Love Among the Lepers

A BURNT-OUT CASE (248 pp.)--Graham Greene--Viking ($3.95).

Alexander Pope, the bitter cripple who wrote of "that long disease, my life," never admitted his deformities into his art. Spiritual deformity--symbolized by the ultimate horror of man's physical being, leprosy--is the central theme of Graham Greene's latest and greatest novel.

In probably the longest, certainly the most intensely sustained metaphor in modern fiction, Greene has made the leper a symbol of modern man, and of the "long disease" of modern life. It is the leper's fate to die piecemeal: limbs, members, features deaden and fall from the still living body. But it is not on these horrors of pathology that Greene's imagination centers. It is the quiet, and some would say merciful, side effect of leprosy--the disappearance of sensation, of the power to feel even pain--which haunts Greene, and which he makes the basis of a novel that would be called existentialist, in the manner of Camus' The Plague, if it were not also Christian.

Powerful Magic. Greene's hero is Querry, a famous architect, celebrated--like Greene himself --as a major Roman Catholic artist. He is rich, successful, greatly loved ("fame is a powerful aphrodisiac''), and he is also dead. He has "had it." The act of love and the creation of beautiful buildings have become empty of meaning. Baldly stated, this spiritual situation is hard to comprehend. But by means of Greene's great novelistic art, the powerful magic of a born and practiced fabulist, the reader is compelled to understand and share such desiccation of soul. As British Critic V. S. Pritchett says of Querry--in a sense of contemporary man--"He can face a fact; he cannot feel." In the face of intolerable pain, man responds by anesthesia. His fate, made visible and horrible in the doom of the leper, is death on the installment plan.

Querry, whose name suggests both a question and a prey, has gone in pursuit of his dead self to the ends of the earth. As an uninvited and anonymous guest, he comes to a leper hospital on a tributary of the Congo in what could be either the former French or Belgian Equatorial Africa. The river boat goes no farther, and symbolically, the road is never more than a week's repair ahead of the all-encompassing jungle.

The hospital is run by the White Fathers, a Roman Catholic missionary order, and by temperament and their own rule, they ask no questions. For them, all questions have been answered; they are happy, childlike men busy with their assignment, whether it is Mass, plumbing, electrical repairs, moral theology, or the grisly business of lepers' laundry. They could not care less about entertaining a VIP, and Querry might live unhappily ever after, driving the mission truck or designing the cheapest possible hospital, but for the intrusion of the world.

Parkinson's Law. At first, the world intrudes through a copy of TIME, which has drifted up the Congo and which carries a cover story on the great architect.* Thus Querry, seeking nothing but anonymity, is doomed to the martyrdom of the fame he has repudiated. Later, the outside world in its total corruption is personified, as it has been so often before in novels, by a British popular journalist, and ex-London Timesman Greene must be presumed to know his type faces. Montagu Parkinson is in the Congo "for the riot," but a rumor about Querry and his newsworthy sanctity causes him to stop off at the leper hospital for a feature story.

Parkinson is a man more grotesquely awful than the lepers, given to misquoting tag lines from the great English anthology poets, and he is dead set on making Querry into another Albert Schweitzer, a sacred cow sanctified by journalism. With facts dug up from the newspaper morgue, involving the suicide of Querry's mistress, the correspondent is determined that his own Parkinson's Law ("A truth is a truth insofar as it is believed") will override the private legislation in Querry's dead soul.

For Whom the Bell. Even among the lepers and the loathsome jungle there is no escape from the fate of being Querry. A leading leper has been assigned to him as a "boy"; his name--and only Graham Greene could think of this--is Deo Gratias. Toeless, fingerless, he gets about; he is a "burntout" or arrested case, like Querry himself, but his mutilation has left him unfit to live in the world, and so he re-enacts the Biblical horror that obliged the leper to carry a warning bell and cry of himself, "Unclean."

As is to be expected in a Greene novel, love persists among God's grotesques. A leper with ghastly mutilations mates with another who crawls like a wounded toad to her rendezvous. Says one of the White Fathers: "Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct," but the offspring is baptized. Querry, however, is beyond love and beyond all sacrament, his only surviving faith a certain "regard for the truth." And so he is doomed, not only by Corruption, in the person of Parkinson, but by Innocence, personified in Marie Rycker, the child wife of a local factory operator. "God protect us from all innocence," remarks one character. "At least the guilty know what they are about."

Region of the Mind. This being the kind of novel that can no more be spoiled by the reader's knowing the plot than can King Lear or Goldilocks, it may be stated that Querry is killed by Marie's husband in vengeance for an imagined sexual wrong, and the journalistic saint becomes a fallen angel. As an ironic footnote, he is buried under a misattributed quote. Parkinson sends a wreath inscribed with a line supposedly from Robert Browning ("Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art"). It is really from Walter Savage Landor, but Querry, ambiguous martyr, might have accepted it, as well as Lander's conclusion: "I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

Querry's death opens more questions than it answers, but Greene's story is more than a novel. It is a parable. The jungly and leprous background is sparely told (Greene himself did a legman's research in the Congo provinces and the Cameroons), but the fable itself sets up echoes in the mind like the imagined ringing of a leper's bell. Justly, Greene says in an introduction, "This Congo is a region of the mind."

It is 25 years since Greene, in Journey Without Maps, a chronicle of his travels through Liberia, first found in the jungle a symbol--a mirror-image of corrupt civilization. Like Evelyn Waugh, another Catholic novelist and jungle fancier, he finds in the squalid and sinister wilderness a living mockery of man's dream of heaven on earth. The two writers wear twin masks--the one with the rictus of comedy, the other with the grimace of agony. Graham Greene's mask has never seemed more agonized than in this novel, nor has he ever been clearer or more eloquent in stating his lifelong argument with God.

* Looking at TIME'S cover portrait, Greene's Querry decided that his features (possibly like those of Novelist Greene himself when he appeared on TIME'S cover on Oct. 29, 1951) had been "romanticized." Greene's hero reflects: "It was not the face he saw when he shaved, but a kind of distant cousin. It reflected emotions, thoughts, hopes, profundities that he had certainly expressed to no reporter."

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