Unbelief among the Lepers

It can at times be a good thing for a reviewer, after reading a controversial book several times, to set it aside, let the story settle to the bottom of his mind, and then write down his conclusions without further reference to the book. That is what I am doing now with Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case. The burnt-out case is M. Querry, a Catholic architect who loses his faith and retreats from wordly success and a sequence of mistresses to a leper hospital in the Belgian Congo. There he uses his builder’s talent to help the Fathers and their atheist doctor to build new huts and latrines for the lepers. By this labour for his fellows he emerges in some degree from his emotional and spiritual coma, and achieves a measure of happiness; but as one could guess, in life or in a Greene story, there are several flies in the ointment.

Father Thomas, a member of the community who suffers from a kind of spiritual hypochondria, begins to plague the unfortunate Querry with a lionising friendship, and comes to the conclusion that Querry is a saint who experiences extraordinary aridity in prayer. M. Rycker, the local owner of a palm-oil factory (I think it was palm-oil) decides likewise, and persecutes Querry with discussions, completely one-sided about the love of God and the matrimonial defects of his (M. Rycker’s) immature but attractive wife. Rycker eventually shoots Querry because he comes to believe, quite erroneously, that Querry has cuckolded him. Querry is tormented also by Parkinson, a visiting English journalist, who produces a series of sensational articles about Querry’s problematical repentance and impending sanctity. Father Thomas, Rycker and Parkinson, hunt, as it were, in a pack. It is a subtle variation on Mr Greene’s favourite theme of the Hunted Man.

The atmosphere of the book is necessarily clinical, since the action centres in a leper hospital. In a sense it is an optimistic book. Hospitals are not usually places of despair. Some actual good is always being done in them. Doctor Colin, the Good Atheist, is a fountain of medicinal goodwill and commonsense. He diagnoses Querry’s complaint accurately enough – Querry has lost the pains of life and faith at the expense of mutilation – and prescribes a course of treatment. The Fathers, excluding Father Thomas, are practical tolerant men, more concerned to build dynamos than to eliminate the weaknesses of the flesh among their charges. The cheroot-smoking Superior (‘I do not try to look for motive, Doctor’) is indeed a gem, a Mogul diamond. Whatever else the book may be, it is certainly not anti-clerical.

It is in the construction of the character of Rycker that the author’s satirical genius reaches its high water mark. Rycker is a monster of devout complacency. The near-to-bedroom scenes (Rycker is never far from God or the bedroom) between him and his morally bludgeoned wife permit Mr Greene to express more pungently than any other writer could or would the tragedy of mis-mating possible within the boundaries of Catholic marriage.

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The terrible point is that Rycker, a man incapable of love, is acting superficially in accord with the intentions of the Church. Ejected from a Jesuit seminary, loaded with dry faggots of theology, he has precedent for demanding his marriage rights; he has precedent for his psychologically disastrous assertion of authority; he has precedent for the highly pitched curtain lectures on the nature and sanctity of marriage which make his young wife’s existence an echoing desert. Rycker is entirely credible. He knows his moral theology; he knows nothing whatever about the young woman he has married. Mr Greene has put his finger directly on the ulcerated area which leads to a great number of lapses from the Catholic Church; the frequent exercise of authority without love or wisdom in Catholic families. We can note with gratitude that he does not charge the clergy with the same offence. It would be prudent for his Catholic readers to re-read these passages many times, with humility rather than with acrimony. It is true that the Church recommends to her members a vocation of suffering; but she has shown no inclination to canonise her martyr-makers, the Ryckers of this world.

Madame Rycker is not so remarkable. She is a familiar Greene heroine, the somewhat awkward tear-smudged girl with a collection of childhood fetishes, midway between a madonna-figure and an irresponsible sixth-former. It is a welcome divergence from the author’s customary idealisation of such characters that he makes no attempt to prove her a saint. She is a nice enough girl; but her criminal irresponsibility in endeavouring to father her child on Querry – she loves him and would have preferred him to be its father – leads directly to Rycker’s murderous attack on him. She is at times a very nice girl; but quite capable of smashing anything or anyone to get her own way, once she had made up her mind to act. This familiar truth, first made plain in the Garden of Eden, is one which Mr Greene has been slow to recognise and express. He has been held back, one likes to think, by a measure of old-world chivalry.

A Burnt-Out Case is quite distinctly a novel, not, in Mr Greene’s terms, an entertainment. It is a novel about the loss of faith, a theme which the author has never before treated directly. Querry’s dilemma is by no means a private one. In a sense his attempt to keep it private leads to his downfall. One has to go back to The Heart of the Matter to find his prototype in Scobie, the Catholic police officer who commits mortal sin out of pity for his wife, and who commits suicide out of pity for his crucified Creator. I have noticed, hearing various people discuss The Heart of the Matter, that Scobie’s torments of conscience appear on the whole unreal to the non-Catholic, but very real to the Catholic. It is perhaps only the Catholic who can find his strongest interior motivation in the desire to have mercy on God.

Pity can be a passion, like fear or hope or anger. The passion of pity disorders Scobie’s judgment and leads him step by step to self-destruction. Querry is wiser in his relations to other people than Scobie was. He consciouslypage 469 suppresses his flare-up of pity for Madame Rycker. Significantly he does not pity Deo Gratias, his leper servant. He is prepared instead to learn from him something about innocence and happiness, albeit the happiness stems from an all-but-forgotten childhood experience.

The most remarkable single passage in the book is probably the long autobiographical fable which Querry relates to Madame Rycker in a hotel bedroom. It is the story of a King’s jeweller who begins by making Easter eggs surmounted by crosses and ends by making jewelled toads for women to wear in their navels and cloth-of-gold condoms. It is a parable on the dangers of the vocation of a Catholic artist. One can scarcely avoid the conclusion that Mr Greene intends us to see in the fictional Querry and the doubly fictional jeweller a distinct type of negative spiritual experience. Both are Catholics who find the Faith too much of a shirt of flame and withdraw in order to find new bearings. In fact Querry’s loss of faith is ambiguous. He speaks of it alternately as unbelief and ‘retirement’ – and though he strenuously resists the imputation of an absurd sanctity, he recognises a mysterious regenerative power in the company of people devoted to humane tasks. All in all, the climate of Mr Greene’s spiritual country has changed. He has ceased perhaps to be an unconscious dualist in the Catholic camp; and whatever the change may signify for him personally, it has led to the production of a profound, humane, intelligent book, with few traces of stageyness or morbidity. In many ways it is the most valuable book that Mr Greene has ever written.

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