230
PARTISAN REVIEW
Problems appear under their
names, but not in their substance.
It is the reader's memory that does
the esthetic work. A hero is called
"D." and we remember Kafka;
the resemblance ends there, but
everything
is
moving so fast that
we do not perhaps notice this, and
we close the book with the illusion
that we have been dealing with the
Kafkan man. Certain key words,
like "innocence," "pity," "good–
ness," "lost," "abandoned," "child–
hood,"
"tenderness,"
"adoles–
cence," recur again and again in
every possible context and invoke
in our minds the whole repertory
of elegiac emotions connected with
the Garden, the loss of innocence,
the Fall, while in actuality this
profound theological subject has
never been treated at all and we
have been chasing about London
with German spies at our heels.
Words with churchly connotations
are used gratuitously in similes,
with the same slightly hypnotic ef–
fect. For example, in
The Ministry
of Fear,
a maid comes to the door:
"Her face was talcumed and
wrinkled and austere like a nun's.
. . . The old maid watched them
with the kind of shrewdness peo–
ple learn in convents." Why? The
likeness is never explained; it was
invented for the religious
frisson.
To read one of Greene's novels is
to put oneself in the position of
one of Pavlov's dogs; it is all stim–
ulus and response; the bell rings
and the reader supplies his own
bone.
What exists in Greene's novels
when the rhetoric is peeled off is a
fast-moving, improbable plot plus
some fine descriptions of landscape
and buildings, plus an acute sense
of the literary man's embarrass–
ment before the trashy material of
modern life. And this .embarrass–
ment, which appears to be the
source of his work,
is
at the same
time its destroyer. For the real nov–
elist cannot regard the whole of
modern life as unassimilable artist–
ically; he begins in fact where
Greene leaves off; he makes be–
lievable what at first glance seems
unbelievable; he humanizes the
horrors, the melodrama, and the
absurdity. When Evelyn Waugh
makes the bad hat, Basil Seal, turn
into a Commando, he performs a
service of illumination; he rescues
the actual Commandos from the
romantic boy's book that Lord
Louis Mountbatten and the news–
papers and Noel Coward have left
them in and restores them to cred–
ibility and human status. But Gra–
ham Greene can only add his own
well-written footnote to thl!! theory
that the book of life, circa 1940, is
a pot-boiler whose Author is Edgar
Wallace.
MARY McCARTHY
Choose Your Quotes
The Life of the Mind!
"Joyce was a man of great
gifts,
unfortunately turned to essentially
destructive ends. It is tragic that
the last years of
his
life, and all his
learning, should have been devoted
to the production of "Finnegans
Wake," which, when all is said and
done, is a mockery of what the
English tongue has accomplished
through centuries of communicated
thought.
(J.
Donald Adams, in
The New York Times,
Jan. 18,
1944).
·The Immanence of Uncle Joe
"The Russians have not thought
of themselves as religious. The Rus–
sians call themselves
Realists.
But
it is easy to see that if God
is
real–
ity and, if the Russians have made
