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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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