'England Made Me'

Graham Greene, as much as any twentieth-century British writer, is a window onto the foreign land of the past. He writes so well about the first part of the century that immersion in any of his books is like a spot of time-travel.

In ‘England Made Me’, pre-Second-World-War Europe is preserved in his special aspic. He does this as well as Orwell, but somehow without the punch. Even though there is a suspected murder in this book, it remains a gentle read.

The story focusses on the relationship between Anthony, a globe-trotting con-man, and his faithful sister Kate. Greene paints a vivid picture of 1930s Stockholm, home of Kate and where she is the mistress of a powerful industrialist and swindler. On several occasions Greene dares to explore the least comfortable aspects of the brother-sister relationship, and the incestuousness of the relationship can at times be troubling.

The most carefully constructed character is Minty, a tired old gossip journalist who sells stories of the rich to scrape a living. At the time of writing Greene was ten years into a long relationship with Catholicism, and some of his own experience is included. Minty is a troubled, pious, jealous, asexual creature.

In this novel Greene also picks through the sexual habits of the pre-War generation, and he is quite frank. It is quite surprising to read a 1970s attitude professed by some of the characters, because it is easy to assume that everyone before the Second World War was straight-laced and well behaved. The opposite was obviously true for some, and Greene takes pleasure in describing it.

It is a modern novel. Europe was being shrunk by the advent of easy air access, and the novelty must have appealed to the author. After so many centuries of struggling along the ground, the modern wealthy Europeans of 1935 thought nothing of taking to the skies to travel quickly from city to city. There has been no significant change in the way we travel in the intervening eighty years, so it is interesting to read about flight at the dawn of a great step forward.

What is absent from ‘England Made Me’ is any reference to the gathering storm. Hitler had been in power for three years but there is no comment about the political situation in Europe. It is interesting to reflect that like so many other people, Greene was either unaware of the dangers in 1935 or unwilling to address them. Indeed, the author delights in a modern Europe that appears untroubled by the flexing of Nazi muscles. His only comments about nationhood hark back to the First World War. I was left wondering how Europe might have developed without Hitler’s attempt to drag everyone back into the dark ages. Greene captures the spirit of co-operative internationalism really well. He is different to Orwell in this respect, who I am sure saw the dark clouds on the horizon before many of his contemporaries.

There is much to learn from re-reading Graham Greene. The main realisation for me is how different the world used to be, and how previous generations would regard us as aliens, even though we occupy the same turf as them. There is nothing more clear about how much the world has changed than the fact that Greene spent many pages of this book writing about cigarettes. Everyone smoked, all of the time. But nobody wasted days gazing a computer screen. How advanced we have become.

'Off to the Side', a memoir by Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison has already lived a full and interesting life, however you decide to measure it. An early interest in hitch-hiking to strange American cities and a desire to make a success of life in New York City in the 1950s meant that by the time he had left his teens he had already racked up enough anecdotes to keep most people happy. Now approaching eighty, he does not seem to have any intention of stopping.

This book is subtitled ‘a memoir’, which is short-hand for a non-chronological effort, unbound by the usual rules of autobiography. It is apparent from the beginning that an autobiography was possible, but the author’s mind pings off in so many directions that he could not marshal his thoughts into a logical order. It is as if he really couldn’t be bothered with the effort of ordering things properly, because there is still so much fun to be had somewhere else. The book is fragmentary and lacks any purpose as a result.

It is a shame because the material that he has to work with is rich. He has been a poet, university teacher, novelist, short story writer, screen writer and Hollywood darling. He has mixed in illustrious circles, and his natural modesty is such that he spends most of the book apologising for his success. The most annoying thing is that a pearl of great insight is always just around the corner. He lived through the sixties on campuses around the USA – but no great conclusion is apparent. He spent time with a range of great and good writers, including Auden and Ginsberg, but the reader is left equally in the dark as to what they were like and what he learned. He has compartmentalised his life to allow for long periods of time in wilderness, but no great satori emerges from all the brooding. I kept turning the pages in the hope that his reflections on his later life would coalesce to form some wisdom, but was disappointed to find that all he had to share was a series of anecdotes about the Hollywood glitterati of the 1970s.

Harrison is a man’s man. He hunts, he shoots, he fishes, and he enjoys French red wine. He suffers from gout because of his love of eating game. He enjoys watching strippers. He has travelled extensively, and is proud of the connections that he has made in Europe, which is uncommon for American writers of his generation. He is unapologetic when describing his loves, which many would call vices. But he does describe and explain, and is honest when he admits that he knows the foolishness of some of his favourite pastimes, and how much like an overgrown schoolboy he must have appeared on many occasions.

The main hole in this book is that he has been sustained through all his adventures by his wife, and she barely gets a mention. She comes across as a two dimensional figure, when in reality she must have had the patience of a saint to support him through all his wanderings. He was good friends with Jack Nicholson, if any proof was needed.

So Harrison paints his life with a broad brush – big wide strokes of colour, but not a lot of detail around the edges. The review quote on the front from the New York Times Book Review calls it ‘a sprawling, impressionistic memoir’. I think it was meant as a complement, but on reading it is a disappointment to discover that the description is entirely correct.