The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Post #1

This starts a series of posts on my reading of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory.  The novel was published in 1940 and set with the Mexican war against Catholicism.  

Summary

Part 1

Chapter 1

We meet an English dentist, Mr. Tench, living in Mexico and the man we later know as the whiskey priest get together to secretly drink whiskey.  We learn the Mexican government has outlawed alcoholic beverages and expressions of Catholicism.  A boy eventually knocks on their door looking for a priest because his mother is dying.  Against his better wishes and despite Tench telling him it’s futile, the whiskey priest goes off with the boy

Chapter 2

(A) We meet the lieutenant, who is the principle enforcer of the anti-Catholic laws and his chief of police, who tells him there is still a priest at large in their state.  We learn of the lieutenant’s hatred of religion, especially Catholicism.  He comes up with a plan to take hold of a peasant in every village and execute him unless they reveal the priest at large.

(B) We see the boy from chapter one with his mother, who we learn is not dying, and they discuss the killing of another boy for his faith.

(C) We meet Padre Jose, a laicized priest who has been forced to marry.  He contemplates his cowardice.

Chapter 3

We meet the Cora Fellows, a young girl and daughter of Americans running a banana business in Mexico.  She tells her parents she has hidden the priest in their barn from the lieutenant who wanted to search the premises.  She prevented the search and saved the priest, but her parents were not happy.  In the middle of the night, the priest leaves and goes off to a small village.

Chapter 4

(A) Mr. Tench is in the process of writing a letter to his wife in England.  His thoughts revert to the priest and he abandons the letter.

(B) At a cemetery Padre Jose is asked to say a prayer for a deceased child being buried.  He refuses out of fear.

(C) The mother of the boy again reads the boy the story of the martyred Juan, and this time the boy reacts by saying he doesn’t believe it.  The mother gets angry at him.

(D) Cora Fellows asks her mother if she believes in God.  That and other religious questions scare Mrs. Fellows and never does answer,

(E) The Chief of Police tells the lieutenant that his plan of executing peasants to get the priest has been approved by the governor.  Outside the lieutenant meets a boy who is throwing rocks pretending they are bombs.  The lieutenant shows the boy his gun.  The boy runs off but the lieutenant stands there wishing to massacre all in an effort to make life better for the boy.

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What an amazing novel.  I knew this novel was great (I had read it before) but I had not realized just how great.  On this read I feel I am reading one of the truly elite novels, perhaps in the top ten of all-time great.  The psychological depth of the whiskey priest is extraordinary, especially when you consider how concise and short this novel is.  I was trying to compare his character development with some of the other great psychologically developed characters.  One thinks of Anna Karenina from Tolstoy’s novel, or the great characters from Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.  One thinks of Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses or Madam Bovary from Flaubert’s novel.  But these are all novels that have room for the character’s psychological development to be brought out.  The Power and the Glory is a mere couple of hundred pages.  The only comparisons I can think of is of the great characters in Shakespeare's plays.  Perhaps Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and the whiskey priest is on that level of depth and with equally tragic dimensions from his innate character.  This novel is Shakespearean! 

And just like the great Shakespeare plays, every element of storytelling works in concert to bring out the theme: plot structure, character contrast, character development, dialogue, conflict, setting.  I’m going to hold off talking about the psychology of the priest until Part 2, when it’s more developed.  Three fictional elements are worth looking at in Part 1. 

First is the plot structure.  Notice how we are introduced to the priest and his contradictions and how he is in conflict with himself up front.  This is no surprise dilemma two thirds into the novel.  And this novel too has a dystopian setting, although the dystopia was a true in life occurrence.  This really was the case in 1920s Mexico.  But the dystopia, if I may call it that, comes after character development, and is never presented to have a resistance.  The novel is really a navigation through the dystopian world. 

[I hope by comparing the structure of The Power and the Glory you can see how poorly structured Brian Moore’s Catholics was.  Once you start up front with the dystopia and a passionate resistance, the author has created expectations.  You can’t just switch then to a psychological dilemma and never resolve the expectation.]

The plot in a way is actually quite simple.  I would summarize it as navigating through the dystopia with the understanding the narrative is propelled by the action to capture the priest.  Throughout the novel it feels like we are watching the priest walk on a high wire without a safety net.  The tension throughout the book of whether he gets caught is palpable.  The reason it is so palpable is because Greene has created a connection with the priest.  We know him and we feel for him, which brings me to the second fictional element that is in the foreground in Part 1, character development.

Our first look at the whiskey priest is through another character, the dentist, Mr. Tench.  What do we see of the priest?  He has a “hollow face charred with a three-days beard.”  He speaks a little English, wears a shabby suit, carries an attaché case and a book under his arms, has protuberant, bloodshot eyes and gives the impression of “unstable hilarity, as if perhaps he’s celebrating a birthday alone.”  He carries brandy in his pocket and is willing to share it.  He reminds Mr. Tench of a coffin and death.  The priest goes off to attend the boy’s mother who is supposed to be dying.  Mr. Tench, the supposed “optimist” tells the priest, who appears to be the pessimist, to not bother.  And yet the priest does go.

We can get into the psychology of it all later, but the priest is shabby, worn, melancholic, and alcoholic. 

Actually for the most part I think we see the priest from the outside in all the chapters of Part 1.  We see the caricature of priests from the lieutenant.  We learn from the boy’s mother how once the priest in a drunken state had baptized a boy with a girl’s name “Brigitta.”  (I just realized; that was his daughter’s name.)  We see him through Cora Fellows, who sees him as a kindly, perhaps grandfatherly man.  He is thankful for her kindness, and apparently has a very good rapport with children.

From the outside he seems to be liked by all, except of course the lieutenant.  So we see him a shoddy man, worn, alcoholic, but kindly, perhaps a screw up but certainly humble.  I think this little bit of conversation between the mother who was supposed to be dying and her husband captures the priest from the outside.  The mother speaks first:

‘They are two little saints already.  But the boy—he asks such questions—about the whisky priest.  I wish I had never had him in the house.’

 

‘They would have caught him if we hadn’t, and then he would have been one of your martyrs.  They would write a book about him and you would read it to the children.

 

‘That man—never.’

 

‘Well, after all,’ her husband said, ‘he carries on. I don’t believe all that they write in these books. We are all human.’

“We are all human.”  I think that’s what we’re supposed to take away.  He is human with all his frailty and with all his kindness.  We connect with him because he is human, he is frail, and he is humble.  In the context of the injustice of the dystopia, we don’t want him caught and killed.

The third fictional element is character contrast.  Part 1 has a wide range of characters that contrast significantly with the priest.  On this I will postpone these thoughts for later in the week.  Please feel free to comment on my observations.   

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My Comment:

My one experience with Mexico is on several occasions crossing over the border to go shopping on the Mexican side. I had been close to the Mexican border several times on business trips and a few times some of us would venture over to shop. The one thing that was amazing to me was how many Mexican dentists were on the border on the Mexican side. The Mr. Tench character recalled for me how Americans who live on the border have their dentistry done on the Mexican side. American health insurance rarely covers dentistry, and so there is usually a high out of pocket cost to dentist’s visits. The Americans who lived on the American border side all went down to Mexico for their dental work where it's cheaper. And lots of snow birds from northern states would come down during the winter and use the Mexican dentists. I don't think that has anything to do with the novel, but I found the focus on dentistry in chapter one interesting.

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There are four characters in Part 1 which clearly are meant as contrasts against the whisky priest’s character: Mr. Tench, the lieutenant, Padre Jose, and Captain Fellows.  What I find interesting is that in Part 1 we see the priest mostly from the outside through the eyes of each of these characters.  In Part 2, the point of view shifts so that we look out at the world from the internal view of the priest and get his reactions to his circumstances.  Let me examine each one of the characters in Part 1 to see how the priest either contrasts against or reflects that character.

Mr. Tench.  The fact that he’s a dentist is an interesting contrast to the priest’s clericalism.  Both in a way are professionals, both try to heal people in some fashion.  Both apply a sort of liturgy, the priest for Mass, the dentist for drilling cavities.  On the contrast side, the Mass heals the spiritual while the drilling of cavities is most definitely and profoundly healing the physical.  In a way, both are addressing the internal rotting of individuals, the priest the rotting from sin, the dentist decayed food between the teeth.  Decay might be an interesting word to hold on to for the novel.  Emotionally they seem similar.  Both have a particular pessimism.  Both see the world as futile, and both have an emotional core that I would describe as apathetic.  They both wish they weren’t there.  The priest, though, despite the apathy, has a strong sense of conscience that compels him to move on despite the indifference.  Mr. Tench does not.

The lieutenant.  The contrast between the two is strong.  The lieutenant is an ideologue, a true believer in socialism.  Despite being a religious, I do not see the whisky priest as a strong believer.  He is not an atheist, as the lieutenant, but we see he has doubts.  His faith never comes across as dogmatic.  The lieutenant performs his job with reckless abandon, and the priest too performs Masses in a reckless way when you consider the danger he places others with it.  But I think that may be the only similarity.  The priest connects with people on an emotional level; the lieutenant is dispassionate to the level of a psychopath.  Anyone that can propose and then carry out the killing of innocent people to reach an objective is deranged.  It is interesting to compare how the priest connects with children while the lieutenant has that one child run away.  The key I think in comparing the priest and the lieutenant is that the priest connects his heart to others while the lieutenant cannot.

Padre Jose.  The contrast here is stark on the surface, but I wonder how different ultimately.  Padre Jose has capitulated from fear to the government and has given up the priesthood and even accepted a wife to his disgrace.  The whisky priest has not capitulated but still he has the very same fears.  He even has a woman who could have been his wife.  Both Jose and the priest are cowards (who wouldn’t be actually under these circumstances), but what sets the whisky priest apart is that there is a piece in his makeup that cannot capitulate, despite the fear.  It is not courage.  He doesn’t want in his heart to face the danger, but there is something in his heart that cannot give up the priesthood, despite the danger.  He feels compelled to pastor when he can, not out of courage but of compulsion.  It’s a very subtle distinction, but a remarkable one.  It’s easy for a writer to delineate a black and white character, but to capture this subtle distinction is superb.

Captain Fellows.  Like Mr. Tench, Fellows is an outsider to Mexico.  He has a certain flexibility and adaptability that the priest shares, but Fellows is most decidedly an optimist while the whisky priest is a pessimist and a fatalist.  Fellows is cheerful while the priest melancholic.  Fellows deals with a dysfunctional wife.  Both Fellows and the priest are adapting to their circumstances, Fellows to a neurotic wife and the priest to a neurotic government.  Fellows does offer some accommodation to the priest, despite the risk, but it’s modulated and limited.  He is practical while the priest is not practical.  Practicality would dictate the priest go to safety, and something within him compels him to not.

So to sum up these characters in perhaps one word, Tench would be apathetic, the lieutenant ideological, Jose as surrendered, Fellows as practical.  The whisky priest can be seen in contrast to all these descriptions, and yet remarkably I think Greene has an element of each these paradoxically within the priest’s character.  It’s quite remarkable.

There are a few other characters, not counting the children, who also add to contrast and compare with the priest.  There is the chief of police who has that painful toothache.  He needs to see Mr. Tench to have it addressed.  The chief is not ideological but he certainly is adaptive.  There is the mother of the boy who is devout and perhaps in an ideological sense.  She certainly is the most dogmatic person of the characters, other than the lieutenant.  Her husband is not a believer, but he is not militant in his atheism, and he adapts to his wife.  Finally there is Mrs. Fellows, who is an atheist too but a neurotic and extremely fearful.  You can see how each of these minor characters have elements of the major characters to more or less some degree, and all serve to compare with the whisky priest.

There are a number of children in the novel, and I do think they are important to the themes.  I’ll do a closer study of them as the themes become clearer.