PARTISAN REVIEW
her voyage to South Africa. After she has gone, he expects to find peace
in
hi~
loneliness, in the honesty of being accountable only to himself, but,
instead, and without wishing it, he becomes involved in a love affair.
Again his sharpest emotion is pity; again, to avoid pain, he is brought
back to the painful depths of "I love you" and "I'll never leave you."
His very act of adultery is a sin which he cannot repent without dishonor–
ing his mistress; he cannot make the required religious effort to abandon
the relationship without bringing unhappiness
to
the woman who de–
pends upon him. His wife returns and to please her he takes Mass,
though in a state of mortal sin. His love of God and his duty to life
conflict at every point. At last he commits suicide, sacrifices his soul
to be relieved of the torture of sacrificing others.
Greene finds in
this
weary, sad sinner a great religious personality.
Scobie is ordinary, inconspicuous, hiding his profound struggle behind
his decent, rather colorless appearance. Apparently Greene had a figure
in mind like the knight of faith, of whom Kierkegaard said, "Good
Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax-collector!"
"I think he loved God," the priest says, after Scobie's impious death.
This mystical resolution, weak and perverse as it is, is the only thing
the Catholic novelist can salvage out of the modern, secular ruins in
which he feels compelled to place his hero. There is a snobbishness in
serious Catholic writers. They are bored with the pious, the regular
devotions, the bland submissiveness-modern man is so much more "in–
teresting." These writers want multiplicity, waywardness, spiritual tor–
ment, weakness and pride; they are in love with sin and intimate with
spirituality only as the capacity for suffering from weaknesses. Toward
the conventionally pious they are inattentive and Greene is positively
churlish. Sebastian in
Brideshead Reuisted
is a drunkard, neurotically
enslaved to an evil German boy, and yet he is "holy." Waugh says,
"He'll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of
his own; he'll be found in the chapeL at odd times and missed when he's
expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be
picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid
that he is conscious when they give
him
the last sacraments. It's not such
a bad way of getting through: one's life."
Greene, in the dramatic self-slaughter, pushes personal heresy to
the limits with a greediness that is convincing neither as fiction nor as
religion. His hero must be everything at once. He must not only be a
sinner, but must commit the worst sin, and with paradox upon paradox,
be nearer to grace than anyone else. Mrs. Scobie, a devoted Catholic,
is "furiously" reprimanded by the priest for her impudence in assuming
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