Back to the Classics #8

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Set in the Americas. It’s been about six months since I’ve read The Station by Robert Byron, a glittering example of one of my favorite genres, travel writing from between the wars. I don’t much like Greene; his capacity to be as bloody-minded as Evelyn Waugh has always dismayed me. I find his serious novels bleak, his entertainments dull, his overall tone portentous, his anti-Americanism tedious.  But, for me, the point of reading in general and a reading challenge in particular is to read writers that challenge me.

The Lawless Roads – Graham Greene

In 1937, the Vatican commissioned Greene to visit Mexico and report on the persecution of the Church by the leftist government of Plutarco Elisa Calles. By interviewing and observing, Graham found grim evidence of murders, imprisonment, and other crimes against people who just wanted to practice their religion in peace. Also, in describing a charlatan trying to exploit a so-called miracle, he observes that when organized religion is suppressed, our built-in ability and willingness to believe nuttier and nuttier things asserts itself. In uncertain times, under stress, people believe in anything.

To his credit, Greene feels for the poor who have lost so much because their religion is being suppressed.

...There  had been one priest over the border in Chiapas, but the people  had told him to go - they couldn’t protect him any longer.

‘And when you die?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we die like dogs.’ No religious ceremony was  allowed at the grave. The old people, of course, felt it most - a few weeks before they had smuggled the Bishop of Campeche in by plane to see her grandmother who was dying. They had money still . . . but what could the poor do?

He is also impressed by their devotion

When the rains came, men, women, and children would go on their knees - some of them carrying the cross - to the river. It must have been a journey of terrible pain - thorn bushes and rocks and steep descents: it was difficult enough for us to keep from falling. When they reached the river they poured water on the cross and carried it back. Herr F in his operations had been very careful of the church, but the Federal engineers threw out the cross and converted the chapel into a shed for their tools

Greene’s contact with believers who have suffered for their faith – facing fines, jail, beatings, contempt, death – made him see the church with more grandeur than before, that it could inspire such fidelity on the part of the faithful was  profoundly moving.

Though his descriptions of place and scene are excellent, Greene also works in the tradition of “I hate it here” travel writers between the wars. The transportation is unreliable, uncomfortable, always late. The food is bad beyond description even if one suffering from dysentery could eat it. The heat is beyond bearing. The bedbugs and rats make it impossible to sleep. Even the turkeys are frightening.

... above all the turkeys - those hideous Dali heads, with the mauve surrealist flaps of skin they had to toss aside to uncover the beak or eyes. Suppose when night fell they chose to perch on the hammock? Where birds are concerned I lose my reason, I feel panic. The turkey cock blew out its tail, a dingy Victorian fan with the whalebone broken, and hissed with balked pride and hate, like an evil impotent old pasha. One wondered what parasites swarmed under the dusty layers of black feathers. Domestic animals seem to reflect the prosperity of their owners - only the gentleman farmer possesses the plump complacent good-to-live-with fowls and pigs; these burrowing ravenous tapirs and down-at-heel turkey cocks belonged to people living on the edge of subsistence.

 Greene got very ill with dysentery so we have to forgive the rude things he says about Mexicans. When you're sick overseas, everything is dreary, scary, and maddening. And what’s really a "bee sting when you're already crying" is near the end he picks up his mail to find out that the guardians of Shirley Temple are suing him over a sulfurous review of Wee Willie Winkle. 

Anyway, reading this book moves me to grant that Greene had formidable powers of observation and description, enough to make us readers see. I would recommend this book to readers who like travel and descriptions of places. Fans of Mexico and Mexicans may be put out.