A Burnt-Out Case was probably my least favorite of all the Graham Greene which I’ve read. That doesn’t mean it was bad – of course not! It doesn’t even mean that I didn’t enjoy reading – most of it. The basic scenario is certainly terrific, but it was discursive in the wrong ways and somewhat less than what I’d hoped.
But first!
You can read A Burnt-Out Case here at archive.org if your local library doesn’t have it (mine didn’t).
Also of great interest, especially to close readers as well as writers is In Search of a Character: Two African Journals. These are journals that Greene kept during two journeys to Africa: one formed much of the basis for The Heart of the Matter and the other, this, A Burnt-Out Case.
I read A Congo Journal after I read the novel, and that’s the order in which I’d recommend you read it as well. If you read it beforehand, you’ll find intriguing observations, but you’ll experience them as rather random outside the context of the novel. Having read the novel, the journal throws the process of writing it into sharp relief. It’s fascinating to see how he develops the book.
He went to the Congo to this leprosarium because he had the notion of a protagonist doing just that. But – who this character was and even why he was going there – Greene had no idea. He wanted to go to the place in order to figure it out. Some of what Greene witnessed made its way into A Burnt-Out Case almost as a documentary record, but the journal, as brief as it is (under seventy pages) records his process of thinking through some – although by no means all – of the rest.
It’s rather reassuring, as a writer, to get a sense of how Greene explores and discovers his characters and plot. It’s surprising how life and art impact each other. For example, in the diary, he writes of reading the French Catholic writer Julien Green’s journals while in Africa – doing so, in the same way his protagonist reads, on a small boat floating in the Congo so as to avoid ants – and he’s irritated by what he’s reading. He finds the way that Green writes about God to be divorced from reality and platitudinous, and in reading A Burnt-Out Case, you can see Greene’s particular observations about a tormented homosexual French Catholic writer being transferred, more or less intact, to characterize the pompous spiritual pronouncements of a rather repulsive married palm-oil factory owner.
More background information. Here’s a long piece by Michel Lechat, the Belgian physician who worked at the leprosarium when Greene visited:
To tell the truth, I was not keen to have such a visitor. In spite of Yonda’s relative remoteness, it was on its way to becoming if not a tourist attraction, at least a showpiece. I was also apprehensive that our guest, a famous Catholic writer, might upset the delicate balance between myself and the mission. It is not always easy to be a mission doctor, especially when one is also a government employee. How would the father superior react, cycling non-stop along the avenues chewing at his cheroot? Or the father in charge of construction, who in a previous life had taught Greek in a provincial Belgian town? Or the brother in charge of carpentry, who did not speak a word of anything except Frisian, at times mixed with some presumably horrendous expletives in Malay, which he had brought back from years spent in a Japanese concentration camp during World War Two? Not to mention the bishop, described in the Congo Journal as ‘a wonderfully handsome old man with an 18th-century manner – or perhaps the manner of an Edwardian “boulevardier”’? What if this ‘pilgrim of the dry season’ – the sarcastic term used by the colonials to designate passing travellers – did not go to Mass? Could he play bridge?
In any event, after a couple of weeks a letter arrived saying that Greene wanted to come to Yonda. And then a second letter arrived: ‘The book that I have in mind has a leper mission purely as a background and I have no intention, I promise you, of producing a roman à clef . . . Nor am I looking for any dramatic material. The more normal and routine-like that I can make the background the more effective it would be for my purpose.’ There was a third letter in December: ‘I want to see things as they are . . . I want also to reassure you about the subject of the novel. The real subject is a theological and psychological argument which . . . I can’t go into for fear of destroying this still nebulous idea that it should take place against the background of an African hospital settlement.’
And here’s another piece about Greene’s stay in the Congo, this one dependent on the recollections of Lechat’s wife and centered on some film footage of Greene at the colony.
*****
Basics:
Querry is a world-famous architect with a Catholic background (of course) who has ended up in an African leprosarium. No, he doesn’t have leprosy, nor is he particularly driven to serve the suffering. His vocation, in his mind, had run its course, and so he took a plane, then a river boat, to this point of no return.
A “burnt-out” case is, as the lepers’ doctor describes it, a patient in whose body the disease has done all the damage it’s going to do, and at that point, the patient can be “cured” and is no longer infectious. To try to “cure” the disease before that produces even more intense suffering. So, it’s a great metaphor, isn’t it: what flaws, sins and harmful aspects of our lives must simply run their course before we are open to healing?
As is the case with all of Greene, the story is populated by great characters who run counter to type – except in Greeneland, where they are all, for the most part, completely of one type or another. The pompous Catholic who flaunts his purported faith is really a mass of tunnel-visioned, rationalizing neuroses. The faithful priests – and they are faithful – are not particularly interested in talking about religion, but simply in doing their work. The atheist doctor has given his life to the lepers, and fully expects to die among them.
Incidentally, this theme of the hardworking priests, largely unconcerned with theological niceties, is a theme in the journals as well. He writes:
I have never yet found in a missionary priest either the naivety which I want for certain of them, nor the harshness towards human failing, nor the inquisitiveness. These men are too busy to worry about motives – they are concerned with cement, education, electrical plant – not motives How can I get rid of this falsity?
I ponder what he means by that last question. I think he means how can he set aside his assumptions or what the reader might expect a priest to be – and just write about who they are?
Maybe?
And of course, in the end the character – Querry – who continually and clearly rejects an explicit faith is one who lives out the tenets of that faith with more integrity than most. Not an extraordinary amount. Not a saintly amount. But when confronted with temptation, with those in pain, with confounding situations – he responds in ways that are just respectful of the other person’s humanity, no more, no less. And he ends up paying a price for that.
This is, of course, a common trope for Greene, and easily misunderstood. No, Greene is not simplistically pointing fingers, crowing that “See! Isn’t it ironic that the person outside of faith is actually the one who lives it!” as a way of disproving the truth or the value of faith.
Nor is he saying much (I don’t think) about what he does or doesn’t see as the truth of faith by suggesting that faith is so true that it’s irresistible. Although I think, in the end, that’s closer to Greene than the former.
No, it seems to me that Greene is simply grappling, as he does in all of his books, with the complexity of the matter. Yes, it’s obviously better to live with conscious integrity and even some level of sacrificial love than to live selfishly. Yes, Christianity is supposed to be all about this. Yes, Christian institutions and Christian people fail to live this out, sometimes in big ways. Yes, the remnants of a once-held faith can live on in a person, sometimes as a sense of guilt, other times as an acknowledgment that objectifying other human beings is wrong, and other times as sacrificial or even heroic actions reluctantly embraced either because one can’t see another way or one has a lingering suspicion that there is such a thing as “the right thing” – or both.
All of these things can be true simultaneously, and it seems to me that every Greene novel presents us with a group of people living out these truths in usually exotic locales, having to confront the consequences of their actions for themselves – and more importantly – for others.
Basicially, what it seems to come down most of the time is a protagonist trying to convince himself that it doesn’t matter and ultimately losing the argument.
Which, is probably Graham Greene, right there.
What did I not like about this novel? I thought it was a little long, I wanted to know more about the lepers beyond them providing a setting for Querry’s inner torment, and there was a long section in which Querry is telling a “story” to another character that, of course, is really the story of his own life – that I thought was unnecessary. It was as if this character, who was telling a story all the while denying that it was actually about him, was a stand-in for Greene telling us the story of Querry, but wanting to make sure that we don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s actually about him – Greene.
Which of course, it is.
There are also several accounts of dreams, which, I admit, is something that unaccountably irritates me in fiction. But, again, reading the journal was illuminating, because in them, Green recounts several dreams that he experienced while on his trip, and indicates that these dreams were vital in various choices that he made – so yes, he’s going to have his characters have interesting dreams.
But here’s what I did like. I was really interested in an aspect of the novel that echoed, in a way, The Power and the Glory.
If you’ve read that novel (and if you haven’t – Lent reading 101 right there, after your daily Scripture, of course) you know that one of the elements of the books’ structure involves a woman telling her children exaggerated hagiographical tales about a Cristeros martyr. This is juxtaposed with our narrative of the Whiskey Priest, wandering the countryside, pursued by the authorities, offering the sacraments where and when he can, but doing so in a haphazard way, unsure of his own faith or purpose. He’s far from the idealized figure choosing easily defined “holiness” and intentionally embracing suffering and sacrifice out of a conscious love for Christ and other human beings.
It’s about the contrast between religious myth and reality.
Something similar is happening here. Querry had a reputation back in Europe as a Catholic architect, designing churches and so on. After he leaves it all behind and runs off to Africa, a journalist hears of this and ends up pursuing the story and writing about it, characterizing Querry’s journey as one of burgeoning sainthood, a modern-day Augustine or Francis, rejecting his earlier profligacy and embracing the lepers instead. He hears a story of Querry helping a leper in the jungle (which happened) and exaggerates it into a miraculous, revelatory event.
The story, of course, angers Querry because it’s false and completely mischaracterizes his life and experience. The plot thread points, again, to the power of religious mythmaking and the aversion so many of us have to complexity. We want our saints simple, we want our scenarios simplistic.
“You’re too troubled by your lack of faith, Querry. You keep on fingering it like a sore you want to get rid of. I am content with the myth ; you are not – you have to believe or disbelieve.”
Querry said, “Somebody is calling out there. I thought for a moment it was my name . . . But one always seems to hear one’s own name, whatever any- one really calls. It only needs a syllable to be the same. We are such egoists.”
“You must have had a lot of belief once to miss it the way you do.”
“I swallowed their myth whole, if you call that a belief. This is my body and this is my blood. Now when I read that passage it seems so obviously symbolic, but how can you expect a lot of poor fishermen to recognise symbols? Only in moments of superstition I remember that I gave up the sacrament before I gave up the belief and the priests would say there was a connection. Rejecting grace, Rycker would say. Oh well, I suppose belief is a kind of vocation and most men haven’t room in their brains or hearts for two vocations. If we really believe in something we have no choice, have we, but to go, further. Otherwise life slowly whittles the belief away. My architecture stood still. One can’t be a half-believer or a half-architect.”
“Are you saying that you’ve ceased to be even a half?”
“Perhaps I hadn’t a strong enough vocation in either, and the kind of life I lived killed them both. It needs a very strong vocation to withstand success. The popular priest and the popular architect – their talents can be killed easily by disgust.”
“Disgust?”
“Disgust of praise. How it nauseates, doctor, by its stupidity. The very people who ruined my churches were loudest afterwards in their praise of what I’d built. The books they have written about my work, the pious motives they’ve attributed to me – they were enough to sicken me of the drawing-board. It needed more faith than I possessed to withstand all that. The praise of priests and pious people – the Ryckers of the world.”
“Most men seem to put up with success comfortably enough. But you came here.” ,
“I think I’m cured of pretty well everything, even disgust. I’ve been happy here.”
“Yes, you were learning to use your fingers pretty well, in spite of the mutilation. Only one sore seems to remain, and you rub it all the time.”