Graham Greene
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by Philip Gambone

Many years ago, I decided to read Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American with a group of American high school students whom I was teaching in Vietnam. The novel, which is set in that country during the time of increasing U.S. involvement, seemed an appropriate choice. Appropriate because there we were in the country depicted in the novel and because of Greene's critique of American foreign policy. These were the days when a liberal-minded examination of American exceptionalism was still something that a high school English teacher was allowed to bring up in class.

I loved the novel. Greene was a superb storyteller, whose work was imbued with strong character development, sharp descriptive passages, and, above all, gritty moral complexity. Rather than preach, he presented the lives of his characters in a way that raised difficult and important questions. This was not a novel that told you how to think, but one that invited you to think. A perfect book for adolescents.

Greene's output comprised about twenty novels, plus collections of short stories and novellas, autobiography, and travel books. Among his most famous and celebrated works is a novel set in Mexico, The Power and the Glory (1940), based on travels in Tabasco and Chiapas that he undertook in 1938.

The Power and the Glory takes place during the 1930s, a time of religious persecution in Mexico, when, as Greene described it in a short essay he wrote in 1940, "the churches were either destroyed or locked, where priests were forbidden to say Mass, and where the sacraments of their Faith could be taken by the people only in secret."

Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, when he was in his early twenties, and many of his novels take up a religious theme. He believed that the characters in novels should have "the solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose." Nevertheless, Greene's relationship to his adopted religion was a complicated one. He was attracted, as his biographer Michael Shelden writes, to the "powerful images, symbols and immutable laws" of Catholicism. At the same time, "for someone devoted to disloyalty, Catholicism offered endless ways to make trouble without risking any great punishment—at least on this side of the grave." Greene called himself a Catholic agnostic.

Cristero War- Execution of a priest
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When the novel opens, a local anti-Catholic regime has risen to power in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Wars. Churches have been sacked and turned into government buildings, and priests are being executed by Red Shirts, the vigilante guardians of militant secularism. Villages have been without the ministry of a priest for years.

We meet an unnamed lieutenant, who is zealously in the service of the anti-Church government. A passionate and ruthless reformer, he is a man who wants to eliminate "all that was poor, superstitious and corrupt." He is prepared "to make a massacre" for the sake of ridding the state of the influence of Catholicism. "It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God." Like all fanatical revolutionaries, the lieutenant wants "to begin the world again."

The lieutenant is intent on hunting down a renegade priest who has been on the run for five years. He is the last Catholic priest in the state, all others having fled, been murdered, or compelled to marry. Unnamed like the lieutenant, the priest is referred to simply as the "whisky priest." He is a drunkard and an adulterer who has fathered a daughter. Fear, a half a bottle of brandy, and the sense of loneliness "had driven him to an act which horrified him—and this scared shamefaced overpowering love was the result." The whisky priest sees himself as a fraud. Prayers no longer have any meaning for him, they are like "undigested food heavy in his body, unable to escape."

For a while, the priest hides out in a village, whose inhabitants reluctantly shelter him. They consider him "a troublemaker whom for obscure and superstitious reasons they preferred not to betray," even though they know that if they don't reveal his whereabouts, one of them will be shot. In fact, there isn't a village in the entire state where the priest would not pose a danger.

Laurence Olivier in a scene from the 1961 film
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Despite his depravity and "desperate inadequacy," he sees himself as forever a priest, as the servant of his flock. "Wasn't it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake, even if they were corrupted by his example?" For him, the immeasurable difference between the small, imperfect life of man and the eternal glory and mercy of God is the only thing that matters.

In the end, the lieutenant catches up with the priest. As he awaits his execution, the priest's only concern is for the safety of his daughter. "O God, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live for ever." Making a kind of confession, ticking off his sins—pride, lack of charity, a host of neglected duties—he is left with only an immense disappointment, "because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all."

In the final pages of the novel, Greene contrasts the priest's abject humility—we are meant to see that grace has saved him—with the lieutenant's cold, stubborn satisfaction in having done what he had to do. Greene, the Catholic agnostic, implies that the last-minute blessedness of the priest is infinitely greater than the lieutenant's unbending pursuit of a more just, earthly realm.

Greene's Catholicism, at least for me, is hard to swallow. It's the kind of Catholicism that preaches that human life, with all its pain, poverty, and suffering, is a mere preparation for eternity with God. "Why should we give power to the poor?" the priest asks his captor. He thinks that it's better to let the poor die, even in misery, as long as they "wake in heaven." For him there is only one thing that counts—to be a saint. The French novelist François Mauriac agreed. "What this extraordinary book shows us," he once wrote, "is the use of sin by grace."

I'm sure that, by whatever name we call it, grace may often be at work in human affairs, pushing us toward unanticipated moments of insight, repentance and peace. Moreover, I think Greene is right to show that the ideological fanaticism of the lieutenant ends up achieving more evil than good. Still, I'm inclined to side with the literary critic Morton Dauwen Zabell, who wrote that in Greene's Catholic novels—certainly in The Power and the Glory—grace descends "like a Christianized deus ex machina" to wrap everything up a bit too neatly. Greene's formula is a little too convenient. It takes us out of the realm of human drama, which, after all, is the territory all novels aim to explore, and into the realm of "salvation," which is a theological, other-world concern. We do not need to believe that we have souls "to lose or save" in order to live lives that have meaning and integrity.

Read The Power and the Glory for its strong storytelling and its portrait of a troubled time in Mexican history. And, if you are a Catholic—agnostic or otherwise—read it as a document that bears witness to the mysterious workings of God's grace. Afterwards, try The Quiet American, to my mind a far better novel all around.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarns Press and is available on Amazon, at the Aurora Bookstore, and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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