SOURCE: "The Witch at the Corner: Notes on Graham Greene's Mythology," in Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations, edited by Robert O. Evans, University of Kentucky Press, 1963, pp. 231-44.

[In the essay below, Scott examines Greene's use of myth in his short stories, focusing in particular on his depiction of the myth of childhood within the context of African and primitive themes.]

In the short story often lies the microcosm of an author's total vision, and for Graham Greene that medium has provided the emblem for both "the power and the glory" of his longer works. Indeed, the volume Nineteen Stories (1949), the best but by no means the only collection of Greene's shorter fiction, contains more than a "hint of an explanation" toward a fuller realization of his world view. Few critics, however, have perceived the significance of the short stories to the whole of Greene's work. Furthermore, those who discuss the short fiction often err in not recognizing the thick web of consciousness surrounding the hero's actions and read them as if they expressed only the conventional Christian dichotomy between good and evil. George Silveira's "Greene's 'The Basement Room,'" [in The Explicator XV, December 1956] for example, searches the Catholic Encyclopedia to discover the relation between the Church's designation of man's seventh year for attaining the age of reason and the age of Philip when he rejects responsibility in the world. Vernon Young's review of the whole volume ["Hell on Earth: Six Versions," Hudson Review II, Summer 1949] practically diagnoses a sort of Augustinian neurosis as the core of Greene's creation. "His flights across the threshold of the occult, of the theological," writes Young, "are impelled by fear of physical being rather than by visions of the power and the glory." And Sean O'Faolain in The Vanishing Hero strongly allies Greene with "antihumanists" like Mauriac and Bernanos who encourage a return to a medieval world. In fact, nearly all Greene's works have at one time or another been considered as Christian allegories, dialogues between the body and soul, and even as Manichean tracts. But surely a man of Greene's stature, a man who most unquestionably belongs to the 20th century and not the Middle Ages, cannot wholly depend on the Baltimore Catechism for thematic structure. Like Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Tolkien, and even his personal favorites, Saki and de la Mare, Greene has created his own myth, one that reconstructs tradition and ritual yet speaks with the immediacy of the modern dilemma. Explicitly, Greene's central symbol is the heart of Africa, seat of our fall, and the whole myth first takes shape in his autobiographical travelogue, Journey Without Maps. It is continued and brought to fruition within the short stories.

Just as Henry James found in Europe the "thickness" and "roundness," the "fairy-tale side of life," so Greene found in Africa a myth of lost childhood, or "Pendélé," as he calls it in his latest work, A Burnt-out Case. He wishes to find, by simply penetrating into the African heart, at what point we went astray—where man fell. No critic can escape the childhood theme in Greene, for it is the one obsession out of which his tragedies grow. But, as in Catharine Hughes' discussion of this matter [in "Innocence Revisited," Renascence XII, Autumn 1959], Greene's view of childhood has been thought to include a Wordsworthian innocence. This is too simple. It cannot explain the knowledge of death that Francis Morton in "The End of the Party" possesses, nor Pinkie's early instinctive distaste for his parents' tawdry Saturday nights in Brighton Rock. These distinctly unromantic elements, however, are placed in perspective by "The Lost Childhood," an essay in which Greene both celebrates and laments his discovery of the creative endeavor in Marjorie Bowen's The Viper of Milan. Before this intellectual awakening, says Greene, he had lived his first fourteen years in a "wild country without a map" where his only recognition was the ancient witch Gagool of King Solomon's Mines whose power haunted his nursery dreams, as we shall see. But inevitably the hand must move along the bookshelf, one must grow up to the moral world, selecting a job, a taste, a death, as surely as Eve's hand moves toward the apple or Oedipus guesses the sphinx's riddle.

So in the childhood of Africa what Greene found was not a prelapsarian Eden, but Eden at the moment the apple is to be plucked: neither guilty nor innocent of the forces of evil. There the childhood of the race is indeed acquainted intimately with the devil, the witch of our dreams; yet in that intimacy it has still not lost the instinctive, ritualistic terror, the imagination which comprehends the supernatural. Thus, for Greene, our civilization has exchanged "supernatural cruelty" for a secular depravity. We have lost a creative sensitivity to witches and angels, the understanding that permits man to create and build a brave new world out of the ruin he placed on nature at the Fall. Our seedy, chrome civilization has made a Manichean sense of evil unfortunately possible.

In Africa, where there is a potential yet unrealized civilization—"the graves not opened yet for gold, the mine not broken with sledges"—Greene discovered the compelling ritual of the Liberian bush devil. These men of power govern the supernatural and natural activities of the community and with raffia skirts and carved masks, go about the countryside both terrorizing and delighting the folk. In an unconsciously erotic ritual, which Greene likens to Europa and the bull, children dance before them, courting that power who leers beneath the carved mask. These bush devils are the initiators of the young, executors of justice, and demigod priests all in one; yet in reality they may be merely the harmless village blacksmith. Greene discovered that their "power" contains that simultaneous quality of good and evil, the essence of black magic that has been lost in most of our civilized theology. He writes:

"Devil," of course, is a word used by the English-speaking native to describe something unknown in our theology; it has nothing to do with evil. One might equally call these big bush devils angels—for they have the angelic properties of alacrity and invisibility—if that word contained no element of "good." In a Christian land we have grown so accustomed to the idea of a spiritual war, of God and Satan, that this supernatural world, which is neither good nor evil but simply Power, is almost beyond sympathetic comprehension. Not quite: for those witches which haunted our childhood were neither good nor evil. They terrified us with their power, but we knew all the time that we must not escape them. They simply demanded recognition: flight was a weakness.

Here Greene's myth allies itself with the archetypal recognition of evil which has absorbed the studies of Freud and Jung. In Freud this dream of the witch, which haunts Greene's heroes through several works, is part of the "archaic heritage which the child brings with him into the world, before any experience of his own, as a result of the experience of his ancestors." Indeed Freud is on Greene's mind as he leaves Africa. "Freud has made us conscious as we have never been before of those ancestral threads which still exist in our unconscious minds to lead us back." Unlike those of Freud, though, the ancestral threads which Greene has come upon are not regarded as sources of neurosis. They are rather a "dread of something outside that has got to come in." Unlike Marlow's descent into hell which culminates in "the horror" of primitive barbarism, the whole journey into the African bush confronts Greene with a "sense of disappointment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made out of childhood." But Greene, for all this, does not see in childhood the "clouds of glory" which surround the child of The Prelude who, unappalled by the drowned man's face, innocently recognizes evil from fairy tales he once read. Greene's "something in that early terror" is perhaps best described in Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry as the "spiritual preconscious" which, unlike the "automatic Freudian unconscious" that merely embodies physical behavior or misbehavior, acknowledges the awareness of the primitive as part of the poetic activity. Thus the "something outside that has got to come in" is for Greene, as it was for James in the dream of the Gallerie d'Apollon, the comprehension, the recognition of appalling power, neither good nor evil, but a haunting, compelling synthesis of both. And thus Greene cannot espouse the conventional Christian view of the dichotomy between good and evil. In his comments on the air of evil in James's The Turn of the Screw, Greene says: "That story . . . belongs to the Christian, the orthodox imagination. Mine [the witches and preternatural personae of his dreams] were devils only in the African sense of beings who controlled power."

The Christian mythos cannot be fully adequate for Greene's highly particular spiritual experience. The comment that Greene "believes in God because he believes in Satan" can only ride on the surface of his works. And so his concern, his obsessions, which, in his own words, makes "every creative writer worth our consideration," is to pursue those symbols which haunted his and all our nursery dreams: the Princess of Time, the poisoned flowers, an old Arab, Tibetan warriors, and the inevitable witch. They pursue, they persist; and his body struggles only to find they survive, not only in his own childish dreams, but also the dreams of a wailing child who cries for the dance of the bush devil. To triumph we need only to find and recognize this power; flight is weakness. This choice of triumph or weakness is the dilemma of Greene's heroes.

The struggle for and recognition of power is the theme of several of Greene's more significant short stories. After the African experience, his first descent into the spiritual underworld was "The Basement Room," written in 1936 on the boat back from West Africa. In this work, a power—which is only amoral, not immoral, in fact that power which is associated with the ritual of initiation before the African bush devil—operates in child Philip's dream world to confront him with the moment of choice in what will become a moral situation. Left by his parents with the butler and housekeeper, Mr. and Mrs. Baines, Philip must choose, at the early age of seven, between the nursery and the cellar, between fruition or defeat. But he is determined not to be drawn into the adult world of secrets, love affairs, and jealousy. "For if a grown-up could behave so childishly, you were liable, too, to find yourself in their world. It was enough that it came at you in dreams: the witch at the corner, the man with a knife." However, those powers which work upon us in every situation "demand recognition," and "flight is a weakness," a weakness that Philip does not overcome.

There are two worlds in "The Basement Room," which Philip must recognize and choose between, separated by a green baize door, an image Greene used elsewhere to separate the world of innocence from the world of knowledge, the world of love from the world of hate, the world of the child from the world of the adult. Cross the threshold and you have committed yourself to ruin or triumph. Greene's own fascination with this image appears later in his Mexican adventures, The Lawless Roads, when he recalls the baize door between his school and home, between hate and love; and again in The Ministry of Fear when Arthur Rowe, beginning to wake up from his dream world and amnesia, passes through the green baize door of the insane asylum to discover the source of evil that has beset him. In his nursery, Philip, burdened with Baine's secret love affair, "strained his ears for Mrs. Baines's coming, for the sound of voices, but the basement held its secrets; the green baize door shut off that world."

Philip's inadequacy also lies in his terror of the dark, of the now unfamiliar rooms of the house where dusters cover the furniture, when nurse and family are away. He too is making a journey without maps. Vivid is the terror he feels for the knock, knock, knock at the door, the bleeding head and glittering eyes of the Siberian wolves, all waiting to be recognized in his dreams. Floating up from that world is the witch, Mrs. Baines, who like the witch with Hansel, plies Philip with jam and pudding, then tricks him into telling the secret. She is like old Gagool, ancient and musty. Her very being is secret as the bush devil; she is "darkness when-the night light went out," and is "flowers gone bad." When Philip's eyes open from the dreams, the terror is real, too real for him to face. The witch with her musty hair, her breath hot, leans over his bed in an unexpected visit to ask, "Just tell me where they are." The doors and windows are wrenched open in a breath, and, wretched, he cries out, "Baines, Baines," and the witch falls in a black heap. He cannot escape on a jeweled swan as did the children of Grimm's fairy tale. Philip is not prepared to accept this violent facing of the adult world he cannot understand. He rejects loyalties and unwittingly "tells on" Baines in his reluctance to face that black heap ever again. "He'd spent it all, had been allowed no time to let it grow, no years of gradual hardening; he couldn't even scream."

Philip, in withdrawing from the dream world, surrenders the initiation to life. To use the metaphor of Greene's mythology, the secret school of the bush devil here has failed to prepare Philip for the adult, moral world. For in that primitive kindergarten which Greene once witnessed, the bush children attend lessons given by the devil for two years. They feel terror and awe for this harsh instructor, but knowledge of him prepares them for a rugged life in the bush. Failure to thrive under his fierce spell may cause one to end as a lifeless heap of clothes at the parents' door. It is best to be thrust into the power of the devil and not resist. This is an African child's baptism and rebirth. "They brought a screaming child up to the devil," writes Greene, fascinated, "and thrust him under the devil's muzzle, under the dusty raffia mane; he stiffened and screamed and tried to escape and the devil mouthed him." And so it is with Philip's own initiation under the dusty hair of Mrs. Baines, only he cannot be reborn because he resists.

The same baptism of terror is performed in "The Hint of an Explanation" except that here the child survives the ordeal. Acting in the role of the bush devil, Blacker, the baker, tempts and ironically instructs for the priesthood, young David by forcing a moral commitment upon him. Even though Blacker asks David to commit sacrilege, we must not interpret this request in any conventionally diabolical sense. Blacker's action betrays much the same "supernatural cruelty," the fusion of love and hate as is found in the bush devil's ritual. This reading of young David's temptation coheres with his own adult observation about the inadequacy of Satan in theology: "The word Satan is so anthropomorphic." We are instead tried by a "Thing" or power, says the priestly narrator. He hesitates to say who or what Blacker really serves. Blacker, whose intense hate becomes permeated with a curiosity close to love, is viewed by David with the awe of the supernatural similar to that of the villagers of Mosamboluhun to the local blacksmith-devil. "It is not the mask that is sacred, nor the blacksmith who is sacred; it is the two in conjunction . . . ," observes Greene. Blacker's appearance is as terrifying as the devil's mask: one wall-eye, turnip head, smears of chalk and pastry. His secret knowledge of bleeding people and opening doors in the night like the devil who says to the bush child, "I'm going to swallow you," terrifies the boy into nearly surrendering the Sacred Host. In the spell of Blacker's professed powers, David fears not to remove the Host from his mouth and place it aside. Like Mrs. Baines, Blacker is the witch who plies his victim with toys to insure his moment of success. Yet, at this moment, the full force of that power shatters into disappointment. Through Blacker's hate for, yet fascination with the Host, that recognition of power which is neither good nor evil intervenes, and the realization of this "Thing's" value for the pulp which is "God there on the chair" saves David and thus prepares him for a new, priestly life. The school of the evil has been his salvation.

This knowledge of a Thing, a power, is almost prophetic in "The End of the Party" when Francis Morton's dream of death comes like a big bird swooping in the darkened house. Francis has dreams which reveal to him that darkness and death are real, dreams that hold secret knowledge to which the adults are cold. These unfeeling adults, Mabel Warren and Mrs. Henne-Falcon, flutter like hens and chickens about the darkening rooms enjoying the hide-and-seek game that is a real and present terror to Francis. Like the bush villagers, the ancient joke of "frightening the child with what had frightened them" governs their unconscious actions. The spiritual terror that leads to death and a powerful realization of the essence of death are but impersonal games to the grownup, civilized world, as impersonal as the nurse's cold torch making a beam through the darkness towards Francis's death. But after death, the power of his terror, conveyed like an electric impulse to his elder twin's hand, overcomes all seedy civilization, all set programs at the birthday party. One is reminded of the significance of this in the later work, England Made Me, where twins also have the power of conveying their awe for death. Kate contemplating her quarrel with Tony, who unknown to her has just been killed, compares it to childhood disputes. "In childhood one had been more careful, death was closer; one hadn't this hard grip on life." Even before the African venture then, Greene in these two stories had decided that the racial childhood held understanding of the darkness of man's heart, of the surety in death. He later confirms:

Oh, one wanted to protest, one doesn't believe, of course, in the "visionary gleam," in the trailing glory, but there was something in that early terror and the bareness of one's needs, a harp strumming behind a hut, a witch on the nursery landing, a handful of kola nuts, a masked dancer, the poisoned flowers.

In lesser works, "I Spy," and "A Drive in the Country," the adolescent, too, comes in contact with this power. For example, Charlie Stowe, reversing the Wordsworthian theme, finds the father "doing things in the dark which frightened him." In the second story, the young girl, disillusioned with her father's meticulous dullness, runs off in a wild ride to the dark woods with reckless Fred. In this action she is like the child swaying in the erotic dance before the old bush devil. In her childish dream, she is courting an adult action. In the cold woodsy fog the British girl finds she must flee back to her father's cheap bolted door in terror from a suicide pact that would implicate her with a man who is damning himself. She has awakened from the dreamy dance with the devil to find the leering eyes of an adult blacksmith beneath the painted mask. And too, the man in "The Innocent" discovers an obscenity he drew as a child in painful, intense desire, hidden, waiting for him in a hollow tree. It reveals the loss of that finer taste, keener pleasure, and deeper terror that must inevitably end in seedy civilization, typified by his slatternly friend, Lola.

So Evil creeps into the later dreams: "The man with the gold teeth and rubber surgical gloves; the old woman with ringworm; the man with his throat cut dragging himself across the carpet to the bed." Greene's adult heroes are struggling with the body as is Craven in "A Little Place off the Edgware Road," who is reminded by a religious placard of a dream he had in which there are no worms and dissolution, the body does not decay. His only waking comfort is that it was just a nightmare. Then evil creeps in, dropping upon him the fine bloody spray from the living corpse of the "man with his throat cut" who haunted the author's own dreams. But in "Proof Positive" Greene reaffirms the power in the unity of the body and spirit and the rottenness in their separation when the dominant spirit, robbed of its bodily connection, "decays into whispered nonsense." Metallic civilization has created this separation of body and soul. Adult life directs what childhood instinctively knew. Religious signs are not enough. The sound of music and the drum are silent. We must go to Africa again to embrace the leper who alone can tell us of Pendélé.

Pendélé is that mysterious land of childhood which Querry, in Greene's newest work, A Burnt-out Case, came to Africa to seek, where in his dreams he wishes to go after death. The tawdry, seedy level of the secular, adult world has betrayed him as it betrayed Philip in "The Basement Room." He cannot build and create any more. His architectural skill, like Philip's Meccano set, has been stowed away somewhere. Querry goes to Africa to seek a word that falls from the lips of Deo Gratias, the leper, who whispers the secret of "Pendélé" in the darkness of the bush, very like the forest Greene stumbled through in Liberia many years before. Pendélé, a childhood place of dancing and singing, becomes the central obsession in Querry's view of his new life. Like the bush devils who speak in foreign dialects, Deo Gratias (indeed the name parody cannot be ignored) mutters all night in unintelligible mixtures of French and bush language, except for one word, "Pendélé." Dr. Colin's answer to Querry's inquiry into the meaning is a facile, unimaginative translation—"pride." This is the sort of impersonal judgment about the world which Querry has been fleeing from all his life. He insists, rather, it is this place of our childhood, where there is singing and dancing and games; where we can sleep in a single bed without the responsibilities of adults. Our mortal sins do not explain our hunger, our flight through labyrinthine ways, our exposure to evil and death.

When Querry elaborates this meaning of the word to the Superior of the hospital force, the father answers, "People have to grow up. We are called to more complicated things than that." Querry recalls the ancient initiation, ". . . surely there's something also about having to be as little children if we are to inherit. . . . We've grown-up rather badly. The complications have become too complex." For belief also belongs to the cave man; Christians do not have the corner on faith. What Querry really is looking for is at what point in our childhood we went astray; the Eden Deo Gratias cannot and will not reveal.

So intense is the impact of the metaphor about the lost childhood that later Querry, figuratively, translates his questioning life into a fairy tale about a country boy and a king. Mme. Rycker, his listener, says in disbelief, "You and I are much too old for fairy-stories." "Yes. That in a way is the story, as you'll see," Querry returns. Both have lost the way to Pendélé. The meaning to Querry's little story may be found, I think, in the lines from A. E.'s [George William Russell, 1867-1935] poem, "Germinal," often quoted by Greene: "In the lost childhood of Judas, Christ was betrayed." The little unformed face of Philip hardens, as does Querry's heart for the world.

Querry's fairy tale is not even a very good story, not so thrilling as Grimm, nor so penetrating as Perrault, but it represents Querry's coming to grips with what was missing in the civilized world, why he came down the river to the leper colony. He is too old for fairy tales, for believing that the King, or God, has sent "a bull, a shower of gold, a son." In a tawdry world where cheap statues and neo-Gothic churches abound, he can no longer cherish the ancient symbols of creativity; he can only recall and be troubled by the memory of them. He envies the unconscious devotions of his parents to the King much in the same way Greene envies the child swaying before the devil—Europa swaying before the bull, unaware of the leering adult beneath who knows of the fall, the forgetfulness.

And Querry, as he steps into the dawn, reflects on the epigram "The King is dead, long live the King." Perhaps in the new life and new country, away from the seemingly impersonal rules of the (man-made, after all) Church, he can find the King of Pendélé, the bush devil who will mouth him and dance for him.

Unlike Querry, Greene sees in primitive ritual and myth-making something which can potentially revitalize our own civilized institutions, most of which have their origins in ancient rites. Greene's own jungle discovery thus refreshes and fulfills his long journey as he comes to realize the relation of the whirling, demanding devil and his own European religious longing. Suddenly recalling a childhood experience where he witnessed the ancient Jack-in-the-Green rites at a quiet crossroads, Greene writes:

It wasn't so alien to us, this masked dance (in England too there was a time when man dressed as animals and danced), any more than the cross and the pagan emblems on the grave were alien. One had the sensation of having come home, for here one was finding associations with a personal and a racial childhood, one was being scared by the same old witches.

The search and discovery of myth seems to bring order from external or internal chaos. The fact that myth fails to distinguish the everyday act from symbolic performance encourages the modern hope that a supernatural power can permeate all things. In this realization Greene hopes for a coherent ritual not incompatible with modern institutions.

His fascination for the primitive, of course, would not exclude such an establishment as the Catholic Church. He finds for himself, as he claims for Henry James, "the treatment of supernatural evil," "the savage elementary belief in prowling evil spirits to be adequate vehicles for expressing the "struggle between the beautiful and the treacherous." In its concept of sacrament the Church preserves those precious remnants of our childhood—the supernatural elements by which "human nature is not despicable." The life within the Catholic Church provides a quality of vision truly catholic in its absorption of the pagan and the primitive. It is not reducible to moral formulas which bind M. Rycker to his sanctimonious practices, Mme. Rycker to her spouse. The struggle for the beautiful and the treacherous in Greene's heroes and heroines requires a judge whose creative, fruitful powers of synthesis can unite the good in evil, the evil in good. Greene's myth provides that judge and judgment, and that power is God, the hound of heaven, the bush devil.

After his childhood discovery of evil, in The Viper of Milan, Greene remarks, "Human nature is not black and white but black and grey." It is from this assumption that Greene's mythology can take shape. In Liberia he reaffirms this basic conviction about life as he uncovers the aboriginal terror in the "grey" visage of the bush devil. Such an impact did this revelation have upon Greene that we are forced to qualify any comment we make on the seeming Manichean qualities of his fiction as well as our thinking about his concept of Hell. As R. W. B. Lewis implies, Hell does lie about Pinkie, Philip, Francis, David, and even Querry in their infancy, but the sterile, chrome, unimaginative boredom of that Hell is not found in Liberia. Rather, Hell is the civilized perversion of the primitive. With the comprehension of what the witch at the corner means to the children of Greene's fiction, with the understanding that these children are like the Liberian boy being initiated to the terror of the bush devil, we find Greene's fiction more intelligible, and even more flexible in its concept of the human act. For the myth opens up to Greene a whole spectrum of possibilities between the theological poles of good and evil, and thus it both extends the range of his ethical sympathies and sophisticates his artistic technique.