BR: The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene)

Amazon Link: The Heart of the Matter

Lietenant Scobie is a weary man, second in charge to the Commissioner of a small British colony in Africa during the second world war, he yearns for peace, for an emptiness of being… for death. His wife, Louise, is a sad, needy woman who in her own way yearns for peace and who draws heavily on Scobie’s spirit and energy. She seeks from him the love and support he is incapable of giving – arguably, that anyone is capable of giving, yet in a symbiotically dysfunctional manner her desperation gives Scobie the purpose to keep on living.

Wilson, a young officer recently posted to the coast, has his sights set on Louise after they spend an evening together over poetry and wine. Wilson is a sensitive, emotional, literary type who is neither masculine enough nor focused enough to challenge Scobie or to win Louise’s heart. He tries but serves only to embarrass himself and alienate Louise even further. Scobie intervenes, trying to bring the two together because he feels Louise would benefit from Wilson’s company, but even that fails.

When Scobie is passed up for an opportunity for Commissioner, he cares little but Louise cares a lot. She fears that she is not well thought of, that her appearance, her manner, her interest in books and poetry set her apart from the other women in the small colony. She pleads for Scobie to send her away so she may gather her thoughts. A holiday, she argues, would do them both the world of good. Scobie can’t afford to pay for his wife’s passage off the coast, let alone afford to go with her, but he promises he will make it happen. He lies and offers soothing words that calm her, but the reality is that he doesn’t have the money and has no legitimate way of getting it.

He asks for a loan, for an advance on his retirement fund, and is refused because he has drawn on it before when his daughter died and his wife fell ill. Yusef, a fat Arab businessman and renowned swindler, is Scobie’s only option. A transaction is set up, one with no strings attached, but of course there is no such thing in the colonies.

Wilson keeps close tabs on Scobie, which does little more than irritate and bemuse the older man because he has never stood in Wilson’s way, despite knowing his intentions. Scobie is a man who seeks only to see his wife happy, even if that means seeing her with another man – it would relieve him of the burden of responsibility, but Wilson is too inept and Louise too inwardly wounded for the liaison to prosper.

While Louise is away, a ship sinks at sea and a bedraggled, half-dead boat-load of survivors reaches the coast. Among them is a woman, Helen Rout, recently married and just as recently widowed. Scobie spends time at the hospital and an attraction forms between he and the much younger Helen. It burgeons into a brief affair, one which lightens Scobie’s spirit even as the guilt of adultery drags him down. Meanwhile, Scobie's interaction with Yusef is brought to the Commissioner's attention (by Wilson), and questions are raised about potential misconduct.

Louise returns, forcing an early termination of the blossoming love between Scobie and his younger lover. Though cleared of any wrong-doing or improper association with Yusef, and offered the Commissioner’s position, a ranking that carries much prestige and respect, Scobie is overwhelmed by shame at his act of adultery and turns inward. Wilson takes advantage and steps up to reveal his true feelings for Scobie’s wife.

‘That night when I got back,’ he could feel the awful immature flush expanding, ‘I tried to write some verse.’

‘What, you, Wilson?’

He said furiously, ‘Yes, me, Wilson. Why not? And it’s been published.’

‘I wasn’t laughing. I was just surprised. Who published it?’

‘A new paper called The Circle. Of course they don’t pay much.’

‘Can I see it?’

Wilson said breathlessly, ‘I’ve got it here.’ He explained, ‘There was something on the other side I couldn’t stand. It was just too modern for me.’ He watched her with hungry embarrassment.

‘It’s quite pretty,’ she said weakly.

‘You see the initials?’

‘I’ve never had a poem dedicated to me before.’

Wilson felt sick; he wanted to sit down. Why, he wondered, does one ever begin this humiliating process: why does one imagine that one is in love? He has read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust? He said with hopeless venom, ‘I love you.’ He thought: it’s a lie, the word means nothing off the printed page. He waited for her laughter.

‘Oh, no, Wilson,’ she said, ‘no. You don’t. It’s just the Coast fever.’

He then blurts out that her husband has been unfaithful, but she is unmoved. If she believes it, she gives no sign, but Scobie is already proactively self-destructing, his demise exacerbated by complications with Yusef that lead to the murder of Scobie’s servant, Ali, a young black boy who had been with him for 15 years. Only when viewing the body does Scobie realise he loved the boy and that he is (indirectly, but justly) responsible for the death. Guilt descends like a deathly veil, bringing with it a heavy perception of how God suffers for Scobie’s human failings.

Scobie thought, if only I could weep, if only I could feel pain; have I really become so evil? Unwillingly he looked down at the body. The fumes of petrol lay all around in the heavy night and for a moment he saw the body as something very small and dark and a long way away – like a broken piece of the rosary he looked for: a couple of black beads and the image of God coiled at the end of it. Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You saved me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me and I couldn’t trust you.

‘What is it, sah?’ the corporate whispered, kneeling by the body.

‘I loved him,’ Scobie said.

Though not particularly religious prior to this, he grasps at the opportunity to self-flagellate and condemns himself to death so as to relieve God, and the two women he considers he has mortally wronged, from the burden of his existence.

Before suiciding, he goes one last time to Helen, more for himself than for her, but she is not there.

I must leave some kind of message, he thought, and perhaps before I have written it she will have come. He felt a constriction in his breast worse than any pain he had ever invented to Travis. I shall never touch her again. I shall leave her mouth to others for the next twenty years. Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers: he went to an eternity of depravation. He looked for paper and couldn’t find so much as a torn envelope; he thought he saw a writing-case, but it was the stamp-album that he unearthed, and opening it at random for no reason, hhfelt fate throw another shaft, for he remembered that particular stamp and how it came to be stained with gin. She will have to tear it out, he thought, but that won’t matter: she had told him that you can’t see where a stamp has been torn out.

There was no scrap of paper even in his pockets, and in a sudden rush of jealousy he lifted up the little green image of George V and wrote in ink beneath it: I love you. She can’t take that out, he thought with cruelty and disappointment, that’s indelible. For a moment he felt as though he had laid a mine for an enemy, but this was no enemy. Wasn’t he clearing himself out of her path like a piece of dangerous wreckage? He shut the door behind him and walked slowly down the hill – she might yet come. Everything he did now was for the last time – an odd sensation. He would never come this way again, and five minutes later taking a new bottle of gin from his cupboard, he thought: I shall never open another bottle. The actions which could be repeated became fewer and fewer. Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing. He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then Hell will begin, and they’ll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You.

The saddest part about this whole book is that in the end, life goes on without Scobie. It is reprehensible that a life can be so easily lost, that an individual allowed to so deeply care for others yet to show such little compassion for himself.

Only the priest, a man who Scobie confessed to about his sins, offers a shred of understanding and compassion for a man who no-one understood.

'And at the end this--horror. He must have known that he was damning himself.'

'Yes, he knew that alright. He neer had any trust in mercy -- except for other people.'

What is the point Graham Greene was making when he wrote this book? Essays about the author suggest that he suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, lived a roller-coaster of despair that creativity helped (in some respect) to alleviate. I understand that. I think a lot of writers can. But to dismiss this work as the writings of an unhappy mind is to miss the deeper meaning.

Greene was Catholic, apparently fascinated by the interplay between good and evil, and the inner workings of a human soul. I have not been raised in a religious manner and do not understand the intricacies of religious practice, especially not of the Catholic faith with its stern obedience to ritual and God's law, but this book was very much about one man's faith and his despair in the light of what he perceived to be his faithlessness. Scobie considered himself a failure, to those who relied on him, who loved him, and especially to God. No matter what way you look at it, that's a hell of way to suffer, to so deeply believe that one's life is so bereft of worth that death is the only way to cleanse the stain from those you love.

Worse, it was all for nought in the end. Scobie thought he could save his wife from suffering by having her believe his death was accidental, but she was smarter than he gave her credit for.

I wonder whether Greene believed that death was Scobie's only option? Did he consider, when writing this work, of offering Scobie a way out, some kind of salvation? He must have, because Scobie himself considered it, he even longed for it, and he suffered for those thoughts too.

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Whatever Greene's writings and personal feelings toward the story (he hated it and idly suggests that an earlier, failed piece whose place was given to The Heart of the Matter may well have been a better work), the themes of failure are threaded strongly throughout. Each character in the novel, be it Scobie or Wilson, fails in their ultimate goals by the end of the book. Scobie's ultimate sacrifice, suicide, fails to bring the expected happiness he imagines it will to his wife and despite the fact that he tries to conceal the secret of his infidelity with that ultimate sin, the reader discovers that his wife had known all along.

Similarly, Wilson, the man who is pursuing an adulterous affair with Scobie's wife, an affair she refuses to participate in, is foiled at the end of the novel when Scobie's wife refuses to give in to his advances even after Scobie's death. Other instances of failure, both subtler and more obvious, can be seen throughout the work, lending it a muted, dark feeling.

The Heart of the Matter is not just about failure, but about the price we all pay for our individualism and the impossibility of truly understanding another person. Each of the characters in the novel operates at tangental purposes which they often think are clear to others, or think are hidden from others, but are in fact not. This is illustrated wonderfully by Scobie's attempt to hide his affair from his wife, thinking that being a policeman should give him the edge, but whose failure is evident in the following passage;

"'Did you know all the time - about her?' Wilson asked.

'It's why I came home. Mrs. Carter wrote to me. She said everybody was talking. Of course he (Scobie) never realized that. He thought he'd been so clever. And he nearly convinced me-that it was finished. Going to communion the way he did.'"

(Graham Greene, ed Philip Stratford, "The Heart of the Matter," The Portable Graham Greene. Penguin Publishing, p 301.)

This is the kind of book I'd enjoy working through in a bookclub. Do bookclubs read Graham Greene!?

Rating: ***** out of five, because it made me think.