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After warming up to Greene with The Tenth Man and The Quiet American I have wasted very little time figuring out what else he’s written that I should read. I know that Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, and The Power and the Glory are musts, and I also found The End of the Affair (1951) highly praised. (Please let me know if I’m missing other “musts” in this list.) The End of the Affair‘s small size pushed it up to the top of the Greene TBR pile. Interestingly, while reading it, I found myself thinking back on my recent introduction to Evelyn Waugh with his Brideshead Revisited. Further research into the matter showed that I was far from the first to make this connection. It looks like Greene himself consciously used Brideshead as a jumping off point. I guess as I continue to get to know these “Catholic” authors, this coincidence of timing could be, uh, providential?
The plot is simple. Maurice Bendrix, a novelist and the first person narrator of this novel, begins the story in the middle. “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” The moment chosen is a January night in 1946, two years after Sarah Miles inexplicably broke off her affair with Bendrix. On this night, Bendrix is walking outside when he sees Henry Miles, the cuckold, Sarah’s husband. Here is how Bendrix introduces their encounter:
If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry – I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love . . . .
Bendrix is a spiteful fellow (a mean man, as Sarah’s mother would perhaps say). Through the novel we feel his anger at all three people mentioned in that passage above, and I have to say it’s easy to see why he’s not that happy. He admittedly “measured love by the extent of my jealousy,” and yet he is convinced he was truly happy during the affair. And now, two years later, he meets Henry and discovers that Henry finally suspects that Sarah is being unfaithful to him. Confiding in Bendrix, Henry explains his despair as he thinks of his unfaithful wife. Greene’s abilities shine through here as he depicts Bendrix’s bitterness at the memory of Sarah, his jealousy of her engaging in another affair, and his hatred / spite / condescending humor toward Henry (“His questions reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive: so easy that he seemed to me almost a coniver at his wife’s unfaithfulness . . . .”)
Henry is uncertain about how to move forward. He is tempted to hire out a private investigator to trail his wife but is ashamed at the thought, mostly because it would look bad for him. Bendrix offers to hire one for him. In the meantime, Sarah returns and we get a slight sense of just how physical one of the affairs in this book is going to be:
How can I make a stranger see her as she stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs and turned to us? I have never been able to describe my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations. Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping macintosh, saying, ‘Yes, Henry?’ and then ‘You?’
With subdued acrimony, Bendrix leaves the Miles’s home. But after two years of wondering why she ended their affair, Bendrix decides to hire that private investigator (from the Savage detective agency, incidentally), ”a specialist who dealt in only one disease of which he knew every symptom.” What Bendrix uncovers gives him hope and reason to become even more bitter, perhaps eternally bitter. It brings to the fore his memories of their last days together, days that were seemingly happy ones, but it also brings Bendrix to a confrontation of the one whom she has chosen to love even as she used to hate.
The strength and limitation of the novel is not in this intriguing plot. Indeed, what I’ve relayed above almost makes this novel sound like one of Greene’s plot-moving “entertainments.” But Greene really is putting his own take on Brideshead Revisited‘s explicit rumination on religion, particularly Catholicism. None of the characters in the novel believe in God in 1939 but by the end of the novel all three have an uncomfortable inkling that he does exist. After all, how can one hate someone so profoundly if one doesn’t believe in him. I wasn’t quite expecting Greene to portray God as the ultimate antagonist in this novel; nevertheless, his characters can say, “I’ve caught belief like a disease.”
Just as this expands the scope of the novel, however, it also limits it. It felt to me that Greene was attempting so hard to bring God into the mix that other elements of the novel were lost in the mix. It was blatant and overshadowed much of Greene’s subtlety, or at least that’s how I felt. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed how Greene, in a way, used a novelist’s narrative technique to link to a philosophy on the eternities. While overall I felt that Greene deadened the potential resonating echoes this novel could have produced, there are still some passages resonating in me:
If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end.
Before you read the book:
My wife noticed that a few of my recent reads have the word “American” in the title, so when I presented her with a few of the books I was considering for my next read, she did not hesitate to choose The Quiet American (1954). I complied, and I’m glad I did. Greene is still new to me (I know, and I like to think I’m well read – this type of situation pulls me back to reality). It was only a few months ago I had my first experience with Graham Greene in his short The Tenth Man. While I liked that novel quite a lot, I was hoping for more. I got it here.
The Quiet American takes place in Vietnam in the early 1950s, not long before the French gave up their colonial dominion. America was warming up to take the baton. However, attention was still being paid primarily to Korea. From my own under-aged perspective, it doesn’t seem that Vietnam was a large worry at this point. The book appears to have been written in retrospect, a decade or two later than 1955, already knowing what was going to happen in Vietnam. As it was written in 1955, however, The Quiet American is incredibly prescient and equally devestating.
The narrator is Thomas Fowler, an older-than-middle-aged British reporter who has been in Vietnam covering the conflict between the French and the Soviet-supported Viet Minh for some years. Thomas has found a degree of contentment in cynicism and neutrality. His ability to avoid any passionate mixup in the battle is strengthened by the fact that he has a beautiful mistress named Phuong who packs his pipe with opium every night before surrendering her body to him. He would like to marry Phuong to secure her presence, but back home in England he has a wife who is staunchly Catholic. However, for the time being, his relationship with Phuong provides him with all of the satisfaction he cares for anymore, so he can distance himself – somewhat – from other conflicts.
Enter the quiet American, Alden Pyle (whom Thomas cannot call by his first name, liking the associations of Pyle too much). Pyle is that unfortunate combination of idealism and ignorance and Congressional support. He has a plan for Vietnam: defeat the Viet Minh by supporting insurgent groups (easy enough), install a leader from the insurgent group, and establish a democracy meant to quash the growth of Communism. That is eerily prescient for how things would be ten years – oh, and (astonishing), even fifty years later.
Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East, which he had known for as many months as I had years. Democracy was another subject of his – he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world.
Fowler doesn’t want to pick a side in the conflict, but Pyle honor-bound one day comes to tell Fowler that he has fallen in love with Phuong and will begin to pursue her hand (she and Fowler aren’t married, after all). It’s not just that he has fallen in love with Phuong; he has fallen in love with saving her, thinking he’s protecting her interests. Vietnam, apparently, wasn’t a good place for a virtuous woman to transition into adulthood. Fowler and Pyle have several conversations about Phuong, some amusing, all interesting (showing that the book has more to it than political intrigue – Greene’s got excellent control, style, and timing):
Suddenly I couldn’t bear his boyishness any more. I said, “I don’t care that for her interests. You can have her interests. I only want her body. I want her in bed with me. I’d rather ruin her and sleep with her than, than . . . look after her damned interests.”
He said, “Oh,” in a weak voice, in the dark.
I went on, “If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she’d rather have a good . . .” The clash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-Saxon word.
A lot younger, a lot wealthier, with no wifely baggage at home, Fowler knows Pyle has a strong chance of winning Phuong from him. After all, Fowler doesn’t delude himself into thinking Phuong loves him any more than he can provide for her needs, which he increasingly can’t.
Fowler’s weery, self-reflective tone smoothly goes from his relationship with Pyle to the ugliness of the war. Greene surprised me here. The Tenth Man was ironic, but sometimes the tone was a bit melodramatic and sentimental, particularly at the resolution. I had, with no real basis, pegged Greene as a bit of a melodramatic author. Not here. His depictions of the war and the dead are properly disturbing.
Thankfully, Greene doesn’t lapse into simple, didactic moralism to attempt to resolve this conflict or any other conflict that is going on, despite the clearly allegorical tale. On the contrary, Greene recognizes the inherent complexity and irrationality in each conflict he describes, on a global, local, and personal level. After finishing the book I watched the trailer for Phillip Noyce’s 2002 film adaptation and slapped my head and spit in spite when in just a few of the sound bites the characters reduced the layers of meaning in Fowler’s and Pyle’s relationship with Phuong and with Vietnam down to just a few simple quote. Greene, thankfully, doesn’t go so far as that, leaving the story to work a wonderful, but not a simply reducible, analogy for the involvement of Europe and America in Indo-China during this period. It made me reflect – quietly.
Before you read the book:
In the introduction to The Tenth Man (revised and published 1985, written 1940s), author Graham Greene said that in “1948 when I was working on The Third Man I seeme to have completely forgotten about a story called The Tenth Man which was ticking away like a time bomb somewhere in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in America.” He had written the story in story form as a basis for a screenplay, much like he did with other stories, but this one apparently slipped his mind. It wasn’t until 1983 that a stranger purchased the rights to the story and offered to let Greene revise it and publish it in novel (well, novella) form. With most writers I would not be excited to read a story they themselves forgot about. But from one of the best writers of the twentieth-century, I was more intrigued than put off.
This is a short novel tightly packed into four parts. The basic premise is this: thirty Frenchmen are in a German prison camp during Word War II. Among them is “a Paris lawyer called Chavel, a lonely fellow who made awkward attempts from time to time to prove himself human.”
I don’t know how much work Greene put into revising the story, but when the book began I knew I was in good hands – it was so well put together. The first small chapter introduces the characters and the prison, but it is focused on watches and time in general; the prison itself is almost incidental. Two of the prisoners, one of them a mayor, have watches and they constantly bicker about whose has the correct time. On this particular day, the mayor’s watch stops because he forgot to wind it the night before. It is incredibly amusing to read Greene’s account of the mayor’s anxiety about finding some privacy in a small prison to wind and set his watch without being noticed, and thus losing his clout as the keeper of the correct time.
But that day was marked permanently in the mayor’s mind as one of the black days of terrible anxiety which form a private calendar: the day of his marriage; the day when his first child was born; the day of the council election; the day when his wife died.
Though this is an amusing account, it is also a great vehicle Greene uses to describe the setting and mentality of the prisoners: “Prison leaves no sense unimpaired, and the sense of proportion is the first to go.”
The tone of the book changes quickly when the guards come to tell the prisoners that three of them are to be executed the next morning – the prisoners can choose for themselves who it will be. To accomplish this impossible decision the men draw lots.
Some men drew the first slip which touched their fingers; others seemed to suspect that fate was trying to force on them a particular slip and when they had drawn one a little way from the shoe would let it drop again and choose another.
They draw lots in reverse alphabetical order, so one of the last to choose is a lawyer named Chavel. It’s a great scene as we watch Chavel calculate the odds. First, 10:1. Then the first to draw chooses the marked paper, so the odds suddenly change to a comfortable 14.5:1. However, as more and more choose, the odds increasingly point to Chavel. Of course, he draws the marked paper. In a fit of anxiety Chavel offers all he has to someone willing to take his place. Surprisingly, someone accepts. Here the psychological story begins.
Philosophers say that past, present and future exist simultaneously, and certainly in this heavy darkness many pasts came to life: a lorry drove up the Boulevard Montparnasse, a girl held out her mouth to be kissed, and a town council elected a mayor; and in the minds of three men the future stood as inalterably as birth – fifty yards of cinder track and a brick wall chipped and pitted.
It seemed to Chavel now his hysteria was over that that simple track was infinitely more desirable after all than the long obscure route on which his own feet were planted.
It may seem like I’ve given away a lot of the novel, but this is merely the stage setup. The rest of the novel is concerned with that “long obscure route” that Chavel has chosen. But where most novelists would be content with this clever psychological game and would then simply show episodes where Chavel felt guilty or hollowed out, Greene explores so much more. Sure, there’s guilt and shame, but what about the possibility of love, of getting back all he signed away, of losing something even more valuable than his possessions and his life? Of having the opportunity to sink even lower?
However, the joy of this short book is in the plot and the clever writing. It’s not a nuanced look at any psychological issues, politics, or anything else really. Perhaps in preparation for filming, the scenes are basic, the characters few. But despite that, it is densely packed and feels like a novel of more substantial size. It goes without saying that if I’m this intrigued by a story that Greene forgot about, I’m in for a treat when I read the ones he didn’t almost discard.
After you read the book:
I know Graham Greene was a bit annoyed at being categorized as a “Catholic writer” rather than as a writer who happened to be Catholic, but the ending of this novel makes it hard to escape that classification. It was obvious the whole time that the book was moving toward Chavel’s redemption by death, though the path was unclear.
Sadly, for me, the ending didn’t excite me as much as the rest of the book. It was a bit too convenient for my taste. And now I’m thinking of another “Catholic” writer whose stories always moved toward redemption but whose endings were less . . . uh . . . convenient: Flannery O’Connor. Remember the ending to “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” O’Connor had the ability to execute her theme of redemption in shocking and upsetting ways. Always unexpected, her endings were perfect, both stylistically and in the context of the story. Though I loved reading The Tenth Man, I will never dwell on its resolution. It wasn’t shocking. It wasn’t strong. It is forgettable when compared to the rest of the story. And isn’t that a shame when the theme is redemption?
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