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Entertainments of Late Modernism: Graham Greene and the Career Criminal

Entertainments of Late Modernism: Graham Greene and the Career Criminal

The of Late : Graham Greene and the Career Criminal

Matthew Levay

‘How seldom a novelist chooses the material nearest to his hand; it is almost as if he were driven to earn experience the hard way.’ Graham Greene, ‘Ford Madox Ford’ (1939, 1962)1 Despite his status as one of the most prominent English novelists of the twentieth century, in recent years Graham Greene has become something of an outcast. In fact, he is perhaps the most commercially and critically successful author of the period who has yet to elicit sustained scholarly . Part of the problem stems from the fact that Greene’s fiction is notoriously resistant to categorisation, eschewing any definitive aesthetic, political or philosophical labels. Consequently, most critical studies of Greene tend to view him in isolation rather than in dialogue with his contemporaries, and even those single-author studies appear markedly conflicted as to how to understand Greene’s literary achievements and ambitions. Depending on whom you ask, Greene is either a Catholic novelist concerned primarily with questions of theology, a socially committed realist with little patience for modernist experimentalism, or a crime-fiction buff who apes the formulae of his boyhood .2 Sometimes he is all three, a with stakes in so many formal and political camps that the task of reconciling his various investments becomes a nearly impossible venture. The longevity of his career compounds the problem, since, from the publication of his first in 1929 (The Man Within) to his last in 1988 (The Captain and the Enemy), Greene witnessed the decline of modernism and the rise of ,

Modernist Cultures 5.2 (2010): 315–339 DOI: 10.3366/E2041102210000237 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/mod Modernist Cultures but never quite settled into either . As David Lodge argued in 1966, Greene’s ‘rejection, after a few unsatisfactory experiments, of the “stream of consciousness’’ technique, and his development of a fictional mode that was serious without being highbrow, using devices of journalism and the cinema, shot through with the sense of social and political crisis’, made him a natural ally of realist contemporaries like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood rather than high modernist touchstones like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce.3 At the same time, however, Greene obviously took inspiration from the modernist authors he often professed to dislike, most notably Joseph Conrad (whose Lord Jim Greene ridiculed as ‘romantic and false’), Henry James (whom he deemed responsible for the gridlock of the ‘dogmatically “pure’’ novel’ and yet ‘as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of ’), and Ford Madox Ford (who received the rather dubious distinction of having written only ‘three great , a little scarred, stained here and there and chipped perhaps, but how massive and resistant compared with most of the work of his successors’).4 Always resistant to labels, Greene’s coyness has led to a remarkably resilient view of his novels as existing solely within themselves, immune to literary history and without affiliation. If the critical record has provided us with a of Greene as an author adrift in the sea of twentieth-century fiction, it is a curious that one of the most obvious reasons for his mixed critical reception hinges on his enthusiasm for fiction, most apparent in those popular novels that Greene dubbed his ‘entertainments’, which fused the conventions of the thriller and the detective story into taut, cinematic narratives. Seemingly outside modernism and postmodernism, neither highbrow nor lowbrow, these novels reflect a commitment to generic manipulation that has left several critics unsure as to where they might fit into Greene’s own oeuvre, let alone the history of British fiction during the period. This is not to suggest, however, that Greene’s generic experiments have received entirely negative attention. Roger Sharrock, in his classic account of Greene’s fiction, defends the entertainments, claiming that within novels like England Made Me (1935) and A Gun for Sale (1936) ‘the deceptions and betrayals of the mystery story, the isolation of the doomed or hunted hero, work at a deeper level than that of plot: the characters are separated not merely by the circumstances and withholding of necessary to the thriller form but by incommunicable pasts and childhoods and by the incomprehensibility of a world without any recognizable total moral pattern’.5 More recently, Brian Diemert has argued that ‘Greene’s texts exist on and investigate the

316 The Entertainments of Late Modernism border of the frontier of genre’, while Chris Hopkins points out how Greene’s entertainments of the 1930s ‘show a strong sense of the thriller as superficially inauthentic, and yet also the only genre really able to represent the emptiness of the modern world’.6 Far from being a philosophically barren attempt to exploit the financial rewards of popular fiction, Greene’s experiments with genre reflect a greater formal commitment to the interrogation of literary , and, by extension, to the representational possibilities offered by the manipulation of popular forms. While these qualities have traditionally isolated Greene from larger critical accounts of mid-century British fiction, they are precisely what makes him such a fitting example of that period now understood as late modernism, in which authors of the 1930s and after rearticulated the formal, political and critical aims of modernism while simultaneously foreshadowing the emergence of postmodernism in a process that David James describes as ‘a hybridity of aesthetic modalities [...] coalescing in practices of literary production closely mediated by the political and economic structures in which they were embedded’.7 Through his manipulation of genre, which responded to the formal experiments of the early modernists without subscribing wholeheartedly to their aesthetic aims, Greene attempted to create ‘hybrid’ texts that fuse the conventions of the popular novel with those of early modernism. In doing this, he developed an approach to subjectivity and its representation that blended the modernist critique of a stable, coherent self with the stock characteristics and narrative devices prominent in twentieth-century detective fiction. Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) serves as a telling example of how fiction might represent the life of crime as an alternately conventional and fragmented identity formation, and thus speaks to the concerns of both modernist and genre fiction. Utilising the form of the psychological case study – itself a hallmark of modernist narrative – as a way of articulating how a career criminal views his identity largely in terms of the conventions of crime fiction and film, Greene’s novel illustrates how fiction can, through a combination of generic and psychological representation, respond to the dictates of a not-so-distant modernist past and at the same time reaffirm the value of a critically maligned popular genre. While Greene may have resented the distinction, examining Brighton Rock through the rubric of late modernism offers a unique perspective on the novel and the period in which it emerged, placing Greene’s fiction into a critical and historical context that has long been obscured.

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Greene’s Late Modernism The idea of late modernism, or a modernism that extends the formal of early twentieth-century over the course of the late 1930s and beyond, has become a critical commonplace in recent years, but the capaciousness of the adjective remains something of a difficulty. Just when critics became comfortable with the idea of ‘modernisms’ – following Peter Nicholls’s argument that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature reveals an interweaving of politics, and experimentation among a variety of movements and avant-gardes, and thus resists the perception of modernism as a ‘monolithic ideological formation’ – the increasing tendency to classify texts from the middle part of the twentieth century as modernist has raised questions about the efficacy of modernism as a descriptive critical term.8 Scholars like Tyrus Miller have attempted to defend late modernism by explaining it as a phenomenon both distinct from and related to the century’s earlier aesthetic experiments, with its works coming into existence alongside those later classified as postmodernist, yet maintaining marked differences in and subject. As Miller claims, late modernist texts

mark the lines of flight artists took where an obstacle, the oft-mentioned ‘impasse’ofmodernism,interruptedprogressonestablishedpaths[...]. The cultural products of this period both are and are not ‘of the moment’. Precisely in their untimeliness, their lack of symmetry and formal balance, they retain the power to transport their readers and critics ‘out of bounds’ – to an ‘elsewhere’ of writing from which the period can be surveyed, from which its legitimacy as a whole might be called into question.9 Late modernism in this account fulfills the early modernist imperative of self-reflexivity, but in a manner that allows authors to interrogate modernism’s established idioms. Such a move becomes more pronounced in the work of authors who were themselves fixtures of early modernism, now responding to the ‘impasse’ of their past writings, political convictions and cultural impact, and distinguishes late modernism as an ‘untimely’ moment in literary history. But despite Miller’s assertions, or perhaps because of them, late modernism represents a significant problem for critics of the period. It traverses the intellectual terrain of both modernism and postmodernism without aligning itself with either category, and many of the texts characterised as late modernist bear little formal resemblance to their early modernist predecessors, while those that do arise from different cultural and historical conditions.10 As Jed Esty points out: ‘While

318 The Entertainments of Late Modernism many of the stylistic hallmarks of high modernism continued to appear in various experimental and nonmimetic well after World II, the broader cultural conditions of metropolitan modernism ended rather sharply during the mid-century’.11 For Esty, the English strain of late modernism represents an attempt to compensate for the loss of imperial power by promoting a distinctly national culture, one ‘whose insular integrity seemed to mitigate some of modernism’s characteristic social agonies while rendering obsolete some of modernism’s defining aesthetic techniques’.12 Other critics have also located late modernism within a specific national and historical context, defining the period’s literature in terms of its cultural moment. In examining British modernism’s response to the Second World War, Marina MacKay argues for a conception of late modernism that takes as its starting point the importance of historical circumstance in producing aesthetic change. MacKay observes that early modernism’s affinity for novelty has led a number of scholars to focus too keenly on the period’s beginning rather than its end: ‘To speak of late modernism is to signal unambiguously a move away from the manifestos of the 1910s and the climactic year of 1922, a shift that allows us to reconsider what modernism means as a description of distinctive aesthetic modes that were not monolithic or static but capable of development and transformation. Focusing on late modernism is a way of reading modernism through its longer outcomes rather than its notional origins.’13 Fredric Jameson offers a similar assessment of late modernism as a phenomenon rooted in global politics, although he too acknowledges the murkiness of the former term. Late modernism, for Jameson, is a product of the Cold War, a response to the transformation of ‘the older modernist experimentation into an arsenal of tried and true techniques, no longer striving after aesthetic totality or the systemic and Utopian metamorphosis of forms’.14 Much as the generation that came of age during the Great War found their political and artistic convictions transformed in the face of international devastation, numerous English authors of the 1940s and after were forced to reevaluate their faith in the revolutionary potential of as a result of the destruction caused by a second global conflict. Yet, as Jameson points out, the aftershocks of the Second World War did not destroy art or politics, but instead led to a transitional period characterised by its reaction to increasing modernisation and artistic self-consciousness. What Jameson calls ‘late modernism’ or ‘neo-modernism’, then, ‘involves a constant and self-conscious return to art about art, and art about the creation of art’, in the manner of later modernist figures

319 Modernist Cultures like Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov.15 Thus late modernism is for Jameson a related strain of high modernism, just as self-referential as its predecessor, but in a manner informed by a different conflict, different artistic practices and different patterns of modernity. For much the same reasons that Esty, MacKay and Jameson view late modernism as the product of an epoch markedly different from that of early modernism, some critics have chosen to avoid the former term altogether, preferring instead the concept of ‘intermodernism’, which connotes many of the same historical, aesthetic and political valences of what others have termed late modernism while referencing a more precise of authors – typically, popular British working between the two World whose texts remain unexplored in recent modernist criticism – and their respective cultural milieus. To illustrate how intermodernism as a category both relates to and maintains its independence from modernism, Kristin Bluemel has pointed to three characteristic preoccupations of intermodernist cultural production: first, class, as ‘intermodernists typically represent working-class and working middle-class cultures’; second, politics, as ‘intermodernists are often politically radical’; and third, literature, as ‘intermodernists are committed to non-canonical, even “middlebrow’’ or “mass’’ ’.16 Bluemel argues that recent modernist criticism has elided important questions of periodicity by claiming as modernist a host of widely divergent literatures, authors and forms. She describes this move as ‘the apparent colonisation of virtually all areas of study of twentieth-century literary cultural activity by the “New Modernist Studies’’ [which] has ensured that whatever is not modernism will function as modernism’s other’.17 In place of late modernism Bluemel offers a term that ‘overlaps with all those periods described as “late modernist’’, “outside’’ or “after’’ modernism’, but also seeks to clarify the peculiar situation of authors whose works bear an uneasy relationship to such established critical categories.18 Intermodernism thus becomes an uncomfortable ally of late modernism even as it seeks to oppose it, a resemblance that indicates just how thoroughly the idea of late modernism has embedded itself in critical consciousness, and how difficult it becomes to distinguish a late modernist work from a modernist, postmodernist or intermodernist one, however dissimilar those works may appear. While a precise definition of late modernism remains elusive, the persistent complaint that the period has too often been relegated to a cursory role in longer studies of modernism’s history, with critics attending more to the era’s origins than its outcomes, points to a serious gap in our understanding of modernism as a whole. However,

320 The Entertainments of Late Modernism as the examples above suggest, the recent investment in theorising late modernism has initiated a concurrent effort to direct our attention to the work of authors like Greene, who throughout his career straddled the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism, realism and popular genre, theology and political critique. In fact, Greene’s tendency to explore all of these apparent opposites simultaneously has led critics like Andrzej Gasiorek ˛ to define Greene’s work of the 1930s and 1940s as characteristic of late modernism in its feverish juxtaposition of formal, generic and political concerns. As Gasiorek ˛ explains: ‘Greene’s work in this period belongs to the “late modernist’’ context[...]notjustbecauseitstitchestogetherrealism, and a tragicomic view of life’s inherent absurdity but because it discloses a symptomatic sense of frustration at the powerlessness of the beleaguered individual.’19 In pursuing the question of where Greene’s fiction might fit within our current conception of modernism, this essay will argue three related points: first, that by understanding late modernism not as a discrete historical phenomenon but rather as a fitful reevaluation of the boundaries of form, genre and subjectivity that borrowed certain elements of early modernism while firmly rejecting others, we gain a greater sense of why late modernism has been so notoriously difficult to define and yet so perfectly suited as a descriptor for Greene’s eclectic body of work; second, that in analysing how a novel like Brighton Rock encapsulates the formal and thematic anxieties of late modernism, characterised by its appropriation of the conventions of the detective genre and the psychoanalytic case study, we can begin to see just how innovative a writer Greene was; and third, that in the novel’s unsettling fusion of detective fiction and the case study we find Greene’s most provocative statement on twentieth-century subjectivity – namely, that the criminal comes to represent the exemplary modern individual.

Crime in Brighton If late modernism signals a tense relationship between the individual and a world that appeared increasingly fragile for much of the twentieth century, then an early moment in Brighton Rock appears to offer some measure of solace. In this particular scene, Ida Arnold, a vibrant woman characterised by her overt sexuality, unflagging optimism and wholehearted faith in the concept of justice, attempts to comfort a newfound male acquaintance named Hale, who seems unusually anxious in her embrace. As Ida tells Hale, hoping her reassurance will help him to relax: ‘It’s a good world if you don’t

321 Modernist Cultures weaken.’20 Unbeknownst to Ida, however, Hale’s anxiety stems not from his awkwardness as a lover, but from his understanding that he is about to be murdered, and in this context Ida’s efforts seem both laughably shallow and hopelessly ineffective. From the novel’s outset, Greene offers a narrative that attempts to undermine Ida’s easy optimism, crushing it under the weight of a bleak social . Indeed, Brighton Rock presents a world that is anything but ‘good’, and where any traces of empathy or human fellowship are obliterated by poverty, gang warfare and the static social condition of Britain’s youth, who have no gainful source of , no steady income and no future. Either everyone in the novel has weakened, behaving badly in an essentially good world, or the world was never all that good to begin with. If Greene’s decision to begin his novel with a depressed urban landscape, in which the possibility of human connection is always subsumed by either the threat of violence or the failure of meaningful communication, links Brighton Rock to some of the most prominent political and social critiques advanced by other late modernist authors, then it also demonstrates how the novel speaks to the formal conventions of both modernism and detective fiction. On the one hand, Greene’s text does not make light of its obvious debts to the detective genre: its jarring, melodramatic opening line (‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him’), detailed rendering of the colloquial speech of Brighton’s gangsters, and its characterisation of Ida as a kind of moralistic detective, determined to uncover the circumstances of Hale’s murder and the clues that might lead her to his killer, establish that the text is a work of detective fiction, or at least a fiction with a clear foundation in that genre (BR, 3). On the other hand, it also bears many of the formal elements characteristic of modernism: minutely detailed accounts of , which equal in significance and narrative attention ruminations on the existence of God or the nature of evil; gradual shifts in narrative voice, in which Greene moves almost imperceptibly from the perspective of an omniscient narrator to those of the characters themselves; and abrupt cinematic cuts from one scene to the next, which not only advance the novel’s plot in rapid order, but also provide an oddly decentred view of both characters and events. Taken together, these elements point to a work that appears formally divided between the conventions of modernism and genre fiction, and yet, for that very reason, encapsulates the aesthetic aims of a late modernism struggling to adapt the formal techniques of early modernism through the lens of popular literature. Brighton Rock

322 The Entertainments of Late Modernism may present a world that is undeniably bleak in its scathing critique of political and human failings, but that world is just as much the product of a late modernist attitude towards aesthetic and the innovative potential of popular fiction as it is a response to social ills. While the good world that Ida envisions and Greene’s narrative lambastes is suspiciously vague, seemingly the product of an idle optimism unconcerned with the social conditions of the period, the narrative world that she inhabits – that is, Greene’s depiction of Brighton, England, during the late 1930s – is unsettling in that its badness is all too vivid. In part, Greene based his novel on the ’s reputation as a popular tourist destination that had been sullied by a growing network of serious and petty crime. A series of grisly murders committed in Brighton between 1928 and 1934 earned the city the unfortunate nickname of ‘the Queen of Slaughtering Places’,21 while its outward prosperity, exemplified by the numerous seaside shops, halls and racetracks catering to a brisk tourist trade, attempted to high levels of poverty and unemployment with little success.22 Greene’s novel magnifies the situation by exposing the rift between Brighton’s visitors and its residents, depicting rival gangs clashing over disputed turf, slicing one another with razors in random attacks underneath the city’s seaside piers while unsuspecting tourists remain oblivious to the thievery and intimidation occurring just beneath their feet. As Greene’s narrator observes in the novel’s opening pages, Brighton’s ubiquitous crowds of tourists become complicit in the city’s violence through their ignorance, and appear not as a haven of humanity, but rather as ‘a thick forest in which a native could arrange his poisoned ambush’ (BR,9). Unsurprisingly, the actual citizens of Brighton were not pleased with Greene’s portrayal of their community. In fact, many felt that the city’s efforts to revitalise its poorer neighbourhoods during the 1920s and 1930s had been undermined by the perception of Brighton that Greene’s novel disseminated throughout the country. Clifford Musgrave maintains that the city’s reputation as a lawless paradise for bookies, gangsters, pimps and thieves was an exaggeration perpetuated in no small degree by Greene’s novel. Musgrave instead blames Brighton’s sordid reputation on an influx of criminals who fled their own city during the air raids of the First World War in predatory pursuit of the wealthy tourists who populated Brighton’s boardwalks, thereby transforming what might have been an idyllic into a seedy haven for criminals looking to set up shop.23 For Musgrave, Brighton crime was a London problem.

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However one construes Musgrave’s misgivings, Greene’s Brighton is a bad place to be, and the epitome of its badness is Pinkie Brown, a seventeen-year-old boy from the city’s slums who struggles to assume control of his gang following its leader’s murder. For Pinkie, the opportunity to command his own gang represents a chance at upward social mobility, and, perhaps more importantly, a shot at achieving a high status in what is easily the most lucrative career option available to him, given the circumstances. Lisa Fluet, in her study of the hit man in late modernist fiction, argues that such professional criminals ‘often advance from poor or obscure origins to the relative stability of white-collar life via intelligence, , and some form of institutional legitimation’.24 Pinkie too seeks out the stability promised by a life of crime, fashioning an identity for himself based on the premise that criminality can be a logical and attractive career choice. He idolises the wealth and political power of Colleoni, a local gangster who runs his operation from the confines of the opulent Cosmopolitan Hotel, and finds security in the company of his fellow gang members, among whom he likens himself to ‘a physically weak but cunning schoolboy [...] who has attached to himself in an indiscriminating fidelity the strongest boy in the school’ (BR, 61). Throughout Brighton Rock, crime functions not as a simple act of random violence, but as a calculated social manoeuvre in which the weak individual can base his identity on his relationship with the strong. Pinkie’s attitudes towards criminal behaviour – namely his eagerness to assert his social and individual value through violence – serve as a for understanding how late modernist authors like Greene began to articulate the connection between destruction and self-creation by exploring the relationship between the individual and the group, the exemplary and the ordinary. Consequently, it becomes more productive to view Pinkie’s criminality not as a reflection of the character’s inherent sinfulness – an explanation favoured by several of the novel’s earlier critics – but rather as an adopted promising a professional identity that is more desirable than anything else Brighton might offer.25 In his depiction of Pinkie as a young man confident in his ability to forge a new and meaningful identity through crime, Greene utilises the form of the case study to explore the psychological impetus for violent self-creation, and manipulates that form in a deliberately ironic and characteristically late modernist vein. Echoing the case study’s insistence that the individual is not an isolated entity but is best understood as the representative of larger groups or patterns of human behaviour, Greene borrows a formal device characteristic of

324 The Entertainments of Late Modernism early modernist writing and uses it to present physical, psychological, and emotional data about his fictional criminal. Freud maintained that the efficacy of the case study resides in the analyst’s ability to equate his patient’s individual symptoms with tendencies observed in the greater population, illustrating how a single figure can serve as an exemplary instance of a larger phenomenon. Despite such lofty claims of the case study’s universal applicability, however, Freud also argued that it must ground itself in the mundane, as it ‘depends for its coherence precisely upon the small details of real life’, and must attend to those seemingly minute behaviours, thoughts and expressions that, when taken together, can reveal the pernicious effects of mental disorder, thus giving the analyst some into the larger problem at hand.26 Here arises the paradox of the case study as a diagnostic form, with Freud claiming that general issues of subjectivity can best be understood by addressing the particulars of individual behaviour. The case study had to demonstrate a dual relevance for the individual and the group, moving seamlessly between the specific and the general. When he describes the sexual obsessions of the Rat Man, and that patient’s elaborate childhood fear that any encouragement of his sexual desires would lead directly to the death of his father, Freud takes special note of the exchange between the general and the specific: ‘It was a complete obsessional neurosis, wanting in no essential element, at once the nucleus and the prototype of the later disorder – an elementary organism, as it were, the study of which could alone enable us to obtain a grasp of the complicated organization of his subsequent illness.’27 Here, as elsewhere in Freud’s oeuvre, the symptom proves the existence of the illness, and by itself can shed light on the complexity of the Rat Man’s neuroses. Because these narratives could disguise just as much as they revealed, the case study proved useful for late modernist authors who, like Greene, were looking to provide a more concrete representation of consciousness while retaining the ambiguity of early modernist characterisation. Late modernist authors employed the case study as a model for psychological representation, often borrowing elements of its narrative structure for their own work, but at the same time resisted any wholesale appropriation of a stream-of-consciousness technique. They were also drawn to the ambiguity of the patient’s narrative, and the ways in which the case study addresses aspects of the fragmentary nature of subjectivity that closely resemble early modernist conceptions of identity.28 On a biographical level, the case study served as an outlet for Greene’s abiding in psychoanalysis, which had been a favourite topic ever since he spent six months of his childhood

325 Modernist Cultures in psychotherapy with the Jungian analyst Kenneth Richmond.29 This process instilled in him not only a profound curiosity about himself and his behaviours but also a pronounced enthusiasm for dream analysis and its emphasis on rendering legible the workings of the unconscious.30 The case study also offered a framework for contemplating the intricacies of criminality by virtue of its ubiquity within the detective genre, since every detective story is, in some sense, the case history of a crime. As Dennis Porter argues: ‘Like the detective story, the psychoanalytic case history is a mystery story’, as both represent ‘the recovery of a story’, whether of psychological malady or of crime.31 In precisely this manner, the case study offered Greene a unique perspective on the complexities of criminal psychology by virtue of its resonance within both psychoanalytic and legal spheres. It pushed him to consider how an individual might attempt to forge a sense of self out of a curious fusion of psychoanalytic inquiry and the stock characters of popular detective fiction.

The Singular and the Typical Greene invites us to interpret his protagonist as a case study, for Pinkie’s process of inventing himself as a career criminal is also an attempt to become a case study, or an exemplary instance of a larger whole. Much of Pinkie’s understanding of criminality, and of the kinds of behaviour expected of someone occupying the position he covets, is based on his knowledge of the stereotypes of criminal life, which he draws upon in order to craft an image of himself as the quintessential gangster. Aping the mannerisms of his peers in hopes of earning their approval, Pinkie looks to others upon whom he might base his criminal identity, and in the process assembles a sense of self that adheres more to a generalised definition of criminality than to any specific individual or set of traits. Although the narrator may claim that Pinkie possesses ‘too much pride to worry about appearances’, the face that he presents to his fellow gangsters is exactly what he does worry about, obsessively (BR, 64). Concerned that he might unknowingly diverge from common expectations of criminal behaviour, Pinkie struggles to live up to those expectations in his every word and deed. This approach to self-creation is all the more natural for Pinkie given that he seems to possess few individual characteristics in the first place. Take, for example, his approach to murder, an action he performs with no apparent relish save the respect it earns him from his peers: ‘The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word “box’’, “collar’’, “giraffe’’. [...] Theimaginationhadn’tawoken.That

326 The Entertainments of Late Modernism was his strength. He couldn’t see through other people’s eyes, or feel with their nerves’ (BR, 47). Pinkie’s mind appears here as an eerie and unfeeling blank, resembling in its lack of empathy what Mark Seltzer has termed ‘the statistical person’, defined as ‘an individual who, in the most radical form, experiences identity, his own and others, as a matter of numbers, kinds, types’.32 Greene presents Pinkie as a curious, even linguistic emptiness, incapable of drawing firm connections to other people or comprehending their pain except on the most general and dissociative of levels. He reinforces this perception by referring to Pinkie as ‘the Boy’ throughout the entirety of the text, highlighting the fact that he is both a typical Brighton teenager and a generic criminal type, lacking a unique identity of his own. Several critics have read Pinkie’s blankness, coupled with other instances of his inability to connect his crimes with any sense of remorse, as evidence of a purely evil nature, much in keeping with the tenets of Greene’s Catholicism.33 At times, Pinkie affirms this assessment by referring to himself as one of the living damned, destined for an afterlife in hell as a result of the crimes he has committed, and for which he refuses to repent. For example, Pinkie insists in a conversation with Rose, the girl he later marries in order to prevent her from testifying against him in Hale’s murder case, that his criminality has no basis in free will. ‘It’s not what you do’, Pinkie tellsher,‘it’swhatyouthink[...].It’sintheblood. Perhaps when they christened me, the holy water didn’t take. I never howled the devil out’ (BR, 136). Greene’s narrative adds to the perception of Pinkie as an inherently evil figure by equating the boy’s physiognomy with a corresponding aura of villainy, alluding to the nineteenth-century practice of associating criminality with a ‘degenerate’ physical type. Pinkie’s eyes, for instance, possess ‘an effect of heartlessness like an old man’s in which human feeling has died’ and are ‘touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went’ (BR, 6, 20). Additionally, Pinkie’s face twitches and contorts when he grows nervous, and any attempt he makes at a smile comes out ‘stiffly’, as he seems fundamentally unable to make such a gesture, or to ‘use those muscles with any naturalness’ (BR, 26). The criminal’s pitiless visage and inability to control his muscle movements reflect either a corrupted soul or an innate criminality revealing itself through the body. Although Pinkie’s face initially seems to suggest that criminality might simply be the inheritance of an unlucky child, his remarks to Rose on their shared Catholicism and its place in his peculiar system of morality possess a noticeably affected air. In fact, Pinkie offers the

327 Modernist Cultures majority of his thoughts on heaven, hell and sin as bits of speculation, always delivered with the calculated effect of strengthening his aura of world-weary expertise, as well as the power he exerts over his listeners. For instance, his blasé statement regarding the possibility of heaven reveals his tendency to adopt the of when it serves the larger purpose of increasing his prominence as a career criminal:

‘These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation’, he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, ‘torments’. ‘And Heaven too’, Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. ‘Oh, maybe’, the Boy said, ‘maybe’. (BR, 55)

The point of this philosophical moment is not to arrive at any consensus about the existence of heaven or hell, but instead to prove to Rose that Pinkie’s knowledge of the world trumps her own inexperience and naïveté, and thus earns him a position of power over her. Pinkie articulates a version of himself that fits with his self- created image as an irredeemable criminal doomed to exist in a bad, heavenless world. This exposes his religious conviction as an ironic instrument of social climbing not unlike his in the power of the gang – a parallel that Greene exploits later in the novel when Pinkie ruminates on his impoverished childhood in a Brighton slum called ‘Paradise Piece’. Criminality in Greene’s novel is not limited to rhetorical violence, however, as physical violence also offers the possibility of liberation from otherwise drastic economic and personal circumstances. Even Rose, dimly aware of Pinkie’s involvement in gang activity yet hesitant to pry too deeply into his affairs, relishes the spotlight that Pinkie’s criminal persona attracts. Scouring the faces she sees along the Brighton boardwalk, she remarks proudly to Pinkie that ‘It’s wonderful being with you. Everyone knows you. I never thought I’d marry someone famous’ (BR, 192). In spite of his marriage, Pinkie maintains that the life of crime represents nothing less than a form of personal illumination, one through which he can pursue every avenue of worldly experience and recognition without being undermined by the bourgeois constraints of marriage, children and conventional employment. He can thus achieve a certain measure of prestige for his abilities – organising a mob, intimidating inferiors, killing rivals and extorting money – while at the same time avoiding the traditional expectations of a successful middle-class professional. In fact, Pinkie

328 The Entertainments of Late Modernism prides himself on his simultaneous mimicry of class mobility and resistance to assimilation into the groups that might now count him as a member. As the narrator observes: ‘his pride coiled like a watch spring round the thought that he wasn’t deceived, that he wasn’t going to give himself up to marriage and the birth of children, he was going to be where Colleoni now was and higher [...].Hekneweverything’ (BR, 97). One of Pinkie’s greatest fears is that the respect he earns through crime may not be strong enough to withstand other measures of masculinity – especially sexual experience – and that the identity he has worked so tirelessly to maintain might crumble when faced with the reality of the physical body. In spite of his assertions that he knows ‘everything’ about organised crime, Pinkie knows almost nothing about sex, and he admits that ‘he knew everything in theory, nothing in practice [...].Heknewthemoves,he’dneverplayedthegame’(BR, 124). In order to hide his sexual ignorance, he insists on a strict system of personal restraint; he abstains from alcohol and spurns women in order to mark himself as one dedicated to the rigours of his work and liberated from the pressures of sexual desire and other wanton appetites. In fact, Pinkie’s abstention from all forms of physical often veers towards complete . Even a fleeting glance at Rose can elicit a keen sense of bitterness about the temptations of femininity: ‘She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape – anywhere – for anyone? It was worth murdering a world’ (BR, 97). For Pinkie, desire can never be accepted on its own terms, but must always be resisted in order to preserve a sense of individual control. If ‘the Boy’ can stifle his cravings to the point at which they cease to exist, then the ideal self-image he has created might be fulfilled: he will remain an ideal criminal instead of becoming a conventional young man. At the same time, Pinkie acknowledges that his asceticism has limited value within most social circles, and he understands that its effects on his position within an all-male gang can prove detrimental. By this logic, the cultivation of criminality is also a work of compensation, an attempt to steel oneself against the pressures of sexual life and to resist social entanglement. By presenting himself as an enterprising gang leader devoted entirely to the welfare of his organisation, Pinkie shirks conventional social interaction, the bourgeois tradition that he fears might put an end to his uniqueness.

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Issues of experience and inexperience, professional celebrity and private embarrassment, come to a head when Pinkie and his gang’s lieutenant, Spicer, are attacked by members of Colleoni’s gang. Seeking shelter after fleeing the ambush, Pinkie hides in a garage located on what he describes as one of Brighton’s ‘bourgeois’ roads, and finds himself surrounded by piles of forgotten children’s toys, worn-out records, and rusted garden tools (BR, 115). Of the garage’s owner, Pinkie notes that ‘he had come a long way to land uphere[...].Andthis,thesmallvillaundertheracecourse,wasthe best finish he could manage. You couldn’t have any doubt that this was the end, the mortgaged home in the bottom; like the untidy tidemark on a beach, the junk was piled up here and would never go farther’ (BR, 116). Pinkie’s observation of these cast-off trappings of middle-class family life fills him with a palpable animosity towards the garage’s owner, and the narrative pauses as he curses the failure of upward mobility to correct the problem of inexperience: ‘the Boy hated [the garage owner]. He was nameless, faceless, but the Boy hated him, the doll, the pram, the broken rocking horse. The small pricked-out plants irritated him like ignorance. He felt hungry and faint and shaken. He had known pain and fear’ (BR, 116). For Pinkie, this realisation of his own ignorance follows immediately upon a moment of intense professional humiliation, as the assailants from Colleoni’s gang will undoubtedly report to their boss the fact that Pinkie has fled rather than facing their attack. Thinking about how close he has come to death at the hands of the mob, Pinkie realises that ‘it wasn’t eternity he thought about but his own humiliation’ (BR, 115). The other impetus for Pinkie’s pursuit of crime as an effort to formulate a new, more glamorous identity is the social world of Brighton itself. When Pinkie convinces Rose to accompany him on a day trip to an area he refers to as ‘the country’ – an ironic reversal of the Victorian tradition of countryside excursions, in that this ‘country’ is only the outer limit of a Brighton slum – he reflects on his escape from an unhappy and impoverished childhood. Worried that any commitment to Rose, legally necessary as it may be, will draw him nearer to the family situation he left behind, Pinkie upon a desolate scene:

the barred and battlemented Salvation Army gaff at the corner: his own home beyond in Paradise Piece: the houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the

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smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up. They lay on the chalk bank side by side with a common geography, and a little hate mixed with his contempt. He thought he had made his escape, and here his home was: back beside him, making claims. (BR, 95)

As with the rumours of cowardice threatening his criminal persona, Pinkie cannot escape the fact that he has a past, and, moreover, a memory, both of which stubbornly remind him that he is not and never will be a complete work of self-creation. In reminiscing about his childhood home, Pinkie begins to realise that Brighton, the city that makes his identity as a career criminal possible, is also a place that will continually remind him of the nobody he used to be. In effect, Pinkie’s realisation that his past can never be transcended brings him face to face with the paradox of the case study and its vacillation between the general and the specific. Although Pinkie strives to create a personal and professional identity based upon a generic sense of criminality, the unique history of his case will always set him apart, keeping him from attaining an entirely new identity. At the same time, Pinkie’s hope of becoming a stereotypical gangster can never fulfill his goal of becoming a distinct individual, as the act of modelling himself into a criminal type will only make him like everyone else who might fit into that category. Greene alludes to this double bind in a 1926 letter in which he describes his practice of researching Brighton Rock by investigating the criminal elements of London’s slums, seeking out avenues with especially dubious reputations. Explaining the excitement of such work, Greene remarks that the ‘disreputable geography of London is a fascinating study[...].Itisfunnyhowthingsruninstreets.Halftheblackmail or swindling cases live in Gerrard Street.’34 By referring to Gerrard Street’s criminal residents as ‘blackmail or swindling cases’, Greene reveals his perception of these criminals not as individuals, but as general types personified by the crimes they have committed. He singles out certain crimes as worthy of his attention but negates the specificity of the men who commit them by describing them in generalised legal terms. Greene’s metonymic conflation of the person with the crime, or, more specifically, of the person with the case, speaks to late modernism’s pressing concern with the case study’s ability to represent criminal activity, and the relationship it posits between the individual and the aggregate. The latter problem proved especially difficult, in that it made visible a tension not only within the framework of the

331 Modernist Cultures case study itself, but also within the very fabric of modern identity. Just as Lauren Berlant describes the case study as a form that ‘hovers about the singular, the general, and the normative’, Greene’s novel suggests that individual identity does the same.35 In analysing Pinkie as a case study in criminality, one begins to perceive a distinct blurring of the boundaries separating the person under consideration from the larger whole that he is elected to represent, and a concurrent inability to arrest the ever-changing nature of subjectivity. In his examination of Freud’s concerns over the similarities between his psychiatric case histories and fictional characterisations, Adam Phillips argues that Freud’s tendency to fret over such disciplinary parameters addresses the larger issue of what a case study might tell us about the tenuous relationship between idiosyncrasy and conformity: ‘In psychiatric case histories the patient has to be a type, or is too much of a type; in short stories people are not too much like types, they are just the right amount. Free association as a method threatens to undo the patient as type; the patient’s resistance to free association is a resistance to unfathomable singularity, to the delirium of idiosyncrasy. As a method it is Freud’s antidote to the typecasting of everyday modern life.’36 Greene, however, takes the opposite approach, creating a protagonist who can never be ‘too much’ like a type. By presenting an individual whose primary goal is to become a type, or to resist the ‘unfathomable singularity’ of being a distinctive subject, Brighton Rock instead directs a concentrated attack on the traditional conception of both the case study and fictional characterisation. The irony here is that Pinkie’s hope of becoming a typical criminal is pursued with the intention of reinventing himself as an absolutely singular individual. Pinkie works to exceed his ordinariness by becoming a stock character – in this case, the powerful and publicly feared gangster – which, by definition, is the epitome of the ordinary. Surely Greene recognised the same paradox at work in his characterisation of Gerrard Street’s criminals as cases, a move which counters the apparent aberration of criminality by casting it as something utterly typical within a given location and set of circumstances. It is this focus on the banality of crime that lends Greene’s late modernism its sinister pall, and that makes his depiction of the criminal appear simultaneously menacing and mundane. While Greene offers a conception of criminality bound to idiosyncrasy – that is, the idea that criminality can wrest the individual from the crushing sameness of daily life – he also advocates a more unsettling view of crime as an unavoidable facet of subjectivity in general, where all are alike in their propensity for violence.

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Crime as If his representation of criminality as a performable set of behaviours, attitudes, and gestures that any individual can adopt aligns Greene with the thematic and political paradigms of late modernism, then why have critics typically excluded him from conversations about the period? While late modernism as a critical descriptor has only been in circulation a short time, the novelty of the category cannot answer this question. Rather, Greene himself is at least partly to blame. He dismissed Virginia Woolf’s brand of fiction by comparing it to ‘a charming whimsical rather sentimental prose poem’, and thus sealed his reputation as a gritty realist working against a modernist tradition woefully out of touch with the plight of England’s poor.37 Ye t Greene’s impatience with what he perceived as Woolf’s indifference to an unjust social order has been overstated; his qualms about Woolf are religious as much as they are social, as is evidenced by his unfavourable comparison of Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay, from To the Lighthouse (1927), with one of Anthony Trollope’s curates, a character who, ‘exists in a way that Mrs Woolf’s Mr Ramsay never does, because we are aware that he exists not only to the woman he is addressing but also in a God’s eye’.38 Nonetheless, the view that Greene was vehemently opposed to the formal innovations of modernist fiction is widely held. While critics like Gasiorek ˛ have acknowledged that Greene was not opposed to modernism per se, but valued Edwardian modernists like Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford because their innovations were ‘less destructive of the novel form than those of the post-war period’, and remained ‘in touch with the social realm he himself wanted to explore’, such a measured response to Greene’s aesthetic predilections has been slow to catch on in critical circles.39 Moreover, Greene’s attraction to genre fiction has led several critics to dismiss his work as too commercial to be taken seriously, and thus outside the bounds of a highbrow, elitist modernism. However, as modernist critics have begun to rethink the standard account of the period as one steeled against the pressures of the literary marketplace, rejecting what Andreas Huyssen characterised as the ‘great divide’ between high modernism and ‘an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture’, Greene’s relevance for a late modernist canon becomes more pronounced, and his habit of working within and between various popular genres lends his fiction a more experimental strain than heretofore acknowledged.40 As Brian Lindsay Thomson argues in his account of their characteristic blend of popular and ‘serious’ fiction, Greene’s novels ‘played fast and loose with generic

333 Modernist Cultures conventions in order to work out problems that intellectuals did not normallyassociatewiththegenrestowhichtheyassignedthem[...]. They neither required nor produced passive observers of stable genres [...]butratheractive participants willing to take a hand in dismantling stereotypes and myths.’41 Greene was not a popular writer for the sake of profit alone, but instead interrogated the boundaries of genre in order to show how it might yield new into the practice of fiction more generally. In light of these connections between Greene’s late modernist approach to criminal psychology and manipulation of popular generic conceits, it is worth remembering that Greene initially labelled Brighton Rock as ‘an entertainment’, a distinction he would attach to various novels throughout his career and one that poses a unique set of problems for contemporary critics. For one thing, Greene never seemed able to make up his mind as to what, precisely, an entertainment entailed, or which of his fictions might fall under that generic designation. Indeed, Greene’s use of the term ‘entertainment’ was often intermittent, as he removed the label from later editions of his novels and sometimes classified other novels as entertainments years after they were published. One notable example of this habit is Greene’s Orient Express (1932; published in Great Britain as Stamboul Train), which was not categorised as an entertainment until Greene decided in 1936 that the novel belonged to that genre. Such indecision is particularly apparent in Brighton Rock’s vexed publication history, as Greene labelled the novel as an entertainment for its first American edition, but removed the generic marker when the novel was published in Britain.42 To justify his change of heart, Greene noted simply that while he initially conceived of the novel as a kind of detective story, the book’s detective element lasts only for the first fifty pages, and he further claimed that he should have abandoned those pages altogether and begun the novel again, starting with its second section. Greene’s critics have exhibited similar confusion. Alan Furst speculates in his introduction to the recent Penguin edition of The Ministry of Fear on what Greene might have meant by categorising certain of his texts as entertainments. He settles on the idea that ‘the subtitle simply acknowledges that the novel is a certain kind of genre fiction which had not, by 1941 [when the novel’s action takes place], had its reputation elevated by the work of Graham Greene’. As for the novel’s deliberate shirking of the conventions of traditional crime narratives, Furst offers the rather baffling suggestion that it is ‘almost as if [Greene is] mad at the reader for buying a suspense novel, and mad at himself for writing it’.43 In establishing a division between the

334 The Entertainments of Late Modernism author’s ‘elevated’ reworkings of the crime genre and the conventional suspense narratives of popular fiction, Furst characterises Greene’s entertainments and their on readerly expectation as both a simple rewriting of generic tradition and a sadomasochistic endeavour, based on an understanding of the writing and consumption of popular fiction as equally shameful pursuits. In a similar vein, Murray Roston dismisses Greene’s entertainments with the explanation that they ‘did not deal with the concerns confronting him as a serious novelist’, and that, although they are ‘often exciting to read’, the novels ‘were really pot-boilers intended to provide him with an income’.44 Greene did little to challenge such criticisms. In a 1955 interview he differentiated the entertainments from his other novels by pointing to their emphasis on action rather than characterisation, explaining that in writing an entertainment ‘one is primarily interested in having an exciting story as in a physical action, with just enough character to give interest to the action, because you can’t be interested in the action of a mere dummy’.45 Years later, he claimed in his autobiography Ways of Escape (1980) that the decision to characterise some of his novels as entertainments fulfilled his desire ‘to distinguish [...] from more serious novels’ those texts that participated in the suspense and thriller genres.46 In both the interview and the autobiography, Greene blithely shrugs off the entertainment as an exciting popular genre driven solely by the engine of plot, far removed from the austerity of the ‘serious’ novel and its emphasis on character, philosophical speculation and contemporary social problems. By this logic, the entertainment stands apart as a wholly conventional and potentially sophomoric genre, with characters who barely rise above the level of ‘mere dummies’ and readers who remain blissfully unconcerned with such a lack of psychological depth. It is imperative, however, that critics do not simply take the author at his word. Greene made no secret of his interest in the crime, detective and adventure genres, and none of his novels, popular or serious, shirk the issue of psychology. Bernard Bergonzi argues that the entertainments ‘were [...] not all that different from the books [Greene] regarded as novels, but they drew more directly on the conventions of popular fiction and allowed Greene to indulge his liking for melodrama’.47 Far from isolating him as a commercial and conventional novelist, the entertainments allowed Greene to experiment with form in a way that exceeds the limits of genre fiction, illustrating how the traditional divisions between popular literature and the mid-century English novel might be far less pronounced than authors of the time suspected, or that our own generation of critics

335 Modernist Cultures has fully grasped. By inventing a new genre that erases the distinction between late modernist and popular fiction – and, in fact, shows the two to be intimately related through their shared emphases on the problem of psychological representation, the upward mobility of violent self- creation and the figure of the stock character – Greene could provide what he considered a necessary corrective to the classic British mystery, which he felt was ‘lacking in realism’ since it contained ‘too many suspects and the criminal never belonged to what used to be called the criminal class’.48 Novels like Brighton Rock, then, do not reflect their author’s desire for money or increased popularity, nor do they reveal an embarrassing indulgence in popular fiction. Rather, they show how literary convention can be mined for its creative potential, and how the formal principles of genre fiction might provide insight into pressing aesthetic and historical concerns. They illustrate, for instance, how a small-time gangster like Pinkie, by striving to reinvent himself as a stereotypical criminal, comes to exemplify a fragmentary, performative and decidedly modern subjectivity, or how a clipped narrative voice can provide a terse dismissal of early modernist fiction’s densely layered representation of individual impression while still emphasising the primacy of interiority and personal experience. Indeed, it is his keen attention to the generic mandates of crime and detective fiction that makes Greene such an influential figure for late modernism and its preoccupation with the criminal as an unstable yet ubiquitous model of the modern individual. Like other late modernist texts, Greene’s novels reflect a simultaneous commitment to modernist ambiguity and a growing dissatisfaction with the vagueness that such ambiguity entails. Convinced that the modern world was an essentially chaotic and unpredictable place, and resigned to the idea that consciousness might be too fragmentary and haphazard a thing to be fully understood by either psychologists or novelists, late modernist authors like Greene adopted their predecessors’ concerns about the role of the self within a larger social network, and attempted to locate new methods of exploring subjectivity that might illuminate this otherwise murky concept. Combining stylistic elements characteristic of high modernism with the thematic and formal conventions of popular crime fiction, Greene’s late modernism reveals an interest in the possibilities for representing criminal psychology and motivation in ways that might make sense of both the violence of everyday life and the allure of crime more generally. To classify Greene as a late modernist is not only to situate his work in relation to earlier modernist experiments with form, psychology and violence, but also to view it

336 The Entertainments of Late Modernism as a complex response to the plight of the subject in a world that seemed increasingly fragmented, contentious and brutal. By placing Greene’s fiction within this critical context we can begin to fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of both modernism and genre fiction, and, just as importantly, to discover those more sinister aspects of late modernism from which our current conceptions of the modern subject arise.

*I am grateful to Jessica Burstein for her generous feedback on this essay, and to Michael Valdez Moses and Andrzej Gasiorek ˛ for their helpful suggestions. I presented earlier versions of this essay at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference in Long Beach, California, and for the Modernist Studies Group at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, and would like to thank and fellow panelists at both events for their advice and encouragement.

Notes 1. Graham Greene, Collected Essays (: Viking, 1969), p. 162. 2. Prominent accounts of Greene’s fiction and its relation to Catholicism include Roger Sharrock’s Saints, Sinners, and : The Novels of Graham Greene (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Mark Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Cates Baldridge, Graham Greene’s Fictions: The Virtues of Extremity (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). For the political valences of Greene’s realism, see Andrzej Gasiorek, ˛ ‘Rendering Justice to the Visible World: History, Politics and National Identity in the Novels of Graham Greene’, in Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge (eds.), British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 17–32; Stephen Benz, ‘Taking Sides: Graham Greene and Latin America’, Journal of Modern Literature 26. 2 (Winter 2003): 113–128; Trevor L. Williams, ‘History over Theology: The Case for Pinkie in Greene’s Brighton Rock’, Studies in the Novel 24.1 (Spring 1992): 67–77; and Neil Nehring, ‘Revolt into Style: Graham Greene Meets the Sex Pistols’, PMLA 106. 2 (March 1991): 222–237. For Greene’s engagement with crime fiction, see especially Brian Lindsay Thomson, Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction and (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Brian Diemert, Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996); and Elliott Malamet, The World Remade: Graham Greene and the Art of Detection (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). 3. David Lodge, Graham Greene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 17. 4. Greene, Collected Essays, pp. 120, 116, 40, 167. 5. Sharrock, Saints, Sinners, and Comedians,p.72. 6. Diemert, Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s, p. 12, and Chris Hopkins, ‘Leftists and Thrillers: The Politics of a Thirties Sub-Genre’, in Antony Shuttleworth (ed.), And in Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the 1930s (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), p. 155.

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7. David James, ‘Realism, Late Modernist Abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Fictions of Impersonality’, Modernism/modernity 12. 1 (January 2005): 113. 8. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. vii. 9. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 13. 10. For a clear introduction to late modernism’s relationship to postmodernism, see Pericles Lewis’s concluding chapter of The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 237–248. 11. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 4. 12. Esty, A Shrinking Island,p.2. 13. Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 15. 14. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 166. 15. Ibid. p. 198. 16. Kristin Bluemel, ‘Introduction: What is Intermodernism?’, in Kristin Bluemel (ed.), Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 1. See also Bluemel’s George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 17. Bluemel, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 18. Bluemel, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 19. Gasiorek, ˛ ‘Rendering Justice to the Visible World’, p. 30. 20. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 17. All further citations will be noted parenthetically, as BR. 21. Clifford Musgrave, Life in Brighton: From the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 388. 22. Suzanne Mackenzie, Visible Histories: Women and Environments in a Post-War British City (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), p. 12. 23. Musgrave, Life in Brighton, p. 387. 24. Lisa Fluet, ‘Hit-Man Modernism’, in Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds.), Bad Modernisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 271–272. 25. In early studies of Greene’s fiction, Brighton Rock is commonly discussed as a morality tale, with Pinkie’s status as a gangster taken as confirmation of the character’s inherent evil. See Morton Dauwen Zabel’s ‘The Best and the Worst’, R. W. B. Lewis’s ‘The “Trilogy’’ ’, Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Felix Culpa?’, and George Orwell’s ‘The Sanctified Sinner’, all reprinted in Samuel Hynes (ed.), Graham Greene: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 30–48, 49–74, 95–102, and 105–109. For an overview of the critical debate surrounding the issue of Pinkie’s fate, see Baldridge, Graham Greene’s Fictions, pp. 129–140. 26. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, (ed.), Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 2. 27. Ibid. p. 9. 28. For an account of the relationship between form and identity in early modernism, see Michael Levenson’s Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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29. The exact dates of Greene’s analysis remain in dispute. Greene’s official biographer argues that his sessions most likely began in the summer of 1921, when he was around sixteen years old. See Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene: Volume I, 1904–1939 (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 92. 30. See Sherry, TheLifeofGrahamGreene, p. 110. 31. Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 243. 32. Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 4. 33. The precise nature of Greene’s Catholicism is difficult to pin down, especially as the author’s views on religion changed during the course of his life. For an account of Brighton Rock in light of Greene’s religious wavering, see Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination,p.4. 34. Greene, quoted in Sherry, TheLifeofGrahamGreene, pp. 627–628. 35. Lauren Berlant, ‘On the Case’, Critical Inquiry 33. 4 (Summer 2007): 664. 36. Adam Phillips, Side Effects (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), pp. 51–52. 37. Greene, Collected Essays, p. 116 38. Ibid. p. 115. 39. Gasiorek, ˛ ‘Rendering Justice to the Visible World’, pp. 19–20. 40. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. vii. 41. Thomson, Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction and Film,p.74. 42. Diemert, Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s,p.6. 43. Alan Furst, introduction to The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (New York: Penguin, 2005), pp. x–xi. 44. Murray Roston, Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies: A Study of the Major Novels (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 12–13. 45. Graham Greene, quoted in Peter Wolfe, Graham Greene: The Entertainer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), p. 5. 46. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), p. 104. 47. Bernard Bergonzi, A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.61. 48. Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 98.

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