Let's write about people who we will not like

One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the "Whisky Priest", in The Power and the Glory. 

A journalist and MI6 officer, Graham Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself.

The Unquiet Englishman biography braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions...

Maine Writer:  I agree with this statement by Gerald Russello:

"I knew nothing about Graham Greene’s life when I began reading his novels. Only because they were books I could not put down did I want to learn about the life of the man who had written them."

Stirring the Embers of Faith:  Let's write about Graham Green

Book review: The Unquiet Englishman: "Stirring the Embers of Faith", By Gerald J. Russello

Critics can continue to fight over the question of whether Greene was a Catholic writer or, rather, what he called himself: an author who “happened to be Catholic.”

Book review echo published in Commonweal

So, a poet friend of mine complained about the common assumption that learning the biographical details about a writer brings us closer to the quality of the work. Learning that a scene in a novel came from a real-life meeting with a Mrs. Smith in Soho or the author’s experiences in Vietnam does not inevitably make the scene more appealing, or even more intelligible. A literary biographer must establish or assume that her readers already find her subject’s writing interesting. The fact that Tolkien got bitten in a Great War trench by a large spider will be of interest only to those already interested in Shelob, from The Lord of the Rings.

As it happens, The Unquiet Englishman, Richard Greene’s sparkling new biography of Graham Greene, would have a lot of interest even if the latter were not an important writer who, twenty years after his death, still has a large audience. Graham Greene traveled widely, through Europe, Mexico, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, and the United States, and he wrote about what he saw in all those places. He worked for the British secret service during World War II, and spent a lot of time with Kim Philby, who would later turn out to be a double agent for the Soviet Union. Greene became a Catholic in 1927 in order to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, but almost from the start, he had trouble with the practical demands of Catholicism—and in particular, trouble with marital fidelity. Soon after his marriage, he began a long series of affairs, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, and he continued to support her.

“There is no understanding Greene except in the political and cultural contexts of dozens of countries,” Richard Greene writes. But he does not explicitly say that those contexts are needed to like the novels. 

I knew nothing of Graham Greene’s life when I began reading his novels. Only because they were books I could not put down did I want to learn about the life of the man who had written them. Richard Greene, a professor of English literature (and no relation to his subject), does draw out the facts behind Graham Greene’s fictions, insofar as these are available. Even more usefully, though, he discusses how the novels work together or draw on the same themes.

We learn, for example, about a dinner Greene and his wife had with T. S. Eliot in 1935. The typically tightly wound poet got to “unbutton” himself when talking about detective stories. Greene liked them too, and the following year would finish a kind of detective novel, A Gun for Sale. But Richard Greene points out that some of the themes and techniques associated with detective fiction can also be found in Greene’s following book, Brighton Rock. In both books, “he put a repulsive character at the heart of the novel and set about making him compelling.” This is biographical literary criticism at its best. 

In the Eliot story, some helpful context is provided, but more important to readers of Graham Greene’s fiction is the observation that both A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock—very different books in most ways—have the same challenge of dealing with a character a reader may not want to like.

A whole chapter of The Unquiet Englishman is devoted to the facts behind Brighton Rock. That town was apparently a rough place where murder was not infrequent. Graham Greene had spent a lot of time there and some version of the town is the setting for several of his stories. He wanted his anti-hero, Pinkie, to be a “repulsive” character whose life had “failed utterly.” 

Originally, Brighton Rock was meant to be simply another detective story, but after the first fifty pages it turns in a different direction. Pinkie marries a woman named Rose to keep her silent about a crime he has committed. Both are Catholic. Pinkie finally decides that he won’t be truly safe until Rose is dead; but, cornered by the police, he ends up killing himself before he can kill her. Rather than feeling relief at having been spared, Rose continues to feel responsible for Pinkie and vows to accompany him into the “country of mortal sin.”

Greene could have written the same story without any confusing religious issues entering into it. For nonbelievers “the country of mortal sin” means less than it does for Catholics. The priest to whom Rose speaks after Pinkie’s death refers to the “appalling... strangeness of the mercy of God,” suggesting that we cannot know whether anyone is damned, even after committing suicide. 

At one point, Pinkie says of himself “I suppose I’m real Brighton.” Greene’s “repulsive” anti-hero thus stands for an entire town, and by implication for our common humanity. If the mercy of God could reach him, whom couldn’t it reach?

Critics can continue to fight over the question of whether Greene was a Catholic writer or rather what he called himself: an author who “happened to be Catholic.” Some of his characters were good Catholics; many were not. And as Richard Greene reminds us, Graham had a lot of trouble practicing the faith he never quite abandoned. 

The late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once said about himself, “I am a failed Catholic, but still a Catholic.” Greene could have said the same thing. Though a convert, he was deeply steeped in the culture of the faith from all the time he spent in Catholic countries. 

It is hard to believe that anyone but a cradle Catholic could have come up with the “whisky priest” in The Power and the Glory, but Greene’s extensive travels in Mexico and his own struggles with Catholicism allowed him to bring that character to life and to keep him from becoming simply a theological emblem.

Toward the end of his life, Greene said, “I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything, or rather my faith tells me that death is not the end of everything and when my belief wavers I tell myself I am wrong.” 

In a letter to Fr. Albert Huerto, SJ, Greene wrote, “I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic.” The Unquiet Englishman helps us understand what that might mean. Greene was in Mexico during the suppression of the Church, and took the Church’s side in the conflict. He criticized America for its support of troops that murdered Jesuits in other parts of Latin America. The “magic” of the Church continued to hold him even when his rationality was not satisfied. Some part of him continued to believe there was more to reality than rationality.

In any case, Greene knew better than to confuse theological standards with literary standards, and he would not have wanted his novels to be read or admired as apologetic works. 

Fortunately, his best work succeeds on its own terms, and can be appreciated by non-Catholic readers as much as by his coreligionists. The psychology of Rose and Pinkie is fascinating and convincingly wrought, no matter what you think of their beliefs about the afterlife. The Unquiet Englishman is a joy to read for the light it sheds on Greene’s novels, but much of their real-life inspiration remains mysterious—which is just how Greene himself would have wanted it.

The Unquiet Englishman
A Life of Graham Greene
By Richard Greene

Let's report about religion news

Writing about religion is not a monolithic or uniform subject. In  other words, "religion news" is inclusive of spirituality and faith, as well as reporting about the challenges faced by people who choose to practice a religion, or not: 

Echo essay by Daniel Burke*, published in America Magazine, the Jesuit magazine: 

Review: Reporting on religion can be dark. But we need people on the God Beat more than ever.

When people asked me why I chose to be a religion reporter, they usually got one of two answers. One was my official response; the other was the truth.

The official response ran something like this: Religion is a force that moves billions of people, for better or worse. You can’t really understand our world without understanding religion.

That’s true, but it is not why I became a religion reporter. The real answer was more personal. I was on a quest for the truth and saw journalism as the means to a free, or at least modestly subsidized, education. I think this idea was stolen from Pete Hamill, who advised young writers in New York to apprentice in one of two story-rich fields: driving a taxi or journalism.

My plan worked at first. During my nearly 16 years as a religion reporter, including the last eight at CNN, I learned more than I could have hoped. But over time, the stories other religion reporters and I tackled grew darker: religious violence, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism; the lies, crimes and casual cruelties of the Trump administration; the rise of QAnon and demise of truth; the Catholic sexual abuse crisis; and, of course, the pandemic. 

Moreover, people’s pain, and anger and confusion seemed fathomless, institutions hopelessly self-involved and religious leaders willfully blind and enthralled by politics or fame. 

In any other era, such a beat would be challenging. For me, in our relentlessly online culture, it was deflating. By the end of my time at CNN, I was a beat reporter.

I thought about all of this while reading The God Beat: What Journalism Says About Faith and Why It Matters. The anthology of 26 essays is edited by Costica Bradatan, a religion editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a professor of humanities at Texas Tech University, and Ed Simon, a staff writer for the literary site The Millions and author of several books about religion and morality.

In their introduction, Bradatan and Simon say they are most interested in what Simon dubs New Religion Journalism, a literary movement that they argue was given life by Killing the Buddha, an online journal of religion writing for “people made uncomfortable by church.”

Like New Journalism, the movement heralded by wizard-suited Tom Wolfe in the 1970s, (and before him, by Matthew Arnold in the 1880s), New Religion Journalism prioritizes the personal, including the reporter’s subjective experience in the story. 

More importantly, argues Simon, New Religion Journalism questions the “theism/atheism” binary and displays the “full ambiguity and ambivalence of belief.”

That ambiguity is explored in Leigh Eric Schmidt’s deeply researched essay, “Monuments to Unbelief,” which guides readers on a short jaunt through 19th-century atheism and introduces characters like the miraculously named Octavius Frothingham.

In “Amma’s Cosmic Squeeze,” Erik Davis muses about the title character’s trademark gesture—a hug—as a “quietly subversive transformation of traditional South Asian worship” as he stands in a Disneyland-worthy line awaiting his sacred embrace. But Amma, who has hugged more than 26 million people, is not only about silent subversion, Davis reports: “During her massive fiftieth birthday celebration in 2003, which was inaugurated by Indian president Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, Amma cranked through a stadium full of devotees for twenty-one hours straight, while a scoreboard racked up numbers well into the five figures.”

Cool scene. But, as I said, these are dark times, and many writers in The God Beat address topics like death, hatred, abuse and decay.

In “Will Anyone Remember Eleven Dead Jews?” Emma Green ponders the paradoxical satisfactions of an archivist in Pittsburgh, who was charged with collecting artifacts from the worst anti-Semitic attack in American history. 

Likewise, Shira Telushkin’s essay, “Their Bloods Cry Out from the Ground,” is a powerful meditation about the murders in 2018, of those 11 people while they were worshiping and the task of those left behind. 

Telushkin explores the work of the chevra kadisha, the Jewish burial society charged with collecting different kinds of remains. They slipped quietly into the crime scene, scraping blood from walls and floors, burying their martyrs just as Jews have done for millennia.

The best essays in The God Beat are like this—quietly reflective, deeply informed, subjective but not solipsistic (aka "egotistical"). Instead, they combine an insider’s knowledge with an outsider’s practiced observation, transcending the limitations of both third- and first-person writing.

As a one-time Catholic, Patrick Blanchfield brings an insider-outsider perspective to his essay on the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, written in 2018, a few weeks after a grand jury report in Pennsylvania described in detail decades of soul-crushing sexual abuse committed by priests against children. Blanchfield raises a question that perhaps only an ex-Catholic would voice. Namely, is there something inherently Catholic about the Catholic abuse scandal?

“Whatever the problems of ‘society’ more broadly, it is impossible not to see in these horrors a very particular Catholic feature: tropes, however twisted, of penance, mortification, and punishment, concepts and ritual items wielded as tools of abuse,” Blanchfield writes. “These priests, in other words, did not just rape children using their hands, mouths and genitals. They also raped them using their faith.”

Prophetic advice for the victims of clergy abuse.  

Behind this rhetoric lies the force of truth. I have heard many victims of sexual abuse by clergymen recount how their abuse and lost innocence amounted to “soul murder,” as Blanchfield titles his powerful piece.

The essay reminded me of another, coincidentally published on the same day in America. Kerry Weber, an executive editor at America, wrote about the questions she pondered, as she read the Pennsylvania grand jury report while her children napped. “I have found myself truly afraid of what it means to ask and to allow my children to be part of the church,” Weber wrote.

Reporting for CNN, I had been chasing the “hard news”—counting the victims, tracking down perpetrator priests, trying (and mostly failing) to hold bishops accountable. Weber’s voice—singular, plaintive, coming from within the fold—whipped my head around. Behind all the hard news, this is what the scandal has wrought, I realized: a mother afraid to raise her children in the church she loves. And that is a story that needs to be told.

*Daniel Burke is a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. He previously covered religion for Religion News Service and CNN.