Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene

Abstract

I had better begin by making my own position clear. I come of an old though not particularly distinguished Lancashire Catholic family, one that held to the faith through the Reformation and had its quota of undistinguished martyrs, was Royalist during the Civil War and hid its quota of undistinguished Royalist leaders in huts in Lancashire cloughs, and supported the Pretenders after i688. There are several such families in England, particularly in the north-west, and they have made less mark in modem Catholic literature than have the converts. There is a tendency in old Catholic families to record a number of apostasies with the coming of the days of toleration, though as Evelyn Waugh demonstrates romantically in Brideshead Revisited deathbed reconciliations are very common; with the intellectual scions of the old Catholic families the faith rarely fires the imagination as it does with new converts, even where the faith burns at all. The English Catholic novel in our own age is almost entirely a product of conversion. Of the English Catholic novelists, Graham Greene is by far the most interesting, since he is probably the least orthodox. The implied doctrines of his novels approach Jansenism, which has been repeatedly condemned by Rome. Cornelius Jansen, founder of the theological school whose most famous and brilliant adherent was Pascal, came too near to Calvinism to be orthodox: he found too much semi-Pelagianism in the 'laxist' Jesuits; he affirmed and re-affirmed the more 'rigorist' doctrines of St Augustine. In Jansen, original sin was not mere 'imputation': it expressed itself in the depravation of nature (whose order was, contrary to official teaching, distinct from the supernatural order), in appetite and in concupiscence. The horror of the natural world is one of the most fascinating aspects of Greene's fiction. Sin is not cool and intellectual matter for theological dissertations: sin is expressed in the joyless sex of Brighton Rock, with its broken toenails in the bed; the