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the heroine not only keeps her promise of renUnCIatIOn, she comes to
love God more than she had loved the novelist. It is the hysterical
utterances in her journal which make her belief convincing: "I believe
there's a God-I believe the whole bag of tricks; there's nothing I
don't believe. . . . They could dig up records that proved Christ had
been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I'd believe just
the same. I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I
fell in love."
The novelist is too cynical to believe that anyone else believes in any–
thing; he suspects that the heroine has rejected him not for God, but for
another lover. Only after hired detectives have failed to discover the
true, new lover, who is God, and only after the heroine is dead and
the novelist has stolen her diary is the hero persuaded that his success–
ful rival is God himself, whereupon the frustrated man begins to hate
God; the book ends with these sentences: "0 God, You've done enough,
You've robbed me of enough. I'm too tired and old to learn to love.
Leave me alone forever."
Thus Greene is, to me, successful with his theme insofar as he
has identified his hero with the skeptical and unbelieving modern
reader and modern human being. But I must admit that I may be
moved too much by personal feeling and desire: I've always wanted
to be religious and have never succeeded, so naturally this kind of a
story makes me respond to too great an extent. The real check on my
personal impressions might be the feelings which this novel caused in
a truly devout Catholic, one who has clear, unequivocal and literal be–
lief as compared with my own state of mind, which, in brief, is: I would
like very much to be able to have religious belief. But the farthest I can
get is the belief that even if God does not exist, He does exist. I am
not trying to be paradoxical. What I mean and what Greene's novel
realizes and shows is that whether God exists or does not exist, the
belief in God is and has been so much a part of human existence, of the
institutions of society, and of the values by which human beings find
it necessary to live, that human beings in their most independent, in–
timate and free behavior act and suffer as
if
in fact God does exist.
Perhaps all I am saying is that good and evil are real; and I imagine
that my state of belief is an ancient, recurrent, and obscure heresy,
probably Albigensian.
I've read several other books during the past few months and I
wish I had the nervous energy to say something about them. But you
can see that I must stop here, since I keep jumping from the novels in
question to something else, and when I jump from
The End of the
