Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgiveable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
(The Heart of the Matter, page 60)
Background
During World War II Greene was recruited by British Secret Intelligence (later MI6) and sent to Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, from 1942 to 1943, to spy on Axis activity in the region. He used this location as the setting for what many people think is his ‘finest’ novel.
Overview
This book has a completely different feel from its immediate predecessor, the ‘entertainment’ or surrealist thriller, The Ministry of Fear (1943) which was, frankly, a shambles.
The Heart of The Matter moves slowly and realistically, building up our sympathy with a handful of carefully contructed characters through an accumulation of psychological insights, and depicting the reality of the humid African setting through an accumulation of perceptive details.
He stood quietly for a while breathing in the heavy smell of the sea. Within half a mile of him a whole convoy lay at anchor, but all he could detect were the long shadow of the depôt ship and a scatter of small red lights as though a street were up: he could hear nothing from the water but the water itself, slapping against the jetties. The magic of this place never failed him: here he kept his foothold on the very edge of a strange continent. (1983 Penguin paperback edition, p.37)
The Heart of The Matter
Major Henry Scobie, ‘a squat grey-haired man’, is Assistant Commissioner of Police in the capital of the unnamed West African country, has been been there for 15 long, hot, demoralising years. Honest and upright he is therefore the target of malicious gossip and criticism. He is hard on himself, with a permanent sense of guilt for having persuaded his wife – ‘poor Louise’ – to come to this hell-hole and then doing little or nothing to gain promotion and a move away.
Their only child, a daughter, died age nine back in England. People laugh at his wife behind her back, calling her ‘Literary Louise’ and she appears to be clinically depressed, unable to get out of bed, frequently weeping and needing constant reassurance from her beloved ‘Ticki’, her nickame for Scobie. She is desperate to escape, to go to her imagined El Dorado of South Africa. They love each other and hate each other and are stuck with each other.
This miserable marriage is painted with an abundance of psychologically acute detail.
A newcomer to the colony, podgy inexperienced Wilson almost immediately ‘falls in love’ with Louise and combines clumsy attempts to seduce her with a steadily growing hatred of Scobie, especially after the older man witnesses him in several compromising situations: Wilson can’t forgive Scobie for having seen him cry.
As the novel opens, the current Commissioner retires and Scobie is passed over for promotion, adding to his wife’s misery. Scobie tries to borrow money to pay his wife’s passage to South Africa, but the bank turn him down. And he breaks all the rules by taking pity on a Portuguese merchant captain who was hiding a letter to his daughter in Germany. Scobie finds it, confiscates it, should hand it in and report the captain: instead he burns it. Scobie’s decline is made of a series of small and forgiveable transgressions like this. The heroes of Shakespeare’s tragedies are each said to have one fatal flaw. Scobie’s is his sense of pity.
Eventually, out of pity for his miserable wife, Scobie borrows £200 from the slippery Syrian mechant, Yusef and is able to despatch Louise to South Africa. But the loan, of course, has consequences. There is a rival Syrian merchant Tallit, and soon his spies are spreading rumours that Scobie has accepted bribes. Yusef pulls the trick of telling Scobie Tallit is smuggling diamonds out on the next neutral ship. When the ship is searched the diamonds are found; but slowly it emerges that Yusef planted them in order to implicate his rival. The real result is that Tallit complains to the authorities and a Colonial Administrator comes to visit for what is, although everso British and polite, in effect an interrogation of Scobie about the affair. He robustly admits his friendship with Yusef, says he knows both are liars scheming against each other, neither has bribed him etc. But his integrity has, for the first time in his career, been questioned.
The next act in this tragedy is Scobie being sent to the border with the neighbouring colony to receive the survivors of a merchant ship which has been sunk by Germans. It is a harrowing scene: they have been in an open boat for 40 days. Scobie finds himself having to pretend to be the father of a poor little boy who is on his death-bed, to give him some last moments of reassurance. Pity, again.
The whole book is like that. Although it’s about a simple adulterous affair, almost every scene seems to involve moments when the author can comment about the extremes of human experience, of life and death and pain and despair. One of the survivors is a young woman, Helen Rolt, newly married, whose husband was drowned. Once they’re shipped back to the capital Scobie makes a point of checking up on all of them but finds himself drawn to the young woman.
Book Two describes with a multitude of persuasive detail, how he slowly, painfully falls in love with this scrawny immature woman . On one visit she talks about her childhood and he finds himself speaking honestly about his feelings for the first time in years. Suddenly, without planning it, they are kissing. They sleep together. They are having an affair. So far so ordinary, so suburban.
What makes it Greene is that Scobie makes promises to look after her, to make her happy and he takes these promises with pathological seriousness. Of course the colony vultures are gathering in the shape of the jealous Wilson who, we discover, is actually some kind of spy sent out from London (a kind of ironic self-portrait by the author, who played this role in Freetown?).
The final parts of the tragedy slot into place when Scobie’s wife unexpectedly (and implausibly) announces she is returning from South Africa. She realises her mistakes, selfishness etc, things will be different this time. Well, they certainly will because instead of doing the sensible thing and chucking in the affair with Helen (which she actually suggests he do) – or splitting up with his wife and committing to Helen – he does neither and places himself in what you could call the Optimum Graham Greene position: a situation where he can revel in an orgy of despair because he has made promises to two people which he cannot keep.
Enter the Catholic Voodoo when Louise insists they celebrate her return by going to communion. Before which you must, as a Catholic, have had full and complete confession of your sins. But Scobie puts off going, then finds that he cannot properly repent. He (and the author) use the casuistry (‘a specious, deceptive, or oversubtle reasoning, especially in questions of morality’) that by breaking his promise to help Helen he will somehow be abandoning her to ‘despair’ and (pathetically) to the advances of various seedy single men in the colony. Hmm.
Either you accept that a man like Scobie feels bound by this rather silly promise even if it means his death; or you feel that Greene is contriving, just this side of plausibility, a scenario which has been designed solely to justify the very heavy freight of moralising which the last pages of the novel carry.
For in the final 30 or 40 pages Greene revels in showing us a man ‘at the end of his tether’, torn between two women to whom he has made what he regards as unbreakable vows, and forced (so he says) to lie to his God. This unleashes a torrent of ripe Greeniana:
When he came out of the [confession] box it seemed to Scobie that for the first time his footsteps had taken him out of sight of hope. There was no hope anywhere he turned his eyes: the dead figure of the God upon the cross, the plaster Virgin, the hideous stations representing a series of events that had happened a long time ago. It seemed to him that he had only left for his exploration the territory of despair. (p.222)
Thus, not properly confessed, he allows his wife to take him to Mass and to take the wafer of bread and wine in the full knowledge that, according to Catholic theology, he is damning himself to eternal hellfire. This scene is an operatic farrago of self-pity, as Scobie insists that he stay loyal to his vow to Helen, taken out of pity for her, watches the priest’s skirts moving closer with horrified clarity, feels his mouth go dry, and then makes the fatal gestures etc.
In the last sections Greene rubs Scobie’s face in the dirt.
- Out of the blue it is announced that he will be promoted to Commissioner after all ie it was all unecessary: it is what Louise wanted so he need never have sent her away, need never have been tempted and fallen with Helen etc.
- Helen herself fails to understand the sacrifice he has made for her. She doesn’t at all believe his Catholic hoodoo, saying he is free to leave her any time (as he, of course, is). Helen becomes the mouthpiece, within the text, of the sceptical reader, allowing Greene to anticipate criticisms of the situation and rebut them via Scobie.
- And finally, he comes to distrust his loyal houseboy of 15 years, Ali, and half-knowingly allows the slimy Yusef to arrange for him to be murdered in the dirty wharf at night. Finding his body drills in to Scobie’s mind the depths to which he has fallen, how evil he has become.
Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. (p.247)
He becomes, in his own mind, an infection, a disease. (Exactly the metaphor frequently used by the protagonists of the early novels and especially by the whisky priest about himself in The Power and the Glory).
I’m carrying my corruption around with me. It’s the coating of my stomach… I can’t bear to see suffering, and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out. (pp.232-3)
He foresees only one end, the ultimate sin for a Catholic, the sin of despair and the unforgiveable act of self-murder. The last pages chronicle Scobie’s methodical way of going about faking the symptoms of angina, to the doctor, to his wife, to his boss and in the diary which he knows will be examined by the coroner and insurance investigator.
O God, he prayed, his hands dripping over the wheel, kill me now, now. My God, you’ll never have more complete contrition. What a mess I am. I carry suffering with me like a body smell. Kill me. Put an end to me. Vermin don’t have to exterminate themselves. Kill me. Now. Now. Now (p.252)
There follows the hallucinatory last day and hours and minutes of the suicide as he realises he is seeing everything, saying everything, smelling and touching and feeling everything, for the last time. He bids his wife goodnight, makes his last – deliberately unfinished – entry in his diary, and takes the overdose of painkillers, collapses and dies.
Postscript
In a technique he experimented with in the early novels and perfected in The Power and The Glory, there is a postscript. And just as in Power its purpose is to undermine the protagonist’s tragedy; to set it back in the shabby everyday world; to highlight how pointless and futile it is to think that anybody can escape the relentless mundaneness of other people’s trite opinions, of our little lives.
The postscript has three quick scenes where we see:
- Louise with Wilson, telling her he loves her. There is the bombshell revelation that she knew all about Scobie’s affair with Helen all along, in fact that’s why she came back from South Africa: the entire colony knew and one of the wives wrote and told her. Wilson reads Scobie’s diary and notices the way the remarks about sleeplessness – one of hte symptoms of angina – have been written in later in a different shade of ink. He floats the thought that Scobie might have committed suicide.
- Helen with the cad, Bagster. Drunk, he tries to seduce her. Numb with loss, she lets him. In his twisted soliloquies Scobie had persuaded himself that continuing to love Helen saved her from emptiness and the attentions of the Bagsters of this world. If so, he has completely failed.
- Louise with the priest Father Rank. She’s obviously shared Wilson’s suspicion that Scobie killed himself. They begin the debates which have continued in millions of readers’ minds, in reviews and scholarly articles and books for the past 66 years: Will God forgive Scobie? Does God’s mercy supercede the laws of the Church? Did he love either of his women? Did he only love himself? Did he truly love God? and on and on, endlessly…
Critique
The Ministry of Fear was a laughable shambles of a novel: it was almost as if Greene deliberately threw together the most bizarrely surreal scenes he could conceive, along with great screeds about suicide and despair, and then set himself the challenge of pulling it all back into some shape by pretending it was a (wildly implausible) Nazi spy conspiracy thriller. It is a reckless satire on the thriller genre, with a whole vat of Catholic guilt thrown into the mix.
The Heart of The Matter is of a different order. It is a serious and sustained effort to portray contemporary characters in depth and detail. It is (rather grandly) divided, like a Victorian novel, into Books, themselves sub-divided into parts, themselves sub-divided into chapters, themselves sub-divided into short 3 or 4 page scenes. Pretty much every one of these scenes is written with thrilling power and accuracy. You could put the book down after every single one of them to savour and admire their craft and force.
The first 120 pages, or Book One, are an immensely powerful portrait of an unhappy marriage, the Scobies’ marriage. The details are so perceptive and familiar to anyone whose marriage has been through rocky patches: the timeworn rituals, the midnight reassurances, the quiet lies to bolster each other’s confidence: the way two people can torture each other and yet stick to each other, is horribly convincing.
And the creation of Wilson as the immature outsider who naively thinks he’s fallen in love with Louise Scobie, and in effect becomes a witness to the outside appearance of these details, these pained looks and furtive deceits, is masterful. And outside this three the ring of ‘others’, the various officers and officials of the colony and their bitchy wives, and the claustrophobic sense of being tightly cocooned by ever-present watchful eyes and malicious gossip, are wonderfully conveyed.
And the character of the slimy merchant Yusef who offers Scobie the bait of a loan of £200 which Scobie, with nowhere else to turn, accepts, in order to pay for his so-miserable wife to be despatched to sunny South Africa. Every scene between the knowing Scobie and the infinitely subtle Yusef are gold. In fact, scene after scene is written with tremendous psychological insight, with a terrifying precision of scene and setting, tone of voice, detail and dialogue.
Whether you accept the final conclusion to the tragedy – whether you intellectually and emotionally accept the premises which lead Scobie to his suicide – will vary from reader to reader, and from mood to mood. If you are a more emotional person or in an emotionally labile mood, then I think you will come away feeling this is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Many critics have claimed it as such.
I am a more detached, intellectual (and older) reader and, while I praise the craftmenship of many of the novel’s individual scenes, in the end I felt too manipulated to give in to the novel’s spell. Either you are ‘inside’ the fiction and feel the author’s relentless comments about pain and despair are truly telling you something about the Human Condition. Or, like me, you are ‘outside’ the fiction, can admire the professionalism and expertise of its assembly, but are immune to its emotional and psychological manipulations.
The Heart of The Matter feels like a truly great novel. Nonetheless, it still reveals the enduring weaknesses of Greene’s approach.
The plotlessness of GreeneWorld
As discussed in my previous posts about Greene, his mental landscape is one of unrelieved gloom, depression fermenting into suicidal thoughts. Freud diagnosed many mental illnesses as being essentially repetitive: the unconscious making repeated attempts to break into the conscious mind, the conscious mind erecting defences against it, a permanent gridlock which results in obsessive and compulsive patterns of behaviour or thought.
Applied to Greene’s fiction, this helps explain why his plots are so thin. His novels don’t really have plots they have predicaments – the whisky priest’s story in The Power and The Glory isn’t really a story at all, it’s a plight. Or even if one of his books does have a plot of sorts, you don’t have any sense of progress or movement by the end of the book. Everyone is still trapped. Maybe a bit trappeder. A Beckett-level of inanition and futility.
Although a plot can be extracted from Heart ie a sequence of events which propel the protagonist to his final disaster, viewed from another angle, the plight of the colonists remains much the same at the ending as it did at the start. Greene’s all-encompassing worldview of despair doesn’t really budge. On page one Wilson feels ‘intolerably lonely’. Towards the end of Scobie’s life, ‘It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before.’ (p.235) Stasis.
The developing world is an ideal setting
As with revolutionary Mexico inThe Power and The Glory, the poverty and degradation of Africa here allow Greene free rein to his gift for finding seediness, shabbiness, moral squalor and decay at every turn. Could it be that his best novels are set in the developing world because there he could indulge to the full his personal obsessions with the (to him) terrifying futility of human existence?
Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst. (p.36)
Not only do developing countries set Greene’s imagination free but his melodramatic existentialist crisis-stricken protagonists somehow seem more plausible in faraway exotic lands than they do in, say, London. They just seem rather ridiculous in a London where they take their place among the millions of people we know who just get on with their lives, most of whom are right at home in the world, thank you very much, and completely oblivious to Greene’s brand of Catholic Despair.
In Mexico, Africa, post-war Austria, Vietnam, Haiti and so on, the setting itself very conveniently justifies a sense of poverty, corruption, easy death and despair before the author even lifts a finger to create a character.
The movie
Greene was phenomenally successful in getting his novels converted into films. The Heart of the Matter took 5 years, appearing in 1953, directed by George More O’Ferrall and starring Trevor Howard and Elizabeth Allan with sterling support from young Maria Schell as Helen, creepy Denholm Elliott as Wilson, slippery Gérard Oury as Yusef, and handsome Peter Finch as father Rank.
It is an astonishingly wooden film. The blurb claims Howard gives the performance of his career but this seems to mainly consist of pushing his cap up his forehead and rolling his eyes.
As usual the medium of film strips away all the subtlety and interest of a text and omits scores of the incidental scenes which help build up the plausibility of the novel. Thus reduced to its bare bones it’s hard to see why Scobie either ends up in love with two women or is so incapable of dealing with the situation like a rational adult.
But if the first hour-and-a-half of the movie are a woodenly directed sketch of the novel, the last five minutes are a complete travesty: in the novel one of Scobie’s last and filthiest betrayals was telling Yusef that he thought Ali, his loyal boy, was spying on him and then acquiescing in what he half knew would happen, Yusef arranging for Ali to be murdered. He then proceeds to overdose on the painkillers he’s been carefully hoarding, passes out, collapses and dies.
In the movie, in a completely different ending, Scobie drives down to the docks to shoot himself but, while he cradles his loaded revolver pondering the whys and the wherefores, hears the screams of the usual night-time fights among the ‘wharf rats’ and goes running off to break it up. He is himself set upon and shot just as his faithful Ali comes running up to him. His good and faithful servant cradles Howard in his lap as he delivers the film’s last line: ‘Tell Mrs Scobie God make it alright.’ Roll credits, not a dry eye in the house.
It is a staggering indictment of the inability of film to bear witness to its literary sources or to make even the most modest gesture towards seriousness and difficulty
Credit
‘The Heart of The Matter’ by Graham Greene was published in 1948 by William Heinemann. Page references are to the 1979 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
Related links
- The Heart of The Matter Wikipedia article
- George Orwell’s famously critical review of The Heart of The Matter
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