GREENE PIECES

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31984, 10 May 1969, Page 4

GREENE PIECES

Collected Essay*. By Graham Greene. Bodley Head. 463 pp. Over a third of the essays in this impressive collection are in print for the first time. Spanning the last 30 years, they deal in the main with 1 literary figures and their ! works, from Henry James to ' Rider Haggard, Hans Ander- . sen to Kim Philby. All are ; men, with the notable excepi tion of Beatrix Potter, obvii ously one of Mr Greene’s ; favourites; who rates an eight- ■ page essay to herself. There 1 is also a passing reference : to “that self-sufficient and - solitary genius, Jane Austen.” > The many other women meni tioned in the essays are all i fictional figures, but seem ! nevertheless, because of the adroit quotation* included by ' Mr Greene, to be as alive > to us as their creators.

The collection is prefaced by the briefest of author’s notes. Speaking tn it of his early essays, Graham Greene avers that he has included only those on which he still holds similar opinions—antagonistic as well as laudatory. He says, “A man should be judged by his enmities as well as by his friendships." Certainly some of the appraisals leave the subject looking rather diminished, as in the one on Samuel Butler, where

■ , Greene accuses him of having “a rather cocky conceit in his own smartness,” and of having carefully recopied his random jottings into elabor-ately-bound volumes, in calculated preparation for his hoped-for fame. Butler was determined, says Graham Greene, to “stuff himself neck and crop between the teeth of time.”

Not all the pieces are so harsh. Most have a quiet contemplative flow that makes easy reading. Although Greene owns that Joseph Conrad was a self-centred man, it is obvious, from many references throughout the collection, that he admired the man and his work, chiefly because of Conrad’s complete involvement with his writing. A. E. W. Mason, “an admirable writer of detective stories,” he condemns for the opposite quality. Mason wrote merely as a aide-line, Greene says, “But if only, with so much skill and invention, he had been involved; if only he had worked at his craft” This is a book of wide scope, offering much more to the reader than mere literary criticism. It demands a wide background of informed reading, much is taken for granted, but gives in return a rich and perceptive assessment of a group of intellectuals.