'His Only Consistent Form of Optimism'

“Promptly generous with time and public praise for new books that pleased him, he brought enthusiasm to his reading. A fresh book never ceased to be a possibility, a promise. It was, I think, his only consistent form of optimism.” 

Among writers of fiction, the late Shirley Hazzard is one of the shrewdest anatomists of sensibility. Here she writes about Graham Greene in Greene on Capri (2001), her account of the thirty-year friendship she and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, had with the English novelist on the island near Naples. Greene appears to have been a difficult friend – quick to anger, charming yet hypersensitive. I once dated a woman who was a Greene acolyte. I countered with Nabokov, and that opposition ended things pretty quickly.

 

I haven’t read Greene in decades but I liked the observation cited above, the notion of reading with enthusiasm. The alternative is reading desultorily, passively, perhaps to kill time, the way many watch television. I understand Greene’s sense of anticipation when starting to read a new book. You hope for the best. You want the writer to succeed. When young, I finished every book I started, regardless of its dreariness. No longer. I feel no guilt about chucking a bad book after ten pages. Or three.

 

This week I started reading two new books – Hans Ostwald’s A Moral History of the Inflation: Germany During the Weimar Republic (1931), translated from the German this year by my Canadian friend Andrew Rickard for his Obolus Press; and Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press, 2023) by Gary Saul Morson. Both confirm Greene’s bookish sense of optimism. One sign of a book being good is thinking about it periodically throughout the day, while working or driving, and feeling impatient to get back to it, resenting the way life delays the return. In that sense, I too am an optimist. Hazzard writes in her first chapter, describing a dinner with Greene, one of his friends and her husband:

 

“We were, all four, writers and readers in a world where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount—beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called ‘the inevitable solace that right language brings.’ We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.”

[The Bayley quote can be found in “State of the Nation: American Poetry,” collected in his Selected Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1984).]