The most significant thing about Cardinal Heenan’s autobiography is its preface. He cannot write the whole truth, he tells us, because ministers of Christ must keep confidences without limit of time; and he has written his own life-story because that was less trouble than the granting of frequent interviews to a prospective biographer. In other words, he regards the history of a man’s life as total recall tempered with discretion. How well does this dubious conception serve him ?

Best, obviously enough, in narratives of a circumscribed and picturesquely memorable kind. Days in the infants’ class; a schoolboy’s escapade; anecdotes of life at Rome or in a parish; episodes in a journey to Russia. Some of the anecdotes are entertaining; of some (especially those of an edifying character), the best to be said is that c'est la guerre, mais ce n'est pas magnifique. However, it is good to have the criminally bad diet at Ushaw set down for posterity by a cardinal, while his account of The Day World War II Broke Out should find a place in any anthology of such narratives. The book proceeds in this style from schooldays to Rome and from Rome to ordination in 1930 and parish work. Before and during the war the author became involved, not only in local affairs, but in public speaking and writing. There follows the resurrection of the Catholic Missionary Society in 1947, retreat work for Clergy (of which the unfortunate The People's Priest was the precipitate) and the author’s appointment in 1951 to the See of Leeds. We are promised a second volume. What kind of man emerges from the first?

Racism. I. The death of an Arab

There’s nothing very poetic about the title ‘XVIIIe arrondissement’, but it contains districts with a claim to poetic nomenclature as strong as that of the Rue du Chat qui peche or The Land of Green Ginger. One of them is the area called la Goutte d’Or, though its surroundings are far from rich and far from poetic. It is, in fact, one of the many Arab ghettos of Paris, a violent, rowdy, and unsalubrious spot, where North African labourers try to construct some kind of domestic life for themselves in the teeth of the environment and the intolerance of their French neighbours. In one of the tenements of la Goutte d’Or, in the last week of October 1971, a young Arab boy was shot dead on the staircase outside his uncle’s flat by the concierge, Daniel Pigot. Pigot pleaded legitimate defence, his story being that the lad, Djellali ben Ali, had attacked Pigot’s mistress—his wife, according to another version—scratching her neck as he went down the stairs to buy the morning’s milk and bread for breakfast. Djellali’s uncle, Lahaouri Djahafi, tells a different story. A week before he had been threatened himself by Pigot, who brandished a rifle at him. Djahafi had brushed the incident aside with uneasy humour, but he knew that Pigot, a laundryman who worked in Boulogne-sur-Seine, lived in an explosive situation: his damp hovel contained not merely his wife/mistress but five children in one room, and he was envious of what appeared to him the increasing worldly success of his neighbour across the landing. Djahafi had been a hawker who had left Algiers for France in 1948 and had managed to set himself up in a little shop selling cloths and silks, ‘Aux tissus et soieries d’Orient’.

What are the motives which make a man wish to write his autobiography? Notoriety, fame, money—these are end products They don’t dictate the decision to write, the impulse to construct an artistic form which will be the shape of one’s own life. We might, perhaps, start by saying that to write an autobiography is a form of self-discovery through the necessity of having to shape and frame one’s life. This affords a measure of control which is also a liberation; we can write the past out of our system by re-living it. But perhaps it is more our sense of the present or an ever diminishing future which hastens our pen. From this vantage we must feel that our life has a kind of totality about it which makes it more than just ‘our life’. It makes a representative gesture, giving our memories and reflections more than a confessional interest. We must have a deep conviction that our constantly repeated first person singular is on easy terms with the first person plural. Looking at these suggested motives for autobiography—-the ordering of experience, the self-discovery, the liberation, the belief that your impressions will hold good for others —we see how little they differ from the motives behind any piece of imaginative writing. There are reasons for thinking that writing an autobiography is closer to writing fiction than to writing history. And if it is a novelist himself who should write his autobiography, a man whose life has already furnished a whole house of fiction—then I think rather odd things begin to happen, particularly if that novelist is Graham Greene.

When it was announced some while ago that Greene was engaged in writing his autobiography, it seemed entirely fitting. Here was a novelist whose life seemed hardly less eventful than his works. The table of contents came readily to the mind’s eye.

Jesus of Nazareth is said to be the sacrament of the saving grace of God and of man’s response to God in that grace. In himself Jesus is the encounter between God and mankind, the Immediator of man and God, the Word of God made world and history, man in his concrete dimensions and the total nexus of his relationships taken up into God. According to the apostolic preaching, in him alone, in his ‘name’ alone, is there the means of passing from a lethal situation into the possibility of survival. If men are going to pass from the world that is doomed to death, that can only be by entering into him, into his name, by in some way becoming him, by living out the biography of the one who, alone, no longer belongs to the dead past. Living it out, amongst other ways, sacramentally. Sacramentally we put on Christ, we are conformed to Christ, we are made one body, one spirit, with him.

An old problem reconsidered

Sacramentally we enter upon the life of Christ by the rites of initiation, or rather by the single but modulated initiation-rite of baptism-confirmation. In those Churches where Christian initiation (rightly or unfortunately) has come to be divided into two rites separated by a more or less lengthy interval of time, there has always been a serious problem about how to speak of confirmation, a problem that has compromised attempts at an effective catechesis of the sacrament and, incidentally, often created something of an embarrassment in speaking of the place of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. Only a very few theologians have felt able to deny that a baptized, unconfirmed person is a Christian.

Steinbeck’s use of Old Testament material in East of Eden (1952) is very different from that in To A God Unknown (1933). As outlined in a previous article, Steinbeck was there qualifying the status of his protagonist, Joseph Wayne, by a number of literary means. But the most powerful qualifier of Joseph Wayne as prophet and saviour of his people is the manner in which Steinbeck contrives to keep the closely parallel story of the Joseph of Genesis ever-present throughout To A God Unknown. In East of Eden Steinbeck again, and indeed more obviously, makes use of Old Testament sources. But the Old Testament Cain and Abel do not loom reproachfully behind mere human characters in the book: when considered at all, they are considered explicitly and rationally in discussion, and in another sense the whole novel is clearly devoted to re-enactments of the episode and discussions of its significance.

Steinbeck sums up the centrality of the story in Journal of a Novel (1970), written during the composition of the first draft of East of Eden:

its framework roots from that powerful, profound and perplexing story in Genesis of Cain and Abel... this story with its implications has made a deeper mark in people than any other save possibly the story of the Tree of Life and original sin (90). It is using the biblical story as a measure of ourselves (105). However, Steinbeck’s adaptation of Genesis 4, 1-16 carefully excludes consideration of God, to whom, in Genesis, Cain and Abel offer their gifts. The blatant Cain-Abel correspondences in the novel are Charles and Adam Trask, and the twin boys Caleb and Aron Trask, ostensibly Adam’s sons, but, it transpires, probably like all of us sons of Cain, that is, of Charles.