Graham
Greene on Travels with My Aunt: If A Burnt-Out Case in 1961
represented the depressive side of a manic-depressive
writer, Travels with My Aunt eight years later
surely represented the manic at its heightor depth.
Travels with My Aunt
is the only book I have written for the fun of it.
Although the subject is old age and death a
suitable subject to tackle at the age of sixty-five
and though an excellent Swedish critic described
the novel justly as "laughter in the shadows of the
gallows," I experienced more of the laughter and
little of the shadow in writing it. When I began with the
scene of the cremation of Henry Pullings supposed
mother and his encounter with Aunt Augusta I didnt
believe for a moment that I would continue the novel for
more than a few days. I didnt even know what the
next scene was likely to be I didnt know
that Augusta was Henrys mother. Every day when I
sat down before the blank sheets of foolscap (for as
symbol of my new freedom I had abandoned the single lined
variety where the lines seemed to me now like the bars on
a prison window) I had no idea what was going to happen
to Henry or Augusta next. I felt like a rider who has
dropped the reins and left the direction to his horse or
like a dreamer who watches his dream unfold without power
to alter its course. I felt above all that I had broken
for good or ill with the past.
I was even irresponsible enough to
include some private jokes which no reader would
understand. Why not? I didnt expect to have any
readers. So I christened "Detective-Sergeant
Sparrow, John" after that elegant scholar the
ex-Warden of All Souls, Augustas black lover
"Wordsworth" after a villainous District
Commissioner whom I had met more than thirty years before
in Liberia, Mr. Viscontis son "Mario"
after my friend Mario Soldati who once greeted me and
gave me lunch in Milan station with similar flamboyance
on my way to Istanbul. I remember I even found room for Kingsley Amiss surname which I gave to a
character on whom I cant at the moment lay my
finger. The name Visconti for Aunt Augustas lover
was adapted from my favourite character in Marjorie
Bowens The Viper of Milan which I had loved
as a boy, and it gave me an innocent amusement when I
heard Detective Sparrow describing him as a viper. Some
critics have found in the book a kind of resume of my
literary careera scene in Brighton, the journey on
the Orient Express, and perhaps a hint of this did come to
my mind by the time Aunt Augusta arrived at the Pera Palace, but what struck me with some
uneasiness, when I reread the book the other day, were
the suggestions I found in it of where the future was
going to take me. The boat which carried Henry Pulling
from Buenos Aires to Asuncion stopped for half an hour
during the night in the little river harbour of Corrientes in northern Argentina, but I had no idea
that I would be landing there from a plane some years
later in search of the right setting for The Honorary
Consul.
from Ways of Escape,
pp.246-248
© Melody Yiu
Email me: greeneland -at- gmail . com
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