274
PARTISAN REVIEW
posed illicit lover of a married woman. "I love you," she writes, and
how could anyone be expected to guess that she meant Him and not
a man?
Religion
in
Graham Greene has a monotonously bootleg character;
spirited into the plots, it is linked with crime (detectives, the police,
murder) and with the vices of drunkenness and tedious adultery. The
limp rhythms and flat similes of the writing ("Eternity going on and
on, like a long litany on a wet day," "You were in love with Nothing,
like a woman," "He's in my lungs like air," "Then God comes back
like memory") enhance the sense of squalor, weariness, and self-pity,
as if religion were a drug-addiction, a bad habit, to which a small
coterie was condemned for life.
God is less like air in the lungs, in Graham Greene, than like a
depressing smog that hangs over a modern industrial city. He permeates
the novels and plays with His unfailing presence, and in turn He soaks
up the smells of His surroundings-bad cooking and mildew and dirty
sheets and stale alcohol. You would not think that this was well cal–
culated to make religion attractive to the general public. But the public
is titillated by this deity, created in fits own bored image. Religion, for
non-believers (and almost everyone, at bottom, is anon-believer), has
become the new pornography.
If
Graham Greene's works,
iin
the ag–
gregate, are tiresome, for all their gift for suspense, and "leave a bad
taste
in
the mouth," this does not detract from their appeal, for
pornography has always been tiresome, while catering to an appetite
for novelty; it cannot escape this fate.
Mary McCarthy
