greene spent a lot of time away from his family and had relationships with other women, which might be perceived as irresponsible, he never divorced his wife and ensured that she and her children were financially secure during the Second World War and after his death by leaving his money and copyrights to the family and not to lovers. This shows a similar kind of responsibility as Scobie had. Weakness, as in Wormold´s case, might be represented by Greene’s hunting his irresponsive wife before marriage, and becoming a Catholic only to fulfil her wish. Also following his lover, who was unwilling to divorce because of him, overlapping affairs and disability to decide might be signs of weakness. It seems that Greene did not have good luck in love, in contrast to Rowe, maybe except at the end of his life which he spent in intimate friendship with Yvonne Cloetta. His relationships to women were
32 difficult as was his approach to himself and his male characters, too. Concerning professional responsibility, he was definitely a responsible and disciplined writer, completing his set number of words a day, rereading, reviewing and rewriting them. If he had not left his family and had not led the adventurous life he had, he would not have been able to write what he did. Even though the comparisons are tempting, it is important to remember that books and characters cannot and should not be compared to the author’s life and personality completely. Nevertheless, some thoughts, fates and situations are based on his experience or character. Some of his characters, on the other hand, are unbelievable, since the mix of their features is incompatible, as in case of Wormold. In the end, it is difficult to say anything about Graham Greene with certainty, because he protected his privacy and in his novels, he published only what he decided to share with the outer world. What can be said with certainty is that Graham Greene tried to deal with at least a bit of his personal problems in each of his novels but he did not try to moralise, neither did he write to advise men, neither did he deal with his own problems exclusively.
33 7 SUMMARY This thesis analyses the novels Our Man in Havana , The Ministry of Fear and The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene and the male characters´ responsibility for their female counterparts. The male characters are very protective and responsible for their women, sometimes only because of pitying them, sometimes because they are too weak to oppose them. The life of Graham Greene is compared to fates of his male heroes and parallels between Greene´s features, his attitude towards women and his male characters´ are drawn. Greene tries to deal with his personal life in his works but he does not do it fully or exclusively. He has a difficult relationship to his male characters but he does not moralise.
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