Over Winter Break, I read the Graham Greene novel The Heart of the Matter about the most MISERABLE man, living in the most MISERABLE place, married to the most MISERABLE woman. Major Scobie is the assistant commissioner of police in a lawless, hopelessly corrupt Sierra Leone. He’s been here fifteen years, and he knows nothing is going to change any time soon. And, his wife is killing him. She hates it in Sierra Leone, but he can’t, or won’t transfer anywhere because his position provides him with the only semblance of dignity he has left. At his work, he has an impossible task to police a population that doesn’t want him there. At home, there is no peace. Everything his wife says or does annoys him. But this is when Graham Greene weaves a twist into the plot. Scobie meets a young woman, Helen, who has been hospitalized after a tragic experience. She's not that pretty. She's not that friendly. This is World War II. A submarine sank her ship off the West Coast of Africa. In the middle of this turmoil, Scobie falls in love. Every moment he is with her, he feels guilty for abandoning his wife. Every moment he is with his wife, he is thinking about his new lover. It just might the WORST thing that has ever happened to him. I mean, it gets so bad, he just wants to shoot himself. I told you he was MISERABLE!
I’m not writing a book report here, but I am willing to share my appreciation for this MISERABLE MAN. It seems like Scobie is honest, insightful and professional. He always tries to make the best of what is handed him. The beginning of the novel begins with news that he will not receive the promotion that he so righteously deserves. All the sacrifices and hard work he has dedicated to his job, he realizes is all for naught. He’s stuck in place. There is nothing positive or hopeful he can tell his wife about his future. Probably the worse thing he has going for him is his commitment to his Catholic religion. Every step he makes seems to be clouded in guilt.
Readers knowledgeable of Greene's background will see a connection between his Real Life and his Real Fiction. Shortly before he began this novel his marriage to his wife Viven was crumbling. Graham was known for his womanizing ways. Especially by his wife. During the early forties, Greene practically abandanoned his family in Oxford to live with his lover, Dorothy Glover, in London, but because Vivien was a devout Catholic, she wasn't about to give the author a divorce. Greene is famously regarded as a Catholic writer. At least a writer who integrates Catholic themes into his novels. This year alone, I have read and/or re-read his prestigious works The Power of the Glory, Brighton Rock, The Quiet Man, and The End of an Affair. All of them are dominated by Catholic protagonists who are haunted by their own guilt. They drink, they cheat, and they consider their own suicides. In the Catholic church, suicide is a sin. I'm not sure if Greene shared the same thoughts as his characters, but in The Heart of the Matter, he leaves Scobie with little options for peace in his life. ( I won't tell you what option he chooses.)
Scobie is not a loser! He's a police officer. He believes in the rule of law. He's a Catholic. He believes in Damnation for sinners. Every day he tries his best to show respect and compassion for the people around him, with little sign that any of it will come back his way. For me, the best representation of Scobie in the novel comes from his time spent reading out loud to a dying child in the hospital ward. This is in the same room where his future lover resides. The little boy is not going to make it through the night, and the nurse has assigned him the most boring book to read – one of the few that are available on the hospital ward's miserable bookshelf. Instead of letting the child pass listening to the meaningless prose of an adult novel, Scobie chose to invent and share a more pleasant story about a rabbit in the child’s last moments on this Earth. He included hand motions and finger postions that resembled the shape of the rabbits ears. Both his future lover (listening in a hospital bed across the room) and the little boy appeared to enjoy Scobies efforts. When the nurse returned, both Helen and the Boy have smiles on their faces. That’s when Scobie heard the nurse’s voice from behind him: “Stop that,” she said harshly, “the child’s dead.”
That shouldn’t be funny, I know. I think I laugh out loud because I have rarely seen anyone who writes in the style of Graham Greene. He has the skills to position his characters in heart-wrenching scenes that begin with hope and end with despair. There seems nothing that Scobie could have done for the boy; what he did do was his best. But that didn’t save him from the wrath of the angry nurse. Greene seems to spend LESS time preaching to his readers and MORE time reminding them of randomness of the universe. What happened to Scobie could have happened to anyone. Was there a connection between his sinful ways and the ugly pattern of events he confronts in this novel? That’s up to the reader to decide. I like it that way.
I laugh for the detailed, realistic descriptions of each scene. Right out of college, Greene joined the British secret service and travelled the world. He was afforded the cover of professional journalists. He actually did file stories about the populations and politices of the countries he visited. He did this in Vietnam before writing The Quiet American. He gave the literary world a taste of The Cold War in his Cuban novel Our Man in Havana. His first on-site entry into poitical intrigue may have come in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The result is the photographic scenes he paints of fat Syrian smuggler in The Heart of the Matter. Scobie succumbs to the obious corrupt intentions of one Yusef – he agrees to help him smuggle diamonds out of the country, for he is desperate for money to help his wife leave the country. Myself, a lonely Jew, I would never find myself involved with an Arab gangster, or manipulated by a hysterical wife. I probably began reading Greene to escape my own dreary life. His writing opened my eyes to parts of the world I would never experience myself, or learn about in school.
It’s still early in 2025, which tells me I still have time to create a Book Goal - Something I don’t think I have ever done before. But now is the time to do so. I’m just rollin’. Here in my classroom blog, I see I have shared my novel reading six weeks straight. I think I can keep the pace. That will make FIFTY novels for the year. Each night I go to bed with 3-5 books on my nightstand. The novel I just completed was written by an author I studied in college, more than forty years ago. The Heart of the Matter counts for One in Ten books written by Graham Greene or about him I have recently read. I mark my progress on my classroom blog and Facebook page. FORTY more to go says the signpost in Jay’s Reading Marathon. I choose my books for a number of reasons. This year I’ve decided to mix in books and authors I read as a college graduate student. Not just Graham Greene, but other Modern British authors, Twentieth Century American classics, Shakespeare, Foreign-Language novels translated into English. In several of my classes, we are reading a Sixties novel and writing Sixties Research Papers. To stay one step ahead of my students, I’m constantly reading books about the politics, music, and culture of the decade. In two other classes, we read a novel set in New York City. On my reading list, I’m sneaking in a few novels that were either written in or about the Big Apple. I see an exciting new writing project on my horizon.
WHY DO I DO THIS? My introduction to literature in college may have been the happiest time of my life. Much before I finished a novel, I had already begun considering/researching the next one I would read. There was no need for a Book Goal. My goals turned into habits. I suppose the difference is that today I READ WHAT I WANT TO READ. Reading what I read in college brings back fond memories. I’m HAPPY. The experience turned me into a life-long reader. In one of my schools this week I taught the the first couple of classes of Spring Semester 2025. I told my students First and Formost, “BUY THE BOOK!” They won’t regret it. Some day, like forty years from now, they will reach for it on their own shelves and remember the good times they had in their college English class.
It's been three days since the accident and I still can't sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I can hear the sound of the train approaching us, getting closer and louder, the wheels scraping on the metal train tracks, the pessimistic look of despair on their faces, and worst of all, the piercing scream that still haunts my ears
My mother, the only parent I know, is both a mom and a dad to me. Both of my parents would work, but even then my father would demand for my mothers paychecks. He'd use that money to get totally wasted, and it went on for a while like this....
In the book “Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility” the most valuable part is when Chuy offered a ride to Yoli on his motorcycle through many places of the San Diego city. no. Yoli thought she hadn’t heard him right...
On November, 1993 both my father and brother started the Richard McGee Correctional Basic Correctional Academy....
For America in the novel The Tortilla Curtain, Being married to Candido is like carrying a backpack full of bricks all day long....
My mother had struggled her whole life to make us happy. Being a single mother of two with two jobs was almost impossible yet it was her daily routine....
My father's addiction has had significant effects in my life. My father's alcohol abuse has made me realize what I want in my life and what I don’t want....
After the bell had rung, I quickly got to my seat, of course being tardy was probably a bad first impression because as soon as I picked a desk to sit at my teacher was glaring at me. He then began to yell at me saying how it was an essential to be on time to his class. This was my first encounter with my economics teacher and I already knew it was going to be a long year. Little did I know that Jack had a specific purpose in my life and although he was scary to me at first, he soon became my strongest adult in my life. As the years went by, I got to know Mr. Little and we became the greatest of friends. Once Jack Little passed away, I had a different perspective on the little amount of time we all have to live...
After living three years in this country, it was important for me to realize that I needed to go to school to learn English. I was feeling like I was illiterate and deaf. When my husband was in work I was afraid to answer the phone, or afraid to go outside. I remember the day when I had my first daughter, I was in pain in the hospital and my new born daughter was crying; the hospital was cold, with a pale color on the walls, and its smell was like alcohol. There were nurses walking on the long and bright hallway. You can hear the nurses talking morning and night. I couldn’t express myself and talk for my daughter that was crying...
Comments