Wartime Mysteries and The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene (Guest Dr Robert Willingham)

We are so excited to expand our discussion of the transcendant The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene with special guest Dr. Robert Willingham.

Rob Willingham is a history professor at Roanoke College.  After receiving his doctorate from UT-Austin (where he shared office space with future Heritage Foundation head, Kevin Roberts, oddly), he’s gone on to write and teach about 20th century Europe, specializing in the era of War and Holocaust.  He is the author of Jews in Leipzig and has won the distinguished teaching award at Roanoke and served two terms as chair of the history department.  He lives in Salem with his wife, twin daughters and cats.  He thinks Graham Greene is a great writer and also just found out there’s a movie of the book; as a teacher, he would never watch it before reading the novel.

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For a long time Sarah & Carolyn have wanted to do more of an in depth conversation with someone who really knows the history of the times these books are being written in and about, and we are delighted that Rob is just that guy.

Published in 1943, THE MINISTRY OF FEAR by Graham Greene blends espionage and psychological mystery set in wartime London. The story follows Arthur Rowe, an ordinary man caught up in Nazi intrigue, navigating a world where nothing is as it seems. The story’s moral complexity redefined the boundaries of the mystery genre.

The title reflects the pervasive atmosphere of dread and paranoia in wartime Britain, where fear itself becomes a tool of control. The ministry of fear represents an institution or force that spreads fear to undermine trust and stability, both on a personal and societal level.

We also touch on the Fritz Lang film, Ministry of Fear, to be discussed futher in upcoming bonus content! Wikipedia summarizes:

Ministry of Fear is a 1944 American spy thriller film noir directed by Fritz Lang, and starring Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds. Based on the 1943 novel by Graham Greene, the film tells the story of a man just released from a mental asylum who finds himself caught up in an international spy ring and pursued by Nazi agents after inadvertently receiving something they want. The original music for the film was composed by Victor Young.

We can't wait to hear your take on this discussion.

Transcript

Sarah Harrison: 0:12

Welcome to Tea, Tonic, and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically from Edgar Allan Poe to the present, we're discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world's most talented contemporary mystery, thriller, and espionage fiction writers. I'm your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: 0:35

And I'm your host, Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, and we're excited you're joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Sarah Harrison: 0:58

Today's sponsor is our own Carolyn Daughters. Carolyn is a senior strategist and trusted C suite partner who leads large scale business transformations, brand identity sessions, persuasive writing workshops and executive communications. Her work bridges strategy and execution across marketing communications, change management and revenue enablement, giving teams the clarity they need to execute and leaders the tools they need to drive sustainable growth. You can learn more about her consulting services at carolyndaughters.com. Hi, Carolyn!

Carolyn Daughters: 1:38

Hi Sarah!

Sarah Harrison: 1:39

I am pretty excited about today's episode.

Carolyn Daughters: 1:43

I am too. We're getting to talk more about this amazing book.

Sarah Harrison: 1:47

Yes, and this is the first time we're doing a totally new setup, where previously you and I have been on location together, and our guest has been remote, and today I get to be here in the Roanoke College bank building with our guest, and you are remote, so this will be new and exciting.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:08

Yes, I like it.

Sarah Harrison: 2:12

Before we get started with more on The Ministry of Fear we do have, I should call her a watcher of the episode. Nancy Logan is getting our shout out today, and that is for watching The Ministry of Fear, or just Ministry of Fear, excuse me, the movie, which if you listen to our last episode on The Ministry of Fear, and then we did a bonus episode on the movie Ministry of Fear. I'm really keen to hear Nancy's take, having not read the book and watching the movie, so that's going to be interesting to bring up. So thank you, Nancy, for watching Ministry of Fear. And we hope you enjoy this episode on The Ministry of Fear and wartime espionage fiction.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:06

And you'll get a lovely sticker, I think a couple stickers.

Sarah Harrison: 3:10

Yes, Nancy's whole family will be receiving stickers.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:14

We're giving them out liberally.

Sarah Harrison: 3:17

Yes, they're very cute.

Carolyn Daughters: 3:21

Today we're returning to our conversation about Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, which was published in 1943 so Arthur Rowe, for Arthur Rowe, the trip to a charity fete was a nostalgic step back into adolescence. It was a chance to forget the nightmare of the Blitz and the aching guilt of having mercifully, mercifully murdered his sick wife. He was surviving alone in London until he happened to win a cake at the fete, and from that moment, he is ruthlessly hunted by Nazi agents and finds himself the prey of malign and shadowy forces from which he endeavors to escape through his mind, though his mind remains obstinately out of focus. Born in 1904, Graham Greene is recognized as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Graham Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full time to writing. With his big success, Stamboul train, he wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being the third man, religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work. And throughout his life, he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a companion of honor. He died in 1991.

Sarah Harrison: 4:55

And I am very excited to introduce our guest today, Rob Willingham. Rob is a history professor at Roanoke College. After receiving his doctorate from UT Austin, where he shared office space with future Heritage Foundation head, Kevin Roberts Audley, he has gone on to write and teach about 20th century Europe, specializing in the era of war and Holocaust. He is the author of Jews and Leipzig, and he has won the Distinguished Teaching Award at Roanoke and served two terms as chair of the History Department. He lives in Salem with his wife, twin daughters and cats. He thinks Graham Greene is a great writer. And also just found out there's a movie of the book, which we'll discuss as a teacher, he would never watch it before reading the novel. And I fully, fully agree with that position. Welcome, Rob. Thanks so much for joining us to discuss Graham Greene and espionage fiction!

Robert Willingham: 5:51

Thanks very much. Sarah, thank you, Carolyn, very happy to be with you.

Sarah Harrison: 5:54

We asked Rob to read one of the passages that stood out to him, and so he's going to do that now.

Robert Willingham: 6:02

All right, so this is fairly late in the book. The two protagonists are coming back into London after a night of the Blitz. They came into London with the early workers along the industrial roads. Men and women were emerging from underground, neat elderly men carrying attache cases rolled umbrellas appeared from public shelters in Gower Street. They were sweeping up glass and a building smoked into the day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff. It was odd to think that the battle had been going on while they stood on the island and the pond and heard only the scrape of the spade a notice turned them from the course, and a rope strung across the road already flapped a few handwritten labels Barclays Bank, please inquire at Cornell as dairy new address, Marquis fish saloon on a long, quiet, empty expanse of pavement, a policeman and A Warden strolled in lazy, proprietary conversation, like game keepers on their estate. And notice, read, unexploded bomb. This was the same route they had taken last night, but it had been elaborately and trivially changed. What a lot of activity Arthur Rowe thought there had been in a few hours, the sticking up and notice, the altering of traffic, the getting to know a slightly different London. He noticed the briskness, the cheerfulness on the faces. She got the impression this was an early hour of a national holiday. It was simply he supposed the effect of finding oneself alive.

Carolyn Daughters: 7:33

I love that. I wanted to start by talking a little bit, because you're bringing so much historical perspective to us and to this podcast today. So when historians are studying the Blitz, they're often focused on strategic planning bombing campaigns and all of these details. But in this book, it's showing the everyday atmosphere that the psychology of people living in London during this, during the Blitz, during these raids, and everybody's feeling exhausted, they're feeling anxious, and yet, a lot of the time, there's this surreal normal, normalcy happening. Is this accurately portrayed? Did people really live with that strange mix of fear and routine. Did he get the historical reality right in this wartime espionage fiction?

Robert Willingham: 8:27

He got one truth of it right. People who talk about living through extended periods of bombing or violence, they come out with a split perspective on the thing. On the one hand, they're able to talk some of them are able to talk coherently about the trauma that they've experienced and the really extraordinary nature of that trauma, the unrealness of the violence for it's so night and day from from real life and normal experience. But then there's this other theme about the banality of it, how easily we are able to slip into some kind of groove, some sort of muscle memory that that serves to keep us functioning, even in times of trauma, but which can flatten out the extraordinary, the perverse nature of these, of these memories, not just The experience, but of the memory. And so I think Graham Greene and this is characteristic of him. He really is working on two levels at once. He is able to provide a jarring and a shocking reality of the thing, but it's always underlying. It's always underscored by his deep cycle psychological understanding of what it's really like to live this way, and then the extraordinary tricks that we all undertake inside our psyche to just deal with everyday life, not to mention this sort of insanity that the Blitz was.

Carolyn Daughters: 9:57

There's an adaptation question over time. We come to fall into our new normal, which is what's happening in the book, it seems. This is interesting espionage fiction because it's taking place during the Blitz.

Robert Willingham: 10:09

Absolutely. My main field is the Holocaust and Holocaust scholars talk about this a lot, the degree to which people are endlessly adaptable and are able to normalize the most extraordinary and horrific experiences. But then again, Green, like a lot of the great thinkers of the middle of the 20th century, is always operating on this awareness that our conscious minds and our conscious understanding of our reality just scratches the surface. And so Primo Levi is my favorite memoirist of the Holocaust, great, great writer, and a real man of deep psychological insights. And I would compare in some ways, his memoirs to what Graham Greene is doing here in his ability to operate on both these planes at once.

Sarah Harrison: 11:03

But we're really excited to have you on to say, as you may or may not be aware, Carolyn and I have been going through the entire history of mystery, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and a lot of our books have really been within a historical context. And very often we have thought it'd be good to have someone who could weigh in on this context here, not necessarily just from a literary perspective. Even more broadly, and as this is related to your area of expertise. What stood out to you and maybe, maybe, did anything stand out as being off base? Maybe I should ask that, what was on target, what was off base? What's your historical take on the book as historical espionage fiction?

Robert Willingham: 12:01

I didn't read it, judging it the way I would a history book. When I read a piece of historical fiction, either one written at the time, like this, or good historical fiction, good research historical fiction after the after the time. I really don't demand a degree of literal historical veracity. I didn't see any huge stumbles in the book, but it's great gift. What we all get from it is less the literal truth of what happened on a day in 1943 but what it's like to live as a human being through that. And this is why I always assign a book, usually a novel. In every one of my history classes, ...

Sarah Harrison: 12:43

You going to start assigning this book?

Robert Willingham: 12:46

Well, I might do. I've assigned Brighton Rock before. Graham Greene is obviously a great actor. I would give this to students to read. It's clear. It's short. Greene's prose totally stands up. It's punchy. It's an exciting story. It's got a twist or two. Sure. I'd give this to fans of literature from, let's say, 18 up.

Sarah Harrison: 13:13

Nice, very good.

Carolyn Daughters: 13:16

If somebody's reading this book, The Ministry of Fear, what might they get from the book that they wouldn't necessarily get from history books or other espionage fiction alone. Because that's, I think part of why you're assigning these novels is it's giving another perspective, or maybe a fuller perspective.

Robert Willingham: 13:33

Well, Graham Greene, the thing that makes him great is his skill at exposing us to the interiority of its characters lives, right? It's a short list of writers who are skilled into into crack and open the head of a real human and inviting us in, and I think that that's the answer. I can tell my students why the Holocaust happened. I can tell them why World War Two happened. I can tell them why Hitler came to power. But it's much, much more difficult for me to talk about a lived human experience. And I think that literature and not just fiction, but prose, not just prose, but But verse. Sometimes I'll use music, sometimes I'll use visual art. The arts are a different angle into a lived experience and I tell my students all the time that the cardinal virtue of the historian is empathy, right? History, like literature, is a radical attempt at empathy. There's nothing more difficult or complicated than really getting inside the humanity of somebody else, really understanding and appreciate the equal and real humanity of somebody just sitting across from you, much less sitting across centuries, much less sitting across different cultures, right? And so that's always been the great challenge for me. A history teacher and writer is to try to make real. Since I was in college, what do I do with the number of 6 million, right? How do I how do I make it clear to my students that every one of those 6 million had a mom and a dad and kids, that every one of their lives was just as real as everyone here. And I think that's the great virtue of fiction. And then when you have someone with the with the skill as a writer and with this just extraordinary intellectual curiosity and lived experience, someone like Graham Greene, you really have a chance to hit at historical truth from multiple angles.

Sarah Harrison: 15:39

One of the things I was excited about when we first reached out to you was that you were already a fan of Graham Greene and had read a number of his books. How does this fit for you within the other wartime espionage fiction that you've read in the Graham Greene canon, so to speak?

Robert Willingham: 15:57

Well, okay, so the my two favorite Graham Greene books before having read this are the quite quiet American and bright and rock, and they share important themes. So if you read bright and rock, it's it's about redemption or the impossibility of redemption. It's about sin, and whether people are capable inside of themselves or with the help of the Divine, very complicated relationship to Christianity and Catholicism, whether redemption is possible. I think that this book is about that too obviously, the character in running from his memory and running from his past and constantly revisiting the death of his wife, we are asked along with him, whether real redemption is possible, right? Whether, whether rogue can be a full human being at the end, in spite of everything, if he comes to terms, if he's with his past, if he's truthful about his past, can he then be a whole and sane person? That's a very similar theme to what we get with the character of pinky in Brighton Rock and like The Quiet American, for me, The Quiet American a great cautionary tale about American foreign policy, speaking of which, the quiet American is about the virtues but then the dangers of good intentions, about what happens when the best of people do things that because of unintended consequences, because of the context, because of the imperfect ability of human intention that like this, The Quiet American asked us to consider the gap between what we try to do and what We actually do how much is actually in our control. And so Arthur Rowe is obviously at sea, right? He's just being bounced around like something on the top of a wave, the crest of a wave. Any control he has is an absolute illusion. He may want to do the right thing, and at the end of the day, I guess that he does, but it's almost accidental. The gap between human agency, human intention, and God's will or outcome. To go back to that religious language, seems to me, I really caught both of those themes in this book. It's very much of a piece with this other writer.

Carolyn Daughters: 18:23

I remember during the mass killings in Rwanda that the most impactful newspaper headline and photo that I saw was of one child. And I think it goes back to what you're saying is, how do you, how do you take a number like 6 million and make it understandable to somebody? And I don't know that you can, maybe you can, but I think bringing it down to a very human level, so we are able to see it a human being. And I think Graham Greene does an excellent job of that with Arthur Rowe, where you see a very flawed person. He is making good decisions and bad decisions based on good intentions, that sort of thing, when you're teaching history, how often does the ordinary guy come into play. I mean, it's, I would think, when I studied history in in high school, college, we focused a lot, of course, on big historical events, leaders, institutions, things like that. To what degree does an ordinary guy come in, come into the discussion in wartime espionage fiction, as it does in the novel.

Robert Willingham: 19:42

Well, this is obviously a big question in history. What you're describing we call great man, history, with an emphasis on man, the idea that history is the biography of kings and presidents and generals and popes, and over the course of the second half of the 20th century, not least because of the catastrophes in the middle of the 20th century, and in part because of the politics and changing culture, especially in the States, you got this move towards social history, gender history, cultural history, the idea that we need to look in different kinds of places. But the trick about getting the ordinary guy or the ordinary woman into history is that it's a trick, because wealthy people, powerful people, those are the people who end up in the archives. Right? Archives tend to be that can tend to come from governments. And so then how do you get at the lived experience of ordinary people? Much, much more difficult. And so you have to pay more attention. You got to look at different texts. You have to look at things like movies and how people watch them. You need to look at how people ate and shopped. You need to look in different directions. And it's really, really hard to do. It requires much, much more creativity to talk about the ordinary guy, in part because the ordinary guy doesn't have access to a printing press. I do wonder, 100 years from now, we're all walking around with a printing press in our pocket. How on earth are historians ever going to sort all this out? We've gone from not enough to way too much.

Carolyn Daughters: 21:16

That is going to be a huge challenge. I hadn't thought of it in that way, but wow. How could anybody I guess we'll use AI to sort through it all.

Robert Willingham: 21:26

Yeah, I don't see any downside there.

Carolyn Daughters: 21:31

What could go wrong?

Robert Willingham: 21:32

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Sarah Harrison: 21:37

That's That's funny. I just having another AI conversation earlier this morning, but you and I were also chatting Rob, and it hooked into a conversation that Carolyn and I were having in the previous episode on The Ministry of Fear, where so we've read two amnesia books now, and both about these guys in wartime espionage fiction. So Margery Allingham's Traitor's Purse saw the main character, and I believe that was World War One, right? Carolyn, if I got that correct,

Carolyn Daughters: 22:10

My brain is trained. It's World War Two.

Sarah Harrison: 22:12

Wow. We are moving slowly through time, folks. Traitor's Purse, the main character, goes through an amnesia, and from that, he gets an external perspective of himself. This character in Ministry of Fear has his amnesia moment and he almost reverts to his childhood and becomes stuck in this childhood perspective of the world. So both, very interesting. Both, I think, offer these transcendent opportunities for self-reflection. And then you and I were talking earlier, and you had mentioned the Freudian aspect around his aggression and self-perception. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Robert Willingham: 23:05

Like a lot of my favorite writers, Graham Greene, is drunk on Freud. He is like all of the great modernists from Kafka on. Graham Greene dealing in the world that Freud made, in the space between the conscious and the subconscious, between the wake waking and dreams, between especially childhood and adulthood. And one of the things that struck me in this espionage fiction in particular, is his explicit references to the horror of what happens to the child when they become an adult. This is from fairly early in the book. He's talking about a dream. Dreams come up a lot in here, and he's in the dream. He's talking to his mother, and he said he couldn't bear the frightened eyes, which he had himself printed on the cement wall. He put his mouth to the steel frame of his bunk and kissed the white, cold cheek of his mother, his dead mother, in this dream, he says, My dear, my dear, my dear. I'm glad you're dead. Only do you know about it? Do you know he was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it. That's it, right there. He's running like hell from the loss of innocence. He's running from from the loss of the innocence of the child, or even the innocence of the subconscious. He and this goes back to his own really extraordinary intersection with Freudian analysis. I learned this fairly recently. So it turns out this is from an article by an Australian, I think his psychologist, named Peter Ellison. When Graham Greene was a teenager, he had this extensive period of intensive Freudian psychoanalysis. He'd had a breakdown at his boarding school, and he ends up with this unqualified Freudian psychoanalyst who keeps him in his house for months.

Sarah Harrison: 25:15

Keeps him in his house, keeps him in his house.

Robert Willingham: 25:17

The Ministry of Fear is more than wartime espionage fiction. I'm going to read the quote from the article. So, Richmond, that's the pseudo therapist, but not qualified, right? A guy with a literary background who had read Freud and Jung Richmond believed that motivation lay with the unconscious, excuse me, with the unconscious, which was accessible via dreams, but only in a coded form. So this is core Freudianism, right? Decode the dream is the job of the dreamer. And so Graham Greene was required by the pseudo therapist to offer a dream each day, and when he didn't have one, he was told to make one up. What Richmond sat at his desk with a stopwatch with which he timed Greene's associations. The stopwatch was a tool used by Jung who also explored automatic writing as a way to map thought, association and representation. Now, automatic writing is very close to stream of consciousness. Writing with two partners, this is actually how They Might Be Giants write a lot of their lyrics, people who are also very, very deeply into Freud, and then he would ask his patients to free associate, timing their responses by stopwatch, and he would note any disturbed associations, or those which took a longer time. And so then Graham Greene, in his memoir, describes this. He gave an example of a dream he had. He says, dream to dreamt about Zoe Richmond, Richmond's wife, then 31 and quote, a beautiful woman. It was a dilemma for a shy boy, but having agreed not to censor his dreams, Greene was duty bound to speak it. And now Richmond said, after a little talk on general theory, we'll get down to last night's dream. I cleared my dry throat. I can only remember one. Let's have it. I was in bed. I said, Where here? He made a note in his pad. I took a breath and plunged. There was a knock on the door, and Zoe came in, and she was naked, and she leaned over me, and one of her breasts nearly touched my mouth, and I woke up. What's your association to breasts? Richmond asks. And he sets his stopwatch tube. Train, I said, after a long pause five seconds, Richmond said, click, that that's the milieu where Graham Greene comes from, this really extraordinary period in the early 20th century where people hadn't discovered that Freud was clinically a terrible hack where, but where the Freudian insights, which are still hugely important, the insights about the significance of the subconscious, right, this insistence that we challenge the primacy of our rational, waking self, were really in full bloom. And so Graham Greene takes these themes, takes them to heart, and then plays them out over the rest of of his career. To a large degree, he's constantly running toward the subconscious truth. He is constantly afraid of it.

Carolyn Daughters: 28:17

The amnesia could be literal or symbolic also in the book, so we're forgetting the things that we don't want to remember. I guess potentially in this book, and we saw it in other espionage fiction, Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham, where amnesia comes to the fore. And other things that we're seeing in here are the idea of psychological breakdowns, of trauma response. And to me, that was really interesting to see in this world war two literature, because I hadn't seen a whole lot of reference to it in some of the literature of the past. I mean, somebody might be a family member, would take somebody and put them in an asylum, or something like that. We saw The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. We see somebody locked away, but this recognition of the psychological breakdown and the trauma response, you're under constant bombardment, as in The Ministry of Fear, which is wartime espionage fiction. To what degree is psychology coming to the fore during this period and maybe being recognized Freudian. But even outside of Freud as this is an actual, real psychological series of events that that are playing out for the people of London, for example.

Robert Willingham: 29:36

The middle of the 20th century is, in some ways, the golden age of American psychology, as as a discipline, right, as as an intellectual discipline, rather than a clinical discipline. If you, if you look at people like Haim Potok, I don't know if either of you have read anything behind po talk, you wrote the chosen and my name is Asher Lev, and he's a fascinating guy. He was a psychotherapist. Had a PhD in psychology. He was a painter. He was a Hasidic Jew, and he was a great, great novelist. And he made clear in his work, which is focused on the divide itself, between the secular and the religious, between the worldly and the traditional. He was focused on a project of appreciating and unifying those selves, I think that it's not an accident that he and Graham Greene are alive at the same time. Yes, psychology during my kids are psychology majors. My mother had a doctorate in psychology. She was a therapist. And both my mother and my daughters believe that psychology is a science that psychology is more about neuroscience. It is more brain than it is mind. But for me, the great insights of the psychologist are philosophical as much as they are clinical, more and in the middle of the 20th century, or really, from the end of the First World War into the 1960s there really is this extraordinary period of creativity and growth and exploration during which psychology almost functions as one of the humanities. More than a science like philosophy and psychology are more unified in the world of Freud and Jung and Haim Potok than they are today. Where I think that, well, I know, because I have colleagues who do this. Most psychology education is much more science based, much more practical and clinically based. And I think in answer to your question, yes, this was a period of time when psychology was hugely important, but maybe a little bit more humble, less sure of itself as a science and scientific truth, and celebrated the gaps in between and the gray areas, maybe a little bit more than than it does now.

Carolyn Daughters: 32:03

It's interesting. It comes into play also, and I'm not going to spoil anything. Sarah, about our next book, which is Green for Danger by Christianna Brand. It's not espionage fiction, but it does take place during World War II.

Sarah Harrison: 32:26

Oh, I'm reading it right now. It's so interesting. Don't spoil it!

Carolyn Daughters: 32:27

I will not spoil it. In Green for Danger by Christianna Brand, there's a character who has a breakdown of sorts, like a mental, emotional breakdown. It's interesting seeing how this is playing out in the book, and also on the first three or five pages, the characters, there's a bombing happening, and they're all working at a hospital, and these nurses are and doctors are just sitting in this room with their feet up on desks, smoking cigarettes, maybe having a glass of water or a cocktail or something. It's interesting how the war is hitting people in different ways, and what's, what's hitting people, but how people are feeling the effects of this war in different ways, and how authors of the time thought to explore it, because it seems like such a contemporary thing to do, like if we were writing a book about set during World War Two. Now, psychology would almost certainly come to the fore of that book for a literary a work of literary fiction. I think it's interesting that they were doing it even back in the 1940s.

Robert Willingham: 33:34

Absolutely. And it makes you think, it makes me think a little bit about what literature will come out of our moment, what kind of fiction, what kind of memorialization is going to be done in Gaza? Going to be done in Israel? Going to be done in Iran now? How are people who are living through those sieges right now going to think about it? Going to deal with the trauma of it? How will we understand it 30 or 40 years from now, not least through the lens of the humanities of literature.

Sarah Harrison: 34:05

On that similar adjacent topic. When I was going through I was going through a lot of different history departments looking for, who do we want to interview about wartime espionage fiction? And one of the things that drew me to your profile was your specialization in war and Holocaust, and the match up with what we're seeing in this book here. And I'm wondering what what drew you, what has drawn you to that area to say, I'm going to make my life's work out of war and the Holocaust?

Robert Willingham: 34:43

It's a long story, but I'll make it short. When I was in middle school, I used to rebel against my mother by running away and going to the local college library and looking at old newspapers on microfilm.

Sarah Harrison: 34:58

Where do history professors come from? Are you sure she wasn't practicing some reverse?

Robert Willingham: 35:02

Right. In retrospect, very clever one. And right away I was, I was drawn to Nazism, Germany, the Holocaust in middle school. A middle school boy, you're just attracted to that stuff at a really superficial level. The Ass had interesting uniforms, but, but then that's a gateway drug. And then over the course of college and then graduate school, you come to the conclusion, I came to the conclusion that talking about Hitler and the Holocaust was a lifelong intellectual pleasure for me to figure out these incredibly difficult things, but then you become an adult and intellectual pleasure isn't sufficient. You need to come to the conclusion that you're actually doing something with your life and that's why I've been very lucky, because I was already there, I've been fortunate or unfortunate to have taught the history of anti semitism now for 24 years, 25 years all told. And when I started, I had to go out of my way to convince my students that anti semitism was really still a thing in the world, and I don't have to do that anymore, and so I like to tell my students that I'm lucky in that my job gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning, that the revival of anti semitism, the revival of fascism Globally, has given me a clearer sense than ever that that I'm doing the right thing with my life, even though it's disheartening as hell to spend all this time combating anti semitism, and you wake up one next one day and it's, it's, it's a wildfire all over the world again, the idea that in my own little corner of the world, The kids who go through my classes, the people I'm around, are going to see all that a little differently. And, yeah, that helps me sleep at night.

Carolyn Daughters: 37:10

In The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene references Tolstoy's critique of patriotism. And you mentioned a bunch of isms there. I imagine a lot of them come to the fore when you're discussing World War Two and wartime espionage fiction. But when Arthur Rowe has this book, the Tolstoy, and it's got the notes in the margins and they're wiped out. And the idea that nationalism fuels war. I mean, that's one simple, obviously extremely simple, argument. But what were you thinking when you read this, the section where Tolstoy is introduced into this book?

Robert Willingham: 37:50

Well, I had to overcome my personal and idiosyncratic extreme distaste to Tolstoy. War and Peace makes me want to jump in a lake. I don't like the book. I don't like all the characters in it. I just want to take all those Russian nobles and take them down to the river time in a sack. Okay? Now, having said that, what does Trotsky actually stand for the romantic universalism, right, this romantic humanism that transcends, I think that Greene's critique, or at least rose critique, is that Tolstoy is so paralyzed by his love of humanity or his restraint that he can't act that, that he can't tell the difference between right and wrong anymore, that you can't tell when at some point you do need to get up and pick up a rifle and go join the fight. And I think that Greene and Arthur Rowe are expressing a degree of frustration, but it's also reflective of the character and the writer's own ambivalence. There's a deeply divided dude, both green and Rowe, and I think that, on the one hand, he's irritated, and I am too by Tolstoy's otherworldliness, he also recognizes a real ambivalence toward action in Tolstoy.

Carolyn Daughters: 39:22

I thought that whole section was really interesting because that he's reverted to his childhood self, Arthur Rowe, and he's slowly emerging back into adulthood and his his identity. And so I think it's he's almost getting like an education on the fly, which is why he's seeking out all those newspapers he wants. He wants to. It's like he wants to be a sponge and take it all in and bring himself back to where he was.

Robert Willingham: 39:50

I think the asylum scenes are the most important in the book, and I that's what was so disappointing about the movie. Maybe we'll get to that. It's just completely absent from the movie. It's, for me, the best part of the book and makes it exceptional espionage fiction. He's so happy, right? He's so happy because he outran memory, he outran his own experience, he outran his own guilt. He outran himself. It can't last. It's doomed. We know that while we're reading it, and that's part of what's so tragic about it, how happy he is, and your knowledge, and then the creeping knowledge on his part, that it can't last, that the human condition being being a grown human, a grown adult man, means that you're not a child anymore, and you're not innocent anymore, that he's being called back to reality, and it's just tragic as hell.

Sarah Harrison: 40:45

I think Graham Greene said something similar after the movie came out. He was like, they took out the asylum. I'm paraphrasing.

Robert Willingham: 40:54

I thought that was your Graham Greene impression.

Carolyn Daughters: 40:57

I know, it was like I was hearing him.

Sarah Harrison: 41:00

I'm pretty sure that's what he sounded like, but, yeah, just the total admission. Let's talk about the movie a little bit. I think Carolyn and I suffer from, like, a really recurrent issue whenever we watch these movies. We read the book, we watch the movie, and then the entire experience is a comparison to the book, which all of these history of mystery books are the great ones standing in the canon of the development of the entire genre. And so it's hard for the movies to match up. I think we struggle a little bit to just take the movie on it, if we never read the book, would this be a good movie? I don't know. You forced your family to watch. What did they think about this thriller based on Greene's wartime espionage fiction?

Robert Willingham: 41:52

I did. Had to take it in two turns. They fell asleep. Actually, my daughter Sydney, brought it back up, I'm gonna do this thing. Good. Good for her. It is a good movie in some ways. I love Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang was one of my very, very favorite directors, and I was thinking a lot about this movie, and M, which is one of my favorite movies, and M is also it's a psychological film. It's a film about trying to outrun your own past. Have either of you seen it?

Sarah Harrison: 42:30

I don't think I've seen M, but I am familiar with it. I've seen Metropolis.

Robert Willingham: 42:34

That's my Fritz Lang. And Metropolis, it's less individually about psychological division, but it is more broadly about the divided society, I think, in part as a metaphor for the divide itself. M is about it's so far ahead of its time. It's one of the first German talkies, and it's about a pedophile child murder, a serial murderer of children's based on a true story in the early German 20th century. And Peter Lorre, it's the movie that makes him a star. He's just incredible. In it, he plays the criminal, and in it, Fritz Lang is able to do this unbelievable psychological portrait of the guy. Now there's not that much sound in M the bulk of the movie is silent, and the way Fritz Lang uses light and shadow and angle to especially around Peter Lorre's face, is just really, really extraordinary, and I strongly recommend it. It's a great, great movie. And so that's what I was looking for in this movie. And I got some of it. There are absolutely points where the angle of the camera or the facial expressions is calling back to German expressionist acting, especially, especially in M but for me, it's so cheap. It's so cheap. I mean, the sets look like they're made out of paper mache, and I know it's wartime, and so I'm sympathetic. I think the acting is good. Well, I think Ray Milland is good. I was infuriated by what they did to the female protagonist, Anna Hilfe, in this film version of Graham Greene's wartime espionage fiction. She's an interesting woman, and the woman in the movie is not. She's a damsel in distress.

Sarah Harrison: 44:25

It really doesn't know what's going on. She's just like this blonde cutie.

Robert Willingham: 44:31

I took the teeth right out of it. The ending is one of the worst endings I've ever seen in a respectable movie in my life, I just couldn't believe it. Don't say cake, unjust, staggeringly bad. It's like they finished the movie and the studio came back and said, No, no, you need something else. But we only have 15 minutes and 80 bucks. Can you get in this car and we'll film you while? You're driving just really extraordinarily bad. But of course, as we've all said, and Graham Greene said, too, for the life of me, I don't know why they cut out the middle scene in the asylum. It is the most evocative. I think it's the most pivotal in terms of theme and character development. Is just really interesting. I just don't know why they did that, but I also don't know why he didn't write the screenplay. I know there's a story there, but if I compare this to The Third Man, right? The Third Man is a much better movie, and I think it's less because Orson Welles is a better director than Fritz Lang, although I think that's a better directed movie. It's the writing, it's the words. That is interesting.

Sarah Harrison: 45:45

He did write screenplays, but not this one. I don't know what. Maybe he just hadn't started. What did your family think about this film translation of espionage fiction, having not read the book? Did it feel they didn't know that the whole asylum wasn't there?

Robert Willingham: 46:00

At first, there was some irritation about how slowly the plot was taking to develop. Now, some of that's just generational. My kids are real smart kids with college degrees and everything, but they're 24 and they they have a different generational appreciation and so, and I've seen this with them before. There was some impatience for the thing to get going, even when it was intentionally drawing out the mystery a little bit and you didn't know what was going on. They're like, well, what's going on? But, but, like I say, there's they're smart kids, and they're readers, and so they got into it more and more over time. I think they they were irritated without even having read the book at the weak tea of the female lead. And, gosh, that ending. I mean, I keep, I know that I keep beating this dead horse, but for the love of Pete man, that was a respectable film. And then at the end of it, something, something really terrible.

Sarah Harrison: 47:03

It was very I was like, not even in character to the movie.

Robert Willingham: 47:05

No, not at all. And so, and so both my kids just started laughing out loud at the ending of the movie in surprise and disdain.

Carolyn Daughters: 47:15

They like the movie. So I think part of, part of it for me, is I'm not very well versed in what world war two movies were made during World War Two. So, I don't know if world war two movies made actually during the war put a little happy, silly spin on them at the end, like this one did, but maybe movies that might come in the decades that follow might have a more serious or introspective tone, maybe more aligned with a solid text. I just don't even know, because I was wondering that. I was like, I think it's the only, possibly the only book about World War Two that he wrote during the war. And so they're like, oh, cool, let's make this movie. But maybe it's the construct of film during that period.

Robert Willingham: 48:09

I don't know. That's part of why it looks so cheap. World War Two cinema is not my thing, nor film versions of wartime espionage fiction. I have a colleague down the hall, Mary hennel, who specializes in the literature and the films of the war, we may need to get that. She's great on this stuff. What I'm thinking about is Vietnam. The first great Vietnam movies couldn't come during Vietnam. During Vietnam, you get the Green Beret, just trash. But not long after Vietnam, here's the deer hunter and here's Apocalypse Now, right? And I think partially that's because of where America's sentiment was in the 1970s but I also think that there it is hard to have perspective on any historical event up to and including war in real time. I mean, I used to do political science, and then I realized I don't, I can't figure out anything in the car, in the present tense. Nothing makes sense while it's happening, but everything gets a little a lot clearer Not long afterward.

Carolyn Daughters: 49:18

No, that that's a great point. It's I just I was thrown by Sarah. And I were both thrown by a number of elements of the film. In particular, that ending was just such a strange way to tie up that story, right?

Sarah Harrison: 49:34

And the fact that the other thing they really gutted was, rather than they turned his murder of his wife into a suicide, which completely gutted his psychological lens that he was doing the whole and the Hollywood rule. It's too hard, right?

Carolyn Daughters: 49:56

It was a Hollywood rule. They had to do that. Yes, always. That, right? Yes, they had to do that. They couldn't have somebody complicit in a murder as a sympathetic lead in a film.

Sarah Harrison: 50:07

I thought that was just self censorship. We saw the same thing in Rebecca, right? They twisted that to make him not murder his wife.

Robert Willingham: 50:18

No. And you know that center that's central to the whole thing. I read a review of the movie that intimated that Arthur Rowe is not sure in the movie whether he actually is innocent of his wife's murder or not. So they turned it into more of a pure wartime thriller based loosely on Graham Greene's espionage fiction. I don't know. I'm not sure. I think he may be given the screenwriter too much credit there, but I didn't know that. I didn't realize it was an external thing. I thought that was just, this is not palatable. No one's going to come to this movie,

Carolyn Daughters: 50:48

My understanding is that they had to do that. The studio had to make that particular change. But, yeah, the ending could be out of time, out of World War Two, and it's just like, almost like, a silly farce, like we're going on this unbelievable ...

Robert Willingham: 51:07

All of a sudden, it's The Thin Man. Who's up for a cocktail?

Carolyn Daughters: 51:18

Exactly.

Sarah Harrison: 51:22

Do you incorporate you said you give out novels for your for your students trade. Do you incorporate movies into do teaching?

Robert Willingham: 51:29

I do one of the nice things about teaching the modern most of what I do is in the 20th century, is that we had cameras, and so I've actually taught a class on European cinema. I don't get to teach that very much. But yeah, like teaching a class on the Russian Revolution, they watched Potemkin. When I teach my class on Weimar Germany, they watch Am I try very hard to, at least once every semester, offer something like that. I use graphic novels sometimes.

Sarah Harrison: 52:02

What graphic novels do you recommend?

Robert Willingham: 52:04

Well, I'm a Holocaust professor. So mouse, okay, yes. And either of you have not read mouse or your list. It's one of the great literary works of the of the late 20th century. Just an extraordinary thing. It's a it's a memoir of the son of a Holocaust survivor. And you say this out loud, it sounds ridiculous. It's a cartoon in which the Jews are mice and the Nazis are cats. But it's, it's just, it's, it's a very, very great book, and because of its genre, because of its format, my students don't run away from it, or they're intrigued by it in a way that they might not have otherwise been. If I could pick one book to have people read who want a book to read about the Holocaust, it might be that one interesting.

Carolyn Daughters: 52:56

Now I want to read it.

Robert Willingham: 52:59

Strong recommend. Make sure you get both volumes.

Sarah Harrison: 53:02

Okay, awesome. Well, we're coming up on time here, which is crazy, but I do want to ask you a couple questions about wartime espionage fiction before we wrap up.

Robert Willingham: 53:12

It has been great fun. You're right. I just looked at the clock.

Sarah Harrison: 53:16

I always have to stay on top of it, because we are bandwidth limited. Unfortunately, it's the nature of the medium. But, talking about all of the interesting intersection, there's history, political science, movies, film, and you and I were chatting just a little bit before our conversation got started about the reduction in scope of the humanities at universities as a whole. It feels sad in light of the human experience. What are your thoughts on that?

Robert Willingham: 53:53

Nothing lasts forever. The American universities, history departments, the humanities over the past 40-50 years have been by far the most important of any university system in the world, and we produce generations of not Only academics, but everyday people, professionals, who went about their professions and their lives with a particular understanding of the world, influenced by the arts and history, philosophy, religion, music and for a bunch of reasons, ranging from the extraordinary increase of costs for higher ed the lack of an automatic job market for college graduates. There has been an increasing wave of students and parents convinced that they need to major in STEM they need to have a major that is also the title of their first job. And so we keep pitching this idea, which I still believe that a degree in the liberal arts and the humanities. It gives you exactly the preparation you do need for a rapidly changing world. But an awful lot of the world right now disagrees, and so even at a small liberal arts college like this one, we have fewer history majors, fewer history professors. And I know it's different in other it's much worse at other places. The flip side of that is history, obviously, is every bit as important as it has ever been. Otherwise, there wouldn't be an attack on it by politicians. There wouldn't be the wars we see in Florida and Texas, where I have colleagues who are being instructed to rewrite their syllabi, to take out obvious truth. If history really didn't matter, then we wouldn't care about those things. We would just let the robots write our history and carry on. But when we think about what it means to be an American, what it means to be a human, we almost immediately refer to to historical reference to for to the historical past, either as a tool or sometimes as a weapon. And the degree to which it is, it is so politically fraught even now, really makes the point that it really still does matter. One of the things history gives you is the long perspective, right? It's a pendulum. Nothing's inevitable, but nothing lasts forever. I think that I don't have a hard time imagining a time maybe in 510, 15 years, when the humanities make a comeback, when people realize, especially in the age of AI, that maybe learning to code isn't as important as learning to how to figure out when you've been lied to, how to, how to figure out a world where truth is seemingly unmoored from any objective reference, when you can't tell who to trust in the world, back to Arthur Rowe, right? Who do you trust? How do you know who's telling the truth? To really bring this home. I want to, I want to quote an important paleontologist who said your science can tell you how you can bring dinosaurs back to life, but it won't tell you whether you should, and Jeff Goldblum was right. Science is important, that knowledge is important, but our souls, our minds, have to be able to catch up with our capacities. And I what I hope right now is that we're in one of those periods where our souls, our minds, are beginning to draw it to our technological capabilities, and it better, because I don't like to think about the alternative.

Carolyn Daughters: 57:49

I think that's a pretty strong note to wrap up on.

Sarah Harrison: 57:55

My only other question was, is there anything that you haven't got to speak about yet for The Ministry of Fear or wartime espionage fiction more generally that you wanted to mention?

Robert Willingham: 58:05

The book is a great book. Let me say that I do think it's a great book because it deals with eternal themes. Who am I inside? Who is the true me? Is my rational self, my true self. Is there something else beside my conscious mind? And where does goodness come from? Those themes were important when Plato started writing about him, those themes were important When Freud wrote about them. Those themes are important, terrifying and beautiful when Graham Greene writes about him, and I think that's what makes his work important and lasting.

Sarah Harrison: 58:48

Totally agree.

Carolyn Daughters: 58:51

Well, thank you so much. This has been amazing.

Robert Willingham: 58:54

Such a pleasure. Really enjoyed it.

Sarah Harrison: 58:56

Rob, it's been a complete delight. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Carolyn Daughters: 59:06

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