再Graham Greene's family, August 7th 2010 P65 (グレアム グリーンの兄弟従兄弟ー書評)

f:id:nprtheeconomistworld:20200202082619j:plain


再Graham Greene's family, August 7th 2010 P65 (グレアム グリーンの兄弟従兄弟ー書評)

 

Shade of Greene:One Generation of an English Family. In the early 1900s two brothers lived at opposite ends of a small country town some 30 miles north-west of London. Their forebears had made money through brewing and West Indian sugar estates and they themselves were successful, one as a headmaster and the other as a coffee merchant. Different in many ways, Charles and Edward Greene were alike in fathering six children. Charles and his family lived at the “School House” and Edward at the “Hall”. The 12 cousins, “a remarkable tribe”, were tall, much married, highly intelligent and, either through shyness or a coldness of disposition, naturally reserved. Their long and diverse lives are the subject of a magnificent group biography by Jeremy Lewis, best known for his fine life of Cyril Connolly. Graham, fourth child of Charles and one of the leading novelists of the 20th century, was the most famous of the “School House” Greenes, but by no means the only one to make his mark. Raymond, “the real heart of the family”, was a leading mountaineer, a member of the expedition that came near to the summit of Mount Everest in 1933, and a pioneer endocrinologist. Hugh was a journalist and broadcaster, famous in the 1960s as a radical and subversive director-general of the BBC. Elisabeth worked for the British secret services in Cairo and enlisted Graham and Malcolm Muggeridge in MI6. In contrast, Herbert, the impoverished black sheep, suffered from being an average person in a brilliant family and was a regular source of anxiety. In the 1930s he flitted around the fringes of the intelligence world, spying ineffectively for the Japanese and in Spain. Thirty years later he organised a nationwide protest against Hugh's decision to switch the nine o'c lock news to ten. Though some contributed in other ways, no member of the two families saw action during the war. (Graham's cousin Tooter came closest but his life as a soldier was cut short when he fell out of a lorry at Sandhurst, banged his head and was relegated to the Ministry of Food.) The “Hall” Greenes felt intellectually inferior to their cousins and were much less effective, though two were just as strange. Ben, Edward Greene's oldest son, was warm-hearted, unworldly idealist, who did battle for the poor, though with limited success. Relief work with the Quakers in Russia and Germany and activity on the left wing of the Labour Party were followed by a switch to the right when he signed up to the British People's Party and the Peace Pledge Union. As a result, and with a German mother, he was deemed a Nazi sympathiser and a security risk and, with Oswald Mosley, was interned in May 1940. The rest of his life was blighted by an understandable sense of persecution. While Ben was in Brixton jail his younger brother Felix was in California with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, taking “a lofty view of events”. Felix was a pioneer broadcaster and the BBC's first North American correspondent but later became increasingly self-centred, neurotic and credulous. In the 1960, he visited Communist China (“one of those useful idiots”) to extol the virtues of Mao's brutal regime in book and film. Mr Lewis has succeeded in his stated aim, to prevent the book from being “lopsided”, “yet another biography of Graham Greene”. He deals evenly with those members of the family whose lives are of interest, describes the relations between them and casts light on their influence on the novelist's life and writing. Born in the middle of the family, Graham was nearest in age to cousins, Ave, with whom he and Herbert were briefly in love. At school, behind “the green baize door”, he suffered the most from being the headmaster's son and was bullied mercilessly. Inept at games, he lived in the shadow of his dashing older brother and felt a sense of inferiority. This, though, produced a “damned desire to be successful”: and Raymond became a useful source of medical details of his novels. Close to Graham were his younger siblings, Elisabeth, who was to become his secretary, and Hugh, to whom as a child he read adventure stories by Henry Rider Haggard, G.A. Henry and their cousin, Robert Louis Stevenson. Cousin Barbara accompanied him to Liberia in 1935, and published an account of their adventures which the family thought a better book than Graham's “Journey Without Maps”. Herbert, though his nefarious activities and seedy characteristics, provided material for the shabby, disreputable figures who flit through Graham's fiction. “Shades of Greene”is an ambitious undertaking that has needed a prodigious amount of research. A shortage of dates and familial details make it difficult to keep track of individuals and events sometimes, but Mr Lewis displays skill and stamina in interweaving his subject's lives. Graham Greene avoided getting mired in his heroes' thoughts, preferring the momentum of a good story. So it is here. With his sense of mischief and his see-through-glass prose, Greene would surely have approved.