Pal, gracious host, and “Youngest Broadway Propmaster in NYC” Scott selects books for me. Possibly because he thinks I might enjoy them. Possibly to improve my execrable sense of culture and taste. The latter two causes are likely lost, but the books _have_ been enjoyable, both for pure reading pleasure and as sources for the literary demolition that, post-Clarion, I can’t really stop from performing.
The problem with reading for literary education is that just reading and enjoying isn’t enough. As it turns out, this is the problem with damn near everything: passive savouring just doesn’t cut it if you want to get better. You’ve got to do something with the information; you’ve got to get your hands dirty and tear shit apart. The first step in tearing shit apart is taking note of especially artful bits. That’s what I’ve done here.
What follows are some paragraphs and sentences from Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, with brief commentary.
When the Chief had guests he dined at home and cooked his own dinner, for no restaurant satisfied his meticulous and romantic standard. There was a story that once when he was ill he refused to cancel an invitation to an old friend, but cooked the meal from his bed by telephone. With a watch before him on the bed-table he would interrupt the conversation at the correct interval, to give directions to his valet. “Hallo, hallo, Brewer, hallo, you should take that chicken out now and baste it again.”
This sentence demonstrates a number of the virtues that Greene brandishes throughout the book with easy grace: an elegant syntax, good rhythm, and the selection of details that, briefly and deftly, make some character both vivid and distinct. It’s difficult to imagine what could bring the Chief to life more effectively than the picture of him propped up on several pillows, cooking by proxy through the telephone. And it’s difficult to imagine a more concise characterization: here’s a man who has such a thorough sense of how things ought to be done that restaurants offer him no satisfaction, and who cannot cede control of a simple meal even on his sickbed.
After his exertions in the kitchen the Chief himself smelt faintly of gravy.
This detail is the final flourish: now we can see him, hear him, and smell him.
“Be careful, Mr Wormold. He is one of the torturable.” They both laughed, drinking daiquiries. It is easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.
and
He had the ill-humored face of a man who is always in the right.
The first of these two shows another of Greene’s gifts: the collision of the quotidian with the sinister. Often Le Carre is compared to Greene, and to me it is in this that they are most similar, in their refusal to allow some seperate domain for the grand and the sinister and the tedious and the normal. Here we see two men sharing a drink; and lightly discussing a topic that is frightening and vile. And yet this is reality, both his and ours: characters that live in a world where torture can be discussed by a torturer over drinks and laughter. It is, indeed, easy to laugh at torture on a sunny day. Torture, and many more things, besides. The thought is so beautifully expressed that its profundity is easily missed.
As to the second quote, Greene uses an abstraction to create a physical impression that could scarcely be stronger if the reader were looking at an actual photograph. More, he not only gives you the physical, but marries it to characterization with astounding economy. We know both what this guy looks like and what he’s about, all in fifteen words.
The Germans formed a group apart, rather suitably against the West wall. They carried the superiority of the deutschmark on their features like duelling scars.
See above.
They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there. It was time, Wormold thought, to pack up and go and leave the ruins of Havana.
In one sweeping paragraph Greene zooms in from abstract narrative commentary to indirect character speech, so smoothly that you don’t notice you’ve been giving a talking-to, and so perfectly observed that you are likely to feel that Greene has just given voice to something you’ve long believed yourself, but lacked the subtlety to fully notice and the words to properly express. Last but not least, he leaves you with a cliffhanger sentence, that will drive the story and the reader’s interest relentlessly forward.
She walked quickly away without answering among the sage-green chairs and he saw that she had talked herself to the edge of tears. Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.
This speaks for itself. As a man fully in the grip of sad caution, I can only shake my head at Greene’s surgical precision in cutting to the heart of things. Sad, yes, but also Beautiful and True, which balms a little the hurt of being so completely known.