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IMAGE CREDIT: Greeneland |
In 1938 Graham Greene traveled through Texas
and into Mexico, purportedly to escape a libel suit which Twentieth Century
Fox had filed against him on behalf of Shirley Temple. In the 27 October
1937 issue of Night and Day, for which Greene served as the literary editor,
he had attacked Fox for what he considered its inappropriate use of Shirley
Temple in the film Wee Willie Winkie. Fox sued Greene and the publishers
of the magazine and won (West 76-77). Greene's biographer, Norman Sherry,
has argued compellingly that Greene did not leave England for Mexico to
escape the lawsuit but rather had planned to visit that country more than
two years in advance of his legal troubles (Life, I, 656). Whatever Greene's
motivation for leaving England early in 1938, out of his trip to Mexico
came the material for his best known novel The Power and the Glory (1940).
The journey also provided the subject matter for a lesser known travel book
titled The Lawless Roads (1939) but published in the United States under
the more neutral title Another Mexico, which Sherry described as "brilliant"
(Life, II, 3) and another Greene scholar praised as "one of the best travel
books of the era" (West 81). |
San Fernando Cathedral on Main Plaza
The San Antonio River in downtown San Antonio, much as Greene would have seen it
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While most of this travel book concerns Greene's sojourn
in Mexico, the first chapter, called "The Border," is devoted largely to
San Antonio and Laredo, the former of which he described as a kind of quasi-Mexican
city. In fact, to Greene, Texas itself seemed to be almost "half Mexico
already--and half Will Rogers" (16)--who had already made a distinct impression
on the state and on the city. When Greene's train arrived in San Antonio
from New Orleans, Greene observed that the city was "more Mexican than American,
not quite genuine Mexican (it is far too clean for that) but picture postcard
Mexican" (18). As a Catholic, he attended mass "in the Catholic cathedral,"
the homily being preached in Spanish,
while electric fans revolved above statues representing
in their pale colours and plaster poses the most noble and fragile sentiments.
As for the congregation, they were like pictures in early Victorian albums:
the black mantillas and the small vivid pointed faces might have come out
of Lady Blessington's Book of Beauty. (18)
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The former Plaza Hotel
Plaza Hotel Bldg. with Tower Life Bldg. in background
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Like several other literary visitors to San Antonio, Greene
encountered the San Antonio River, and he described it as being "wound cunningly
through the town like a pattern on a valentine (does it make a heart?) with
little waterfalls and ferny banks" (18). For Greene it seemed to circumscribe
an Edenic refuge that excluded the world of reality. "Where," he asked,
"loitering on a bridge above the little tamed river, was there any sign
of that ‘terrible original calamity' which [Cardinal] Newman perceived everywhere?
This--during the day--was the perfect ivory tower" (18). Actually, the ivory
tower symbol finds a more appropriate embodiment a paragraph later in the
Plaza Hotel, which Greene described as "soaring yellowly up to scrape against
the sky" (19). Although this aging downtown structure at the corner of St. Mary's and Villita Streets, located
next to the better known Tower Life Building, has been converted into a
senior citizens' residence, it made such an impression on Greene in 1938
that he used it, along with the River scene, to contrast the affluent side
of San Antonio with its extreme poverty, which also made a powerful impression
on him: But you only had to open a paper to escape from that vacuum [the
ivory tower]--or take a bus into the dreary hovels of the Mexican West Side
where the pecan workers live who shell pecan nuts by hand for a few cents
a day. Nowhere in Mexico did I see quite so extreme a poverty. In Mexico
the standard of living is appallingly low outside the great towns, but here
that low standard lay next door to the American standard. (19) |
 
Two views of Camargo Park, formerly Pablo's Grove
Another view of the San Antonio River, which Greene admired
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The plight of the pecan shellers attracted Greene's interest
to the point that he devoted the subsequent section of the chapter to discussing
the attempts of a Mexican priest named Father Lopez to organize a strike
among the workers for better wages. In fact, a protest meeting was held
"in the Mexican park-- a dry drab plain of trampled earth and a few bandstands
and benches," attended by an audience of "two hundred workers and a few
American ladies with the fussed hair of energetic slummers. . . . [who]
looked pale and weak and self-conscious before the dark sensuous confident
faces of the half-castes" (20). The park referred to was probably Pablo's
Grove, which was specifically designed for the outdoor recreation of the
Hispanic residents in the area and has been more recently re-named Camargo
Park. Concerning the protest, Greene observed that "the intention was good,
of course, but the performance was deplorable" (20), and nothing much seems
to have come of the demonstration. Nevertheless, Father Lopez's efforts
at reform in San Antonio may have given Greene some preliminary ideas for
the creation of his whiskey-priest in The Power and the Glory, even though
the chief inspiration for that character seems to have been "Mexico's most
famous martyr, Padre Pro, who died eleven years before Greene went to Mexico"
(Sherry, Life, I, 708-9). Notwithstanding Greene's ambivalent attitude toward San Antonio,
he seems to have liked the city, for he commented on its appeal in a postcard
addressed to his wife, Vivien: Very hot, palmy, old Spanish Cathedral [San
Fernando], a river winding in & out of the town, very clean and skyscraping
& ancient at the same time. Mass in Spanish, the old Archbishop very sweet
and useless. (Sherry, Life, I, 668)
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