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It took The Power and the Glory (1940) to convince the critics that Greene had something to say—besides a compellingly cinematic way of saying it. It was—and is —his best book. Greene had taken a trip to Mexico in 1938 to investigate the government's persecution of the Catholic Church. The hero of The Power and the Glory is a Catholic priest who is being hunted down by the police in a province where the church has been outlawed. He is a drunkard, a weak "whisky priest" who has fathered a child, and is terribly conscious of his guilt. But his love of God is stronger than his egotistic sense of sin. Starved, driven from village to village by a relentless police lieutenant, he goes on being a priest to his people until his final betrayal and capture.
The Power and the Glory brought the critics around. Even his old employer, the London Times, could not forbear to cheer: "There is no end to the subtleties of thought and feeling with which Mr. Greene has imbued his hero . . . The book . . . starts in the reader an irresistible emotion of love and pity."
When The Heart of the Matter was published (1948), it was plain that Greene was turning from a novelist who was a Catholic into a Catholic novelist. Scobie, his Catholic hero, is a good man whose sins seem to flow quite inevitably from an unselfish sense of pity. But Greene was trying to show that pity could be "a terrible thing . . . Pity is the worst passion of all. We don't outlive it like sex." Pity led Scobie to commit the sin of pride, to put himself above God. Many a Catholic critic was puzzled by Greene's sympathetic handling of Scobie's suicide (Evelyn Waugh called it a "mad blasphemy").*Greene himself was puzzled by the controversy. Said he: "I wrote a book about a man who goes to hell—Brighton Rock—another about a man who goes to heaven—The Power and the Glory. Now I've simply written one about a man who goes to purgatory. I don't know what all the fuss is about."
Spiritual Autobiographer? Like most writers, Greene would like to have it thought that there is nothing very interesting (except, perhaps, as raw material for a writer) in his own life. He simply writes, and between times travels—to get away. Last year he flew to Malaya to get a look at the life of English rubber planters in a peninsula overrun with Communist guerrillas—and while he was about it spent 2½ days in the jungle with Gurkha troops, tracking guerrillas. Late last month he went for a Mediterranean cruise on Sir Alexander Korda's 150-ton yacht Elsewhere, with Sir Laurence Olivier, his wife Vivien Leigh, and Ballerina Margot Fonteyn for fellow passengers. Last week he was back in London—packing his bags for Indo-China.