When, earlier this year, I saw notices of Shirley Hazzard’s memoir of her and Francis Steegmuller’s acquaintanceship with Greene on their and his annual visits to Capri, I thought I must get it for its possible ‘leads’ on this new author I was attracted to (though I soon gathered that everyone else in the world intimately knew their Greene). In this regard, the memoir is certainly useful and informing, as are its side-journeys into the more general cultural and political history of the island. Hazzard’s book is interesting on how intellectuals whose only belonging is to the world of ideas nevertheless still form attachments to particular places.

I learned a lot. I’m grateful. I’m pleased. And she’s probably right, it is about time a female writer’s perspective was brought to bear on Greene. But from its first careful page, Greene on Capri manages to be mannered, presuming, overwritten, ponderous, cold, and prim. The first page inaugurates the use of ‘one’ as a kind of verbal tic throughout (‘one cannot be forever throwing up one’s hands at the world’s condition’). The book claws at its reader, calling: admire me, admire me. Get away, I thought. I responded to the book’s preciousness by (as it were) manhandling it: I underlined, wrote in the margins, and notated ‘fuck’ next to particularly studied phrases (like ‘cold evenings of Rilkean stars’).

It speedily occurred to me that Greene on Capri is a peculiarly Australian text, reminding one of generations of antipodean literary intellectuals, at least into the 1960s, who wished to leave behind the periphery where all is empty and mediocre and travel to Europe to attain the centre of civilisation. That would explain why a memoir on an irreverent maverick like Greene manages from beginning to end to be completely humourless, lacking in fun, wit, absurdity, self-irony, self-parody. For the intellectual from the periphery, the acquisition of high European cultural capital is too serious for fooling around, less one make a slip, as indeed happens to our author a couple of times.

At least this is how I read a couple of conversations she reports having with Greene. One time Greene admits that during World War II, on the way to Africa by ship, he brought along War and Peace, which he had never previously opened. Hazzard comments: ‘Strange that Graham, who had read incessantly since childhood, should have come to Tolstoy only in his late thirties.’ I rather think one reads books, even Tolstoy’s books, for highly haphazard reasons, as occurred with acquiring Greene’s The Quiet American on a street in Hanoi. Hazzard’s slightly disdainful reflection on Greene apropos War and Peace makes me think that Hazzard the provincial intellectual feels that ‘Europe’ represents cultural knowledge to be acquired in due order, and that to be qualified to be in ‘Europe’ one has to know as soon as possible those Hazzard refers to as ‘the great writers’.

In another conversation, Hazzard finds herself discussing with Greene the French literary masters of the nineteenth century. Then Greene started talking about ‘the irruption of detectives into the novel’. Hazzard confesses: ‘I was hopelessly outclassed, Graham being encyclopaedic on the fiction of crime and concealment’. Why feel ‘outclassed’ if a fellow intellectual knows something about a field you don’t know much about? This suggests that the provincial intellectual sees cultural knowledge as a competition of acquisition, and in this case she hasn’t acquired enough. Or, rather, more slyly, her conception of European culture is that it is constituted by the received high forms, so that naturally one doesn’t care to know detective and such like genres.

Unwittingly, Greene on Capri stages a conversation between the provincial intellectual for whom the European canon is to be attained so that one can show fluent familiarity with it, and a metropolitan intellectual like Greene who wished to flee the mythical centre as deadening and confining, who desired in Hazzard’s words ‘to test the dangerous margins of his world’. Greene wants to fragment, splinter, irritate, the centre; a postmodern writer avant la lettre, Greene can be seen as deploying low genres in order to disrupt, disgust, shock the institution of Literature. Hazzard wants to reverently receive European literature as coherent and whole, and thence to reveal authoritative knowledge of it. Hazzard wishes to exalt Europe; she can refer to a Florentine intellectual as of ‘infinite civilisation’. Greene and other twentieth-century intellectuals like Walter Benjamin exiled or self-exiled wished to reveal how closely entwined European civilization is with infinite barbarism. Hazzard herself mentions the history of fascism and antisemitism on Capri, and that Greene might have been antisemitic in his early work.

Overall, Hazzard emerges as profoundly conventional in her literary judgments and cultural interests (one has to go to all the exhibitions, museums, concerts). She reports that Greene would try to badger her in conversation, because he viewed intellectually independent women with displeasure: ‘If argument was in the air with Graham, I – as a woman, and more perturbable – might be singled out for provocation on a fine range of topics.’ But maybe as well the metropolitan intellectual felt provoked by imperturbable provinciality, conformity, imitativeness.