[Marxism] Graham Greene

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, January 4, 2009
Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me
By PANKAJ MISHRA

GRAHAM GREENE
A Life in Letters
By Edited by Richard Greene
Illustrated. 446 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35

Soon after completing “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene confessed to 
Evelyn Waugh, his fellow Roman Catholic novelist,that “it’ll be a relief 
not to write about God for a change.” “Oh, I wouldn’t drop God if I were 
you,” Waugh retorted. “Not at this stage anyway. It would be like P. G. 
Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.”

Waugh had a point. Born in 1904, Greene belonged to a lost British 
generation that had been too young either to fight in World War I or to 
reflect soberly on its calamitous effects. Until his conversion to 
Catholicism in 1926 (in order to marry a believer), Greene had known 
only the private neurosis of a privileged English youth. As a 
preternaturally bored schoolboy, he is said to have played Russian 
roulette; it could be argued that he never recovered from the ennui of 
the 1920s and the following even lower (and more dishonest) decade.

Discontented with modern civilization, Greene became, along with Waugh, 
Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, a travel writer specializing in the 
pre-modern world. He went to Liberia in 1935, drawn there by a map of 
the region boldly marked “cannibals.” Mexico in 1938 seems to have 
refined his taste for seediness and misery. Soon af­ter­ward, German 
bombs made the streets of London appear as thrillingly full of the 
dangers Greene had sought in the African bush and the Mexican plains. 
“The whole war,” he writes in one of the few revealing letters collected 
in “Graham Greene: A Life in Letters,” “is good for someone like me who 
has always suffered from an anxiety neurosis.” “The prospect of peace 
now,” he worries in 1943 from Sierra Leone, “would fill me with utter 
gloom.”

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Greene was not much interested in the arduous and often self-defeating 
post­colonial struggles for dignity and equality. He had “no sympathy 
for either side” in the war in Algeria. He irrationally disliked Arabs, 
hero-worshipping Moshe Dayan. Richard Greene cautiously argues that he 
“never admired Islamic culture,” but there is no evidence he knew much 
about it. His principal objections to British imperialism seem to have 
been aesthetic rather than moral. Writing from British-ruled Sierra 
Leone, he complains of “little plump men in shorts with hairless legs, 
and drab women, and the atmosphere of Balham going gay.”

Drawn mothlike to war and revolution (the Congo, Kenya, Indochina, 
Malaya, Israel, Haiti, Cuba, Argentina, Panama and Nicaragua), Greene 
occasionally arrived, as in Vietnam, ahead of most journalists. “The 
Quiet American” is driven by an old posh British disdain for America 
combined with a new resentment of the inheritors of European empires. It 
is not his best novel: implausibly virginal and earnest, the American 
Pyle resembles, as A. J. Liebling shrewdly observed, a French author’s 
idea of an Englishman. As it turned out, the blunders of the best and 
the brightest in the 1960s helped give Greene a reputation for 
geopolitical prescience and obscured the fact that he was mostly wrong 
about the urgent issues (decolonization, Communism, the political 
potential of Catholicism) of his time.

“When we are young,” Fowler says in “The Quiet American,” “we are a 
jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” This was 
certainly true of Greene, whose letters in later life show him becoming 
a first-class tourist to revolutions: “Now I’m off to Nicaragua (as the 
guest of the Sandinista government) to light a small fire under the fool 
Reagan.” Though covering a vast period of personal and public turmoil, 
“Graham Greene: A Life in Letters” traces, quite astonishingly, no 
refining of sensibility and intelligence. The increasingly exotic 
settings merely underscore how the mind of this most famous of 
Englishmen abroad was fundamentally never really broadened — and may 
have been narrowed — by travel.

Pankaj Mishra’s most recent book is “Temptations of the West: How to Be 
Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond.”

---

 From my review of "The Quiet American":

One should never forget that Graham Greene had much in common with 
Fowler [the jaded British journalist in "The Quiet American"]. In the 
early 1950s he was a correspondent for Life Magazine in Malaya, where he 
honed his sense of being a British interloper in an exotic setting. In 
the appropriately named "Ways of Escape", he described his first 
impressions of Vietnam. A spell was cast "by the tall elegant girls in 
white silk trousers, by the pewter evening light on the flat paddy 
fields, where the water-buffaloes trudged fetlock-deep with a slow 
primeval gait, by the French perfumeries in the rue Catinat, the Chinese 
gambling houses in Cholon, above all by that feeling of exhilaration 
which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket."

Ah, the mysterious East!

According to Judith Adamson, the editor of "Reflections", Greene's final 
collection of essays, he believed that the Catholics in Vietnam should 
have been supported against the Viet Minh in 1954. Like the character 
Fowler, a stand-in for Greene, the novelist was a Catholic who held to 
his faith despite a veneer of cynicism. While one could not possibly 
expect somebody like Greene to rise above his social and political 
environment, perhaps the most distressing aspect of the novel, which is 
unfortunately retained in the film, is the treatment of Vietnamese 
women. Although Fowler is determined to preserve the authentic Vietnam 
from American intrusiveness, there is an Orientalist understanding of 
what that reality is. He tells Pyle, "In five hundred years there may be 
no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, 
they'll be carrying their produce to the market on the long poles of 
wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on their 
buffaloes."

Phuong is the ultimate fantasy of the Western male. She is an ex-taxi 
dancer; she is quiet and passive; she is beautiful. When she finds 
herself a kind of prize to be awarded to the more competitive male, she 
accepts this fate with inexplicable equanimity. Surely this was Greene's 
fantasy rather than an embodiment of real Vietnamese women who were not 
likely to move in his social milieu on equal terms.

Literary critics Zakia Pathak, Saswati Sengupta and Sharmila Purkayastha 
have co-written an article titled "The Prison House of Orientalism" that 
deals with "The Quiet American" using the approach evolved by Edward 
Said. They write:

        In the consciousness of Fowler represented through the first-person 
narration, Phuong is without a history; there is a noticeable absence of 
cultural markers of class, religion, education which suggests that these 
are invisible for Fowler and that his desire is only for her body. If 
Phuong has any identity at all it is as an Annamite and a "bird." The 
"libertine and less guilt ridden sex" which is offered is clearly 
outside a social and moral formation; that Said valorizes this sexuality 
is evidence of the displacement of race by gender. Fowler himself ends 
up as deracinated. His use of pronouns stresses his resistance to being 
incorporated with the white imperialist ideology. "We've brought them up 
in our ideas. We've taught them dangerous games and that's why we are 
waiting here, hoping we don't get our throats cut". This attempt to 
disengage his identity from theirs only foregrounds the older British 
imperialism. "I've been to India and I know the harm that liberals do". 
His political "involvement" in the final instance is presented as his 
humanization. But it is tragic that the figure he presents at the end is 
one of exile, confined to his room, smoking endless pipes of opium.

While Greene was far too much a creature of his environment to transcend 
certain Orientalist conceptions, he did finally become more sympathetic 
to the Vietnamese cause. Adamson views this as a result of a meeting 
with Ho Chi Minh that left him struck by the Vietnamese leader's 
"simplicity and candor". All through the 1960s Greene shifted ever more 
increasingly to the left, so much so that by 1979 he would state that "I 
would go to almost any length to put my feeble twig in American foreign 
policy."

The US was certainly not inclined to view his efforts as feeble since 
ocuments obtained by the Guardian newspaper under the US Freedom of 
Information Act "disclose how officials in Washington went to 
extraordinary lengths to compile secret reports on the distinguished 
novelist over 40 years as he travelled the world in support of anti-US 
causes." They add:

He was monitored when he stayed up talking to Fidel Castro until five in 
the morning, as well as when he and Yoko Ono heard actor Kris 
Kristofferson "eschewing women and whiskey to discuss God, war and peace".

It might be useful to conclude this review with Ernest Mandel's 
description of Graham Greene's remarkable political voyage in his 
"Delightful Murder: a Social History of the Crime Story":

        The biography of Graham Greene offers a striking illustration of this 
evolution, as seen through his novels. Greene started out as a 
conservative agent of the British intelligence services, upholding such 
reactionary causes as the struggle of the Catholic Church against the 
Mexican revolution (The Power and the Glory, 1940), and arguing the 
necessary merciful function of religion in a context Of human misery 
(Brighton Rock, 1938; The Heart of the Matter, 1948).

        However, the better he came to know the socio-political realities of 
the third world where he was operating, and the more directly he came to 
be confronted by the rising tide of revolution in those countries, the 
more his doubts regarding the imperialist cause grew, and the more his 
novels shifted away from any identification with the latter. In Our Man 
in Havana (1958), he was still only poking fun at the imperialist spy 
establishment. But whereas Greene had been extremely hostile to the 
Malayan and Kenyan guerrilla fighters, his attitude began to change in 
Vietnam (The Quiet American, 1955) and, as he described in his 
autobiography (Ways of Escape, 1980), hardened still further in an 
anti-imperialist direction in Zaire {A Burnt-Out Case, 1961), Haiti (The 
Comedians, 1964), Paraguay (The Honorary Consul, 1973), and South Africa 
(The Human Factor, 1978). This evolution culminated in his eloquent 
denunciation of the real-life interpenetration between gangsterism and 
the public authorities (including the judiciary) in the Nice region of 
southern France, in his latest book J'Accuse  banned in France by the 
'socialist' government of Mitterrand and Mauroy.

  full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Quiet_American.htm

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