The Matter at the Heart of the Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter is all about Scobie, the high-ranking police official of an unnamed African community in the British Empire.  How the reader responds to Scobie and his philosophies is how the reader responds to the novel as a whole.  I found myself in a complicated position when thinking about Scobie because always at the back of my mind I was trying to divine what Greene himself thought about Scobie.

As readers, we almost always look for the author's attitude toward his or her subject, and we normally don't have to look that far.  We know pretty early on that Orwell is not a fan of Big Brother.  We know that Isherwood is not a fan of the Nazis and that he is deeply in love with all his characters.  We know how the author's feel because they make it so easy to like some characters and so difficult to like others.

Greene, on the other hand, is incredibly subtle with his character.  Other characters pass judgment on Scobie, but they are not reliable evaluators of the man.  Wilson, for instance, hates Scobie for a number of reasons, and his declaration that Scobie does not love Louise or anyone but himself are hardly worth anything.  Louise loves Scobie, and she also feels that the only person Scobie loves is Scobie.  Helen feels the same at times, but Louise and Helen are his lovers, and it is unclear how far they see into Scobie's character.  So it is left to us to determine what kind of man is Scobie.

Perhaps he is a good man who falls into a web of lies and deceit that eventually undo him both morally and physically.  Yes and no.  This is definitely the story of Scobie's decline, but to see the crux of the matter as the political intrigue that pretends to be at the heart of it all is to miss the larger point.  I initially thought it was just such a book, one about the political world around Scobie that conspires and pressures him into an ever-tightening circle.  The book has all the trappings, and Greene lays them out brilliantly.  Scobie is an upstanding man.  His compassion for a father and fellow Catholic leads him to do his first immoral thing, burn inconsequential letters instead of handing them over to the censors.  His desire to give his wife what she desperately wants leads him to take out a loan from a crooked Syrian, putting himself in Yusef's debt.  At the same time, Wilson is in town as a spy, who shortly has it in for Scobie because Wilson falls in love with Scobie's wife and embarrasses himself by letting Scobie witness his tears.  While Louis is gone, Scobie takes on a lover, and in an effort to please her, he writes a compromising letter that is intercepted by Yusef's men and used to blackmail Scobie into breaking the law by smuggling diamonds for Yusef.  The Louise returns unexpectedly and Scobie cannot break it off with Helen or his wife and feels he must keep his deception up.  As everything gets tighter, Scobie goes to the one man who knows all his secrets, and tells Yusef his worries.  When Ali, Scobie's servant and companion is killed, Scobie has no one to turn to.

That's great writing! Right!?  That's a crazy good web of problems for poor Scobie to stumble into one turn of the screw at a time!  I'd swear this book was a kind of thriller, and I enjoyed myself immensely through the first two-thirds of the book as thing ratcheted up for our protagonist.  But then, after Ali dies, the screws stop turning altogether.  No one breathes down Scobie's neck.  Yusef disappears.  Wilson quits hounding him.  The outside concerns vanish, and we are left with only the internal worries and pressures of Scobie and his Catholic beliefs.  The build up was false and was never about what it seemed to be about.  We are like Wilson, who confronts Scobie only to be told, "The things you find out are so unimportant."  Because what we quickly learn is that the mad descent of Scobie's morality, all those pressures acting upon him, were there primarily to put his mortal soul in danger, not his personage.  The final third of the novel is about the safety of his soul, not his skin.

Now as readers we are charged with the task of evaluating Scobie's logic and attitudes about God and salvation.  Up to the final third, I had not given Scobie's personality much thought.  He was my protagonist.  He was a decent guy.  He seemed pretty level headed.  He thought and felt deeply, even if we didn't agree on everything.  But once I was done with the novel, and I was left trying to figure out the importance of what finally happened, I had to go back and study him closely--I had to study him closely to find out if Greene left me any clues.

In the end, I don't know.  And to be blunt, I don't know because I am not Catholic or even religious.  Clearly Greene wanted this to be thought of and discussed even among Catholics (especially among Catholics?).  But as with other Catholic novels on this list (and there seems to be a lot of them--Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Power and the Glory, Brideshead Revisted), I cannot trust my own instincts to interpret the novel because my assumptions and beliefs can run perpendicular to those of the authors.  Nevertheless, we are allowed and invited to make analysis (and even judgments) no matter our religion, so I will forge ahead.

After re-approaching Scobie at the close of the novel, I found that I glossed over his attitudes toward his fellow human beings.  At first I loved his obsession with pity, because it was such a unique concern:  "He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way.  It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance.  The word 'pity' is used as loosely as the word 'love':  the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience."  And I loved what seemed like a generosity of spirit: "Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst."  I dismissed the notion expressed by Wilson and Louise and Helen that he loved no one but himself.  But as Louise expressed that very sentiment to Father Rank in the final pages of the novel, the Father responds, "And you may be in the right of it there too."  Did Scobie love anyone else, or was he only able to feel pity and responsibility?  And in spite of his glorification of pity, pity is a lopsided emotion, one that places the pitier in a position of superiority over the pitied.  Scobie's detachment seemed to me more and more pathological.  His affair with Helen, which was odd even on the first read through, just seemed odder as he never had a moment of pleasure with her.  He went from non-committed to responsible and full of pity.  He put himself in a position of power over his wives when he says that he "formed" them in his school, that he turned them into miserable creatures.  The more I looked at Scobie, the more he seemed to have a God-complex, a conviction that he was the only one who saw things as they were.  He even compares his suicide to Jesus's crucifixion.

Perhaps Greene intended this re-interpretation of Scobie, or perhaps he meant his reader to be suspicious of Scobie from the start.  Or perhaps, he felt that Scobie was in the right, that he saw things accurately.  What Greene wanted, we can never know, nor does it really matter in the end, because a work of literature is far more than intention.  In it's consumption, the novel fuses with our DNA and is rewritten in our brains and comes out as a new thing, a synthesis of the original words and our interpretations, perceptions, and feelings.

When Bad Men Do Good: Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene is a name I have been familiar with for a long time, but until now, I have not read any of his books. One summer, on a long drive, I listened to a BBC radio play of his book Our Man in Havana, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. But The Power and The Glory is the first of his books that I have read. And according to all the little blurbs that come with my edition, it is his masterpiece.

I am not a religious man, and trials of religious people do not typically move me. There is no exception here for the unnamed priest at the center of The Power and The Glory. I can respect his struggles, and I understand his dilemma, but for the most part I was not moved by his inner religious turmoil. That said, however, I really enjoyed this book and really enjoyed the main character we follow around because even as the book is about the trials of a persecuted priest among persecuted people, it is the people and not the religion that Greene studies and discusses.

When I learned in the biographical sketch at the head of my edition that Greene converted to Catholicism when he was 26, I was very wary about what I was about to read. That knowledge acted like a lens, affecting the way I started into the book, the symbols and lessons I looked around for. That lens fell away as I got a quarter of the way into the book and simply enjoyed the story and the writing. Greene creates crisp, clear, and evocative sentences. He seemingly effortlessly creates a scene with deft description and characters come to life through their dialogue and interaction. I never found myself wanting the scenes to move faster or for the plot to develop quicker, nor did I wish to linger longer. It all moved so perfectly. And then, as I neared the end, as the whiskey priest neared the end of his journey, I suspiciously picked that lens back up and read on expecting one of two things. Either the priest was going to get his absolution and become an appropriate martyr, or he would be denied confession and die ingloriously.

Greene did something I didn't expect and he did it with great skill. The whiskey priest does indeed die without confession, without repenting of his own scenes AND he becomes a proper martyr, believably. There is nothing superhuman in the priest's fate. He does not find God's strength to face his execution. He does not transcend to some higher spiritual level in meeting his death, but it is that incredible humanity that makes his death meaningful. Unlike Christ, the priest is a man steeped in sin, but like Christ, he dies with the sins and confessions of everyone who called on him. He gave his life to hear the last confession, and he did it without seeming ridiculously pious. And his last word, overheard by the dentist, before the firing squad let loose, was "excuse." What a great and ambiguous word! Was he making an excuse for his own behavior, pleading for a stay of execution, or speaking to God as Christ upon the cross, asking him to "excuse" their murdering him, for they know not what they do? In this conclusion, Greene allows tragedy and hope to come together in a beautiful balance. He gives us the ending that the priest becomes a martyr but without it becoming a cheesy tale of morality. Greene gives it all to us, and you cannot ask for a better ending than that.

The thing Greene explores throughout the novel and the priests travels is the difference between the man and the role he performs. The priest can be a bad man, a bad priest, and still do good. He can be the horrible example he fears he is and still bring God to people. There are no wicked characters in this book; and there are certainly no saints. But what the people are like on the inside, what motivates them and occupies their mind, are different from the effect they have on other people and the world around them. The lieutenant is a kind-hearted man who gives money to a struggling man and seeks to eliminate the church for what he sees as the good of the people, but he is ready to execute innocents to reach his goal. The fang-toothed mestizo is another great example of the person and the role being at odds.

Graham Greene is another author that I plan to return too when this experiment is over. I love his writing, his plotting, and his combination of intellect and intuition to create a riveting and rewarding story.