502 Greene, Graham
desperation, and the moral, human squalor of his
environment. It is not until the incident on a ship
called the Esperança—that is, hope—that Scobie
becomes unmoored from this stability. Hiding the
captain’s infraction of the maritime code gives him
the opportunity to act on his frozen grief for his
daughter, who died at school in England several
years before the novel begins, and this sets in motion
his hopeless battle with fate. He borrows money to
send his wife to South Africa; he begins an affair
with shipwreck survivor Helen Rolt.
Through these actions Scobie puts himself at
the mercy of the Syrian trader Yusef. Like Iago in
Shakespeare’s othello, Yusef has an almost pre-
ternatural knowledge of Scobie’s personality and
his actions, so that every attempt Scobie makes to
improve his life or that of those around him—most
particularly, his wife Louise and mistress Helen
Rolt, but even that of the Esperança’s captain—fur-
ther enmeshes him in a trap. Yusef ’s blackmailing
and double dealing is but a visible correlative of
the psychological and spiritual futility of Scobie’s
actions, most tellingly revealed in how quickly his
relationship with Helen becomes a carbon copy of
his relationship with Louise. A criminal by profes-
sion, Yusef is a sort of guarantor of permanent stasis,
and just so, he becomes more powerful the more
Scobie attempts change.
Until he is moved to act, Scobie has a certain
empty acceptance, if not contentment, that belies
the term futility, which carries a heavy psychic bur-
den. That burden is upon Louise, whose exaspera-
tion with their lack of advancement borders on the
hysterical. In some sense, Louise is Scobie’s pain,
is where Scobie hurts, and his sending her away is
a logical means of freeing them both of that bur-
den. The boy Ali is where Scobie feels peace, and
Scobie dreams of happy calm times with him in
the future. It is a measure of the futility of human
affairs that instead of settling into the peace of a
narrowed life with his loyal and innocent servant,
Scobie immediately falls in love with Helen Rolt,
who has already become the new locus of his pain,
and begins an affair that will result in Ali’s death.
From the novel’s perspective, it is futility and not
justice that governs human events. Indeed, this
point is made early in the novel. Approaching first
the courts and then the police station, Scobie sees
this system as being full of grandiloquence but
ultimately lacking strength. Justice, then, is futility.
Henry Scobie governs his life with a rigorous Stoic
philosophy, but he leaves one of the central tenets
of that philosophy unexamined. The Stoic does his
duty, but he also accepts that it is only his justice,
and not the justice of the universe, that is within
his control. Once moved to action, Scobie cannot
accept his lack of power.
In the end, human futility is but a foil for the gla-
cial but certain movement of the church toward the
fulfillment of God’s promise, and Greene’s intent, as
we see with other themes the novel addresses, is to
create a picture of a Christianity that is meaningful
and convincing, if not compelling, to his existential-
ist contemporaries. In The Heart of the Matter, the
only efficacious action is sacramental, and its power
is love, such that, having avoided it for as long as
he could in life, Henry Scobie may not even be able
to escape it in death, as the priest suggests to Louise
that even a suicide may not be beyond God’s mercy
and grace.
Scott DanielreliGion in The Heart of the Matter
The Heart of the Matter is, of course, a novel about
religion. Graham Greene foregrounds Catholic con-
cerns; indeed, much of the dramatic tension of the
plot depends on the characters’ belief in the Catholic
vision of human life. Scobie believes his immortal
soul is imperiled in that he will not repent his affair
with Helen Rolt; Louise returns from her rest in
South Africa because she believes her husband’s
immortal soul is at risk; the tension is to a degree
resolved, the tragedy of the protagonist’s suicide dif-
fused, by the priest’s closing words to Louise about
the unfathomable mystery of God’s grace.
The novel’s closing scene is an informal theo-
logical dialogue between the confused and grieving
widow and Father Rank. The conversation seems
to match legalistic against mysterious Catholicism.
Louise, fearing to hope for a man who has taken his
own life, finds the comfort of despair in calling her
husband a “bad Catholic” who must have known
that he was sinning. Consistently, Rank removes
religion from the institution of the church and