A beautifully written, economical book that manages to convey both
Graham Greene the man and the author. Hazzard knew him for many
years, not intimately but regularly. They became friends in the
1960's when she interrupted a conversation he was having in a cafe
in the piazetti of Capri (Greene was struggling to remember the
last line of a Browning poem, which Hazzard supplied). She tells
the story of their friendship (which lasted until Greene's death in
1991) with disarming honesty: they often disagreed and she was
never starry eyed about Greene's many faults. She clearly had great
respect for his work and remains both loyal and discreet. Referring
to his numerous affairs she neither judges nor indulges. In her
sensitive reading of his works she is particularly amusing about
Greene's ambivalent attitude towards his emancipated female
characters, fictitious and real, who were never really expected to
'do' anything. She also conveys a sense of the wide range of
literary interests Greene managed to sustain while writing his own
fiction. As a director of Bodley Head he was an ardent promoter of
new talent. There are no salacious details or gossipy speculations
in the pages of this memoir which fulfills its purpose admirably,
to capture something of what it was like to pass time with Graham
Greene. Hazzard understood, as one writer would understand another,
that despite all the passionate affairs, the devastating
depressions and elated highs, Greene's greatest pleasure in life
was literature and it was too literature that he always returned.
'It seemed time, too, that a woman should write of Graham Greene'
she says. And with this memoir she is proved right. (Kirkus UK)
When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a
survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom
has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the
remembrance of a friend who knew him - not wisely, perhaps, but
fairly well - on an island that was "not his kind of place," but
where he came season after season, year after year & where he,
too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.' For millennia the
cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers & refugees
alike, among them the emperors Augustus & Tiberius, Henry
James, Rilke & Lenin, plus hosts of artists, eccentrics &
outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with
Shirley Hazzard & her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller;
their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991. In GREENE ON
CAPRI, Hazzard uses their ever volatile intimacy as a prism through
which to illuminate Greene's mercurial character, his work &
talk & the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on
this ravishing, enchanted island.
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