Graham Greene and A Burnt-Out Case

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RonPrice
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Graham Greene and A Burnt-Out Case

Post by RonPrice »

A BURNT-OUT CASE

SBS TV showed the docudrama Lamumba two nights ago, on the evening of 30 July 2010. I had never really got a handle on the events of the historical crisis associated with the legendary African leader Patrice Lamumba, events which took place when I was in my mid-teens. Lumumba is a 2000 film directed by the award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck(b. 1953). It is centred around Patrice Lumumba in the months before and after the Democratic Republic of the Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960. Raoul Peck's film is a coproduction of France, Belgium, Germany, and Haiti. Lumumba dramatises the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. In late October 1959, just days after I joined the Baha’i Faith at the age of 15, Lumumba was arrested for allegedly inciting an anti-colonial riot in the city of Stanleyville where thirty people were killed. He was sentenced to six months in prison. His name was just a news item on the distant periphery of my life, immersed as I was in a smalltown culture in the 1950s, in Ontario Canada.

The plot of this docudrama is based on the final months of the life of Patrice Lumumba in his role as the first Prime Minister of the Congo. His tenure in office lasted two months until he was driven from office in September 1960. Joseph Kasavubu was sworn in alongside Lumumba as the first president of the country, and together they attempted to prevent the Congo succumbing to secession and anarchy. The film concluded with the army chief-of-staff, Joseph Mobutu, seizing power in a CIA sponsored coup.-Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, “Lamumba,” 30 July 2010.

Graham Greene went to Belgian Congo in January 1959, just before the Congo crisis broke out, with a new novel already beginning to form in his head by way of a situation involving a stranger who turned up in a remote leper settlement for no apparent reason. While Greene was writing A Burnt-Out Case in 1959 in the months leading up to and after I became a member of the Baha’i Faith. This novel is one of those in the running for the most depressing narratives ever written. The reader only has to endure for a short time the company of the burnt-out character whose name in the novel was Querry. Greene had to live with him and in him--in his head--for eighteen months.

Greene wrote that: “Success as a novelist is often more dangerous than failure; the ripples often break over a wider coast line. The Heart of the Matter(1948) was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers, perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired. This account may seem cynical and unfeeling, but in the years between The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair(1951) I felt myself used and exhausted by the victims of religion. The vision of faith as untroubled sea was lost for ever; faith was more like a tempest in which the lucky were engulfed and lost, and the unfortunate survived to be flung battered and bleeding on the shore. A better man could have found a life's work on the margin of that cruel sea, but my own course of life gave me no confidence in any aid I might proffer. I had no apostolic mission, and the cries for spiritual assistance maddened me because of my impotence. What was the Church for but to aid these sufferers? What was the priesthood for? I was like a man without medical knowledge in a village struck with plague. It was in those years, I think, that Querry was born, and Father Thomas too. He had often sat in that chair of mine, and he had worn many faces.”

I was never much of a reader of novels,
but in the 1990s I became a teacher of
English lit to matriculants and A Burnt-
Out Case, a book Greene wrote when I
was just getting into life, and a life which
would also make me one of those burnt-out
cases. Greene’s book was on a curriculum
as I was getting near the end of a teaching
career and only beginning to discover his
perpetually grey and disturbing Greenland.1

1 Matthew Price, Sinner Take All: Graham Greene’s Damned Redemption, Book Forum, Oct/Nov 2004.
Ron Price
1 August 2010
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verbals
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Post by verbals »

I’m pleased to bump this topic; I was looking for a topic for Graham Greene, and the above post with its quote illustrating the ambivalent attitude of the author to faith is especially exemplary of the philosophy behind the books. The effect of The Heart of the Matter and it’s success and the transition to The End of the Affair and how Greene writes about faith in that astonishing story is particularly interesting.

I think of The End of the Affair, Brighton Rock and The Quiet American apart from his other work which, in those books I have read, breaks into two categories;

Entertainments;
Stamboul Train
The Confidential Agent
A Gun For Sale
Ministry of Fear

Other;
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter

And I call it other because calling them serious books is a strange if accurate descriptor; perhaps thematically serious is more appropriate (but really clumsy!)

His later books seem to be a synthesis of the two styles. Greene becomes comfortable with plot driven writing but even when he writes in the thriller genre he expands into more philosophical ideas; his ease with his own English cynicism. Cynicism is a strong term; his own experience of the world and how he copes with its oppressions and evils; how he parsesnthe world’s unacceptable nature; for instance, the use of three characters to represent Europe, America and Vietnam in The Quiet American, without this being an oversimplification; he becomes a master of the form. He somewhat defines that English attitude of standoffish objectivity when he probably is aiming to serve back to that audience emotions in a form they can cope with!

Is Greeen underestimated? If he was to be appreciated by his native audience then that would be unusual since the British try to dismiss and diminish their own culture as much as they can; From Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens onwards to the Beatles and the Stones. So in that sense why should Greene be any different? :shock:
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Emma13
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Post by Emma13 »

I'm not sure he is underappreciated by us Brits. If you go into any library, you'll find a good range of his works on the shelves. Brighton Rock, in particular, is very popular, and has been made into a couple of films over the years.

I think he can be seen as a tricky writer, both in terms of style and content. His books definitely conjure up a different time, and I wonder if some of the colonial themes in his stories are a bit, well, uncomfortable for us! His focus on religion is also something that doesn't always translate to a British audience. I tend to come away from his books feeling like there's a layer of meaning that I haven't been able to tap into, making him a fascinating writer but also quite a frustrating one.
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