Pretty Goes with Pretty

Graham Greene: The Lawless Roads

Maybe you haven't noticed, maybe you don't care, maybe you were silently cheering to yourself, but: my Graham Greene obsession continues on, despite the dearth of Greene-related posts lately. Since the last one I've read The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory, the latter of which I've been meaning to say... something... about. Like, for instance, that it is ridiculous that this brilliant, simple but majestic novel came from Graham Greene, whose prior ten books were mostly great but nevertheless had a real workhorse/journeyman thing going on. I love Greene as a craftsman, the way he handles plot as if it were the least mysterious thing a novelist need figure out. But The Power and the Glory is just too perfect. Prior to embarking on my quest to read all of his books in a row, in order, I'd read this novel and two others, all bona fide classics of English literature. My hope was that by reading his works straight through I might get a stronger sense of his trajectory as a writer. To some extent that's true, but the leap he took from Brighton Rock to The Power and the Glory (including the travelogue and an entertainment in between) is astounding.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be my P&G post. More of a placeholder for a Lawless Roads post. This was Greene's book of nonfiction which he wrote just prior to P&G. He went to Mexico for a month and traveled around the southern part of that country, which had just come out of some serious anti-Catholic purges. Religion was outlawed, churces were burned, priests were executed. The worst was over by the time Greene got there, though its effects were still apparent.

I bring this up because, coincidentally, The Millions had a nice review/summary of the book yesterday. My two cents: as travelogues go I found Journey Without Maps a better read. Greene went to Africa really with no expectations and frankly no ability when it came to traveling. His Mexico trip, on the other hand, while interesting, was more premeditated: he was looking for specific material. (Interestingly, however, he didn't really find it.)

A lot of people likely pick up The Lawless Roads because they read The Power and the Glory first and want to learn more about what "really" happened in Mexico in this not-too-distant past. I'm not so sure that's actually the best thing to do. For one, as Norman Sherry exhaustively illustrates in his biography of Greene, Greene pillaged his nonfiction work for scenes, characters, descriptions, and sometimes entire passages nearly word for word, to use in his fictionalized account. Since Greene's real-life experience came after all the real danger in Mexico (not to mention it is self-aware in the extreme), the nonfiction book is actually far less palpable, far less visceral, than the novel. It is therefore a more interesting companion to The Power and the Glory if you're interested in Greene as a writer and want a window into his fiction-writing process. Anyone who is truly interested in finding out more about the true story of Mexico's history would probably do better to pick up a history book. Surely there must be a well-written book that is really focused on Mexico in the early twentieth century that depicts this horrific time.

Speaking of companion reads for The Power and the Glory, try this on for size: before you read Greene's book, pick up Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter first. Urrea and Greene couldn't be more different as writers go—Urrea is this close to being magical realism—but The Hummingbird's Daughter takes place in Mexico a generation before the action of The Power and the Glory. In Urrea's novel, the government is steadily growing more and more anti-Catholic. Greene's novel picks up about thirty years later, when things have truly descended to their worst level. The two books make an interesting pair.

Numerous additional posts on Graham Greene—most of them more fully baked than this one—can be found here.

Listening in Color

I’m reading Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars right now, and the first chapter is about a painter who, after an accident, suddenly goes 100% color blind. He sees the entire world in a muddy, dingy black and white. He dreams in black and white. His memories are now in black and white. It’s a terrifying condition, all the more so for this man for whom color was an intrinsic part of his identity.

Then, this passage jumped out at me:

Music, curiously, was impaired for him too, because he had previously had an extremely intense synesthesia, so that different tones had immediately been translated into color, and he experienced all music simultaneously as a rich tumult of inner colors. With the loss of his ability to generate colors, he lost this ability as well—his internal “color-organ” was out of action, and now he heard music with no visual accompaniment; this, for him, was music with its essential chromatic counterpart missing, music now radically impoverished.

My brilliant wife was nearby when I came to the passage and I wanted to read it aloud to her. “You know how you can sometimes see colors when you listen to music?” I prefaced. But she looked at me with a curious look and said, a little baffled, “No.”

It never occurred to me that perhaps not everyone shares this experience. There are certain bands, albums, and songs that always put a color or group of colors in my mind. Low does this to me, for instance. When I hear their early albums I inevitably see a deep burgundy, silver gray, and black. When I hear their later albums (everything after The Curtain Hits the Cast), I see washed out whites and blues with sharp punctuations of black and blood red.

I happen to be listening to Iron & Wine as I write this: right, brownish gold, like a wheat field at sunset, with stripes of a dull, flat green.

My wife asked me who else. Thinking clearly about it, I found that if I tried to call a band to my mind I’d simply see the colors of their album covers. The more conscious I was of it, the more literal I was, the more influenced I was. Later that night, as I lay in bed, I tried a psychological test on myself, which was to think of the color first and see which band or song came to mind. Some colors had immediate mental associations. Yellow: Jonathan Richman. Orange, for some strange reason, makes me think of Death Cab for Cutie (I don’t even own anything by them). Sometimes I would give myself a color, then a band would spring to mind, then the color would start to change. Ash gray made me think of Sigur Ros, and then the gray slate in my mind was dappled with specks of pure white and darker shades of black, and finally a faint blue hue would radiate from the center. 

Have you ever thought about listening in these terms? Do you see colors when you listen to some songs? How conscious of it are you? Do you have to “catch” yourself seeing things when you’re listening to music? Do you see abstract images? Is it a pattern? Does it move or morph? Or does music paint actual scenes in your mind, like memories or fantasies?

[An Anthropologist on Mars was written in 1996 and draws seven portraits of people who have rare brain disorders. Sacks is also author of the recently published Musicophilia, which I posted about once before. That book is structured similarly but connects each case study directly to some relationship with music. I haven't read it, but intend to as soon as it comes out in paperback and, I hope to god, has a new cover that I can stomach having on my shelf.]

Ha Jin

Ha Jin has a new book out, A Free Life. I've read three other Jin novels and have loved each of them (particularly the most recent, War Trash). A Free Life is the first book to come along since I started my Graham Greene journey that has tempted me to take a break. If you're not familiar with Jin, John Updike has a nice article in the New Yorker that gives you a good idea of  Jin as a novelist in general, and of A Free Life in particular. [via Return of the Reluctant.]

Graham Greene: The Confidential Agent

[Note: numerous other posts on Graham Greene and his novels here.]

Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene skips right over The Confidential Agent as if it were never written. But in fact this thriller cropped up in between Greene’s nonfiction account of his travels in Mexico, The Lawless Roads, and his masterpiece, also set in Mexico, The Power and the Glory. Apparently Greene was knee-deep in writing The Power and the Glory but he’d hit a wall (not sure if it was creatively or financially). By then he’d either been in Mexico, writing about Mexico, or thinking about Mexico for couple years straight. So he took six weeks off and did up his second “entertainment” (the first being the far superior A Gun for Sale). The novel follows D., a foreigner from a country somewhere in Europe mired in a civil war, who has come to London to purchase coal from an English businessman, Lord Benditch; if D.’s side can get this coal, then they might finally be able to quash the rebels. The problem is that there are other agents, representing both sides of the war, competing with D. for Benditch’s business. Before he even sets foot on English soil, D. is being observed or hunted by enemies and distrustful allies alike.

Knowing that the book was, in Greene’s mind, not meant to be “literary” (that’s how he distinguished his novels from his entertainments), and that it was to some degree a distraction from what was really occupying his creative mind, you can feel that the book was a sort of rush job. What struck me as immediately strange, decidedly un-Greenean, was the lack of detail in this book. Greene had dedicated so much effort in each of his other novels to getting the facts straight, believable, real. If Pinkie was walking down a street in Brighton, then by golly Greene had been to that street himself; the shops being described were there, the intersections were real. Hell, Greene had just spent two months in southern Mexico, where the government conducted anti-Catholic purges, in part so he could write his next novel. The man does not shirk the responsibility of detail.

In The Confidential Agent, on the other hand, we are presented with characters without real names—D., L., Mr. K.—and while the action takes place in London, these characters are concerned with a civil war happening in their home country of… somewhere in Europe. It is never specified. In the movie adaptation, it’s Spain, which would make sense given the book was written in the late 1930s; perhaps, if read at the time it was published, the country would have obviously been Spain, though Greene makes absolutely no allusions to the culture of the country, or of how the two sides of the battle differ politically. But I think, cynically, that Greene left D.’s homeland vague so that Greene would not be obligated to provide the small details that color all of his other novels—one of the very qualities of his writing that cause people to lump his novels into that category, “Greeneland.”

The result is that nearly every character and situation is two-dimensional, and the stakes don’t feel palpable. When, at the end, D. and Rose (Benditch’s daughter) are returning to his home country, it feels unreal. They are traveling to more danger. Rose, honestly, has made perhaps the most idiotic decision of her life by joining D. on the boat out of England and into a civil war—for love!, or whatever. What’s more, the pacing of this novel is not as taut as Greene is capable of. A Gun for Sale also follows a hunted man, Raven, through England as he tries to stop a war breaking out, and every element of that plot is better rendered—Raven’s motivation, his previous life, the adrenaline running through him as he is chased—all keep the energy of the plot high. (By the way, there’s more fog and another shed in The Confidential Agent, though not used to the same effect.) We run with Raven through every page. D., on the other hand, seems resigned to the chase. He would be caught, tried, and killed numerous times if it weren’t for other people, coincidentally or intentionally, intervening on his behalf. His success, at the end of the novel, is ambiguous—other than getting the girl, which seems slight, forced, and frankly unimportant in the bigger picture of his situation.

Donald Barthelme: Flying to America

Donald Barthelme has a new book out this week, Flying to America. The book gathers forty-five short pieces not already anthologized in 40 Stories, 60 Stories, The Teachings of Don B., or Not-Knowing. It also includes a few stories never before published anywhere, and previously difficult-to-find “Sam’s Bar,” an illustrated story I once I saw in a library but have never seen in its originally released format.

Over at the New York Sun, Benjamin Lytal has a nice write up of Barthelme [via Maud Newton].

"Bellow, Cheever, Updike, Malamud—I hold in the highest regard," Barthelme said, "I'd be a fool not to." But he has lost a certain kind of race to Saul Bellow: Barthelme's tastes were catholic—he didn't like camps—but he has become a cult writer, and non-fans are not obliged to read him.

The new issue of McSweeney's is apparently Barthelme-heavy as well, though I haven’t seen it yet.

Graham Greene: England Made Me (Briefly)

I never got around to writing anything about England Made Me, which Graham Greene wrote shortly after It's a Battlefield and prior to his trip to Africa for Journey Without Maps. It was a good book, better than the flawed It's a Battlefield and dealing (more subtly) with similar themes (namely, socialism, communism, class issues), but it's not a terribly special book, either. I guess that's why I wasn't moved to say much. For the sake of completism (and my own reference, when in a year or more I'll have trouble remembering what each and everyone of these twenty-some-odd books were about), I will point to this review at Book Addicts, which happened to go up earlier this week.

I'll leave the Book Addicts to describe the book itself, but one very small point I'll make is about the ending, in which Krogh, the business man, returns to work after the denoument. This was the third time Greene employed this type of cold ending. In It's a Battlefield it was the Assistant Commissioner who returned to work; and in Orient Express, most cruelly, it was Myatt. Quite simply, despite what tragedies may have occured, life goes on. It is exactly what happens in reality, yet in all three books the mere act of going on seems heartless.

Many more posts on the work of Graham Greene can be found here.

Writing with a Red Crayola

From our vantage out on the edge, Zappa and the Velvet Underground, and other more conventionally strange bands, were Vichy-puppet right-wingers, ordinary musicians trying to do something different and still function within the rock & roll framework. We said fuck the framework, listen to this, motherfucker. And then busted your eardrum.

Oxford American’s music issue has plenty to offer besides the article I mentioned in last week’s marathon post. Another feature, tying in tangentially with my recent posts on music and books, is a series of reminiscences by writers who led past lives as rockers, to one degree of success or another. Sven Birkerts, Warren Zanes, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Mike Powell, and James Whorton Jr. all offer a peek into their musical pasts. (Zanes, late of the Del Fuegos, has a particularly entertaining piece, which among other things relates his realization while onstage that he was going bald: “Everyone in the audience was looking toward the stage. They knew…. I was torn between playing the guitar and feeling for damage.”)

The real highlight, though, is the piece by Frederick Barthelme (brother of Donald, who I’ve written about before). Barthelme was the original drummer for the Red Crayola, possibly the longest-running art rock band out there. Anyone at all interested in the band should enjoy the article; it gives a lot of insight into the band’s beginnings.

Because we couldn’t play all that well, we had to do something else, something more interesting, and since we were art-inclined, we went that route, leaning on every possible art idea at every turn. Soon we were making “free music,” playing long improvised pieces heavily invested in feedback, random acts of auditory aggression, utterances of all kinds. We began to have big ideas about ways to listen to music, and what “music” was.

As players, some of us were better than others. Mayo could play a little guitar and already had that odd touch on the instrument that he has today—his playing was wonderful and startling, very spare, full of asides and quotations, and always giving you the impression he was about to screw the pooch, musically speaking. Steve Cunningham could play a bit of bass, and did so, fearlessly. As a drummer, I was like the last guy selected for the dodge-ball team—no time, no coordination, no nothing. So I was spectacular on drums. And all this worked fine because in the larger scheme of things, we didn’t really want to play well. Playing well was what we were against.

Barthelme departed from the Red Crayola after their second or third album, finding his own success as a writer and teacher instead. Since his second novel, Second Marriage, published in 1984, Barthelme’s fiction has been of a more realist bent—everyday people, usually living in the south. But his first book, War and War, was published in 1971 and was written between 1966–69, when he was still a member of the Red Crayola. The book is experimental (and out of print), unlike his more well-known work. If it is spoken of at all, it is usually noted for being similar (and inferior) to brother Donald’s metatextual, language-obsessed style.

It’s one of my favorite books on my shelves—not for its content but for its dated yet wonderful cover. Don’t ask me to explain it; I just like it. The book itself is a stream-of-consciousness pastiche of fiction and (drug-addled? art-school pretentious? merely youthful?) fact. It’s less a novel than a description of the novel Barthelme is writing. It’s a combination of lists, diagrams, photographs, and a constant self-awareness of truth and lies and revision, both of truth and of lies.

It's not a particularly great book, but Crayola fans may want to search it out, both because it's a document from the band's earliest days and because Mayo Thompson appears throughout the novel. For instance (click on the image if you can't read the text):

Elsewhere on pgwp:

• Donald Barthelme is King
• Two posts on experimentalism vs. accessibility in music and writing: part I, part II
• About that other, "more conventional" art rock band, the Velvet Underground, and that other directionless jam band, the Grateful Dead
• "Listen to this, motherfucker. And then busted your eardrum." Oh yeah? Fred, let me tell you about Glenn Branca

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters

My dear, after all this time have we got to say goodbye. Harry says I am not to speak to you. Is this final? You always said you would stick to me. I don’t know what to do. For God’s sake send me a line.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Graham Greene: A Life in Letters also hits stores next week. Greene wrote thousands of letters over the course of his life, to his wife, to his mother, to his mistress, and to many others. Fans of his novel The End of the Affair, in particular, may want to pick this up, as it follows Greene’s longtime affair with Catherine Walston, who was the inspiration for Sarah Miles.

You can read an excerpt from A Life in Letters here. Terry Eagleton reviewed the book for the Guardian, and came to the curious conclusion that “Greene's life sometimes seems straight out of his fiction,” as if it weren’t quite obviously the other way around.

Many more posts on the work of Graham Greene can be found here.

Music and the Brain: Oliver Sacks, Daniel Levitin, and David Byrne

Oliver Sacks has a new book coming out next week called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which collects a series of case studies looking at different ways in which music has affected neurological patients, or vice versa. Thanks to a link from Conversational Reading, I read an excerpt from the book in last week’s New Yorker and it was both heartbreaking and fascinating. The article is about Clive Wearing, a former musicologist who suffers from the most extreme case of amnesia ever recorded: he can only remember a few seconds at a time; if he blinks or turns his head, it’s as if he’s just woken up all over again. Everything is on constant reset. Worse, his pre-amnesiac memories—everything prior to 1985—have been slowly deleting themselves from his mind. From the article:

His constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and life itself. As Deborah wrote:

Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake.... 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake.... 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.

This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages.

What’s interesting, though, is that he can still play the piano, can still read music, and can still remember that he loves his wife. He can’t really describe any of it, but he can experience it. The article is stunning and I definitely plan to pick up the book when it comes out next week. Wired (via bldgblog) also has a Q&A with Sacks (and a look at his metaphorical iPod). There are also videos of Sacks at Amazon.

Finally, I picked up the latest issue of Seed last week and it too had an interview with Sacks. The article gives a good sense of how Sacks brought science writing to a new level. It’s not online, but when I went to Seed’s website to see if it was, I found this instead: a conversation between David Byrne and Daniel Levitin, another scientist who has also studied music’s relationship with the brain. I’ve heard great things about his book This is Your Brain on Music, and I might just make it a twofer when I hit the bookstore next week. From their conversation:

David Byrne: When somebody tells us what this song is about, or what this painting is about, we're kind of stuck because talking about the art, and the art itself, are almost separate areas. The music seems to have straight access to the so-called "reptile brain," and we feel it immediately. But often it's also touching all kinds of other parts of the brain. If it has lyrics, there's language in it. If it has a strong rhythmic element it's touching what you would call the motor parts of the brain and muscle. All kinds of stuff is involved. How do you think this all happens?

Daniel Levitin: My guess is it starts with trying to unite rationality with irrationality.

DB: I'll bet you get resistance too from people who say you can't analyze this.

DL: Well, I remember a quote from Allan Watts, the philosopher. He wrote a number of books on Eastern philosophy in the 70s. He said that the problem with science is that when it wants to study the river, the scientist will go to the river with a bucket, take a bucket of water out, bring it to the shore, sit there, and study the bucket of water. But of course that's not the river.

And you know a lot of people have tried to study music by getting rid of everything except pitch or everything except rhythm. Or by using very strange, computer-generated sounds, to see what the brain does in response to them.

There's always this tension in science that you want to control your variables and you want to know what it is you're studying. And yet you want to have what we call ecological validity, which is just a fancy way to say it has to be like the real world. There's a tension between these two, and I've erred on the side of having ecological validity in my own experiments because I want to see the real phenomena.

You can read the edited conversation here, or you can watch the hour-long video here.

Previously on pgwp: Noise Solution—researchers in London are using MRI scanners to measure "positive soundscapes" within the urban environment: what could this mean for urban design and/or public sound art?

Greene for the Weekend

Three Graham Greene posts in a week. Even for me that's a little much. But this morning both Maud Newton and Ed Champion noted this article in the Independent, about the discovery of audio tapes of some never-before-heard Graham Greene radio interviews. In the broadcasts Greene discusses his time in Indochina, smoking opium, and is writing habits, and also reads from a work-in-progress which eventually became The Quiet American. The broadcasts will be released in the U.K. next week as a CD released by the British Library, part of a series that also includes audio tracks by Beckett, Shaw, Wells, and others. The article includes an exerpt from the interviews, featuring Greene discussing his novel Brighton Rock.

The article also mentions one of my favorite Greene anecdotes, which relates to when he was the editor for the short-lived magazine Night and Day. Greene wrote film reviews for the magazine, and in an article about Shirley Temple, who was nine, he went on and on about how she must actually be an adult midget and fully aware of the coquettish sexuality she puts across on screen. Well, he got sued by the movie studio for libel, and lost. He heard that he'd lost the case while traveling in Mexico and wrote to a friend "Apparently I've got to apologize to that bitch Shirley Temple."

Recent posts by yours truly on Graham Greene:

Why Hitchcock and Greene never collaborated
Greene recycling his own material in A Gun for Sale
How Journey Without Maps changed Greene's writing style

Graham Greene: A Gun for Sale or, Mining the Archives

[Note: if you're looking for more posts on the novels of Graham Greene, click here.]

Reading A Gun For Sale, Graham Greene’s first “entertainment”—a self-categorized segment of his oeuvre that describes straight-up thrillers supposedly with no real “literary” ambition—I’m reminded of Alfred Hitchcock once more. Not in the way I’ve already described, but in Greene’s recycling of his own material. Just as Hitchcock had numerous shootouts in crowded theaters (The 39 Steps, Saboteur, The Man Who Knew to Much), or placed his climaxes atop tourist attractions (Saboteur again, and North by Northwest), A Gun For Sale sees Greene revisiting two of his own more thrilling scenes. Approaching the novel’s climax, Greene starts an integral chapter by replicating a scene from Orient Express, and concludes the chapter by revising the best moment in The Man Within.

In A Gun for Sale, Anne—a second-rate chorus girl—is mixed up with Raven, a mercenary killer whose recent job may spark a world war. On the run from the police, the two hole up in a shed in the middle of the night. The shed is filled with sacks of grain, which they use to keep warm in the cold night.

Raven groped through the dark of the small shed till he had found the sacks. He piled them up, shaking them as one shakes a pillow. He whispered anxiously: ‘You’ll be able to rest there a bit?’ Anne let his hand guide her to the corner. She said, ‘It’s freezing.’

The scene is set up almost exactly as one from Orient Express, in which Coral—a second-rate chorus girl—is mixed up with Dr. Czinner, a political exile hoping to return to Hungary to lead a revolution. On the run from authorities, the two hole up in a shed in the middle of the night, fallen snow all around outside. Czinner has already been shot. The shed, as in A Gun for Sale, is filled with sacks of grain, which Coral “pulled… down from the pile and made a kind of cave large enough to shelter them, piling the sacks at the entrance, so that no one could see them from the door.”

In both books, the authorities are not far off. They circle Raven’s shed but refrain from storming the entrance for fear of harming Anne, who they view as a hostage and don’t realize she sympathizes with Raven. Instead, they choose to wait them out, forcing the two to remain in the shed overnight. In Orient Express, the authorities pass torches through the shed but see no one, moving ahead in their chase. Coral remains with Czinner in the shed overnight, waiting for him to die from his gunshot wound. Czinner, hot with fever, hallucinates his way through the night:

His mind became confused, and soon it was falling through endless space…. His mother and father bobbed at him their seamed thin faces, followed him through the ether, past the rush of stars, telling him that they were glad and grateful, that he had done what he could, that he had been faithful. He was breathless and could not answer them, tugged downward in great pain by gravity. He wanted to say to them that he had been damned by his faithfulness, that one must lean this way and that, but he had to listen all the way to their false comfort, falling and falling in great pain.

“Damned by his faithfulness”: it’s a pretty good summation of the core of many of Greene’s novels—an anger at one’s inability to reject one’s own beliefs, one own choices. In Czinner’s case it his faith in his political beliefs. For Coral, it is her love of Myatt, the businessman she met on the train, who had failed to rescue her but did manage to rescue Grünlich, the murderer.

But she knew too well that it was her nature, she was born so and she must make the best of it. She would be a fumbler at the other game; relentless when she ought to be weak, forgiving when she ought to be hard. Even now she could not dwell long with envy and admiration at the thought of Grünlich driving away into the dark beside Myatt; her thoughts returned with stupid fidelity to Myatt himself… But she was aware all the time that there was no quality in Myatt to justify her fidelity; it was just that she was like that and he had been kind. She wondered for a moment whether Dr. Czinner’s case was not the same; he had been too faithful to people who could have been served better by cunning. She heard his difficult breathing through the dark and thought again without bitterness or criticism, it just doesn’t pay.

Stuck in their own shed, Raven and Anne have a conversation that tackles similar themes:

Anne said: ‘I’m awake.’ She said defensively, ‘I was just praying.’
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anne said. ‘Sometimes maybe. It’s a habit, praying. It doesn’t do any harm. It’s like crossing your fingers when you walk under a ladder. We all need any luck that’s going.’
Raven said, ‘We did a lot of praying in the home. Twice a day, and before meals too.’
‘It doesn’t prove anything.’
‘No, it doesn’t prove anything. Only you get sort of mad when everything reminds you of what’s over and done with. Sometimes you want to begin fresh, and then someone praying, or a smell, or something you read in the paper, and it’s all back again, the places and people.’

Both Czinner and Raven feel a kind of anger that their choices have led to this point—here in a shed, in the cold, with an innocent chorus girl by their side, and the realization that they are condemned.

Finally Czinner dies, and at daybreak the innocent Coral walks out of the shed with little left to fear. Raven and Anne’s story is not so easily resolved, however. The police are stationed outside, waiting for them to exit. Lucky for them, a heavy fog sets in. Greene allows Raven to escape his captors by returning to the single most effective scene in his otherwise flawed debut, The Man Within.

In that book, the traitorous Andrews is on the run from his fellow smugglers, led by his father-figure, Carlyon.

He had been walking uphill and now emerged from the thickest fog as from a tunnel. It stood concrete at this back like a white wall…. It was not, however, the mere abstract fear of light which startled Andrews. A tall man, with dark hair uncovered by a hat, stood in the middle of the road. His back was turned and his hands were clasped behind him. Andrews could not mistake the light poise of the legs and shoulders that seemed to symbolize a spirit on tiptoe…. Andrews half shifted a foot and the shoulders in front of him stiffened. He remembered a remark that Carlyon had once made to him, prompted by sudden friendliness, ‘I’d know your step, Andrews, in a thousand.’

The scene is one of the most tense and most thrilling Greene has written. Andrews is standing just a few feet from his pursuer, masked simply by a thick fog. All he can do is remain silent and hope that Carlyon and the nearby crew do not realize he is there.

Andrews, moving as softly as he was able, took three steps backward and was swallowed in the mist. He waited listening with a racing heart: the sound of its beats he felt would drown any noise there might be. He could no longer see Carlyon and therefore he was certain that Carlyon could not see him. The anxiety that pecked at his nerve was the uncertainty whether or not Carlyon had recognized his tread.

The silent standoff goes on for pages. Carlyon does sense that Andrews is there and calls his name, but Andrews remains silent. Finally, Andrews senses that Carlyon and the others have moved on, and he stands alone in the fog.

Greene must have thought highly of this scene, which stands out as a truly gripping moment in an otherwise terrible novel. Perhaps, himself disliking his debut novel, Greene felt the need to rescue this scene from its original, overwrought plot. Thus a fog rolls in to surround Raven and Anne’s shed, clouding the vision of Saunders, who leads the many policemen who have been camped outside of the shed since the night before, waiting for Raven to emerge. With the fog as their cover, Anne dons Raven’s trench coat and runs out of the shed, drawing the police to the dark shape passing through the fog so that Raven escapes in the dense soup without notice.

‘The door’s opening.’ Saunders put his whistle in his mouth and lowered his safety catch. The light was bad and the fog deceptive; but he recognized the dark coat as it slipped to the right into the shelter of the coal trucks…. It was impossible to see at all more than twenty feet ahead. But Saunders kept doggedly just in sight blowing his whistle continuously…. They had him cornered, and this Saunders knew was the dangerous moment.

Except that the reader knows that this was not a dangerous moment, for we already know that the dark coat is Anne. There is an artificial thrill of wondering whether the police will inadvertently kill Anne, but simple knowledge of how rote thrillers work tells us that she will not be hurt.

Thus the scene, unfortunately, hardly works as well as in The Man Within—chiefly because it is told from the point of view of Saunders, who only sees Anne. Raven, who is in much greater danger and must move through the scene with delicacy and daring, is absent from the scene altogether. All of the tension that made Andrews’s escape so thrilling in The Man Within is deflated in A Gun For Sale, since the reader knows from the get-go that Saunders has been duped.

Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock: It Wasn't Meant to Be

Readers of pgwp know of my ongoing obsession with Graham Greene—I’ve been working my way through his bibliography for the better part of 2007—but did you also know that I’m equally obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock? Slowly but surely I’ve been watching all of his movies—not in order, though one day I’d like to. So you can imagine I was quite excited by AMC’s “7 Nights of Hitchcock” last week. I was able to catch many that I hadn’t seen before (Saboteur, Marnie, Frenzy, and Torn Curtain) as well as revel in my old favorites (among others, Vertigo and Rear Window—by the way, I have a similar must-see-everything obsession with Jimmy Stewart).

I’ve been thinking about both Greene and Hitchcock together lately. The more Greene novels I read, the more I think Hitch might have done something great with one of them. I’ve already noted that the atmosphere of The Man Within reminded me of Jamaica Inn, an early Hitchcock (made in 1939, ten yeas after The Man Within was published). Likewise Orient Express was positively cinematic in its execution—and I don’t think it takes much effort to imagine that Hitchcock could have made a fantastic mystery-on-a-train with that material.

Wishful thinking aside, many of Greene’s “entertainments” really do seem to have very Hitchcockian plots. A Gun for Sale, for instance, is about a hired killer who is exposed by the very people who hired him, so he’s on the run from the cops while hunting the “real” criminals down—looking for personal justice but also uncovering more nefarious plans. Of course, a beautiful woman gets involved, and the novel reaches its climax during a town-wide safety drill which requires every citizen to wear gas masks. It’s a brilliant set piece Hitchcock could have had a blast with. (Instead, it was butchered in the 1942 noir This Gun for Hire, which transplanted the action from England to California and from a small town filled with gas-masked citizens to an employee drill in a Los Angeles factory. How a director could reject the opportunity to show a young paperboy riding his bike up a desolate street, wearing a gas mask, I'll never understand.)

But apparently Greene thought Hitchcock was tremendously overrated. Greene actually met Hitchcock while Hitch was making Sabotage—a movie based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which is possibly noteworthy since Conrad was one of Greene’s favorite novelists, and The Secret Agent influenced Greene's own writing.  According to Norman Sherry's biography, Greene wrote his brother Hugh,

I had to see Hitchcock, the other day... A silly harmless clown. I shuddered at the things he told me he was doing to Conrad's Secret Agent.

Upon the movie's release, as a film critic for The Spectator, he elaborated on his feelings for the director:

His films consist of a series of small “amusing” melodramatic situations: the murderer’s button dropped on the baccarat board; the strangled organist’s hands prolonging the notes in the empty church; the fugitives hiding in the bell-tower when the bell begins to swing. Very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities) and then drops them: they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.

Greene apparently found Hitchcock’s lack of subtlety to be akin to a lack of real talent. There’s no real arguing that many of Hitchcock’s movies are designed to end in stunning set pieces—look no further than North by Northwest, the entire plot of which was apparently written with the express purpose of reaching its climax atop Mount Rushmore. Yet the same could be said for A Gun For Sale—let's face it: filling a town with men, women, and children in gas masks is no more of a "'tricky situation" than hanging Cary Grant from George Washington's nose. It's obviously an image devised at the expense of naturalistic plot.

It's too bad, because I really can't think of a novelist and filmmaker better suited for each other. And perhaps their similarities are no accident. Their careers both started in the 1920s and lasted into the 1970s, and they both hit their creative and commercial peaks at the exact same time. On one level or another, it’s quite possible that Greene influenced Hitchcock, despite Greene’s own dislike of the director’s work. Indeed, at some point—I assume in the early 1960s, shortly after the novel’s release—Hitchcock apparently tried to get the rights to A Burnt-Out Case, but Greene wouldn’t allow it, according to this Times article from the 1980s:

“I have not got all that much admiration for Hitchcock. He was offering a rather derisory sum and announced that he had bought it so I said no,” Mr Greene confessed.

Assuming that had happened in the early 60s, and compounded by Greene’s reviews of Hitchcock’s early films, it might explain Hitchcock’s awkwardly mum answers to questions by Bryan Forbes in this interview from 1967:

BF: Am I right in saying that you have never worked with Graham Greene?
AH: No. Never.
BF: Do you regret that?
AH: I don't know. It's very hard to say until you put the thing into practice. It's very difficult to tell.
BF: I think he has so many affinities with you that I'd love to see you two come together.
AH: Yes.
BF: I think he's such a superb craftsman.
AH: Oh yes, he is.
BF: And he writes on the page. He visualises so well. All his sentences just grip you. I'd love to bring you together. If you ever come to ABC, it's you and Graham Greene.
AH: Right. Good.

Based on such taciturn answers, it's hard to really know what Hitchcock thought of Greene—though he had to have known what Greene thought of him.

Watching Psycho this weekend, however, I couldn’t help but see a connection. Psycho is, incidentally, one of my least favorite Hitchcock movies; I think it’s terrifically overrated, except for the one specific thing the movie is hailed for—Hitchcock’s move to set Janet Leigh up as the protagonist, only to kill her off in the first act and flip the story to follow Anthony Perkins. It’s an ingenious move—and by the way, one that Greene had already done at least twice in his novels. Most explicitly is Brighton Rock, which from page one seems to be about Hale, a reporter who immediately realizes he is being hunted in Brighton. He meets a nameless boy early on who threatens his life, then disappears. The rest of the chapter is all Hale, looking for a way to evade the mobsters gradually surrounding him. He befriends a woman, Ida,  so that he won’t be found alone. It all seems like the classic setup for a Greene entertainment—or, for that matter, a Hitchcock flick—until Ida wanders off to the bathroom and Hale is never heard from again. From chapter two onward, the book belongs to that boy, Pinkie, the villain—just as Psycho belongs to Norman Bates. Greene employed the same trick (though in a less sinister fashion) in The Power and the Glory, which begins as if it will be about Mr. Tench, the dentist. The first chapter is his star turn, as he looks out at the pier and wiles away his time in desolate southern Mexico. Like Hale, he encounters a nameless man—this time a priest—who quickly disappears. When chapter two begins, it’s the priest, not Tench, who the cameras, as it were, have chosen to follow.

Hitchcock’s film is regarded as a classic in large part because he dared to do something that hadn’t been done in film before (actually, Antonioni’s L’Avventura does the same thing, but it came out the same year as Psycho so couldn’t have been an influence), but it’s precisely something Greene had dared to do in fiction, more than once, more than twenty years earlier.

Ultimately I find it downright bewildering that Greene and Hitchcock never came together. Greene's distaste for Hitchcock is particularly strange given his own willingness to write what he called "entertainments," as opposed to those works he felt had more literary aspirations. He clearly wasn't too good to write novels that hinged on gunplay and chorus girls rather than larger, philosophical themes, and he was certainly not above cashing a paycheck. To know that there was even a glimmer of a chance in the 1960s for Hitchcock to actually make a film based on one of Greene's novels is all the worse. Greene has gone on record as being disappointed by most of his film adaptations, including those by filmmakers he admired (see Otto Preminger's The Human Factor). Who knows: maybe Hitchcock would've been just what Green was looking for.

Journey Without Maps Addendum

A day or so after my previous post, I took up Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene, which I've been reading concurrently as I trek through Greeneland. I was pleased to see that both of my assumptions outlined in that post—that Greene's Liberian journey spawned an indeliable link for him between the acts of writing and traveling, and that the form of writing a travelogue informed his overall skill—were validated through a couple of anecdotal passages. Of the latter assumption, there was this passage:

His letters to his mother, to [his brother] Hugh, and to literary agents, his articles, book and film reviews, after he had established himself in London, all reveal a growing sense of confidence, and one wonders whether this was not in part due to the fact that he had, in Liberia, experienced what few of his contemporaries in London had experienced: he had undertaken a journey into the unknown, come close to the primitive origins of mankind, journeyed without maps and had, like those who had survived the horrors of the First World War, come through—by means of his own determination and grit. Certainly, he now had a surge of creative energy which was nothing short of phenomenal.

Of course it's not difficult to look at a list of Greene's books and see, quite simply, that all of his best-known novels followed right after Journey Without Maps—obviously something happened. But I'm encountering most of Greene's novels in succession; I've read a few of the later novels but I've been trying to put them to the back of my mind as I follow his development. So my experience of Journey was really the sense of "hey, the writer of England Made Me was developing," as opposed to the sense of "here's where the writer of The Quiet American got his shit together"—know what I mean? This passage from Sherry let's me know that I'm not imagining things.

As to the other point—that Greene essentially caught the travel bug and, consciously or not, entwined it with his fiction writing—this anecdote was both entertaining and insightful to that end. To set the scene: Greene at this point was still writing Journey Without Maps and A Gun for Sale, while England Made Me had just come out—to lackluster reception. Greene, with his agent Nancy Pearn, was soliciting numerous magazines with short stories and pitches for stories, and not always meeting with success. He was very close to finishing both his works in progress, but he also had a wife and two children and income was an issue. Pearn suggested giving a pitch for a story to the News Chronicle.

With so much on hand Greene might well have let the suggestion of a synopsis for the News Chronicle sleep awhile. Not so. The day after promising to think abut a story he produced a synopsis called “Miss Mitton in Moscow” and coupled it with the astonishing idea that he should leave for Moscow, almost immediately, his urgent deadlines for his two books notwithstanding: “Here is the synopsis of a 10,000 word story for the News Chronicle. If they feel inclined to commission it, could you hurry up their decision, as I want to get in the background and the satirical description of the tourists, as it were, on the spot. In other words, will they make up their minds so that I can book a seat for Moscow to leave in ten days!”

It is strange that on the suggestion of a commission for a serial Greene was willing to drop everything and go to Moscow. It could not be because the synopsis promised a brilliant story, yet he was prepared to follow his star to Moscow, chasing after background for a story about a bored, disillusioned journalist meeting up with an old lady’s naïvety and excitement in visiting Moscow for the first time; of how her absurdities become a topic of conversation; of how he has to help her out of the country ahead of the other tourists as she had tried the Moscow authorities too much; only to discover, when he finds himself to be a central figure in an advertised Soviet Trial that Miss Mitton was a dye expert and had carried out a smart piece of commercial espionage.

The literary editor of the News Chronicle liked the synopsis and asked the see the first instalment, which Nancy Pearn thought encouraging, but this was not sufficient for Greene: “I explained it was dependent on a definite decision within ten days. The boat’s sailed now & there’s not another till the spring. Besides it’s a costly business & I wouldn’t take the trip without a definite commission. So we’ll have to wait for another story to come to mind.

Graham Greene: Journey Without Maps

[A lot of people seem to be finding my Graham Greene posts via Google, so I hope my regular readers will forgive the repetition of this first bit (probably my regular readers just scroll past anyway—be honest, you just want me to keep writing about Feist): I've tasked myself with reading all of Graham Greene's books in succession. If you're curious to read my thoughts on any of Greene's other novels, click here and see if I've gotten to it yet. ]

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Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene's nonfiction travelogue recounting his audacious 1935 trip through Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, is like a wedge shoved deep into his oeuvre. While it is not the book that catapulted him from merely popular novelist to lasting literary influence, it nonetheless signals a shift in his ability as a writer. The seeds of his talent have been present in his last few novels, but the experience of Africa—and the way he wrote about it—feel as if someone has put those seeds in the path of direct sunlight.

Greene has come to be known for novels in which his (usually British) protagonists exist in foreign, underdeveloped—hot—beautiful landscapes: The Quiet American in Vietnam; The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case in Africa; The Power and the Glory in Mexico; The Comedians in Haiti; and so on. All of those novels came later. Prior to his trip to Africa, Greene’s first four (actually six) novels all took place in England or, I suggest, ostensible stand-ins for England. The Man Within and It’s a Battlefield both take place inside the country. Orient Express follows a largely British cast (save the Yugoslavian Dr. Czinner and the Austrian Grünlich), but the novel exists outside of any one country as it travels across Europe. The characters exist in a self-contained bubble. Likewise England Made Me concerns itself mostly with twin siblings Anthony and Kate Farrant, Brits who have taken up in Stockholm; but the majority of the action occurs in the context of the global corporation they work for, Krogh’s, a company which conducts its business in English. The Stockholm setting is largely arbitrary; Anthony’s struggle has more to do with his placement within the company than it  does within a foreign city. And of course, the title alone should tip you off that Sweden is not the country Greene is most concerned with.

It’s no surprise that Greene had yet to bring the exotic locations into his novels—though his tentative fictional forays out of England in those two novels (plus Anthony Farrant’s background as someone who had lived in Shanghai, Aden, and elsewhere) do point to some inevitable desire to place his characters outside of the familiar. No surprise, because Greene was a realist writer; from the very beginning he’s had to experience his locations in order to write about them, whether walking from the outskirts of Lewes into its center for The Man Within or taking a weekend trip to Stockholm for England Made Me; and as of 1935 that was essentially the extent of his traveling experience. Paul Theroux’s introduction to Journey Without Maps (which incidentally is a worthy read after you’ve finished the book—he calls bullshit on much of what Greene writes of) spells it out:

[Greene] had hardly traveled. He had made jaunts out of England, but in a hilarious, weekending way, and had never ventured beyond Europe. He knew nothing of Africa, had never camped or slept rough or been on a long sea voyage or a long hike of any consequence—certainly not a trek through the bush. Probably influenced by the journeys his friends and contemporaries were taking, he got it into his head to hike with porters and carriers through an unmapped part of the Liberian hinterland; he did not know exactly how many miles he would have to walk , or how long it would take, or what his actual route would be.

Much odder than this vagueness—to me, at any rate... was Greene's decision to take his young female cousin Barbara with him. She was twenty-three, she had never been anywhere, she'd had a privileged upbringing, she was not much of a walker.

In other words, Greene really had no business attempting this journey. But he did accomplish it—suffering fever along the way—and he considered it a life-changing experience.

Journey Without Maps is a dramatic act on Greene’s part to bring the far corners—the desperate corners—of the world into his realm of experience, and therefore into his writing. Besides being a realist, he was also a devotee of Joseph Conrad, and many other contemporaries (Waugh, for instance) were making similar African pilgrimages in Conrad’s footsteps. On one level, at least, Greene’s trip is a naïve rite of passage—more an attempt to acquire a level of “experience” any novelist worth his salt should have than a conscious act to “change” his fiction. In fact the Liberian trip didn’t factor into his fiction at all, other than a short story, “A Chance for Mr. Lever.” Nevertheless Greene’s subsequent travels, often as ambitious as the Liberian episode, did factor directly into his novels. Within three years he was riding a mule through Mexico, which resulted in the nonfiction Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and the Glory. Soon he would return to Africa, to Sierra Leone, where he lived for a year; here he set The Heart of the Matter. Later in life he would return to Africa a third time with the express mission of researching for A Burnt-Out Case, which takes place in a leper colony.

But I think what may separate Greene’s pre-Journey novels from those that came after is more significant than mere scene setting. Looking back at the pre-Journey novels, all but Orient Express are flawed; they each seem to occupy themselves with a preconceived theme that stamps its way across every page at the expense of realism (in The Man Within), character (It’s a Battlefield), or form (England Made Me—which includes odd forays into stream-of-consciousness interior monologues)—in other words, much of what Greene is best remembered for. Journey, by its very nature, could not suffer in the same way. Greene didn’t know what to expect. All he could do was record what he saw and reflect as went. Thus the heat of Africa and its lush greenery, the natives’ nakedness and alternately strange, stoic, or childlike behavior, became the bulk of the book’s content, colored at every turn by Greene’s very real emotions—anxiety, anticipation, exhaustion, homesickness. After reading the pre-Journey novels, where melodrama frequently forced its way into a scene to derail its believability, Journey Without Maps reads to me almost like a disciplinary exercise for Greene—he couldn’t insert melodrama; he was forced instead to rely on its more subtle cousin, tension. I’ll bet that its no accident that, regardless of their settings, Greene’s string of best-regarded novels followed nearly one after the other directly after Journey Without Maps (not including the noir thriller A Gun for Sale, which was written simultaneously with Journey)—Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American. The fact that England-set Brighton Rock was the first in that succession indicates that exotic scene setting was not the first or only lesson Greene learned through his trip or through the writing of Journey Without Maps.

Graham Greene: It's a Battlefield

I’ve been slow to post on It’s a Battlefield, Graham Greene’s third novel. I’ve been finished with it for about a month and am now well into his next, England Made Me. My laziness in writing about it is probably a good indication of how I felt about it. Not bad, but not great, either. The novel is conceptually interesting, but it never congeals into a successful work. Its most dramatic moments feel like rewarmed scenes from his previous novels—the love triangle recalls The Man Within, while the business-as-usual conclusion is similar to that of the far superior Orient Express.

The novel’s central character is Jim Drover, who has been imprisoned for the murder of a policeman during a riot (the policeman was going to strike Drover’s wife). However, Drover never appears in the book—not a single scene. (Interestingly, Norman Sherry’s biography implies that Greene wrote numerous prison scenes but cut them all out.) Instead the book concerns itself with all the characters who are satellites of Drover’s current situation—his brother Conrad, his wife Milly, and her sister Kay; the Assistant Commissioner of police; Conder, a reporter; Mr. Surrogate, a member of the local communist chapter (of which Drover was a member); and a few others.

So, like Orient Express, this is an ensemble novel, no one character taking control. But where that novel was so concise, so gripping, It’s a Battlefield is a muddle. It makes you wonder how Greene was able to keep things so perfectly paced and plotted in Orient Express, how he was able to keep all his characters so well-drawn, when he more or less failed in this same respect here. Perhaps it is because the very nature of Orient Express entwined with a linear progression toward a climax. The train moved forward, and characters could only enter and exit the story when the train stopped. It’s a Battlefield is much looser, more tangential. There are more characters, for one; many are given just a few pages or a single chapter, such as the policeman’s wife. But even those that are more directly tied to Drover’s fate are given a rather democratic number of pages, to the point that much of their dramatic arcs are suppressed. When the promiscuous Kay takes a date with Jules, for instance, the heart behind their engagement is deflated. The chapter is told from Jules’s perspective, an otherwise minor character whom the reader has nothing invested in.

More drama is found in the love triangle between Drover and his wife and brother, Milly and Conrad. The entire relationship reads like The Man Within version 2.0—thankfully a subplot this time around rather than an entire novel. In that book, Andrews was torn between his love for the virtuous (in his eyes) Elizabeth and his father figure, Carlyon, leader of a band of smugglers. Like Drover, Carlyon was largely offstage for most of The Man Within, as Andrews internally wrestled with whether he should love a man who represented so much that Andrews loathed about himself and his childhood—not to mention who he had already betrayed. In truth “love triangle” is not really the correct term—perhaps “allegiance triangle” would be more apt. Similarly, Conrad is drawn to Milly, who he feels is saintlike, yet is torn over his feelings for his brother, who may be sentenced to death or may be given eighteen years in prison. Conrad has always looked up to Jim, and cannot process that what Jim did was actually wrong; yet a part of Conrad wants Jim to die so that he can be with Milly forever.

Ultimately Conrad betrays his brother by consummating his relationship with Milly. But like Andrews in The Man Within, the further Conrad gets, physically, from his love, the less he feels its effects and the more his allegiance to his brother grows. The same can be said for Andrews and Elizabeth in The Man Within;  when Andrews heads for the city he quickly falls into bed with another woman, and when he returns to Elizabeth but is outside her house when the smugglers arrive, cowardice overpowers love. Likewise, in Orient Express, the romance at the novel’s center disintigrates when it is forced apart by physical separation; once Carlton and Coral are separated, Carlton simply goes on with his life.

It’s a Battlefield is full of other themes as well, not least of which is socialism and Communism. This too appeared in Orient Express, in the form of Dr. Czinner. In that novel all of Greene’s thoughts on the matter were expressed directly through Czinner. With It’s a Battlefield (and his next novel, England Made Me), Greene spends more time painting an entire landscape filled with political unrest, whether in the form of actual members of the Communist party in It’s a Battlefield or in allowing the stark class divisions in that book and in England Made Me to speak for themselves. It’s interesting that Greene would come to be known as a “Catholic writer,” for in these early books religion makes scant appearance. According to Norman Sherry’s biography, Greene did join the Communist Party in Great Britain when he was twenty years old. However he paid his dues for just four weeks before lapsing. Obviously Greene had some continued sympathy, or at least fascination, for the workers, though it’s unclear to me whether he was committed in reality or if it was simply a newsworthy issue of the day.

Mingering Mike on NPR

I posted once before about Mingering Mike, but now that the book is officially on shelves I thought I'd plug it one more time. NPR's Day to Day did a two-part story on Mike: the first part is an interview with the book's author, Dori Hadar; the second is with Mingering Mike himself. It's really great to hear the story told this way; for one, you get to hear some of the actual songs in the background, plus this is the first time I've heard the story from Mike's mouth.

But of course the best way to get the full story—and to see all the great artwork—is to buy the book. I was the book's editor, so I've read it just shy of 183 times, but I can tell you that the more time you spend with the story and looking at all the details on the album art, the more endearing the whole thing becomes.

The Hummingbird's Daughter

The only book I read this year that wasn't by Graham Greene was the altogether excellent Hummingbird's Daugher, by Luis Alberto Urrea. Going into the book all I really knew was that there was a "mystical" element to the book, which led me to assume it would be Garcia Marquez-like magical realism. But it really is its own animal. It's quietly epic, with wonderfully drawn characters down to the most minor or incidental, and does a great job of blending true history, vivid imagery, and masterful storytelling. Highly recommended if you haven't read it already.

If you have read it, then get yourself over to Readerville, where we'll all be discussing the book throughout the month of May. Join the discussion or just lurk—there's sure to be some insight.

[For those not familiar—you do have to register, for free, to access the content at Readerville. Once you've done so you can lurk or post to your heart's content. They do ask for a monthly donation, but it's just that, so don't let it scare you off if you've never poked around there.]

Graham Greene: Orient Express

At age 29, Graham Greene was already publishing his fourth novel, Orient Express (also known as Stamboul Train). Perhaps it’s no wonder that his previous three novels were not that great; broadly speaking, it’s common that a novelist in his or her early or mid-twenties might not have settled on his or her own voice or style. But as one grows older, giving one’s craft time to develop, the grasp on nuance, subtlety, and tone becomes more firm. Orient Express finds Greene taking on an ensemble cast and a third-person omniscient perspective—the opposite of his near-claustrophobic debut. Where The Man Within could work easily as a play—you’d need no more than three sets and a cast of three main players—Orient Express is decidedly more filmic, which is not surprising given Greene’s love of the cinema.

You can almost see the credits rolling at the beginning of the book, as it opens at a train station in Ostend, where a purser helps a succession of distinct character types aboard the train: a young chorus girl, a wealthy Jew, and a mysterious mustachioed doctor. We meet each of these characters—Coral Musker, Carleton Myatt, and Dr. Czinner—from the perspective of a detached character who knows nothing but what he sees. This announces a new tack for Greene and sets the tone for the rest of the book, even as we get to know the characters better: Greene paints their disposition through their actions and appearance rather than their innermost thoughts. It’s a Creative Writing 101 lesson, but Greene didn’t really seem to embrace it until now. It also suits the mystery element of the novel. Immediately there are clues to take in, about the doctor in particular. The purser is surprised to learn that the doctor has an English passport, despite a noticeable accent. When Myatt encounters him later, he notes that the man’s clothes are torn and worn—not the clothing a man of means would wear.

Orient Express is most definitely working within a subgenre, the train mystery. Think Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Putting your characters on a train just begs for mystery. But Greene’s mystery is not one of murder (though there is a murderer); it has more to do with identities, with a certain freedom from your own life you can enjoy while traveling. So long as your feet are not on solid ground, you can be whoever you like. Dr. Czinner is the first and most obvious example. He boards the train as Dr. Richard John, a schoolteacher from England. But we learn soon enough that he is actually a political exile returning to his home of Belgrade. As the train makes its three-day journey to Constantinople, stopping in Cologne, Vienna, and Subotica along the way, more passengers board the train, and each wear their masks. Josef Grünlich, who boards in Vienna, is a murder on the lam, so of course he hides his identity. The author Q. T. Savory has banked his career on appearing as a working-class Cockney, though the reporter Mabel Warren finds him transparent. Warren, who is a butch lesbian, suspects her lover, the beautiful, feminine, and fairly vacant Janet Pardoe, to be looking for a new sugar daddy (she’s tired of her sugar mommy, apparently); so Warren herself sets her sights on Coral Musker as new girl-toy. All of this speaks to an anything-goes mentality that only feels natural in the limbo of the locomotive.

This theme is played out in the relationship that serves as the heart of the novel, that of Myatt and Coral. This is the most tentative romance I’ve ever read; their entire relationship is built on mixed signals and misunderstood overtures—if ever two people fell in love, it’s these two. It is alternately awkward, sweet, creepy, noble, and cruel. Coral is a struggling chorus girl, flawed because she is “forgettable.” She is too plain to ever be a leading lady. Myatt meanwhile is a rich Jew, in an often unfortunately stereotypical sense. For reasons of both class and culture, the two should never meet nor fall in love. At first Myatt reminds Coral of any other Jew she’s ever met—they stand outside the stage door waiting to take her out; and after their first encounter Myatt has a dream in which he and a friend are driving down a boulevard looking for prostitutes and he chooses Coral. But nevertheless their lives intertwine on the train. Coral has a fainting spell so Myatt lets her sleep in his first-class berth; he sleeps in the hall. She suspects him but nevertheless takes him up on the offer. The following morning he buys another first-class berth for her out of charity. But she assumes he expects some quid pro quo. Still, she takes him up on it. When she alludes to his expectations he denies it, but now that the thought is in his mind, they do set a date for that evening after all. Both seem to approach the night with dread, despite spending the day together on the train. By the night, she’s declared her love for him; when Myatt realizes Coral is a virgin, their sexual act becomes more noble in his mind, and he too declares his love for her. They make plans to remain together once they’ve reached their destination. But of course, Constantinople is an actual place. It’s not limbo.

The other lead in the novel is Dr. Czinner, a Communist who narrowly escaped arrest and certain death five years previous and has never been heard from since. He is on his way back to Belgrade to lead an uprising. Unfortunately for him he is recognized by Mabel Warren. Warren is a fascinating character. She has the briefest ride on the train—she gets on at the second stop and is left behind at the third—yet she sets Czinner’s story in motion and plays a less direct but significant role in Myatt and Coral’s story as well. Greene has a great knack for making colorful and memorable characters out of people who occupy only a small number of pages—I’m thinking of Mr. Tench in The Power and the Glory or Albert Parkis in The End of the Affair. Warren is an alcoholic lesbian with major co-dependence issues. She’s full of spite and loathing and has the tenacity of a terrier. She is positive that Czinner is returning to Belgrade and bullies him into a story for her newspaper. He doesn’t cooperate beyond uttering a few words, but she publishes her story via phone from Vienna, and by the time he reaches Subotica the police and military are waiting.

Subotica, a town on the border of Hungary and Yugoslavia, is the penultimate chapter of the novel and is the real climax. The action leaves the train as Czinner is pulled for questioning—along with Grünlich and Coral (perhaps not incidentally, the most depraved and most pure-hearted of all the characters). This is the moment when the novel becomes a true potboiler, as the trio makes a daring escape after being found guilty of various crimes. This is also the moment where you realize Greene is better, more deft, than the preceding pages might have lulled you to believe. It is a tragedy that Coral has been wrapped up in this portion of the plot, and I didn’t realize until this point just how wrapped up I was in her story. I was screaming at her to stay put, the way you scream at characters on Lost to do the sensible thing.

This novel, like so many of Greene’s books, lives and dies by its plot twists, so forgive me if I become vague. Suffice it to say the fates of Czinner, Grünlich, and Coral are determined at Subotica. But the real tragedy of the book is its coda: Constantinople. This short, twenty-page chapter follows the remaining characters to the end of the line, and the whole thing is a brilliant dagger to the heart. Myatt, of all characters, is the ultimate embodiment of the novel’s theme. The Orient Express is a limbo where you can be whoever you want. But step off that train and your fantasies slough off like water from the shower. We are who we are: it’s a delicious tragedy.