The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene

It ought to be a source of satisfaction to British Christians that our two greatest poets of the last century, T S Eliot and W H Auden, were both Anglicans, while our two greatest novelists were Catholics – Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Why this should be so might offer a fruitful research project for someone. Is it because meaning is still a significant issue for us? Words after all demand meaning, don't they? Is it because we avoid the deadness cast over language by the positivist and materialistic epistemologies of the last era, with their hatred of metaphor, which for us is like the fingerprints of God left over his world? Is it because we see human beings as infinitely valuable to the God who created us in His image – and therefore novels about the inner workings of human beings actually matter? Is it because our awareness of transcendent values means that real tragedy, as opposed to sad and painful circumstances, is still possible?

The Heart of the Matter is a tragedy constructed along Greek lines. The protagonist Scobie shares with Othello that most ultimate of tragic dooms, his own damnation. He is spurred on to it, like Oedipus, by a fatal character flaw which compels him step by step closer to that doom. In his case that flaw is his fundamental decency. He hates letting anybody down, ultimately to the point where he would sooner damn himself eternally than cause hurt to another. The bitter irony is that this decency is itself a version of the love of the Cross, that God lays down his own life in order to save us from sin and death. For Scobie is a convinced Catholic, deeply committed to his church, its values, its theology and to his God. Scobie even debates with himself, as the option of suicide becomes gradually clearer to him, whether the cross was not itself an act of self-destruction. The act that will condemn him forever is parallel to the act that God meant to save him forever.

The two people he wants to avoid letting down are his wife Louise and his lover Helen. His love for Louise died with the loss of their young daughter soon after her first communion – presumably the daughter is in a state of grace in Catholic terms and a citizen of heaven. It gradually becomes apparent as the novel progresses that Scobie was on duty in Africa at the time of her death and could not be there in England for her or for Louise. Greene never states that the grief of this loss is the source of Scobie's deep-seated unwillingness to let anyone down ever again, but it's all the more powerful because he lets us draw our own conclusion. So this sorrow, with its overwhelming sense of the duty of protecting others from pain, has invaded the marriage and choked the love that once formed its heart. Real communication and real intimacy are no longer possible, as a series of stilted exchanges between Louise and Scobie makes clear.

His lover Helen has also just endured a deeply painful loss: the ship she was sailing on was torpedoed by the Nazis, her husband of only a few weeks was killed in the shipwreck, and she was afloat in a boat on the open sea for many weeks with others dying all around her. She is washed up with the few other survivors on the shore of the colony where Scobie is a police officer. She is vulnerable, she has lost everything, she knows no-one, there are predatory men circling… Scobie wants to protect her. She is a lot younger than he is – does he see her as the daughter he failed to protect? Or does he seem them both as comfortless victims of bereavement? Against his best intentions he finds himself in bed with her, and then he cannot pull away from the relationship without letting her down as well.

All this happens while Louise is away, no longer able to stand the morale-sapping climate of the colony and the deadness of Scobie's relationship with her. But just as Scobie's relationship with Helen is beginning to develop, there comes the news that Louise is coming back, determined to re-affirm her love and support for Scobie. Now he is cruelly caught. He cannot move forward without damaging either Louise or Helen, and he cannot live with himself if he does this.

When Louise actually returns the dilemma becomes unbearable. Louise insists they go to Mass - Scobie tries to avoid this because he is not in a state of grace, he is living with unrepented sin, and therefore to take the body of Christ is to ingest his own condemnation. Scobie tries confession, but it's hopeless. The priest points out that the sacrament is invalid if he does not repent, and repentance here means being prepared to stop sinning, not the modern version where you just feel bad about it. Scobie can't repent because that means letting Helen down. The only way out is to kill himself, but Scobie is aware of the terrible damage suicide does to everyone left behind. He has to make it look like an illness so that neither Louise nor Helen will blame themselves with the terrible guilt that attaches to everyone who is close to a suicide. So his plan takes shape…

But surely the one who will be most hurt by Scobie's suicide, the one most painfully let down, is God Himself – the One who loves him to the uttermost and has given everything to have his love forever. Greene reveals the Saviour's agony in a couple of extraordinary dialogues - or interior monologues? Does it all happen in Scobie's oppressed imagination? Or is Jesus really speaking to his soul, trying to woo him away from his destruction? These passages are extraordinary, without parallel in any other literature except possibly Dostoevsky, and acutely vivid and painful for a Christian reader. Christ is portrayed as going through his agony all over again for love of Scobie, who horrifically sees himself in the crowd surrounding Jesus on the road to the Cross, mocking and beating him.

For Scobie is resolute. It is not just Louise and Helen he is letting down, it is Christ Himself. Since he cannot let himself hurt them, he cannot avoid hurting Christ either. Surely then, Christ is better off without him too? Isn't it his duty to separate himself from Jesus finally and forever, so that Jesus' pain can stop? Scobie is hunted to death by his own remorseless logic.

Pity and terror are the accounted the hallmarks of tragedy, the wellsprings of its cathartic power. The Heart of the Matter has them in spades. An utterly compelling book but desperately painful. Just because the author is a fellow Christian doesn't mean we can expect an undemanding read.

A few final observations before I go away and try to recover.

It is painful to see grace offered in such mechanical terms – upon these conditions, with these rules and exceptions, and with these inexorable consequences. Somehow grace seems to have become a new legalism of its own. Is this what Catholicism looks like from the inside? Or is it Scobie's own flaws that make it look like this to him? Is it because he is a policeman? Or is it the negative logic of Scobie's depression, that makes everything look so clear yet so cold and hopeless?

Sin is disturbingly portrayed as an atmosphere that clings to the entire West African colony. Scobie at one point even gives this as his reason for wanting to live there: at least the soul-destroying climate makes people more honest, their sins are out in the open, not politely brushed away as they are back in England. You see sin as an atmosphere creeping into the relationship between Scobie and Louise. Every time they touch each other a film of sweat forms disgustingly between them. Yet surely the sin is not in their bodily contact but in their emotional distance. Then, horribly, the same slippery sweat starts to form between Scobie and Helen too…

Silence has a huge part to play in Scobie's tragedy, to point where you feel it could have been averted if only people could have talked to each other. Three key points are:-

After his death it turns out that Louise returned to Scobie, not ignorant of his liaison with Helen but because of it, and not to rebuke him for his unfaithfulness but because she realises how lonely, grief stricken and in need of support he is. She is far more generous to him than he has imagined – she really loves him and puts his needs before his own. If only she had said, "I know about Helen, and I forgive you." But she was silent, perhaps taking her lead from his own inability to talk about it.

After the confessional Scobie goes away, not helped, but convinced that there is no way out. If only the priest had made an arrangement to meet him and talk it through, or to send him to someone who could help him. But neither of them can escape the formulaic structure that has been imposed upon grace.

Scobie's plan to kill himself depends on complete secrecy. If either Helen or Louise suspected that it was a case of suicide they would have to bear the agony of responsibility for his despair, either because of their words and actions or at least for not having been able to save him, for having loved him in vain. This would have been a worse letting down than any other. So when Scobie is at his most despairing he is least able to confide his true intentions and feelings to those closest to him. Unfortunately it is the spy Wilson, who would like to be Louise's lover, who detects Scobie's deception after he is dead, so Scobie's repressed silence turns out to have been for nothing.

In these respects then we see some advantage in our own age over Greene's – we're allowed to talk to each other nowadays, even if in practice millions have no opportunity. That openness brings its own set of problems of course, but how many tragedies must it avert.

Fourth observation is that Scobie has an after life, just as Oedipus had, albeit a half-life as a blinded exile in Oedipus at Colonnos. For Scobie that half life is in the speculations of his priest, who tells Louise after Scobie's death that Scobie really loved God and that the church may be wrong in its teaching about suicide:

            Father Rank… said furiously, "For goodness' sake, Mrs Scobie, don't imagine that you – or I – know a thing about God's mercy."

            "The Church says…"

            "I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart."

A final acknowledgement then that God's grace is greater than law or than anything we know.