Zoeb Matin looks at an unfinished, discarded, hence unpublished Greene novel from the 1930s entitled The Other Side of the Border. Written at some point following Greene’s return from his daunting journey across largely uncharted Liberia in 1935 – an adventure relived in his travel work Journey Without Maps (1936) – The Other Side of the Border, had it been completed and published, would have marked Greene’s first substantial non-European-centred novel.
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ZOEB MATIN
Graham Greene’s The Other Side of the Border
“You can’t cure success, any more than I can give my mutiles back their fingers and toes. I return them to the town and people look at them in the stores and watch them in the street and draw the attention of others to them as they pass. Success is like that too – a mutilation of the natural man.”
So said Doctor Colin, the comfortably atheist doctor of the leproserie in A Burnt-Out Case, and perhaps the only man, in a novel filled with many men, who happens to understand just what the cause of the fate of Querry, the titular victim of spiritual and psychological mutilation. This novel was written in the end of the 1950s, that restless decade for its author, who himself must have felt mutilated by the “success” and subsequent popularity in the wake of The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. This was also a moment when Greene would have been unable to reconcile his waning belief with the almost burdensome stature of being, for many, misunderstood as a “Catholic novelist” that had been thrust on him. But even two decades before A Burnt-Out Case, it seems that he had realized – and even become wary – of the mutilating, deforming effect of success.
This might seem rather paradoxical, for the 1930s have to be considered as perhaps the most prolific decade for Greene as an author; fuelled by his persistent fears that his family would be unable to cope with his hardly lucrative career as a full-time novelist, he seemed to be in his most experimental and even inventive mood, flitting from short fiction to film and literary criticism, from two travelogues to eight novels, all in a bid to pay off his debts to his publishers. But Greene would also taste success in the same decade, with Brighton Rock proving to be unexpectedly a success and he did, undeniably, savour some of the disenchantment of failure too – failure that inevitably made him question his own capabilities all too glaringly. His review of the Shirley Temple-starrer Wee Willie Winkie was unnecessarily misunderstood as an act of scandalous libel and led, as a consequence, to the closure of the magazine Night and Day and even his marriage with Vivien was almost on the brink of his first brush with infidelity that would plague it in the subsequent decade. But most tellingly, Greene seemed to scent defeat and disillusionment in the very specific cultural, social and political atmosphere of the decade wherein he happened to be working. The England of the 1930s, economically shaken by the destructive tide of the Depression from across the Atlantic and nearing the long-delayed moment of decisive commitment in the upcoming world war across the Channel, struck Greene vividly and indelibly with its very air of desolation and despair, of that “Metroland” culture, even of a kind of sophisticated lawlessness spuriously concealed beneath the only slightly seedy dignity of civilization.
Surely, this awareness of failure and defeat had an even further personal source as well – the ne’er do well Herbert Greene, his more cocksure but more ill-fated sibling, whose ignoble failures and indefatigable derring-do would lend much of the raw material to the similarly doomed but daring Anthony Farrant of England Made Me. The latter, in Greene’s view, seemed to borrow much of Herbert’s sometimes dangerous and often simply reckless proclivity for adventurism in his unpredictable and unflappable sense of rebellion against things as omnipotent and invulnerable as the new forces that had taken over the spheres of business and world domination.
Few are aware, however, that alongside this equally overlooked accomplishment, there was another novel that, if it would have been completed and published, would have summed up Greene’s perceptive brush with the sense of failure and disillusionment that was contained in this private understanding of even his sibling’s misadventures and manifested, on a larger scale, in the world around him. Written possibly in the wake of his return from his eye-opening, if daunting, journey across the breadth of Liberia, The Other Side of the Border would also have proved, had it been finished, to be the first of his novels that are set in a place beyond the boundaries of the continent. Alas, it was not to be.
Only twenty-eight pages (in the new Penguin edition of Complete Short Stories) of the unfinished novel remain and while these are rather inadequate to give a complete idea of where the story is headed, unlike the unfinished but more or less tentative Lucius, they do hold significance of their own as well-built foundations of what could have been a really masterful novel on its own strengths. As a matter of fact, the opening act of the novel itself gives a more or less coherent hint at what this story – of four Englishmen dispatched on a foolhardy quest for gold in an uncharted West African republic – would culminate in. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t a glorious or happy denouement.
“But there are things I’ve simply got to tell you.” Morrow said. “The whole business – it’s fantastic. The gold – and Hands himself – so many deaths – Colley and then, there’s Billings.”
There must have been, surely, some brutal, cathartic travesty in Greene’s subconscious, towards which the doomed despair of this venture could have led up and already the names of these characters toll with a sinister, even elegiac portent.
In the subsequent pages, Greene lets some of the story unravel by introducing to the reader each of these men in turns. Hands, who seems to be the primary protagonist, comes off as the most striking of them, not surprisingly since, as Greene himself explained in the brief preface, “Hands had the same origin as Anthony Farrant in that novel”, a possible reason as to why Greene must have abandoned it entirely. Nevertheless, even in his similarity to the cocksure bravado of the earlier character, Hands feels fresh and vividly alive in the pages of the unfinished novel – not least because of how deftly as ever Greene locates inside him that desperate restlessness of a man trying to break free from the Metroland mediocrity of his surroundings.
…and like Othello, he sat there on the hard nobbly throne speaking of pigmies and poisoned arrows, the wild elephant and the leopard and the hidden treasures in the rocks, to old Millet and to Desdemona. He held them fast, he could feel their attention like praise, while the feet of the season ticketholders went by on the pavement, and the moon swam up above the flinty church and the Tudor Cafe.
That same spirit of desperate defiance is to be found in the novel’s other two characters as well. Colley, who is full of bitterness and vengeance at the cut-throat world with its selfish dictum of “every man for himself” around him, is desperate to prove his worth again, even as he is still haunted by his failure. As with Hands, Greene capably places Colley’s disillusionment as a reflection of the lingering impoverishment of the time and the milieu with the same vivid and cinematic precision that is such a signature element of his style.
The spring night blossomed under the headlamps, a twig of budding beech scraped the windows from a chalky bank, and Colley thought with misery and a kind of thwarted murderous love in his heart, ‘Competition. I’ll give them competition. Every man for himself,’
And when we come to Billings himself, the fourth specimen of desultory Englishness, trying to keep a stiff upper lip even in the face of shabby failure, even as we traverse the seas and boundaries that lie between nations and continents, the portrait of this desolate African wilderness that develops in the hypo of Greene’s prose belongs less to fact than a region of the mind.
He stood there in the tin-roofed church and looked round – the small bare crossless altar, the yellow pitch-pine benches, the big tin tank for total immersion. It was a kind of home. Here he had had authority, holding out the money bag to the blacks. Midday struck outside from the fake Norman church, and the sun weighed down on the tin roof; somewhere outside, a steamer wailed.
Unsurprisingly, Greene was critical of how he portrayed the West African port in this segment; he felt that he would render it more realistically after his stint as a MI6 officer in Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Indeed, this initial vignette, while absorbing in its portrait of damp darkness and blinding heat, of tin-roofed stores and scavenging vultures, is remarkably more of a picture formed from an author’s subconscious, indelibly marked by his bleak perception of a landscape of moral impoverishment that could be either in Africa, in England or even unexpectedly in Mexico.
That last place particularly bears an interesting comparison to this miniature portrait of this West African port of this unfinished novel. Billings is first seen as walking out in the blinding heat, in a desultory fashion not too dissimilar from Mr. Tench walking out morosely, absent-mindedly for his ether cylinder, and in both these opening scenes, vultures are seen to be spying upon these forlorn men, stranded in these miserable, mediocre lands, without any chance of escape and relief from tin roofs too. If Billings is visited by an African who asks him for his photographs, a request that he defers brusquely, Mr. Tench is almost interrogated by a Mexican guard on duty near the customs shed for his new set of teeth; in either case, there is a picture of complete isolation and helpless despair that feels starkly vivid and credible. But even as these Englishmen do seem to have a bearing on the story, it is the character of Hands – a cocksure loafer, outwardly full of reckless derring-do, inwardly haunted, despondently, by his own failures – who piques one the most. It would have been worth pursuing him in the course of the story, to find out how he would evolve and emerge and how he would be eventually condemned to his fugitive fate hinted in the first act of the novel.
Had The Other Side of the Border been published, it could also have borne a more recognizable similarity to yet another work of Greene’s – The Lawless Roads. A bleak and uncompromising portrait of Mexico still in the dystopian depths of its anti-Catholic regime and rampant lawlessness, its prologue is set in Berkhamsted, where Greene visits the nooks and crannies of the market town where he was born and where he spent so much of his childhood and youth. His mesmeric, though often melancholic, portrait of the place’s quaint but seedy charm, and his skilful disinterment of its sordid core of immorality, a sense of even thinly disguised “lawlessness”, serve as a suitably disquieting prologue to the account of his journey that charter the lawlessness of Mexico itself. A brief description of Denton, one of the many fictional twins of Berkhamsted to be found in Greene’s fiction, as seen through the eyes of Hands, himself despairing to break free and embark on yet another foolhardy adventure, nearly emerges to be a word-for-word replica of the same.
You couldn’t live in a place like this; it was somewhere to which you returned for sleep and rissoles by the 7:50 or the 8:52: people had lived here once and died with their feet crossed to show they had been on a crusade, but now…
Did Greene use what he had already written for this aborted novel to describe his experiences and observations of Berkhamsted, as seen again on one of his intermittent returns to his birthplace, in the later book? It is an intriguing little mystery for us sleuths of Greene’s trail through fiction and non-fiction and unless more evidence surfaces, it is possible that Greene must have recorded some of his impressions, as he was often in the practice of recording even memories of his childhood and youth, in the interlude of two years that lies between these two books. In either case, as expected with the author, the description blends in seamlessly without the slightest hint of discord.
Apart from the typically solid grasp of atmosphere and evident skills at nimble characterization, The Other Side of the Border holds certain other points of worth, especially in relation to Greene’s other works, even though they were written in a more distant future. Mr. Danvers, the manager of the hardly scrupulous New Syndicate, who hires Hands, Colley, and Morrow for this expedition, also assigns a reporter to follow them in their tracks and chronicle it in the exaggerated fashion of a great colonial enterprise, like that of even Stanley and Livingstone and this particular sub-plot is eerily prophetic of how, two decades later, in A Burnt-Out Case, the seedy journalist Parkinson pursues Querry even to the furthest limit of the leper colony, eager to prop him up as a kind of modern Schweitzer.
“Candidly,” Mr Danvers said, “I want – a Legend. I’ve spoken to your advertisement manager and you’ll be given space. I want Hands – made a figure…In a way, you know, the man who leads this expedition is an ambassador – the ambassador of Europe, of civilization.”
And true to what Greene said in his little preface, this fragment of a novel is indeed stamped with “the atmosphere of the middle-thirties”. Twice, the ascent of fascism and even Hitler is referred to in the story: first, when Mr. Hands, the protagonist’ father, remarks, “Leaders seem cheap these days”, meaning how fascism has taken over the world. And the son himself, who loathes his father’s liberal attitudes, boasts that “a man’s sometimes kept – for the biggest things. Like Hitler”, again foreshadowing of what would have followed: the deaths already hinted in the first act. We weren’t so fortunate as to read the entirety of The Other Side of The Border but we are certainly fortunate to possess, in what Greene managed to complete, the many shards of raw narrative brilliance that always, when processed completely, formed and defined the career of the greatest and most dexterous storyteller of the twentieth century with all its chaos and catharsis.