Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield

According to Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends, Graham Greene’s 1934 novel It’s a Battlefield is the only thing written by a member of Waugh’s set which took the politics of the 1930's seriously.

During the Great Depression, if you considered yourself to be an intellectual, it was the “in thing” to be a Communist. Greene alludes to this when one of his characters says in response to the statement that a former friend has become a Communist, “It’s fashionable.”

It’s a Battlefield is about Jim Drover, a bus driver and member of the Communist party, who has been sentenced to death for killing a police officer. Actually the novel is not really about Drover so much as it is about the impact of Drover’s death sentence. Drover’s imminent execution not only affects his immediate family but also the highest levels of the British government. Drover himself never really appears as a character in the novel. He is glimpsed at a distance in prison by officials and is discussed by his wife and brother, but never actually appears as a character in his own right.

Because this is a “serious novel” about the lives of the English lower classes during the Great Depression, there is a lot of misery and despair. Drover and his wife Milly go to a Communist Party rally which turns into a riot. Drover stabs the policeman to stop him from hitting Drover’s wife with a nightstick.

Greene intentionally draws parallels between the life of the inmates in the prison where Jim Drover is confined on death row and the life of the workers in a match factory where Drover’s sister in law, Kay, works. Because this is a Graham Greene novel, there is a lot of illicit sex which just makes everybody more miserable and nobody seems to enjoy.

The Home Secretary wants the Assistant Police Commissioner, who is never identified by name but is “the Assistant Commissioner” throughout the novel, to find out if it is better for the government politically to go through with Drover’s hanging or to grant him a reprieve. The leaders of the local Communist Party want Drover to be hanged because it will give them a martyr. Milly wants her husband’s life spared but is despondent because if he is reprieved he will serve a long prison sentence away from her. Drover’s brother, Conrad, is in love with Milly and wants to be with her. Conrad wishes that Jim would be hung so that he could marry Milly and be happy with her. Milly’s sister, Kay, has a dead end job in the match factory and her only consolation is to hop from the bed of one man to another.

Milly eventually goes to bed with Conrad. After committing adultery with her husband’s brother, Milly is miserable, which then makes Conrad more miserable. Conrad is already miserable because of the pressure of his job as the chief clerk in an insurance company. Because of Conrad’s low social status, he is always having to look over his shoulder because the middle class boys he supervises are always trying to take his job. Conrad was always jealous of Jim, so he buys a gun and attempts to assassinate the Assistant Commissioner. Conrad is mortally wounded by the police and dies shortly thereafter. Drover’s sentence is commuted to 18 years in prison. Knowing that his wife will never be able to remain celebate for 18 years and will cuckold him, Jim attempts to commit suicide. The Assistant Commissioner wishes that he was still a police official in India where life was a lot simpler. And they lived miserably ever after. The End.

In his immediately previous novel, Stamboul Train (1932), Greene had set about to write a pot boiler in order to make money. Stamboul Train was a success and saved Greene’s career as a writer. As a popular thriller, Stamboul Train is fast paced and entertaining, with interesting characters and situations. In fact, Stamboul Train is everything that It’s a Battlefield isn’t.

Throughout most of his career, Greene divided his long fiction into what he called “entertainments” and what he considered to be his “serious” novels. As opposed to the “entertainment” Stamboul Train, it appears that Greene was trying much too hard to produce “a serious novel.” Whereas the reader is sitting on the edge of her seat throughout Stamboul Train, the reader is mostly bored out of her skull throughout most of It’s a Battlefield. By the end of the novel, I actually came to hope that His Majesty’s Prison would go ahead and hang poor old Jim Drover on schedule and put him out of his misery. None of the characters in this novel gripped me to the point that I cared one way or the other what happened to them.

Although there were also a lot of characters in Stamboul Train, Greene did a good job of tying their stories together so that the reader cares about what happens to them. It’s a Battlefield, on the other hand, seems to have no real cohesion. We get to hear about Kay’s dalliances with the head of the Communist Party, who makes love to Kay underneath a portrait of his deceased wife who was a celebrated artist, and about Conrad’s lust for Milly and jealousy for Jim, and Milly’s misery that she knows that she will go on running around on good ol’ Jim while he’s in prison. We are placed inside the Assistant Commissioner’s brain for page after interminable page where he wishes that he were back in India where things were simple and he didn’t have to get involved in politics or make decisions about “Justice.” Although Graham Greene is one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century, this book just doesn’t seem to work. It has some good episodes, and there is a lot of good writing in it, but all together this is definitely one of Greene’s lesser efforts.

COMING SOON: Continuing our travels in Greeneland, the next stop will be Greene’s 1935 novel England Made Me.

Graham Greene's Stamboul Train

I was going through withdrawal, so I thought it was high time for a return to Greeneland.

After his first moderate success with The Man Within, Greene wrote two other novels which he thought were so bad that he consistently refused permission for them to be reprinted. After this failure, suffering from a shortage of money during the early days of the world wide Depression, Greene set out to write a popular pot boiler.

The result was Stamboul Train: An Entertainment published in 1932 (published in the United States in 1933 as Orient Express). This was the first book which Greene labeled “an entertainment” to distinguish it from what he felt was his serious fiction.

As the title implies, Stamboul Train is a thriller about a group of travelers aboard the Orient Express which ran across Europe from the English Channel to Istanbul, Turkey. The descriptions of Istanbul are based upon a visit which Greene once made during a vacation cruise. Short on funds, Greene could not afford to make the full trip aboard the Orient Express but bought a third class ticket for the trip across France. At the German border, he was granted a free pass to Cologne because he was a writer. The rest of the descriptions are based upon guide books and imagination.*

As an ensemble piece, Greene invented a diverse group of characters. Coral Musker is a dancer in her late teens or early twenties who is traveling to Istanbul to take a job as show girl. Carleton Myatt is an Jewish businessman. Dr. Richard Czinner is a Yugoslav Communist Revolutionary who has been living in hiding in England and is making his way back to his home country to foment revolution. Mabel Warren is an English reporter stationed in Germany. Janet Pardoe is Warren’s paid companion and lesbian lover. Josef Grunlich is an Austrian thief who is fleeing after killing a man in a bungled burglary attempt.

This book is full of the stereotypes and attitudes of the early 1930s. Myatt is described in unflattering anti-semitic terms throughout the book. Mabel Warren is the stereotypical predatory masculine lesbian with an unsatiable desire for pretty young girls. Dr. Czinner is the proverbial radical intellectual. The really chilling thing about reading this book was Greene’s editorializing, on the eve of the Holocaust, that Western Europe was now enlightened and above hatred of Jews which was sure to be a thing of the past.

The plot in a nutshell: (WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS!):

The wealthy Jewish businessman Myatt has a stateroom all to himself. When the attractive young Coral Musker, who could only afford to travel second class, falls ill, Myatt purchases her a first class ticket and allows her to sleep in his compartment. In gratitude, Coral loses her virginity to Musker the next night. Musker actually falls in love with Coral, however, and plans to set her up as his full time mistress. (After all, a rich Jewish boy like this can’t be expected to marry a lower class girl like Coral).

Mabel Warren is escorting her lesbian lover Janet Pardoe to the train station where Pardoe is to take the Orient Express to meet her aunt and uncle in Constantinople. When Warren finds out that the popular novelist Quin Savory is traveling on the Orient Express, she uses her press pass to get on board. Warren loses interest in interviewing Savory when she recognizes Yugoslav Communist leader Dr. Richard Czinner. Czinner, who is a wanted criminal in his own country, has been in hiding in England and is traveling under an assumed name. Warren discovers that Czinner is headed back to Belgrade to lead a revolt. After crossing the German frontier it is discovered that Czinner’s fellow Communists launched the revolt early and have been defeated. Warren also decides to try to make Coral Musker her new lover.

Leaving the train in Vienna to call in her story to her paper, Warren’s handbag is stolen by Grunlich who is fleeing from the police after murdering a man during a burglary. Grunlich then uses Warren’s money to buy a ticket and board the Orient Express. Having no money and no ticket, Warren is not allowed to reboard the train.

Meanwhile, the Yugoslav authorities have gotten word that Dr. Czinner is on the Orient Express. At the frontier, the Yugoslavian Army stops the train and arrests Czinner. They also arrest Grunlich for carrying a gun and poor Coral Myatt for conspiracy because she is carrying a message which she was handed by Czinner just prior to his capture.

After a summary court martial, Dr. Czinner is sentenced to death, Grunlich is sentenced to one month in prison, and Coral Myatt is ordered to be deported back to Britain. Myatt, in love with Coral, gets off the train and hires a car to take him back to the border to look for her. Grunlich, Coral and Dr. Czinner manage to escape but Dr. Czinner is shot. Coral drags Dr. Czinner into a storage shed where he eventually dies. Grunlich is rescued by Myatt and denies that he knows anything about the whereabouts of Coral. In despair, Myatt rejoins the train and continues on to Constantinople.

Coral is eventually rescued from the Yugoslav Army by the timely arrival of Mabel Warren. Coral, who apparently had a weak heart, collapses from exhaustion and is last seen lying in the back seat of a car being taken care of by Mabel. Unless she dies from her heart trouble, we can only assume that Coral now has the honor of taking Janet Pardoe’s place as Mabel’s “companion.”

Arriving in Constantinople, Myatt discovers that Janet Pardoe, who is half Jewish, is the niece of his new business partner. Although she had started a relationship on board the train with the novelist Savory, by the end of the novel, Myatt has come to an understanding with Janet's uncle for an arranged marriage with Janet which she is happy to accept. The End.

If that summary seems really sappy, let me assure you that Stamboul Train/Orient Express is a lot better than it sounds like it should be. After all, this is a Graham Greene novel and Greene is a master story teller. The book is very well written and well plotted and holds the readers' attention from start to finish. We even see glimpses of the “Catholic novelist” who is yet to come. There is a fairly lengthy section where Dr. Czinner, the now Communist and Atheist, remembers his Catholic boyhood and regrets the loss of his religious faith. There is a very humorous section where, knowing that he is about to be killed, Dr.Czinner wishes to go to confession. Seeing an Anglican Minister wearing a clerical collar, Dr. Czinner seeks to confess his sins to him, but all the Protestant Minister, Mr. Opie, can talk about is Cricket and Freudian psychology.

Stamboul Train became a best seller and saved Greene’s career as a writer.** Although it is 78 years old, like all of Greene’s novels this is entertaining and has to rank as a classic.

Coming Soon: The Eclectic Reader’s next stop in Greeneland will be Greene’s 1934 political drama It's a Battlefield.

*Carpenter, Humphrey. The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) p. 227.

** Ibid. P. 228.