The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene [1948]

       Evelyn Waugh's Guy Crouchback, in the war trilogy Sword of Honour (q.v.), pays a great compliment to this novel of Greene's. He is in West Africa in 1941. In 1948 he reads The Heart of the Matter and is asked "Was West Africa like that?" He replies: "It must have been like that." The evocation of time and place -- the laterite roads, the flapping of the vultures on the metal roofs, the sweat and the rain -- is done with exact economy.

       Waugh himself was unsure, however, about the theology of the book. It is about a colonial police officer named Scobie, a Catholic convert married to a cradle Catholic named Louise ("literary Louise" is what the philistines of the club call her). Louise, sick of West Africa, takes a holiday in South Africa, with money which Scobie has borrowed from an untrustworthy Syrian trader. While she is away Scobie is deputed by his chief to take care of some shipwrecked civilians, victims of a German torpedo. He falls in love with a young widow, though the motives of the unwise affair that ensues are grounded more in pity than in passion. As always happens in a British colony, the affair, despite the careful secrecy with which it is conducted, becomes common knowledge. Louise in South Africa hears about it and comes Home, though she does not disclose her knowledge. She thinks to put an end to the affair by asking Scobie to go to communion with her at Christmas. He will have to confess adultery before taking the eucharist and will, presumably, vow not to continue in the sin. But Scobie cannot condemn his young mistress to misery and loneliness. He does not repent and he makes a sacrilegious communion.

       Loving two women at the same time had damned him. He determines to cast himself out thoroughly from God by compounding sacrilege with suicide. Louise is convinced of his damnation, but the local priest, Father Rank, is not so sure. The Church, he says, knows little of the human soul: men don't go to a priest to confess their virtues. Thus the book ends on a heretical note. We cannot believe that Scobie is in hell. It is even implied, by a careful deployment of symbols, that Scobie is really a saint. Evelyn Waugh was unhappy about this and condemned the book's message from an intransigently orthodox angle, along with the Vatican itself (though Pope Paul confessed to Greene that he had read it). Aesthetically, however, Waugh considered the work to be masterly.

       It is, in fact, a work of brilliant economy, very moving -- even to non-Catholics (though my Muslim students to whom I taught the book in Malaysia thought Scobie's situation ridiculous). Casting doubt on ecclesiastical doctrine that is specifically Catholic, the novel may be considered more sectarian than universal, but it is concerned with real human dilemmas and its presentation of scene and atmosphere is altogether brilliant.

Ape and Essence

ALDOUS HUXLEY [1948]

       This brief novel was written under the shadow of Hiroshima. After the dropping of the atom bomb many writers were obsessed with the prospect of a Third World War which could not be long delayed and which would, through the employment of nuclear weapons, wipe out civilization. We have been waiting forty years for that war and it has not yet transpired; we have stopped writing novels about it. Novels like Ape and Essence seem now to be very much products of their time and rather dated. But this is Huxley -- clever, brutal, thoughtful, original -- and his fictional tract clings to the mind.

       The novel is presented in the form of a rejected film script. This shape enables the author to indulge in visual fantasy, whereby men are turned into apes and voices singing words of Goethe ("Das Ewgi-Weibliche zieht uns hinan") accompany a shot of spermatozoa wriggling into the ova. A female ape sings:

              Love love love love's the very essence

               Of everything I say, everything I do.

              Give me give me give me give me detumescence --

               That means you.

       There are no illusions about man and his high ideals. Nuclear man has reverted to the simian.

       Woven into the fantasy is a story set in Southern California after the World War which puts an end to civilisation. Worship in Belial has replaced Christianity. After all, the atom bomb is diabolic, and the devil may drop it again unless he is placated with prayer and human sacrifice. Sex is banned, except for seasonal orgies which produce hideous mutations that can be mactated in Belial's name. The heroine, who falls in love with a visiting New Zealand scientist, is considered physically normal, since she merely has supernumerary nipples. It is a nauseating vision of a still possible future and, as this is Huxley, a very full intellectual summation of man's self-damnation is put into the mouth of one of the characters -- a castrated elder of the Californian tribe. All of human history has deferred to the diabolic: as a man sows, so shall he reap.

The Naked and the Dead

NORMAN MAILER [1948]

       The British edition of this novel appeared in 1949, the same year as Nineteen Eighty-Four, and percipient critics saw that the two books had in common the theme of a new doctrine of power. Winston Smith's torturer in Nineteen Eighty-Four (q.v.) presents his victim-pupil with an image of the future -- a boot stamping on a face for ever and ever. General Cummings in Mailer's novel tells Lieutenant Hearn to see the Army as "a preview of the future", and it is a future very like Orwell's, its only morality "a power morality". He, representing the higher command, and Sergeant Croft, the lower, are fighting fascism but are themselves fascists and well aware of it. Hearn, the weak liberal who will not, despite his weakness, submit to the sadism of Cummings, is destroyed by his general through his sergeant. Cummings the strategist plans while Croft the fighting leader executes; Hearn, who represents a doomed order of human decency, is crushed between the two extremes of the new power morality.

       The narrative presents, with great accuracy and power, the agony of American troops in the Pacific campaign. A representative group of lower-class Americans forms the reconnaissance patrol sent before a proposed attack on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. We smell the hot dishrag effluvia of the jungle and the sweat of the men. Of this body of typical Americans, however, despite the vivid realization of skin, muscle and nerves, only Hearn and Croft emerge as living individuals. With the men there is an over-zealous desire to range the racial and regional gamut of the United States -- the Jew, the Pole, the Texan and so on. Mailer blocks in their backgrounds with a device borrowed from John Dos Passes -- the episodic fragmentary impressionistic flashback, which he calls "The Time Machine". This is something of a mill or grinder: it seems to reduce the pasts of all the subsidiary characters to the common flour of sexual preoccupation.

       The futility of war is well presented. The island to be captured has no strategic importance. The spirit of revolt among the men is stirred by an accident: the patrol stumbles into a hornets' nest and runs away, dropping weapons and equipment, the naked leaving the dead behind them. An impulse can contain the seeds of human choice: we have not yet been turned entirety into machines. Mailer's pessimism was to come later -- in The Deer Park and Barbary Shore and An American Dream -- but here, with men granting themselves the power to opt out of the collective suicide of war, there is a heartening vision of hope. This is an astonishingly mature book for a twenty-five-year-old novelist. It remains Mailer's best, and certainly the best war novel to emerge from the United States.

No Highway

NEVIL SHUTE [1948]

       Nevil Shute disclaimed any high literary intention in the writing of his novels. He was a no-nonsense engineer who worked on the airship R-101 and whose autobiography is entitled Slide Rule. But he had imagination, and some of his themes are enhanced by the plain style in which he wrote. Thus, In the Wet looks first at an England grown grey and spiritless with socialism and the over-levelling of a one-man one-vote universal franchise, finally transferring the British monarchy -- beset by the snarling republicans of the Left -- to Australia. In On the Beach we have another Australian narrative: the antipodes awaits the drift, from the already extinguished northern hemisphere, of the radiation sickness which is the legacy of World War III. The people of Melbourne await the end with commendable phlegm, having closed their minds to the impending disaster. This comes, however, and only Shute is there to describe it. This is the only true "close-ended" novel ever written. No character exists after the final page, but it would be cruel to suggest that no character exists before it either. The creation of living Tolstoyan personages was not Shute's strong suit. After all, he was an engineer.

       But No Highway does contain credible characters, not least the hero, a boffin who tries to persuade his unconvinced colleagues of the reality of metal fatigue in aircraft. The concept was not taken seriously at the time when the book was written, and No Highway must be looked on with awe as a rare novel that has changed not social thinking but aerodynamic doctrine. The courage of a dim disregarded theoretical engineer in sticking to convictions that are derided, his domestic life with his motherless daughter (who has the gift of extrasensory perception) and his bizarre relationship with a famous film star (one of the passengers on the fatigued plane he ruthlessly grounds) are presented with sharp humour and compassion. It is also good to have a novel so firmly based on the facts of the world of technology.

The Heat of the Day

ELIZABETH BOWEN [1948]

       No novel has better caught the atmosphere of London during the Second World War. Elizabeth Bowen conveys that drab suffering world in such intense and credible detail that it conjures sensuous and emotional memories (in any reader who knew that time and place) so heightened that one seems to be re-living them. But the novel is much more than this and it is even much more than the story of Stella Rodney, who falls in love with Robert Kelway, a man discharged from the services after Dunkirk who, wounded in body and in mind, becomes a traitor. The war crystallizes for the author the problem of where to look for assurance when a civilization breaks down. "The private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain." Stella's wartime situation -- living in a rented flat where nothing is hers and where her love affair is carried on with no sense of permanence and continuity -- is symbolic of the death of tradition. When Stella visits the Home of Robert's family, Holme Dene, she asks: "How can anyone live in a place that has for years been asking to be brought to an end?" The house is no emblem of permanency, merely a place bought to sell at a profit. The roots of Robert's treachery lie in such artificiality and impermanence. Meanwhile in neutral Ireland images of reality are to be found -- the "big houses" set in landscapes which mock human pretensions and teach man his place in nature. Holme Dean in England is set against Mount Morris in Ireland. The former, with its "swastika-arms of passages leading to nothing", grants nothing except an artificial moral sense which has replaced human compassion. Robert becomes a victim of an abstraction -- the belief that Nazi Germany represents a new order to which he can attach himself. Mount Morris, on the other hand, embodies the marriage of past and present; a tradition which transcends the self and curbs the ego, "the heated brain." This outline sounds simplistic, but the novel, with its economy and sharp elegant writing, suggests answers to the human predicament, expressed in exactly chosen symbols.

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