2 Rendering Justice to the Visible World: History, Politics and National Identity in the Novels of Graham Greene Andrzej Gasiorek

And art itself may be defi ned as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’1

The First World War has long functioned as a convenient point of departure for discussion of what we now think of as the period of high modernism that immediately followed it. The brutal reality of mechanized slaughter didn’t just shatter human bodies but also destroyed long-held illusions about the nature of pre-war society, with far-reaching consequences for the arts.2 Refl ecting on the erosion of the storytelling tradition by twentieth- century modernity, Walter Benjamin noted that ‘the ability to exchange experiences’ on which narrative depends had been progressively under- mined since the First World War, which had decisively exposed human vulnerability; experience, he suggested, had ‘fallen in value’ and looked as though it were ‘continuing to fall into bottomlessness’, so that ‘our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible’.3 This benumb- ing of experience is evoked in the second half of Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1927), a text Wyndham Lewis described in his 1937 memoir as a ‘masterly winding-up of a bankrupt emotional concern’ whose demise his own work sought to hasten.4 Benjamin, in turn, grasped that the transfor- mation he was struggling to adumbrate was of a hitherto unimaginable kind, which meant that coming to terms with it required a different view of human reality and altogether new modes of representation. What had earlier been unthinkable – namely the existential crisis he was tentatively gesturing towards – had somehow to be conceived and articulated, not least because its abyssal quality was so threatening to communal life.

17 18 British Fiction After Modernism

Modernism answers this need in complex and confl icting ways. None- theless, it is striking that many writers saw the war as sweeping away a moribund civilization and offering the possibility of a clean break and a new beginning. If T.S. Eliot’s search for order in myth and for continuity in tradition mounts a bulwark against a modernity troped as nightmare and anarchy, then this defensiveness should be contrasted with D.H. Law- rence’s passion for a cleansing apocalypse, Ford Madox Ford’s exposure of pre-war cultural pretensions, and Lewis’s anatomization of a society in ter- minal decline. Lewis was initially the most ‘advanced’ of these writers, arguing in the years immediately after 1918 that ‘those whose interests lie all ahead, whose credentials are in the future, move . . . forward, and away from the sealed and obstructed past’, although Pound too considered that Europe before the war ‘was guttering down to its end’ and saw in Gaudier- Brzeska’s sculpture ‘the proclamation of a new birth . . . [a] volitionist act stretching into the future’.5 But by the late 1930s these hopes for root-and- branch social change had been dispersed, to be replaced by a widespread feeling that the interwar years had turned into a stagnant interregnum. George Orwell, writing in the early months of yet another war, tellingly contrasted the nineteenth-century Walt Whitman’s expansive faith in American freedom with European pessimism, arguing that ‘our own age . . . is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing’ and asserting that ‘we live in a shrinking world’.6 Graham Greene’s novels in the 1920s and 1930s evoke this sense of a shrinking world. Unillusioned studies in what Christopher Caudwell described as a ‘dying culture’, they document the slow slide into hopeless- ness.7 But whereas Lewis lamented England’s failure to break with the past, Greene reveals that he was never optimistic about its chances of doing so. In Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) – a book Greene admired – Lewis famously declared of himself, Eliot, Joyce and Pound that they were ‘the fi rstmenofaFuturethathasnotmaterialized’ and that they belonged ‘to a “great age” that has not “come off” ’; despite the numerous differences between himself and Orwell, Lewis deploys a similar rhetoric to that of ‘Inside the Whale’ when he concludes that ‘more and more exhausted by War, Slump, and Revolution, the world has fallen back’. 8 Greene, in contrast, writes of Armistice Day that those ‘who, even though we were children, remember Armistice Day . . . remember it as a day out of time – an explosion without a future’, and he notes that this curious timelessness suggested in turn that ‘perhaps there would never be a peace . . .’9 The difference between Lewis’s disillusionment and Greene’s caution is explicable in generational terms. Like Ford, Lewis fought in the First World War, and both writers’ subsequent views were conditioned by their experiences of the confl ict. Greene was just ten in 1914, and he came to maturity within the post-war milieu. His fi rst novel, The Man Within (1929) was published one year after Evelyn Waugh’s scabrous Decline and Fall (1928), two years after Graves’s Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene 19 sobering Goodbye to All That, and three years after the beginning of the period that for Lewis signalled the end of the post-war interval and the start of the real post-war period.10 Greene comes after modernism, after the great upheavals and experiments that have now been so belauded and canonized. But Greene’s relationship to his predecessors is complicated, and the way in which he negotiates it reveals a good deal about his writing in the 1930s and 1940s especially. Tyrus Miller has suggested that a number of writers (Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and Mina Loy among them) are best thought of as ‘late modernists’ whose works ‘represent breaking points, points of nonsynchronism, in the broad narrative of twentieth-century cultural history’.11 These are interstitial works produced in full, if ironic, awareness of modernism, but because they mark out ‘lines of fl ight’ away from it they are its ‘splinter-products’.12 Miller notes that there is a resistance to the fetishization of aesthetic form in this writing, a refusal to embrace the consolations of narrative order, and although he does not mention Greene, the latter’s writing belongs to the cultural landscape he describes. Greene’s novels are characterized not only by their suspicion of an earlier modern- ism, perhaps especially its over-valuation of form and its fascination with subjectivism, but also by their almost relentless focus on vulnerable char- acters caught up in global processes that threaten to destroy them. Benja- min’s view that ‘never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by infl a- tion, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power’ is amply illustrated by fi ction in which the individual is a mere distraction in a political game (Stamboul Train, 1932; and It’s a Battlefi eld, 1934); a social and national anachronism in the world of high capitalism (England Made Me, 1935); or a confused loner adrift in a conspiratorial terrain marked by alienation and paranoia (AGunforSale, 1936; The Confi dential Agent, 1939; and TheMinistryofFear, 1943).13 Miller might well be summarizing Greene’s early work when he observes that:

Taking their stand upon the shifting seismic plates of European society between two catastrophic wars, late modernist writers confronted no less an issue than the survival of individual selves in a world of technological culture, mass politics, and shock experience, both on the battlefi eld and in the cities of the intervening peace.14

How, then, does Greene position himself in relation to his immediate predecessors? In fi ne, he chooses to skip a generation, bypassing fi gures such as Joyce, Lewis and Pound (although Eliot was important to him) so as to proclaim his affi nity with writers such as James, Conrad and Ford. These writers are all early modernists whose experiments are arguably less destructive of the novel form than those of the post-war period.15 By 20 British Fiction After Modernism invoking them, Greene not only signals his allegiance to one kind of writing rather than another but also distances himself from direct competi- tors and aligns himself with the safely dead. This may be a defl ecting strategy but it still signals a key shift: Greene looks back to writers who may not have been as overtly ‘radical’ as those he criticizes but who were no less obsessed with aesthetic considerations. High modernism was in his view at once too self-regarding and too removed from the workaday reality of ordi- nary people, whereas he believed that the proto-modernists whose work he celebrated were in touch with the social realm he himself wanted to explore. Greene’s passion for the fi ne minutiae of everyday life is the motor of his early narratives, making them telling social documents. Unlike Orwell, whose misguided infatuation with Joyce clearly mars A Clergyman’s Daugh- ter (1935), Greene’s forays into stream-of-consciousness modes (in It’s a Battlefi eld and England Made Me, for example) were half-hearted attempts to render the inner workings of the mind, which quickly disappeared from his work. Greene feared that modernism was always just on the edge of solipsism, a view he articulated in a hostile review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, during the course of which he claimed that ‘after twenty years of subjectivity, we are turning back with relief to the old dictatorship, to the detached and objective treatment’ (Essays, 116). This invocation of the detached and objective stance is intended as a reminder of the virtues of the Jamesian method. James was the writer Greene most admired (although Ford and Conrad ran him close). But however much he was infl uenced by James’s technique – especially as medi- ated by Percy Lubbock – Greene was no less concerned with his depiction of social viciousness and moral corruption, in which he saw an extraordi- narily powerful awareness of the interpenetration of the spiritual realm and the material world. If James was driven by ‘a sense of evil religious in its intensity’ (Essays, 21), then he was also ‘a social critic’ and for Greene (who virtually paraphrases Ford here) no ‘writer was more conscious that he was at the end of a period, at the end of the society he knew’ (Essays, 31).16 In his criticisms of modern fi ction Greene was most exercised by the loss of this extra-textual dimension. Prior to Flaubert and James, he argued, the novel ‘was ceasing to be an aesthetic form and they recalled it to the artistic conscience’, but their inheritors treated the ideal of formal perfection as the novel’s raison d’être and trivialized the genre, transforming it into ‘the dull devitalized form . . . that it has become’ (Essays, 93). Coterminous with the lapse of what Greene calls ‘the religious sense’ is the erosion of any ‘sense of the importance of the human act’, and this leads to a double loss: the writer seeks ‘refuge in the subjective novel’ but this in turn dissolves external reality itself such that the ‘visible world cease[s] to exist as com- pletely as the spiritual’ (Essays, 91–2). Reading these observations, we can see why Greene was moved to write the novels that, starting with Brighton Rock (1938) and continuing with The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene 21 of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the human and the supernatural, in such diverse ways. In the earlier novels, however, it is this world that looms largest, in keeping with Conrad’s claim, endorsed by Greene, that art ‘may be defi ned as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe’.17 In the fi ction with which I will be concerned here, in books such as It’s a Battlefi eld, England Made Me, AGunforSale, The Ministry of Fear and Brighton Rock, Greene documents the changes taking place in a decaying society and depicts the bewilderment of people trapped in events they can neither understand nor control. Conrad, of course, held that the writer should disclose what is hidden behind surface realities, and Greene is no less interested in exposing the truth underlying appearances. This drive to uncover, to challenge conventional ways of seeing and thinking, motivates much of his writing, manifesting itself on one hand in the melo- dramatic streak that runs through ‘entertainments’ such as AGunforSale and The Ministry of Fear, and on the other hand in the social criticism that informs ‘novels’ such as It’s a Battlefi eld, England Made Me and Brighton Rock. In TheMinistryofFear, for example, the melodramatic imagination runs free, and it conjures up a topsy-turvy world pervaded by alienation and paranoia. In this tragicomic situation time-honoured abstractions such as patriotism, honour, good, evil, justice and so on, are meaningless: society is out of joint. Yet there is no escape from the phantasmagoria. The novel’s central protagonist, Rowe, considers ‘that you couldn’t take such an odd world seriously, and yet all the time, in fact, he took it with a mortal seri- ousness’.18 Confronted by a world so strange that it seems unreal in com- parison with pre-war complacency, Rowe has a histrionic dream in which he addresses his dead mother:

‘It sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read – about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that’s real life: it’s what we’ve made of the world since you died.’ (Ministry, 65)19

Yet inasmuch as melodrama and a strong sense of the absurd fi gure prominently in Greene’s writing they are balanced by attentiveness to the prosaic detail of ordinary life. In this aspect of his work, an active social conscience is in evidence, focusing on the various injustices perpetrated against the underprivileged and the vulnerable. Even the most ‘monstrous’ of his characters, Brighton Rock’s Pinkie, is portrayed as the unwitting product of an environment that has made him what he is: 22 British Fiction After Modernism

Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust. A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn’t conceive what it had never experienced; his cells were formed of the cement school-play- ground, the dead fi re and the dying man in the St Pancras waiting-room, his bed at Frank’s and his parents’ bed.20

Pinkie’s mawkish self-pity and adolescent rage manifest themselves as a desire to annihilate the world altogether. As the most vicious of Greene’s egotists – characters such as Raven, Acky, Lime, Bendrix, Scobie and Pyle – Pinkie is the terminus ad quem of this particular psychopathology. But if we think of him alongside Raven, the fi rst of Greene’s ressentiment- fi lled protagonists, then we can see that such fi gures are social types as much as they are psychological cases.21 Emerging from the depths of a world that makes no allowance for them, they expose the class fault-lines of 1930s’ British society and the hypocrisy with which they were veiled. Greene noted of this period that it was impossible to believe in patriotic values, imperial aspirations, civic purposes or constitutional politics in a time of economic depression and hunger marches. Raven was thus an exemplary fi gure: ‘It was no longer a Buchan world. The hunted man of AGunfor Sale . . . was Raven, not Hannay; a man out to revenge himself for all the dirty tricks of life, not to save his country’ (Ways, 54). Yet although Raven is the most fully-fl edged of Greene’s early anti-heroes, he is not the fi rst character to be hostile to the social order, for It’s a Battlefi eld and England Made Me are centrally concerned with Greene’s ‘sense of capitalism stagger- ing from crisis to crisis’ (Ways, 31). The most noticeable feature of both It’s a Battlefi eld and England Made Me is the extent to which their protagonists are bereft of any sustaining belief system or ideology. Written and set in a decade usually associated with the politicization of social and literary life, these two novels depict a fracturing world in which there are neither clear-cut public causes nor trustworthy personal relationships. It’s a Battlefi eld is marked by scepticism, while England Made Me is suffused with world-weariness, but both books contra- dict Stephen Spender’s glib assertion that this ‘was one of those intervals in history in which events make the individual feel that he counts’.22 On the contrary, in these texts the individual counts for nothing. It’s a Battle- fi eld is peopled by characters who struggle with personal diffi culties, and although private crises intersect with public concerns, the public and the private never coalesce. In the Assistant Commissioner’s jaundiced view, the country is a chaos of unrelated confl icts and is not ‘on the edge of revolu- tion’ at all: ‘The truth is, nobody cares about anything but his own troubles. Everybody’s too busy fi ghting his own little battle to think of the next man.’23 The idealistic Caroline Bury wants to believe that she and the Assis- tant Commissioner are ‘not fi ghting their own battle in ignorance of the general war’, but the novel suggests that there is in fact no general war at Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene 23 all, because society is splintering into fragments. In England Made Me, by contrast, the individual is depicted as an anachronism, as an escapee from the past who has wandered unwitting and unprepared into a present run by multinational corporations, high fi nance and global strategists. The plausible but fraudulent Anthony Farrant, a middle-class Englishman run to seed, is displaced in spatial as well as temporal terms. His sister Kate recognizes that in contrast to the modern businessman Krogh, ‘he’s not the future, he’s not self-suffi cient, just one of us, out of his proper place’, while Anthony himself admits that he’s giving up because he’s ‘not young enough and not old enough: not young enough to believe in a juster world, not old enough for the country, the king, the trenches to mean anything to me at all’.24 If It’s a Battlefi eld asks whether there is any pattern to be discerned in social confl ict, then England Made Me probes the fate of the individual in a globalizing world economy. But we are not talking about just any ‘individual’ here. The characters depicted in these novels belong to a particular historical period and to a determinate social conjuncture. To revert for a moment to Spender, he is more right when he suggests that ‘in a crisis of a whole society every work takes on a political look either in being symptomatic of that crisis . . . or in avoiding it’.25 Of what, then, are the two novels under discussion symptom- atic? Most obviously, a crisis of ideology. Notwithstanding his four-week membership of the Communist Party, to which he signed up as a jest, Greene might best be described as something of a ‘fellow-traveller’ in the 1930s.26 Although he was sympathetic to Communism, he saw the writer as an oppositional but non-partisan fi gure. For Greene, the novelist’s job was to sympathize with dissidence from all quarters, and this precluded the writing of literature that sided with any particular political outlook.27 Greene’s participation in a literature of commitment was always going to be unlikely, but this does not mean that he refused to deal with social concerns. It means that he refused to be didactic: ‘I don’t want to use literature for political ends, nor for religious ends . . . I don’t fi ght injustice: I express a sense of injustice, for my aim is not to change things but to give them expression.’28 The crisis of ideology to which I have referred was not Greene’s crisis but a cultural crisis, which his novels diagnose and anatomize. Greene’s early novels are characterized by a longing for social change, but they give no sense that it is imminent or even possible. Their protago- nists adhere to no consistent ideology or coherent political programme, and the strength of their longing for change seems to lie in inverse proportion to their capacity for bringing it about. In Stamboul Train, for example, the doomed socialist Dr Czinner sees moral scruples as a luxury permissible only to those who already possess the power he knows he will never have; thus he refl ects that he ‘would have welcomed generosity, charity, meticu- lous codes of honour to his breast if he could have succeeded, if the world 24 British Fiction After Modernism had been shaped again to the pattern he loved and longed for’.29 In The Ministry of Fear the dissolution of established distinctions between right and wrong, which unmoors its protagonist from any reality he can recognize, is expressed as a shift in literary codes: ‘The Little Duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten; we cannot recognise the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place.’30 But it is in It’s a Battlefi eld, which stealthily rewrites Conrad’s The Secret Agent, that loss of belief in viable ideologies is most marked. The Secret Agent suggests that police and revolu- tionaries are trapped in a pointless dynamic, are counters in a game that has no purpose and can have no resolution. The anarchists may be por- trayed as parasites and charlatans, but no higher purpose is attributed to the forces of law and order. The Assistant Commissioner in It’s a Battlefi eld is a no less disillusioned fi gure. Considering that his job is ‘simply to pre- serve the existing order’ (Battlefi eld, 19), he sees himself as a mercenary, ‘and a mercenary soldier could not encourage himself with the catchwords of patriotism – my country right or wrong; self-determination of peoples; justice’ (Battlefi eld, 129). Like the idealistic Czinner, the Assistant Commis- sioner is a utopian who yearns for ‘an eternal life on earth watching the world grow reasonable, watching nationalities die and economic chaos giving way to order’ (Battlefi eld, 191). But this is a passive vision from which agency has been expunged; it is a dream of change magically taking place all by itself. Reality lies in the nausea the Assistant Commissioner feels at the situation under his nose, and this nausea discloses his impotence in the face of injustice and his sadness that he fi nds it ‘impossible to believe in a great directing purpose’ (Battlefi eld, 191), impossible to have ‘any convic- tion’ that he is ‘on the right side’ (Battlefi eld, 201–2). Indeed, the very notion of clear-cut ‘sides’ is undermined in It’s a Battlefi eld, which ends by suggest- ing that the espousal of causes may be motivated more by the desire to have faith in something (anything?) than by their intrinsic political or social merits. England Made Me provides a depressing picture of what happens when nationalities start to die: they are assimilated by multinational capital. It is of particular interest in this text that the nationality in question is English, for what is delineated here is the gradual crumbling of a once powerful nation-state in the face of global economic forces. Anthony Farrant and his semblable, the pathetic Minty, are products of a country that, as the novel’s title insists, has literally made them. Yet both characters are symbols not only of the country’s failure to keep pace with a changing economic and political landscape but also of its refusal to recognize this fact. Even more damningly, Farrant is above all a fake, a disreputable fi gure whose mis- demeanours dog his every step but who is able to conceal them beneath a façade of good breeding. With his interchangeable public school ties, his invented military ranks, his fabricated autobiographical stories, and his effortless charm, Farrant is the epitome of the Englishman whose job it is Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene 25 to administer the affairs of the world. Except that his cuffs are frayed, his vita is a record of disgrace, and he has no future. No future. The words reverberate through this text, which dissects the pretensions of a super- seded class and skewers the illusions that so precariously sustain it. Yet Farrant is also a tragic fi gure. He is a man who in his childhood attempted to escape from the class values being imposed on him but who was forced to conform, with disastrous consequences. The novel’s depiction of the process by which both he and Minty were reeled in reads like an object lesson in the interpellation of subjectivity by means of violent coer- civeness. Minty’s fawning passion for the school that brutalized him reveals a profound and inescapable self-abasement: ‘The school and he were joined by a painful reluctant coition, a passionless coition that leaves everything to regret, nothing to love, everything to hate, but cannot destroy the idea: we are one body’ (England, 83). Farrant’s entire life, in turn, has been domi- nated by an authoritarian father and his proxy, the public school where he learned ‘to conform, to pick up the conventions, the manners of all the rest’ (England, 141). A major theme of the novel concerns his sister Kate’s regret that she convinced him to return to school when he ran away, and her sense that she is responsible for making him what he is, but the father’s role in moulding Farrant’s identity has been equally decisive:

Anthony learning (the beating in the nursery, the tears before the board- ing school) to keep a stiff upper lip, Anthony learning (the beating in the study when he brought home the smutty book with the pretty pic- tures) that you must honour other men’s sisters . . . yes, he loved Anthony and he ruined Anthony. (England, 63–4)

The result of this upbringing is a fi gure whose identity has been hollowed out, leaving him a shell whose ‘character’ is compounded of empty moral clichés and obsolete social traditions. Greene captures Farrant’s inherent falseness in a passage that shows his ‘personality’ to be a masquerade:

The more he drank, the further back he plunged in time. His slang began the evening bright and hollow with the immediate post-war years, but soon it dripped with the mud of the trenches, culled from the tongues of ex-offi cers gossiping under the punkas of zero hour and the Victoria Palace, of the leave-trains and the Bing Boys. (England, 31)

England Made Me depicts Farrant as one of J.M. Barrie’s ‘lost boys’, a naïf who is out of time as well as out of place. Taken away from the shabby London milieu with which he is so familiar, Farrant is forced to confront the gleaming modernity of Krogh’s Stockholm business concern. There is 26 British Fiction After Modernism of course an irony in the fact that he has hitherto made his desultory way in the tropics of the East, in the far-fl ung corners of a decaying British Empire, for the novel dramatizes the transition from an imperialism based on the control of territory to an expansionism based on the deterritorialized fl ow of liquid money. Farrant’s out-of-date and ersatz Englishness is risible in large part because the class he represents has no understanding of the irrel- evance of its worldview to the economic and political reality of the 1930s. If in It’s a Battlefi eld and TheMinistryofFear sentiments such as patriotism, duty and justice no longer seem credible, then in England Made Me they simply have no purchase on the world at all. More specifi cally, the national/ racial distinctions between different countries and peoples on which patrio- tism depends are dismissed as entirely beside the point. Anthony’s lofty refusal to go and work in Stockholm (‘ “I don’t like foreigners” ’) is met with Kate’s irritation at his inability to keep up with the times: ‘ “My dear . . . you’re out of date. There are no foreigners in a business like Krogh’s; we’re interna- tionalists there, we haven’t a country” ’ (England, 11). The modernity of a business such as this is signalled by its refusal to be limited by territorial boundaries. The language of nationalism is consigned to the dustbin of history, to be taken over by a rhetoric of placelessness. This cosmopolitanism is inextricable from what Anthony Giddens describes as a process of ‘disembedding’, that is, ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefi nite spans of time-space’, which he sees as a defi ning feature of modernity.31 Farrant and Minty have no future because they cannot accommodate them- selves to the spatio-temporal transformation that disembedding brings about. Although they long for a return ‘home’, this longing represents nostalgia not just for a ‘place’ but for a ‘time’ – in other words, for a past that has been shown up as a fantasy. Yet at the same time, ‘home’ is in this text consistently constructed metonymically in terms of specifi c locations, as though a return to them could somehow bring about a return to a world in which ‘England’ (as place and as site of specifi c values) has not been destroyed by transnational modernity. Giddens suggests that the ‘advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between “absent” others’ and that ‘locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social infl uences quite distant from them’.32 In England Made Me this shift from ‘place’ to ‘space’ is signifi ed partly by the contrast between a notion of ‘here’ that belongs to the past and a concep- tion of ‘there’ that signifi es the future and partly by the ubiquity of global business: ‘Krogh like God Almighty in every home; impossible in the small- est cottage to do without Krogh; Krogh in England, in Europe, in Asia.’33 Kate is described as ‘a dark tunnel connecting two landscapes’ (England, 139), and she functions as a link between Anthony (the past) and Krogh (the future). Although she is marked by the ruthlessness that characterizes Krogh, she is nonetheless nostalgic for the values that are being superseded, Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene 27 even if, in the end, she rejects the past because it is associated with a routed nationalism. But Kate is ultimately as lost in this frontierless world as Anthony: ‘Good Looks and Conscience, she thought, the fi ne fl owers of our class. We’re done, we’re broke, we belong to the past, we haven’t the char- acter or the energy to do more than hang on to something new for what we can make out of it’ (England, 135). In the end, the notion of ‘England’ as a touchstone has been so discredited that Kate, a deracinated cosmopoli- tan, is simply ‘moving on’, while the dead Anthony, ‘the refuse of a chang- ing world’, stands as the symbol of a defunct class. His inevitable doom has of course been prefi gured early on when he turns his eyes on his perceptive sister: ‘They were as blank as the end pages of a book hurriedly turned to hide something too tragic or too questionable on the last leaf’ (England, 13). Greene’s belief that the writer should not take sides but should try to grasp his characters’ motivations comes across strongly in England Made Me. Given that his political leanings were to the Left, his portrayal of Farrant was a remarkably sympathetic one, even if his account of national identity and its helplessness in the face of economic globalization was unremittingly critical.34 In England Made Me sympathy is granted to the members of a still relatively privileged class, but in other novels of the 1930s and 1940s, such as It’s a Battlefi eld, AGunforSale, Brighton Rock and TheMinistryofFear, it is extended to those who have never had the opportunities vouchsafed a Farrant or a Minty. Desperately impoverished fi gures such as Raven (AGun for Sale) and Pinkie (Brighton Rock) are shown in these texts to be the real ‘refuse’ of capitalist modernity. The 1930s and 1940s were for Greene char- acterized by economic chaos, political uncertainty and ideological confu- sion. Above all, perhaps, they were marked by poverty. Various writers of the period testify to this aspect of interwar life, most obviously in books such as Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man (1935), Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939), and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and TheRoadto Wigan Pier (1937). Greene does not explore this terrain in anything like the detail found in these books, but he is acutely aware of the world they describe. It’s a Battlefi eld, for example, is not just concerned with the Assis- tant Commissioner’s musings about abstract justice but also with the reality of automated factory work and the sense of hopelessness induced by blighted domestic conditions.35 AGunforSale and Brighton Rock, in turn, depict protagonists who are the victims of extreme poverty, their class resentment manifesting itself as violence against a persecuting world. AGunforSale and Brighton Rock are especially attentive to the issue of housing, which was so central to debates about how to ameliorate poverty in the period.36 A strong sense of social decay permeates both novels. In A Gun for Sale, for example, Anne Crowder is struck by the jerry-built nature of a new estate, revealingly situated at the margins of the town: ‘These 28 British Fiction After Modernism houses represented something worse than the meanness of poverty, the meanness of the spirit. They were on the very edge of Nottwich now, where the speculative builders were running up their hire-purchase houses.’37 This refl ection has a wider resonance, of course, since the novel is also concerned with profi teering and suggests in a more general sense that England itself is becoming a speculative enterprise. (Another example in Greene’s work of the way that internationalism denotes not a ‘league of nations’ spirit but the cartelization of an increasingly global economy.38) By the end of a book in which it is revealed that respected ‘Establishment’ fi gures have been fomenting war in order to boost profi ts, Anne will wonder, ‘staring out at the bleak frozen countryside, that perhaps even if she had been able to save the country from a war, it wouldn’t have been worth the saving’ (Gun, 183).39 For what is there to be saved in a country that is divided against itself? No positive answer to such a question could ever be found in Brighton Rock, in which living conditions are far worse. Pinkie’s dismissal of Nelson Place merely conceals his intimate knowledge of the slum in which he himself grew up:

he could have drawn its plan as accurately as a surveyor on the turf: 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, fl apping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model fl ats which had never gone up.40

Such descriptions show the extent to which Greene sees Raven and Pinkie as products of a specifi c and historically locatable social environment. To put it like this is not to absolve them of responsibility for their actions but to explain what motivates them. The main characters of AGunforSale and Brighton Rock are driven by a rage that may well be nourished by large dollops of self-serving self-pity, but it is recognizable as class rage for all that. Raven’s obsession with proving that he is educated, his belief that his disfi gured face is ‘a badge of class’ (Gun, 14), his loyalty to people ‘of his own kind’, and his growing ‘sense of injustice’ (Gun, 29) at the way they are treated, all indicate his awareness of social inequality. A man ‘made by hatred’ (Gun, 66), Raven is at the outset of the novel entirely preoccupied with himself. Although he is conscious of how he has been formed as a subject, it is only as the novel unfolds that this consciousness is partially extended to others. Early on it is said that he ‘had never felt the least ten- derness for anyone’ (Gun, 66), but he later admits that had he known the politician he was to kill was a socialist he would not have committed the act: ‘ “I didn’t know the old fellow was one of us. I wouldn’t have touched him if I’d known he was like that” ’ (Gun, 129). The irony here is that the murdered man had cut down on military expenditure in order to generate Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene 29 money for the clearance of slums. But Raven is only on the verge of self- consciousness. The profi teer Sir Marcus describes him contemptuously as ‘ “this – waste product” ’ (Gun, 110), and so he is, although not in the way this sinister fi gure means. For Raven, who has always been excluded from society, functions as its ‘return of the repressed’: Anne’s feeling that ‘they need never go back to the scene’ of the crime is undermined by her uneasy recognition that ‘a shade of disquiet remained, a fading spectre of Raven’ (Gun, 184). AGunforSale and Brighton Rock are characterized above all by a profound sense of waste. This is not Eliot’s elegiac waste-landism – described by Orwell as ‘a lament over the decadence of Western civilisation (“We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men,” etc., etc.), a sort of twilight-of the- gods feeling’ – but rather H.G. Wells’s more practical disgust at simple opportunities missed.41 Anne Crowder expresses this sense of a social rather than a metaphysical anger when she associates Raven with a tortured indus- trial landscape: ‘In this waste through which she travelled, between the stacks of coal, the tumbledown sheds, abandoned trucks in sidings where a little grass had poked up and died between the cinders, she thought of him again with pity and distress’ (Gun, 182). But the sentiment of pity may be no more effectual than the belief that one is living through a Götterdäm- merung (and the ambiguous nature of pity is a major theme in later works such as The Heart of the Matter, ABurntOutCase and The Human Factor). In Greene’s early writing sympathy for life’s victims is closely related to a sense of impotence in the face of events that are too big and too distant for the individual to have any sway over them. Individuals are simply swallowed up by impersonal social processes, economic changes and political machi- nations. Whether they are disillusioned, confused, scared or angry, they are unable to intervene meaningfully in social life or to alter the course of its direction. Pity is displaced by compassion in Greene’s early novels, a feeling that is perhaps compounded by his recognition that he has no solutions to the social problems he describes. But there is also intense anger. It is reveal- ing that when Greene refl ected in 1940 on the violence unleashed by the Second World War he reacted to it (just as Lewis and Pound had reacted to the First World War) with the hope that it might destroy the interwar world once and for all:

Violence comes to us more easily because it was so long expected – not only by the political sense but by the moral sense. The world we lived in could not have ended any other way. The curious waste lands one sometimes saw from trains – the cratered ground round Wolverhampton under a cindery sky with a few cottages grouped like stones among the rubbish: those acres of abandoned cars round Slough: the dingy fortune- tellers on the fi rst-fl oor above the cheap permanent waves in a Brighton back street; they all demanded violence. (Essays, 334) 30 British Fiction After Modernism

They demanded violence because they were themselves instances of a social violence perpetrated against people who could scarcely resist it. Greene’s work in this period belongs to the ‘late modernist’ context described by Tyrus Miller not just because it stitches together realism, melodrama 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. As Rowe is informed in The Ministry of Fear: ‘One must avoid self-importance, you see. In fi ve hundred years’ time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even fi gure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles’ (Ministry, 188).

Notes

1. Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” ’, in Conrad’s Prefaces to His Works (New York: Haskell, 1971), pp. 49–54, 49. 2. See Daniel Pick, War Machine: the Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1978), 83–109, 83–4. 4. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: an Autobiography (London: John Calder, 1982), 6. 5. Wyndham Lewis, Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913–1956, ed. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 195; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: a Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 142, 144. 6. George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in Essays, ed. John Carey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 211–49, 219. 7. Christopher Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 8. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 256. For Greene’s welcoming review of Lewis’s book, see ‘Homage to the Bombardier’ in Graham Greene, Refl ections, ed. Judith Adamson (London: Reinhardt, 1990), 52–4. 9. Graham Greene, Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 129, Greene’s ellipses. Greene is refl ecting here on the ending of the third novel in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, A Man Could Stand Up (1926). He was disappointed with the fourth volume, The Last Post (1928), which he described as ‘a disaster’; in his view it mistakenly tidied up the confusion and uncertainty at the end of A Man Could Stand Up. See Graham Greene, Collected Essays, 128. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Essays, followed by page number. 10. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 249–51 and 339–43. 11. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 12. 12. Miller, Late Modernism, 13, 14. 13. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 84. 14. Miller, Late Modernism, 24. 15. See Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 33. Here- after cited parenthetically as Ways, followed by page number. In ‘Homage to the Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene 31

Bombardier’ Greene dismisses Eliot along with Joyce and Pound: ‘Somehow these great and good men lack, for me, the legendary excitement – perhaps a younger generation may fi nd these the most thrilling pages’ (Greene, Refl ections, 52). 16. An unconscious echo of something once read or homage to an admired writer? Compare Ford on James: ‘He gives you an immense – and an increasingly tragic – picture of a Leisured Society that is fairly unavailing, materialist, emasculated – and doomed. No one was more aware of all that than he’ (Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday, ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 164). 17. Greene cites Conrad’s remark in Essays, 21. 18. Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 33. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Ministry, followed by page number. 19. Acknowledging his ‘inclination towards melodrama’, which originates in his ‘adolescent reading’, Greene notes that ‘there are times in fact when I’m inclined to think that our entire planet gravitates inside a fog-belt of melodrama’. Marie- Françoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, trans. Guido Waldman (London: The Bodley Head, 1983), 37, 65. 20. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Vintage, 2004), 248. 21. Andrews in The Man Within (1929) is perhaps a prototype, but his rancour pales into insignifi cance in comparison to Raven’s. 22. Stephen Spender, TheThirtiesandAfter:Poetry,Politics,People (London: Fontana, 1978), 25. 23. Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefi eld (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 188. Here- after cited parenthetically as Battlefi eld, followed by page number. 24. Graham Greene, England Made Me (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 158 and 180. Hereafter cited parenthetically as England, followed by page number. 25. Spender, The Thirties and After, 25. 26. For his account of how and why he joined the Communist Party, see Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London: The Bodley Head, 1971), 132–3. 27. Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett (London: Percival Marshall, 1948), 46–47, 48. 28. Allain, The Other Man, 81. 29. Graham Greene, Stamboul Train (London: Vintage, 2004), 136. 30. Greene, The Ministry of Fear, 89. The reference is to Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Little Duke, a novel that functions as a key, if lighthearted, intertextual reference point throughout TheMinistryofFear. The simplistic values put forward in Yonge’s text are swamped in Greene’s novel by a paranoid melodrama that has the savour of truth. Like Orwell, who envisaged a ‘shrinking world’, Greene sees the shift from one kind of literature to another as evidence of a shutting down of cultural and social possibilities. 31. Anthony Giddens, TheConsequencesofModernity (London: Polity, 1990), 21. 32. Giddens, TheConsequencesofModernity, 18–19. 33. Thus ‘here’ is troped as ‘the scented pillow, the familiar photographs, the pawned bags, the empty pockets, home’, while ‘there’ is ‘the glassy cleanliness, the latest fashionable sculpture, the sound-proof fl oors and dictaphones and . . . the reports from Warsaw, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin’ (England, 15). 34. For a clue to the nature of this sympathy, see Greene’s claim that Anthony was based on his brother Herbert and that he himself ‘shared many of Anthony’s experiences’ (Ways, 31). 32 British Fiction After Modernism

35. See, for example: ‘Between death and disfi gurement, unemployment and the streets, between the cog-wheels and the shafting, the girls stood, as the hands of the clock moved round from eight in the morning until one (milk and biscuits at eleven) and then the long drag to six’ (Battlefi eld, 29). 36. See Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (St Albans: Panther, 1973), 200–22; Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: an Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 37. Graham Greene, AGunforSale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Gun, followed by page number. 38. It is worth noting that in TheMinistryofFear the breakdown of distinctions between ‘England’ and ‘Germany’ is related to erosion of clear ideas about what constitutes ‘crime’ and ‘legality’. In the end, the spreading of an all-pervasive atmosphere of fear, initially attributed to an insidious secret German ‘ministry’, is seen as an omnipresent feature of modern life itself (see Ministry, 46–8, 121, and 220). 39. Even the stolid policeman Mather sees England as ‘this darkening land, fl owing backwards down the line’ (Gun, 185). 40. Greene, Brighton Rock, 95. 41. Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, 227. Wells’s Tono-Bungay ends with George Ponderevo noting ‘the immense inconsequence of my experiences’ and concluding: ‘It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and steril- ity. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste.’ (H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay and A Modern Utopia (London: Odhams Press, 1933), 300.)