LOVELESS LOVE
THE HEART OF THE MATIER. By
Grehem Greene. Viking.
$3.00.
"Do you love me, Ticki?"
"What do you think?"
"Say it, one likes to hear it-euen if it isn't true."
"I love you, Louise. Of course, it's true."
This exhausted domestic dialogue is used with remarkable
power in Graham Greene's new novel,
The Heart .of the Matter.
Greene
has stolen the trivial chatter of marriage from Noel Coward and given
it an existential, neo-Catholic varnish, the high polish of fear and
trembling and sickness unto death. The petulant archaisms, the white
lies, are profanations of the lost ability to love; they bring moral fatigue,
not satisfaction ("Say it again, darling!"). The nasty emptiness of the
evening compliment ("My dear, how absurd you are. I've never known
anyone with so many friends"); the anxiety that one's desperate
separateness will be noticed ("He flinched a little away from her, and
then hurriedly in case she had noticed lifted her damp hand and kissed
the palm") ; the nervous wretchedness of politeness; the anguish edging
outrageous promises to provide for another's happiness ("Don't worry.
I'll find a way, dear") -in all of this dry, light material Greene finds
the terror of, to use Marianne Moore's phrase, that "interesting impos–
sibility," marriage and ideal love.
Scobie, an official
in
a British-governed town on the west coast of
Africa, does not love his wife and so the reckless, embarrassing language
of marriage, the optimistic accent, fill him with a dread of such great
dimensions that each expected deception appears as a terrible crime.
The vocabulary of Scobie's heart is responsibility, self-hatred, anxiety,
and guilt. There is a scalding monotony and desperation in his life
because of his supererogatory sense of pity. Scobie is mild, dutiful, just,
a Catholic who loves God with the bitter passion that has died out in
his earthly attachments. All of his secular life is contained in his re–
luctance to inflict pain. He suffers the agonies of the dinner table and
the bedroom as if they were an immense crime against God; his wife's
tears are a death sentence; her inevitable moments of ugliness fill him
with the "pathos of her unattractiveness"; her absurdity, a malicious
remark at her expense arouse
in
him a bereaved, tragic defense of the
right of everyone to live without scorn. With intense seriousness he ac–
cepts the burden of her dissatisfaction as his due responsibility. With a
kind of fury he compromises his deepest principles
to
get
the money for
937
