Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene (1980)

They all drank. I could tell they were more than a little intoxicated – it was only I who seemed hopelessly condemned to the sadness of sobriety however much I drank. I left my glass empty. I was determined to drink no more before I was at home alone and I could drink myself to death if I chose. (p.123)

A novella (140 pages) from Greene’s old age (he was 76 when it was published) showing he was just as miserable and suicidal in his seventies as in his teens.

The plot

A first-person narrative by Alfred Jones, fifty-something clerk and translator who works for a chocolate company in Geneva and who, despite having only one hand (having lost his left one as an air raid warden in London during the Blitz) falls in love with beautiful, young, high-spirited Anna-Luise Fischer. She is the daughter of the notorious Dr Fischer, a self-made millionaire whose fortune is based on a phenomenally successful toothpaste (Dentophil Bouquet).

A miserly misanthrope Dr F domineered over his wife, ridiculing her love of music and, when he discovered she was spending time with a lowly clerk who shared her love of classical music, he got the clerk sacked and his wife went into a decline. Anna-Luise tells Alfred how her mother told her all this, emphasising what a swine her father is. No love lost.

Compelled by good manners, Jones reluctantly goes along to tell Dr F that he’s marrying his daughter, experiencing the millionaire’s big house by the lake, his rude and surly butler, and encountering one of his regular guests in the waiting room. Dr F himself is abrupt and rude and not remotely interested in his daughter’s marriage, grateful to have her off his hands.

Shopping for records in a record store, Alfred and Anna-Luise encounter her mother’s confidente, the one who got into trouble and was sacked for playing classical music with her at their secret trysts, a sad man named Steiner. In fact Steiner faints at the sight of Anna-Luise so much does she look like her mother. They see him restored to health, at which point he fills in a bit more detail about what a swine Fischer is…

Back in their love nest, Anna-Luise explains to Alfred that Dr F has gathered round him a motley crew of sycophants and toadies. In her imperfect English she calls them the Toads. Funny thing is they’re not poor, they’re rich. But Dr F believes it’s only the rich who are truly greedy, and so he invites them to parties to ritually humiliate them before handing out (luxurious) presents.

The Toads

When a card arrives inviting Alfred to one of these parties he and Anna-Luise argue about it, she warning him off, he saying he’s curious. In the event he witnesses Dr Fischer’s guests more or less grovelling in order to earn their luxury gifts, on this occasion being forced to eat cold porridge while the Doctor enjoys fine caviar. Alfred alone refuses to eat and is not to be bought, unlike the other Toads: wealthy blue-rinse Mrs Montgomery, alcoholic movie star Richard Deane, the Divisionnaire – a retired Swiss military officer – Belmont a lugubrious tax accountant, and Mr Kips, a wizened old man bent almost double.

Anna-Luisa recounts how her father humiliated Kips by commissioning a children’s story writer to write a story about Mr Kips in Search of A Dollar with plenty of illustrations showing Mr Kips as he actually appears, and which Fischer got placed in every bookshop in Geneva at Christmas. Since he had just made Kips his lawyer on a healthy retainer the deformed old man had to put up with this appalling humiliation.

Anna-Luisa dies

Christmas approaches and Alfred takes Anna-Luisa to one of her favourite skiiing locations for her to have a morning’s exercise while he – too old and never learned to ski – waits in the cafe below. When an ambulance is called and a figure brought down on a stretcher he has a bad feeling and indeed it is Anna-Luise who swerved to avoid a boy on the piste and went head-first into a tree. Ambulance to hospital. Kindly doctors. Emergency operation. She dies under anaesthetic. Alfred goes back to their flat numbed.

Jones’s suicide attempts

Greene, the patron saint of suicides, lets rip. Alfred mixes all the aspirin he owns into half a bottle of whiskey and drinks it all. Wakes 18 hours later with a hangover. Goes to work and considers jumping off the top of his building. Driving his car off the road. Throwing himself into Lake Leman, letting the freezing water numb him till he drowns. Gas from the cooker. Fumes from the car. Starvation? Yes, he will set out to starve himself to death.

Dr Fischer

Fischer invites Alfred to visit him and tells him he despises humanity and he enjoys humiliating the Toads. Alfred asks why he didn’t come to his own daughter’s funeral and tells him he hates him. ‘But you must come to my final party,’ says Dr F. It will be a very special party with very valuable gifts for those who endure and submit. Disgusted with himself, but with nothing to live for, a few days later Alfred posts an RSVP saying ‘Yes, he’ll come’.

The bomb party

Dr Fischer gives his grotesque parties names. Alfred (and we) witness the Porridge Party. (We hear about the Lobster Party and the Grouse Party). When the Toads and Alfred are assembled for the final party, to be held outside in the snow by the light of flares at a luxuriously appointed table, waited on by the butler, Dr F tells us it is to be a bomb party. In the tombola barrel are six little crackers. Five contain cheques for 2 million francs; one contains a small explosive, big enough to kill.

In the following few pages the various guests at first think he is joking then rush and push others out of the way to get at the barrel. Mrs Montgomery opens her first with no explosion: the very drunk actor Deane opens his ditto; Kips walks away refusing to play; Belmont swiftly opens his. At last it comes down to the military man who has picked his sachet but is standing paralysed with fear. Impatiently Alfred seizes and rips open his, the final, sachet – but there is no explosion, there was no bomb. They’ve all been fooled and humiliated. Again.

Dr Fischer commits suicide

Alfred walks down to the lakeside in a daze of disappointment and has only been there a few moments when Steiner comes sidling along the waterfront. He must have broken into the grounds somehow. He reaffirms his hatred of Fischer and there are some Greene-ish maxims and quotable thoughts about hate and spite and so on.

‘You hate him and I suppose I hate him too. But hate – it isn’t important. Hate isn’t contagious. It doesn’t spread. One can hate one man and leave it there. But when you begin to despise like Doctor Fischer, you end by despising the whole world.’ (p.141)

Steiner says he has come because he wants to spit in Fischer’s face for causing the death of the beautiful wife. Almost immediately this becomes possible as Dr Fischer walks down the pitch-black night-time lawn to join them at the lakeside. He complains to Alfred that he really has spoiled the party; he particularly wanted to see the cowardly Divisionnaire pull his own cracker. Oh well. ‘And you, Steiner, I shouldn’t have got you sacked, I should have got you a pay rise and left you and Anna to play all the Mozart records you wanted to.’ To the last casually toying with people’s lives… Oh well, ‘Time to sleep’, he says and strolls off along the lakeside. A minute later there is a loud report. Fischer has shot himself in the head.

That’s it.

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Thoughts

This is a way to spend 3 hours or so as long as you suspend everything you know about human nature or behaviour and as long as you enjoy a simplified mental world full of extreme abstractions like Love, Hate, Guilt, Despair, Suicide, Nothingness and so on.

Like all Greene’s entertainments it seems to me cranky and wilful. Supposedly a satire on the Euro-rich it is in fact far too tame and simplistic. One suspects the Euro-rich are much more clever, complex and corrupt than this fairy story portrays. And the suicidal thoughts which follow the death of his lover and which also, it turns out, plague Dr F, are the same suicidal thoughts which followed Greene throughout his life and recur in the minds of so many, too many, of his protagonists.

If one were feeling harsh, one could describe it as melodramatic twaddle.

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The movie

In 1985 the novel was made into a TV film, Dr. Fischer of Geneva, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and starring James Mason (in his last role) as Dr. Fischer, Alan Bates as Alfred Jones, and Greta Scacchi as Anna-Luise. Doesn’t look like it’s available on DVD. A glance at this crude trailer, cut from the VHS version, suggests why.

Related links

• Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party on Amazon
• Doctor Fischer of Geneva Wikipedia article

Greene’s books

• The Man Within (1929) One of the worst books I’ve ever read, a wretchedly immature farrago set in a vaguely described 18th century about a cowardly smuggler who betrays his fellows to the Excise men then flees to the cottage of a pure and innocent young woman who he falls in love with before his pathetic inaction leads to her death. Drivel.
• The Name of Action (1930) (repudiated by author, never republished)
• Rumour at Nightfall (1931) (repudiated by author, never republished)
• Stamboul Train (1932) A motley cast of characters find out each others’ secrets and exploit each other on the famous Orient Express rattling across Europe, climaxing in the execution of one of the passengers, a political exile, in an obscure rail junction, and all wound up with a cynical business deal in Istanbul.
• It’s a Battlefield (1934) London: a working class man awaits his death sentence for murder while a cast of seedy characters, including a lecherous HG Wells figure, betray each other and agonise about their pointless lives.
• England Made Me (1935) Stockholm: financier and industrialist Krogh hires a pretty Englishwoman Kate Farrant to be his PA/lover. She gets him to employ her shiftless brother Anthony who, after only a few days, starts spilling secrets to the seedy journalist Minty, and so is bumped off by Krogh’s henchman, Hall.
• A Gun for Sale (1936) England: After assassinating a European politician and sparking mobilisation for war, hitman Raven pursues the lecherous middle man who paid him with hot money to a Midlands town, where he gets embroiled with copper’s girl, Anne, before killing the middle man and the wicked arms merchant who was behind the whole deal, and being shot dead himself.
• Brighton Rock (1938) After Kite is murdered, 17 year-old Pinkie Brown takes over leadership of one of Brighton’s gangs, a razor-happy psychopath who is also an unthinking Catholic tormented by frustrated sexuality. He marries a 16 year-old waitress (who he secretly despises) to stop her squealing on the gang, before being harried to a grisly death.
• The Confidential Agent (1939) D. the agent for a foreign power embroiled in a civil war, tries and fails to secure a contract for British coal to be sent to his side. He flees the police and unfounded accusations of murder, has an excursion to a Midlands mining district where he fails to persuade the miners to go on strike out of solidarity for his (presumably communist) side, is caught by the police, put on trial, then helped to escape across country to a waiting ship, accompanied by the woman half his age who has fallen in love with him.
• The Lawless Roads (1939) Greene travels round Mexico and hates it, hates its people and its culture, the poverty, the food, the violence and despair, just about managing to admire the idealised Catholicism which is largely a product of his own insistent mind, and a few heroic priests-on-the-run from the revolutionary authorities.
• The Power and the Glory (1940) Mexico: An unnamed whisky priest, the only survivor of the revolutionary communists’ pogrom against the Catholic hierarchy, blunders from village to village feeling very sorry for himself and jeopardising lots of innocent peasants while bringing them hardly any help until he is caught and shot.
• The Ministry of Fear (1943) Hallucinatory psychological fantasia masquerading as an absurdist thriller set in London during the Blitz when a man still reeling from mercy-killing his terminally ill wife gets caught up with a wildly improbable Nazi spy ring.
• The Heart of The Matter (1948) Through a series of unfortunate events, Henry Scobie, the ageing colonial Assistant Commissioner of Police in Freetown, Sierra Leone, finds himself torn between love of his wife and of his mistress, spied on by colleagues and slowly corrupted by a local Syrian merchant, until life becomes intolerable and – as a devout Catholic – he knowingly damns himself for eternity by committing suicide. Whether you agree with its Catholic premises or not, this feels like a genuinely ‘great’ novel for the completeness of its conception and the thoroughness of its execution.
• The Third Man (1949) The novella which formed the basis for the screenplay of the famous film starring Orson Welles. Given its purely preparatory nature, this is a gripping and wonderfully-written tale, strong on atmosphere and intrigue and mercifully light on Greene’s Catholic preachiness.
• The End of The Affair (1951) Snobbish writer Maurice Bendrix has an affair with Sarah, the wife of his neighbour on Clapham Common, the dull civil servant, Henry Miles. After a V1 bomb lands on the house where they are illicitly meeting, half burying Bendrix, Sarah breaks off the affair and refuses to see him. Only after setting a detective on her, does Bendrix discover Sarah thought he had been killed in the bombing and prayed to God, promising to end their affair and be ‘good’ if only he was allowed to live – only to see him stumbling in through the wrecked doorway, from which point she feels duty bound to God to keep her word. She sickens and dies of pneumonia like many a 19th century heroine, but not before the evidence begins to mount up that she was, in fact, a genuine saint. Preposterous for most of its length, it becomes genuinely spooky at the end.
• Twenty-One Stories (1954) Generally very short stories, uneven in quality and mostly focused on wringing as much despair about the human condition as possible using thin characters who come to implausibly violent endings – except for three short funny tales.
• The Unquiet American (1955) Set in Vietnam as the French are losing their grip on the country, jaded English foreign correspondent, Thomas Fowler, reacts very badly to fresh-faced, all-American agent Alden Pyle, who both steals his Vietnamese girlfriend and is naively helping a rebel general and his private army in the vain hope they can form a non-communist post-colonial government. So Fowler arranges for Pyle to be assassinated. The adultery and anti-Americanism are tiresome, but the descriptions of his visits to the front line are gripping.
• Loser Takes All (1955) Charming comic novella recounting the mishaps of accountant Bertram who is encouraged to get married at a swanky hotel in Monte Carlo by his wealthy boss who then doesn’t arrive to pick up the bill, as he’d promised to – forcing Bertram to dabble in gambling at the famous Casino and becoming so obsessed with winning that he almost loses his wife before the marriage has even begun.
• Our Man In Havana (1958) Comedy about an unassuming vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, living in Havana, who is improbably recruited for British intelligence and, when he starts to be paid, feels compelled to manufacture ‘information’ from made-up ‘agents’. All very farcical until the local security services and then ‘the other side’ start taking an interest, bugging his phone, burgling his flat and then trying to bump him off.
• A Burnt-Out Case (1960) Tragedy. Famous architect Querry travels to the depths of the Congo, running away from his European fame and mistress, and begins to find peace working with the local priests and leprosy doctor, when the unhappy young wife of a local factory owner accuses him of seducing her and fathering her child, prompting her husband to shoot Querry dead.
• The Comedians (1966) Tragedy. Brown returns to run his hotel in Port-au-Prince, in a Haiti writhing under the brutal regime of Papa Doc Duvalier, and to resume his affair with the ambassador’s wife, Martha. A minister commits suicide in the hotel pool; Brown is beaten up by the Tontons Macoute; he tries to help a sweet old American couple convert the country to vegetarianism. In the final, absurd sequence he persuades the obvious con-man ‘major’ Jones to join the pathetic ‘resistance’ (12 men with three rusty guns), motivated solely by the jealous (and false) conviction that Jones is having an affair with his mistress. They are caught, escape, and Brown is forced to flee to the neighbouring Dominican Republic where the kindly Americans get him a job as assistant to the funeral director he had first met on the ferry to Haiti.
• Travels With My Aunt (1969) Comedy. Unmarried, middle-aged, retired bank manager Henry Pullman meets his aunt Augusta at the funeral of his mother, and is rapidly drawn into her unconventional world, accompanying her on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on a fateful trip to south America, caught up in her colourful stories of foreign adventures and exotic lovers till he finds himself right in the middle of an uncomfortably dangerous situation.
• The Honorary Consul (1973) Tragedy. Dr Eduardo Plarr accidentally assists in the kidnapping of his friend, the alcoholic, bumbling ‘honorary consul’ to a remote city on the border of Argentina, Charley Fortnum, with whose ex-prostitute wife he happens to be having an affair. When he is asked to go and treat Fortnum, who’s been injured, Plarr finds himself also taken prisoner by the rebels and dragged into lengthy Greeneish discussions about love and religion and sin and redemption etc, while they wait for the authorities to either pay the ransom the rebels have demanded or storm their hideout. It doesn’t end well.
• The Human Factor (1978) Maurice Castle lives a quiet, suburban life with his African wife, Sarah, commuting daily to his dull office job in a branch of British Security except that, we learn half way through the book, he is a double agent passing secrets to the Russians. Official checks on a leak from his sector lead to the improbable ‘liquidation’ of an entirely innocent colleague which prompts Castle to make a panic-stricken plea to his Soviet controllers to be spirited out of the country. And so he is, arriving safely in Moscow. But to the permanent separation with the only person he holds dear in the world and who he was, all along, working on behalf of – his beloved Sarah. Bleak and heart-breaking.
• Monsignor Quixote (1982) Father Quixote is unwillingly promoted monsignor and kicked out of his cosy parish, taking to the roads of Spain with communist ex-mayor friend, Enrique ‘Sancho’ Zancas, in an old jalopy they jokingly nickname Rocinante, to experience numerous adventures loosely based on his fictional forebear, Don Quixote, all the while debating Greene’s great Victorian theme, the possibility of a doubting – an almost despairing – Catholic faith.
• The Captain and The Enemy (1988) 12-year-old Victor Baxter is taken out of his boarding school by a ‘friend’ of his father’s, the so-called Captain, who carries him off to London to live with his girlfriend, Liza. Many years later Victor, a grown man, comes across his youthful account of life in this strange household when Liza dies in a road accident, and he sets off on an adult pilgrimage to find the Captain in Central America, a quest which – when he tells him of Liza’s death – prompts the old man to one last – futile and uncharacteristic – suicidal gesture.

Posted by Simon on August 18, 2015

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