An absolutely terrifying story, menace and squalor permeating every page.
After the nephew of the suicide Dr. Philipott develops a monomania for getting his hands on a "Bren":
"Perhaps I had not taken him seriously enough. I had thought of the Bren as a new poetic symbol of his, like the pylons in the poems of my youth: after all those poets never joined the Electricity Board."
Greene was, as was brilliantly
Also picked up Shirley Hazzard's beautifully written "Greene on Capri" which contains as finely balanced a picture of friendship as has ever been so succinctly captured. Greene is by turns quarrelsome and gregarious, prickly and welcoming. Though their encounters with one another were mostly limited to sharing meals and occasional hikes in one of the most stunningly beautiful places in the world she noted that Greene had no eye for landscapes, visual art or any sort of beauty other than a greedy appreciation of a pretty girl, which rankles.
In the photos, he is rakish- his eyes magnetic, but he seems a lanky, frail creature- a cad with women far heartier than he. Conversely, Hazzard and her husband Francis Steegmuller look like a perfectly matched pair of standard poodles.
From the book:
Graham had many pleasures and, perhaps, even in later years,
some euphoric moments. But enjoyment was transitory and not, to
him, a necessity: a disposition, deeply attributable to temperament,
which should also be referred to his background and generation. As
with other Englishmen of his age—who had become adolescent
during the slaughter of the 1914-18 war, and adult with the Great
Depression-—pleasure could not be an assumption and was not
a goal; whereas suffering was a constant, and almost a code of
honour. Suffering was the attestable key to imaginative existence.
“Happiness” had an element of inanity, verified by Greene in life
and in his fiction: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you
out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.”
(Flaubert, in a letter of I846, also felt that “to be stupid, selfish,
and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though
if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” Acknowledging the possibility of a
higher form of happiness, achieved incidentally in the exercise of
deeper capacities, Flaubert felt that, in his own case, that, too,
would remain phantasmal.)
One of Graham’s rare contemporary admirations, Padre Pio—a
south Italian village priest said to be afflicted with the stigmata——
asserted that “suffering is the test and testimony of love.” In Greene,
however, I think that suffering was a requirement of consciousness
itself: an agitation of spirit providing some defence against the
dreaded accidie. “I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive”—-—so writes
the exhausted protagonist of Graham’s A Burnt-Oat Case in the
opening sentence of that novel. '
The elation of sexual passion itself is repeatedly portrayed, by
Graham, as frantic or despairing. Here is the narrator of The
Comedians making love: “I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide
on to a pavement.”
In Mario Soldati’s novel The Capri Letters, the central character
observes that human beings need unhappiness at least as much as
they need happiness. (Almeno is mistrans1ated—surprisingly, by
Archibald Colquhoun—in the English language edition of that
book as “almost as much,” as if shirking the issue.) Soldati assigns
this thoroughly European view to his American protagonist. I
would say that Graham Greene needed disquiet in many forms,
not least in his pleasures.
Graham’s hostility to the American “way of life” was exacer-
bated by what he considered a contemptible national quest for
the Grail of happiness—the pursuit itself, as he felt, unworthily
enshrined as an ideal in the nation’s founding Declaration, with
the goal soon defined as materialism and indulgence. When we
once spoke of Thomas Hardy’s lines explaining the poet’s refusal,
on grounds of his own fateful view of existence, of an invitation to
visit the United States-—
....
—Graham said that he had no doubt that tears in plenty were shed
in America; but that, without the shared pathos of acknowledged
pain, they were shed in bafflement and felt as failure. Bringing to
mind a theme of The QuietAmerican, he held that a policy of good
cheer was often a repudiation of feeling: a licence for indifference
or ruthlessness.
I agreed. “Pollyanna is a cruel goddess.”
Francis said, “An inartistic one, too.”
#####
The anxiety of men, women, and children living close to
the bone and the abyss is a climate of the early fiction, which
frequently takes place in wet, cold, sunless settings; in which even
the astute can expect little advancement and no quarter, and the
rich exist in privileged unconcern. Greene’s own bleak experiences
in Depression years are noted in his two volumes of autobiogra-
phy, and his biographer Norman Sherry records the keen relief of
Graham and his young wife over a gift of ten shillings from an
aunt who was herself in pinched circumstances. Vivien Greene
told Sherry that, in those years at the brink, “we were very fright-
fully poor. . . much poorer than anyone of our own social qual-
ity.” With his knowledge of that wretchedness and reduction,
Graham, like others, long sought to keep faith.
Reflected in the early writings, an innermost sense of helpless-
ness under fate and unfairness contributed to an imprudent belief,
among readers, in Graham’s unconditional solidarity with the
underdog and the working class. Graham’s sympathies—innately
mercurial and unbiddable, and ever more dispassionate with
age~—1ay far less with categories than with the peculiarities and
torments of all manner of unquiet spirits in their disillusion,
equivocation, culpability, self-doubt, and self-disgust. Singularity
engaged him. He was disinclined to solidarity or to any sustained
“position.” In his books, there is culmination in the narrative, but
he does‘ not seek to “resolve
The anxiety of men, women, and children living close to
the bone and the abyss is a climate of the early fiction, which
frequently takes place in wet, cold, sunless settings; in which even
the astute can expect little advancement and no quarter, and the
rich exist in privileged unconcern. Greene’s own bleak experiences
in Depression years are noted in his two volumes of autobiogra-
phy, and his biographer Norman Sherry records the keen relief of
Graham and his young wife over a gift of ten shillings from an
aunt who was herself in pinched circumstances. Vivien Greene
told Sherry that, in those years at the brink, “we were very fright-
fully poor. . . much poorer than anyone of our own social qual-
ity.” With his knowledge of that wretchedness and reduction,
Graham, like others, long sought to keep faith.
Reflected in the early writings, an innermost sense of helpless-
ness under fate and unfairness contributed to an imprudent belief,
among readers, in Graham’s unconditional solidarity with the
underdog and the working class. Graham’s sympathies—innately
mercurial and unbiddable, and ever more dispassionate with
age~—1ay far less with categories than with the peculiarities and
torments of all manner of unquiet spirits in their disillusion,
equivocation, culpability, self-doubt, and self-disgust. Singularity
engaged him. He was disinclined to solidarity or to any sustained
“position.” In his books, there is culmination in the narrative, but
he does‘ not seek to “resolve
####
He had
learned to give “Capri” its correct emphasis, on the first syllable.
(The mispronunciation “Capree” presumably derives from the once
popular song about “The Isle of Capree,” whose tune still brays forth
from souvenir stalls around the bay.) If he had ever learnt of the old
dialect name, “Crapa,” by which the island was once known to its
inhabitants, I think we would have heard about it.
Cyril Connolly, a contemporary of Graham’s youthful literary
life in London, sought to distinguish j
i between the flight of the expatriate which is an essential
desire for simplification . . . and the brisker trajectory of the
travel addict, trying not to find but to lose himself in the
intoxication of motion.
I think that Graham had at one time been impelled by both those
urges, and, more darkly, by his wish to test the dangerous margins of
his world; but that addiction and intoxication had, with age, been
diluted by indifference. The round-trip ticket of the jet era, in mak-
ing the travel trajectory dramatically brisker, had eroded those ele-
ments of risk and rigour that once sent Graham on lonely journeys
to enigmatic places. What had previously gone unperceived and
unreported was becoming the shared province of group travel.
Graham’s trips—to Central and Latin America, to central and South
Africa, to Russia—grew systematic, prompted in the 1950s by a need
to exchange one kind of unhappiness for another; and, later, by the
lure of political ferment and of themes for a new book. All was inter-
spersed with the odd yet unfailing return to Capri.
#####
Some comments were made, far
from favourable, about Deconstruction, which had begun, then, to
cut its swath through the universities; and about the modern
obsession with explication and analysis that blighted the singular
experience of literature. Graham said that there had been phases of
the kind before, though never, probably, on such a scale or with
such implication of the larger vacancy.
Francis told him that Gibbon had identified the same phenom-
enon as a signal of Rome’s decline. (“The name of Poet was almost
forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of
critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learn-
ing, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption
of taste.”) He asked whether Graham wasn’t beleaguered by theo-
rists and dissectors of his work. l
“Well, they do get in touch. But Antibes is off the track, you
know. And I’m often abroad. \/Vhen I’m in London they sometimes
find me. They’re wounded people. I feel that one has to give them
special attention, because of their huge disappointment. One has
to be specially nice to them.” And suddenly, explicitly to me: “As
one is to Indians and women.” '
Later——l’esprit de l’escalier—I told Francis, “I might have asked,
‘And are you especially nice to Indians and women?’ ”
####
and finally on Harold Acton:
On the following evening, we dined with Harold alone. We spoke
of Naples, of friends, books, travels; and of France. Francis thanked
Harold for agreeing to write, at F.’s suggestion, an introduction for
the forthcoming book of a Neapolitan historian. Harold said that he
had accepted with pleasure: “I am always at it with introductions
these days. It’s the only way I can keep my hand in. As to reading, I
shall soon be able to say, with Valéry, ‘Ie ne lis que les livres dontjefais
les préfaces.’ ” He mentioned that he now received, from Italian pub-
lishers, many new books on Bourbon rule at Naples: “A veritable
outpouring.” Veritable was one of Haro1d’s words. Francis asked
whether, if he were writing his history now, he would be more sym-
pathetic to the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, in the wake of which
a generation of the young Neapolitan intelligentsia was brutally
destroyed. I
Harold: “An enduring tragedy, and obscure to the world.” He
could not share our belief that the revolution might have succeeded.
“Rash,” he thought, “and in vain.” As to his own view of the event,
expressed in his histories: “I was writing in the aftermath of war, and
rather had the bit between my teeth against the uniform Leftism
proclaimed by Italian intellectuals—a cloak in which many a former
fascist sought to cover himself. It was my revulsion against the spec-
tacle of-—say, the arch-fascist Malaparte in the arms of the arch-
Stalinist Togliatti. And then there was the artistic conformity, all
falling into line. Most disheartening.” Later, he said, “When I started
out, I was greeted as an iconoclast—inaccurately. Now I’m called and
anachronism—which I don’t mind.”
As we were parting that evening, Harold suddenly asked, “Does
Graham Greene still come to Capri?” It was a question, one felt,
that he had been intending to raise.
- ‘ '1.
_!\?
_
GREENE on CAPRI 37°14]
We told Harold that Graham was on the island now. “If you can
come over, we could lunch together.”
Harold, gravely: “I would not care to impose myself on some-
one who now takes so little pleasure in my society.”
We were quiet. Francis said, “What a pity this is.”
Harold nodded. “A long association. But his continual air of dis-
pleasure has become tiresome.”
It was unlike Graham, by then, to have hurt so old a friend.
Harold outlived Graham by three years. On a visit to Florence,
late in 1992, we saw him for the last time. He had invited us to
lunch. We had been told that he was steadily weakening; and we
came up to the house in November light and with the pang of
finality—-that consciousness, after familiar pleasures, of a leave-
taking. Harold, frail, greeted us as ever. I had brought an early,
signed copy of his first book of prose, Carnelian, to ask for his
inscription——-“My dear, puerility,” he said, taking it up. His signa-
ture, that day, at eighty-eight, was unchanged from sixty-four
years earlier.
At table, we were six: three elders, with younger companions. I
was the only woman. Those three elders——Harold, Francis, and
Iohn Pope-Hennessy—-have all departed now. During lunch,
Harold told me, “I shall never leave Florence again. A time is com-
ing when I may leave this house less and less. I don’t mind. I love
the house, and never tire of it.” He said, “The only regret is for
Naples. When I think that I’ll never see Naplesagain, it pains me.”
A little later, he turned to the others: “We’ve been speaking of
Naples, which I shan’t see again.” He then raised his head and
began to sing.
The song, in dialect, was an old Neapolitan favourite-—
He sang it through to the impassioned dying fall at the end. Harold
had a fine, firm singing voice and made the song his own; and I
have never heard it since without mentally adding, to those old
Neapolitan words, the Actonian lilt. The young men serving us
came, smiling, from behind their screen to listen; and, when the
song was over, added their applause to ours. Harold had again
seized the sombre moment and enlivened it.
Following his death, he became for a while something of a target
for the strictures of the righteous: a prey of the spectacle, recently
renascent, of virtue addressing error. Harold was now a card to
play. Ignoring his benefactions and his books, critics derided his
affections and pleasures and sifted his ancestry. This, though it
might have wounded him, would not, I think, have surprised:
throughout his life, some faction or other had sat in judgment over
him. If his shade revisits his beloved garden, it certainly does not
waste the moonlit evenings there in rancour; but will pass them
joyfully, re-experiencing the grand illusion of art in the company of
those who count the hours spent with him among the best.
The crisis at Antibes subsided, throbbing. Graham and Yvonne
returned to Capri. Although we had, perhaps, some of our best
times, these visits could hardly be a resumption. By then, the years
and the world gave context only for retrieval amid uncertainties.
learned to give “Capri” its correct emphasis, on the first syllable.
(The mispronunciation “Capree” presumably derives from the once
popular song about “The Isle of Capree,” whose tune still brays forth
from souvenir stalls around the bay.) If he had ever learnt of the old
dialect name, “Crapa,” by which the island was once known to its
inhabitants, I think we would have heard about it.
Cyril Connolly, a contemporary of Graham’s youthful literary
life in London, sought to distinguish j
i between the flight of the expatriate which is an essential
desire for simplification . . . and the brisker trajectory of the
travel addict, trying not to find but to lose himself in the
intoxication of motion.
I think that Graham had at one time been impelled by both those
urges, and, more darkly, by his wish to test the dangerous margins of
his world; but that addiction and intoxication had, with age, been
diluted by indifference. The round-trip ticket of the jet era, in mak-
ing the travel trajectory dramatically brisker, had eroded those ele-
ments of risk and rigour that once sent Graham on lonely journeys
to enigmatic places. What had previously gone unperceived and
unreported was becoming the shared province of group travel.
Graham’s trips—to Central and Latin America, to central and South
Africa, to Russia—grew systematic, prompted in the 1950s by a need
to exchange one kind of unhappiness for another; and, later, by the
lure of political ferment and of themes for a new book. All was inter-
spersed with the odd yet unfailing return to Capri.
#####
Some comments were made, far
from favourable, about Deconstruction, which had begun, then, to
cut its swath through the universities; and about the modern
obsession with explication and analysis that blighted the singular
experience of literature. Graham said that there had been phases of
the kind before, though never, probably, on such a scale or with
such implication of the larger vacancy.
Francis told him that Gibbon had identified the same phenom-
enon as a signal of Rome’s decline. (“The name of Poet was almost
forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of
critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learn-
ing, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption
of taste.”) He asked whether Graham wasn’t beleaguered by theo-
rists and dissectors of his work. l
“Well, they do get in touch. But Antibes is off the track, you
know. And I’m often abroad. \/Vhen I’m in London they sometimes
find me. They’re wounded people. I feel that one has to give them
special attention, because of their huge disappointment. One has
to be specially nice to them.” And suddenly, explicitly to me: “As
one is to Indians and women.” '
Later——l’esprit de l’escalier—I told Francis, “I might have asked,
‘And are you especially nice to Indians and women?’ ”
####
and finally on Harold Acton:
On the following evening, we dined with Harold alone. We spoke
of Naples, of friends, books, travels; and of France. Francis thanked
Harold for agreeing to write, at F.’s suggestion, an introduction for
the forthcoming book of a Neapolitan historian. Harold said that he
had accepted with pleasure: “I am always at it with introductions
these days. It’s the only way I can keep my hand in. As to reading, I
shall soon be able to say, with Valéry, ‘Ie ne lis que les livres dontjefais
les préfaces.’ ” He mentioned that he now received, from Italian pub-
lishers, many new books on Bourbon rule at Naples: “A veritable
outpouring.” Veritable was one of Haro1d’s words. Francis asked
whether, if he were writing his history now, he would be more sym-
pathetic to the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, in the wake of which
a generation of the young Neapolitan intelligentsia was brutally
destroyed. I
Harold: “An enduring tragedy, and obscure to the world.” He
could not share our belief that the revolution might have succeeded.
“Rash,” he thought, “and in vain.” As to his own view of the event,
expressed in his histories: “I was writing in the aftermath of war, and
rather had the bit between my teeth against the uniform Leftism
proclaimed by Italian intellectuals—a cloak in which many a former
fascist sought to cover himself. It was my revulsion against the spec-
tacle of-—say, the arch-fascist Malaparte in the arms of the arch-
Stalinist Togliatti. And then there was the artistic conformity, all
falling into line. Most disheartening.” Later, he said, “When I started
out, I was greeted as an iconoclast—inaccurately. Now I’m called and
anachronism—which I don’t mind.”
As we were parting that evening, Harold suddenly asked, “Does
Graham Greene still come to Capri?” It was a question, one felt,
that he had been intending to raise.
- ‘ '1.
_!\?
_
GREENE on CAPRI 37°14]
We told Harold that Graham was on the island now. “If you can
come over, we could lunch together.”
Harold, gravely: “I would not care to impose myself on some-
one who now takes so little pleasure in my society.”
We were quiet. Francis said, “What a pity this is.”
Harold nodded. “A long association. But his continual air of dis-
pleasure has become tiresome.”
It was unlike Graham, by then, to have hurt so old a friend.
Harold outlived Graham by three years. On a visit to Florence,
late in 1992, we saw him for the last time. He had invited us to
lunch. We had been told that he was steadily weakening; and we
came up to the house in November light and with the pang of
finality—-that consciousness, after familiar pleasures, of a leave-
taking. Harold, frail, greeted us as ever. I had brought an early,
signed copy of his first book of prose, Carnelian, to ask for his
inscription——-“My dear, puerility,” he said, taking it up. His signa-
ture, that day, at eighty-eight, was unchanged from sixty-four
years earlier.
At table, we were six: three elders, with younger companions. I
was the only woman. Those three elders——Harold, Francis, and
Iohn Pope-Hennessy—-have all departed now. During lunch,
Harold told me, “I shall never leave Florence again. A time is com-
ing when I may leave this house less and less. I don’t mind. I love
the house, and never tire of it.” He said, “The only regret is for
Naples. When I think that I’ll never see Naplesagain, it pains me.”
A little later, he turned to the others: “We’ve been speaking of
Naples, which I shan’t see again.” He then raised his head and
began to sing.
The song, in dialect, was an old Neapolitan favourite-—
He sang it through to the impassioned dying fall at the end. Harold
had a fine, firm singing voice and made the song his own; and I
have never heard it since without mentally adding, to those old
Neapolitan words, the Actonian lilt. The young men serving us
came, smiling, from behind their screen to listen; and, when the
song was over, added their applause to ours. Harold had again
seized the sombre moment and enlivened it.
Following his death, he became for a while something of a target
for the strictures of the righteous: a prey of the spectacle, recently
renascent, of virtue addressing error. Harold was now a card to
play. Ignoring his benefactions and his books, critics derided his
affections and pleasures and sifted his ancestry. This, though it
might have wounded him, would not, I think, have surprised:
throughout his life, some faction or other had sat in judgment over
him. If his shade revisits his beloved garden, it certainly does not
waste the moonlit evenings there in rancour; but will pass them
joyfully, re-experiencing the grand illusion of art in the company of
those who count the hours spent with him among the best.
The crisis at Antibes subsided, throbbing. Graham and Yvonne
returned to Capri. Although we had, perhaps, some of our best
times, these visits could hardly be a resumption. By then, the years
and the world gave context only for retrieval amid uncertainties.
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