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Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Mexico
Renascence, Fall 2002 by Brennan, Michael G
1. "It is before you cross a frontier that you experience fear" (Graham Greene)
IN 1951, the year in which The End of the Affair was published, Graham Greene also contributed a five-page introduction to John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, translated by Father Philip Caraman, S.J. - a composition which passes unnoticed in the three major biographies of Greene by Norman Sherry, Michael Shelden, and W.J. West. This introduction (also overlooked by most of Greene's modern-day literary critics) may, at first sight, appear merely of incidental interest to his career as a novelist. It puts on record Greene's intense admiration for the heroism and spiritual fortitude of Jesuit missionaries, both during the brutal Elizabethan persecutions of the 1580s and during the 1920s in modern Mexico. On one level, Greene's willingness to attach his name (a potent marketing-device after the international success of The Heart of the Matter in 1948) to this translation was doubtless intended as a straightforward act of personal friendship. The translator was a respected member of an extensive London circle of Catholic literati, including Evelyn Waugh and Greene's then mistress, Catherine Walston; and the idea for a new translation of Gerard's work had come from Father Martin D'Arcy, the Provincial of the English Jesuits. However, on a deeper level, the vicissitudes of the Elizabethan Jesuit missionaries also seem to have exerted a strong emotional appeal, both heroic and spiritual, for Greene. His introduction to Caraman's translation at first casts Gerard's gripping narrative of his return to England, followed by his capture, interrogation and torture, as a kind of exciting "adventure" story. But this tone is then recast within a more somber and devotional framework: "(it would be more accurate, when we remember his narrow escapes, his disappointments and betrayals, the long terrible scene of his torture, to call it his Passion)" (vii).
This concept of delineating the "Passion" of the missionary priest is both powerful and arresting; and it is one which took firm root in Greene's creative imagination during the second half of the 1930s. A key text perhaps the most important one - in considering the formulation of this spiritual concept in his writings is Greene's first-hand account of the effects of the repression of the Catholic Church in Mexico, as recorded in The Lawless Roads (1939), a volume which is often categorized, rather flatly, as one of his major "travel" books. It seems now mainly prized either for its spectacularly vivid realizations of the oppressive landscapes of Mexico; or for its documentary relevance to the rise of Mexican socialism; or, most commonly for modern literary critics, on account of its germinal role in the inspiration of Greene's most powerful and memorable depiction of the personal agonies and "Passion" of the ordinary, flawed man through the sufferings of the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory (1940). But The Lawless Roads (and it is significant that it was compiled soon after the intense preoccupation with hell, damnation, and the elusiveness of redemption in Brighton Rock) should also be considered for the insight it offers into the development of Greene's own understanding of his personal but often doctrinally unorthodox adherence to a Catholic faith. Within the context of Greene's exploration of his own often conflicting religious emotions in his fictional writings, The Lawless Roads becomes a pivotal text, drawing together many of the preoccupations of Brighton Rock and, at the same time, preparing the author for the intense devotional potency of The Power and the Glory.
Greene himself admitted in Ways of Escape (75) and The Other Man (154-5) that, following his conversion in 1926 (motivated primarily by a desire to please his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning), his own Catholicism had hardly exceeded a dutiful formal observance of the statutory devotions. Only through his 1938 visit to Mexico (and also, to a lesser extent, in response to Franco's attack on Republican Spain), did he finally achieve a more personal and emotional engagement with what, through Brighton Rock, had already become for him the three key polarities of Catholicism: heaven and hell, love and hate, salvation and damnation. In the torrid and murderous landscapes of The Lawless Roads, an environment perfectly matched to his idiosyncratic tastes for the extremities of the human condition, Greene finally found a world which demanded from him a more intense personal engagement with Catholicism. This engagement, however, did not blend seamlessly with his initial purposes as a writer in going to Mexico. The Lawless Roads, unlike his earlier "travel" work, Journey Without Maps (1936), is distinctive for a striking unevenness of structure, at least for an overtly journalistic work which purports to have a clear documentary purpose. It opens, for example, not in South America (or even with Greene's outward voyage from Europe) but rather with a series of puzzling internalized reminiscences about Greene's school days and childhood 'fears. The first readers in 1939 of The Lawless Roads - many of whom would perhaps have been drawn to it by the success of Brighton Rock - were offered a disturbing "Prologue" which took them not to Mexico but first to the hellish landscapes of Berkhamsted School and its renowned "green baize door." This was a world in which on one side his parents' quarters, smelling of "books and fruit and eau-de-Cologne," seem to represent a calm, socially ordered middle-class England; and on the other, the lawless iodine and ink-stained schoolrooms, presided over by the bullying Collifax, become a kind of allegorical Mexico: "one was aware of fear and hate, a kind of lawlessness - appalling cruelties could be practiced without a second thought ... Hell lay about them in their infancy. There lay the horror and the fascination." But - and the relevance of this "Prologue" to the subsequent chapters of The Lawless Roads now comes into clearer focus - it is only through this schoolboy world of extremities that the author can first experience the peace and solace of what he denotes as pure "faith." Retreating into the school gardens, a kind of tainted Eden, from the fearful dichotomy symbolized by the "green baize door," the young boy finds:
