The tenth man.

GRAHAM GREENE'S The Tenth Man, published from a manuscript recently discovered in the archives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, presents an occasion to scan the whole shelf of his works and perhaps to venture a prediction as to which of them will still be read a generation hence. Although fairly slight even for one of Greene's "entertainments," The Tenth Man, written shortly after World War II and long forgotten by both MGM and Greene himself, still serves to take us back to a time when the British novelist was more or less at the top of his form.

In the Seventies, Greene was given the Jamesian privilege of writing introductions to the separate volumes in both the British and French editions of his Collected Works. Though he is certainly a writer good enough to have been taken that seriously, it is almost equally certain that the more than thirty volumes of this edition will not enjoy anything close to immortality from one end of the shelf to the other. Leaving aside the travel books and a few of the better entertainments--Travels with My Aunt (1969); Our Man in Havana (1958)--the question must at last come down to which of the serious novels will survive.

In Greeneland's bleak and sometimes forlorn terrain, there are three great peaks: Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), and The Heart of the Matter (1948)--but the greatest of these is The Power and the Glory. In these novels, Greene has created an almost overpowering sense of the presence of evil and of moral confrontation that is simply unequaled in the whole range of English fiction. Bloy, Mauriac, and Bernanos were already working in this tradition in France, where Greene is widely admired, but in England itself Greene single-handedly all but checkmated the Christian cheerfulness of Chesterton, Belloc, and C. S. Lewis.

Greene once thought Brighton Rock to be so slight as to rank among the entertainments, but he later admitted that it contains some of his best writing. Greene also feared that the book, as a work of his earliest period, was slightly tainted, but new generations of readers ought not to find this a problem. It's still a powerful work.

The Power and the Glory is a thoroughly existential novel in that it seems to have written itself--that is, without benefit of Author as omnipresent and omniscient observer. It is curious that so competent a critic as V. S. Pritchett has given the novel so flawed a reading, objecting to Mr. Tench, the dentist, as a seedy irrelevance and regarding the suppressed reading of local hagiography by a Mexican family as extraneous matter, whereas these are powerful and yet subtle counterpoints to the Whisky Priest himself. There seems little question that The Power and the Glory is Greene's masterpiece, and, despite the common passage of a wayward clergy these days, it remains a stunning re-creation of the presence of salvific grace in the worst of circumstances. Primarily, though, it's a great yarn--and storytelling is, after all, the novelist's real job.

The heavy and possibly intrusive "theological" problem in The Heart of the Matter has gained for it a dubious distinction as Greene's most argumentative novel. The question always comes down to whether the sacrilegious and suicidal Scobie was actually damned, according to Roman Catholic definitions; fellow novelist Evelyn Waugh was positively Dantesque in consigning Green's unhappy police commissioner to something other than a West African version of hell. However, the cheif flaw in The Heart of the Matter is not so much theological as literary--it tends to break down from possibly authentic drama to mere melodrama. It is a considerable testimony to the power of this novel that the lapses into melodrama do not in the end destroy it althogether. The point has largely been missed, though not by Greene himself, that Scobie's sin was inordnate pride (Pritchett gain misreads this unaccountably) just as Pinkie's flaw, in Brighton Rock, was a soul damaged by eternal immaturity.

The tree great novels are works painstakingly derived from the art of the born storyteller. If it now seems that the force and meaning of the novels have faded, it is not because the enormous issues they grappled with have ceased to be important, but because we ourselves have succumbed to the attritions of the age--an irony of which Greene was actuely aware.

Nevertheless, Greene ought by now to have reached a state of octogenarian transquillity that one might have expected to see accompanied by a blessed increase in holy wisdom. Instead, we hear him still rumbling about in the attic of his spent imagination, puttering among all those old plots and subplots, watching countless stock characters wander aimlessly to and fro.

Greene's anti-Americanism remains in full flower. He lately informed readers of the London Sunday Observer, who may have been unduly concerned about the U.S. elections, that President Reagan was a menace so extreme as to match the career of any recent occupant of the Kremlin. He regards Americans in general as "noisy and incredibly ignorant of the world." Self-knowledge cringes at the possibility of this, but it doesn't get Greene off the hook. He scorns U.S. capitalism, but enjoys the vigor of his book sales here. Intellectually, he still plays the Russian roulette of his youth; he said lately of John Paul II, "This Pope is a horror." A man approaching the eternal verities should know better than to speak such ill-tempered nonsense. In ironic view of this, one ought also to read "The Last Pope" in The Portable Graham Greene (1973).

Greene might better spend his time, even at this advanced stage, in sprucing up his style. Evelyn Waugh once remarked that Greene does not have a literary style at all; but this contention does not hold up in the face of the best of Greene's essays on Henry James and other important writers, including a remarkable trouble to Waugh himself. What is more to the point is that Greene tends, in his fiction and possibly in his life as well, to require the structure of a police-state mentality as a counterbalance to his own spiritual anarchy. He himself has always known that the man within is his own worst enemy.

It has been said the Greene is an Augustinian by virtue of his entrapment in the City of Man while yearning hopelessly for the City of God. In fact, he is clearly a card-carrying Manichean. Graham Greene's present connection with the Church is probably not so much tentative as tenuous, and in this regard alone one may hope for the best. We are like that Communist ex-mayor in Greene's bitterly pensive but delightful little parable, Monsignor Quixote (1982), who takes disconcerting note of the fact that while death brings hate to an end, at least temporarily, beyond that point a kind of love survives.