The many shades of Greene

SPY; novelist; journalist; thrill-seeker who sought escape in extramarital affairs, heavy drinking, and drug dependency; self-styled “Catholic agnostic”, who initially became a Roman Catholic with a purpose to marry, but eventually grew in piety, using religion to “measure my evil against” — Graham Greene was as vibrant and compromised because the characters he concocted.

Yet, expressing a view of humanity which was “not black and white but black and gray”, his books proceed to appeal to a contemporary audience. New editions appear, and events, resembling the Graham Greene International Festival, provide fresh interpretations of his œuvre. How, then, does his murky vision survive a climate obsessive about moral frameworks that simplify the world — whether in politics or human affairs?

I WAS first intoxicated by Greene two years ago, during a vacation to Andalusia. It was a time of deceptively easy cures on all fronts. Populism, with its soundbite solutions, was surging on each side of the Atlantic. After three long years of psychotherapy, I used to be also feeling disenchanted by my mirage-like expectations of transformation.

I had spent the morning ambling across the geometrically exquisite Alhambra in a late-summer glow. My mind must have been trained on moral perfection and earthly transcendence, but as a substitute, as I sipped a glass of red overlooking the Catedral de Granada, a yellowing, dog-eared paperback in my rucksack was tugging at my attention: The Quiet American.

I used to be immediately hooked by the novel’s roiling backdrop: Fifties Saigon, in the ultimate few years of French occupation. A postlapsarian literary landscape: quintessential Greeneland, which I discovered as unsettling because it was comforting, and as foreign because it was familiar. It is a spot that the protagonist, the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, says is “promising the whole lot in exchange on your soul”.

I READ more about Fowler and Alden Pyle, an American intelligence agent espousing interventionist idealism. As each compete for the affections of a Vietnamese woman, Phuong, Pyle’s naïve political meddling threatens disaster. Fowler warns that Pyle’s lofty ideals will get people hurt: “I wish sometimes you had a couple of bad motives, you may understand slightly more about human beings.”

Eventually, Fowler begrudgingly attempts to do the proper thing by tipping off an area contact about Pyle’s activities, notwithstanding Fowler’s own moral failings and impure motives. He is unfaithful to his wife, uses Phuong selfishly, and privately calls her “splendidly ignorant”, besides resenting Pyle for attempting to steal Phuong in the primary place. Nevertheless, that is Fowler par excellence: an illustration of compromised virtue. He is neither gleaming white nor mired in unalloyed dirt.

Green would probably have baulked on the suggestion that his novels had anything as vulgar as a “message”. Yet, the book unmistakably holds up a mirror to ideological neatness and political certainty. Pyle’s idealism is contrasted with Fowler’s deep experience. Costly responsibility emerges as a more honourable path to political stewardship than naïve solutions.

The contrast between Pyle’s polished virtue and Fowler’s murky but ultimately decent character also questions modern society’s unforgiving categories of public guilt and virtue, which punish individuals who have blemished backstories or deviate from accepted morality. Fowler reminds us that doing the proper thing rarely looks — or feels — good. Moreover, while this book will not be considered one of Greene’s “Catholic novels”, it remains to be arguable that deeper theological themes are at play. It is scrappy moral growth and sacrifice, not inherent virtue or political allegiance, that matter most and are where grace, in its broadest sense, is most abundant.

THIS dynamic recurs in Our Man in Havana, one other of Greene’s satires, which follows the struggling vacuum-cleaner salesman James Wormold. After being offered a job by British Intelligence to fund his daughter’s lifestyle, bumbling Wormold fabricates spy reports, unleashing accidental calamity. As we discover, nonetheless, his actions are ultimately driven by loyalty to family and friends somewhat than political fealty.

This is shown at the top of the novel when Wormold tries to do the proper thing by his friend, Dr Hasselbacher, after he’s tragically caught up within the scheming. Wormold confronts their nemesis, Carter, with fatal consequences, and later confesses. His imperfect acts of courage and private loyalty here contrast with the dehumanising absurdity of espionage and with Hasselbacher’s earlier cynicism: “People die or leave us.”

DWELLING by myself psychotherapy attempts, which had yielded little ostensible progress, I wondered whether Greene’s morally complicated characters may also delay a mirror to contemporary therapy culture, a trend that includes otherwise credible and worthwhile skilled psychological concepts — resembling trauma, authenticity, boundaries, and self-actualisation — into on a regular basis life, thereby flattening the undulating journey of non-public growth into a simple technique of emotional realignment.

Greene himself underwent psychoanalysis in his youth and was well aware of its usefulness in identifying unconscious drives and selfish motives. Yet, a few of his characters still arguably challenge a broader therapy culture, which may valorise emotional integration as a pre-eminent good. For instance, Fowler and Wormold remain rogues who respectively cheat and leave chaos of their wake, but, when pushed, they struggle to do the proper thing. Psychological growth is contrasted with something altogether different: moral goodness.

I wondered whether that was where I had been going unsuitable, expecting therapy to vary me on a soul level and conflating personal development with something deeper: character growth.

In The Heart of the Matter, Major Henry Scobie isn’t any paragon of psychological health. He cheats, drinks, is emotionally tortured, and wracked by toxic guilt and shame. Yet, he still shows real concern for others and his relationship with God. As he reflects, in an imagined conversation with God, “If you made me, you made this sense of responsibility that I’ve all the time carried about like a sack of bricks.” The ending stays ambiguous, but contrasts costly responsibility and the unedifying struggle for goodness with psychological ease.

THE unnamed whisky priest in The Power and the Glory is one other deeply compromised character who nevertheless exhibits goodness. A cowardly alcoholic who fathers an illegitimate child, he stays an ethical failure within the eyes of the world, but still shows remarkable courage by continuing his ministry in secret. Holiness, for Greene’s characters, will not be clean and tidy. Brokenness isn’t simply a fault to be fixed through therapy, but might be the soil where real spiritual growth occurs.

As the sun set on the Andalusian city, I assumed again about Greene’s murkier vision of a fallen humanity which is nonetheless shot through with grace. Greene can have reflected that his becoming a Roman Catholic a century ago was something “to measure my evil against”. But, today, his literature perhaps offers us something altogether more hopeful: not a persist with beat ourselves with, but an honest mirror wherein to recognise our capability for goodness and strive to do slightly higher. Maybe that was the epiphany I used to be in search of, in any case.

Rhys Lewis works within the education sector and is a contract author.

The twenty seventh Graham Greene International Festival runs in Berkhamsted until Sunday. grahamgreenebt.org/festival.