Appreciations: Graham Greene, With a Poignant Tale of a Holiday Affair, ‘Cheap in August’

“It was cheap in August: the essential sun, the coral reefs, the bamboo-bar and the calypsos – they were all of them at cut-prices, like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale. Great groups arrived periodically from Philadelphia in the manner of school-treats and departed with less bruit after an exact exhausting week when the picnic was over. Perhaps for twenty-four hours the swimming-pool and the bar were almost deserted, and then another school-treat would arrive, this time from St Louis. Everyone knew everyone else: they had bussed together to an airport, they had flown together, together they had faced an alien customs; they would separate during the day and greet each other noisily and happily after dark, exchanging impressions of ‘shooting the rapids’, the botanic gardens, the Spanish fort. ‘We are doing that tomorrow.’”— British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Graham Greene (1904-1991), “Cheap in August,” originally printed in The London Magazine, August 1964, reprinted in May We Borrow Your Husband (1967)

The exotic seaside setting might be familiar to readers of the globe-trotting Graham Greene, but the melancholy that gradually supplants the light wit in this short story? It’s a far different variety than the tortured moral dilemmas elsewhere in the Greeneland landscape in novels like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

An Englishwoman, Mary Watson, has come to a Jamaican resort: i.e., when it is “cheap in August.” At 39 years old, in a marriage to an American academic that has become increasingly lifeless, she has concocted an excuse to escape for the kind of “holiday affair” that friends her age have talked about.

She does not expect three weeks with “no opportunities for infidelity, only for writing post-cards” to her husband—a period in which she finds herself increasingly isolated from the “jolly bunches” at the resort who have abandoned any attempt to look attractive.

Nor does she expect at the end of that time to find herself being propositioned by an especially unprepossessing fellow tourist, an obese 70-year-old old enough to be her father who goes by the name of Henry Hickslaughter.

He is hardly an attractive figure: unsuccessful in business, distant from his siblings, and, as becomes increasingly apparent, lonely (“I don’t write love letters. Never did and I’m too old now”). Yet in spite of herself, she finds herself drawn to this “old shoe comfortable to wear.”

In terms of brevity or intensity of passion, what they share this night is not even a brief encounter but a temporary reprieve against the desolation encroaching on their lives. They will never see each other again, but Mary, out of pity, has alleviated the plight of “the fat old frightened man whom she almost loved.”

For Greene, cinema not only provided at times a livelihood (a short-lived stint as a critic in the late 1930s) and the extra assignment (his classic screenplay for the 1949 thriller The Third Man), but an eye for telling details that reveal character.

His use of simile and metaphor is especially pronounced in “Cheap in August,” such as, in the paragraph leading off this post, “like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale”; rear ends that “lurch by like hippos on the way to the water”; and, most surprisingly (to me, anyway), “the air-conditioners made a continuous rumble in the starry palmy night like over-fed hotel guests.”

Collectively, these go far towards depicting the dense humidity and downscale resort in which Mary and Henry, disappointed in where they are in their lives, take stock of themselves.

Moreover, in detailing so carefully these 24 hours in a pair of lovers thrown together by subdued discouragement with life, Greene demonstrates what he meant in this passage in perhaps his best-known novel, The Power and the Glory:

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

In recent years I’ve seen several screen adaptations of Greene’s work, including Our Man in Havana, The Fallen Idol, and, of course, The Third Man. (I would like to see the September 1975 Thames Television adaptation of “Cheap in August,” but it doesn’t look like it’s currently available on mainstream streaming services, or on DVD.)

But I haven’t read him since high school and college, when I went rapidly through The Power and the Glory, A Burnt-Out Case, The Honorary Consul, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, The Human Factor, and his second memoir, Ways of Escape. Clearly I knew to go back for more of his voluminous output, especially two of his most famous novels, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

Quote of the Day (Graham Greene, on Why Books Excite Us So Much in Childhood)

“Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?...It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.”—English novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, playwright, and journalist Graham Greene (1904-1991), The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951)

This Day in Literary History (Zane Grey, Prolific Creator of Westerns, Dies)

Oct. 23, 1939— Zane Grey, a bored dentist who took up writing and quickly became synonymous with Westerns that became omnipresent in bookstores, movie theaters and TV sets, died at age 67 of heart failure in California.

Graham Greene invoked, with considerable irony, the influence of Grey on contemporary literature in his screenplay for The Third Man. In a moment of comic relief in the novelist’s dark vision of postwar Vienna, author Holly Martins, a woebegone generator of pulp fiction, stumbles when he finds himself in an unexpected exchange with a questioner at a lecture in the city:

MAN: “What author has chiefly influenced you most?”

MARTINS: “Grey.”

WOMAN: “Grey?  What Grey?”

MARTINS: “Zane Grey.”

The English moderator at the lecture then steps in:

CRABBIN: “Oh, that is Mr. Martins' little joke, of course.  We all know perfectly well that Zane Grey wrote what we call Westerns—cowboys and bandits.”

In other words: Grey wrote genre fiction—hardly to be taken seriously.

Grey never was acclaimed as a stylist, but millions of readers regarded him as a top-notch storyteller. And scholars of popular culture should take him very seriously indeed as someone who achieved considerable commercial success.

To be sure, Grey was not the inventor of the Western (John Jakes, in his introduction to Great Tales of the West, credits two Eastern authors, James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms, as the “grandfathers” of the genre).

But, through relentless self-disciplined and travel to many locales, Grey put out, in roughly three decades, book after book—60 westerns alone—that readers snatched up eagerly: titles such as Last of the Plainsmen, Heritage of the Desert, West of the Pecos, and his most successful work, Riders of the Purple Sage.

Gifted with unquenchable energy, Grey soon transplanted the genre to a medium where the wide-open spaces celebrated in this literature could be enjoyed in nearly literal form: the motion picture.

Far earlier than other authors such as crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, Grey recognized the importance of this medium and sought to control the product. In 1920 he even formed his own production company, Zane Grey Pictures Inc. When Jesse Lasky bought the firm several years later, the unit would comprise the core of westerns made under the aegis of Lasky’s company, Paramount Pictures.

According to John Milton Hagen’s Holly-Would!, at one time, every one of Grey’s books had been adapted for the screen. I am unable to prove or disprove that assertion. But the entry on Grey in the Internet Movie Database lists 117 story credits for him.

Among the actors who appeared in films based on his work were such luminaries as John Wayne, George Montgomery, Tim Holt, Randolph Scott, Buster Crabbe, George O'Brien, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, and Richard Dix.

As another medium—television—searched for new content in the 1950s, the work of Grey resurfaced through the efforts of a longtime admirer, Dick Powell. In 1956, the veteran actor-director launched the first anthology series devoted entirely to westerns, Zane Grey Theatre. 

Its half-hour format eventually limited Powell’s initial determination to adapt all of Grey’s novels. But by the end of its run of more than 100 episodes in five seasons, it aired pilot episodes for such western series as Trackdown, Black Saddle, The Westerner, Johnny Ringo, and most famously, Chuck Connor’s long-running The Rifleman. And one of the writers on its staff, Aaron Spelling,  became one of the most successful producers in TV history.

Flashback, September 1949: ‘Third Man’ Exposes Evil in Postwar Vienna

The Third Man, which premiered in the U.K. 70 years ago this month, is now frequently regarded as the greatest British film of all time. 

No wonder—it featured a supernova of creative forces in front of and behind the camera: producers Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, director Carol Reed, assistant director Guy Hamilton (who later graduated to helm three James Bond features), stars Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, and, in a small but pivotal role, Orson Welles. 

The production history of this drama set in postwar Vienna is fascinating in and of itself, including the clash of wills between Korda and Selznick, the accidental discovery of the musician who contributed the distinctive “zither music,” Anton Karas, and the hurdles thrown up at will by the willful Welles.

But the prime mover behind this classic thriller may have been Graham Greene. Not only did the finished feature stick closely to both the novella he wrote as, in effect, a treatment as well as the screenplay, but it sounds themes he returned to consistently throughout his five-decade writing career. 

Easily among the most famous literary converts to Roman Catholicism in the last century, Greene still resisted making his chief characters simple conveyors of virtue. Riven by doubt himself even after converting, Greene depicted characters twisting in the coils of sin, utterly unable to escape even when they knew the right path to take. The Third Man was no different.

Until relatively late in his career, Greene classified his novellas as one of his “entertainments,” a name given to distinguish his crime melodramas from his other, supposedly more profound, works. But, as he recognized as time went on, that division was too neat and facile.

Like many entertainers, Greene knew how to pay more attention to his work by joking about it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the satire directed at the hack writer of Westerns, Holly Martins, when a literary group he’s to address presses him for something profound.

"They want you to talk on the crisis of faith," he is told.

"Cri-? What's that?" Martins asks, stupefied. 

"Oh, I thought you'd know,” comes the reply. “You're a writer."

In a discomfort he could never have previously imagined, Martins must address this “crisis” not only in a lecture hall or on the printed page but also in his own life. He will have to answer to what extent his loyalty matters when the friend he thought he knew so well, Harry Lime, turns out to have made a fortune peddling diluted penicillin that resulted in the maiming and deaths of countless innocent children. 

Divided politically by four occupying powers who often find it hard to speak the same language, the Vienna of The Third Man is riven spiritually by the eternal sins of greed and hatred. Through the Oscar-winning cinematography of Robert Krasker, the “old Vienna of Strauss music and bogus easy charm” has been reduced to a city of shadowy, slightly tilted streets. 

Martins, a penniless pulp fiction writer, finds it even more dangerous here than his earlier callow predecessors, the American innocents abroad of Henry James. Amid proud but crumbling buildings, it is not merely hard to see here, but even to maintain one’s balance. It is a striking visualization of Greeneland.

With the war having reduced survivors to a Darwinian struggle for existence, crossing borders, geographically and ethically, becomes commonplace, even expected. Identities are cast aside, then utterly confused. Martins is mistaken at the hotel for a more acclaimed author; Anna Schmidt mixes up his first name with that of her onetime lover and Martins’ friend, Harry Lime; Martins drunkenly calls the unillusioned British Major Calloway “Callaghan”; and the plot centers on the uncertainty identity of the title character.

But it is in the sewers of Vienna that Greene finds the ultimate metaphor—a Stygian repository for human waste to which the desperate run for an illusory escape. Even amid the loud roar of this rushing underground river, humanity runs aground. From here, fate—what passes for the justice of God in this fallen world—arrives in the form of a relentless police manhunt.

The late, fine mystery novelist Philip Kerr suggested that, in the confrontation between Martins and Lime on the Ferris wheel in Vienna’s Prater Park, Greene underscored the moral hypocrisy of the Western victors of the war, as Harry disclaims any sense of responsibility for his victims: “Victims?” says Harry. “Don’t be melo­dramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?”

There is another way, however, to view this scene: as one where the devil cites scripture to his purpose. Lime, a figure of energy and charisma, binds men and women to him. But all of that intelligence and charm, instead of being directed toward life-affirming ends, is devoted to selfish ones. Rapid by necessity on his feet, he is just as agile with his tongue, as made beautifully clear in a speech ad-libbed by Welles:

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

But all of this is clever, honeyed words. Not only does Lime take facts taken out of context (the Renaissance was hardly confined to Italy), but he doesn’t address the sources of Martins’ rage: How can Harry endanger the lives of innocent people? If he loved Anna as much as he said, why did he betray her to the Russians by disclosing the secret of her forged papers?

Greene’s friend Kim Philby—the British intelligence operative who sold secrets to the Russians—has been proposed as a model for Lime. (Philby’s given first name was Harry.) But it might be even more appropriate to regard Greene himself as a possible source for the character. Not only was his real first name Harry, but the character was associated with a fruit of a green(e) color. 

And both author and creation remain nominal Catholics, with Lime remarking cheerfully to Holly, "Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and mercy and all that. I'm not hurting anyone's souls by what I do.The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils."

If Harry Lime lives—and he does, more so than any other character in the film or, arguably, throughout all of European film noir—it might be because Greene (himself a serial betrayer, of his marriage vows) was a paradoxical secret sharer of his sinful humanity. 

In a famous address on “The Virtue of Disloyalty” given at the University of Hamburg, Greene observed: “Loyalty confines you to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids you to comprehend sympathetically your dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages you to roam through any human mind: it gives the novelist an extra dimension of understanding." 

That “extra dimension of understanding” elevates The Third Man to an unforgettable cinematic experience long after Anna cold-shoulders Martins at the wintry second funeral in the haunting final scene.

Quote of the Day (Graham Greene, on Truth and the Swings of the Mind)

“It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.” —English novelist (and Roman Catholic convert) Graham Greene (1904-1991), The End of the Affair (1951)

Quote of the Day (Graham Greene, on Pity and God’s Image)

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” —Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)