‘Your glass, monsignor.’
‘I have asked you not to call me monsignor.’
‘Then why not call me comrade – I prefer it to Sancho.’
‘In recent history, Sancho, too many comrades have been killed by comrades. I don’t mind calling you friend. Friends are less apt to kill each other.’
‘Isn’t friend going a little bit far between a Catholic priest and a Marxist?’
‘You said a few hours back that we must have something in common.’
‘Perhaps what we have in common is this manchegan wine, friend.’
They both had a sense of growing comfort as the dark deepened and they teased each other.
(Monsignor Quixote, page 51)
Father Quixote is a good-natured Catholic priest in the sleepy town of El Toboso in the sleepy province of La Mancha in south-central Spain, jokily aware of his fictional predecessor, the great Don Quixote, who was supposed to have lived in the same area 400 years earlier.
One day he helps out an Italian bishop whose car has broken down on the main road to Madrid, giving him lunch and wine before sending him on his way. A few weeks later he is astonished to receive a letter declaring that the same bishop (back in Rome) has recommended Quixote be promoted to monsignor. His own Spanish bishop (who has never liked him much) is taking advantage of this surprise development to suggest the new monsignor Quixote is despatched to preach to a wider congregation (ie to get rid of him).
Around the same time the communist mayor of El Toboso is voted out of office and rendered unemployed. Though named Enrique Zancas, Father Quixote jokingly calls him Sancho. Over a drink or two they commiserate being ejected from their respective cosy jobs and hit on the idea of taking a prolonged holiday and going touring in Quixote’s battered old Seat 600 which he jokingly refers to as ‘Rocinante’ (after the fictional Don Quixote’s donkey).
Thus this unlikely pair find themselves motoring around rural Spain, bickering about Catholicism and communism (‘What about Stalin?’ ‘What about the Inquisition?’) and quite closely echoing the adventures of their famous fictional forebears.
Spain as land of archetypes
Greene wasn’t the first or last writer to come from a complex, industrialised, north European country and fall in love with the ‘simplicity’ of arid, backward Spain. The novel was published seven years after General Franco – the Fascist dictator who devoted his life to preserving Spain’s peasant Catholic culture – had died and little had changed. The ideological opposites of communism and Catholicism still had the kind of primeval power they enjoyed during the Civil War (1936-39) and Greene’s novel is appropriately simplistic, pitching the two mid-century ideologies against each other in a terrain denuded of most other people (apart from monks and religious processions) and almost every indication of messy, mundane 20th century life – reminiscent sometimes of the stripped-back landscapes of a Samuel Beckett play.
The impact of the modern world with its package holidays, tourist buses, industrial estates, roaring 747s, flashy sports cars, with its schools and offices and newspapers – none of that is in evidence here. Instead Sancho and Quixote drive around a Spain of the mind, visiting shrines, sleeping in the fields or cheap hotels or monasteries, all the time carrying out a kind of fifth form debate about the rights and wrongs of communism and Catholicism:
Is it better to live with faith or doubt? Is honest disbelief better than shallow faith – or vice versa? Was Torquemada worse than Stalin? Is Das Kapital a better guide to living than The Dark Night of The Soul? Is it better to read Lenin or Marx? Was it insulting of Our Lord to refer to his human flock as ‘sheep’? Was Marx a prophet like Isaiah? And, because it’s a novel about Catholicism, there are, inevitably, some rather sordid conversations about Catholic teaching on birth control (coitus interruptus versus the Rhythm Method… God these Catholics and their genitals, what a lifelong obsession: who knew there were so many activities which come under the category of ‘onanism’?) And so, charmingly, ramblingly, on…
‘Oh, you can’t beat those moral theologians. They get the better of you every time with their quibbles.’ -Enrique ‘Sancho’ Zancas (p.84)
‘Among the reflections and resolutions it is good to make use of colloquies, and speak sometimes to our Lord, sometimes to the Angels, to the Saints and to oneself, to one’s own heart, to sinners, and even to inanimate creatures…’ -St Francis de Sale, as read by Monsignor Quixote just before he goes to sleep. (p.106)
‘How happy you must be with your complete belief. There’s only one thing you will ever lack – the dignity of despair.’ -Quixote (p.112)
‘”There is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty which whispers in the ears of the believer. Who knows? Without this uncertainty how could we live?”‘ -Sancho, quoting Unamuno (p.112)
Occasionally Quixote in particular is prey to the kind of religiose self-pity which Greene made his own throughout his career:
‘I don’t pity him. I never pity the dead. I envy them.’ -Quixote (p.120)
Sometimes he envied the certitude of those who were able to lay down clear rules – [the theologian] Father Heribert Jone, his bishop, even the Pope. Himself he lived in a mist, unable to see a path, stumbling… (p.134) -Quixote
How can I pray to resist evil when I am not even tempted? There is no virtue in such a prayer… O God, make me human, let me feel temptation. Save me from my indifference. (p.141) -Quixote
He felt as though he had been touched by the wing-tip of the worst sin of all, despair. (p.182)
I believe what I told her… I believe it, of course, but how is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief? (p.197) -Quixote
The true voice of the most depressive of English writers, the poet laureate of failed suicides, ruminating on his imperfect faith at interminable length.
Part one
Sancho and Quixote’s peregrinations are modelled on those of their fictional forebears. The book is in two parts: in part one, after being introduced to the couple, we motor off with them towards Madrid, then visit:
- General Franco’s extraordinary tomb at Valle de los Caídos
- the city of Valladolid
- the city of Salamanca and the tomb of Unamuno
But as they do so a snowball of trouble grows around them. They are parked by the roadside enjoying cheese and wine and, for a joke, Quixote passes Sancho his clerical collar to try on at the precise moment some officious Guardia approach and note that the monsignor is lending a communist his Clothes. Later, at a loss while they wait for old Rocinante to be fixed at a garage, Sancho takes the innocent Quixote to the cinema for the first time. Quixote chooses to see The Maiden’s Dream, neither of them realising it is a porn film. As they emerge Sancho cracks a joke and Quixote is seen laughing and joking emerging from a porn cinema. Lastly and by far the worst, the pair are stopped again by a Guardia who warns them about a robber who’s just done a bank robbery with a gun and is in the neighbourhood. Quixote is oddly shifty and when the Guardia is gone, shows Sancho that he had encountered the robber five minutes earlier who assured him it was all a mistake. Now the robber does in fact pull a gun, makes Quixote give him his shoes and forces them to drive him to the nearby town where he disappears into the crowd. Sancho takes Quixote to a shoe shop to buy new shoes where the shop assistant notices his clerical garb and, it turns out, informs the police. By this time they have captured the robber who tells them he was helped to get away by Quixote. Late that night, after they have drunk a lot of wine and fallen asleep under the stars after their usual bicker about Stalin or Torquemada, or Faith versus Doubt, Sancho wakes up to find Quixote gone.
Part two
Quixote wakes up back in his priest’s house in El Tobaso. He has been kidnapped by the town doctor, acting under the instructions of his officious young replacement Father Herrera, himself acting under orders from Quixote’s bishop. All of them are trying to contain the scandal of a priest seen coming out of a porn cinema then helping a bank robber. Quixote is so indignant at being kidnapped then held prisoner he gets angry and insulting which confirms the priest and doctor’s belief he has gone mad. They lock him in his room. Soon Sancho turns up and with the help of Quixote’s outraged housekeeper liberate him, they clamber into Rocinante and set off on part two of their adventures.
The highlight of this is coming to a region in Galicia inhabited by lots of natives who emigrated to Mexico, made a lot of money, and have come back to dominate the countryside. Quixote is outraged at the money-grabbing corruption they have introduced to the region and interrupts a Catholic procession where the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary has been covered in dollar, franc and peseta bills, pulling it crashing to the ground. Sancho drags him away, bundles him into Rocinante and they drive full pelt for the Trappist monastery of Osera.
Just as they arrive some Guardias ambush them, pulling guns and shooting the tyres of Rocinante so she skids and crashes into the monastery wall. Sancho is mildly injured but Quixote is concussed. He is carried to bed by the outraged monks and treated by a local doctor who turn on the poor Guardias who were only obeying orders to stop the now-thought-to-be-deranged escaped priest, bank robber-protector, and religious processions attacker.
In the final scene Quixote rises from his bed in a dream, sleepwalks to the altar of the cathedral and carries out a sleepwalking Mass, witnessed by a devout monk, a sceptical visiting American academic, and Sancho, torn between love and respect for his old friend and his ancient disbelief.
Quixote places a dream Host on Sancho’s tongue, followed by dream wine, then collapses and dies. The last words describe Sancho, left haunted by his experience and (Greene the Catholic makes sure) oppressed by the dawning of the True, Deep and Terrible idea of Faith.
Why is it that the hate of man – even of a man like Franco – dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence – for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end? (p.256)
None of this rings true for me. Greene’s popularity seems to come out of the murk of the late 1930s, then the film noir 1940s and on into the Cold War of the 1950s, and his stricken landscape of flawed men aspiring to nobility and religious faith, only to be clawed down by their own weakness or the fickle hand of fate, seem very much part of the black-and-white existentialist 1940s and 50s. He is from the world of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux, an intensely serious world which can’t take a joke. To his fans he was one of the great writers of the 20th century who described the angst of the human condition in a world threatened with annihilation.
In fact the agonising over the stereotypical alternatives of Doubt or Faith which take centre stage in almost every Greene novel make me think of him as the Last Victorian, carrying the earnestness of his father, the headmaster’s, sermons forward from his Edwardian childhood into the twentieth century. ‘Doubt’ is the great Victorian theme, the core, for example, of that age’s poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Greene is his sex-obsessed, adulterous, despairing heir.
Looking back
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the Eastern bloc countries 25 years ago, almost everything written about Marx, Lenin and their great achievements became irrelevant overnight. Bang goes Sancho’s part of the couple’s numerous discussions… And almost all the Catholic side of the conversations boils down to one question, repeated in a thousand variations: Is it alright to be a bit of a doubting Catholic? Seen from 2015, both ‘sides’ of this 250-page long debate seem dustily irrelevant.
In fact, looking back from 2015 – with the planet threatened by global warming, Europe racked by what might become a permanent refugee crisis, the Middle East collapsing into chaos and spawning an endless threat of terrorist atrocities, worried by the end of the 20-year-long China boom, anxious about the fragility of the global banking system, and uneasy that everything we say, write and do is being recorded on vast, secret databanks, while the seas are poisoned, the coral reefs die out and infectious diseases develop immunity to antibiotics – these undemanding chats about two almost vanished value systems seem as remote as a pamphlet about repealing the Corn Laws. A charming memento of a lost age.
It is an odd, distinctively Greene affect that he has to put a stab or sting into even his most charming novels (as he did, unnecessarily with the equally entertaining Travels With My Aunt) as if aware of his Time magazine status as ‘writer of the century’, as if afraid of providing simple entertainment, as if conscious his fans expect some ‘deep’, ‘religious’, ‘philosophical’ message. It mars all his books. Now that the Victorian earnestness of that whole existentialist world has disappeared, it is like having a gang rape at the end of an episode of Dad’s Army. It seems wilful and inappropriate.
The movie
Greene collaborated on turning the novel into a TV movie, directed by Rodney Bennett, starring Sir Alec Guinness and Leo McKern and broadcast in 1985. This clip, from YouTube, appears to be from a VHS copy of a version dubbed into gutteral Spanish.
Credit
‘Monsignor Quixote’ by Graham Greene was published by the Bodley Head in 1982 in 1929. Page references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
Books & Boots 