The Books: Arguably, ‘Graham Greene: I’ll Be Damned’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

For probably obvious reasons, Christopher Hitchens has some huge issues with Graham Greene. On some pretty important topics, like religion and politics. Graham Greene is kind of the watch-word for Catholic fiction and my dad used to talk about how they had to read all of Greene’s stuff in Catholic school, Greene was a regular part of the school curriculum (which was not the case in my public school, anyway – I had to come to Greene on my own.) I still haven’t read a lot of Greene, but like most people who are aware of things, have an image of who he was and what he was about. A dissipated Englishman drinking brandy at some back-woods embassy in the tropics, nurturing his intelligence contacts, and all tormented with self-awareness of his own sin. I mean, Graham Greene pretty much OWNS that territory, wouldn’t you say?

He nails a certain ethos, a certain mood and feel, in a way that is so definitive that Hitchens (in this piece anyway) bemoans anyone ever topping it, himself included. But I’ll get to that. So despite his contempt for Greene’s devotion to Catholicism, as well as his love affair with Communism, dictators, traitors, and all that stuff, Hitchens does not make the mistake (as so many do when there are disagreements as serious as this) of dismissing Greene offhand. “Well, he did this thing I abhor. Therefore he is not worth listening to” is often the attitude and it’s a huge error. Hitchens wrote about Graham Greene a lot. His introductions show up in new editions of this or that Greene work. Hitchens has studied him, inhaled him.

Green’s books, of course, are suffused with Catholic belief. He takes this shit seriously, as (in my opinion) you should, if you’re going to believe. It reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s famous comments on the Eucharist:

“I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, A Charmed Life). She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

Greene’s The End of the Affair turns on a baptism, happened before the lead character was even conscious as a human being. Her mother baptized her when she was a baby, and she didn’t know it, but once she learns it, the story is over. From that moment, the Church owned her. It is not up for debate. It is that revelation that brings about “the end of the affair.”

This essay was a review of the second volume of Norman Sherry’s massive three-volume biography of Graham Greene. Overall, Hitchens had a good opinion of it (I have not read the biography.) There are many unsavory aspects to Greene – and I wouldn’t put his religion on that tally, but I would put his politics there. However, your mileage may vary. All of that aside, the fact remains that Graham Greene owns a vast territory, literature-wise, especially when it comes to travel writing mixed with politics, and this, obviously, is something Hitchens admires, tried to emulate. Others admit it to. Robert Kaplan. Ryzsard Kapuscinski, and others who traveled in these dangerous tropic zones, outposts of the British empire (current and former). If you tried to describe them, you HAD to go to Greene first, because he probably said it better. He described it better. All of these writers admit that.

There are quite a few essays about Graham Greene in Arguably, but this one is the most elaborate.

Here is how Hitchens opens the essay.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Graham Greene: I’ll Be Damned’, by Christopher Hitchens

Graham Greene once wrote a celebrated essay about a doppelgänger who cared enough to haunt and shadow him, even to masquerade as him. This “other” Greene appeared to have anterior knowledge of the movements of his model, sometimes showing up to grant an interview or fill a seat in a restaurant, so that Greene himself, when he arrived in some old haunt or new locale, would be asked why he had returned so soon. The other man was suitably nondescript yet camera-shy. He was caught once by a society photographer, and captioned in the press into the bargain, but a combination of flash and blur allowed him to escape unmasking. So who or what was he? Semblable? Frère? Or perhaps hypocrite lecteur?

This mode of imitation or emulation or substitution – at once a form of flattery and a species of threat, or at any rate of challenge – was and is analogous to the role that Greene himself played and still plays in the lives of many writers and readers. A journalist, most especially an Anglo-American travel writer, will run the risk of disappointing his editor if he visits Saigon and leaves out any reference to quiet Americans, or turns in a piece from Havana that fails to mention the hapless Wormold. As for Brighton, or Vienna, or Haiti – Greene was there just before you turned up. Leaving the Orient Express, you will glimpse the tail of a raincoat just at the moment when that intriguing and anonymous fellow passenger vanishes discreetly at the end of the platform. In Mexico or Sierra Leone some old veteran all mumble something about the stranger in the off-white suit who was asking the same questions only a while back. On one of my first ventures as a foreign correspondent, in 1975, I sat in the garden bar of a taverna in Nicosia, reading about the adventures of Dr. Saavedra in The Honorary Consul, visualizing what I had just seen along the haunted “Green Line” that slashed through the ruins of the city, and moaning with relief that Graham Greene had never been to Cyprus. Even so, as I crossed that same corder in the broiling noon of the next day and heard only the cicadas and the click of the rifle bolts at the frontier, I was composing a letter to him in my mind.

It was a matter not just of place but of character. Disillusioned diplomat whose wife was drying up before his unseeing eyes? Snake-eyed cop? Priest to whom Eden was forever lost? Sentimental terrorist spokesman? All these went straight into the notebook. You could divide the eager freelances into roughly three types: those who had been influenced by Scoop, those who were stirred by Homage to Catalonia, and those who took their tune from The Quiet American. Overlap with Le Carré fans was frequent in the third instance: Their preferred quarry was the naive guy at the U.S. embassy, insufficiently comprehending of the ancient hatreds and millennial routines that had been so quickly mastered by the old/new hands.

Greene’s centennial year, just now past, saw the reissue of many of his classics in beautiful new editions from Penguin Books, along with publication of the third and closing volume of Norman Sherry’s biography. In an effort to isolate and identify the elusive and evasive figure who could so plausibly be impersonated – to lay his ghost, so to speak – I set myself to reading it all. I think what surprised me the most, when I had finished, was his sheer conservatism.

Greene, after all, was nothing if not radical, even subversive, in his self-presentation. Always at odds with authority, not infrequently sued or censored or even banned, a bohemian and a truant, part exile and part émigré, a dissident Catholic and a sexual opportunist, he personified the fugitive from the public school, Foreign Office, rural and suburban British tradition in which he had been formed. By what means did this pinkish roué gradually mutate into a reactionary?

The first and easiest reply is: By means of the sameness of his plot formula. This tends to consist of a contrived dilemma, on the horns of which his characters arrange to impale themselves with near masochistic enthusiasm. Dear God, shall I give him/her up, for your sake? Or might it be more fun to wager my immortal soul? The staginess and creakiness of all this was well netted by George Orwell, himself no stranger to the sweltering locale and the agonies of moral choice, in his review of The Heart of the Matter for the New Yorker in 1948. Of the central character he asserted,

Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is – that is, a man whose chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain – he would not be an officer in a colonial police force.