I suppose it’s inevitable that my search for novels of Christian experience should bring me back to Graham Greene. The Heart of the Matter is a novel of Christian experience with a difference. It is set in Freetown, capital of the then British colony of Sierra Leone, during the Second World War. Greene never refers to the town or the colony by name, but he mentions the Mende people and their language, covertly confirming that this is the town where he had worked as an intelligence officer during the war.
The narrative is set in the town’s expatriate community, which, like many such communities in former colonies, is small, isolated, self-obsessed, and doesn’t understand or care much about the native population. Inevitably in this setting the characters betray attitudes which, 3/4 of a century later, some readers will find distressing. But these attitudes are part of the background to the story. The main character, Scobie, stands out because he has been in the town for 15 years, loves the place and cannot imagine leaving.
Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst . . .
There are several quite detailed summaries of the narrative to be found on the Internet, and I won’t give another one here. Nonetheless, I can’t avoid mentioning some of the novel’s main events, so the reader who prefers to remain ignorant until they have read The heart of the matter should probably shut down this post now. If you do decide to read on, please don’t skip the quotations from the novel. They are there because they are incapable of summary.
Scobie’s dilemma
Greene’s command of language is magnificent. He has an unparalleled ability to bring his characters to life, to get inside Scobie’s head, and to catch the atmosphere of a place like nowhere most readers have ever been. Only in retrospect does the reader see how finely Greene weaves his story together.
Scobie is the country’s deputy-commissioner of police. He has what at first appears to be a loveless marriage that survives only through boring routine. His wife Louise dislikes the expatriate community and wants Scobie and herself to leave the colony, largely because Scobie has been passed over for promotion to police commissioner, and as a result she thinks the community despises her and her husband. Scobie feels responsible for Louise, pities her and is attentive to her needs but is unable to fulfill them on any level. Louise’s one pleasure in life is reading poetry, and Wilson, a newly arrived clerk (who turns out to be an intelligence officer), ashamed of his own love of poetry, forms a friendship with her, and quickly comes to believe that he is in love with her.
A question implicit in the novel is, What is love? Scobie regards Wilson’s feelings for Louise as a mere symptom of loneliness, whilst Wilson pours scorn on Scobie’s claim that he loves Louise, a claim that in the end turns out to be true, but not in a way the reader might imagine.
Scobie’s routine is upset by two events. Since Scobie insists on staying in the colony, Louise decides she wants to go and stay in South Africa in order to escape the town’s expatriates’ supposed whispers, and Scobie finally infringes his own principles by borrowing the fare for her voyage from Yusef, a disreputable and manipulative Syrian businessman. This perhaps is the beginning of Scobie’s downward slide. Meanwhile, Scobie has been sent to Pende, an outstation on the river separating the colony from the neighbouring French territory, now ruled by Vichy France and thus indirectly by Hitler’s Germany. A ship has been torpedoed at sea, and one of the reasons Scobie is in Pende is to supervise the British side of a transfer of its survivors across the river into British hands. They have drifted in an open boat for several weeks. Most are sick, some are dying. He spends some time in the makeshift hospital attending to the survivors, some of whom die, and his attention is drawn to 19-year-old Helen, who had been married for a month when the ship went down and she lost her husband. Scobie finds himself wanting to take care of her. This is a part of his personality. He has, after all, taken care of Louise. There is also a hint that Helen reminds him of his only child, a daughter who died many years earlier. After they return to the town, he ensures that she is comfortably, if minimally, housed, and a friendship develops between them. Scobie visits daily. They regard their friendship as “safe” because of the age difference between them, but are caught unawares by passion, and a romantic and sexual relationship begins.
What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.
Scobie tells Helen that he loves her and will never leave her. By implication, he believes that Louise has left him for good.
Louise, however, decides to return, having put her dislike of the expatriate community behind her. Her previous plaintiveness is gone. Scobie, on hearing that she is arriving soon, finds himself in a terrible quandary. Shall he tell Louise about Helen and end his marriage? Or shall he end his relationship about Helen? He finds he can do neither. When he married Louise, he had converted to Catholicism, and he has become a believer, so he cannot divorce her. He knows his relationship with Helen is adulterous, but his feelings for her and his fear of what will happen to her if he breaks his promise and leaves her are so great that he cannot break off their relationship. She asks him,
‘But I simply don’t understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?’
How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. He said, ‘You are right, of course: it ought to prevent all this. But the villagers on the slopes of Vesuvius go on … And then, against all the teaching of the Church, one has the conviction that love – any kind of love – does deserve a bit of mercy. One will pay, of course, pay terribly, but I don’t believe one will pay for ever. Perhaps one will be given time before one dies …’
During a conversation with the priest, Father Rank,
Could I shift my burden more, he wondered: could I tell him that I love two women: that I don’t know what to do? What would be the use? I know the answers as well as he does. One should look after one’s own soul at whatever cost to another, and that’s what I can’t do, what I shall never be able to do. It wasn’t he who required the magic word, it was the priest, and he couldn’t give it.
Before Louise’s return, Scobie goes to confession and admits his adultery to the priest. Louise returns, and Scobie continues his relationship with Helen surreptitiously. Then Louise asks him to come to Mass with her. He knows that before he can take the elements, he must again go to confess his adultery to his priest and seek absolution from his sin. He does so, but Father Rank asks if he is willing to repent of his adulterous relationship and end it. Scobie says he is not sure he can, and Rank declines to absolve him. Louise keeps insisting that he come to Mass with her, and on the first occasion Scobie excuses himself from having Communion, knowing that if he does so he commits mortal sin. He kneels in his seat and watches Louise and others at the altar rail:
Father Rank turning from the altar came to them with God in His hands. Scobie thought: God has just escaped me, but will He always escape? . . . It seemed to him for a moment cruelly unfair of God to have exposed himself in this way, a man, a wafer of bread, first in the Palestinian villages and now here in the hot port, there, everywhere, allowing man to have his will of Him. . . . How desperately God must love, he thought with shame. . . . suddenly Scobie was aware of the sense of exile. . . . The sense of love stirred in him, the love one always feels for what one has lost, whether a child, a woman, or even pain.
Eventually, however, out of his desire to maintain his relationship with Louise (as well as with Helen), he accompanies her to the altar rail and takes the elements, thus condemning himself to eternity in hell.
But he had no love of evil nor hate of God. How was he to hate this God who of His own accord was surrendering Himself into his power? He was desecrating God because he loved a woman – was it even love, or was it just a feeling of pity and responsibility?
On a later occasion, going for Communion with Louise,
But with open mouth (the time had come) he made one last attempt at prayer, ‘O God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them,’ and was aware of the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue.
Greene’s descriptions of Scobie’s states of mind are piercing. Scobie loves two women—in different ways, perhaps, but he loves them both and has promised himself to both. His integrity will allow him to leave neither of them, and this makes for a shocking dilemma. The way out would be to confess his adultery afresh to Father Rank, to genuinely repent and break off his relationship with Helen, and to receive absolution, but he cannot do this. So eternal hell is the only option.
This was what human love had done to him—it had robbed him of love for eternity.
By now he has decided that the hell option should be brought on sooner rather than later. That is, he decides on suicide, carefully planned to look like a natural death, so as not to burden either of his loves.
Scobie sees himself as profoundly soiled by sin (there is more to this than there is space for here). He thinks,
I can’t desert either of them while I’m alive, but I can die and remove myself from their blood stream. They are ill with me and I can cure them. And you too, God – you are ill with me. I can’t go on, month after month, insulting you.
He sees his repeated sin causing God pain. When Louise talks of Christmas Midnight Mass,
He had a sudden picture before his eyes of a bleeding face, of eyes closed by the continuous shower of blows: the punch-drunk head of God reeling sideways. . . .
‘You have only to say the word,’ he addressed God, ‘and legions of angels …’1 and he struck with his ringed hand under the eye and saw the bruised skin break. He thought, ‘And again at Christmas,’ thrusting the Child’s face into the filth of the stable. He cried up the stairs, ‘What’s that you said, dear?’
After his death, it emerges in short conversations between Louise and Wilson and between Louise and Father Rank that Louise had returned from South Africa because someone had written to her about Scobie’s relationship with Helen, but she had never confronted him with it. Wilson notices from a change in the ink that Scobie had doctored recent entries in his diary after he had written them and had been over-careful in noting his consumption of medications, so that Wilson and Louise realise that Scobie has taken his own life. The conversations reveal that Louise has no insight into the man who made an early entry into eternal damnation out of love for her. Father Rank confirms her supposition that Scobie must have known what eternity held for him, so she says, “It’s no good even praying …” but
Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and said furiously, ‘For goodness’ sake, Mrs Scobie, don’t imagine you—or I—know a thing about God’s mercy.’
‘The Church says …’
‘I know the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’
A moment or two later Father Rank says,
‘It may seem an odd thing to say—when a man’s as wrong as he was—but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.’
. . .
‘He certainly loved no one else,’ she said.
‘And you may be in the right of it there too,’ Father Rank replied.
And so Greene ends the story with a double irony. Father Rank thinks Scobie committed himself to damnation out of a love for God (but Rank is not so sure that damnation is really the consequence), and Louise thinks bitterly that Scobie loved no one except God.
Comment
Greene’s central point is perhaps summed up in the paragraph much earlier in the novel where the title phrase ‘the heart of the matter’ occurs—just once. During the Pende episode (Book 2, Part 1, Chapter 1), Scobie also has to deal with the suicide of a junior colonial official, which prefigures his own death. He meditates: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” Outside the makeshift hospital where the worst-affected survivors are receiving care, he wonders,
If one knew . . . the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?
At the end of the novel it is powerfully evident that Louise is nowhere near reaching ‘the heart of the matter’. Father Rank is a little closer. One is left wondering if Louise is so shallow that she had used the Mass as a tool with which to manipulate her husband, while for Scobie it was a matter of life or death.
Thus while Greene is clearly writing about the kind of moral dilemma a deeply believing Catholic Christian might face, he ends by pointing the reader to the sheer immensity of ever understanding the heart of any human matter. He also raises the question, What do we mean when we talk about love? And less directly, What is God’s character?
Faced with the spiritual depth that Greene depicts, it would be inappropriate to comment on the Catholicism he depicts, for two reasons. First, the novel ends on an ambiguous note in Father Rank’s response to Louise. Second, and more importantly, as a non-Catholic I have no idea whether Scobie was typical of believing Catholics when the novel was published, let alone today. But The Heart of the Matter challenges me. Do I take God seriously enough? Am I willing to accept a principle Scobie enunciates: if we knew all the facts surrounding an action, wouldn’t we almost always be willing to forgive?
- cf Matthew 26:53 ↩