The Captain and the Enemy: Graham Greene

 A treatise on Love

I bought the gracefully printed hardcover, first edition of Graham Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy, printed by Reinhardt Books of London, in August, 2010. This was Green’s last novel which he published in 1988 three years before his death at the age of 87.

A cryptic note that I wrote on the title page – I thought, then, that this gave a personal touch to my books, a practice I abandoned soon – tells me I bought it quite cheap from strandbookstall.com. Strand Book Stall, the iconic book shop, in Fort, Bombay, was started by T.N. Shanbhag in 1948 and closed down in 2018.

In last few years, I read with horror, and sadness, as similar fate visited many such legendary bookshops in other cities: Lal Advani’s bookshop in Hazrat Ganj, Lucknow, T.S. Shanbaug’s Premier Bookshop on Church Street in Bangalore, V.G. Mani’s Manney’s bookstore in the camp area of Pune. These were in business for more than half a century, established before 1947, but, I believe, could not survive the onslaught of behemoths like Amazon. I too am culpable in their demise, for, I buy all my books online.

Greene, precipitously plunges into the narrative with the first paragraph, as his measured prose sets the stage for the strange tale that follows. Reader is instantaneously transported to the Greeneland – a fictional land of distinct gloom and moral complexity.

'I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest is my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September I met the Captain for the first time. I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to an abrupt halt while my pursuers went whistling away, because there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat, a rare sight already at that date, so that he looked a little like an actor in costume – an impression not so far wrong, for I never saw him in a bowler hat again. He carried a walking-stick over his shoulder at the slope like a soldier with a rifle. I had no idea who he might be, nor, of course, did I know how he had won me the previous night, or so he was to claim, in a backgammon game with my father.'

Captain abducted Victor Baxter, the narrator, then twelve years’ old, whom he allegedly won in a game of backgammon with his father, with a daring panache.

Victor’s own father had never cared for him. His mother was fond of telling him that ‘Your father is a devil’. He called him devil since then, as did all who knew him. After the death of his mother, Devil wanted to be completely rid of the boy. He put him in a boarding school, and gave his guardianship to his aunt, a loveless, penny-pinching spinster, sister of Victor’s mother, with whom Victor spent his vacations, and who would visit him at school on the days of parent-teacher meetings. When other parents took their boys to the restaurants, Victor, with his aunt, ‘sat beside the canal and ate the sandwiches, drinking not even orangeade or Coca-Cola but hot milk out of a thermos.’

Victor was a pariah among his school mates, the perpetual butt of other boys’ jokes and cruel pranks. In his school years ‘the word ‘suffer’ meant to [him] … the splashes of ink upon [his] face … the visible sign of being an Amalekite, an outcast’. Being an Amalekite – the staunch enemies of Israelites in Hebrew bible – in Victor’s juvenile reasoning was the reason he was considered an outsider, a victim of the playground wars between the bullies and those who did not belong. But he felt, his aunt’s sandwiches and the milk, were also responsible for their hatred – ‘Somebody no doubt had spied the milk. Milk was for babies.’

Victor was happy to be taken to London. Captain took him to a decrepit basement flat and handed him over to Liza:

‘I’ve brought him’.

‘Who’.

‘Victor. But I think we’ll change all that and call him Jim.’

Victor couldn’t believe that changing his hated identity was so easy; Choosing another name.

Liza, a young woman, was the mistress of Victor’s father, who had forced her once to undergo a difficult abortion. This had left her barren. She had hankered after a child since then.

Liza was the caretaker of a rundown basement flat in London. The flat was marked for demolition and owners had put her there to guard the property from squatters. This became Victor’s new home, actually the only home he ever knew.

The first part of the novel narrates Victor’s life in Liza’s flat. The years, never mentioned explicitly, could have been the gloomy war-years in England, or the equally dismal post-war 1950s. The fudging of the chronology is deliberate – since Victor, who is now an adult, is reconstructing the tale from his memories. Memories may not be the true guide to construct the emotional life of past.

I had read the book many years back. It is not rated among Greene’s better books. I had found it exquisitely written. It had Greene’s trademark features: Concision, understated emotions, brief and witty dialogues, an all-pervading suave humour, and the bleakness of human condition underlined by the seemingly irreverent comical situations. I was disappointed to learn that critics seemed to have taken little note of it. I remembered Captain as one of the most intriguing characters I had come across in literature. I read it again a few days ago and relished each word.

Greene was enamoured of a roguish personality and wondered if one couldn’t discern a saint in many. He once chose these words from Robert Browning verse as an epitaph for all his novels – ‘Our interest is on the dangerous edge of things, The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist.’

Is Captain a thief or a messiah? ‘When you are not a good man yourself you respect a good man’, Captain told Liza once. Greene doesn’t say a word on this. Reader must decide for himself.

Captain met Liza at the Devil’s house and had cared for her since then. He won Victor in the game of backgammon, as he says, only because she so wanted a child. He looked after all her needs, and later Victor’s too.  But how? He does not live in Liza’s flat permanently but pays infrequent fleeting visits. Every time he visits Liza, he flaunts a new name: Victor, Claridge, Carver, Smith. In his absence Liza receives envelopes and his letters that are delivered by unknown men. There is cash in envelopes or occasionally a cheque payable to the bearer. There is a hint of a jewel robbery, hushed visits abroad, lying low or fleeing from police. 

Soon, after a few pages, reader realises that the he is actually reading a love story: between Captain and Liza. And about the ways of love.

Greene does not write explicitly about the love Captain and Liza share. Victor, trying to reconstruct the relation between Captain and Liza from his memory, and not knowing if what he remembers are facts or his perceptions, at an age he did not understand these emotions, offers Greene another excuse for obscurity.

‘For in his own way he was a very proud man and she had become an essential part of his pride – and a part of his timidity too. Love and fear – I know how inextricably they are linked,’ wrote Victor in his journal. He saw this timidity in Liza too. She had told him, ‘Sometimes I think he’s just too kind to live. He makes me scared’. For a time, Victor associated love with fear.

‘I’m fond of him in my way … and I’m pretty sure he’s fond of me,’ are the only expressions of this love Liza would ever admit to Victor. And Captain would say, obliquely, ‘I think … that she's a bit fond of me. In her own way of course.' It appears both, Captain and Liza, are suspicious of the word love. Even Victor is wary of the word, as he writes later – ‘To love and to like – it must have been difficult for me as a child to learn how to distinguish between the two. Even in later years when sexual desire began to play its part, I would find myself wondering, do I love this girl or do I really only like her because of the pleasure that for the time being we share?’.

Captain once took Victor for a movie. It was King Kong. Victor did not enjoy it. King Kong clambered over skyscrapers with a blond in his arms, being followed by police. The girl kicked him ceaselessly. ‘Why doesn’t he drop her’, Victor said, peeved at this unreal drama. Captain, who was keenly watching the movie, replied harshly, ‘He loves her, boy. Can’t you understand that – he loves her?’. When lights came on Victor noticed tears in Captain’s eyes.

Once, before his departure, on another of his interminable travels, Captain exhorted Victor to be around Liza always – ‘I don’t want her to feel lonely – ever. Does she speak of me sometimes?’. In his long absences Liza waited to hear the coded ring of the bell that would announce that captain had arrived. She lived in constant fear and knowledge that a day would bring her the dreaded news. She rarely left the flat. But went out every morning to fetch the Telegraph and back home scanned it surreptitiously. She believed that she may glean from it, a hint of her misfortune.

…

Victor moved out of Liza’s flat in the second part of the book. He was then, trying to work as a provincial journalist. Now, he rarely visited her. He met captain only on two or three occasions on his visits. On these occasions, Captain mostly left the flat with Victor. Liza feared for Captain as in old days and requested Victor, ‘Don’t you ever say you aren’t living here now. I don’t want him to worry about me. He has enough worries’.

Liza met with a grave accident when she had gone to the baker to buy the daily bread. When Victor visited her at the hospital, she asked him to destroy the old letters Captain wrote to her, ‘He always writes a lot of nonsense. Don’t let the Captain know that I’m here’. Liza was aware that it was extremely improbable that Captain will return soon and she knew how grave were her injuries. ‘Be kind to him. He’s always been kind to us,’ she added. Victor took the liberty of mentioning the forbidden word, ‘Does he love you?’. ‘Oh, love. They are always saying God love us. If that’s love I’d rather have a little of kindness,’ she replied.

It is when he visited the flat to retrieve Captain’s letters, he came across his notes that he had written when he was a boy. He had forgotten about them. He constructed the preceding narrative from these – ‘There had been a period in my youth when I had nursed the vain ambition to become what I thought of as a ‘real writer’ and I suppose it was then that I began this fragment’.

Letters further obfuscate in Victor's mind the nebulous relation of Liza and Captain. They were obviously written from far off lands. As usual, he was never Captain in them, except when he signed the letters – Carver in one, Cardigan in the other. He was going to make a fortune soon. ‘Everything is hunky-dory except for missing you. … You are my life, Liza, remember that. A man has to have an object for living and you are my object.’ He worried about her constantly. He was frightened that ‘one day I may harm you too like I’ve harmed the others. I’d rather die now than let it happen – but then my death might be harming you even more that my life has done’. And he was aware that he could ‘talk more easily on a bit of paper than I can with my tongue. Perhaps I ought to live in the next room to you and just write you notes’.

A recent letter enclosed a cheque from a bank in Panama to the bearer, for fifteen hundred pounds. Captain had asked Liza to fly to Panama with Victor in the earliest flight.

This was not to be. Liza was gravely sick in the hospital. Victor had not written to Captain about Liza’s accident. He encashed the cheque. Another letter arrived soon asking that Liza should hold her flight to Panama for some time. Liza died in a few days, without knowing that Captain had finally asked her to join him.

At this juncture, Victor decided that he was tired of being a hack journalist. His desire to be a writer revived. He had the money Captain had sent Liza. He corrected the account of his childhood he had found in Liza’s flat. And decided to visit Panama to complete the story – ‘One day it might find a publisher. … I shall continue it as I would a journal and who knows what conclusion I may give it when I find myself with the Captain in that unknown territory of Panama’.

…

In the third part, book changes track abruptly as Victor lends in Panama. One now enters another Greeneland, the conspiratorial world of Central American countries, a world of intrigue, where none can trust the other. CIA agents, revolutionaries, and agents of the police-state – the dictatorial regimes, roam the streets masquerading as common folk.

Victor had written to Captain to inform him about his arrival. He found a room arranged for him in a hotel. Captain, as he was in Liza’s flat, was a fleeting visitor here too, and elusive as to what he did in Panama. For a time, Victor deceived him regarding Liza’s health. In Captain’s long absences he roamed the city chaperoned by Pablo, a bodyguard, assigned by Col Martinez, the city police chief. Neither Captain, nor Pablo told him what was the danger to his life. Another strange person who befriended him, and forced his company on him was Mr Quigly – A most thin man whose ‘trousers were like a second skin. He was narrow as well – narrow shoulders, narrow hips – even his eyes were too close together. He was like a caricature in a newspaper serial’. Secretive, evasive, presumptuous Mr Quigly called himself a financial correspondent. But in whose pay? Perhaps, CIA.

Captain’s love for Liza was intact. He worried about her constantly. Every night he sat on the writing table and told Victor, ‘I always try to write to her before I sleep, even if I don’t always send the letter. When the day is finished I can forget the difficulties and think only of her’.

During a spar with Captain – who is unhappy that Victor had left Liza alone in London and wanted him to return to her – Victor threw the fact at him, ‘There’s no one to go back to. Liza’s dead’. Without waiting to look at Captain’s stricken face he bolted out of the hotel. The same day it was found that Captain was killed as he tried to fly smuggled arms to Sandinistas’ guerillas in Nicaragua.

When Victor returned to hotel, he found two letters, one addressed to him by Captain, and another addressed to Captain by Liza, her last letter to him.

Captain wrote to Victor that he was exhausted with his company. He enclosed a ticket for him to return to London. He also wrote a sort of confession of his love for Liza – ‘When I began I didn’t steal to make myself rich. It was a game, a risky game like roulette. … [stealing] was amusement enough until I saw poor Liza … I don’t know that she ever really cared much for me. She was an honest girl and I don’t think she would ever have liked to use the word love untruly. … Since then I’ve played the danger game only for her sake so that one day she might be safe when I was gone. I never took serious risks after I met Liza. … nothing bad can happen to Liza any longer, she’s free and I’m free at last. … and I can take any risk I like. … When you get this letter, go away and never come back’.

Captain was the ‘nearest thing, [Victor] had known to what [he] thought of as a father, even though [he] had never been conscious of needing a father and had done reasonably well without one’.

Though, Victor knew all the while that he counted for little in Captain’s world, the harsh tone of letter left him distraught – ‘One can hate one’s father and even though I may choose to follow in his footsteps, it will still be hate that I shall feel. Compared to Liza I was nothing to him. He looked after her till her death, but me – he has left me this unfeeling legacy of a ticket of return to a place I have left for ever and if I stay here one thing I know for sure. I shall write no more’.

Liza’s letter was short – ‘Dear Captain, I know what the doctor and the nurse are trying not to tell me, that I shall soon be dead. I’ve loved you ever since the day you came to see me with the Devil in hospital. You had lost a button off your shirt and your shoes could have done with a good clean. You were the kindest man I’ve ever known. Liza’.

Victor was astonished to learn that there had been some kind of love among the two. And he is crushed. Their love seemed more durable than all the ‘sexual interludes’ which he had, in his way, enjoyed – ‘I felt a stab of jealous pain. To have remembered that missing button through all the years of unexplained absences, this was something beyond my imagination, and I was seized with a furious sense of inferiority. I was shut out, an Amalekite again’.

…

End is as swift as the beginning. But whereas the headlong beginning is in line with the marvellously controlled prose-style of Greene, the sudden end jars. Part 3 of the book seems a standalone story, forcefully glued to the rest.

This is an exceptionally short novel of Greene, perhaps his shortest. It’s really a novella. Is this its failing? Is this the reason that it left the public and the cognoscenti cold. Graham Greene was obsessive about writing only 500 words a day. It is rumoured that he hand-counted words as he wrote and stopped mid-sentence when the daily limit was reached. In later years he reduced this to 300. I am tempted to believe that the ageing writer, at 84, did not want to commit himself to the long rigour, a novel demands.  

In his ninth decade, Greene was obviously in his top form – to have created a convincing, and moving story, from certain queer and funny facts, and caricaturist characters. Notwithstanding its failings, book is a bewitching tale of love. Greene, once again, and for the last time, delivered a captivating commentary on the bleak human condition, in his unparallelled elegant prose.