Birthday Book of the Day: Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, inscribed, 1949

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (London, William Heinemann Ltd/Star Editions, 1949). Paperback, 7 ¼” x 4 ⅝”, 297 pp.). Good condition, with some edge wear to the covers.

This trade paperback was published in 1948 from the original Heinemann text for sale on the European continent only. Henry's copy comes from the estate of UNC-Charlotte Dean Glenn Burne, and was inscribed to Burne by Greene at a Paris publisher's autograph party in December 1949. Enclosed in the book are two tickets to that event. Good condition, and highly rare. HBB Price $750.

The British writer Graham Greene (1904-1991) was born on this date. Over a 67-year career, he became one of the best writers in English ever, but was a perennial Nobel Prize also-ran. A spy in World War II (his handler was later to become famous as the Soviet agent Kim Philby), he developed a style so spare and bleak his characters were said to inhabit a world called Greeneland; when he entered- pseudonymously- a 1949 magazine contest for the best parody of his work, he came in second.

A depressed young man who converted to Catholicism but turned into what he called a “Catholic agnostic”, Greene was a restless, detached man, a serial adulterer long estranged from his own family, endlessly traveling to dismal, out of the way places. He thought his books his real children.

After his first novel did well in 1929, Greene lived on his writing the rest of his life, producing a mountain of articles, essays and film reviews in the days when magazines and newspapers abounded and paid well. But not all of his early books did well; later, when he became famous, they did immensely well, prompting the Greene collector John Baxter to write,

As a result, his earliest books appeared in tiny printings while the later ones almost immediately went into second and later impressions. This made first editions of both almost equally rare.

“Though, more than many writers, he understood and tolerated collectors, this didn’t mean he liked us, or gave us much help,” Baxter recalls in his collecting memoir, A Pound of Paper. “You’d never find him behind a table at Hatchard’s in Piccadilly, adding that minute, spidery signature to hundreds of copies of his latest work….[but] he did sign books for all sorts of people, and in all sorts of places…”  

In his memoir, Ways of Escape, for example, Greene recalled finding two of his books in a Saigon opium den in 1955: “I wrote a dedicace in each of them.”

Which brings us to Glenn S. Burne. In December 1949, the US Navy vet  was studying in Paris and living at 50, rue de Vital. He snagged two tickets to a book-signing event (so much for never doing book signings), at Les Jeune Presses in the 5th arrondissement on Tuesday the 20th at 5 pm.  Greene was riding high after the late-summer release of the film The Third Man, for which he wrote the screenplay from a short story.

“Vous invitent à faire dédicacer par Graham Greene ses ouvrages en particulier Le Fond du Problem,” the invitation read.

Published the year before, The Heart of the Problem was the third of Greene’s four great “Catholic novels”, preceded by Brighton Rock (1938) and The Power and the Glory (1940), and followed by The End of the Affair (1951). Of one of the quartet, The Writer's Almanac says,

The Power and the Glory was so popular that it attracted the attention of the Vatican, which appointed two different people to review it and decide whether the Church should take an official position. The two readers had similar reactions to the novel. One wrote: “Odd and paradoxical, a true product of the disturbed, confused, and audacious character of today’s civilization. For me, the book is sad.” They thought it should never have been written, but they also knew it would look bad for the Church to officially condemn it, since Greene was the most famous Catholic writer in England. Instead, they recommended that Greene’s bishop privately scold him for it and direct Greene “to write other books in a different tone, attempting to correct the defects of this one.” Greene did nothing of the sort, and continued to write about characters struggling with their own moral failings and their Catholicism in novels like The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), which he dedicated to his mistress.

Though he rejected the implications of being labeled “a Catholic writer,” Greene’s moral arc was decidedly Catholic, and in the preface to one of his later books he estimated that since, out of every ten characters in his books, one was liable to be Catholic, he might as well put them to work.

The book was a big hit. In The New York Times for July 11, 1948, William DuBois’ “A Searching Novel of Man's Unpaid Debt to Man,” summarized the plot:

A policeman's lot is not a happy one. The white (and dark) man's burden must always be heavy. And man's debt to man will be forever in arrears -- from West Africa to the West End, from Brooklyn to Bucharest. Generations of novelists have wrestled with these melancholy truisms. It is a pleasure to report that Graham Greene, in "The Heart of the Matter," has wrestled brilliantly with all three -- and scored three clean falls. Mr. Greene (as a well-earned public knows) is a profound moralist with a technique to match his purpose. From first page to last, this record of one man's breakdown on a heat-drugged fever-coast makes its point as a crystal-clear allegory -- and as an engrossing novel.

Mr. Greene has chosen a carefully unnamed spot on Africa's coastline as his backdrop: we are told merely that it adjoins Vichy-held territory across one of its sluggish, tan-colored rivers, that the time is the wrong end of World War II. Obviously, this could be any outpost of Empire where vultures roost on the roof-trees at noon, and the slightest scratch turns green in an hour without the saving iodine -- where there is no antidote for a climate-ridden psyche, if a man "stays out" too long. The author's protagonist, Henry Scobie (who is both a model police inspector and a colonial Englishman in microcosm), had had no leave in years. But Scobie is more than a man victimized by a sun too strong for his nerve-ends. He is a textbook case of a judge destroyed by his own sentences. He is also a perfect example of a soul lifted by compassion -- and destroyed, just as surely, by the knowledge that there are so few bridges between love and reality...

Understanding all these febrile, unhappy people, explaining them with each slow step to his own destruction, is Commissioner Scobie: and Scobie's search for a light in this humid darkness (a search that takes him from the altar of Venus to the confessional in his own church) is presented in masterly terms, with no bit of drama overlooked, no symbol wasted. The heart of the matter, of course, is all too simple. Man's heart, the optimists insist, is in the right place; man's brain, the novelist reminds us, was both a misplaced and misshapen organ -- long before it could be stultified by an overdose of envy, boredom, greed. Scobie, who was all heart, was merely the victim of his own acute kindness -- a disease that destroys its victims no less cruelly than angina.

Such is Mr. Greene's parable: the reader will search far to find another novel that explores that basic malaise in such clinical depth -- and with such compassion. But it is the novelist, after all, who deserves the last word. The scene is Scobie's bungalow shortly after his suicide. Father Rank, the wise, tired, jaundiced priest, is paying the widow his visit of condolence:

"He was a bad Catholic."

"That's the silliest phrase in common use," Father Rank said.

"And in the end, this -- horror. He must have known that he was damning himself."

"Yes, he knew that all right. He never had any trust in mercy -- except for other people."

"It's no good even praying ..."

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."

"You think there's some hope, then?" she wearily asked.

"Are you so bitter against him?"

"I haven't any bitterness left."

"And do you think God's likely to be more bitter than a woman?" he said with harsh insistence, but she winced away from the arguments of hope.

"Oh why, why, did he have to make such a mess of things?"

Father Rank said, "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."

She had denied just now that she felt any bitterness, but a little more of it drained out now like tears from exhausted ducts. "He certainly loved no one else," she said.

"And you may be in the right of it there, too," Father Rank replied.

Greene inscribed Burne’s copy on the title page in “that minute, spidery signature” and Burne held onto it until he died, nearly ninety, in 2012. He became a prominent scholar of French literature, organized the English Department of the new University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and became an expert on children’s literature late in his career.

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