Something Old

 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. 

GRAHAM GREENE’S “ENTERTAINMENTS” (five novels and two novella published between 1932 and 1958)

As novelist, journalist, controversialist, playwright and short-story writer, Graham Greene (1904-1991) attracted both admiration and hostility, especially with regard to his left-wing views and his on-again, off-again relationship with Catholicism (see earlier posts on this blog about The Man Within; The End ofthe Affair and The Quiet American; and Journey Without Maps). Once established as a writer, from the 1940s onwards, he always had a huge readership, and nearly every one of his novels was at some time filmed. I’m fairly sure that the only ones never to make it to the screen were It’s a Battlefield and A Burnt-Out Case.

One minor cause for comment, however, was the distinctive way Greene used to categorise his work. The fly-leaves of his books would list his full-length fictions as either “Novels” or “Entertainments”. The suggestion was that the “Novels” were serious literary works, whereas the “Entertainments” were simply for fun. (The only other writer I know who did something similar was Georges Simenon, who would list his Maigret detective novels – in fact the most enduring part of his output – separately from his “romans durs”, or “serious novels”.)

Greene kept up this categorisation of his fiction until the publication of his novel The Comedians in 1966, where “Novels” and “Entertainments” are still listed separately. But then he appears to have changed his mind, and from the publication of his next novel Travels With My Aunt, in 1969, he dropped the distinction. The term “Entertainments” disappeared and now they were all listed as “Novels”.

At one time or another, I’ve read nearly all Greene’s “serious” work but – apart from two of them – I had not read most of his “Entertainments” until a couple of months ago, when I decided to read them all in the order they were written. I wanted to see why or how they could be considered as different from his other novels. Beginning with Stamboul Train in 1932, and ending with Our Man in Havana in 1958, five of the “Entertainments” are thrillers and two are (more-or-less) comedies. I introduce you to each of them below, before closing with some comments on how, in spite of everything, their settings, themes and characterisation are as typical of Greene as his other works are. As they were all filmed, and as I have seen most of those films, I append to each comments on how the “Entertainment” appeared on screen. And after all, as has often been pointed out, Greene, the one-time film-reviewer, was very influenced by film in his writing and often used quite cinematic techniques in his prose.

So here goes.

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Stamboul Train (1932) is midway between murder mystery and pure thriller. On the Orient Express (Ostend to Istanbul) various characters struggle with their own problems and become linked by circumstances. An aggressive English woman journalist (surprisingly for a popular novel of this vintage, she is explicitly identified as lesbian) wants to get a scoop by interviewing a Communist politician who may be plotting revolution in his East European country. The politician is wracked with thoughts of his own inadequacy and wonders whether his apparent idealism is just pride. A handsome young Jewish merchant (there seems to be a soupcon of anti-semitism in the way Greene describes him) worries about business affairs, but on the train becomes sexually involved with a chorus girl, down-on-her-luck and on her way to fulfil an engagement in Istanbul. Again – surprisingly for a novel of this vintage – the sex is quite explicit. Under a false identity, a German thief and murderer is on the run from police. The connections made between characters are quite convincing, and it does come to a violent climax, although the ending is more downbeat and dispiriting than most thrillers are. Basically, the good guys don’t win.

Stamboul Train is both a competent and still readable thriller, even though Greene himself came to despise it and later said he wrote it only for the money (see review on this blog of JourneyWithout Maps). In retrospect, it is notable for two things. First, it includes the (very minor) character of a smug popular novelist called Q.C.Savory, who wants literature to be cheery and uplifing with none of this sordid modernist stuff. Informed readers immediately understood that this was a caricature of the popular novelist J.B.Priestley, who threatened to sue, insisted the publishers remove a few phrases clearly linked to him, and wrote a “revenge” review panning the novel. Second, Stamboul Train (first publshed in America as Orient Express) was probably the first modern thriller to take the Orient Express as its setting. Agatha Christie’s more formulaic Murder on the Orient Express was first published two years later (in 1934) and Ian Fleming’s James Bond thriller From Russia With Love, mainly set on the Orient Express, 24 years later (1956).

Film: Stamboul Train was promptly filmed by Hollywood, under the title Orient Express, in 1934, with a second-string cast. The film was hardly noticed, and has not been seen for years. I have not seen it.

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After two “serious novels” came A Gun for Sale (1936), a really down-and-dirty thriller. James Raven is a hired hit-man, recognisable by his twisted hare lip, who has killed a government minister, but who soon discovers that his contact man has paid him with stolen and marked bank-notes, easily traceable by the police. So we have the double-chase. The police are after Raven, and Raven is after the man who cheated him. En route Raven kidnaps as “cover” the chorus girl Anne, and they are together for much of the novel. The complication (read “bloody big coincidence”) is that Anne’s boyfriend is the police detective who is on the trail of Raven.

As a thriller, this is a big step-up from Stamboul Train, with a far more straightforward and urgent plot. You do, however, have to swallow the implauibility of the character of Anne, who stays with Raven even though she has many chances to escape him, and who rather too easily comes to see Raven’s point of view. The milieu is seedy, sordid London, and then the seedy, sordid northern industrial city of Nottwich (Greene’s fictitous combination of Norwich and Nottingham). Appearing in 1936, A Gun for Sale very much reflects a Europe already gearing up for another major war. The real villains are wealthy industrialists and arms traders, implicitly contrasted with the wretched of the earth like the tormented Raven; and there is a crucial scene involving a mass air-raid drill in which gas masks are distributed.

Film: A Gun for Sale was first published in America as This Gun for Hire. It was a bestseller, a number of film studios vied for the film rights, and it was eventually filmed by Hollywood as This Gun for Hire in 1942, directed by Frank Tuttle. I have seen this film a number of times, and think it is one of the best of its type. The story was Americanised, with the setting switched to wartime San Francisco and the enemy, in cahoots with the corrupt industrialist, clearly identified as Japanese. In his starring debut, Alan Ladd was excellent as the stone-faced, homicidal Raven, although the film gave him a broken wrist in place of a hare lip (we can’t have our star looking too grotesque, can we?). Veronica Lake’s character was upgraded from struggling chorus girl to star of a number of production numbers; but Laird Cregar stole some crucial scenes as the double-crossing “finger man” who gives Raven the dud banknotes. The first twenty minutes are a master class in setting up character and motive and – despite many changes to plot – crucial episodes survive, such as the gas-mask drill. The film was very popular. Apparently there was an inferior remake, under the title Short Cut to Hell, in the late 1950s – but it bombed and I have never seen it.

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Greene’s next “entertainment” was The Confidential Agent in 1939, a thriller that again reflects a contemporary political situation. A civil war is going on in an unspecified country, although it is clearly modelled on the Spanish Civil War, which was in its dying days when the novel appeared. Main characters are not given full names, perhaps to avoid using clearly Spanish names. Our hero, called only D., has been sent to England by his government (read the Spanish Republic) to negotiate over crucial supplies with an important English industrialist. But in England he is dogged by L., an agent for the other side in the civil war (read the Francoists). D. is hunted through foggy England – but D. in turn becomes the hunter.  He has to track down some of L’s agents. They have murdered a little girl who witnessed something that they did not want reported to the police. So again, as in A Gun for Sale, there is the double-chase. Given that this is a novel in which Greene was politically “engaged”, it is odd how flat much of it is, including the cliché of a final romantic clinch. For en route, D. becomes involved with some romantic relief from “the other side” in the (most improbable) form of an aristocratic young English beauty, the daughter of the industrialist forsooth. Nevertheless, there are some moments of waspish humour, as when the “cover” for a group of nasty foreign agents is an Esperanto club and when Greene pokes fun at a group of “Buchmanites” or “Oxford Groupers”. Greene is said to have dashed this novel off in six weeks.

Film: The Confidential Agent waited six years to be filmed by Hollywood, and when it appeared (as Confidential Agent) at the end of 1945, it was able to refer directly to the Spanish Civil War and to its hero as Spanish. The trouble was that said hero was played by the very French Charles Boyer, while his aristocratic English girlfriend was played by the very American Lauren Bacall. This caused much mirth among reviewers, the lead performers were ridiculed and the film was not a hit. Oddly enough, Greene himself liked the film and praised the actors. But his main motive was that, unlike many other adaptations of his work, the film actually followed his plot closely and kept its English setting.  I saw Confidential Agent once only, as a teenager, on old black-and-white television. I remember the sequence in which the child was killed as genuinely terrifying (I wonder how I would react to it now?). But, apart from its caricature villains (Peter Lorre, Katina Paxinou), it did not make a big impression.

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In 1943 came Greene’s next “entertainment”, The Ministry of Fear. It reflects the London of the Blitz, and of ongoing fears of Nazi agents, as clearly as The Confidential Agent reflects the Spanish Civil War. Topicality was one of Greene’s things. Arthur Rowe - mentally fragile after a spell in a psychiatric hospital and still wracked with guilt after mercy-killing his sick wife - manages by pure chance to stumble onto a ring of spies. At a church fete, he is accidentally given a cake which, it transpires, happens to contain vital microfilm. He is framed for murder and chased by enemy agents intent on retrieving said microfilm. In turn, he is intent on exposing the spies, with the help first of a private detective and then of the police. Yet again we have the double-chase. Lively enough, and working through a pattern of events with sufficient suspense, The Ministry of Fear is an acceptable thriller but with an oddly surreal tone. There is a scene in which a house is destroyed in a credible air-raid, but many events and characters seem to belong to a dotty alternative universe – a fey second-hand-book dealer; a séance involving eccentric (and very gullible) people; the hero’s incarceration in a mental hospital, run by spies, where his memory is taken from him. Add to this the nightmarish depiction of London and the narration of the hero’s dreams as he shelters in the Tube, and you have what sometimes amounts to hysteria – perhaps a real reflection of a popular mood when England was under siege.

By this time, in my sequential reading of all Greene’s “entertainments”, I was getting a little weary of what was becoming a formula – in A Gun for Sale, The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear there is the double-chase; the flawed hero who so both hunter and hunted; big industrialists or respectable people in the community eventually exposed as the true villains; and a sympathetic young woman who gets attached to the hero and comes to see his point of view. (In The Ministry of Fear, she is the sister of a foreign agent.) Dare I say, they sometimes sound as if they were written for the movies.

Film: Which brings me to the disappointment that was the film version of The Ministry of Fear – doubly disappointing because it was directed by the illustrious Fritz Lang. By this stage, Greene was prominent enough for film studios to snap up the rights to his novels. Ministry of Fear appeared in 1944, the year after the novel was published. It is set in a Hollywood-studio version of England, and stars the uncharismatic (read “dull”) Ray Milland and the forgettable Marjorie Reynolds. It more-or-less follows Greene’s plot, but softens everything and withdraws all nuance. In the novel, when Arthur Rowe (given a different name in the film) finally pairs with the Nazi agent’s sympathetic sister, it is clear that their’s will be a very rocky and probably unhappy partnership. But in the movie it is all sweetness and light and a cliché fadeout on a lame wisecrack about wedding cakes. Again watching it as a teenager, I can remember being disgusted by how unmemorable even the cackling villains were.

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In complete contrast, the next “entertainment” begat what is still probably the best-known movie to be adapted from a work by Greene. It is sometimes cited as the best British film ever made. This is The Third Man – but it has a unique relationship with its film version. This novella was first published in 1950, the year after the film was released. At the urging of the director Carol Reed, Greene wrote the novella specifically so that it could be filmed. It is dedicated to Reed. Reading it is a little like reading a slightly expanded film treatment.

Because this short book has been so overwhelmed by the film version, and because the plot is so well-known, I will not insult you by giving you a plot summary. You already know it is set in post-war battered Vienna, it concerns the flashy criminal Harry Lime and his innocent friend Holly Martins, there is a bogus funeral, a ride on the Prater fairground wheel, a chase through the sewers and a famously downbeat fadeout – not to mention the zither music of Anton Karas.

My own view is that the film is much superior to the novella.

For the record, however, here are a few things that surprised me when I recently re-read it. Disconcertingly, the novella is told in the first-person by the English policeman Calloway (played in the film by Trevor Howard). Even more disconcertingly, the novella’s Harry Lime and Holly Martins (called “Rollo” in the novella) are both Englishmen of public school background. Given that they were memorably played by the Americans Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in the movie, this is the hardest thing to take. In the novella, Harry Lime does not get to make his famous speech about cuckoo clocks (apparently this was inserted into the film by Orson Welles). Also in the novella, there is a repeated running gag about Martins, the hack-writer of Westerns, being mistaken for a serious intellectual literary star. In the film this becomes one single – very amusing – sequence in which the British Council representative (played by Wilfred Hyde-White) forces Martins to make a disastrous appearance before a group of literati.

The Third Man was Greene’s last “entertainment” to be a thriller.

His final two “entertainments” were essentially comedies.

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Loser Takes All (1955) is a very short novella – even shorter than The Third Man.

A middle-aged clerk unexpectedly gets to honeymoon with his young wife in Monte Carlo. He becomes addicted to gambling and wins. But the more he acts like a boorish rich man, the less his young wife likes him. To test him, and make him more agreeably humble, his young wife goes off with another man. It has a cutesie happy ending.

A forgettable piece of fluff, this is very atypical of Graham Greene. Acceptable as light rom-com, it is probably the most trivial thing he ever wrote and certainly the most forgettable. It was made into a British film in 1956, and re-made as an American film under the title Strike it Rich in 1990. Both films flopped. I have not seen either of them.

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Finally, the last novel Greene designated as an “entertainment” – and it is a good one. Our Man in Havana (1958) concerns Wormold, a humble English vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Havana. Middle-aged, divorced and rather morose, Wormold makes a precarious living at best, but has a demanding teenaged daughter, Milly, who goes to an expensive private school. Wormold desperately wants to send her to an even more expensive finishing school in Europe – but he doesn’t have the funds. Enter an English MI5 recruiter, who thinks Wormold would make a good spy. He commissions Wormold to gather information on government officials and military movements. But Wormold is not a spy and knows nothing about these things. Solution? To earn his pay, he sends totally fabricated reports to MI5 in London. They are so convincing that Wormold is soon regarded as a top agent. MI5 even believe him when he sends them a blue-print for a vaccum cleaner, claiming it is a secret weapon. And to increase his pay, he fabricates a cohort of non-existent local agents and informers.

Of course it all unravels eventually (and farcically).

There’s an interesting element to this novel. Greene was often seen as forseeing events that only later were to become major news. For example his The Quiet American was written years before American military involvement in Vietnam, but it clearly suggested that it was on the way. Our Man in Havana was written when Batista was still in power in Cuba, and when rebels in the mountains could still be depicted largely as “noises off”. Yet Havana is depicted as a place of sleaze (brothels, strip clubs, porn movies) and of official corruption, especially in the character of the police chief Captain Segura. There is a sequence where Wormold is beaten up by police for breaking a curfew. And one of Womold’s fabrications is that the Cuban government is installing huge secret weapons in the hills, which can be observed only from the air. To readers of a later date, this sounds eerily like the observation from the air of Russian missiles in Cuba, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis four years after this novel was written – but in this case, I think Greene’s version was just a lucky coincidence, not a prophecy.

As Greene had himself been in Britain’s secret service during the Second World War, Our Man in Havana must in some part reflect his amusement with the ineptitude and the willingness to believe tall stories of his former employers – and perhaps their credulous acceptance of bogus spies.

Film: Like The Third Man, Our Man in Havana was made into another very good British film, again directed by Carol Reed, in 1959. In fact, the film was shot in Havana just after Fidel Castro’s rebels had taken over, and Castro paid a visit to the film’s set. Alec Guinness is perfectly cast as the humble-but-devious Wormold, and there are good performances by Ralph Richardson (a pompous chap at MI5 HQ in London) and Noel Coward (the arrogent recruiter), although the scene-stealer is Ernie Kovacs as Captain Segura. The film follows the novel’s plot, but plays up the comedy and plays down the sleaze. Graham Greene himself wrote the screenplay. It was good box-office, was praised by the critics, and I remember enjoying it on the one occasion I saw it.

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Well here endeth my round-up of Graham Greene’s “entertainments”, but what conclusion can I reach about them? How are they distinguishable from Greene’s other “serious” novels?

First and obvious point – the “entertainments” are all genre works, either thrillers or comedies, with not too much nuance in the characterisation, and little of the psychological probing or analysis of social and political matters found in his other novels. As I read my way through the “entertainments”, I found many of them dated in their formulas, although they might have seemed startlingly modern when they first appeared. Early in the 20^th century, British spy-novels and thrillers tended to have upper-crust toffs as heroes (the John Buchan school), but Greene, along with Eric Ambler, was one of the first to make his leading characters middle-class or working class. Note the chorus girls in both Stamboul Train and A Gun for Sale, and the middle-class hero of The Ministry of Fear.  Reading the “entertainments”, I couldn’t help thinking of them in terms of the movies that were made from them, no matter how many differences there were between text and screen.

On the other hand, there is in these “entertainments” much that puts them at one with Greene’s other work. Most obviously A Gun for Sale (1936), with its killer Raven who has had a horrible, brutalising childhood, is very much like a first run at Greene’s next “serious” novel Brighton Rock (1938), with its killer Pinky who has had a horrible, brutalising childhood. Then there is the matter of the man on the run. A Gun for Sale, The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear all turn on a main character who is somehow on the run (from police, spies or other enemies). But then some of Greene’s “serious” novels have the same narrative arc. The Man Within has its main character on the run from the smugglers he has betrayed. The Power and the Glory has the Mexican “whisky priest” on the run from violently anti-clerical forces.

And so we come to religion, which upsets some readers of Greene’s works. Novels like Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair and (especially) The Heart of the Matter turn on theological questions and serious cases of conscience. There is no such religious matter in the “entertainments”. But only Graham Greene could have dropped into his “entertainments” the religious asides that are found in them. The Communist politician in Stamboul Train wants some form of absolution for his failures in life, and wonders if there might have been something in the Catholicism he abandoned in his youth. In A Gun for Sale, Raven thinks of his horrible childhood in a reformatory, and wonders why there isn’t more true Christianity in Christians. (The novel also features a pathetic defrocked clergyman.) The Ministry of Fear has no overt religious references, but Arthur Rowe’s mercy-killing is a big moral question and there is a scene in which Arthur sees and admires a missal and approves of the truthful things it says about war. (Stretching a point, one could also note that when Arthur is forced to lose his memory, he feels inanely happy – but once a remembers who he is, he feels a crushing weight of guilt. This could square with Greene’s idea that Original Sin is part of being truly human.) In The Third Man (both film and novella), Harry Lime and “Rollo” (Holly) Martins have a discussion on where God fits into a horrible world.

Certainly the “entertainments” are (often formulaic) genre works and not as serious in intention as Greene’s other work. But in setting, narrative arc, and some of the religious asides, they are as clearly the work of Greene as anything is.

After a couple of months (April and May) reading all Greene’s “entertainments” for my evening diversion, I could only classify them as “Graham Greene Lite”. Greene was quite right to abandon the system of segregating them from his other novels.