Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene (1969)

 Another first exposure, and one that I'm guessing may be atypical, given what I understand about the general tone of Greene's work. This edition is part of a really clutzy series called Vintage Voyages, put out by the Random Penguin behemoth - bad because what it includes is such a peculiar mixture: from the expected, given the series title, like In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, to the ridiculous, like To the Lighthouse and this volume. Seemingly just a repackaging excuse, or someone influential's odd idea being indulged. Anyway, none of that affects the fact that this novel is splendid. It is a comedy of unknowing in the main, or perhaps a comedy of slow dawning. Henry Pullen is a retired mid-century bank manager, having had the usual preoccupations, and led a quiet life. He cultivates dahlias, is single but interested in Miss Keene in a Pymish way. But at his mother's funeral, up pops the aunt he has rarely seen, his mother's only sister, and she acts as disturber of his peace. She reveals that his mother wasn't that at all, rather his stepmother; that his sleepy father had a louche side; that she herself has had a wild life (hints at promiscuity and prostitution, touches in the direction of international criminal intrigue!). He is captivated by her despite himself and is enjoined in small journeys around Europe with her, tasting a bit more of life than he has hitherto - pot-smoking youngsters on trains, meetings with shadowy characters (arms dealers?) in Italian hotel rooms, shepherding suitcases full of money through customs, and smuggling gold ingots too. His aunt Augusta is basically an Edwardian, so all this has an enjoyably unexpected and outrageous feel. Gradually Henry comes 'alive' via her irruption into his world. It's pretty clear early on that she's likely to be his real mother, and interestingly Greene doesn't harp on that waiting discovery - it's treated quite quietly. Toward the end, things get quite hot for Augusta and some of her long-established connections, particularly a WWII-collaborator (with anyone who'll give him a deal, and the money to keep afloat) wheeler-dealer by the name of Visconti, with whom she has been in and out of love for a good part of her life, and lost touch with for periods of time, but is well in with again now. She finally calls Henry to Paraguay, where the local dictator has created a system which will afford them reasonable protection, and various threads come to a head. Henry decides to finally leave his corner of London and the possibility of Miss Keene, to embrace the excitements of life with his aunt, ultimately realised and accepted as his mother in the last chapter. The understatement in this is delicious, the implied working away with great effect. I wonder what his converted Catholic compatriot, Evelyn Waugh, would have made of it had he still been alive? Nancy Mitford too? Perhaps her response is recorded somewhere. I can't but believe they'd have relished its impropriety. As do I.

Commonplace Book

 'But to this distinctive expression which his face had taken - stamped there by lonely contemplation, by unutterable longings, by helpless chafing, by many fits of mental agony, by hope fallen sick and spiritless, by such things which do really and truly of this life make a hell without participation of conscience, as there are sufferers to swear - was super-added at this time, as he walked through busy thoroughfares, a painful anxiety so acute as to fix upon his heart the shadow of physical torment.'

from Auld Lang Syne by W. Clark Russell (Volume II, Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

 '...her eyes bulged like a pekinese dog's, but they were pretty nonetheless. They had in them what used to be called by my generation a sexy look, but this might have been caused by short sight or constipation.'

from Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene (Chapter 11)

Commonplace Book

 'Night is the bitterest time for sorrow. Something there always is in the day ― in the activity of cloudy sunshine, or the waving of trees, or the going to and fro of men and women, and the sound of their voices ― to pluck grief as it were by the sleeve, and compel it from fixed contemplation. But the stillness of night gives subtlety to thought, and quickens the madness which despair truly is....'

from Auld Lang Syne by W. Clark Russell (Volume II, Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

 '...A diaryㅡeven a cruelly honest diary一is a kind of home-made lover. In the pretender's diary, though he may not be justified, he is always forgiven; though he may not be admirable, he is always visible. His diary cedes to him the right to reign unchallenged in his corner. His corner has a sufficient population―a population of One. That One may be admittedly a poor thing, but at least it is undespised一a real thing, withdrawn from a crowd of ghosts. The ghosts that pass the diarist's corner cannot shake his courage; he looks at them, but they cannot look at him; he is revenged upon smilers behind the hand, upon the cruel queer crowds outside; his accusers are gagged at last.'

from Sitting in Corners, a piece in Worlds within Worlds by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

 '...Was religion, she wondered, given to us that we might always carry grave faces, always be quoting Holy Writ, always rebuking mirth; that we should have no forgiveness for sin, and no mercy for error which is not sin, and no tenderness for the child that had stepped out of the hard dry road of life to pluck one of the few flowers that bloom on the way-side, but must not be gathered without our leave?..'

from Auld Lang Syne by W. Clark Russell (Volume II, Chapter III)

Boyhood by JM Coetzee (1997)

 This is my first Coetzee. I know very little about the arc of his career, aside from the prizes. The first impression is of starkness, a boniness and pared-downness. But not poetry so much, though the prose sings very quietly. The feeling is that anything which was pronounced enough to be labelled 'poetic' would be a little distasteful to him. There are two things which seem critical: the depiction of himself here, and the broad fact that autobiography is reconstructed reality, has narrative structure retro-applied. It's the story of himself when young, in the South Africa of the 40s turning to the 50s. There is some talk of race, some of unthinking conservatism, some of the dryness and leachedness one might expect. Those things decorate a tale of his parents' unhappy marriage, of farms versus proto-suburbia, of family skeletons and melancholy, frustration and wondering. And there is the closer-in perspective of the child's world, dominated by school, and growing apprehension of what the adult world that impinges upon childhood might mean. Here is where both critical concerns come into play. He seems to know a great deal about his parents' crushednesses and fallibilities, seems very involved in their world and its story. This has a glimmer of reconstruction to it, and the concomitant purpose of making retro-fitted sense of what went on - would they have been intelligible in this fashion at the time in the way he portrays? Not a problem if not, if the reasons why have needed an adult mind to establish them, but then why portray himself as having agency in it at the time, and its dominance in his young world, as he does? Perhaps the situation was unusual, and he was involved to that extent. The other concern, that of the depiction of himself, is notable. The image that plays in my mind is a bit fanciful: the young Coetzee here has the resonance of a clay idol, a bit of a tiki. It has the glaring quality that goes with these, and the staring-eyed fierceness - anything could happen with this untamed demiurge, it blazes and is convex with urgency. And lacks a kind of softness and vulnerability, like he's seeing himself extra-starkly and finds engaging with the part of himself which is silly, humorous, even dear, as beyond the pale. Is this the Coetzee story, the 'thing' I need to recognize which is most typifying about his work? The potential shibboleth of extreme honesty works strongly here, with his desires, disgusts and cruelty self-mercilessly examined. Well, who ever knows how much of an autobiography is truthfully flagellatory, as against management for effect?