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A Textual History of Graham Greene's
The Power and the Glory
by
David Leon Higdon
[*]
In the years since its publication in early 1940, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory has established itself as one of the most important modern novels.[1] The novel has also established a special place for itself among Greene's other works, having given him "more satisfaction that any other [he] had written."[2] Yet few of its critics and fewer of its readers know that the novel exists in print in four states of text distinguished by almost four hundred substantive variants.[3] For example, American readers have for years viewed a drunken priest baptizing a boy "Carlota" (A37), while English readers have seen the same boy baptized "Brigitta" (E30), an unconscious reminder of the priest's concern over and love for his illegitimate daughter, memory of whom intrudes into his drunken state.[4] Those who teach the novel know the intent, almost obsessive, interest students have in Coral Fellows and their attempts to explain what happens to her—Murder? Worms? Appendicitis? A miscarriage? The American text tells us that she stands "in pain" (A73); the English text more explicitly reads "in her woman's pain"
Those readers who silently congratulate Greene for resisting Church pressure to revise his novel (C, xi) and who assume that his refusal "to revise the book, on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of [his] publisher" indicates stability in the text are as mistaken as those who assume that his admitted satisfaction with part of the novel indicates no later revisions occurred.[5] Three-hundred-eighty-five substantive and almost two thousand accidental variants scarcely make a stable text, especially when many of the variants involve readings crucial to an interpretation of the whisky priest. In A Sort of Life, his autobiography, Greene turned to a Jamesian metaphor in commenting generally on his revisions:
Neither William Heinemann nor Viking Press, the publishers of the first English and American editions, anticipated that the novel would be a success, much less a classic. Heinemann issued a small 3500-copy edition, and
The novel's paratexts—title, dedication, and epigraph—perhaps hold the key to the relationship. The Power and the Glory was published "under the difficult and misleading title" The Labyrinthine Ways "chosen by the publisher" in America, because Phyllis Bentley's romance of the English Civil War had pre-empted Greene's title in the copyright office.[9] The American edition is dedicated "To Vivien [Greene's wife] With Dearest Love," but both the proofs and the English edition have "To Gervase" who is yet to be identified. Almost as significant as the title change is the American omission of the epigraph "Th' inclosure narrow'd; the sagacious power | Of hounds and death drew nearer every hour" drawn from John Dryden's The Hind and the Panther (Part II, lines 5-6), an important work of Catholic apologetics. The passage refers to the persecution of Catholics following the Popish Plot and probably also during the Commonwealth, thus offering a historical parallel to the Mexican Revolution. Omission of these lines—they still
The 111 substantive variants (12 inversions, 82 changes, 10 deletions, and 77 additions) separating the first editions fall into three groups: errors and corrections, American house-styling, and authorial revisions. The American text has "cose" (A224) instead of "cost" (E210), incorrectly adds an apostrophe to "hackles'" (A184/E170) but corrects "chicel" (E82) to "chicle" (A91); a spacing error crept into the English text giving "front on" (E145) rather than "fronton" (A157) in the sentence "it drove and jumped upon the cement floor of the useless fronton which had once been the cathedral . . . ." The Viking editors apparently also exercised a free hand in americanizing the text, because sixty-seven readings are unlike anything in the proofs or the English text. These range from addition of apostrophes to "barbers'," and "dentists'," (A10/E4) on the first pages of the novel to the use of "onto" (A10 et passim), "a while" (A119, 200), and "Oh" (A14, 99) in place of "on to" (E4 et passim), "awhile" (E109, 185), and "O" (E7, 90),[13] to variant spellings of "Brigitta" (E76 et passim), "Pueblito" (E78), and "hooves" (E122, 231) as "Brigida" (A84 et passim), "Pueblita" (A86), and "hoofs" (A132, 247). Elsewhere, a number of phrases were inverted—for example, "in if he could with steel" (E27) became "in with steel if he could" (A33), "You do not always say good-bye to those you love beside a deathbed" (E84) became "To those you love you do not always say good-bye beside a deathbed" (A93), and "walked as if his shoes were cramping him delicately to the bed" (E135) changed to "walked delicately to the bed as if his shoes were cramping him"
The remaining thirty-one variants appear to have entered the text as authorial page-proof revisions. In them, we see Greene sharpening details, correcting facts, avoiding repetition, and occasionally shifting meaning. As always, a few variants appear indifferent, though at the moment of revision, they must have struck the author as being necessary. Among these are revisions of "small plaza" (A26) to "little plaza" (E20), "maguey" (A142) to "mescal" (E130), "received" (A174) to "experienced" (E160) in "he had a sense of companionship which he had never received in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton gloves," and the four revisions of "scrumpled" (A113, 187, 194, 212) to "crumpled" (E103, 173, 179, 197).[15] Among these might be included the changes of "A Colt No. 5" (A77) to "A Colt .38" (E69) and "stopping" (A295) to "filling" (E274). In revising "he picked the book up" (A24) to "he shut the book up" (E19), Greene corrected
Several revisions are genuinely important in terms of understanding character. Two, the revisions of "Carlota. Carlota" (A37) to "Brigitta. Brigitta" (E30) and "in pain" (A73) to "in her woman's pain" (E65), have already been mentioned. One revision, "though" (A248) to "enough" (E231) in "Poor man, the priest thought, he isn't really bad though . . ." reverses meaning in that it significantly changes the priest's opinion of the mestizo from denying evil in the half-caste to stressing it and its limitations. Elsewhere, near the end of the novel, Greene readjusted one point in the discussion between the priest and the lieutenant. Originally, the priest explained "It's not worth bothering too much about a little pain here. There's one belief we both of us have—that it will all be much the same in a hundred years" (A262).[16] The critical temper which fastens on one sentence, sometimes one word, to validate an interpretation could take this passage as the priest's ironic expression of failure. After all, what difference does the present conflict over pain and its uses or cures matter since all will be much the same in succeeding generations? Greene revised this to read "It's not worth bothering too much about a little pain here. There's one belief we both of us have—that we'll all be dead in a hundred years" (E244). Suddenly the passage stresses the significance of the conflict while reminding the actors of their
In addition to the substantives, 532 accidental variants separate the two editions, indicating the extensive house-styling Viking imposed on this as well as on the other Greene novels.[18] When queried about the publication of Greene's works, a Viking editor, Edwin Kennebeck responded:
we have produced Graham Greene's books in different ways. sometimes we got duplicate typescripts from Mr. Greene, and did out own styling—mostly following the style of Collins Authors' and Printers' Dictionary. Sometimes we used the English publisher's proofs, making occasional improvements in the case of typographical errors, etc.
Mr. Greene usually read our proofs and answered our queries, sometimes acceding to our suggestions for changes. He generally showed little concern for "accidentals," and generally accepted our minimum styling, recognizing that U. S. practice differs from British (the British seem to be much more likely to accept an author's manuscript as is, without trying to correct obvious inconsistencies). Sometimes Mr. Greene sent a few corrections to be inserted at some stage or other (including later reprints of books already published).[19]
In The Power and the Glory, Viking's minimum house-styling seems concentrated on spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and other changes which sometimes acquire significance by becoming semi-substantive in nature. Viking regularly changes the "-ise" spellings to "-ize" but retains the "-our" spellings. It uses "grille," "zareba," "griffon," "hooves," "storied," "slyly," and "rooted" rather than "grill," "zariba," "griffin," "hoofs," "slily," "storeyed," and "routed." Collins Dictionary recommends "grille" and "slyly," but prefers "griffon" and "zariba." Compounds presented as two words in the English text become one word ("undernourished," "whitewashed," "stomachache"), or hyphenated words ("down-river," "house-keeper," "up-hill"), whereas two-word phrases are sometimes hyphenated ("oil-lamp," "deathbed"). Viking's goal of consistency was never achieved, though, because the text contains both "police station," "whitewashed," "courtyard" and "police-station," "white-washed," and "court-yard." Analogously, identical adjectival phrases also appear inconsistently, for example, as "badly-affected" and "hand beaten."
The Viking text italicized all Spanish and Latin words, phrases, and sentences, missing only "sala," regularized ellipses at the ends of sentences to four dots, and added the typical American comma before the final item in series and after introductory phrases and clauses. It capitalized all titles such as "Governor," "President," and even "Señorita," and attempted to capitalize all references to the deity and to church ritual acts: for example, Contrition, Confession, Absolution, He, Him, His, Thy, etc. The results sometimes are inappropriate, as when the "holy book," the life of Juan being read by the mother to her children in counterpoint to the priest's life, is capitalized.
In addition to affecting the appearance of the page and the texture of the prose, the Viking text subtly affects meaning at times with its heavier, more rhetorical punctuation. Its punctuation of "'We'll be in before dark?' the lieutenant said" (A269) is quite inappropriate but the insertion elsewhere of question marks with rhetorical questions and exclamation marks with interior dialogue may be more appropriate though no more authorial. It added question marks to the mestizo's jailyard talk with the priest: "'It would be better, wouldn't it, to catch you out of here? In the town somewhere?" (A185) as it did to the lieutenant's "and it's your duty, isn't it, to forget it at once?" (A261) and to the priest's examples of love's powers: "'It [God's love] set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark?" (A269). Elsewhere, it freely distributed exclamation marks—far more freely than Greene intended—to Captain Fellows' remark "'What an extraordinary thing!'" (A43), to the governor's cousin's comment "Fifteen pesos!'" (A148) where it does pick up the text's direction "exclaimed," and to "Mother of God!" (A156), the Red Shirt's interjection when the priest bumps his elbow as he attempts a billard shot. It also handles interpolations quite differently. Where the English text reads "It might prove awkward—if she had married again" (E54), the American text has ". . . awkward, if . . ." (A61), thus destroying the intended sense
A crucial date in the textual history of The Power and the Glory is the 1948 publication of The Heart of the Matter, Greene's first commercial success since The Man Within (1929) which had had a promising sale of 8,000 copies (SL, 140). Nine novels later, however, Greene had not repeated this initial success. The popularity of The Heart of the Matter, though, led Heinemann to reprint The Power and the Glory and Greene's earlier novels in a Uniform edition (and its variant binding the Library edition),[20] thus enabling Greene to make another 158 substantive revisions in the text (4 inversions, 110 changes, 35 deletions, and 9 additions).
When a full history of Greene's texts and a biography are written, the years 1947-1950 will probably loom significantly as a transitional period not only in terms of Greene's commercial success but also in terms of his attitude towards his texts. In the Introduction to The Heart of the Matter Greene states that his "writing had become rusty with disuse and misuse" (HM, vii), and the Introduction to The End of the Affair opens with the plaint "The slow discovery by a novelist of his individual method is exciting, but a moment comes in middle-age when he feels he no longer controls his method; he has become its prisoner. Then a long period of ennui sets in: it seems to him that he has done everything before" (EA, vii). These words describe a moment in late 1948 when the novel began to take shape. Paradoxically, success arrived at the time Greene was experiencing doubts about his creativity and talents, especially over "fidelity to his manner . . . and the desire to discover new formulations for himself" described so ably by Edward Said.[21] The revisions in The Power and the Glory hint an uncertainty and an artistic tiredness. For example, a fourth of the changes involve two slight adjustments—changing "buzzards" to "vultures" fourteen times and substituting "asked" for "said" twenty-one times in questions. The first edition has both "vultures" and "buzzards," and the "said" to "asked" changes are part of a larger tendency to find some variety and some color with the eternal "he said" difficulty in dialogue. For example, elsewhere, "said" becomes the more descriptive "whispered" (U4), "explained" (U47), "continued" (U78), "went on" (U180), and "urged" (U235). Revising "asked" (E5) to "whispered" (U4) in the sentence "Somebody whispered in English," adds a secretive, almost
Greene deleted the very inappropriate description of Luis's sisters "enjoying themselves like Hell" (U61/E60), as he did the "leopard" of the snake raising itself "like an affronted woman on the path" (U97/E103). The priest no longer feels "anxiety or despair" (U78), because "horror" is foreign to his response to anything in the ten year's of wandering. Instead of merely stating that he had "betrayed God not even for real lust" (E122), he now questions ". . . betrayed God for what? Not even for real lust" (U126). The revision is slight but in sharpening the rhetorical question Greene hints the priest's growth as a character as he now questions why he had acted as he did. His prayers which were "like undigested food heavy in his body, unable to escape" (E190) become prayers which "weigh him down like undigested food" (U197), similar to revisions in The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.[22] Finally the lieutenant who originally told the priest, I "hate your guts" (E249) now simply says "hate you" (U257). The revision keeps the focus on the entire individual and broadens the extent of the lieutenant's hatred. One wonders if two of the variants are printer's errors or puns. In one of those instances of the natural world counterpointing the human world and usually setting up a risible situation, the priest listens to confessions in the Lehr's barn while a horse frequently breaks wind in the background: the horse "blew windily in the dark as the sins came whispering out" (E216). Greene or someone changed "whispering" to "whimpering" (U221). Near the end of the novel, Greene originally described Mrs. Fellows as "bunched up" (E270) but changed this to "hunched up" perhaps to avoid the pun with bananas mentioned a few lines earlier.[23]
The remaining variants involve an equal number of errors and corrections, pronoun changes to avoid ambiguous references, tightened analogies, avoidance of repetitive or superfluous phrasing, and verbal changes. Usually such changes as "is" (E178) to "was" (U185), "was back" (E217) to "were back" (U222), and "had to admit" (E227) to "would have had to admit"
Although the Uniform edition did correct several errors from the first edition (the apostrophe in "barbers'" [U2], the spacing in "fronton" [U150], the phrasing in "Gulf to Vera Cruz" [U30], and "away, the Pacific" [U30]), several additional errors, none significant, crept into the text, most obviously a missetting of "woman" (U53) for "women" (E53) when the plural is indicated by the context, "here" (U233) for "there" (E227) when the priest, still at the Lehrs', thinks of the gangster as being "here," the omission of an article in the phrase "to include a griffon and oak leaf" (U190/E183), and possibly "to her" (U65) rather than "there" (E64) in the sentence "She felt no resentment at all at being there, looking after things: the word 'play' had no meaning to her at all—the whole of life was adult."
Although such revisions as "riverside" (E5) to "bank" (U3), "curious" (E91) to "inquisitive" (U92), "not frightened" (E91) to "unfrightened" (U92) "way of life" (E206) to "mode of life" (U210), and "drew" (E69) to "pulled" (U70) are indifferent in their effects, many other revisions expunge superfluous phrasing, clarify references, and turn to a more felicitious word. Why not use "them" (U281) to avoid repeating "his eyes" (E274) which appeared in the preceding sentence or describe a crop as "meagre and inadequate" (U113) when "meagre, limited and inadequate" (E111) is redundant? Similarly, "all the way" is unnecessary in the description of the gangster following "them all the way" (E195/U203) because if he followed them at all, he obviously has followed "all the way," just as if José's bed "filled up half" (E33) the room, it also "filled half" (U32). A number of the revisions simply involve substituting a synonym; for example, "mouth" (U186) for "muzzle" (E180), "things" (U179) for "something" (U173), "grid" (U263) for "grill" (E255), and "turned away" (U270) for "turned its back" (E261). There are also a few inversions such as "He himself" (E24) to "Himself he" (U23) and "The word sounded odd and archaic and local in the little stony town" (E57) to "The word in the little stony town sounded odd and archaic and local" (U57). Several times, "he said" (E102, 268/U103, 276) was cancelled when the identity of the speaker was obvious. Revision of "It lay" (E9) to "Home
Attention should also be called to the accidental variants between the first English and the Uniform edition. There are 786, an unexpectedly large number, since there are only 46 between the two editions of The End of the Affair.[24] The number, of course, is inflated because 582 involve use of a comma rather than a colon after the word introducing dialogue. Indeed, the four large categories of colon to comma (582), colon to semicolon (65), colon to period (30) with the following word capitalized as a result of the change (17), and the inversion of the order of punctuation and quotation marks (13) account for 724 or ninety-two per cent of the variants—many or all dictated perhaps by editorial decision in the resetting of the edition. The colon-to-period change seems effected to avoid two- and three-colon sentences. A few of the variants, however, result in semi-substantives. For example, early in the novel, the chief of police tells the lieutenant that the American gangster shot two G men. The lieutenant responds "'G'" (E24) to which the Uniform added a question mark, giving some point to the sentence (U23). Elsewhere, the priest tells Coral "'The boat was leaving and then—I was summoned" (E46). Deletion of the dash (U46) shifts the focus of the sentence. Either punctuation is effective: the dash indicates that "I was summoned" is an afterthought which breaks in upon the priest's mind as a moment of sudden realization that he was summoned through God's will; deletion of the dash keeps this idea but there is no hesitation or uncertainty. Likewise,
An entirely different Greene from the Greene of 1948-49 returned to The Power and the Glory in 1970 or 1971 in preparing the text for the collected edition. No longer was Greene still awaiting commercial success and widespread critical reception; instead he was an established author, some would say the dean of living English novelists, secure in his reputation. However, between 1940 and 1970, two things, over which Greene had little control, had happened to his text, and Greene approved of neither. First, John Ford had filmed the novel as The Fugitive, extensively changing the conflicts and the characters.[25] Second, Cardinal Guiseppe Pizzardo of the Vatican had condemned the novel "because it was 'paradoxical' and 'dealt with extraordinary circumstances'" (C, xi). Cardinal Archbishop Bernard William Griffin read the letter to Greene, as Greene recalls in A Sort of Life:
There is a special mystique to a Collected edition and perhaps has been ever since Jonson and Shakespeare. A collected edition setting in uniform
If The Power and the Glory followed the pattern of the other novels in the production of the Collected edition outlined by Roland Gant, Greene marked a copy of the Uniform edition which was then photocopied by Heinemann for use as printer's copy by Heinemann and Bodley Head. The revisions, for the Collected edition, 113 in number (2 inversions, 12 additions, 44 deletions, and 55 changes), are not extensive, but they take two interesting directions. First, there are numerous deletions, almost as though Greene were paring his novel down to a minimal structure. Second, the prison scene experienced much minor revision. Three tendencies, evident from the first edition, remain obvious: changes of "said" to more descriptive terms, changes of verb tense, and selection of more colorful diction in a few instances. "Said" becomes the more emphatic "asked" (C38) and "answered" (C198). Elsewhere, "said with a kind of exultation" (E25) becomes the tighter "demanded" (C22) and "shot" (E8) becomes "spat" (C6), shifting from a figurative to a literal description of Tench spitting out his bile. Usually, the revisions are more descriptive, more contextually precise, and more emphatic. Considering the uncertainties in the world of the novel, it is appropriate that "safety" (E111) became "relative safety" (C105), and Maria's "'I'm his wife'" (C87) is a slightly more accurate reply to the lieutenant than "'It's me'" (E93).
In addition, the Collected edition contains a number of corrections of misprints, verb tenses, and details—such matters as necessary apostrophes with "dentists'" (C2), correcting "Mexico" (E67) to "Mexico City" (C63) to make a reference to the capital more precise, changing "commented" (U14) to "commanded" (C13) in Tench's order to the child, correcting the idiom in the "routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling in" to "dribbling through" (C68), revising verb tense from past to present in describing a martyr who "prays for us" (C134), and thrice changing "case" (E11, 212, 274) to "cast" (C9, 201, 261) in references to Tench's dental work and the priest's memory. There are more than the usual number of indifferent revisions, however, where no loss or gain occurs for the text: "began to blow" (E18), "father" (E38), "began" (E54), "stirring" (E89), "ringing
Three important points need to be made concerning the other revisions: first, an unusual number of deletions occur; second, twenty-four of the revisions cluster in the jail-cell scene, the crucial scene in the novel; third, a number of revisions concentrate on the priest's perception of himself and his relationship with his world. One of the two prison-world metaphors, as has been pointed out, was deleted, and such passages as the following also were cancelled:
"Are you a German?" they might have said, with incredulity at the similar face, or: "Are you English?" (E125/C119)
It must sometimes be a comfort to a soldier that the atrocities on either side were equal: nobody was ever alone. (E125/C119)
You may be a saint for all I know, (E232/C221)
. . . it was the first definite indication that they and the half-caste were not alone. (E237/C226)
He felt the trap close again, irrevocably. (E226/C215)
. . . just so he could be certain Coral would arrange the final evacuation. (E39/C35)
. . . the gate was closed which would one day let it in. (E42/C38)
The novel contains a surprising number of references to World War I, but only those in Charles Fellows' thoughts seem appropriate to the characters' backgrounds. The first two passages were probably omitted because the war experience was foreign to the priest's background and possibly because Greene did not wish to leave the impression that somehow the causes of the priest and the lieutenant were roughly equal in value as were those of the English and Germans in World War I, as his original sentences imply. The third deletion, one of the half-caste's comments about the priest, removes a pointed evaluation, perhaps too pointed since Greene made similar deletions in The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case.[29] The reference to Coral became inappropriate also since Mrs. Fellows actually arranged the "final evacuation." Also, deletion of the passage shifts the focus of the paragraph away from the mother and totally to Coral. Any passage—however effective in context—which apparently struck Greene as unnecessary, slightly inaccurate, or wanting in any way—fell to his pen. Among these were several similes—"out like a curtain" (E134/C128) and "hut like a piece of furniture"
Although he did not extensively reshape the character of the priest as he did Henry Scobie in The Heart of the Matter and Richard Smythe in The End of the Affair, Greene did make the priest less sophisticated, more truly humble, and more aware of his failings. Originally, the priest "spoke English" (E6); now he speaks only "a little English" (C4), thus making him less educated, less worldly, and less experienced despite his years in the Arizona seminary. The sentence "Time was elastic: it stretched to snapping-point" (E176/C168) also disappeared from his thoughts, possibly because such a time awareness is too sophisticated for the priest who thinks largely in terms of seasons and the approaching rains. Moreover, it is an entirely different personality who can say "I have no sense of responsibility" (C188) rather than assert "I have no responsibility" (E195) while following the Indian woman on the way to bury her dead child. The earlier reading denied responsibility; the latter reading stresses the need for responsibility but the failure to feel it. The priest at this point is "tormented by ideas" and feels responsible for the woman and "the American as well" (C188). Elsewhere, his responsibility becomes "overwhelming" (C157) where it was once "enormous" (E164) signalling both a burden and a recognition that what is required is beyond his ability. In the first edition, the priest "tried—mechanically—to relieve his fear" (E65) by scratching crosses into the wall of Fellows' barn. By excising "mechanically" (C61), Greene stressed the priest's movement beyond appearance to reality. "mechanically" suggests that he scratched the crosses as a bored, unconscious action having no meaning to him. Nor does the priest criticize himself anymore saying "They deserve a martyr to care for them—not a fool like me, who loves all the wrong things" (E118). "Man" (C112) replaced "fool" because the priest knows he is a man—aware of and responsible for his actions during the last ten years; he is no "fool" and certainly not a "divine fool."
The jail cell seems to provide a microcosm of Greene's revisions, evidencing as it does all of his typical revisions designed to hone this most crucial part of the novel. Clauses such as "the lumpy blackness seemed to shift and stir" (E151/C144) and "forty miles, superstition said" (E152/C145) were inexplicably excised, and phrases such as "muffled painless cries" (E152), "their hooded and cramped pleasure" (E154), "an enormous and irrational" (E158) "feet like leprosy" (E161), "had somewhere fallen" (E161), "woman disappear—as if for ever—through" (E172) and "thought with relief" (E173) become "muffled cries" (C146), "their cramped pleasure" (C147), "an irrational" (C151), "feet" (C154), "had fallen" (C154), "woman go off through" (C165), and "thought" (C166) as Greene strove to remove all melodramatic or strained effects. Since the woman in the cell does give a "tiny scream" of
Far more accidental variants, 473 in all, separate the Collected from the Uniform than the orderly succession of texts leads one to expect.[30] Heinemann chose to make certain design changes for the Collected Edition: single quotation marks in place of double quotations, no periods after abbreviations rather than periods, arabic numerals instead of roman numerals, spaced dashes rather than unspaced dashes, and asterisks rather than blank space separating scenes. However, there are numerous other changes, many of them designed to shorten the sentence length and to remove the hesitant syntax created by use of dashes and ellipses. Several hundred colons were changed to semi-colons, commas, and periods. For example, a sentence such as "The whole sky was blackening: the crosses stuck up like dry and ugly cacti: he made off to the edge of the plateau" (U202) became three short sentences as the associative cluster sentences of the earlier texts acquired a simpler syntax. The effect of the deleted dashes and ellipses is perhaps more immediately recognizable: "celebrating a birthday . . . alone" (U4) became "celebrating a birthday, alone" (C4), "it was like making your will—and might be as valueless" (U94) became "it was like making your will and might be as valueless" (C87), "went in—to complete darkness" (U113) became "went in to complete darkness" (C105), the mestizo's complaint "'You are leaving me here—to die'" (U125), became "You are leaving me here to die" (C116), and "I don't mind you telling—the right people" (C140) became simply "I don't mind you telling the right people" (C129). In these typical examples, Greene or his publisher has dispensed with the element of unexpected interpolation. The text becomes less melodramatic in its use of hesitations and emphatic pauses when the syntax is reoriented. The text also changes the spelling of some words—most noticeably "baptized" to "bapised" throughout—, corrects earlier errors such as the failure to paragraph (U4/C3) and the failure to provide a break between scenes (U278/C258) while adding only two apparent errors itself in an omitted comma (U109/C101) and the misspelling of "Presently" (U205) as "Presenly" (C190). Obviously, though, with the many accidental variants between the first, the Uniform, and the Collected
Thus buffeted from without by the outbreak of World War II, which surely hurt early sales, from inadequate film adaptations, and from Church disapproval, The Power and the Glory has evolved to its present state through three periods of authorial revision and at least three house-stylings. The text has matured as repetitions, slack phrasings, strained images, and minor errors have gradually fallen to the side under searching authorial scrutiny. The revisions in The Power and the Glory, perhaps more clearly than those in any of his other novels, explain Greene's comments about the value of his Times experience "learning lessons valuable to his craft . . . removing the clichés . . . compressing a story to the minimum length possible without ruining its effect" (SL, 129).
Notes
In A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel, revised edition (1972), Frederick R. Karl writes: "In many ways, nevertheless, despite its flaws, The Power and the Glory is a political-religious novel in the manner of The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain" (p. 102).
Introduction, The Power and the Glory, Collected Edition (London: Heinemann and Bodley Head, 1971), p. x; hereafter cited as C. The Collected Editions of It's a Battlefield (1970), The Heart of the Matter (1971) and The End of the Affair (1974) will be cited as IAB, HM, and EA.
In addition to the Collected, other editions used are The Power and the Glory (London: Heinemann, 1940) [8s3d], reprinted at least four times and once (1945) as a Heinemann Pocket Edition; The Labyrinthine Ways (New York: Viking, 1940) [$2.50], reissued under the original title in 1946 and reprinted as a Viking Compass edition in 1959 (three times), 1960, 1961 (four times), 1962 (with Introduction), 1962 (twice), 1963 (three times), 1964 (three times), 1965 (twice), 1966 (twice), 1967, 1968 (twice), 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 (twice), 1973, 1975 (twice); The Power and the Glory, Uniform Edition (London: Heinemann, 1949), reprinted in 1949, 1951, and 1952, and issued in a variant binding as the Library Edition in 1959, 1960, 1964, and 1965. Hereafter these texts are abbreviated E, A, U, and L. The Penguin editions since 1971 have reprinted the text of the Collected edition. I have not considered the Bantam reprints in this essay.
In "Bibliography and Modern Studies," Approaches to the Study of Twentieth-Century Literature (1963), pp. 12-13, Bruce Harkness noted this and three other variants in the text. He concluded that "a critic who admits that knowledge is one of our aims would insist that his students not use the Viking (Compass) edition . . . nor the even worse Bantam edition."
In A Sort of Life (1972), Greene writes: "In most of my novels I can remember passages, even chapters, which gave me at the time I wrote them a sense of satisfaction—'this at least has come off'. So I felt, however mistakenly, with the trial scene in The Man Within, and later with Querry's voyage in A Burnt-Out Case . . . [and] the prison dialogue in The Power and the Glory" (p. 144). Hereafter this text is abbreviated SL.
See my "Graham Greene's Second Thoughts; The Text of The Heart of the Matter," SB, 30 (1977), 149-156; "'Betrayed Intentions': Graham Greene's The End of the Affair," The Library, 34 (1979), 71-78; "Saint Catherine, Von Hügel, and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair," forthcoming in ES, and "The Texts of Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case," forthcoming in PBSA. Also see Philip Stratford's "Second Thoughts on "Graham Greene's Second Thoughts': The Five Texts of The Heart of the Matter," SB, 21 (1978), 263-266 which corrects faulty assumptions in my first essay.
Interview with Roland Gant, Editor-in-Chief, W. W. Heinemann, London, 7 July 1977. I wish to thank Mr. Gant and his colleagues for their willingness to discuss Greene's association with Heinemann and the production of the Uniform, Library, and Collected editions. Many Heinemann records were destroyed during the war, and at least some Viking records have also been destroyed, see note 19 below.
These unmarked proofs, hereafter cited as P, are in the Rare Book Room, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. For a complete description of the Greene holdings, see my "A Catalogue of the McFarlin Library Graham Greene Collection," forthcoming. I particularly wish to thank Mr. Michael Bleckner for his assistance and suggestions during my stay at the University of Tulsa.
Introduction, C, p. x. Bentley's book was published in America by Macmillan early in 1940, and, ironically, was reviewed and advertised opposite Greene's novel in Catholic World, 151 (May 1940), 253-254. Even though Greene has expressed his disapproval of the American title, it continues to attract unwarranted attention. The Viking Critical Edition, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Peter J. Conn (New York, 1970) reprints the Francis Thompson poem, "The Hound of Heaven," from which the title was taken, draws attention to the title through study questions, and begins the introduction with a brief discussion of its significance (pp. 515-520, 537, and vii-viii).
The importance of epigraphs has been briefly noted by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), pp. 100 and 198, and more fully discussed in my "George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph," NCF, 25 (1970), 126-51 and Time and English Fiction (1977), pp. 13-14, 109-11, 115-116, and 147. The theoretical problem of epigraphs was explored in the MLA Special Session, "Paratexts in Fiction," 28 December 1978.
The Wordsworth epigraph appears only in the unmarked proofs. Greene did extend his revisions to epigraphs late in the composition of his novels. A contemplated Dickens epigraph was dropped for A Burnt-Out Case and its Dante epigraph was not added until the final typed copy was completed.
In A Burnt-Out Case, Greene frequently inverted phrasing at all stages in composition from early drafts to page proofs; see note 8 above. Three inversions in The Power and the Glory are unquestionably authorial: "the priest's head round" (A78), "up apprehensively" (A262), and "taken tentatively up" (A276) changed to "round the priest's head" (E70), "up apprehensively" (E245), and "taken up tentatively" (E257). The A readings agree with the unmarked proofs.
In A Burnt-Out Case, the final typescript, proofs, and first English edition use "scrumpled" (E58) until the Collected changed it to "crumpled" (53).
The political implications of the novel were discussed in a review by Anthony West (The New Statesman and Nation, 19 [16 March 1940], 372-373), who called the novel "a parable about the importance of Religion to the Individual and to Society told with great skill and power, and all the more interesting because it is so fundamentally opposed to everything for which Liberalism stands."
Early reviewers were accurate in viewing the novel as a "thesis" novel, but they erred in their focus. The TLS reviewer wrote: "what is otherwise unsatisfying in the story is its bleak division of human experience into shabby sins, lusts and violences on the one side, doctrinal salvation on the other. There seems to be hardly anything between—neither joy in life nor kindness, neither practical philosophy nor a gleam of humour. In brief, it is not so much as illusion of life that Mr. Greene achieves in this novel as an illustration of doctrine" (9 March 1940, p. 121). Ralph Bates concluded that "Mr. Greene has carried over his pietism into his revolutionary, that's all. What he needed in his last conversation was a revolutionary who had sounded his own philosophy to its depths, whose knowledge of men had been enriched by a humane sophistication. But then he would have needed a priest of similar capacities, and that might have strained the Tabascan probabilities" (New Republic, 22 April 1940, p. 550). Needless to say, it would also have "strained" the novel. From a later perspective, it is easier to see the confrontation scenes between the priest and the lieutenant as typical of the parabolic literature perceptively surveyed by Samuel Hynes in The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (1977), see pp. 312-313 in particular.
There are 570 variants between the English and American editions of A Burnt-Out Case, 1810 between the editions of The End of the Affair, and over 1100 between the editions of The Heart of the Matter. A full tabulation of the 532 accidental variants includes: commas added (106), quotation marks regularized (69), spelling changes (44), hyphenated forms to one word (37), italics added (32), ellipses corrected (30), lower case raised (30), accent omitted (25), changing capitalization (21), upper case lowered (19), two words hyphenated (14), hyphenated word to two words (14), other spelling changes (8), one word to hyphenated form (7), colon to semi-colon (7), comma to colon (6), comma to dash (6), comma to dash (6), comma deleted (4), and other miscellaneous changes (54).
Edwin Kennebeck to DLH, 24 November 1976. The house-styling guide mentioned is F. Howard Collins' Authors' and Printers' Dictionary: A Guide for Authors, Editors, Printers of the Press, Compositors and Typists, first published in 1905.
Collation has borne out Roland Gant's recollection that the two texts are identical except for the more substantial binding and the front pages.
Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), pp. 254-255. Said continues: "During this third period in the career, innovation and repetition not only constitute the writer's judgments of what he is doing, they also parallel judgments of him made by his audience, by now accustomed to his idiom and to the particular place he occupies, through his text, in its mind. But whether or not author and audience agree in their judgment, it is nevertheless true that during this phase the writer judges his work much as a reader world" (p. 256).
In The End of the Affair, Greene deleted the clause, "the orgasm was over" from "The demon had done its work, the orgasm was over, I felt drained of venom" (A77, B67), and from The Heart of the Matter, he deleted "I can never void it" from "It's the coating of my stomach. I can never void it," see Compass Edition (New York: Viking, 1948), p. 259.
Harkness, p. 23, n. 22, suggests this explanation. Throughout the novel, however, there are an almost equal number of "bunched" and "hunched" bodies.
See note 6 above. There were 24 marks added, 6 deleted, and 16 changed. Otherwise, the two editions appear to have been printed from the same plates—unlike the editions of The Power and the Glory. The 786 accidental variants between the first and the Uniform include: colon to comma (582), colon to semicolon (65), colon to period (30), lower case raised (17), quotation mark and punctuation reversed (13), dash to comma (12), comma deleted (10), hyphen deleted (5), upper case lowered (4), comma added (4), semicolon to period (3), single quotation mark added (3), and other miscellaneous changes (38).
Ford's movie, The Fugitive, is an RKO film, released in 1947. As far as I know, Greene has not commented publicly on the Paramount 1962 television production starring George C. Scott as the lieutenant.
SL, p. 58. The Introduction to The Power and the Glory implies that the meeting occurred in 1955 (C, p. xi), as it could have since Archbishop Griffin died 20 August 1956. The passage in A Sort of Life suggests an earlier date ("my novel . . . which had been published ten years before"). The meeting probably occurred in 1954 or early 1955.
Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Griffin Archbishop of Westminster for Advent 1953, p. 7. I wish to thank Elisabeth R. Poyser, Archivist of the Archdiocese of Westminster, for her assistance in locating this pastoral letter. Cardinal Pizzardo's letter will not be available to study until after 1985.
Greene deleted "Like many a recognised saint" from Parkinson's description of Querry in A Burnt-Out Case (E147/C134) and several similar passages from The Heart of the Matter; see note 6.
The full tabulation is as follows: colon to semi-colon (161), colon to period (119), colon to comma (43), spelling change (23), dash to comma (22), dash deleted (22), semicolon to period (17), dash to period (14), colon to dash (9), comma added (8), dash to semicolon (5), comma deleted (4), semi-colon to comma (4), semi-colon to colon (3), quotation-punctuation reversed (2), and 1 each for apostrophe added, apostrophe deleted, paragraphing corrected, ellipsis to comma, period to comma, colon to exclamation mark, ellipsis corrected, comma to colon, dash to colon, comma to semi-colon, and break in text added.
The most extensive discussion of Greene's punctuation is Dominic P. Consolo, "Graham Greene: Style and Stylistics in Five Novels," in Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations, ed. Robert O. Evans (1963), pp. 61-95. Throughout his essay, Professor Consolo pays close attention to accidentals, unfortunately using the American texts as his source: "And what should be explained at this point is the stylistic function of the punctuation—especially of the colon, for it seems literally to pepper the pages of his novels. The colons set off from each other a series of succeeding clauses, but also tie them to the initial statement so that in themselves they have the simple force of a concluding statement and, in their succession, the added force of their syntactical combination. By using punctuation in this manner, Greene can strip his narrative of articles and connectives, vary the cadence by the number of the length of numbers in a sequence, and free the internal elements for unexpected interpolations" (p. 85).
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