For more than 30 years, politicians and academics have debated the long-term consequences of the moral, cultural and social revolution that the 1960s brought.1 While the decade saw profound transformations in patterns of production and consumption, Arthur Marwick, ‘the dean of sixties historians’, has argued that the most ‘fundamental and historically signifi cant’ of its changes arose from the subversion of ‘the authority of the white, the upper and middle class, the husband, the father, and the male generally’. This brought about ‘Upheavals in race, class, and family relationships’ and a new concern for ‘civil and personal rights’ whose consequences reverberated through all levels of society. Advances in science and technology, most notably the development and widespread availability of ‘the contraceptive pill’, further drove this process. The ‘general sexual liberation’ it initiated and the ‘striking changes in public and private morals’
that resulted were manifest in new ‘modes of self-presentation’, a rejection of ‘the old canons of fashion, and a rejoicing in the natural attributes of the human body’ (Sandbrook, 2005: xvi;
Marwick, 1998: 16–20). While their proponents have argued that these changes brought improvements in ‘material conditions, family relationships, and personal freedoms for the vast majority of ordinary people’, conservative critics have asserted that they visited ‘misery, decadence and ignorance’ on the secular west (Marwick, 1998: 15, 16; Hitchens, 2000: 369). Whatever their material outcomes, in Britain the 1960s concentrated attention on the fading of the nation’s power, furnishing a language through which anxieties about national decline could be articulated and
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a means of exploring how Britain could live in the present while still holding on to the past.
In Travels With My Aunt (1969), Graham Greene offers a response to these anxieties. The 1960s and the painful readjustments they brought seem to have entirely bypassed the novel’s protagonist, retired bank manager Henry Pulling. Southwood, where he lives, is a timeless community of ancient admirals and dyspeptic majors,
‘where one read of danger only in the newspapers and the deepest change to be expected was a change of government’ (Greene, 1969: 201).2 On closer inspection, Southwood’s insulation from the anarchic energies of the age seems less a matter of chance than an act of will. When at Christmas lunch Henry’s neighbour, Major Charge, asks him to feed his goldfi sh while he spends a few days with a study group, Henry quizzes him:
‘What kind of a study group?’
‘The problems of empire,’ he replied, staring at me with eyes enlarged and angry as though I had already made some foolish or unsympathetic reply.
‘I thought we had got rid of all those.’
‘A temporary failure of nerve,’ he snapped and bayoneted his turkey.
(Greene, 1969: 202)
Seen in this light, Southwood is no suburban backwater, curiously sheltered from the rising tide of change, but a militant outpost of the old order, doggedly resisting its advance. In refusing to let go of the past and surrender themselves to the uncertainties of the present, Southwood and its hidebound habitués have stiffened into emblems of morbidity. Henry is rescued from rigor mortis by his Aunt Augusta who, after a 50-year absence, emerges at his mother’s funeral, ‘dressed rather as the late Queen Mary of beloved memory might have dressed if she had still been with us and had adapted herself a little bit towards the present mode’
(Greene, 1969: 10). Having attuned herself to the present mode she conducts Henry from ‘the child’s security’ of the past to ‘the adult world’ of the here and now via a crash course in sex, crime and travel (Sharrock, 1984: 264). Their journey leads from the stagnation of Southwood, via the intrigues of post-war Europe, to
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the lawlessness of Latin America where, in the comic kleptocracy of Stroessner’s Paraguay, they fi nd a balance between the certainties of the past and the challenges of the present.
Henry’s experience of travel demonstrates that for all its novelty and excitement, the dynamism of the present is profoundly unsettling, that the freedoms it brings come at the cost of the reliable norms on which cultural and psychological stability rest. Speeding through Europe aboard the Orient Express, accompanying his aunt on the fi rst of her mysterious adventures, the rapid fi re crossing of frontiers that gives him a ‘feeling of elation merely at being alive’ also leaves him dizzy and disoriented (O’Prey, 1988: 124). Yet if the present threatens bewilderment, the past has only death and dissolution to offer. When he quarrels with his aunt in France and makes his way back to Southwood, Henry fi nds that:
Like a waiter on his day-off I passed virtually unrecognized. It was an odd feeling for one who had been so much in the centre of Southwood life. As I went upstairs to bed I felt myself to be a ghost returning home, transparent as water…I was almost surprised to see that my image was visible in the glass. (Greene, 1969: 196)
It isn’t only Henry or Southwood that seem to be dematerialising;
the whole country looks set to disappear beneath a fog of gloom as the mythic energies of the age are dissipated in a thousand petty disputes:
England lay damp and cold, as grey as the graveyard, while the train lagged slowly from Dover Town towards Charing Cross under the drenching rain…
In the opposite corner a woman sneezed continuously while I tried to read the Daily Telegraph. There was a threatened engineering strike, and the car industry was menaced by a threatened stoppage of cleaners in some key factory which turned out windscreen-wipers. Cars in all the BMC factories waited without wipers on the production line. Export fi gures were down and so was the pound. (Greene, 1969: 194)
There can be no going back for Henry, and when his aunt summons him to Paraguay he promptly follows.3
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While Henry’s arrival in Asunción might look like a fi nal break with the past, he fi nds there not an escape from Britain but the still faintly beating heart of its essential identity, a living remnant of
‘the Victorian world where I had been taught by my father’s books to feel more at home than in our modern day’ (Greene, 1969: 316).
Here he can imaginatively re-inhabit the nation’s heyday while still living in the present. Likewise Aunt Augusta. Dancing with her long lost lover, Mr Visconti, she looks ‘like the young woman in my father’s photograph pregnant with happiness’, transported back to a time and a place where, always one step ahead of the law, life was a hazardous adventure, the only passport you needed was cash and indifference to the values of others was not a crime but a Briton’s birthright (Greene, 1969: 318). What Henry and his aunt discover in Paraguay then is neither the anarchy of the new world nor the decay of the old, but a perilous balance between them, a place of permanent contingency. Although Henry ends the novel an expatriate smuggler betrothed to the teenage daughter of Asunción’s Chief of Police, it is clear that he has never been more authentically British or more at home. Reciting Tennyson to his adolescent bride-to-be while paying off her father, he has one foot in past, the other in the present and for the fi rst time in his life, is fully alive.
Through the 1960s and 70s Latin America’s dependable provision of a world of anarchy and adventure continued to furnish British readers with a simpler past where they could take refuge from the anxieties of the present. In Up, into the Singing Mountain (1960), the sequel to Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley (1939), his protagonist, Huw Morgan, fi nds among the Welsh settlers in Patagonia a Wales twice removed from the 1960s – once by distance and once by time. While Britons were embracing new freedoms of thought, expression and love, and managing the moral and social upheavals they brought, Llewellyn’s Welsh Patagonians held fast to the traditions of the preceding century, their lives revolving around work, worship and home. While Morgan denounces the backwardness of these communities, he treasures the biblical simplicity of life there. The pioneering struggle to tame the land and the moral invigoration
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it brings return him to the values of the imperial past. When, via politics and war, the complexities of the modern world intrude on Morgan’s idyll, in a further sequel, Down Where the Moon is Small (1966), he moves back into the simplicities of the old world again, leaving Welsh Patagonia for a grant of land in the Andes.
Political violence in Latin America registered a new intensity in the late 1960s and early 70s as an array of revolutionary groups from across the continent struggled to wrest power from the military strongmen who governed. Graham Greene saw in these events a topical context where he might return to the obsessive subject of his serious fi ction, the quest for redemption in a fallen world. As such, while he is quite specifi c about the physical and temporal location of The Honorary Consul (1973), in and around Corrientes in northern Argentina in the early 1970s, it is clear that its events map a moral and psychological rather than a geographical or political terrain. Indeed, its signifi cant landmarks – temptation, weakness, cowardice, betrayal, failure, guilt, and despair – are so well-known to readers of Greene’s fi ction that they have been identifi ed as an autonomous fi ctional province,
‘Greeneland’, an environment in which the ‘landscape is distorted as in a heat haze by the view of life projected onto it’, its salient details ‘selected and placed in order to contribute to what one might call the prevailing Greenery’ (Spurling, 1983: 62).