Being Smart Together. - Review - book review

Greene on Capri: A Memoir, by Shirley Hazzard (Farrar, Straus, 149 pp., $22)

An English critic once wrote that some books aren't books at all, but "things in books' clothing."

Graham Greene wrote real books if anyone has in our time. Although dead for nearly ten years, he continues to cast a long shadow. He was co- opted long ago by academics, yet his novels retain a wider public. He has been examined magisterially by one biographer and picked over by others. But biographies these days tend to serve up too much on the plate. One may prefer incisive morsels of insight to the mass of dubiously relevant detail.

Now Shirley Hazzard, a friend of Greene's for over 20 years, and a novelist herself, offers a memoir of exquisite brevity, telling us more about Greene in 150 pages than tomes of footnotes might do. And the story she tells doesn't suffer from being set amid the exotic beauty of the island of Capri.

Set in the Mediterranean off the coast of Naples, Capri was a place where literary and artistic free spirits took refuge, and one where rich people went to be smart together. Greene, a man covetous of his privacy, bought a small house there in 1948 in order to be "away" occasionally. Hazzard and her husband, the critic and translator Francis Steegmuller, came to know him there in the late 1960s after a chance meeting in a restaurant when Hazzard, sitting at a nearby table, capped a line from Browning for which she heard him straining his prodigious memory.

That was a scene, as Hazzard admits, fit for a novel by Graham Greene. But the friendship struck that night, lasting till Greene's death, was genuine. Hazzard does not avow the most intimate knowledge of Greene. Nor does she exploit the relationship to reveal sides of his life or character that remain largely none of our business. Instead she reveals the man without laying him bare. That she does this while still holding the reader rapt is a tribute not only to her subject but to her own literary skill. This is a portrait at once affectionate and keen.

Those of us who enjoy Greene's work while knowing little about him discover a few surprises here, some of them quite gratifying. Given his predilection for the darker sides of human nature, as well as his peculiarly Catholic-if also idiosyncratic-view of sin and guilt, the author of The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, and Brighton Rock was, in his unbuttoned moments, no renegade but a quietly literary man. He lived for words and books. What is for some a bit of ornamental trapping to life was for him of the essence. Hazzard writes that for Greene, literature was "the longest and most consistent pleasure" of an otherwise troubled life.

Poetry, for example, both high and low, flowed through his veins. Greene, though himself a bestselling novelist, was no follower of trends in literature, reading less of contemporary poets and writers as he got older. He preferred the old slippers. Hazzard recalls several incidents when, over drinks or dinner, the band of two or four would delightedly discuss at length one word or line from a favorite poem, swishing it about as they would a fine cabernet. Words mattered. This was a time when literary people, despite their lunacies, were still literary-not just celebrities, but men and women of intellectual power with capacious memories, "beneficiaries of . . . 'the inevitable solace that right language brings.'" There may not be many like them left. Minds were bred differently then, and reading of their casual conversations provides a porthole view on a vanishing world.

Hazzard gives us the Greene of the breakfast or cocktail table. He decries the modernity asserting itself on the island, destroying the old family and seasonal ways. He simmers, still, over the review A. J. Liebling gave The Quiet American in 1956. We discover his high regard for Henry James and Joseph Conrad (which we might have guessed) and for Francis Parkman (which we might not have). We also learn of Greene's unobtrusive generosity to penurious writers, posting off checks in a pinch-acts unexpected in light of his fabled insularity.

Like many another man of extraordinary talent, though, Greene could be a pill. Sometimes a wretched host with a bad temper, he couldn't concede a point in argument, however contrite he was to the offended party the next day. His anti-Americanism in the backwash of Vietnam- usually irrational and, when rational, irrationally expressed-is well known; Hazzard and Steegmuller, both Americans, took his rants good- naturedly. He could be agreeable only on his own terms. Still, even his exasperating traits tend to endear him in the reading, as they seem to have done in life.

His friend Malcolm Muggeridge called the peripatetic Greene one of "nature's displaced persons," congenitally unable to be content in a room-except when working. It was a temperament that wafted him around the world, yearning, in Hazzard's words, "to exchange one kind of unhappiness for another." But it also fueled some of the finest writing of our time. For Greene's best work was always, like that of any great or even good writer, "intuitive of the long echo in human affairs."