For the Time Being (21 page)

He goes towards them all with arms wide open. Dangerous, you may well think. How many foolhardy, but passionate, people in the business, say, of Religion, have tried this guileless method and ended up simmering away without the Oxo? But Pritchett always seems to win.

He calls the Germans ‘The Secret People', and with reason; he writes in 1964 of the German Experience beginning all over again. The hideous Wall was still intact, the land still divided. But the German, West or East, is implacably the same as ever he was, and he will never change. Innocent, plump and pink, as sugar mice. West and East cry in surprise: ‘Guilt? What Guilt? Why should we feel any guilt for what our parents may have done? Why?'

That was in 1964. Today the dreadful Wall lies in designer-chunks all about the coffee tables of the West, the Brandenburg Gate is now open and it is not only my heart which sinks at the idea of a reunited Germany.

Pritchett's last line of that piece fills one with a sense of acute unease: ‘The most hopeful thing is that this younger generation is at any rate not as sick as the Hitler generation was.'

He writes of sweeter things, particularly of the England he so very clearly loves and knows well and which is so horrifyingly being lost to us. Forget, if you can, the toxic waste, the dying North Sea, the concrete ribbons of traffic, the Ridley-rapes of the housing estates, the caravan parks and the dead villages, home now to stockbrokers, pop stars, designers and their ilk.

Remember it through his eyes: ‘The oak and the ash close in on sudden ravines where fast black streams worry and curdle among the rocks under the old stone bridges. The rhododendron empurples the woods … and the leaves of the woods shine.'

Written in 1958. History almost now. A great deal of water has gone under the stone bridges of Exmoor, but that tiny piece of prose leaves us with the fragment of a memory of an England that
was, once, which some of us have known, and which, if you seek carefully, still manages to exist here and there: somewhere in the woods where ‘the leaves shine'.

This is a perfectly lovely collection: go for it, you'll regret it bitterly if you don't.

Sunday Telegraph,
18 February 1990

The Last Word and Other Stories
by Graham Greene (Reinhardt)

Years ago, my very first literary editor gave me sterling advice: ‘If you cannot find anything agreeable to say about a book I send you, do not review it. No point.' Simple advice. But was he really right? Anyway, I am in a dilemma. My new literary editor has already reprimanded me for declining to review two volumes, not, I hasten to add, because they were books which I disliked but merely because I did not think that I was capable. They were much too advanced for me.

Now I have been sent this collection of short stories,
The Last Word,
written by, without doubt, one of the greatest writers of prose alive today.
2
The book has been submitted to me, I would guess, because it is not very long – 149 pages – and is perfectly simple to read. Surely such a collection should not be beyond my capabilities?

But, alas, I sit and struggle to review Graham Greene's personal selection; I really cannot find anything positively agreeable enough to say about this wistful little cluster of tales. To start with, I cannot help thinking that the price (£11.95) is a bit steep.

Of course the book is stuffed with all the absolute, essential Greenery: I can't deny that. God, of course, religion naturally, South America, spies, wicked generals in unnamed Eastern European countries, and, of course, suburban homes in cosy areas of the Home Counties in which quite unspeakable agonies take place behind the Dulux and Dralon.

There are, as you must expect, the Americans; either sweet and silly, or just naïve and perhaps evil. It is all delicious, familiar ground,
all ready to rediscover. For it is pretty certain that you have been there before. There are, to be sure, echoes of the wondrous works he has given us, like, for example,
The Power and the Glory;
of
The Third Man, Our Man in Havana;
and, from one book which I loved above the others, a purely personal reaction:
The Heart of the Matter;
there are even very distant echoes of
Brighton Rock
but, to be perfectly honest, I realize, writing this, that they are more like whispers than echoes.

Threads of memory tumbled into a mixed ball of silks, a scatter of seed pearls fallen from the garments of an emperor rather than jewels from his crown. And as such they are not to be scorned.

And I do not scorn them: I don't know how I have the temerity to pass judgement on this packet of tales from a mastercraftsman – it's just that when I had finished one I could hear myself say, aloud: ‘Well, so what?' Or, worse still: ‘So what was that all about?' A general feeling of déjà vu and dust.

One story held my attention firmly. Although written as long ago as 1940 and, perhaps, dated, it still has immense power to move and hold one. ‘The News in English' is, in this lot, the very best; far and away more compelling than the title story, which just does not seem to work very well. Perhaps one is over-familiar with the pattern. I don't know, but ‘The News in English' still chills the heart far more than the newer stuff.

‘Murder for the Wrong Reason' is a pretty predictable tale, and I, unlike its author, who read it after some years, twigged the murderer far too early on – Mr Greene says he did not discover ‘who' until the murderer was disclosed.

I find ‘The Lieutenant Died Last' okayish. Rather implausible, not because it is a story of a German parachute landing of troops in modest numbers on an isolated part of the English countryside, but simply because it didn't hold water, it doesn't
feel
true, and it has a rather wobbly end, which makes it all the more irritating.

I am nitpicking: there is still much to admire, and envy even, in this slender book. The scraped-bone economy with words, the coolness, sometimes almost coldness, the instant, tidy descriptions, the very deceptively simple construction going on; but in some
strange way the heart is never really touched, nerves are not shaken; one does not – or at least I did not – set the book aside and say: ‘That is true. I know that feeling, person, place, dilemma.' One is not spellbound.

Perhaps one asks too much? The spellbinding has been going on for a very long time and one should be grateful for the splendours of the past after all. Greed is an ugly vice.

But this is not a book for a long flight to Tokyo, for a tedious train journey anywhere at all in the British Isles, even to take to bed with a ‘go' of flu. It does not, in short, satisfy; one does not
long
to read the following story, and one is not contented.

As one switches off the light and settles down for the night, there is no feeling of being satiated and comfortably ready for sleep. It will do, until the next time, but it is curiously unsatisfying. One feels empty, sad; in need of sustenance or dreams even.

Oddly, I have been reading, strictly for pleasure, a cruelly overlooked book by P. Y. Betts called
People Who Say Goodbye: Memories of Childhood
(Souvenir), which has given the greatest pleasure and fulfilled all the demands I have made of Mr Greene's book and which I did not find there. The odd thing is that Mr Greene has written a most handsome quote, which is used on the cover, and it is comforting to think that we both were joined in our delight and amusement at least on a different kind of book. A mutual sharing.

The Last Word
is not my best book, but it very well may be yours. After all, as I have said, one does not scorn the crumbs from the master's table. There is bound to be a next time. One rather looks forward to that.

Daily Telegraph,
7 July 1990

Garbo: Her Story
by Antoni Gronowicz (Viking)
The Legend of Greta Garbo
by Peter Haining (W. H. Allen)

Forensic scientists know very well what ‘corpse maggots' are: they are an inevitable part of death, normal to decay, ugly to behold. I have seen them scattered like rice across a shattered face, or, depending on the weather and the temperature (they appear to proliferate in the heat), fat and bloated. But it is not only the pathologists who know this ugly metamorphosis from living flesh to maggot-death. It often flourishes in journalism.

Once death has claimed the subject, and therefore when no libel action can be perpetrated, journalistic imagination quickly soars. The greater the celebrity, the greater the feast or demolition job. Many kinds of secret jealousies, longings, yearnings and envies are freely let loose and the victim, chilling in its coffin, is very soon set upon by the unpleasant phenomena.

There is always a few quid to be made from setting before the public that which they – we are solemnly assured – have the ‘right' to know about their once adored idols. If they
are
idols it is essential to show the worshippers that, in truth, their feet were of clay. And clay, usually, of the most perverse kind.

These creatures have writhed away in the bodies of Gable and Garland, Monroe, Davis, Crawford, Burton, Grant and Clift and many, many others. And they continue to thrive and grow fat, for there is always food for them. Here you will not find a biographer. No A. N. Wilson or G. Painter, no V. S. Pritchett, Frances Donaldson, Antonia Fraser; nor will you find a Sybille Bedford, a Scott Berg, or a Richard Ellmann or any writer of that ilk. But if you find the workings of the creatures to your liking, if that is your preference, then
Garbo
by one Antoni Gronowicz is just the book for you.

It is only fair to warn you that in very small print the publishers do admit that ‘Neither Ms Garbo nor her estate authorized the publication of this book.' You can bet your life on that. The writer, now himself deceased, claims that he got to know the unfortunate victim of his imagination and cruel pen as early as 1938 and that they became intimate friends. He uses what is known as the ‘first person literary device to emulate the voice of Greta Garbo' and many will consider this a worrying mistake.

From that decision on, he is in deep trouble: how on earth is it remotely possible to recall conversations in shattering detail from as long ago as 1917, or even 1937? Well, we get them all here, plus the most intimate thoughts of all the characters we are to meet.

I only met Greta Garbo once, in an elevator in New York in 1956. We nodded at each other shyly, and that was that. Mr Gronowicz gets much closer than I did in the elevator, and, by page 20, he opens wide his generous heart and shares his most intimate moments with us all. As well as hers. Thus: ‘Since her blouse didn't yield to my fingers, she helped me. I began to kiss her breasts, but I did not feel her shiver.'

One must pause there to reflect that while she may not have done so, we do. But she seemed immune to the gross impertinence of this passionate Pole. For he continues: ‘I pulled down her skirt, unwrapping perfectly proportioned legs. Pressing my lips to hers, I began feverishly to undress.'

With variations on gender and location, this kind of stuff goes on for most of the next 400 pages. Here and there shafts of light fall on the reader to lift the gloom, but I reckon that you may have got the gist of things from this indelicate, not to say, acrobatic, opening. ‘Unwrapping perfectly proportioned legs' seems to have a distinct smack of a family butcher, or, perhaps, your local friendly pathologist.

As a matter of fact, her legs were not really very good and her feet very large. But who the hell cares? The magic she distilled up there on the screen overcame these minor deficiencies and, in any case, she was hardly ever seen out of a long skirt and,
with the glory of her eyes, who ever looked at her feet? No matter.

Born Greta Gustafsson of peasant parents in a working-class area of Stockholm. Papa a drunken dreamer, Mama, apparently sexually deprived (by said drunken Papa), hefty, hardworking, bullying, who would – according to this effort – prance about the flat naked, holding heavy breasts before her like lard-filled gourds in a desperate endeavour to ignite a spark from slumbering mate. Garbo grew up desperately anxious to leave this unpleasing atmosphere. There were two siblings, a boy and girl, but they apparently hardly counted for much.

At a reasonable age, Greta got a job in the local barber's shop, lathering the neighbours for their weekly shave, then moved on to model hats in the local department store, made a modest appearance in an advertising film, got herself into the Royal Dramatic Academy, was seen by the man who became her Svengali (for want of a better phrase), one Mauritz Stiller, who launched her into the world in a film he made called
Gosta Berling.

She, and the film, were minor, but important successes; they were carted off to Hollywood by MGM (shopping for talent in Europe), where she was ‘put under wraps' for a time and he was dumped.

And then the process started from cygnet to glorious swan. Greta Garbo began. I stop short, here, of using the word Legend, but of course that is exactly what she became in a very short period of time – under twenty years to be precise.

Garbo was not an actress, as she so inaccurately is called; she was an ‘instinctive' and a ‘behaviourist' – very different things altogether.

Acting, as such, is surface; ‘behaving' is interior and only surfaces in thought. The camera photographs thought as readily as it photographs acting, but it sets both on the screen, and the result which most often touches the audience is the ‘thought' rather than the histrionics. Garbo had thought in abundance.

It is not an intellectual thing, it is simply a ‘gut' thing. She also, being a shrewd Swede, took the infinite trouble to learn the
technical details, essential – unless one remains
only
an actor – to absorb so that the mind is untrammelled, is clear, open, for the ‘thinking'.