University of Virginia Library

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"

(E65). The striking figure of the small snake rearing "itself like an affronted woman on the path" (E103) disappears from the later editions (U104), as does the description of Luis's two sisters "enjoying themselves like Hell" (E60/U61) as they listen to their mother read the pious history of Juan's martyrdom. Also, one of the most memorable defining metaphors in the novel—"He gave up the effort: this place [the jail cell] was very like the world elsewhere: people snatched at causes of pleasure and pride in cramped and disagreeable surroundings: there was no time to do anything worth doing, and always one dreamed of escape . . ." (E165/C158)—is missing from the most recent edition of the novel.

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:

The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931) have been "demolished" through suppression. The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951) have undergone extensive "remodeling"; and most of the other novels have experienced repairs, more or less extensive.[6] The Power and the Glory belongs in the latter group and provides an opportunity to view Greene the stylist concentrating on the art of the exact detail, the carefully planned effect, and the minimal text. It also shows Greene moving through at least three stages or attitudes towards his texts.

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

Viking only 2000 copies (C, x). Since no correspondence is yet available and because publishers' records from the period were destroyed during World War II or as a matter of policy,[7] the relationship between the two editions must be inferred from collational evidence. Fortunately, a set of unmarked Heinemann proofs exists,[8] and from it one can conclude that the American edition was set from either a duplicate typescript or galley proofs heavily "americanized" by Viking editors whereas the English edition evolved from proofs corrected and revised by Greene. The unmarked proofs, for instance, contain two errors—"customs" (P4/A10) for "customs'" (E4) and "C men" (P24/A31) for "G men" (E24)—repeated in the American edition, and an error—"excusada" (P21)—"corrected" in the American to "excusado" (A27) but "excusados" (E21) in the English. Furthermore, the priest comes closer to revealing his name in the American edition than he does in the English text. The text reads: "he gave his name to a stranger for the first time in ten years: Father So-and-so" (A213). This move towards individualization does not appear in the English text (E198), though it does appear in the unmarked proofs (P198).

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

appear in no American edition—constitutes a major substantive change not only because the omission is unauthorized but also because Greene's epigraph defines the conflicts of the novel, predicates the action, establishes tone and theme, and functions as the first bit of interpretative rhetoric in the text.[10] At one time the novel had a second epigraph—"The best of what we do and are, | Just God, forgive!"—drawn from William Wordsworth's "Thoughts Suggested the Day Following, On the Banks of Nith, Near the Poet's Residence," one of his three memorial poems on Robert Burns.[11] Because this epigraph was still in the unmarked proofs, we can surmise that it was not in the printer's copy sent to America or else that it was cancelled by letter. Revision of the title and omission of the Dryden epigraph hint Viking's interventions in the text, but presence of the "Gervase" dedication and the two epigraphs in the unmarked proofs suggests that the American edition was either set from an early duplicate typescript or that Greene communicated some but not all changes to Viking by letter.[12]

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"

(A147), although knowing that one of Greene's most frequent revisions in typescripts and proofs is inversion, I suspect that this is further evidence that the American text records an early reading.[14] Substitution of "Whom" (A87, 109), "she" (A42), "were" (A18) for "Who" (E78, 99), "her" (E36), and "was" (E12) shows American grammar replacing English idiom, just as "hanged" (A39), "rooted" (A56), "awakened" (A94), "buzzed" (A109) and "within" (A209) crowded out "hung" (E32), "routed" (E49), "woken" (E85), "burred" (E100), and "in" (E194). The American text is also fussy over pronoun reference, often replacing a pronoun with a noun to avoid ambivalent antecedents. Only once does the change seem necessary: "The priest" (A58) replaced "He" (E51) in the sentence "The priest fell uneasily asleep . . . ." Because the paragraph had described both the priest and an old man, some certainty of reference is necessary to specify who goes to sleep. Only twice, though, does the American text make significant changes. "Bandage" (E167) became "muffle" (A190) in "he thought of a man he had once shrived who was on the point of death with cancer—his relatives had had to muffle their faces, the smell of the rotting interior was so appalling." An eye-skip on the part of a compositor may account for the omission of "He was shaken by the sense of his own uselessness" (A182/E168) in the description of the priest's feelings as he and the others leave the jail cell. The sentence is crucial in that it early signals the priest's true humility. The sentence does appear in the proofs. Occasionally, the American text omits words its editor might have considered redundant, as when "quick" was struck from "a quick furtive look" (A275/E256). The proofs read "a quick, furtive look" (P256) capturing the nervousness of the action with the comma which Greene apparently deleted when revising them.

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

a minor detail since Tench had "picked up" the book two sentences earlier. The description of Tench preparing to write his wife because "an old impulse had come to him" (A61) was corrected to "an odd impulse" (E54). The impulse must be "odd" because it had not existed before the priest's visit. The priest creates something new in Tench in terms of his past rather than reawakening an "old" impulse. Elsewhere, Greene strove to avoid repetition as when "all the lines" (A125) "land away?" (A218), and "the heavy stormy sunlight" (A251) were changed to "the lines" (E115), "land?" (E204), and "the stormy sunlight" (E235). The first deletes a word already used in the sentence; the second avoids a word used in the following sentence; the third avoids redundancy since the image "stormy" already includes "heavy." Occasionally, the revision sharpens imagery, as when "something left over" (A163) in the description of the soldiers, "A few men moved in the hammocks—a large unshaven jaw hung over the side like something left over on a butcher's counter," became "something left unsold" (E150). The revision more effectively captures the idea of rejection. The other items on the counter have been considered and sold; this one, however, has been passed over, rejected by the customers as unworthy. Changing "refused" (A243) in "It wouldn't really have been a good dream—that confession in Las Casas when he had to admit, as well as everything else, that he had refused confession to a man dying in mortal sin" to "denied" (E227) more clearly picks up religious connotations and hence heightens the priest's potential failings.

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

insignificant existence. The individuals will die, but the conflict will continue. This thought is more in keeping with the numerous allusions throughout the novel which stress the permanent opposition between the religious outlook arguing that the causes of pain are inherent in man's nature and hence cannot be removed and the political outlook arguing that the causes for pain reside in faulty institutions or individuals and can hence be cured as soon as these are reformed or destroyed.[17]

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:

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

of the sentence. The American text establishes that a letter from Tench would be awkward if his wife had remarried: the English stresses that a letter would be awkward, no matter what, and especially awkward if—an afterthought—she had remarried. The dash more effectively captures the hesitation and turn of thought.

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

conspiratorial tone to the priest's initial speech to Tench on the riverside. Likewise, "explained" (U47) is more effective than "said" (E47) in conveying Coral's almost patronizing tone in telling the priest that he could renounce his faith and thus escape the necessity of flight. Beyond these, Greene's revisions concern corrections, deleting "again" in "down again" (U9) in describing Tench laying down a cast for the first time. Throughout his text, Greene shows a concern for tightening phrasing. Analogies such as "painfully: it was as" (E115) become "painfully, as" (U160) and adjectival constructions such as "lesson it had learnt" (E235) become "lesson learnt" (U242). All the revisions indicate a basic satisfaction with the text except for certain local effects within individual sentences.

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"

(U233) concern only slight adjustments or corrections of verb tense, but often such changes tighten the verbal structure: for example, "caught himself up" (E232) becomes "checked himself" (U239), and "was sent spinning" (E18) becomes "spun" (U18), or create a slightly more telling change as when "a whole world had ended" (E85) becomes "a whole world had died" (U85) or when the priest's desires become more conscious in the revision of "needed" (E103) to "wanted" (U104). Once the change of tense generalizes an entire sentence moving it from the local effect of the character's mind to the narrative voice's general truths when "Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair" (E177) becomes "Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knows despair" (U183). "Sentimental in that way" (E195) became "Sentimental in that respect" (U203) to avoid repetition of "the way" earlier in the sentence, and phrases such as "it was as" (E155) and "it was like" (E215) were shortened to "as" (U160) and "like" (U220).

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

lay" (U7), "He" (E104) to "the priest" (U105), and "the message" (E237) to "that message" (U244) simply clarifies antecedents when ambiguity is possible in the original phrasing. Once, however, in "not, father" (E79) to "not that, father" (U78) the clarified reference is essential. The priest has asked two questions of the villagers—have they heard of Padre José, do they wish him to be like José—and it is essential that their answer be in response to the second, not the first question. Changing "restlessly" (E44) to "aimlessly" (U44) in describing Captain Fellows was also a nice touch in that it more effectively captures the feckless lack of direction and planning in the Fellows' world, just as deletion of "he shared it" from the sentence "He had touched the taboo—he shared it, the bond was broken" (E38/U44) sets him apart from his death-entranced wife. In the Introduction to It's a Battlefield, Greene explained: "I have seldom had the courage to re-read a book of mine more than once and that immediately after publication, when I check it for misprints and for the small changes which I ought not to have missed, in manuscript, typescript and proof, so that I may have a marked copy ready for another edition if one is ever required" (IAB, ix). The Uniform edition of The Power of the Glory may have evolved in this way.

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,

capitalization of "He" (U167) in "If God intended him to escape He could snatch him away from in front of a firing squad" heightens the relationship between the priest and his god.

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:

Cardinal Griffin's Pastoral Letter for Advent 1953, the one most likely given to Greene, contains more than a "parting shot." It roundly condemns unnamed sensational tabloids, particularly of the Sunday press, and then turns to novels which sin "against the sixth commandment . . . in thought and word. . . ."[27] Cardinal Griffin then seems to focus on Greene's The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair:

There is a special mystique to a Collected edition and perhaps has been ever since Jonson and Shakespeare. A collected edition setting in uniform

bindings and dust-jacketed volumes stretching across a shelf must give an author a sense of satisfaction, accomplishment, and arrival, although revisions for the edition raise serious questions concerning intention and technique. Greene turned to a military metaphor in describing a three-volume Oeuvres choisies of his work: "I sometimes see myself as a ragged troop commander driving his exhausted column on towards the last frontier. I have no wish to march at the pace of the stragglers; they must be left to the mercies, however harsh, that a hostile population may perhaps accord them."[28] So saying, he omitted The Man Within and Stamboul Train as he had earlier dropped The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall. However, when he turned his attention to The Power and the Glory he made certain that it did not "straggle."

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

up" (E257) and "the oddest thing" (E184), scarcely differ from "became evident" (C16), "dad" (C35), "started" (C50), "astir" (C87), "chiming up" (C246), and "an odd thing" (C176), though "dad" is more informal, and "an odd thing" removes the superlative. One revision however, results in an error. Greene changed "six days" (E211) to "three days" (C200) in describing the journey to Las Casas though elsewhere references remain to six days.

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:

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"

(E190/C182)—, a description of the contents of bottles—"small fingers of crudely coloured liquid lay in some of them" (E178/C170)—, and a grisly joke made by the priest over the matter of boundaries between the two states—"A mile or two makes no difference. Nobody here's likely to bring an action" (E225/C214).

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

sexual enjoyment, "painless" became slightly inappropriate as did "hooded" with its connotations of secretive and "somewhere" since the old man has fallen asleep not "somewhere" but directly against the priest himself. Four times "horror" disappeared from the priest's reactions. Once the priest has accepted the possibility that a god can love the entire world, he has no reason to realize "with horror" (E152/C146) that the couple in the cell is enjoying sexual pleasure, nor does he need to protest "in feeble horror" (E151/C145) when he accidentally steps on someone's hand.

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

editions, all generalizations concerning the typical Greene punctuation and syntax must be cautiously drawn.[31]

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