Graham Greene

The professor never smiled.  He was late middle-aged, austere, intent.  He wore a dark, conservative suit.  To me, he was a professor I could imagine lecturing in Vienna or Berlin, although he had no accent.  He projected a sense of sadness, of disillusionment with humanity.

His class was called "The Theological Novel in Modern Europe."  His class was large, and well-attended.  If your mind tended toward theology, as not all his students' did, his lectures were electrifying.  Every novel he taught, so far as I recall, was by a Catholic author.  He himself was devoutly Catholic.

Students called his class, good-naturedly, "Nine o'clock Mass."

I don't recall all the books we read, but I do recall his introducing me to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Georges Bernanos, and François Mauriac.  My young, sophomore brain gravitated toward what, to an American, were the more accessible novelists, especially Greene and Waugh. 

I think we read Greene's The Power and the Glory.  Maybe also Brighton Rock?  It's hard to recall, because within a couple of years of taking his class, I had read all of Graham Greene's "Catholic novels" on my own.  Only in later years did I read, appreciatively, but with less fascination, some of his other works, the ones he called his "comedies."

In this week's New Yorker, American writer and critic Joan Acocella has written a succinct summary of Graham Greene's life and of his theologically-themed novels.  She has done so under the guise of a book review, but she barely discusses the book she's reviewing -- it's the subject of the book that fascinates her.

After my college class, and my own later readings, I considered Greene to be a strongly religious author, but one who applied religious beliefs to real people in the real world.  He did not write about plaster saints or -- except perhaps in Brighton Rock -- villains certain of damnation.  He understood and portrayed the conflicted beliefs and ambivalent impulses driving most human lives.  

Like many readers, I found it thrilling that Greene's protagonists lived as though every thought and every act were watched and judged from on high.  That every thought and act had cosmic significance and was weighed in deciding one's fate.  I remember a student saying that after reading one of Greene's novels, you felt (until you shook it off) that your life had incredible dimensions, an importance beyond our daily concerns of getting up and going to class. 

Greene was an example, I felt, of a truly modern Christian writer. 

Ms. Acocella points out that Greene converted to Catholicism when he was 22, shortly before he married.  His marriage and conversion followed an adolescence filled with thoughts of, and half-hearted attempts at, suicide, suicidal impulses stemming from what appears to have been his bipolar disorder.  His career as a committed Catholic lasted about as long as his devotion to his devout wife -- at most ten years, although they remained married his entire life, until he died at age 86.  

Ironically, it was after he stopped receiving the sacraments, and began consoling himself with the more earthly pleasures of other women, that he wrote his "Catholic novels."  As Acocella observes:

Although Greene may have turned religion down to a lower simmer in his life, in his novels he raised it to a rolling boil.  

I suppose this disconnect between how he was living his life and how he was writing about life in his books resulted in the palpable tension in those books that made them so appealing -- appealing not just to me, but to a mass American audience.  His heroes often were men walking on a precipice, striving for some form of sanctity while teetering, always about to plunge into the abyss.  Even the most truly saintly of his heroes, the Mexican priest in The Power and the Glory, was tormented by his addiction to whiskey.

Christianity arguably does not require bipolar disorder on the part of its adherents, or of its writers.  But my professor was wise in asking his students to read and reflect on Greene's writing.  Whatever Greene's own religious dispositions at the time he wrote his theological novels, he offered stories about real people who strived to live worthwhile lives in a real world.  Some succeeded, others failed, and at least one of them didn't even try.

And Greene himself?  Acocella doesn't really comment on Greene's final years, but notes that after thirty years of absence from the Church, he next received the sacraments when he would have been about 77.  He had another nine years before his death.  

He might well have written an interesting novel about living out those last years of his life.