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Loser Takes All: Graham Greene’s Theological Puzzle Box
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2024
Abstract
Graham Greene’s novella Loser Takes All has been unfairly ignored in the critical literature. Rather than the mere frivolity it is taken to be, it is a humorous examination of some serious theological issues. By means of an inversion of Pascal’s Great Wager, Greene makes the case that attempts to rationalize the mystery that is the object of our faith will cheapen and diminish that faith. In the course of so doing, he alludes to and has fun with his earlier works, particularly Brighton Rock, and critiques the inversion of the Wager by Albert Camus. He shows the influence of Miguel de Unamuno, who years later would influence Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. Greene also invokes a poem by Charles Baudelaire, which Greene has quoted in many works, that the possibility of damnation adds meaning to life, though it may drift into what von Balthasar called Greene’s indulgence of the mystique of sin.
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References
1 Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980) p. 224.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Andrew Madigan, ‘A Bad Aunt? Travels with My Aunt, Morality and the Catholic Novel’, The Heythrop Journal, 52 (2011), 986–92.
7 Peter J. Comerford, ‘Kneel compañero: Monsignor Quixote’s Sacramental Adventure’, New Blackfriars, 103 (2022), 337–58.
8 Mark Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
9 Harvey Curtis Webster, ‘The World of Graham Greene’, in Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations, ed. by Robert O. Evans (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1963), p. 18.
10 Ibid.
11 Gene D. Phillips, Graham Greene: The Films of His Fiction (New York: Teachers College Press 1974), p. 89.
12 Ibid., p. 90.
13 Nicholas A. H. Stacey, ‘The Accountant in Literature’, Accounting Review (1958), 102–05.
14 J. W. Miller, ‘The Earthly Inferno of Graham Greene’, The Angle, 1959 (1959), 9–13.
15 Ibid., p. 11.
16 Ibid.
17 Robert Pendleton, Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot: The Arabesques of Influence (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996).
18 Ibid., p. 139.
19 Ibid., p. 140.
20 Ibid., p. 141.
21 Gwenn R. Boardman, Graham Greene: The Aesthetics of Exploration (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1971).
22 Ibid., p. 123.
23 Ibid., p. 118 et seq.
24 ‘Gom’ is an acronym used by the employees of the company where the protagonist works, standing for Grand Old Man, referring to their boss. Despite being an acronym, it never appears in the novel with all capital letters.
25 Ibid., pp. 122–23.
26 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 113.
27 Comerford, ‘Kneel compañero’.
28 William J. Entwistle, ‘Cervantes, the Exemplary Novelist’, Hispanic Review, 9 (1941), 103–09, at 104.
29 Richard Creese uses the term ‘thickness’ of language to refer to the allusive power of importing, by implication, the significance of certain words and images that resonate with meaning because of their prior use in other novels and in the culture at large. See, generally, Richard Creese, ‘Objects in Novels and the Fringe of Culture: Graham Greene and Alain Robbe-Grillet’, Comparative Literature, 39 (1987), 58–73.
30 Creese, supra.
31 Graham Greene, The Comedians (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), p. 55.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Creese, ‘Objects in Novels’, p. 70.
35 Ibid.
36 Peter M. Sinclair, ‘Graham Greene and Christian Despair: Tragic Aesthetics in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter’, Renascence, 63 (2011), 41–56, 50.
37 Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 239.
38 Marie-Francois Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 148.
39 James F. Dorrill, ‘Allusions at Work in Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock’, Renascence, 66 (2014), 167–88.
40 Ibid., p. 186.
41 Greene, Brighton Rock, p. 85.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., pp. 130–31.
45 T. S. Eliot, ‘Baudelaire’ Collected in Selected Essays of T.S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 380.
46 Ibid., p. 379.
47 Ibid.
48 Hugh Underhill, ‘Poetry of Departures: Larkin and the Power of Choosing’, Critical Survey (1989), 183, quoting D.E.S. Maxwell.
49 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 381.
50 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 378–79.
51 William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954).
52 Ibid.
53 Kerry Weinberg, ‘The Women of Eliot and Baudelaire: The Boredom, the Horror and the Glory’, Modern Language Studies (1984), 31–42.
54 Graham Greene, Journey without Maps (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), p. 28.
55 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 375.
56 Greene, Journey without Maps, p. 28.
57 Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 175.
58 Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Bantam Books, 1974) p. 14.
59 Michael Gorra, ‘On “The End of the Affair”’, Southwest Review, 89 (2004), 109–25, 110.
60 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 380.
61 Ibid.
62 Loser Takes All (New York: Viking Press, 1957) p. 21.
63 Loser Takes All, p. 33.
64 In Ways of Escape (pp. 224–25), Greene wrote that the Gom was based on the film director Alexander Corda, with whom Greene would discuss Baudelaire. Thus, ascribing to the Gom a taste for Baudelaire may be, at a minimum, a nod to Corda. Greene’s use of this very poem throughout his oeuvre shows it is more than that.
65 Ibid., p. 27.
66 Ibid., p. 36.
67 Ibid., p. 47.
68 Greene, Brighton Rock, p. 52.
69 Ibid., p. 169.
70 Ibid., p. 189.
71 Ibid., p. 194.
72 Gorra, ‘On “The End of the Affair”’, p. 110.
73 Herbert R. Haber, ‘The Two Worlds of Graham Greene’, Modern Fiction Studies (1957), 256–68 at 259.
74 Ibid., p. 260.
75 Peter M. Sinclair, ‘Graham Greene and Christian Despair: Tragic Aesthetics in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter’, Renascence, 63 (2011), 41–56 at 41, internal citation omitted.
76 I use the A. J. Krailsheimer translation, Penguin Classics Harmondsworth England 1975. Pensée 418 is at pp. 149–53.
77 Ibid., p. 150.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., p. 151.
80 Ibid., p. 153.
81 Loser Takes All, pp. 50–51.
82 Ibid., p. 53.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Greene notes that when Bertram enters his office building, a ‘huge office block with its glass, glass, glass and its dazzling marble floor and its pieces of modern carving in alcoves and niches like statues in a Catholic Church’. (Loser Takes All p. 9) He is soon summoned to Room 10 on the 8th floor, which, we are told, is ‘as far as the London County Council regulations allowed us to build towards Heaven’. (p. 13) Thus, Greene starts us off in a counterfeit Heaven atop an ersatz cathedral, and a spurious Trinity; a deliberately staged simulacrum meant to teach a lesson about the difference (as Greene would find it expressed by Unamuno) between a mere ‘God idea’ and God Himself.
87 Loser Takes All, p. 126.
88 Cf. Madigan, ‘A Bad Aunt?’ p. 987.
89 Henry A. Grubbs, ‘Albert Camus and Graham Greene’, Modern Language Quarterly, 10 (1949), 33–42.
91 A. Camus, Notebooks: 1942-1951. Translated from the French and Annotated by J. O’Brien, Vol. 2 (New York: Knopf, 1965). There are four quotes from The Confidential Agent (p. 195) and four quotes from The Heart of the Matter (p. 230). Greene had this volume of Camus’s notebooks in his library (http://www.librarything.com/catalog/GrahamGreene&deepsearch=Camus) but would not have had this volume when he wrote Loser Takes All, since they were not published until after Camus’s death in 1960. In Greene’s copy of the notebooks, he highlighted a passage in which Camus wrote ‘Christianity is pessimistic about man and is optimistic about human destiny. Marxism is pessimistic about human destiny and human nature and is optimistic about the march of history’. (p. 226) Greene’s marginal note included ‘Perhaps the most important historical point in the future will be when the Christian says “I do not always believe” and the Marxist agrees with him’. (Ibid.) Greene later reflected that at that moment in 1964, he had written what Monsignor Quixote was all about.
92 In a notebook entry sometime between January 1942 and September 1945, Camus makes a statement that could equally have been made by Greene: ‘Meaning of my work: So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned’. Notebooks: 1942-1951, p. 99.
93 Henri Peyre, ‘Albert Camus, an Anti-Christian Moralist’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102 (1958), 477–82.
94 Ibid., p. 477.
95 R. W. B. Lewis, ‘The Fiction of Graham Greene: Between the Horror and the Glory’, The Kenyon Review, 19 (1957), 56–75 at 71, Ibid., p. 64.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., p. 70.
98 Indeed, Thomas Merton says ‘Paneloux is a spiritual profiteer, and his kind of Christianity is a reflection of the social establishment, with which it exists in a symbiotic unity. Of such Christianity, Teilhard [de Chardin] says it makes one less than a man and a traitor to the human race’. Thomas Merton, The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, New Directions, p. 236.
99 Albert Camus, ‘The Unbeliever and Christians’ Collected’, in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 71.
100 Comerford, ‘Kneel, compañero’, p. 342.
101 Leopoldo Durán, Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), p. 212.
102 Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 265.
103 Durán, Graham Greene, p. 266.
104 Ibid.
105 Comerford, ‘Kneel compañero’, p. 342.
106 Durán, Graham Greene, p. 212.
107 Miguel de Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Company, 1960), p. 107.
108 This essay does not contend that Pascal’s thought, writ large, is properly reducible to the wager. Neither does it contend that Unamuno rejected Pascal’s thought. As F.R. Martin pointed out in his 1944 essay (F. R. Martin, ‘Pascal and Miguel de Unamuno’, The Modern Language Review, 39 (1944), 138–45), there is ‘a special sympathy between these two minds with their personal, non-intellectual approaches to the problem of belief’. (Ibid., p. 138) Martin quotes the opening lines of a 1923 essay Unamuno wrote (in French) for the tercentenary of Pascal’s birth: ‘The reading of the writings which Pascal has left us, and especially those of the Pensées, do not invite us to study philosophy, but, on the contrary, to know a man, to penetrate the sanctuary of the universal pain of a soul, a very naked soul, and better yet maybe, a soul wearing a hairshirt’. (Ibid., translation by Dr. Constance Rousseau).
109 Comerford, ‘Kneel, compañero’, p. 358.
110 Ibid., p. 23.
111 There is a good critique of the division of Greene’s work between Catholic and post-Catholic novels in Graham Holderness, ‘“Knight-Errant of Faith”? “Monsignor Quixote” as “Catholic Fiction”’, Literature and Theology, 7 (1993), 259.
112 Comerford, ‘Kneel, compañero’, p. 353.
113 Ibid., p. 355.
114 Holderness, p. 270.
115 Patrick Henry, ‘Doubt and Certitude in “Monsignor Quixote”’, College Literature, 12 (1985), 75.
116 Comerford, ‘Kneel, compañero’. p. 355.