Rock Island, IL

You may sometimes experience a certain low-grade fear when, once again, you approach a favorite book. Lurking about the uncertain enterprise of re-reading is the strong and unsettling possibility that, this time, the book will fall short.

A book may fail you because it is an inadequate book. It may fail you because, having thought it good once, you were at one time an inadequate reader of it. Or perhaps it will not so much fail as fall short simply because you are a different reader now, and it, therefore, is a different book, just as the river you stepped into as a child is, in a manner of speaking, a different river from the one you step into as an adult. It is not quite so deep as it once was, nor its current so swift.

When I was very young I read with considerable delight the novels of Chaim Potok. As an adult I have liked them still on the few occasions I have returned to them. But I admire them far less than I once did for the simple reason that they are not as admirable as I once thought them to be. Other books, by contrast, have improved with age—with my age and theirs. There was a stretch in my twenties during which I read Chesterton’s book on St. Francis every summer. The book improved probably because I was a little bit smarter each time I read it, and maybe even a little bit better, but its brightness never dimmed. I haven’t read it in many years now, but I doubt it would fail me much, if at all, were I to pick it up tomorrow, which I may do.

But the fear that it might fail me lurks, and that lurking fear is an aspect of re-reading that will sometimes intensify the pleasure for the very reason that it increases the risk. The whole affair of re-reading is comparable, I suppose, to meeting an old friend after many years. You quake with fear in anticipation of such a meeting, and then, when the time comes, all goes smashingly. Jones lives up to your memory of him, and all is as it was: well.

And then of course there are times when, one sip into your beer, you realize that fifteen ounces of torture still remain. Smith, it turns out, is insufferably dull, just as you feared—no doubt because he has been worn down by his work or wife or prosaic life or by the comfortable delusions that for some inexplicable reason he settled into somewhere along the way. He says he can’t imagine why he ever found George Herbert worth the time of day. You look at him and know the feeling.

Just as there is something profoundly satisfying about the reunion with Jones, there is something irreparably devastating about the meeting with Smith. Jones has brought back the hour of splendor in the grass; Smith is proof that there hath passed away a glory from the earth. Jones is like King Lear, Smith To Kill a Mockingbird.

I would not push the analogy too far. It is easier to survive the disappointment of an old book you once cherished than it is to survive the disappointment of an old friend you once loved, and at any rate it’s altogether possible in either case that familiarity will eventually breed contempt. The difference is that it is sometimes easier to ignore a book than a man. Smith may badger you precisely because he is insufferably dull; Chesterton and Brother Francis may yell to you from the shelf, but they don’t keep leaving you messages and demanding your time like someone completely unaware of how excruciating his conversation is.

All of this is by way of preparation. I want to say a word about the kind of book that doesn’t seem to get worse and why it doesn’t seem to get worse.

I don’t know how many times I have read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but I read it again last week with a group of about thirty-five students. I typically devote three seventy-five-minute sessions to the book, and I can fill them easily without ever opening the book at all (though I do open it). My aims are modest: I want students to understand the book, to possess for themselves the logic that governs the book, to know something about the tradition to which the book belongs, to see what a tightly written story it is, to grasp its formal elements, and to admire it as I do.

(Teaching literature well is partly about perpetuating your own tastes. That is inescapable and seldom to be repented.)

But fear lurks about that admiration. Each time I assign the book I am afraid my admiration will be diminished, but each time I read it my admiration increases. If I admit that there are one or two missed notes in Greene’s whole performance, I am nevertheless convinced that this is a novel that pretty much gets everything right.

Set somewhat amorphously in early twentieth-century revolutionary Mexico, it is the story of a nameless priest—the last remaining priest, save one who has struck a deal with the atheist state and married—on the run from a nameless lieutenant. The priest is a drinker. He has fathered a child. He is disheveled and undisciplined, weak, sick, and near despair. The lieutenant, by contrast, willingly enforces prohibition. He is self-controlled and has no need of women. He is smartly turned out and disciplined to a fault, strong, healthy, and hopeful.

Greene’s task is to put his whiskey priest on a journey the trials of which will make him worthy of a martyr’s death. The physical action takes place between the priest’s parish, Concepcion, and Vera Cruz, the place to which, as the novel opens, the priest is trying to escape. The spiritual action takes place between conception and the true cross, and the purpose of the Whiskey Priest’s journey—both physical and spiritual, for they are inseparable in Greene’s imagining, is transformation. This is “pilgrimage” such as St. Augustine stamped on Western consciousness. Life itself is pilgrimage, the purpose of which is transformation, preparing for and being worthy of the destination.

The Power and the Glory is a book that takes seriously our full, which is to say our incarnate, condition. It sends its hero off in what Flannery O’Connor called the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus; in doing so it strikes a kenotic but not a heretical note. It is a novel that fully realizes the comedic structure of providential history. Cast in the conditions of tragedy, it is in a very real sense a divine comedy.

The book would not have survived my many readings of it, it is true, did it not flatter my own prejudices. I could not admire it, nor could I hope to help students admire it, were it not in accord with my own sensibilities. That must be admitted.

And yet it is a fine novel. It is sparing, understated, and cogent. It wastes no details. Not a character moves but he or she makes another character sharper. Not a scene on any page but arrests the reader’s five senses. No part of it fails to accord with the whole.

And the book itself accords with the whole of Catholic literature, with all the great Catholic writers, whose understanding of history is essentially comedic and who work within the comedic structures that derive from the Bible itself. For the Bible moves not toward chaos but toward order: it ends with a return to order, with a marriage and with the dancing and feasting and merry-making that attend it.

I’m not sure I know of a character in fiction who takes up his cross better than Greene’s Whiskey Priest—or of a novelist who does a better job of setting his hero on the via dolorosa. Long may this fine book please, and long may we worthily admire it.