Happiness

This scene is repeated over and over, everywhere, with endless permutations: four literary figures, “intellectuals”, sit around a well-laid table, enjoying a well-watered repast; sooner or later, the topic turns to happiness and they all agree.

“Happiness” had an element of inanity, verified by Greene in life and in his fiction: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” 

(Flaubert, in a letter of 1846, also felt that “to be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” Acknowledging the possibility of a higher form of happiness, achieved incidentally in the exercise of deeper capacities, Flaubert felt that, in his own case, that, too, would remain phantasmal.) 

Proof positive. Flaubert said so.

Of course, if you start out by assuming, axiomatically, that happiness is inane, you will not pursue it; and if you do not pursue it, you will not achieve it. It actually does not take stupidity to understand this; rather, it takes more than uncommon intelligence. If Greene and his companions were unhappy, it wasn’t for excess of intelligence, it was for… an insufficience of it.

IMHO.

Case in point:

None of us gave first importance to food, or tended to discuss it at any length.

(OK?)

While the evening excursion to Gemma’s restaurant was pleasurable to Graham, I think that for him the imperative of food remained something of a tyranny. He was preternaturally resistant to any form  of compulsion; and nothing is more peremptory than  the digestive system.

Oh pity the man who eats out of compulsion to please his digestive system! Is that how he makes love to his lovers?

It gets worse.

While the beauty of women inflamed and antagonised Graham for most of his life, impressions of works of art, or of the ancient monuments and towns of Europe, goes on Ms Hazzard, had little place in his talk or writing. (“Florence bored me”; “Nothing to distract me in Rome”—so Norman Sherry quotes  from the love letters to Catherine.)

Goodness gracious. Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt? Looking down at Piazza del Poppolo from Pincio at daybreak?

And worse yet.

Once in a while he would echo, as if dutifully, classic comments on the light and colours of Capri; but  natural beauty had erratic claim, only, on his attention.

Brr.

This is rather symptomatic, actually.

Literature was the longest and most consistent pleasure of Graham’s life. It was the element in which he best existed, providing him with the equilibrium of affinity and a lifeline to the rational as well as the fantastic. The tormented love affairs of adult years—and, supremely, the long passion for Lady Walston—brought him to the verge of insanity and suicide. It was in reading and writing that he enjoyed, from early childhood, a beneficent excitement and ground for development of his imagination and his gift: an influence contrasting with that of his undemonstrative parents. Our own best times with Graham usually arose from spontaneous shared pleasures of works and  words—those of poets and novelists above all—that  were central to his being and ours. 

I have known people like this, who live entirely in the world of literature. The sort who imagine that inner life consists of manipulating symbols.

To a man (woman), they are not happy.

There is a lesson in there, somewhere. Something about oversized brains and not enough liver.

I rest my case.

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On another note, Hazzard’s book is better than Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter: Hazzard does go beyond a litany of people met and parties attended: she does attempt a psychological portrait of Graham Greene — of sorts. It isn’t her fault if I find the portrait uninteresting: I suppose I would have found Graham Green himself uninteresting.

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On another note yet, I do have to ask myself: why is it that everything ever written about or on Capri is such a bore? Axel Munthe? South Wind? Greene on Capri? And why do I keep discovering and reading these books? One blessed, calm, quiet afternoon spent on the island in early November, cool, quiet, unhurried, uncrowded, in the blessed company of a lover, in that instant of perfection. The very last time we were good together. That’s why.

Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri