The Confidential Agent– Graham Greene, 1939 ★½

Spy vs. Spy

You can take the man out of a war, but can you take the war out of a man? Graham Greene uses the device of a spy novel to ask this question, foregoing such typical spy-fiction elements as plot and suspense in favor of mystery and atmosphere for a novel that takes a long time going (mostly) nowhere.

The title character, a middle-aged man known to us only by a letter, D., arrives in England from his war-torn homeland, also unnamed. His mission, explained after some bumping around and a beating, has to do with getting a British coal-mining concern to do business with his nation’s government. The nation is currently embroiled in civil war, and an agent from the rebel side, identified as L., is hot on D.’s trail.

Meanwhile, D. contemplates the idea of travelling in a peaceful country when all he has known for the last few years is a war which has claimed all he held dear, including a beloved wife who was executed by the rebels – apparently by accident.

“He carried the war with him,” Greene writes by way of an introduction. “Wherever D. was, there was the war. He could never understand that people were not aware of it.”

The real-life circumstances behind the writing of The Confidential Agent are more interesting than what’s on the page. Greene was struggling at the time to write a popular novel to support his growing family. But the novel he was currently writing, The Power And The Glory, about an alcoholic Catholic priest in anti-clerical Mexico, promised little in the way of easy lucre. So Greene rented himself a flat, stocked up on Benzedrine, and commenced to crank out The Confidential Agent in six weeks.

While never spelled out, it is clear the nation that D. hails from is Spain, then under Marxist-inspired leadership and actively opposed by right-wing forces that included the eventual Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Why Greene keeps this under wraps is less clear; perhaps he didn’t want to risk too overtly dipping into the waters of England’s own political divide regarding the Spanish Civil War; The Confidential Agent was written to be commercial, not profound, and is even subtitled “An Entertainment,” which was Greene’s designation for works he meant to be taken less seriously by the literati.

Reading the novel, another possibility presents itself: That Greene didn’t want to write a novel about politics at all. Greene was an ardent man of the Left who supported the Spanish government, but the character D. seems uncertain of the merits of his cause. He fights not because he thinks he’s right, but rather because fighting is all he knows.

Graham Greene later in life. According to A. J. West's study, The Quest For Graham Greene, many who read Greene's depictions of bomb attacks on civilians as experienced by his title character in The Confidential Agent thought them inspired by the London Blitz, though that event had not yet happened when he wrote the novel. Image from www.williamlanday.com.

“You have to feel something to stop the war,” D. says at one point. “Sometimes I think we cling to it because there is still fear. If we were without that, we shouldn’t have any feeling at all. None of us will enjoy the peace.”

D. even thinks about his own side’s wrongs in the matter, such as their suppression of religion (while not a believer himself, D. admires the artwork of “the Dark Ages”) and the fact that they, like their rebel opponents, kill with impunity. Greene was perhaps trying to capture the feeling of conflict, rather than a conflict itself.

“It’s no good taking a moral line – my people commit atrocities like the others,” D. explains at one point. “I suppose if I believed in a God it would be simpler.”

It’s an interesting way to write a spy story. If only Greene had more going on here than dark mood-setting! Certainly The Confidential Agent reminds me of John le Carré, a noted admirer of Greene’s. Confidential Agent has a lot of le Carré-style philosophical navel-gazing, and even a May-December romance for our middle-aged hero. D. in fact engages the affections of two young women, one being a 14-year-old chambermaid at a seedy hotel (apparently based on the rooming house where Greene wrote this novel) with whom D. is affectionately loyal but not romantically involved; the other being a 20-year-old socialite named Rose Cullen, who knows only luxury but is attracted to this haggard refugee.

Rose is in fact the daughter of Lord Benditch, the coal magnate with whom D. seeks to make his deal. Rose happens upon D. quite by accident, overhearing her order a drink on the ferry-ride into Dover.

“It is an odd coincidence,” D. marvels, no doubt speaking for the reader here.

“I don’t see why,” Rose answers. “Everybody I ever meet has business with him.”

The Confidential Agent is that kind of book. Things sort of happen without much in the way of a set-up, like fragments of a half-remembered dream. Greene’s inspiration was a single moment where rival agents happen across one another aboard the misty deck of a ferry, a scene which occurs in Chapter 1. After that, it’s off to the races, with Greene’s Benzedrine-fueled imagination not stopping to offer much of anything in the way of explanation.

That isn’t to say The Confidential Agent is a novel of action. It sort of putters along in its unhurried way, Greene teasing out D.’s unsettled condition at length. He gets beaten up early by a goon set upon him by L., although it’s a curiously unexciting scene the way Greene writes it. “They’ll have to stop soon: they don’t want murder,” D. thinks between blows to the face, a strange thought given the fact he blames them for murdering his wife.

After a while of D. wandering through London, he meets Rose again as well as connecting up with her father and another agent, Mr. K., who teaches a made-up language called Entrenationo. This broad parody of Esperanto is Greene’s one noticeable dip here into humor, though even here Greene keeps his narrative focus on D.’s disconnection with everything around him. A touch of Kafka, perhaps, but it might have worked better if D. himself was more palpable a personality. Here all we seem to get is a lot of shadows and fog.

There is also Else, the 14-year-old who works as a rooming-house maid and reaches out to D. as a kind of personal savior. She wastes little time declaring her love for him, “calf love,” D. thinks of it, and he responds with a profession of loyalty and security while enlisting her aid in a moment of crisis.

“He promised rashly, as if in a violent world you could promise anything at all, beyond the moment of speaking,” Greene writes.

The book takes some strange U-turns, with D. switching from hunted to hunter and running into the same three or four people over and over. The business with the coal deal is teased out for a while, then dropped with a kind of shrug. Greene throws up some odd metaphors, perhaps reflecting the bleariness with which he wrote. A subway ride suggests an explosion to the war-wracked D., “a wind full of death and the noise of pain,” and he watches buses “vanishing gradually like alligators into the marshy air.” The ending is especially odd for the way it sort of collapses into what I guess Greene thought was giving readers what they wanted, even if they had no idea how they got there.

Saying The Confidential Agent suffers from opacity seems wrong only in the sense that being opaque appears to have been the author’s driving principle. Greene here is always working the angles of the unknown, in terms of the physical, the moral, the psychological. Even when D. has a chance to avenge himself by killing someone connected to the murder of a friend, he can’t quite bring himself to pull the trigger:

“They had pushed him around…it was his turn now, but fear was returning – the fear of other people’s pain, their lives, their individual despairs. He was damned like a creative writer to sympathy…”

It seems at times Greene himself is peeking out from behind the curtain, trying to make a comment about the folly of having a rooting interest in such a thing as war.

The fact that war was about to come to England within a very short time of The Confidential Agent’s publication gives the novel a sort of ironic interest when Greene has D. take in the peaceful Kentland around him: “Violence seem more than ever out of place in this country of complicated distinctions and odd taboos. Violence was too simple. It was a breach of taste.”

Ultimately, The Confidential Agent works as a kind of mood piece regarding the last days before World War II, but falls apart when it comes to developing the sort of engagement one expects from an “Entertainment,” especially with spies involved. Greene would find other vehicles more worthy of his moral shadings and ambiguities, where such things as suspense and character wouldn’t be made to suffer.