The Human Factor : Graham Greene

The human of fiction

You cannot separate literature from human condition. Skilful writers give words to the story that we call life. I cannot recall one great work of fiction that is divorced from life. Rather, the more elaborate the association, richer is the story.

Spy fiction, a genre of literature, has espionage as its major context, around which is woven the plot. It came of age in early twentieth century – an era of major conflicts among foremost world-powers.

Espionage, the machinations of state-craft in international relations, appears distant from the run-of-the-mill vicissitudes that make the life of a common man. Ian Fleming, who had worked in the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, was the most celebrated writer of this genre. James Bond, Fleming’s prodigiously popular protagonist, is farther from a real person, than Paneer Manchurian is from a Chinese dish. Fleming’s novels are as much about the life of their characters as mythology is about history.

Realistic spy story began, perhaps, with the Ashenden stories of Somerset Maugham. Maugham had served in MI6 in first world war. After the war he published a set of stories featuring Ashenden, a writer by profession, who is recruited by British Intelligence as an agent. Stories were apparently, quite realistic. Winston Churchill severely criticised Maugham for breaching the British Official Secret Act, and Maugham burned the original drafts of 16 Ashenden stories. In preface to the collection of these stories, which he published many years later, Maugham wrote, ‘This book is founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction.’ Maugham eschewed melodrama and histrionics that are staple of the popular spy fiction. He added in the preface, ‘The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless, the author has to make it coherent, dramatic and probable.’

Later, writers like Graham Greene, Len Deighton, and John Le Carre, followed in Maugham’s steps, and wrote a string of memorable spy novels.

 

Espionage novels comprise a significant portion of Graham Greene’s oeuvre: The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Quite American, The Human Factor, among others. All these books sensitively deal with the moral ambiguities, betrayal, and human frailty in the background of political drama and intrigues. These novels seamlessly blend with the literary fiction of Greene. Ironically Greene himself disparaged his spy books by calling them ‘entertainments’ against others that he considered ‘serious’ work. This may be true of some like Stamboul Train, but rest are among his finest.

The Human Factor is not among Greene’s most popular books. I read it a few decades ago. I had discovered Greene around this time and had tripped headlong for his concise, witty, and understated prose. I had read The Human Factor under this spell. I liked it immensely, and found it one of his best. I read it again some weeks back. I was delighted to note that my earlier appraisal of the book was not addled by my adoration of the author. Novel is undoubtedly in company of his best work.

Greene was 74, when the book was published. Half a century of writing was behind him, but he was not contemplating retirement yet, for, ‘…before I could consider retiring, there was one engagement I had made with myself. My ambition after the war was to write a novel of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service. I wanted to present the Service unromantically as a way of life, … an undangerous routine, and within each character the more important private life’ – he writes in his memoir A Sort of Life.

As in all his novels, human-factor is an inseparable element of Greene’s spy novels too. But in no other espionage book does it so overwhelmingly and so vigorously pervade the soul of the story. True to his word he assiduously shunned melodrama in the novel. Spies in the book are ordinary people doing intelligence work prosaically – a nine-to-five job, that earns them their livelihood. Greene’s skilful language, his astute commentary on the workaday life that is the lot of his characters, his understated suave humour, flow unhinderedly from his mature pen. This is a work of a writer at the peak of his creative faculties.

Now, I must warn readers who intend to persevere with the essay. I cannot discuss the book further without revealing the plot. Although, there is little of it. Greene drops enough clues that one can unravel from the beginning. And it does not seem his intention was to write a thriller, but the way mundane work of spies affects their lives.

Greene had begun The Human Factor ten years before it was published. Kim Philby affair had rocked Britain around this time. In 1963, Philby, the most famous spy in the British Intelligence Service, was revealed to be a Soviet double-agent. Greene was a close friend of Philby. He feared that the novel would be ‘taken as a roman a clef’, a novel in which real persons or actual events figure under disguise. Green adds this was not true. He believed that reality constricts imagination. Maugham mirrored these beliefs when he wrote, ‘fact is a poor story-teller’.  A writer, Greene elaborates, can base only a minor character on a real person. In despair, he abandoned the novel. For years the unwritten story hung around his neck ‘like a dead albatross’. After a decade, Philby affair had slipped from the public memory. Now, he ‘found few good things’ in the words he had written many years ago and took up the book ‘reluctantly and doubtfully’.

 

Maurice Castle, the protagonist, is a 62-year-old, low-level officer in the Eastern and Southern Africa section of MI6. He has a dull job of an office-clerk, reading and responding to daily clutch of reports sent by various British overseas outposts. He bears the monotony of his insipid work-life by following his daily routine rigorously, ‘in a profession anything which belongs to an everyday routine gains great value’. He thus enjoys the pattern of his tedious life: inane conversation with his junior colleague, Arthur Davis, lunch at the same public house behind his office at the same time every day, cycling to his home from the Berkamsted station – where, everyday in morning, he leaves his cycle in the care of same ticket collector, and back home, a glass or two of J&B whisky.

In the evening, his lacklustre life is transformed to one brimming with tender joys, as he returns home to his wife and son, Sarah and Sam. He lives in a detached house in a suburb, far from his office – as if to protect the loving domesticity of his family life from the oppressive shadows of secrecy and intrigues that pervade the air of the office.

Maurice had met Sarah in South Africa when he was posted there. He was then an elderly widower; now on the verge of retirement. Sarah was many years younger. He irredeemably fell in love with her. They fled the country avoiding capture by BOSS, the South African intelligence service, by the skin of their teeth – for Sarah is black and he white, a union not permitted in South Africa then. Communist friends helped them in the escape. Maurice felt indebted to them for life. This encounter changes his future for ever. His mother used to say that he ‘always had an exaggerated sense of gratitude for the least kindness’.

Greene has portrayed Maurice’s love for his wife and her son – who is not his – with profound sensitivity. It is not an exaggeration to state that book is a story of an elderly man’s love for his young wife, his bland job as a spy, lurking in the background: ‘They lay quietly together, all these years later, only a shoulder touching a shoulder. He wondered whether this was how the happiness of old age, which he had sometimes seen on a stranger’s face, might come about, but he would be dead long before she reached old age. Old age would be something they would never be able to share.’ Greene brings out this love in exquisitely carved scenes and perfectly worded dialogues. Even the act of Sarah handing Maurice his glass of whisky suggests their deep love: ‘And now she brought it to him and closed the glass in his hand, as though it were a message no one else must read.’ Greene, after he had finished the novel, like most writers, was not sure that he had written a good book. He writes in A Sort of Life, ‘I am never satisfied with a novel, but I was more than usually dissatisfied with this one … It wasn’t as realistic a picture as I had intended, and the novel was saved only by the human factor of the title. As a love story – a married-love story of an elderly man – I think it may have succeeded’.

A leak is detected in the South African sub-section. There are only three people in it. Section-head is above suspicion. Drab Maurice Castle is far from the image of a double-agent. Colonel Daintry, head of security, describes him thus – ‘Dullish man, first-class, of course, with files … Castle is safely married, second time, his first wife’s dead. There’s one child, a house on mortgage in Metroland. Life insurances – payments up to date. No high living. He doesn’t even run to a car. I believe he bicycles every day to the station. A third class in history at the House. Careful and scrupulous’. Davis, Maurice’s assistant, a garrulous, reckless worker, unmarried at forty, fond of wine and betting on race-horses, who flirts with the beautiful office-clerk Cynthia fits the bill of a mole-in-the-service. Dr Emmanuel Percival, a high-ranking officer in the service, plans and executes a scheme of poisoning Davis.

With Davis eliminated, Uncle Remus, a covert operation by America and Britain, to further their financial interests in South Africa in collaboration with Apartheid, lands up on Castle’s desk. Maurice must make a choice now. If he passes the crucial information sought by his Soviet handlers – who befriended him on his return from Africa – he would have to forever abandon the private life  he has painstakingly built over the years. The day, years ago in Africa, when infused with love for Sarah, he accepted help of his communist friends, he knew he had willingly closed the doors to every other future, but one: ‘A man in love walks through the world like an anarchist, carrying a time bomb…’. He delivers the papers his handler has requested and sends a message that he is prepared to defect.

In The Human Factor Greene depicts how secret nature of the job mars the joys of day-to-day domestic life of the workers in intelligence service. It is a sad book. Melancholy is the ink it is written in. Through literary tool of fiction, Greene lays bare the futility of espionage, its pettiness, its inhuman ways. Maurice could never wholeheartedly enjoy Sarah’s love mired in deceptions, lies, and secrets that is his other life at work: ‘He envied men who were free to come home and talk the gossip of an ordinary office.’ He often feels suffocated when he is forced to withhold information from Sarah. This appears to sully the pure love he has for her: ‘He had at such moments an enormous temptation to trust her, to tell her everything, much as a man who has had a passing affair with a woman, an affair which is finished, wants suddenly to trust his wife with the whole sad history to explain once and for all the unexplained silences, the small deceptions, the worries they haven’t been able to share…’ In moments of exceeding frustration, he even seeks the company of his Soviet control to be relieved of the secrets clogging his mind: ‘A control was a bit like a priest must be to a Catholic – a man who received one’s confession whatever it might be without emotion’.

In the novel, Greene paints many interesting characters, other than Maurice. Colonel Daintry is a conscientious man who refuses to accept the evil, pragmatic thoughts of his colleagues. His secret work has estranged him from his wife. One tenuous connection with domesticity, he grips fearfully, is meeting his adolescent daughter, with whom he has occasional dinner. When his daughter informs that she is marrying soon, he realises that he is going to lose this last mooring too: ‘He felt like a man who was departing into a long exile and who looks back from the deck of a ship at the faint coastline of his country as it sinks below the horizon.’ Dr Emmanuel Percival is the only unreal character in the book. His cold, calculating, ruthless efficiency is at odds with the placid shopworn personality of other characters. Even Greene felt that ‘Doctor Percival was hardly a typical figure of the British Secret Service’.

In pithy descriptions Greene weaves two more interesting characters in the book: A bookshop and its owner. Maurice is fond of reading and visits a book shop regularly. Later in the story, it is revealed that books have for him other uses too. Though the bookshop is named Halliday and Son ‘the son was never seen there, only old Mr Halliday himself, bent and white-haired, wearing an air of courtesy like an old suit in which he would probably like to be buried’.  Son had another bookshop opposite it but stocked different books: Mr Halliday’s shop ‘was an unusual respectable bookshop for this area of Soho, quite unlike the bookshop which faced it across the street and bore the simple sign ‘Books’ in scarlet letters. The window below the scarlet sign displayed girlie magazines which nobody was ever seen to buy — they were like a signal in an easy code long broken; they indicated the nature of private wares and interests inside. But the shop of Halliday & Son confronted the scarlet ‘Books’ with a window full of Penguins and Everyman and second-hand copies of World’s Classics’. Greene offers sad but true commentary on reading: ‘There’s little demand today for the great writers. The old grow old, and the young – well, they seem to stay young a long time, and their tastes differ from ours.’

After defection, Maurice leads a bleak life in Russia: Cramped and cold quarters, rationed food and drinks, constant surveillance, suffocating loneliness, and an underwhelming job. For months he can not contact Sarah. This life of deprivation is singularly hard for Maurice. For, unlike Greene’s friend, Kim Philby, Maurice did not choose betrayal of his country because of an ideological alignment with communism. He was ensnared in a web that began as a favour he granted to people towards whom he felt hugely beholden. Greene reveals in his memoir that after publication he sent a copy to his friend in Moscow. Philby wrote back saying that Greene ‘had made Castle’s circumstances in Moscow, … too bleak’. In Moscow, Philby had ‘found everything provided for him. … It was true, he added, that he was a more important agent than Castle.’

Greene brings out Maurice’s anguish in exile in a short phone conversation he has with Sarah, when he is allowed one: “‘Oh, everyone is kind. They have given me a sort of job. They are grateful to me. For a lot more than I ever intended to do. … I’m not alone, don’t worry, Sarah. There’s an Englishman … He’s invited me to his dacha in the country when the spring comes. When the spring comes,’ he repeated in a voice she hardly recognised – it was the voice of an old man who couldn’t count with certainty on any spring to come.”

This story is the life of a common man, which was Greene’s aim when he set out to write the novel. It is about ‘men going daily to their office to earn their pensions’. And the ‘background much like that of any other profession – whether the bank clerk or the business director…’. It is a marvellous novel narrated in a faultless prose. Every reader can identify with the griefs and joys of living – the human-factor – that Greene evokes, mesmerizingly. If there is a better yardstick of greatness in a literary work I haven’t learnt it yet.