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Aversions to food have prompted knowing comment since antiquity, and interpretations are not lacking in our own assiduous day. However that may be, Graham’s “case” was consistent with his hostility to all matters imposed on him—whether by circumstance or natural forces, or at the will of others: a motif unmistakable in the pattern of years. The helplessness or complicity of our humanity in its involuntary needs, cravings, and decay aroused a resentment conspicuous above all in many of Graham’s responses to women. For much of his life he had wrestled, in love and in his books, with the paradox of desire and consummation, illusion and disgust, ecstasy and blame. It was not difficult to imagine him holding the view ascribed by Plutarch to Alexander the Great—another abstemious eater—that “sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was merely mortal.”
From the 1920s into the 1940s, Greene and several of his talented male contemporaries were working, in English fiction, related veins of anxiety and intelligence, anger and danger, sex and sensibility, and contrasting an ironic private humanity with the petty vanities and great harm of established power. Their narrative frequently centred on the difficulty of being a moody, clever, thinskinned—and occasionally alcoholic—literate man who commands the devotion of a comely, plucky, self denying younger woman. These were demonstrable elements of educated life in Britain between the sexes and between the wars, and they lingered in Graham’s fiction ever after, briefly “orientalised” in The Quiet American.
i just like this phrasing
Among the multiple causes of Graham’s disconnection from Italian scenes one might count his unconcern with aesthetic pleasures important to many who visit the peninsula. Evelyn Waugh, who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, regretted having neglected Europe during his youthful travels of the 1920s and ’30s, later wrote that restless young British writers of his generation had deludedly imagined that
Europe could wait. There would be time for Europe . . . These were the years when Mr. Peter Fleming went to the Gobi Desert, Mr. Graham Greene to the Liberian hinterland; Robert Byron . . . to the ruins of Persia. We turned our back on civilisation. Had we known, we might have lingered . . . Had we known that all that seeming-solid, patiently built, gorgeously ornamented structure of Western life was to melt overnight like an ice castle . . . Instead, we set off on our various stern roads; I to the Tropics and the Arctic . . . At that time it seemed an ordeal, an initiation to manhood.
cool
Two tall figures under umbrellas appeared in the empty square and loped across to the café: a pair of Englishmen wearing raincoats, and one—the elder—with a black beret. The man with the beret was Graham Greene. I recognised him—as one would; and also because I had seen him in the past on Capri, at the restaurant Gemma near the piazza, where he dined at a corner table with his companion, and great love of the postwar decade, Catherine Walston. That was in the late 1950s, when I used to visit Naples and Capri from Siena, where I then spent part of the year. One knew that Greene had a house in the town of Anacapri, in the upper portion of the island, which he had visited faithfully if sporadically for many years.
On that damp December morning, Greene and his dark-haired friend came into the Gran Caffè, hung their coats, and sat down at the next tiny table to mine. I went on with my puzzle; but it was impossible not to overhear the conversation of my neighbours—or, at any rate, not to hear one side of it. Graham Greene certainly did not have a loud voice, but his speech was incisive, with distinctive inflections, and his voice was lowered only in asides or to make confidences. It was an individual voice, developed before the great British flattening, when one’s manner of speaking might, beyond any affectation of class, become personal speech: one’s own expressive instrument casting its spell in conversation. I would in any case have noticed what he was saying, because he began to quote from a poem by Robert Browning called “The Lost Mistress.” The poem opens:
[...]
And then he could not remember the very end. He recurred to this several times, trying to draw it up from his memory, but did not manage it.
When I had finished my coffee and my puzzle, and had paid, and had taken my raincoat and umbrella from the dank stand, I said, “The line is
“Or so very little longer.”
<3 <3
Noticing, on another raking of our Capri shelves, Leon Edel’s volumes of Henry James’s letters, Graham said that he, too, brought those books to Capri: “They make me want to write.”
To write fiction is to learn to inhabit other skins, whether thinner or thicker than one’s own. (Thus Auden, paraphrasing the Book of Revelation, pays tribute to the novelist who must among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too.) In his best work, Graham excelled at those acts of convinced imagination and irresolute morality. There was, also, an authorial distance that could make it hard to establish where his sympathies lay—in Brighton Rock, for instance—or whether sympathies were engaged at all, as in The Quiet American, where cynicism, scarcely stirred by sensuality, expresses itself in violence and displeasure. In The End of the Affair, the temperament of the narrator, Bendrix, is unsparingly close, in anger, wit, and struggle, to Graham’s own—so faithfully drawn as to challenge the credibility of the character by seemingly improbable contrasts of mood: an accomplished exercise in self knowledge.
He asked whether I could remember a poem at sight. I told him that I had rarely “memorised” a poem, even at school, and had no “system”; that I remembered particular lines at once, being moved by them, and then might read the poem over, bear it in mind, say it aloud when I was alone. Then I might remember it always. That had been the case since childhood. In adolescence and in my early twenties, when I had much solitude whether circumstantial or inward, I was able to recall poems from a reading or two if they were not very long. There was nothing diligent in it. Recollection was spontaneous, easier than breathing. One remembered all manner of lines that captured ear and imagination. Where there was greatness, the words seemed inevitable, as if memory had been awaiting them.
For Graham, something of the same: memory, rather than memorising. He found that he added less and less with age, and rarely recalled lines of new poets, even if he liked their work: “I don’t think one is so accessible to poems that come after one’s own era.” Sensations aroused by poetry were in any case private, intuitive, unaccountable. In the past, poetry had been a presence that cut across the generations and the classes. One never knew where it would turn up. Like mercy.
:)
Thinking of those times of transition—and of their violations, contested in vain and now institutionalised and extended—a lover of Capri must gratefully wonder that beauty continues to prevail there—not as touristic prettiness, but in the grand and ultimate indifference of Nature to the antics of humankind. In a future age, perhaps, even today’s silliness may slide away, as have the courts of emperors, and the incursions of centuried invaders.
pretty
[...] A cold is really just being overworked and overextended, drinking too much and partying too much, generally not taking care of ourselves, the sneaky ways that depression manages to articulate itself as something more comprehensible. Because a cold is non-critical it feels, at least to me when I have one, like it has be about something other than itself, as though stuffed-up sinuses and a leaking face were just the container, just the form. The substance, the content, needs to be something else—not a cold, but an explanation. The cold must be about my flaws, my tendency to say yes to too many things, my eating habits, my laziness. Because a cold is so low-level as to not quite seem medical, it acts instead as a referendum on one’s whole lifestyle. We expect having a cold to have a thesis. There is so little to it that it has to somehow be more than itself.
[...] Colds are a referendum on how kind we can be to ourselves, how much we can let ourselves get away with, how small we can allow ourselves to be. They are also reminders of the large and overwhelming power of the systems that want us to be none of these things.
Every day there is some news story about someone who kept going to work through some horrible sickness, with a broken limb, through labor pains. We are supposed to find these stories inspiring. This particular tendency - to find the human willingness to break ourselves, the desperation that refuses kindness to one’s own body - to be somehow heroic, equated with both physical and moral strength, is not particular to our era. It is older and more insidious than that, deeper and harder to get at than the easy classification of millenial burnout. That burnout, or whatever name you want to give it, is real, but it is part of a vast and ancient idea that by destroying ourselves, by using ourselves up, we become holy and virtuous, guaranteed moral clarity, free from possible accusations of selfishness, clean as a bone and bathed in light. It is silly to think that there is nothing that does not reach back to an old and creaking and claw-fingered religion in our belief in the redemptive beauty of bearing up under suffering, of working through the pain.
[...] I woke up on January second, perhaps the dullest and most obligated day of the whole year, a living garbage pile topped by a discarded Christmas tree, and couldn’t breathe through my face. I went to the gym because I didn’t believe myself, and it took me nearly a week of dragging my body around the city, leaking and listing to the side like an old ship with a hole in it, to admit that I actually was sick. Surely I must be faking it. Surely I must want this, this excuse from class, this note that says I can stay home today, under the covers, with a mug of something warm, allowed to sit out this round of doing life, excused from getting up and walking myself to the next thing and the next. Surely I must want the sick day. And worse, some part of me did.
argh i just love how she writes