Word: matter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...home. The Senate was still involved in the leisurely Southern filibuster against the anti-poll tax bill. But on the fifth day there was a break. The G.O.P. leadership tried to invoke cloture. But when Senate President Arthur Vandenberg ruled that cloture could not be applied, no matter how many votes in its favor, the Senate recapitulated. It was a clear victory for the South...
Thus Henry Scobie, leading man in The Heart of the Matter, is singled out as by a movie camera's swooping eye from the rest of the world; and readers of Graham Greene's previous novels will not have to read far in this one before they know that they have met Scobie and his world before. For this world, disguised though it is under African heat, is the same cruel, sordid, vulturous hell that Greene has conjured up in most of 14 books, and Hero Scobie is Greene's equally familiar creation-a sinner disguised...
What makes The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene's most profound novel is that Henry Scobie, who seems to have one skin less than his tortured predecessors, actually has one more. In Brighton Rock (1938) Graham Greene drew a horrifying portrait of an adolescent Catholic named Pinkie, who was headed straight for damnation, and dimly, desperately knew it. In The Heart of the Matter he draws a man who is threatened with the same damnation, and sees it-apparently-much more clearly. Every man & woman, of whatever color, who has run into Scobie during his 15 years...
...murky thriller-writer, Georges Simenon, or from mysticky W. Somerset Maugham, or even from a Hollywood scripter ("One can imagine . . . Miss Bacall's pretty head lolling on the stretcher . . .") But needless to say, it is the flesh and mind, not the skeleton, that make The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene's most ambitious book...
Novelist Waugh, a fellow Catholic, thinks that Greene intended to make a saint out of Sinner Scobie. Yet, he says, to will your own damnation "for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a mad blasphemy." Waugh admires The Heart of the Matter as a novel but disapproves its theology. His opinion is by no means the verdict of all Catholic critics; the book has been banned as obscene in Eire, acclaimed by one of England's leading Jesuits, Father Martindale. And it has quickly become a bestseller in both England...