Study Guide to Brighton Rock and Other Works by Graham Greene

INTRODUCTION TO GRAHAM GREENE

One of the most prolific and talented writers of modern times, Graham Greene was born in Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, England, on October 2, 1904. His father, Charles Henry Greene, was headmaster of Berkhampstead School, and his uncle, Sir W. Graham Greene, K.C.B., held the position of permanent secretary to the Admiralty during the greater part of the First World War. The author was educated at Berkhampstead and Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford he edited the Outlook and published his first book, which was a volume of poems called Babbling April. After graduation, he held a staff position with the London Times between 1926 and 1930. It was during this period that his first novel, The Man Within, appeared. Also in this period he became converted to the Roman Catholic Church and married Vivien Dayrell-Browning. In the course of his career as a writer, he has travelled widely; and as a result of his stays in such places as Mexico, West Africa, and Indo-China, he gathered much of the material for his books. Apart from writing, he has taken an active part in the English publishing world and has sponsored certain controversial causes, among which is censorship, regarding each issue from the viewpoint of morality.

HIS WORKS: GENERAL COMMENTS

Although we will be concerned mainly with Greene’s major novels, it should be noted that he has also written many short stories, essays, travel journals, plays, children’s stories, and entertainments. His most important works show that he is preoccupied with characters of abnormal psychology and with the analysis of every shade of religious feeling. We shall deal with Greene’s religious works in detail later, but the reader should be aware that Greene as a Catholic writer draws more on French influences than on English. In fact, an article in the Catholic intellectual magazine, Commonweal, once described Greene as being the first major English novelist who was a Catholic. It is true, at any rate, that Greene had few English-language predecessors whose roots were in Catholicism. Greene’s interest in moral issues is not confined to his main novels, however, since similar implications concerning man’s spiritual crises can be found in many of his entertainments. Readers will find, for example, that Greene is among those writers whose concern is not so much with active external events as with people, their subjective emotions and internal reactions. He is also among those few writers whose works are accepted and debated in intellectual circles, as well as being popular on the general reading market.

MAIN CATEGORIES OF HIS NOVELS

Generally speaking, Greene’s novels can be divided into three categories, which can best be defined by chronological periods.

First Period (1929-1935): During this early period, Greene wrote The Man Within (1929), It’s A Battlefield (1934), and England Made Me (1935). These are rather hard to classify with any degree of precision. They deal with crime studied from a social and political standpoint, and it was in these works that Greene made his initial experiments in dealing with the psychology of his characters.

Second Period (1938-1951): We shall be studying in detail the first three novels of this period, namely Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), and The Heart of the Matter (1948). These three novels constitute the main body of what we can call Greene’s religious writings, and they have in common the central themes that fascinate Greene-sin and salvation. By examining man’s relationship to himself, society, and God, Greene explores the nature of evil, and the possibility of man’s redemption. In many ways these novels contain the elements of crime stories-particularly the manhunt theme. But their contents assume spiritual dimensions which place them with the best of modern fiction. In Brighton Rock, for example, the main character, Pinkie, is a young gangster on the run from the police, a gang, a woman - and ultimately from God. Pinkie seems incapable of loving or of redemption - but Greene takes that assumption and examines it in all its aspects. The chase theme is also central to The Power and the Glory, where a corrupt whiskey priest is tormented by a ruthless lieutenant, by his own guilt-and again by God. In The Heart of the Matter, Greene examines the process involved in the total collapse of Scobie, a police officer whose warped sense of Christian pity drives him to self-destruction. While The End of the Affair (1951) falls into this period, it does not match the intensity and quality of the first three.

Third Period (1955 - ): It is too early to attempt a clear-cut classification of the novels of this period, which include the Burnt Out Case (1961) and The Comedians (1966). It is interesting to observe, however, that the first novel of this period, The Quiet American (1955), while not specifically religious in theme, deals with the destruction of a human being who is apparently doomed by a kind of moral innocence.

GREENE’S OTHER WORKS

An extremely prolific writer, Greene has written many varied kinds of works, from children’s stories, such as The Little Train, to plays, such as The Potting Shed. The body of his works hardest to classify is that commonly referred to as his entertainments - called so mainly because they do not deal directly with spiritual issues. These entertainments include books like Stamboul Train and Our Man in Havana, but underlying the apparent shallowness of many of them - The Third Man, for example - lie many of the same moral issues which Greene tackles deliberately in his major novels. His plays have not been particularly successful, mainly because of the pessimistic strain which runs through them. His travel books are extremely interesting, not only for their intrinsic merits, but also for the fact that they reflect the locale of many of his novels. The Lawless Roads, for example, is a book recording his travels in Mexico during the ’30s. In it we can see the background which influenced The Power and the Glory. His book of essays, The Lost Childhood, is worth examining, since it reveals much of Greene’s personal reflections on religion in general and the theological conception of evil in particular. This provides the reader with a useful background when he comes to study such powerful novels as The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory.

OUTLINE OF GREENE’S WORKS ACCORDING TO FORMS EMPLOYED

Since Greene has written so many works of such varied natures, we have outlined them in eight form categories, each one in chronological order, outside the period in which each was written.

Novels: The Man Within (1929), It’s A Battlefield (1934), England Made Me (1935), Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (The Labyrinthine Ways) (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), The Burnt Out Case (1961), and The Comedians (1966).

Short Stories: The Basement Room (1935), Nineteen Stories (1947), Twenty-one Stories (1954), and A Sense of Reality (1963).

Essays and Journals: The Lost Childhood (1951) and In Search of a Character (1961).

Travel: Journey Without Maps (1936), and The Lawless Roads (Another Mexico) (1939).

Plays: The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), The Complaisant Lover (1959), and Carving A Statue (1964).

Entertainments: Stamboul Train (Orient Express) (1932), This Gun for Hire (A Gun for Sale) (1936), The Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943), The Third Man (1950), The Fallen Idol (1950), Loser Take All (1955), and Our Man in Havana (1958).

Children’s Stories (with Dorothy Craigie): The Little Train (1947), The Little Fire Engine (1950), The Little Horse Bus (1952), and The Little Steam Roller (1953).

Poems: Babbling April (1925).

MODERN CATHOLIC LITERATURE

GENERAL COMMENTS

In many ways it is extremely difficult to define exactly what is meant by a Catholic writer, and Graham Greene himself has on occasion objected to being classified as such. On its simplest level, the phrase could apply to any writer who happens to belong to the Roman Catholic faith. For our present purpose, however, some clearer definition is necessary, to include writers whose greatest works revolve around characters and situations deeply concerned with the teachings of Catholicism. We must, in fact, make a clearcut distinction between writers who regard the separation of Church and Art as the sine qua non of their personal artistic creed and those for whom the spirit of Catholicism embraces their art and molds their expression. For those in the latter category, of course, an acceptance of the realities of sin and redemption and the translation of these concepts into literary terms must be accomplished according to certain tacit ground rules. Such writers as Mauriac, Peguy, and Bloy, for example, could not hold their eminent stature if they allowed their sense of Catholicism to overwhelm their artistic instincts. On the other hand, they would not merit the status of being great Catholic writers if they depicted sin in such a way that they either condoned or were in any way shocked by it. These Catholic writers do not have the function of sitting in judgment on the sinner, nor is it their task to make a case for Roman Catholicism in any narrow, chauvinistic way. They are artists, first and foremost, whose creative efforts seek and appeal to a universal audience. When considered as Catholic writers, it is essential that they do what the great French thinker Jacques Maritain told them to do: show a sense of compassion for the sinner without in any way suggesting collusion with the sin.

In this context, then, Graham Greene can conceivably be considered a specifically Catholic writer, when we come to study the content of such works as, for example, The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory. In general, he cannot be separated from the mainstream of what we shall call modern Catholic literature, and to appreciate fully his place in this category, it will be helpful to give a brief appraisal of the works of some leading nineteenth - and twentieth-century Catholic writers. The most comprehensive selection of these has been compiled by the brilliant critic Conor Cruise O’Brien. The eight writers he chooses are well worthy of the student’s attention, so that Greene’s place among them can be properly appraised in the light of what is finest in the Catholic literary tradition. Mr. O’Brien’s choice of Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Sean O’Faolain, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, Leon Bloy, and Graham Greene is as embracing and instructive a list as one would wish for this purpose. While it is not our task to make a detailed study of these writers and their works, some of them are nonetheless worthy of a cursory examination to help us see why Greene’s Catholic works are undoubtedly among the finest of their kind.

GREENE AND CATHOLIC LITERATURE

Mauriac once gave his own definition of his purpose in writing when he said that it was to make perceptible, tangible, odorous, the Catholic universe of evil. While he succeeded in doing this with remarkable power in his earliest and greatest works, Genitrix and Le Desert de l’amour, his later works such as La Pharisienne and Le Sagouin are relatively pallid and dreary. Mauriac’s own inner torment and sense of class dominate his works, which at their best are prompted by the power of his instinctive, uncontrolled passion. His view of the Catholic universe of evil is worth bearing in mind when we come to study the greatest of Greene’s works. Bernanos goes even deeper into this universe, however, to the extent that he sees the world as a putrid, decaying organism; some critics have equated his works with those of Greene in that they seem obsessed with evil in some kind of sick way. However, to attack a