The Creative Artist's Vision in Graham Greene's Novels

THE CREATIVE ARTIST’S VISION IN GRAHAM
GREENE’S NOVELS

“The highest art,” Lascelles Abercrombie wrote in his book on Hardy, “must have a metaphysic; the final satisfaction of man’s creative desire is only to be found in aesthetic formation of some credible correspondence between perceived existence and a conceived absoluteness of reality.” Graham Greene’s novels have a consistent “metaphysic” and we see in them a “credible correspondence” between his perception of existence and his conception of reality. Greene is an artist whose work makes manifest the aesthetic formation of his metaphysic; he is one of the most skilled and powerful of creative artists who have a standpoint and a vision. His is an appalling vision. The existence of evil in this world as a predominant and driving force fascinates him. His presentation of man’s predicament, though a little exaggerated, is still a recognizable one. He does justice to his subject by bringing the full weight of his artistry to bear upon the appalling vision. Life, for him, is an endless quest for the understanding of certain serious matters like good and evil, justice and grace. Art is the reflection of life and we find in Greene’s fiction a preoccupation with eschatological issues.

Graham Greene has to his credit more than thirty volumes of fiction, essays, stories and plays. He has travelled extensively and he brings his varied experience, worldly as well as artistic, to bear upon his fiction. He is a major force in English fiction, continuing the tradition of the Victorian novelists, displaying a vigorous individual talent for observation and analysis of the appalling vision, the human impasse and the “terrible aboriginal calamity” in which Newman saw the human race implicated. After a long quest, Greene has arrived at a standpoint. His works reveal an intensely personal vision. In terms of his vision, evil is a predominant force in life: man is susceptible to temptation and sin but there is God’s grace. At the same time this is not a complacent attitude. The struggles and conflicts in Greene’s world are extremely violent. They are physical, mental and spiritual and into these are brought all the sins in the calendar. Life is a violent conflict, but it is also a comedy and even a farce sometimes. Greene’s standpoint is that hope and faith in divine grace.

Evil in this world as envisaged by Greene is an extremely powerful force. In his essay on Walter de la Mare Greene wrote: “Every creative writer worth our consideration, every writer who can be called in the wide eighteenth century use of the term a poet, is a victim: a man given to an obsession.” In Henry James’s case the obsession of the artist is betrayal. In Hardy’s case, it is pity: in Greene’s case, it is pity and evil. But there is an essential difference between Hardy’s outlook and Greene’s. Hardy’s characters are impelled by fate towards their terrible ends, Greene’s by their own choice and commitment to evil. Evil is the force, as Greene finds it, that drives existence. He quotes Eliot: “It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation: it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.” Greene’s works consistently reaffirm and illustrate this statement. What is right may not be good and what is wrong may not be evil. Right and wrong, morality and immorality are relative terms, whereas good and evil in the theological sense are unvarying absolutes. With all his preoccupation with evil Greene does not condemn it; he analyses it. He does not damn his sinners; he sympathizes with them. Though the vision that he displays is diabolic, it is sufficiently convincing.

The major themes in Greene’s fiction are closely related to evil and they recur in several of his novels. Betrayal, the Judas complex, is one of the most recurring themes we find in his fiction. To these we may add ‘justice’, ‘pity’, ‘responsibility’, ‘jealousy’ and ‘innocence’. Greene’s obsession with the seedy and the shabby and his fascination for failure come up in every of his books. The radical themes in his novels are: betrayal and jealousy in The man within, The name of action, Basement room and Stamboul train; justice and “honour among thieves” in A gun for sale, It’s a battlefield and England made me; childhood and its terrible impact in Brighton rock and A gun for sale; pursuit in The confidential agent and The ministry of fear; pity and responsibility in The power and the glory and The heart of the matter; love and hate in The end of the affair; fear and suspicionin The third man and Our man in Havana; the unintelligibility, absurdity and illogicality of existence in a Burnt-out case, The comedians and Travels with my aunt. Then there ishis idea of resurrection and reanimation which comes out in some of his novels and plays. Greene’s principles are torn between ambivalent attitudes like love and hate and sympathy and jealousy.

Greene’s novels introduce us to a world which to a large extent resembles our own. But his vision apprehends reality in such a way as to reveal a new perception. But in any artist, as only some aspects of experience shape his imagination and guide his creativity, his achievement is necessarily limited to the presentation of his own perception. That is to say, the artist’s imagination limits the range of his perception. David Cecil pointed out in his lectures on Hardy: “Hardy said that the highest art was that which, though changing the appearance of what it describes, only does so in order the better to bring out its essential quality.” Greene’s view of life has the limitations imposed upon him by his range but his view of life is consistent and it has a sharp quality of reality.

Greene’s vision has two facets, each distinct and clear-cut. The world is seen as a subtle combination of appearance and reality. The creative artist sees flashes of illusion and flashes of reality. The vision of appearance is sordid and seedy, squalid and trivial. Human existence in the vision of reality is tragic. In the vision of appearance it is comic, almost farcical. Men in this world can be divided into two sharply opposite types; those who are committed to reality and those who are afraid of it. Characters like Scobie, the whiskey priest and Dr Magiot are alive to the tragic reality. Wormold and Aunt Augusta cling to appearance. Greene in his serious books deals with people who display a sense of commitment. Those who are afraid of reality and those who are congenitally deficient and cannot envisage it, are content with the peripheral, the external, the appearance and the illusion. Such are Greene’s characters in his lighter fiction. These men and women are mere products of the age in which they live, their environment and upbringing They are more worldly than the men and women in his serious novels. Though their attitudes are different both the types live in the same world of violence and distrust. Reality for them is something horrifying–hence their attempt to escape and strive for something which appears to be within their reach.

The aim of fiction is the creation of a world through the presentation of ideas; the artist’s task is to present a world that is philosophically adequate. While the presentation part of it requires skill, the philosophical part requires sensibility. Greene’s philosophy may not be acceptable as true but it is adequate. The great artists of the past who remade the world are eminent writers like Dickens and Hardy, though by no means can it be said that their worlds are entirely similar. Dickens’s, Hardy’s and Greene’s–each is a world distorted in some measure by the standpoint of the individual artist. Greene’s work is nearer to the English novels of Dickens and Hardy than to those of the innovators like Joyce and Woolf, since he is preoccupied with the presentation of, and comment on, what is going on around him. Greene is accused of having an eye for the unsavoury and the brutal which of itself, it is further alleged, does not betoken any greatness. But his greatness lies in what he does with it. He succeeds in exercising the capacity of the reader’s pity for the condemned and communicates his conviction that God’s mercy is appallingly strange. With his thesis that none is sinner enough to be condemned to Hell, he stings his readers into a new awareness of puzzlement and in the end throws at them his conclusion that existence is absurd and that nothing in life really matters.

Greene seems to believe that there is no fundamental dissonance between man and his environment which Lord David Cecil saw in Hardy’s work. He has successfully plodded through his death-wish to a point where one acquires a jest for life. He has displayed more than fellow feeling for other men: he has evoked our sympathy and made us appreciate the normal satisfactions of human life. He is endowed with a highly intense creative imagination and his work never fails to convince us as good fiction. He tells us, having shown sin in all its rawness, that the greatest things are understanding, sympathy and charity.

Greene’s world is inhabited by lewd people, demoniacs, criminals, sexual monsters, satyrs, lechers, drunkards, fornicators, liars and the like. It stinks with a musty smell; there are cockroaches and spiders everywhere. His works are chronicles of sin and suffering where we hardly come across genuine love or genuine happiness. Love, for the characters in Greene, is only reckoned in terms of affairs and an affair, by his definition, must come to an end, more often than not, leaving a bad taste in the mouth. This attitude has been severely criticised as emanating from Greene’s Jansenist tendencies. In fact Greene’s portrayal of evil is so vivid that critics have accused him of Manichaenism. But it should be noted that his preoccupation with evil is a process of rendering justice to God in an artistic tradition exemplified in the novels of Dickens, Henry James and Conrad. In the artistic expression of the creative writer an attitude towards the world has to be presented and it happens that in Greene’s picture of the world, sin and evil are more striking than everything else. Though the weakness of the flesh appears to be his primary focus, Greene is more interested in the sinner than in the sin itself.  His characters compel our sympathy.   Ida Arnold says in Brighton Rock  “It’s like those sticks of rock; bite it all the way down, you’ll still read Brighton. That’s human nature.” Characters like Ida Arnold and Anthony Farrant justify their conduct by asserting that God does not mind a bit of human nature. Sin, Greene appears to assert, is not very important, at least not so important as understanding. Martha, a character in The Comedians, in a letter to her lover says: “Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn’t worry so much about good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination...then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.”

In Greene’s fiction, the characters whose ideals and aims are not related to the highest things in life have, comparatively, a much smoother sailing. Ida Arnold and Aunt Augusta have no cares of the other world, for as Browning says:

Irks care the cropful bird,
Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast

An optimistic belief in the mysteries of divine grace is the distinctive quality of Greene’s writing. The appalling vision of existence, the horrors of life and the presence of evil have turned Huxley into a cynic. Greene is also accused of cynicism and expressions like “Hell lay about them in their infancy” have been cited to prove the point. It has to be pointed out here that Greene hated complacency and only as a protest against this that the line from Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” has been twisted. The evil that Greene paints with a vividness that he alone can manage tempts us to draw the unjust conclusion that he is a pessimist. Man finds himself faced with, insoluble problems; human intellect cannot grapple with matters like sin and damnation. But the realization that God is in His Heaven that life itself, however absurd or farcical, is worth living is an acceptance of the terms of life. With a largeness of heart that is remarkable Greene exercises our pity and urges us to be charitable to his sinners without parading moral righteousness.

Though Greene’s vision of the world is horrifying, he do not leave us breaking into a cold sweat. He lights a ray of hope in the endless mercy of the Creator, which however eludes human comprehension. We, hollow men, are taught by him never to condemn anybody or anything since our conception and understanding of divine mercy are distressingly limited. Ours is human understanding and for that very reason, a very deficient one. Given proper understanding, we tend to pity the worst sinner. Scobie, the central character in The heart of the matter, wonders if one would have to pity even the planets, if one knew the facts and reached what they called the heart of the matter. (Greene’s novels abound in priests, who have a vocation to understand, to forgive and to absolve.) The whisky priest in The power and the glory tells the pious woman in the prison cell in the ground they hear the cries of a copulating pair) that our sins have so much of beauty. The priest in Brighton Rock tells the bereaved wife that none can understand the appalling strangeness of God’s mercy. The crippled priest in Greene’s play The living room says that Hell is for the very great and that none is great enough for Hell except Satan.

As a novelist, Greene has made manifest to his readers the creative artists’s personal myth and this, very easily, is his outstanding contribution to the world of fiction. The myth and its ground are so recognizable that one is tempted very to murmur: “Why this is Greeneland nor am out of it.” Greeneland is a distinct and easily recognizable setting against which the action in the various novels takes place. Wherever the scene is laid the qualities of the Greene hero are always the same, the qualities of his world unmistakable. We same the sordidness and squalor. Human beings are always the same here, the adulterous and fornicating pairs, the sensitive sinners and the hunted criminals. They are always under the all-seeing eye of their Creator. They are often pursued by the cruel hounds of their desires, for in Greene, we come across very frequently schizophrenic characters. Whatever might be the external manifestations of their deep guilt and sin, his characters are always the victims of a delicate sensibility as exemplified in their introspection and self-analysis. With his clinical detachment while surveying sin, Greene reminds us of the lines of T. S. Eliot:

Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
with time, is an occupation of the saint.

Greene has said in several places that our sins have a grandeur and that the fallen angels were not the ugly ones. He has the saint’s sympathy for man caught in the whirl of circumstances, a victim of his own desires, terror and pity. This deep understanding and largeness of heart are of abiding interest in a creative artist. We find in Greene’s fiction the spirit of the statement attributed to St. Juliana of Norwich:

Sin is behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of things shall be well.

Greene’s personal vision of the “Waste Land” has provoked a lot of comment and led Sean O’ Faolain to remark: “Joyfully he (Greene) reversed Browning. God’s in His Heaven and all’s wrong with the world.” Perhaps this remark went home to Greene’s mind. In his Travels with my Aunt he makes up for thisnot-too-laudatory remark by dealing with his theme in a very skilful manner, keeping away from any theological debate or distressing portraiture of evil which might appear extravagant and exaggerated. Henry Pulling, the retired bank manager, reverts to Aunt Augusta’s way of life and spends his life withchild wife reading Browning:

God’s in His Heaven,
All’s right with the world.

Greene appears to be greatly influenced by two writers–Elliot and Baudelaire. His world is not very different from the one presented by Eliotin This Waste Land. Greene is a Catholic by conversion and by his own assertion he is a convert for intellectual reasons, not emotional. He appears to be constantly grappling with fundamental issues; he constantly endeavours to express and rationalize his personal convictions in the media of artistic delineation of character and incident.

Eliot wrote:

Be not curious of good and evil;
Seek not to count the future wave of time,
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

Greene is curious of good and evil and his long journeys and electrifying career as a novelist are protracted attempts to find a foothold. The foothold that he has found is humility, the acceptance of faith reached by intellectual conviction. The outcome of this humility and implicit faith in God is the conviction that divine grace is limitless.