What Becomes of the Broken Hearted Wednesday

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What I've Finished Reading

The Heart of the Matter

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity. . . .She sat there, reading poetry, and she was a thousand miles away from the torment that shook his hand and dried his mouth. She would understand, he thought, if I were in a book, but would I understand her if she were just a character?-- I don't read that sort of book.

That word "pity" appears over and over. "Pity" is the reason Scobie lies to his wife and why he begins and can't bring himself to end the affair with Helen; it pervades and poisons every one of his relationships like the oppressive humidity of the air before the rains that makes even the smallest wounds fester.

So why won't Graham Greene get under my skin? It's not that there was nothing to like about The Heart of the Matter; there was so much, yet I spent huge portions of it just sort of coldly admiring the sentence structure from the other side of an empty ballroom. It's like the jokes in The War With Mr. Wizzle: I know it's good and can guess at why, but I don't feel a thing. And by this point I'm overstating the case a little; it did get under my skin, just not in the way I wanted it to. I was indifferent to Scobie for a long time and then I hated him, not all at once but in flashes like sudden downpours, and finally it didn't matter whether I felt anything about him because it isn't that sort of book.

This one, like The Power and the Glory, gives us religion as an impenetrable glass wall between men and their better selves. If Graham Greene were a character in a G. K. Chesterton story, he would probably be unmasked at the end as an atheist sleeper agent, but I don't think he is one. He takes his religion seriously enough to be unflinching about it; he won't cheat by fudging the results or smoothing over the details to make cruelty look kind, or Scobie's weakness a victory. I'd be interested to know what practicing Catholics think of it. I thought it was admirable and interesting but I also have even less desire now to read another Graham Greene book than before. Except maybe The Third Man? I liked that movie.

What I'm Reading Now

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken

John Keats! Because his poetry-writing life was so short, the editor of this book feels that he has to include a selection of his earliest work, even though he doesn't think it's very good. And it isn't! There's a lot of singsong and so much earnestly bathetic feminine rhyme, and he's obviously talented for how impossibly young he is, but you can see why the editor felt the need to apologize a little.

Even the clunkiest of these are still delightful, though. The teenage Keats is terribly sad about Chatterton's early death ("how nigh / Was night to thy fair morning!") and terribly excited about Byron. He loves his friends and his brothers and the whole earth and every single poet he reads. It's good to be alive in the midst of all these living things and stars, and to have friends, and to have a language. I didn't appreciate these things when I was twenty, but Keats appreciates them enough for everyone.

Also from the Neglected Bookshelf: Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I'm not sure if I'm going to try to plow through the whole thing. I bought it years ago out of curiosity because The Old Heloise was the greatest of the terrible role models of my adolescence, but these "two lovers who live in a small town at the foot of the Alps" and their friends are a dull bunch so far. I'll give it another week.

In 99 Novels: Ape and Essence, just started. Why do I find Huxley's damn dirty apes so boring? Tell me what I'm missing, Huxley fans! This one doesn't even have the hideous-golden-melancholy descriptions of Southern California that were the best part of After Many a Summer. Only I'm being unfair, so I'll have to start over in better faith. I haven't gotten very far -- I did like the opening conversation between the Hollywood hacks. Tell me some things you like about Huxley! If you don't mind, that is.

What I Plan to Read Next

Heartsongs: The Intimate Diaries of Young Girls by Laurel Holliday (ed.), and lots more from the Neglected Bookshelf.