Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE
END OF THE AFFAIR” by Graham Greene (first published 1951) and “THE QUIET
AMERICAN’ by Graham Greene (first published 1955)
Famously
England’s best-known novelist from the 1940s to the 1970s, and just as famously
the man who never won the Nobel Prize for Literature although he should have,
Graham Greene (1904-1991) had an odd mix of Catholicism and Marxism that
managed to rub many people up the wrong way. Once he’d brushed off the heavy
influence of Joseph Conrad (see the post on his first novel, The Man Within) he produced novels that
were either straight thrillers – which he called “entertainments” – or were
serious novels always with contemporary settings and with heavy theological or
political overtones, but also with the narrative pace and briskness of
thrillers. For such a serious novelist, then, it was no fluke that he was also
a big bestseller. The fact that he had been a film critic, and learnt much from
the pacing of films, probably also helped.
In saying all
this, I am probably saying nothing that most readers of this blog do not already
know. What amuses me, however, is the way the theological element really irks
some people. One of Greene’s greatest admirers is the novelist and
travel-writer Paul Theroux. I remember once hearing Theroux, on a radio
documentary about Greene, saying how much he admired Greene for his vivid sense
of place, pacing and awareness of the contemporary world – but then adding
that, whenever the matter of God cropped up in Greene’s novels, he simply
skipped a few pages in his reading. This is more than a little absurd in that
God is so central to many of Greene’s works, especially the three that are widely
regarded as his best, Brighton Rock (1938),
with the furious (and therefore religious) blasphemies of its young thug
anti-hero; The Power and the Glory (1940),
with the paradoxical salvation of its “whisky priest”; and The Heart of the Matter (1948), with its colonial policeman
deliberately courting God’s damnation by suicide.
Where these
novels are concerned, Theroux’s statement is a bit like saying you like Dickens,
but can’t stand his caricatures, comedy and sentiment.
God is part of
the deal with much of Greene. And it makes not the slightest difference that
(as three or four biographies have already told us in detail), Greene’s
desertion of his family and his disorderly and active sex-life (many mistresses
and prostitutes) did not add up to what would commonly be seen as a devout
Christian life.
And then there
is the Marxist side of Greene, which tends to rub up a different set of people.
Greene was no Communist (despite having flirted with that secular religion in
his student days), but he did often give Communist regimes more benefit of the
doubt than some would approve. He had worked briefly for Britain’s spy service
in the Second World War and annoyed many by writing sympathetically of his
former colleague Kim Philby, even after the man had defected to the Soviet
Union. (The title of Greene’s novella The
Third Man [1948] was often invoked when people were looking for “the third
man” who had helped two other Soviet spies, Burgess and McLean, to defect.
Philby was that man.) Greene produced positive portraits of many people who
stood in the way of American foreign policy, notably General Torrijos of
Panama, about whom he wrote the memoir Getting
to Know the General (1984). For some Americans, Greene was a dangerous
leftist and definitely “anti-American”.
Add to these
objections those fastidious English souls who didn’t like the sordid element in
many of Greene’s novels and invented the term “Greeneland” to ridicule Greene
and protect their own delicate sensibilities.
So at last to
the two novels which I have chosen as this week’s “Something Old”. I choose
them because they neatly illustrate how people have reacted to Greene’s
religious views and to his political views.
Published in
1951, The End of the Affair is set in
London in the war years. It has a complex time-scheme which skips between a time late in the war when London is being bombed and discoveries which the main character makes two years later.
The main character is the first-person narrator, the novelist Maurice Bendrix,
a bit of a cynic and a libertine as well as a non-believer in God. His affair
is with the married woman, and Catholic convert, Sarah Miles. Her husband is
the dull, complacent and implicitly impotent civil servant Henry Miles. The
novel follows the course of Bendrix’s and Sarah’s guilt-ridden affair. Bendrix
asks Sarah to divorce her husband and marry him. As a Catholic, she refuses to
contemplate divorce. Then Bendrix is nearly killed in a bomb blast (this is wartime, remember). When Sarah discovers he is slightly injured, but still alive,
she immediately gives up their affair and never sees Bendrix again.
Why is this?
Because of a
number of the sort of things which made some of Greene’s critics very annoyed.
Sarah dies of a
lung infection. As Bendrix discovers only two years later, and while he is
reading the pages of her diary which he has acquired, Sarah made a bargain with
God at the time of the bomb blast. Real love led her to plead that if God would
allow Bendrix to live, she would abandon her adulterous affair with him.
Bendrix had been jealous enough to suspect her of abandoning him for another
lover, but God was the third partner of their love triangle. At the time of her
death, Sarah was widely reputed to be a devout and pious person by people who
knew nothing of her love-life. Bendrix is therefore very cynical when he
eventually reads her diary. But then, after her death, apparently miraculous
“coincidences” happen, including the disappearance of a birthmark from the face
of the atheist ideologue Smythe with whom Sarah sometimes conversed. We are, by
the novel’s later sections, presented with a Bendrix who is drawn kicking and
screaming towards belief in God, even if he still hates God. Yet Greene is a
subtle enough psychologist to leave open the possibility that this form of
“belief” is simply the result of his imaginative guilt and grief.
There is one
obvious background fact about this novel, which it is now de rigueur to mention.
The affair of
Bendrix and Sarah Miles was clearly based on Graham Greene’s ongoing affair
with his longest-term mistress Catherine Walston. Maurice Bendrix is a
novelist, like Greene. Sarah Miles is a Catholic convert, like Catherine
Walston (and Greene). Greene and Walston began their liaison during the war and
Greene survived a near-miss when a house he was renting was destroyed by
bombing. The first (1951) edition of the novel was coyly dedicated “To C.” The
first (1952) American edition of the novel was openly dedicated “To Catherine”.
It strikes me as a bit on the nose that Greene chose to call the novel’s
cuckolded husband Henry, as this was the first name of Catherine Walston’s cuckolded
husband, the Labour Party peer Baron Henry Walston. (On the other hand, Henry
was also Greene’s first name – he dropped it when he starting publishing novels
so that he would no be confused with the older established novelist Henry
Green.)
I first read
this novel – missing much of what it was about – when I was a teenager. I can
remember even then finding it a bit of a cheat that the narrator was a
novelist, allowing him to make neat novelist-like character analyses of other
characters. I was also irritated by the device of having Bendrix read about all
Sarah’s inner feelings in her diary. Somehow, I intuited that this was a
structurally-crude way of giving us, all in one lump, Sarah’s view of the same
affair which we had hitherto seen only from Bendrix’s viewpoint. On the other
hand, I found the guilt and the greyness and the distress of wartime London
very convincing.
But it was the
God part that got Greene’s harshest critics down.
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At
which point, but with reason on my side, I cut crudely to another matter.
At one time or
another, nearly all of Greene’s novels were filmed. The only ones I can think
of that were never filmed were It’s A
Battlefield (1934) and A Burnt-Out
Case (1960), but all the others got the business. Wikipedia informs me
that, exclusive of TV adaptations, 29 films have been made from Greene’s novels
and stories. Greene had a very pragmatic attitude to these films. On the whole,
once the screen rights were sold, he allowed the filmmakers to do whatever they
pleased – although he reserved the right to criticise the results. (I have this
information from Quentin Falk’s guide to Greene-based films, facetiously
entitled Travels in Greeneland,
published in 2000.)
Five of Greene’s
novels have been filmed twice. They include The
End of the Affair, and to compare the two films tells us much about how
attitudes to Greene changed.
The first film
version was released in 1955, directed by Edward Dmytryk and filmed in black
and white. I have only the vaguest recollection of this film, which I saw on
television years ago, although I have subsequently seen a few short clips from
it on Youtube. It starred Deborah Kerr as Sarah Miles but, to woo the American
box-office, it cast the American Van Johnson as Bendrix. Greene was appalled by
this casting and said very rude things about the film. I cannot imagine the
under-talented Van Johnson as a hard-bitten and cynical novelist. Apparently
the 1955 film left much of the God stuff intact, but (given the censorship of
the day) toned down the nature of the affair so that audiences could almost
believe it was a passing flirtation.
Having read the
novel as a kid, I re-read it in 1999 when I was a film-reviewer and ahead of
the release of Neil Jordan’s re-make. The re-make made the fullest of the
affair and Ralph Fiennes was perfectly cast as a cynical Bendrix. But – oh woe!
– the American box-office still had to be placated, so this time it was an
American, Julianne Moore, who played Sarah Miles. Her acting was adequate, but
with the novel fresh in my mind, I noted how the story had now been skewed
another way. To extend the sex stuff, the film had Bendrix and Sarah getting
together for another fling once he learns the news that she is dying. There is
no such reunion in the novel, but the director was able to have Sarah state her
motives in dialogue rather than having Bendrix discover them in her diary. The
1999 film missed the novel’s touching scenes between Sarah and the atheist
Smythe, because it eliminated Smythe from the story and merged his character
with the novel’s quite separate character of a priest. This meant there could
be only very abridged discussions on theological matters. Also the birthmark
“miracle” was presented more peremptorily and crudely than it is in the novel,
and transferred to another minor character.
My chief
impression was that the theological element embarrassed those who produced the
re-make. What they wanted was a doomed love story in a wartime setting, and
that essentially is what they produced.
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* * *
* * *
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* * *
The Quiet American (first
published in 1955) is one of Greene’s most overtly political novels. Again its
main character is the novel’s first-person narrator and again he is
transparently based on aspects of Greene himself. Between 1951 and 1954, Greene
spent part of each year in Saigon, reporting for The Times and Le Figaro
on France’s Indo-Chinese war. The novel’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, is a cynical
British journalist stationed in Saigon during France’s Indo-Chinese War.
From the opening
pages, we know that the American “aid worker” Alden Pyle, the eponymous
character, is dead. Going into flashback mode, the novel tells us how Fowler
came to hate Pyle, and eventually how Pyle died. Apparently idealistic and
naïve, Pyle claimed that Vietnam could be saved from both the colonialism of
the French and the Communism of the insurgent Viet Minh if only a democratic
“Third Force” could be found. Or manufactured. For it is soon evident that, far
from being an innocent “aid worker”, Pyle is really an operative of the OSS
(i,e, the earlier form of the CIA). Pyle becomes actively involved in terror
activities in order to provide provocations. He arranges for bombs to be set
off, so that the destruction they cause can be blamed on the Viet Minh and used
in anti-Communist propaganda. In the event, the bombs cause many civilian
deaths. Pyle brushes this off as collateral damage in a good cause.
Fowler is
disgusted in this foolish, self-righteous and deluded American college boy. In
retribution he arranges for Pyle to be killed by some real communists.
At least, that
is the skeleton plot if we miss out half of what happens in the novel. For the
fact is that Fowler’s real motives are as murky and questionable as Pyle’s. At
first Pyle had got to know Fowler as a source of information. But then Pyle
moved in on Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress Phuong and took her away from Fowler.
A selfish revenge motive taints the murder, which Fowler might otherwise delude
himself is an act of political justice. There are also intimations that in some
ways Fowler, like the French, represents the older European colonialism as
opposed to the new American variety.
The novel really
does work as a condemnation of America’s covert involvement in other nations’
affairs, and the naïve American belief that America itself is not a colonial
power. It also condemns the belief that American forms of democracy can be
instantly re-planted in other nations which have their own traditions. There
are many swings at the type of sententious American journalism which passes as
informed commentary. (Pyle is always quoting from a hack called York Harding.)
For these reasons, The Quiet American
was seen as an extraordinarily prescient novel, especially as it was written
years before America was fully involved in Vietnam or fighting its own war
there. I recall once hearing a left-wing journalist (it may have been John
Pilger, but I’m not sure) saying that to understand the causes of the Vietnam
War, all you had to do was read The Quiet
American.
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* * *
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Once again, like The End of the Affair, The Quiet American is a Greene novel which
has been filmed twice.
The first
filming was in 1958, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. This black-and-white
production had what could have been excellent casting in the two leading roles,
with Michael Redgrave supercilious, cynical and patronising as Fowler and Audie
Murphy (despite being middle-aged and a much-decorated war hero) still looking appropriately
boyish and gee-whizz as Pyle. (The role of Phuong was played, ridiculously, by
an Italian actress).
Unfortunately, this film is notorious
as an absolute travesty of Greene’s novel. It half-heartedly follows parts of
Greene’s plot, but turns Pyle into a hero – a genuine aid worker who has
nothing to do with terrorism, but who is doing his best for the Vietnamese
people. The bombs really were set by the Communist Viet Minh, and it is the
Communist Viet Minh who murder Pyle for their own motives. The film ends with a
title praising the Republic of (South) Vietnam and its great leader Diem.
Greene thought
the film ridiculous and said so.
So
why was this travesty created? For the obvious reason that no American film made
in the Cold War was going to criticise American foreign policy – or raise the
topic of covert ops. But why would Hollywood film the novel in the first place?
Because Joseph Mankiewicz (who was advised about the script by the CIA chief
Colonel Lansdale) realised that with a few tweaks of the plot it could become
good anti-Communist propaganda – and counter the effect of Greene’s original
novel. There’s the additional silliness that Audie Murphy refused to play the
character of Pyle as anything other than an American hero.
Flash
forward 43 years later to the re-make of The
Quiet American directed in very different circumstances by the Australian
Philip Noyce. It starred Michael Caine as Fowler and Brendan Fraser as Pyle
(and a Vietnamese actress as Phuong). The film was made in 2001 but not
released until 2002 because, when “9/11” happened, American distributors were
jumpy about a film condemning American involvement in terrorist activities. As
with the re-make of The End of the Affair,
I re-read the novel in my capacity as film reviewer ahead of the release of the
new Quiet American.
I
regret the casting of Michael Caine, who does not have the same sort of cynical
condescension that Michael Redgrave could muster. Otherwise, the re-make
follows Greene’s political plot fairly closely. Pyle is revealed as a CIA
operative responsible for a terrorist act. The three-way romantic entanglement
is still there, but Fowler is let off the hook somewhat in the eventual killing
of Pyle.
Bearing in mind
that the novel was written when America was only beginning to be involved in
Vietnam, we have to remember that this re-make was made decades after the whole
debacle of the Vietnam War. It is therefore very much an after-the-event film,
playing up the political aspects at the expense of Fowler’s inner life. It fades
out on Fowler (the journalist) writing despatches over the years as US
involvement becomes more and more fatal. He is, in effect, elevated to the
status of prophet.
What I did
notice about the re-make is that, despite its early 1950s setting, Christopher
Hampton’s script plays down the presence of French colonials. Greene’s novel
doesn’t focus on theology, but it does have the police inspector reading Blaise
Pascal and wanting to talk about his theology. And the novel does end with the
atheist Fowler, after having Pyle murdered, saying “I wished there existed someone to whom I could say sorry”, as if he
is groping his way towards God. None of this survives in the re-make. It does
follow Greene’s ideas and political perspective closely, but at the expense of
characterisation – leaving it as something of a tract.
No film ever
follows a novel exactly. Film and novel are different media after all. But the
four films I have discussed do illustrate how, for commercial as much as political
reasons, films have sometimes distorted or neutered what Greene was saying.
I really enjoyed this post on films based on those two great works of Greene. I would love to read your thoughts on The Third Man.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts on "The Third Man" are not many. The film is greater than the short novel; but then the short novel was specifically written to be filmed.
DeleteNick - I printed out this post as I have an interest in Graham Greene. In the book "The Other Man - Conversations with Graham Greene by Marie-Francoise Allain", Greene states (and I paraphrase) that his fiction was more influential than any of the non-fiction work he wrote, including his columns. I repeat that to myself at times of doubt but also use it when urging authors to be much braver in trying to find and write what they want to say.
ReplyDelete