The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

 

Of Sin and Virtue

Peace in life is transient. Disquiet, as one contemplates an unknown future, is inescapable.

Belief in God and practice of religion are universal attributes of humans. To most, this faith offers a support to bear the vicissitudes of life with a semblance of fortitude. In a changing world, ways of which are beyond our ken, religion with its seemingly timeless teachings and rituals, provides one stable refuge to the anguished soul. Perhaps this is why, freedom to practice the religion of their choice, is an inalienable right, guaranteed by the constitutions of all secular states.

In the early twentieth century, a brutal persecution of religion was unleashed in Mexico, in the form of a socialist revolution, by the president Plutarco Elias Calles. English novelist, Graham Greene, was commissioned by a publisher to write about this anti-clerical purge. He visited the provinces of Tabasco and Chiabas in Mexico, in the spring of 1938. His travel account was published as The Lawless Roads in UK and The Labyrinthine Ways in US.

Journey also furnished Greene with material for his most acclaimed novel, considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.

In his autobiography Ways of Escape, Greene explains how he wrote the book– ‘I had no idea, even after I had returned home (from Mexico), that a novel … would emerge from my experiences’. This was not the first novel he published after visiting Mexico. In the late 1938 England, all knew that war could come any time. Writers were worried that they would be called in army at a short notice and their families would be left without support - ‘I was struggling then through The Power and the Glory, but there was no money in the book as far as I could foresee. … So I determined to write another ‘entertainment’ as quickly as possible in the mornings, while I ground on slowly with The Power and the Glory in the afternoons.’ In a hurry to finish the ‘entertainment’, he fell back ‘for the first time and last time’ on Benzedrine. He ‘started each day with a tablet and renewed the dose at mid-day’. He wrote ‘two thousand words instead of my (his) usual stint of five hundred words’. The novel was The Confidential Agent, a progeny of Benzedrine-induced prolixity.

 

Religion is never absent from Greene’s books, only its eminence in the book varies. His most admired novels, other than The Power and the Glory, are Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of an Affair. All three have predominantly religious themes. Subject of guilt, faith, doubt, and redemption, occupy Greene’s books. But these are not the exclusive domain of religion. They are the universal preoccupation of human mind. Deluded that one is free-willed, whose actions today will decide their joys and sorrows in future, one constantly sifts through the choices life appears to offer. Unable or unwilling to countenance the role of chance – the real meaning of destiny – in their lives, one falls back on religion to resolve these insoluble dilemmas.

In Ways of Escape, Greene writes that ‘The Power and the Glory is the only novel I have written to a thesis.’ Thesis is subversion of religion. Book is the account of the oppression of religion told through the experiences of an unnamed Mexican priest. Priest is unlike the popular image of a clergyman. He is fond of worldly joys. He is addicted to a glass of brandy. He is a ‘whisky priest’ – Greene tells us in Ways of Escape that this is the name given to such priests in Mexico. In the same memoir, he writes that he was aware of the ‘thesis’ of corrupt priests, even in his childhood, - ‘I had always, even when I was a schoolboy, listened with impatience to the scandalous stories of tourists concerning the priests they had encountered in remote Latin villages’. His journey to Mexico furnished him with characters for the story, that had been with him for long.

The unnamed lonely priest is being hounded by the totalitarian state for eight years. He appears in the first chapter - ‘a small man dressed in a shabby dark city suit, carrying a small attaché case’ – as he tries to escape the accursed state (Tabasco, but unnamed) to a less intolerant border state (Chiapas, also unnamed) in a boat. Priest is a plebian, like the folks he ministers. Years of life as a fugitive have affected him – ‘He had the air, in his hollowness and neglect, of somebody of no account who had been beaten up incidentally, by ill-health or restlessness’.

Waiting for the boat, he is summoned by a boy whose mother lies dying in their village. Priest doesn’t want to miss the boat – his only chance to escape the god-forsaken country and his death – as another boat wouldn’t arrive for three weeks. But he cannot refuse the needy. ‘He knew what it meant: the ship had kept to time-table: he was abandoned.’ He is acutely aware of his desires but also his duties, - ‘He had tried to escape, but he was like the king of a west African tribe, the slave of his people’.

The struggle between priest's sinful life – as he conceives it – and his saintly duties, is the pervasive motif in the book. In his masterly understated, measured prose Greene brings out the pathos of this constant strife. He says in his autobiography, A Sort of Life, that he had known priests who were ‘driven by some inner compulsion to priesthood’, who ‘could distinguish between … the man and the office.’

State relentlessly erases all signs of religion from the country. Churches are burned and priests are banned from practicing their clerical duties. Some have escaped the state, many have been shot, and a few have given up religion, married, and live in ignominy – constantly being mocked by the society. In scene after scene, Greene brilliantly recreates the harrowing downgrade of priest’s sacramental functions, the vacuity in people’s lives, and their tenacious longing for religion.

Past relentlessly haunts the debased priest – ‘He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind – a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind; somewhere they accumulated in secret he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart’ He is now an itinerant priest. People starved of religion, flock to him, in whichever village he happens to be hiding for the moment. He delivers them the religion they covet, in a barn or their huts. His degradation complete - He often spends the little sacramental fees he collects from poor peasants to buy him brandy.

Not only is the priest a drunkard, but he has fathered a child too, in a drunken moment, spent in the company of a village woman. Watching his daughter is ‘like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him’. He cannot erase from his heart the love he feels for her. He doesn’t ‘know how to repent. … He couldn’t say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed, because the sin seemed to him so unimportant and he loved the fruit of it. He needed a confessor to draw his mind slowly down the drab passages which led to grief and repentance’. He now believes that ‘love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open – it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy’.

Years of running away from the state have impoverished not only his body, but mind too.  And he is now nearer to the religion as is perceived by his poor parishioners – ‘The simple ideas of hell and heaven moved in his brain; life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery’.

He clings to this wretched life because he knows that people need religion, - ‘When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist. Wasn’t it his duty to stay … even if they were corrupted by his example? … He was the only priest most of them had ever known – they took their standard of the priesthood from him.’

This is the tale of ideas – God, religion, good, and evil. Consequently, plot of the story is not intricate. But the pace is fast, and priest's escapades from the state read like a picaresque. Greene endows the story with an effulgent beauty through his intelligent prose that throbs with elegance and literary excellence. When a character recollects his childhood fancies and believes he can see his present life in them, Greene says, - ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. … We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere’. Hesitant boasting by a character has Greene writing, - ‘Pride wavered in his voice like a plant with shallow roots’. Tentative priest ‘sat there like a black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair’.

In the book, atheist, anti-clerical state is represented by a police lieutenant. Greene says he ‘had to invent him as a counter to the failed priest; the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives; the drunken priest who continued to pass life on’. Idealist lieutenant believes that religion is futile and has corrupting influence on the children of his country, – ‘He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth – a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose. He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes … He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.’

In his wanderings across the country, trying to escape the state that is intent on eradicating him, priest learns the hollowness of the concept of piety in religion. He sees only beauty in the common sins of his folks – ‘Such a lot of beauty. Saints only talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. … It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can’t afford to’.

A half-cast, a mestizo, who recognises the priest in a village, follows him relentlessly, and proves his Judas. He lures the priest – who has just stepped into the safe state – to return as a dying man wants to say his last confession. Priest knows that mestizo will betray him for the reward the state has announced, but he cannot refuse the wish of an individual for confession. He is fearful of death, but cannot abdicate his duty, and willingly walks into the trap - ‘He had never really believed that he would ever get back to parish work and the daily Mass and the careful appearances of piety, but all the same you needed to be a little drunk to die’.

Until his last moment, the worldly whisky-priest is ignorant about the concepts of good and bad, as his religion has taught him. He only knows that people who need religion, cannot be denied it. He tells the police lieutenant just before being shot, – ‘I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God: I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I know this – that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too. … I wouldn’t want it to be any different. I just want justice, that’s all’.

 

Is this a great religious novel? Was Greene a religious novelist?

From what I gather from his books, Greene had a torturous relation with religion. He was not convinced that world is Godless. But he often found the religious explanations of good and bad, at odds with common sense. Through the theme of religious persecution, Greene has carved an exquisite tale of human frailty and heroism. Whisky-priest is one of the most memorable characters of the twentieth-century English literature. Greene’s prose is subtle and sophisticated. It grows on you, insidiously and gradually. But the joys it proffers are matchless. One can say of it, what William Boyd wrote for John Le Carre, that it ‘enhances massively the sheer aesthetic pleasure of reading’.