I don’t usually do my whole excerpt thing until I’ve finished a book, but only 62 pages into Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal I’ve already marked so many passages that I think I’ll need to do this one in instalments. The very last sentence quoted, in particular, is one of those lines which is so incredibly, bitingly, spot-on that you wonder why you never realized it before you read it.
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Again I am brought to my knees by Graham Greene. Again I find myself fumbling for words that deserve to be used in a review. Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is an incredibly audacious book; perhaps one day I’ll write an equally bold one about Graham Greene – because in my life so far (narrow-horizoned as it admittedly has been), I have not read a writer who can equal his understanding of what it is to be human.
Read More “Graham Greene: The Power And The Glory”
Interest in national politics was rather thin at school. In my grandparents’ house I had heard it said too often that the only difference between the two parties after the War of a Thousand Days was that the Liberals went to five o’clock Mass so that no one would see them and the Conservatives went to Mass at eight so that people would believe they were believers.
* * *
At that time Bogota was a remote, lugubrious city where an insomniac rain had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century. I noticed that on the street there were too many hurrying men, dressed like me when I arrived, in black wool and bowler hats. On the other hand, not a single consolatory woman could be seen, for they, like priests in cassocks and soldiers in uniform, were not permitted to enter the gloomy cafes in the business district. In the streetcars and public urinals there was a melancholy sign: “If you don’t fear God, fear syphilis.”
I was briefly distracted from my ongoing affair with Graham Greene by other books, but I’m firmly back in the arms of my lover now with The Quiet American.
I always feel somewhat unworthy of commenting on Graham Greene’s books, because it is so blindingly obvious that he knows more than me, thinks more deeply than me and writes with an elegance and economy of words which no commentary of mine could ever have.
So all I will give you is a resounding recommendation, and three very short excerpts which don’t do justice to the book at all, but which can at least be quoted here out of context and still understood. They’re all observations by Fowler, the English journalist. He’s the detached world-weary cynic, and Pyle (referred to in the first excerpt) is the idealistic self-absorbed “quiet American” dipshit who fully deserves to have started off the book by being dead.
* * *
“Dear Thomas,” he wrote, “I can’t begin to tell you how swell you were the other night. I can tell you my heart was in my mouth when I walked into that room to find you.” (Where had it been on the long boat-ride down the river?) “There are not many men who would have taken the whole thing so calmly. You were great, and I don’t feel half as mean as I did, now that I’ve told you.” (Was he the only one that mattered? I wondered angrily, and yet I knew that he didn’t intend it that way. To him the whole affair would be happier as soon as he didn’t feel mean – I would be happier, Phuong would be happier, the whole world would be happier, even the Economic Attaché and the Minister. Spring had come to Indo-China now that Pyle was mean no longer.)
* * *
“It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.”
* * *
“Who’s Joe?”
“You know him. The Economic Attaché.”
“Oh, of course, Joe.”
He was a man one always forgot. To this day I cannot describe him, except his fatness and his powdered clean-shaven cheeks and his big laugh; all his identity escapes me – except that he was called Joe. There are some men whose names are always shortened.
Last Exit To Brooklyn can be quite tough going, partly because of the style in which it is written, and partly because its subject matter is extremely harrowing at times. The abiding impression I have of this book is not of obscenity at all (it got banned in England in the 60s for this), but of rather profound sadness. Its characters are larger than life on the outside, and emotional cripples on the inside, though nowhere as cliched as my description makes them sound. It’s like Rent, except without singing or happy endings or seasons of love or la vie Boheme.
The first of the two excerpts below isn’t actually from the book itself, but from the introduction written by its publishers, describing the litigation surrounding the banning of the book in 60s England. The second is from one of the stories in the book. A bunch of drag queens are entertaining some guys they hope to hook up with, and everyone’s high on benzedrine.
* * *
(From the Introduction, September 1968)
The first prosecution witness was Professor Catlin, an elderly sociologist, who was admitted exceptionally between two defence witnesses as he had to return to America. Catlin insisted on talking through Mr Neill, proclaiming among other things that ‘if this book is not obscene then no book is obscene’. While admitting that what happened in the book happened in life, he announced that he did not object to it in life but he did object to it in literature. The other prosecution witnesses were David Holloway (critic), Sir Basil Blackwell (bookseller and publisher), H. Montgomery Hyde (writer), Dr Dennis Leigh (psychiatrist) and the Rev. David Sheppard (priest and social worker). Sir Basil claimed that the book had depraved him, but it transpired that he had only read it because he had been asked to appear as a witness for the prosecution. The most telling of the prosecution witnesses was the last, the Rev. David Sheppard, who emerged as a naive and well-meaning man, sympathetic to the jury. He said he felt the book pandered to all that was worst in him, and had left him ‘not unscathed’. He was not cross-examined as to what he meant by this, but the assumption is that he found the book erotically stimulating.
* * *
(From the story The Queen Is Dead)
Tony kept leaning forward more and more, listening, laughing, making certain that each one was aware that she was listening to their story and enjoying it; trying to think of some little anecdote she could tell, some funny little thing that had happened or she had seen…or even something in a movie…she refilled her glass with gin, smiling at Goldie; nodded, smiled, laughed, still trying to think of something funny, even slightly humorous, thumbing through years of memories and finding nothing – Well how about leslie? – O!!! that filthy thing – she goes through Central Park about 5 in the morning looking for used condums and sucks them. Holy Krist. Well I have a john who makes me throw golfballs – we had a kid upstate who stuck a life magazine up his ass and couldnt get it out. The – O I love the ones who almost cry when they are finished and start telling you about how much they love their wife and kiddies. And when they take out the pic – O I hate those freaks – Hey, how about that guy the Spook met in the Village that night who gaveim 10 bucks for his left shoe. The Spook toldim he could havem both for 10 bucks and his socks too – Goldie kept looking at Malfie and the way his hair waved back into a thick DA; and Georgette leaned closer to Vinnie and everyone seemed so close, as if they belonged to and with each other and everything was wonderful – Did Francene ever tell you about that Arab she met one night? Well honey, he just fucked her until she thought she would turn insideout. O, that must have been divine. – Camille looked nervously at Sal – It is so refreshing to meet a man who will give you a good fucking. Yes honey, but she almost had to have a hysterectomy.
“I had just dropped out of the faculty of law after six semesters devoted almost entirely to reading whatever I could get my hands on, and reciting from memory the unrepeatable poetry of the Spanish Golden Age. I already had read, in translation, and in borrowed editions, all the books I would have needed to learn the novelist’s craft, and had published six stories in newspaper supplements, winning the enthusiasm of my friends and the attention of a few critics. The following month I would turn twenty-three, I had passed the age of military service and was a veteran of two bouts of gonorrhea, and every day I smoked, with no foreboding, sixty cigarettes made from the most barbaric tobacco. I divided my leisure between Barranquilla and Cartagena de Indias, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, living like a king on what I was paid for my daily commentaries in the newspaper El Heraldo, which amounted to almost less than nothing, and sleeping in the best company possible wherever I happened to be at night. As if the uncertainty of my aspirations and the chaos of my life were not enough, a group of inseparable friends and I were preparing to publish without funds a bold magazine that Alfonso Fuenmayor had been planning for the past three years. What more could anyone desire?”
* * *
Gabriel Garcia Marquez rOxOrS so much. This already feels like an autobiography and a half, and I’m only 20 pages into one book of an intended trilogy.
Shadwell didn’t require much encouragement. It was easy to see that he was clever and well read, but he was also boring. Like many spectacular bores, his thoughts were catalogued and indexed. When I asked him a question he’d say, “The answer to that is – in fact the several answers to that are…A.” And you’d get point A followed by points B and C, and on the one hand F, and on the other foot G, until you could see the whole alphabet stretching ahead, each letter a Sahara in itself to be crawled across.
* * *
“Concentrate on the way you think your position in society has been fixed,” said Pyke.
Being sceptical and suspicious, the English sort to be embarrassed by such a Californian display of self, I found the life-stories – accounts of contradiction and wretchedness, confusion and intermittent happiness – oddly affecting. I giggled all through Lawrence’s account of working in a San Francisco massage parlour (when she was stranded there), where the women were not allowed to proposition men directly in case they were cops. They had to say, “Is there any other muscle you’d like relaxed, sir?” This was where Lawrence discovered socialism, for here, in a forest of pricks and pond of semen, “I soon realized that nothing human was alien to me,” as she put it.
Richard talked about wanting to fuck only black men, and the clubs he cruised constantly in order to acquire them. And to Pyke’s delight and my surprise Eleanor told of how she’d worked with a woman performance artist who persuaded her to extract the texts of poems – “Cows’ teeth like snowdrops bite the garlic grass” – from her vagina before reading them. The performance artist herself meanwhile had a microphone up her vagina and relayed the gurglings of her cunt to the audience. This was enough for me. I was hot on Eleanor’s trail. For the time being I gave up on Terry.
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
* * *
Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
* * *
I felt that afternoon such complete trust when she said to me suddenly, without being questioned,”I’ve never loved anybody or anything as I do you.” It was as if, sitting there in the chair with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand, she was abandoning herself as completely as she had done, five minutes back, on the hardwood floor. We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement – we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubts. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space. What did time matter – all the past and the other men she may from time to time (there is that word again) have known, or all the future in which she might be making the same statement with the same sense of truth? When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.
She wasn’t lying even when she said,”Nobody else. Ever again.” There are contradictions in time, that’s all, that don’t exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had – I couldn’t bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t not fear. Even in the moment of love, I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed, and when more than seven years later I opened Parkis’s letter the evidence was all there in my memory to add to my bitterness.
From Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader:
“What happened at the selections?”
Hanna described how the guards had agreed among themselves to tally the same number of prisoners from their six equal areas of responsibility, ten each and sixty in all, but that the figures could fluctuate when the number of sick was low in one person’s area of responsibility and high in another’s, and that all the guards on duty had decided together who was to be sent back.
“None of you held back, you all acted together?”
“Yes.”
“Did you not know that you were sending the prisoners to their death?”
“Yes, but the new ones came, and the old ones had to make room for the new ones.”
“So because you wanted to make room, you said you and you and you have to be sent back to be killed?”
Hanna didn’t understand what the presiding judge was getting at.
“I…I mean…so what would you have done?” Hanna meant it as a serious question. She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done.
Everything was quiet for a moment. It is not the custom at German trials for defendants to question the judges. But now the question had been asked, and everyone was waiting for the judge’s answer. He had to answer; he could not ignore the question or brush it away with a reprimand or a dismissive counterquestion. It was clear to everyone, it was clear to him too, and I understood why he had adopted an expression of irritation as his defining feature. It was his mask. Behind it, he could take a little time to find an answer. But not too long; the longer he took, the greater tension and expectation, and the better his answer had to be.
“There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one can distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.”
Perhaps this would have been all right if he had said the same thing, but referred directly to Hanna or himself. Talking about what “one” must and must not do and what it costs did not do justice to the seriousness of Hanna’s question. She had wanted to know what she should have done in her particular situation, not that there are things that are not done. The judge’s answer came across as hapless and pathetic. Everyone felt it. They reacted with sighs of disappointment and stared in amazement at Hanna, who had more or less won the exchange. But she herself was lost in thought.
“So should I have…should I have not…should I not have signed up at Siemens?”
It was not a question directed at the judge. She was talking out loud to herself, hesitantly, because she had not yet asked herself that question and did not know whether it was the right one, or what the answer was.
[The reference to signing up at Siemens is to her signing up with the SS when it recruited workers from the Siemens factory where she had been working.]
My first Norman Mailer book since giving up on The Armies Of The Night in disgust is The Gospel According To The Son, which is either very appropriate or somewhat blasphemous to begin reading today, judging from its first page:
“While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.”