What Price Pity?

THE HEART OF THE MATTER (306 pp.)--Graham Greene--Viking ($3).

Edward Wilson, secret agent of His Majesty's Government in World War II, sat on a hotel balcony and sourly surveyed the West African seaport to which he had been assigned. He saw row upon row of hot and hideous tin roofs sloping away toward the sea, and a ringing clang came to his ears as a vulture perched heavily on top of the hotel. Down at the quayside, pickaninnies swarmed like little vultures around a newly landed seaman and triumphantly escorted him to the local brothel.

Young Negro girls sat in the shade, "engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair"; a West Indian dandy traipsed through the squalid streets, sporting a feather boa. Then a white man, wearing a police uniform, hove into view--a squat, grey-haired man whom Wilson would barely have noticed if the Englishman at his elbow had not exclaimed: "Look . . . look at Scobie . . . Our great police force."

Thus Henry Scobie, leading man in The Heart of the Matter, is singled out as by a movie camera's swooping eye from the rest of the world; and readers of Graham Greene's previous novels will not have to read far in this one before they know that they have met Scobie and his world before. For this world, disguised though it is under African heat, is the same cruel, sordid, vulturous hell that Greene has conjured up in most of 14 books, and Hero Scobie is Greene's equally familiar creation--a sinner disguised as a hero-villain.

What makes The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene's most profound novel is that Henry Scobie, who seems to have one skin less than his tortured predecessors, actually has one more. In Brighton Rock (1938) Graham Greene drew a horrifying portrait of an adolescent Catholic named Pinkie, who was headed straight for damnation, and dimly, desperately knew it. In The Heart of the Matter he draws a man who is threatened with the same damnation, and sees it--apparently--much more clearly. Every man & woman, of whatever color, who has run into Scobie during his 15 years as Deputy Commissioner of Police, admires or despises him because, in a world of utter corruption, Policeman Scobie seems utterly incorruptible. What they do not know--what Scobie himself does not know at first--is that in order to feed his voracious sense of pity, Scobie is ready, if necessary, to break the most cherished laws of both Church & State.

The Loved One. He shows that he is ready to do so when he brushes the letter of the law aside and sympathetically permits a Portuguese captain to communicate with "the enemy" (the captain's beloved daughter, who lives in Germany). But it is Scobie's own wife, Louise, who gnaws the hole that is destined to grow into "an enormous breach [in] ... his integrity." Fever-racked, miserable Louise knows too well that though her husband may once have loved her, he feels nothing for her now but pity. And since "it had always been his responsibility to maintain happiness in those he loved," Scobie one day sets his integrity aside, surreptitiously borrows money from an unscrupulous Syrian (the only man who can afford the loan) and sends Louise off on the long vacation that is her heart's desire. It is also his (unadmitted) heart's desire to have her go.

Pity, or what Scobie thinks of as pity, proceeds inexorably to destroy him. A young girl, survivor of a torpedoed ship, is carried into his life on a stretcher, and rather than let her innocence be corrupted by a promiscuous R.A.F. pilot, Scobie becomes her adulterous protector. Blackmailed by the Syrian loan-shark, Scobie, who cannot bear to let his wife suffer, buys off the Syrian by helping him to smuggle diamonds through the British blockade.

Scobie is incapable of wounding his wife by admitting his relations with the girl--and equally incapable of wounding the girl by breaking off their relations. To reassure his wife, who has heard the gossip, he receives Communion when he is in this state of mortal sin; and at last it is the same sense of enormous "responsibility" that makes him decide that suicide is preferable to his prolonging the two women's agony.

Likable Sinner. Graham Greene writes with pity; is it possible that he also writes with irony? If so, his irony is so deep that it has escaped the notice of reviewers, and will probably escape most of his readers. He seems to be saying that Scobie--though, God knows, no saint--is in reality a very likable, perhaps admirable, and probably forgivable sinner. And the implicit sympathy with which Author Greene watches his "hero" plod doggedly from one crime to the inevitable next--adultery, sacrilege, murder and suicide--seems to show that Greene is on Scobie's side. He is certainly in Scobie's corner (he is his handler); but he is not necessarily on Scobie's side (he is not his manager).

Nevertheless, the irony, though irony can never be explicit, is there: though Scobie thinks of himself as a sinner, he never realizes what his real sin is--purblind selfishness, appalling spiritual pride1. His "pity" carries him to such morally insane heights that he pities his fellow men --and women--instead of loving them; he ends by pitying God.

But how successful is Graham Greene's irony? The reader sees (and shares) the author's sympathy for Scobie, and can easily miss the irony beneath that sympathy--or, noting it unawares, can find it ambiguous or confusing. Is it any part of Author Greene's purpose that readers should misconstrue the nature of Scobie's sinfulness--misconstrue it, in some cases, all the way to sainthood? Obviously not. But if an author is widely misunderstood, the reader is not usually to blame.

It may be, of course, that Author Greene shares with some of his readers the sentimental view of Scobie as a hero--without quotation marks. It seems more probable that he tried to write a true tragedy and succeeded in writing a suggestive melodrama, with tragic overtones and ironic implications.

As Novelist Evelyn Waugh has pointed out, the bare bones of this story might just as well have come from the pen of France's murky thriller-writer, Georges Simenon, or from mysticky W. Somerset Maugham, or even from a Hollywood scripter ("One can imagine . . . Miss Bacall's pretty head lolling on the stretcher . . .") But needless to say, it is the flesh and mind, not the skeleton, that make The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene's most ambitious book.

Novelist Waugh, a fellow Catholic, thinks that Greene intended to make a saint out of Sinner Scobie. Yet, he says, to will your own damnation "for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a mad blasphemy." Waugh admires The Heart of the Matter as a novel but disapproves its theology. His opinion is by no means the verdict of all Catholic critics; the book has been banned as obscene in Eire, acclaimed by one of England's leading Jesuits, Father Martindale. And it has quickly become a bestseller in both England and the U.S.

The Author. "Today," wrote Graham Greene shortly before World War II, "our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and those half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover, if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray."

Graham Greene has indulged this nostalgia and stayed at this level in four thrillers, all of which have been made into profitable and pulse-racing movies. But, unlike other thrillers of the gut & gat school, his "entertainments," as he calls them (in contrast to his serious novels), are not just brisk episodes of irrelevant evil. They are haunted by a problem--the plight of the human soul benighted in the back alleys of evil. For in the thriller, Graham Greene has found a literary form capable of embodying not only the violence that characterizes modern life, but the insidious violence of the modern soul from which it springs.

This nostalgia for life below the level of the brain explains why so sensitive, religious a man as Graham Greene is preoccupied almost exclusively with the physical and spiritual underworld. Born in 1904 (his father was headmaster of Berkhampstead School, Robert Louis Stevenson was a distant relation), bookish, retiring young Greene finished his education at Oxford's scholarly Balliol College. After that he ran through a succession of newspaper jobs, plugged away at his novels in his spare time. The Man Within, the first book he thought good enough to submit, so delighted the publishing house of Heinemann that they staked Greene for three years. Except for a few years in the Information Ministry and the Foreign Office during World War II, Greene has been writing ever since.

He writes like a movie camera. Says Evelyn Waugh, of his books: "It is as though, out of an infinite length of film, sequences had been cut . . . The writer has become director and producer. Indeed, the affinity to the film is everywhere apparent." Several of his books (e.g., The Ministry of Fear, Brighton Rock) have been transmogrified into movies--and one (The Power and the Glory) bowdlerized into Beauty, Hollywood style (as The Fugitive).

Greene's home is in Oxford with his wife, Vivien, and two children, but he often disappears, bobs up again in the backstreets of other countries, where he scours the sleazier dives and nightclubs for not-so-fresh material ("Paris is not the same since they closed The Sphinx,"* he says). Recently returned from a tour of Vienna lowlife, he is at work on a new thriller and a movie script (The Third Man) for Producers David O. Selznick and Sir Alexander Korda. His slumming adventures are received by his family with mixed feelings. His white-haired old mother very naturally writes them off as nonexistent, says firmly of the use to which her son puts his escapades: "Graham must imagine it." But his aunt looks the other way and admits frankly: "It seems very realistic."

* One of the leading bordellos.

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