Flashback, June 1954: ‘Father Brown’ Role Triggers Guinness Conversion

Featuring a sterling British cast and one of the most unusual sleuths in the history of detective fiction, Father Brown premiered this month in the U.K.

For many mystery fans, it was a chance to see, on something other than the printed page, the adventures of the owlish, unassuming Roman Catholic prelate created by G.K. Chesterton. For the movie’s star, Alec Guinness, the role represented far more: the catalyst for his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In childhood, the Father Brown stories became my avenue into the marvelously versatile Chesterton, who tried his literary talents not only in detective fiction but also the novel, poetry, essays, biographies, and Christian apologetic literature. Though not a Catholic when he invented his clerical sleuth, the author became one halfway through producing these 53 stories, in 1922. Something of the same conversion process took place with Guinness.

Seeing the 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets a couple of weeks ago reminded me of Guinness’ amazing versatility and ability to disappear completely into a role. (In this case, eight: the number of eight heirs—including one woman—to an aristocrat’s fortune, all of whom fell victim to a poor relation.) 

The Bridge on the River Kwai won Guinness his Oscar and Star Wars brought him last financial security. But Father Brown (retitled The Detective for its American release) brought the actor something else entirely: a different path in his spiritual life.

Like another inveterate actor-diarist, Richard Burton, Guinness was tormented by self-loathing. The Welshman considered acting a misuse of his talents, but Guinness struggled with a variety of issues.

The full extent of Guinness’ malaise did not become generally known to the public until after his death in 2000: catty comments confided to his diary over fellow actors; shame over his illegitimacy; anger toward his alcoholic, thieving mother; a difficult relationship with his wife and son; and questions about his sexual orientation.

In the case of the latter, nobody has ever come forward to claim a homosexual relationship. But several aspects of his life suggest inclinations that others detected or that he himself wrote about, including:

*his father-in-law’s joking nickname for him, that of a gay male ballet dancer;

*diary references to other males making passes at him, or to attractive young men;

*visits to Turkish baths;

*stopping sleeping with his wife after age 40;

*visible discomfort with romantic scenes he had to play.

If Guinness was gay, he did not have to look far to see what it might cost him. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean’s involvement in the Cambridge spy ring of the early 1950s fed suspicions that homosexuals in the intelligence service and armed forces represented inherent security threats. Just the day before the premiere of Father Brown, Alan Turing—the mathematician who cracked the Nazis “Enigma” code during WWII—allegedly committed suicide after accepting chemical castration in lieu of prison for violating laws against “gross indecency.” Guinness’ contemporary among London’s elite actors, John Gielgud, had been arrested just the year before in a public restroom in Chelsea for “'persistently importuning men for immoral purposes.” 

In a 2003 interview with the UK paper The Daily Telegraph, Guinness’ friend and biographer, novelist Piers Paul Read, explained that by the early 1950s, the actor "was suffering from tremendous bouts of depression, because of his homosexuality and the contradiction between that and his love of [his wife] Merula and his family, and looking for a faith that would give him something to hold it all together.”

Guinness had returned to the Anglican faith of his childhood during World War II, but now he began edging closer toward Catholicism. When his son had been stricken with polio at age 11, Guinness began stopping in a nearby Catholic church to pray for his recovery (which did, in fact, come to pass). 

Then, another incident, during the filming of Father Brown, drew him even closer to the Church. A young boy, finding him still in costume for his role, took his hand and accompanied the “priest” off the set. 

The youngster made a profound impression on the actor. "Continuing my walk," he later noted, "I reflected that a Church that could inspire such confidence in a child, making priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable, could not be as scheming or as creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices."

Guinness formally entered the Church two years later. Becoming a Catholic did not make his securities or anxieties disappear. But like another English convert, Evelyn Waugh, he saw the Church as a bulwark against moral relativism and looked askance at a number of post-Vatican II changes. 

On the 40^th anniversary of his entrance into the Church, Guinness wrote in his diary: “I rejoice in that and wish it had come decades earlier.”

A year or two ago, while channel-surfing, I came across the current BBC version of Father Brown. Despite its notching seven seasons on the air, I could not mount the kind of enthusiasm for it that I did for the Guinness film. The plot was pedestrian and the directors could not match the smooth handling demonstrated by Hamer, who was working yet again with Guinness and co-star Greenwood (and, playing the thief that the priest rescues from crime and sin, Peter Finch).

Quote of the Day (Alec Guinness, on Dealing With Fools)

“I neither suffer myself, nor other fools, gladly.” —Oscar-winning English actor Sir Alec Guinness (1914-2000), A Commonplace Book (2002)

Careful with that light-sabre, fella!

Quote of the Day (Alec Guinness, on Knighthood for British Actors)

“The point of a knighthood for British actors is to enable them to play butlers.”—Sir Alec Guinness, A Commonplace Book (2002)

(The image accompanying this post is of Guinness’ fellow actor-knight, Sir John Gielgud, who actually won a Best Supporting Actor for playing the butler Hobson in Arthur.)

This Day in Literary History (Le Carre Unleashes Mole Hunter Smiley)

June 17, 1974—A decade after making his first career splash with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, former British intelligence officer David Cornwell—better known by the pseudonym John le Carre—reached what is probably the artistic zenith of his career with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  At least partly inspired by the treason of Kim Philby, the novel popularized the term “mole” to denote the particular nature of the latter’s offense: a highly placed enemy at the heart of a national intelligence service.

So successful was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that it spawned a 1979 TV miniseries starring Alec Guinness (pictured here) and a more recent film starring Gary Oldman. Both adaptations gave the lead actors one of their most prized roles as le Carre’s donnish spymaster George Smiley. The spy thriller also was the opening novel in a trilogy, The Quest for Karla, in which Smiley pursues his cunning, ruthless counterpart at Soviet intelligence.

“Karla”’s double agent at the highest levels of British intelligence engages in a devastating series of national and personal betrayals with implications not just for Britain agents and their minders but also for their American “cousins.” The damage was similar to that perpetrated by the spy ring recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s and centered around Philby, the highest-ranking British intelligence officer to serve the Soviet Union as a double agent.

Bill Haydon in Tinker contains characteristics of three other notorious spies who joined the Communist Party while at Cambridge in the 1930s—Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean—but Philby, another spy with upper-class connections, a famous father specializing in Arab studies, and links to U.S. intelligence, was the most obvious model for the character. Le Carre recalled, in an interview with Jon Snow of Britain's Channel 4 a few years ago, that he had special reason to loathe Philby, "a bad lot": the novelist, before his writing days, had used the cover of a British diplomat to run agents and lure defectors in Germany—until Philby blew his cover in the early 1960s. Le Carre would not meet the dying double agent in Russia in 1988 because of his memories of a man whom he "wouldn't have trusted...with my cat for the weekend."

Oddly enough, I had read the last two-thirds of The Quest for Karla, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People, more than 30 years ago, but not Tinker until I began researching this post. I discovered that inadvertently, I had saved the best for last.  Le Carre had introduced Smiley in two mysteries written in the early 1960s, Call for the Dead,” and A Murder of Quality, and part of the compulsive power of Tinker is simply as a whodunit. Cashiered from the highest levels of British intelligence, “Circus” (so nicknamed for the location of MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, at Cambridge Circus in London) after a failed operation, Smiley is now called out of retirement, because he has no connection to the suspected current treachery, to ferret out the mole among four principals in Circus who are code-named Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Poor Man.

Although the propulsive thrust of the novel came from adhering to the detective and spy genres, its richness derived from its depictions of the intelligence profession as half-calling, half-bureaucracy. The high priests of the intelligence services in the book struggle with loss of faith in their mission, even as they cling to the mysteries at the heart of their work. At the same time, rather than the dashing derring-do of a James Bond, they engage in pitched turf battles with each other, in memos replete with their own in-house vocabulary, such as “lamplighters” (a section that provided surveillance and couriers), “babysitters” (guardians of safe houses used to accommodate defectors) and “scalphunters” (strong-arm men responsible for assassination, burglary, abduction, and the like).

James Wood, in How Fiction Works, criticizes le Carre’s form of “commercial realism,” terming one passage from Smiley’s People “a clever coffin of dead conventions.” That criticism is itself too clever by half. Seldom in the history of the spy story—a genre that has produced other notables such as Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene—has a writer brought to the form such precise attention to atmosphere and almost Dickensian characterization.

The one problem I have with le Carre’s work, actually, is its Anti-Americanism. In his novels—especially with the passing of the years, when the Soviet Union at least reminded him that another political and economic system could rival and surpass the capitalist West in ruthlessness—the United States looms balefully large. The moral ambiguity between the two Cold War superpowers, as strong an element as the weather in these novels, often shades into moral relativism.

The novelist has been at pains to deny it, saying that it’s not Americans he resents but their government. Some might find his vitriolic criticism of the foreign-policy adventurism of the Bush administration bracing. But even his early spy novels, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and A Small Town in Germany, were written with liberal Democrats in the White House and controlling the American intelligence services.

And consider this: If he finds Americans as individuals all right, why do you seldom if ever find a good one in his work? Why are they often depicted as outright villains? Even in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, why is the traitor’s eventual explanation of his turn to the Soviet Union (“The United States is no longer capable of undertaking its own revolution”) regarded by Smiley in this way: “it was the tone, rather than the music, that alienated him”?