706
ELI ZABE TH H A ROW I,C:K
.exclusiveness. The
char:;t~t~rs
take their . sexu:;tl
guilt
a,nd stanq .l!.t
.the edge of damnation discussing possibilities fGr fresQ
th~logj!"~l
interpretations.
Th~y .
are weill)' and .romantic .a,nd .fascinated . by
suffering and they look upon themselves and their feelings in ..a
peculiarly intense Catholic-convert way, with a sort of intellectual,
clannish, delighted sectarianism. The question is not, in the great
Russian manner, how one can live without God, or with God; the
question is how one can exist as a moral, or immoral, man without
running into vexing complications with the local priest. Marriage,
love, sex, pride, art, no matter where you turn things are not
quite as the Church would have it and to function ·at all one has
to break rules or offer new versions of the old.
Of course Greene is fascinated by sin and heresy; it could
not be otherwise. His terse novels with their clear, firm
th~mes
and symbolic situations, are acted out by men
~ith
beautifully apt
gifts for language, men raised on Cardinal Newman and Ronald
Knox. The world is anti-psychological; the world of psychoanalyt–
ical motivation does not exist, its questions are never raised, its
interpretations never suggested. Class, childhood, history are ir–
relevant, too. These are indeed peculiar novels. The omission of so
much life and meaning, of the drama of social and psychological
existence would seem to be ultimately limiting. There is a sense
of disfiguration, baffling sometimes, and yet always intellectually
exciting. Everything is sharper and more brilliant than the effects
of other writers. God is a sort of sub-plot and the capricious way
He treats Roman Catholics is a suspenseful background to love
and boredom and pity. It
is
most perplexing.
How often Greene sees the living thing as a dead or trivial
object, an article of manufacture. "A smile like a licorice stick";
"the pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the
smuggled memories of a disappointing life"; "he was like the kind
of plant people put in bathrooms, reared on humidity, shooting too
high. He had a small black mous:tache like a smear of city soot and
his face was narrow and flat and endless, like an illustration
-of
the
law that two parallel lines never meet."-
Licorice sticks, purses filled with snakes, leggy bathroom
plants
are lined up for the argument, the great
deba~eover.
a
~hisky·
and
soda at some -peaceful, intellectual Priory.. And
meanwhil~ ·
-it.
is
