It occurs to me that at some point after the Great War a new type of English English writer- one incapable of reading- came into existence. Consider the following extract from the collected essays of a typical example.
Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives.
This would certainly be true of people who stop reading the moment they get into long trousers. For the rest of us, books only gain influence over us when we return to them after a gap of a decade or two and discover that they yet show more than their authors could have possibly known.
In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already: as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back.
Graham Greene wrote this. No doubt his various mistresses were flattered that he thought they looked like him- more particularly in the throes of passion. Still, it is little wonder that a narcissist gets little out of the Bible save some forlorn echo of childhood play or prayer.
Perhaps, converting to Catholicism- for Anglicans- is an excuse not to read the one thing which alone can change how everything is to be read.
I suppose, one could say 'Greene was a Manichaean. One day, when he was 14 years old, he chanced upon the novels of Marjorie Bowen and found his own vocation.'
One had lived for fourteen years in a wild jungle country without a map,
An Edwardian schoolboy was spoiled for choice when it came to boy detectives and boy explorers but quickly graduated to stories about cricket or rugby. Such literature stressed what McClelland would later call 'need for achievement'. Orwell, I suppose, would have called it proto-Fascist. Kipling's Kim, after all, was an Imperial cartographer/spy much concerned with maps. But R.L Stevenson's Jim Hawkins had a Treasure Map. That's fucking Capitalism, that is! No wonder Greene was such a joyless shithead.
but now the paths had been traced and naturally one had to follow them. But I think it was Miss Bowen’s apparent zest that made me want to write.
Bowen had great talent but her early life was difficult. Her zest probably had a lot to do with earning money for her wee bairns.
One could not read her without believing that to write was to live and to enjoy, and before one had discovered one’s mistake it was too late — the first book one does enjoy. Anyway she had given me my pattern — religion might later explain it to me in other terms, but the pattern was already there — perfect evil walking the world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pendulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done.
I suppose the English intelligentsia had accepted that achievement no longer mattered. Social Justice was the grim grail questing which they must grow prematurely grey.
Man is never satisfied, and often I have wished that my hand had not moved further than King Solomon's Mines , and that the future I had taken down from the nursery shelf had been a district office in Sierra Leone and twelve tours of malarial duty and a finishing dose of blackwater fever when the danger of retirement approached.
No, you fucking dufus! You were supposed to study something useful at Collidge- like the bacteriologist, Lord Walston, whose wife you were poking- so as to cure malaria or blackwater fever or whatever. Sierra Leone had plenty of smart young people who could have been trained up quickly to create a better administration to benefit the native people- who would become more productive- thus also benefiting the British people who were buying from and selling to them. The pendulum of trade and exchange is set in motion by the invisible hand of the Katechon. But, Greene's generation thought they had to be focused exclusively on the Social Justice's Eschaton or Day of Wrath. Against that eventuality, Greene provided his class with an alibi. They had been molested as children by an absent God and thus had been set up to fail. True, a successful novelist may appear to have failed to fail- but that is mere appearance.
What is the good of wishing ? The books are always there, the moment of crisis waits, and now our children in their turn are taking down the future and opening the pages.
So long as they stuck to hard Sci-Fi, and had a penis, they were safe enough.
In his poem 'Germinal’ A.E. wrote: In ancient shadows and twilights Where childhood had strayed , The world's great sorrows were horn And its heroes were made . In the lost boyhood of Judas Christ was betrayed .
But that too was a beginning- the Genesis of a New New Testament. That's why the poem is called 'Germinal'. Greene has reversed the meaning.
Still, it is true that there was a good reason Sir Harcourt Butler, sometime in the 1880's, said 'We're all Socialists now'. The fact is some types of achievement- though leading to great wealth- were fundamentally evil or otherwise repugnant. But to right such wrongs too would be an achievement.
Greene writing of Henry James conjures up
'the black and merciless things that are behind great possessions’
there were plenty of blacks in Britain's great imperial possessions
as an expression of the ruling fantasy which drove him to write: a sense of evil religious in its intensity.
Henry James's America had torn itself apart in a Civil War which, ostensibly, was about black possessions being shown scant mercy. But that evil could be exorcised by high achievers.
Art itself’, Conrad wrote, ‘may be defined as a single- minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe’,
So, Art should carry its own justification in its every line. But, Conrad said, its achievements are different from those of Science or Philosophy because, since it can't be authoritative and does not command reverence, its votaries must look within themselves and find some more subtle or intimate way in which to communicate the truths they thus uncover.
and no definition in his own prefaces better describes the object Henry James so passionately pursued, if the word visible does not exclude the private vision.
It does. The heroine of 'Golden Bowl' cleverly gets rid of her rival, till her husband can 'see nothing but her'.
If there are times when we feel, in The Sacred Fount , even in the exquisite Golden Bowl , that the judge is taking too much into consideration, that he could have passed his sentence on less evidence, we have always to admit, as the long record of human corruption unrolls, that he has never allowed us to lose sight of the main case ; and because his mind is bent on rendering even evil ‘the highest kind of justice , the symmetry of his thought lends the whole body of his work the importance of a system.
Henry James was concerned with 'economia' not the narrow 'akreibia' of the Law Court. But that economy- more particularly to mathematicians- is mysterious, if not ontologically dysphoric. Ultimately, it is founded on Faith, which is Credit, which is Belief of the sort that Artists can but hold in suspense.
No writer has left a series of novels more of one moral piece. The differences between James’s first works and his last are only differences of art as Conrad defined it. In his early work,
written at a time when High Society was more censorious
perhaps, he rendered a little less than the highest kind of justice ; the progress from The American to The Golden Bowl is a progress from a rather crude and inexperienced symbolization of truth to truth itself: a progress from evil represented rather obviously in terms of murder to evil in propria persona , walking down Bond Street, charming, cultured, sensitive — evil to be distinguished from good chiefly in the complete egotism of its outlook.
No. James was American, not stupid. He understood that the difference between an outlaw and a Senator was that though the latter had killed more men and robbed more banks, he was rich. As did his Pragmatist brother, Henry understood 'cash value'. But he also knew there were some varieties of experience which were beyond price. Were they also beyond words? Sadly, for him, yes.
Why does Greene pretend that people who marry for money, and then poison their spouse, are anarchists or nihilists or have sinned against the Holy Spirit? The answer is that he doesn't want to admit that James wasn't so different from Thackeray or Balzac. Novelists are supposed to turn tea-table gossip into something dramatic- no matter how pathetic or contemptible the protagonists. James and Conrad were part of an older tradition which looked for 'economia', not 'akreibia'. The sought to understand not merely to judge. They were concerned with the Katechon- i.e. what holds the Apocalypse at bay. But, truth be told, the Edwardian World deserved nothing less. For James, perhaps there was the fear of inherited mental illness- a fear psychosis which, had he turned to religion, might have put him in company with Kierkegaard & Tolstoy. Did Greene suffer anything similar? Perhaps. Or, it may be, he simply drank too much and popped pills which even English Doctors back then were too ready to prescribe. Still, what is undeniable is his talent. My mistake was to think he wrote simply enough for a Babu like me to imitate. In my collection 'Deus Absconditus', you will find a terribly grim Catholic novella set in a famine struck East African country. It is fucking hilarious.
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