The Paper Chase

A SENSE OF REALITY by Graham Greene. 119 pages. Viking. $3.50.

Rudely understood, the substance of Graham Greene's religious writing is an irreverent version of the famous saying about Hungarians: "If you have God for a friend, you don't need an enemy." Greene readers, observing God's persistent inhumanity to man, are not merely instructed that his ways are not man's. They are drawn inevitably into speculation about the apparently tormented belief of Author Greene himself.

Without admitting that his books are autobiographical in detail, Greene has said that a novel is a kind of confession. But whatever he says on this subject, he goes on dropping clues in an ever-lengthening paper chase which seems to lead straight through the potting shed into a paradoxical garden where loss of faith is somehow proof of God's existence. The latest is a new short story called A Visit to Morin. Presented along with a slight bouquet of recent literary Greenery, Morin is fascinating (and likely to draw more attention than the other stories in the book) precisely because it seems to carry Greene a razor's edge closer to despair than did A Burnt-Out Case, his most recent novel.

Like Greene, Morin is a Roman Catholic novelist. He has had enthusiastic non-Christian readers who "detected in his work the freedom of speculation which put his fellow Catholics on their guard." But Morin has apparently written away his faith. He now views his successful past as a Catholic writer with distaste. "Long after I ceased to believe myself," he explains, "I was a carrier of belief, as a man can be a carrier of disease without being sick."

As a famous Catholic author, Morin does not wish to create a scandal by not going to church, at least on Christmas Eve. But when he goes, he dares not take Communion. Why? Ostensibly, because of a sinful love affair. But the affair is long over, and he still cannot bring himself to take Communion. Tortuously, he argues that if he no longer had any faith at all, he could take Communion without a qualm. The fact that he cannot is his last lingering hope: perhaps his loss of faith is visited on him as a judgment. "As long as I keep away from the sacraments," he explains, "my lack of belief is an argument for the Church. But if I returned and they failed me, then I would really be a man without faith."

There is perhaps a measure of comfort in the notion that the disease of faith may after all turn out to be incurable. But it is a far less positive hope of heaven even than that of earlier Greene characters, who often tried to see in their own aridity and torment a sign of God's pursuing love.

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