Book Review, 07 December 2006
Reviewed by David Lodge

Chameleon edging close to greatness

Articles of Faith: the collected Tablet journalism of Graham Greene
ed. Ian Thomson
Signal Books, £12.99
Tablet bookshop price £11.70 Tel 01420 592974

The reputations of writers often dip following their deaths, but 15 years after Graham Greene's demise interest in his life and work shows no signs of diminishing. Biographies and memoirs accumulate; the annual Graham Greene Festival in Berkhamsted flourishes; there have been three recent feature films based on his novels. The retrieval and publication of Greene's occasional and uncollected writings, and a steady stream of critical studies, are further evidence of his continuing appeal.

Articles of Faith, with useful introduction and notes by Ian Thomson, will obviously be of particular interest to Catholics. There are only just enough contributions by Greene to The Tablet to make up a book, and a substantial portion of it consists of reports from Mexico from which emerged his travel book The Lawless Roads and the novel Monsignor Quixote. Nevertheless I was glad to revisit those texts placed in their original context. It was Greene's friend Tom Burns, a publisher at Longman, who secured him an advance to write a book about the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico, without which The Power and The Glory would never have been conceived. Reading Greene's dispatches from Mexico as they first appeared in 1938 in The Tablet, then edited by Douglas Woodruff, heightens one's appreciation of his exceptional ability to evoke the sense of place at that relatively early stage of his career. When Burns himself became editor he persuaded Greene to serve as a trustee, and asked him for a story for the Christmas issue of 1978, which in due course developed into Monsignor Quixote. I found its somewhat arch humour more congenial in these serialised extracts.

Articles of Faith offers fascinating sidelights on Greene's shifting attitudes to the Church into which he was received in 1926. His earliest contributions were entirely literary: on eight occasions between October 1937 and March 1938 he reviewed new novels in clutches of four or five titles. Greene himself was not yet identified as a Catholic writer, and only a few remarks in these reviews reveal his religious preoccupations - when for instance he describes Djuna Barnes' Nightwood as "an exaggerated reaction against the world by someone who has been bitten by faith, but faith gone wild and dangerous with despair". Soon afterwards he published Brighton Rock, a work to which the same words might be applied; and he went on to write three more novels with an explicitly Catholic theological content, culminating in The End of the Affair (1951); books that made him the most celebrated English literary novelist of his generation.

In the eyes of many Catholics, these novels were subversive, even heretical, but in 1950 Greene contributed to The Tablet a remarkable defence of the Assumption against those, especially Anglican theologians, who were dismayed by its definition as a dogma of faith in that year. It is a brilliant piece of polemic, making use of literary allusion, and invoking the Incarnational theology which Greene had used to powerful rhetorical effect in his novels: "The statement that Mary is the Mother of God remains something shocking, paradoxical, physical." The article is defensive towards other Churches and faiths, and infused with Cold War hostility to Soviet Communism.

Never again would Greene present himself as such a convinced Catholic. His novels became increasingly secular in subject matter, their world-weary heroes sceptical about religion and sympathetic to postcolonial revolutionary Marxism. Greene intimated that he was no longer a practising Catholic, and described himself as "a Catholic agnostic" - even a "Catholic atheist". In a remarkably candid interview in The Tablet with John Cornwell in September 1989, Greene, just 18 months away from death, distinguished between belief, which he found increasingly difficult, and faith, to which he still clung, often in rather superstitious ways, like his habit of saying a Hail Mary every time his plane left the ground, or his fascination with the stigmatic Padre Pio. He was apparently untroubled about the irregularity of his sexual life, but revealed surprisingly that he still sometimes confessed to and took Communion from his friend the Spanish priest Fr Leopoldo Duran. To Cornwell's final question, on what religion finally meant to him, he replied: "It's a mystery ... which can't be destroyed ... even by the Church." The essay by the American Jesuit Alberto Huerto published in The Tablet shortly after Greene's death was a rather unconvincing attempt to claim that the source of these puckish and in some respects self-contradictory reflections belonged to the Catholic mainstream. My own opinion is that Greene never had a consistent attitude to either religion or politics, but was capable of adopting and articulating with equal persuasiveness quite incompatible points of view as his mood or situation determined. That was one reason why he was a great writer.

Or at least a very good writer. Bernard Bergonzi prefers that more judicious assessment, arguing that Greene failed at least one test of greatness for a male novelist - the ability to create convincing female characters -  and he is probably right. His intention is to counterbalance the tendency of much recent commentary, to "collapse Greene's novels back into their sources", by looking again at the texts as works of verbal art. He draws our attention to the poetic quality of Greene's prose and the melodramatic nature of his plots in the early novels, which in some ways have more in common with Jacobean drama and Imagist verse than with the great tradition of realistic fiction. Adopting this perspective he regards Brighton Rock as Greene's most powerful and original novel, and also makes a persuasive case for the merit of that neglected early work, It's a Battlefield. The End of the Affair, as he admits, does not fit his thesis, being a consummately constructed novel in the realistic tradition (albeit with a supernatural dimension) and containing, uniquely in Greene's oeuvre, a fully rounded characterisation of a woman. But after that book, something of what Shirley Hazzard memorably called "the inspired pain" of the earlier fiction deserted Greene, though his later novels were usually thought-provoking and technically adroit.

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