The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene, 1948
Penguin Group USA
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142437995
Summary
Set in a small British colonial outpost in Sierra Leone during World War II, The Heart of the Matter occupies and comments on the ambitious subjects of war, espionage, love, adultery, treachery, and betrayal. But at its core—at the heart of The Heart of the Matter—it is a novel of moral dilemmas. Its plot, its psychological and spiritual depth, even its political intrigues turn around two basic moral questions: Is it possible to make others happy? Is suicide ever the right choice? The novel's enigmatic protagonist, police officer Henry Scobie, even wonders if Christ's death might be understood as an act of suicide, since He allowed Himself to be sacrificed.
Before he reaches the climactic decision of his own moral crisis, Scobie struggles to make his poetry-loving and deeply unhappy wife, Louise, happy. Fed up with the ghastly climate, the remoteness, and, in her case, friendlessness of village life in Sierra Leone, Louise lets her husband know the full depth of her misery. And Henry Scobie is not a man who can bear the thought that he has caused another to suffer. When he is passed over for the job of Commissioner of Police, Louise feels humiliated in the eyes of the other British officers and their wives, and her unhappiness is brought to a fever pitch. She decides she must leave, and Henry makes a fateful promise to send her to South Africa, even though he lacks the funds to do so.
Thus begins a series of decisions and bargains that push Scobie into a terrifyingly unfamiliar moral terrain. Though Scobie wonders if any human being can arrange another's happiness and even considers the desire to be happy in a world so filled with pain and suffering to be impossibly foolish, he still tries to make Louise happy. To raise the money to pay for his wife's passage, Scobie strikes a bargain with Yusef that leads to Scobie's corruption after many years of honest service. And once Louise is gone, Scobie begins an affair with the recently widowed Helen and soon finds himself responsible for the happiness of two people, rather than just of one. When Louise returns, hoping to restore their strained marriage, she suggests that they receive communion together, which requires a full confession, and the cage door swings shut on Scobie and his deceptions.
Only one way of escape presents itself to Scobie, and he believes that eternal damnation awaits him if he chooses it. But he convinces himself that by sacrificing his own life, he can spare both Helen and Louise further misery at his expense. And it is here that the crucial question of the novel is asked most poignantly: how far should one sacrifice oneself for the happiness of others? Henry Scobie provides one answer but the novel itself leaves the question open for its readers to ponder. (From the publisher.)
This is the third of four in what are considered Graham Greene's explicitiy Catholic novels. The other three are Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), and The End of the Affair (1951).
Author Bio
• Birth—October 2, 1904
• Where—Berkhamstd, England, UK
• Death—April 3, 1991
• Where—Vevey, Switzerland
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Hawthornden Prize; Companion
of Honour; Chevalier of the Legion of
Honour; Order of Merit.
Known for his espionage thrillers set in exotic locales, Graham Greene is the writer who launched a thousand travel journalists. But although Greene produced some unabashedly commercial works—he called them "entertainments," to distinguish them from his novels—even his escapist fiction is rooted in the gritty realities he encountered around the globe. "Greeneland" is a place of seedy bars and strained loyalties, of moral dissolution and physical decay.
Greene spent his university years at Oxford "drunk and debt-ridden," and claimed to have played Russian roulette as an antidote to boredom. At age 21 he converted to Roman Catholicism, later saying, "I had to find a religion...to measure my evil against." His first published novel, The Man Within, did well enough to earn him an advance from his publishers, but though Greene quit his job as a London Times subeditor to write full-time, his next two novels were unsuccessful. Finally, pressed for money, he set out to write a work of popular fiction. Stamboul Train (also published as The Orient Express) was the first of many commercial successes.
Throughout the 1930s, Greene wrote novels, reviewed books and movies for the Spectator, and traveled through eastern Europe, Liberia, and Mexico. One of his best-known works, Brighton Rock, was published during this time; The Power and the Glory, generally considered Greene's masterpiece, appeared in 1940. Along with The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, they cemented Greene's reputation as a serious novelist—though George Orwell complained about Greene's idea "that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only."
During World War II, Greene was stationed in Sierra Leone, where he worked in an intelligence capacity for the British Foreign Office under Kim Philby, who later defected to the Soviet Union. After the war, Greene continued to write stories, plays, and novels, including The Quiet American, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, and The Captain and the Enemy. For a time, he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, producing both original screenplays and scripts adapted from his fiction.
He also continued to travel, reporting from Vietnam, Haiti, and Panama, among other places, and he became a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Some biographers have suggested that his friendships with Communist leaders were a ploy, and that he was secretly gathering intelligence for the British government. The more common view is that Greene's leftist leanings were part of his lifelong sympathy with the world's underdogs—what John Updike called his "will to compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class."
But if Greene's politics were sometimes difficult to decipher, his stature as a novelist has seldom been in doubt, in spite of the light fiction he produced. Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and R. K. Narayan paid tribute to his work, and William Golding prophesied: "He will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety."
Extras
• Greene's philandering ways were legendary; he frequently visited prostitutes and had several mistresses, including Catherine Walston, who converted to Catholicism after reading The Power and the Glory and wrote to Greene asking him to be her godfather. After a brief period of correspondence, the two met, and their relationship inspired Greene's novel The End of the Affair.
• Greene was a film critic, screenwriter, and avid moviegoer, and critics have sometimes praised the cinematic quality of his style. His most famous screenplay was The Third Man, which he cowrote with director Carol Reed. Recently, new film adaptations have been made of Greene's novels The End of the Affair and The Quiet American. Greene's work has also formed the basis for an opera: Our Man in Havana, composed by Malcolm Williamson. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Mr. Greene has wrestled brilliantly with [his themes. He] is a profound moralist with a technique to match his purpose. From first page to last, this record of one man's breakdown...makes its point as a crystal-clear allegory—and as an engrossing novel.... The novel never labors...[as] Mr. Greene's triumph is not that he makes his doomed policeman human but that one sympathizes with this roges and weaklings as well..
William Du Bois - New York Times (1948)
Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations.... For experience of a whole century he was the man within.
Norman Sherry - Independent (UK)
Discussion Questions
1. How relevant is the setting to the action of The Heart of the Matter? How do the climate, the war, and the indigenous people of this remote colonial outpost affect Scobie, Louise, Helen, and Wilson? Is the novel implicitly or explicitly anticolonial?
2. Scobie thinks that "no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness" (p. 75). What are the fateful consequences of Scobie's trying to make others happy? In what ways does the novel reveal the limits of our ability to understand one another?
3. What kind of woman is Louise? Why is her love of literature so often regarded with derision in the novel? Why is she so upset when Scobie is passed over for the commissionership? To what extent is she responsible for Scobie's downfall?
4. What role does Yusef play in the novel? By what means does he entice Scobie into a corrupt relationship? Are we meant to see him as a diabolical character or merely as someone working the colonial occupation to his best advantage?
5. In discussing mercy and damnation, Father Rank says, "The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart" (p. 254). To what extent can The Heart of the Matter be read as a critique of the Catholic Church? In what ways does the novel show the workings of the human heart to be beyond the comprehension of Catholic doctrine?
6. Early in the novel, Scobie promises to find a way to send Louise to South Africa, and we read that "He would still have made the promise even if he could have foreseen all that would come of it" (p. 50). What are the consequences of this promise? Why would Scobie still have made it, even if he could foresee the ruin that it would cause?
7. In what ways is Wilson a foil for Scobie? How are the two men different? For what reasons does Wilson wish to destroy Scobie?
8. How has the death of his only child affected Scobie and the decisions he makes throughout the novel?
9. Why is Scobie so drawn to Helen? Why do they feel so "safe" in each other's presence? Why does this sense of safety turn out to be so dangerous?
10. In what ways do the subplots of spying and diamond smuggling parallel the novel's central concern with relationships? In what ways is the novel about the tensions between openness and secrecy, honesty and deception?
11. At the end of the novel, Father Rank says of Scobie, "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." To which Louise replies: "He certainly loved no one else" (p. 255). Are these statements about Scobie true? Does he love God and no one else? If so, how can we explain the choices he has made—to commit adultery and finally suicide?
12. After Pemberton's suicide, Scobie thinks: "Suicide was for ever out of his power—he couldn't condemn himself for eternity—no cause was important enough" (p. 83). Why does Scobie kill himself, even when he believes it will bring eternal damnation? How does he rationalize his suicide to himself? Should his suicide be considered self-sacrifice for the well-being of Helen and Louise? Is suicide his only choice? What else might he have done?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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