Read The Heart of the Matter Online
Authors: Graham Greene
The Heart of the Matter
Contents
About the Book
Scobie, a police officer serving in a war-time West African state, is distrusted, being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in doing so he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with drastic and tragic consequences.
About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on
The Times
. He established his reputation with his fourth novel,
Stamboul Train
. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in
Journey Without Maps
, and on his return was appointed film critic of the
Spectator
. In 1926 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote
The Lawless Roads
and, later, his famous novel
The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock
was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the
Spectator
. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel,
The Heart of the Matter
, set in West Africa.
As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography –
A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape
and
A World of My Own
(published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections
Reflections
and
Mornings in the Dark
. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and
The Third Man
was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in 1991.
Also by Graham Greene
Novels
The Man Within
It’s a Battlefield
A Gun for Sale
The Confidential Agent
The Ministry of Fear
The Third Man
The End of the Affair
The Quiet American
A Burnt-out Case
Travels with my Aunt
Dr Fischer of Geneva or
The Bomb Party
The Human Factor
The Tenth Man
Stamboul Train
England Made Me
Brighton Rock
The Power and the Glory
The Fallen Idol
Loser Takes All
Our Man in Havana
The Comedians
The Honorary Consul
Monsignor Quixote
The Captain and the Enemy
Short Stories
Collected Stories
The Last Word and Other Stories
May We Borrow Your Husband?
Twenty-One Stories
Travel
Journey Without Maps
The Lawless Roads
In Search of a Character
Getting to Know the General
Essays
Yours etc
.
Reflections
Mornings in the Dark
Collected Essays
Plays
Collected Plays
Autobiography
A Sort of Life
Ways of Escape
Fragments of an Autobiography
A World of my Own
Biography
Lord Rochester’s Monkey
An Impossible Woman
Children’s Books
The Little Train
The Little Horse-Bus
The Little Steamroller
The Little Fire Engine
To
V.G., L.C.G.,
and
F.C.G.
Introduction
Why not begin at the beginning?
Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond Street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in dark-blue gym smocks engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young moustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters.
It is a celebrated opening: a Flaubertian precision of detail refracted through a cinematic lens; we know at once why Graham Greene called himself ‘a film man.’ It is a style one could call commercial realism—an often powerful, sometimes melodramatic mixture of the literary and the merely efficient. In a few lines, Greene establishes the terms of his locale as usefully as any movie’s opening tracking shot. He does so with considered authorial reticence, in homage to the notion that fictional narrative should show and not tell. But what, then, is shown? First, the Bedford Hotel and Bond Street. These canonical names, with their pale loyalty to the originals, tell us that we are likely to be in a British colony. Wilson’s shorts tell us the same thing too, but they have a deeper connotation: schoolboys wear shorts. So this pale young colonial overseer, who looks down on what he rules, is less a master than a child, the white negative of the black schoolgirls he can see on the other side of the street. Indeed, Wilson’s childish knees are pressed ‘against the ironwork’ of the balcony as if confined by the ironwork of a heavy school desk. Or perhaps
more
sinisterly confined? It sounds as if these absurd knees might be imprisoned.
Greene’s first paragraph establishes not only the place but the terms of the book’s imagery: we are, it turns out, in an unnamed British colony in West Africa during the Second World War, closely based on Greene’s own experiences, in 1942–43, in Sierra Leone. Throughout the book, this closed community will be pictured as both a kind of minor boys’ boarding school and as a prison. Scobie, the book’s tormented protagonist, reflects that ‘one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony,’ rather—as is implied—as convicts measure their years inside. Later, as Greene introduces us to Scobie’s servant boy, Ali, we are told that he had been briefly in prison: ‘There was no disgrace about prison; it was an obstacle that no one could avoid forever.’
But the ‘albino’ (Scobie’s word) English, Scots, and Irish who run this colony act more like school prefects than prison warders. They anxiously finger their old school ties at the officers’ club. One of the faint gleams of comedy shines when Harris, a young and lonely officer, discovers that he and Wilson attended the same miserable minor school, Downham. Wilson writes excitedly to the old boys’ magazine,
The Downhamian
, and Greene’s morbidly good parody of Harris’s letter captures the intersection of public school jollity and mediocre, now-faded imperial romance: ‘I’m afraid I’ve been out of touch with the old place for a great many years and I was very pleased and a bit guilty to see that you have been trying to get into touch with me. Perhaps you’d like to know a bit about what I’m doing in “the white man’s grave,” but as I’m a cable censor you will understand that I can’t tell you much about my work. That will have to wait till we’ve won the war.’
Sealed by the war—letters are censored, shipping routes limited, and borders closed—Greene’s colony resembles the rat-infested closed town of Oran that Albert Camus allegorized in
The Plague
, a novel that appeared in 1947, a year before
The Heart of the Matter
. Camus’ town becomes a kind of hell, whose inhabitants, punished by plague, must work
out
their own theodicies, their own metaphysical and political explanations for what has unfairly visited them. Greene’s African colony shares with Camus’ town something of the hellish, and something of the allegorical. The local priest, Father Rank, has a laugh whose hollow clang is likened to the bell of a leper; Scobie, the Catholic sinner, keeps a broken rosary in his desk; another priest, to keep himself occupied, plays cards—the game is ‘demon.’ There are cockroaches and rats everywhere, and the humidity is so great that wounds take weeks to heal. Greene makes much symbolic use of sweat; as soon as Scobie and his wife, Louise, touch, sweat starts up. Sweat, often a mark of sexual desire or activity, painfully substitutes for the lack of it in Scobie’s loveless marriage. More than this, sweat is the body’s nasty confession, the sign that control has been lost. Louise likens her depression to fever—‘it comes and goes’—as if fever is not only an inevitability in this climate, but as if being without fever is really just a state in which one is waiting to contract it again. And, as Father Rank reminds his listeners, ‘There are more policemen in this town than meet the eye.’ Everyone is watching everyone else (and Wilson, indeed, turns out to be a spy). Gossip functions as knowledge here, and the officers’ mess is the gossip-oasis, where truths and lies meet and mingle.
Alongside this community, or hidden under it, is an alternative one—the Catholic Church. Scobie and his wife are Catholics, and of course the novel turns dramatically on the question of Scobie’s religious faith. When Scobie encounters the fat Portuguese naval captain, and seems to be about to report him for a crime, their shared religion suddenly binds them in a kind of guilty pact: ‘He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart: the whisper behind the confessional curtains: the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood … They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.’ Despite this talk of a ‘wide region,’ the novel presents, in effect, two imprisoned communities, the colony-prison and the theology-prison, the city of man and the city of God, and finds them both to be awful places, sites of torture and pain. In both the
colony
and the Catholic community there is spying (it is Father Rank, the great gossip, who knows everything beforehand); snobbery (only the Catholic believer has the capacity for damnation, apparently—it is better even to be a Catholic sinner than a non-Catholic saint); comfortless ritual (Scobie thinks of the interview between policeman and suspect as akin to that of priest and server); and imprisonment. It is never clear if the colony offers an ironic shadow-world to the religious world, or if the religious community offers an ironic shadow-world to the secular community.