The Potting Shed (Greene)
Greene’s plays
are little-known compared to his fiction which, in the case of The Potting
Shed, is just as well. He attempted
to write a tendentious piece in support of old Jehovah using the plot structure
of a mystery, but succeeded at inspiring neither faith nor suspense. The plot, concerning a militant atheist and
an alcoholic priest, requires not only the suspension of disbelief necessary
for all fiction, but a rather idiosyncratic view of Christianity itself. To accept the premise of the plot, one must
accept the idea that God miraculously restored James’ life in trade for the
priest William’s faith, leading the former to a fevered search for the
resolution of his own dissatisfaction while the latter stews in even more
miserable wretchedness. Christian and
non-Christian alike might wonder what sort of a God would participate in such a
deal, but I suppose this is a sacred mystery.
As a play-goer (or reader), though, one expects a more solid foundation
to a work’s themes. The hero’s tragic
anagnorisis is managed with appropriate drama as long as one does not think
about it much. The enormous lion that
appears in the closing image must surely be a close relative of C. S. Lewis’s
Aslan, though his appearance here seems an artificial graft.
Selected Letters (Mme. de Sévigné)
Reading Mme. De
Sévigné’s letters one is brought into the world of the seventeenth century
French court, but not the court alone.
She was acquainted with the chief writers and intellectuals of the day
and delivers opinions of plays by Molière, Racine, and Corneille when they were
fresh. She was a close friend of
Rochefoucauld as well as of woman writers like Mme. de La Fayette and Madeleine
de Scudéry. Still, despite its vivid recreation of its time, I found this
collection unsatisfying. Though these
are genuine letters, full of gossip and news and emotion, they are not very
artful. The author turns out a nice bit
of wit now and then (often a catty sort of remark), but most of the writing is
formless and very often pedestrian (the Penguin volume I read translated by
Leonard Tancock contained perhaps one quarter of the extant correspondence and
might have been cut further yet in my opinion.)
The lady never ventures an original opinion which makes her an excellent
source for historians but sometimes dull for other readers. Most of the letters are to her daughter,
living far off in the South of France and her intense maternal concern for her
child, for her health in particular, and
her delicate management of her son-in-law M. de Grignan, a man with a weakness
for gambling and little financial acumen are fascinating at first encounter,
but very shortly a bore. The glittering
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné who frequented the court of the
Sun King, comes to seem like a guest who stayed too long, blathering about her
offspring until one found one was no longer listening.
Prisoner of Grace (Cary)
Though the novel is explicitly engaged
with politics, the real thematic center of Prisoner of Grace is
psychological. Chester Nimmo’s every
position is presented as expedient, as his real passion, his most strongly felt
“cause” is consistently his own career, from advocacy for the Boers through
pacifism and then patriotic support for WWI.
Thus the actual validity of, for instance, his denunciation of
“baby-starving landlords” is never an issue; the rhetoric is a means for him to
the end of political success. likewise,
Jim Latter’s defense of the Luga tribespeople seems merely an aspect of the
errant quirks of that rather shallow individual rather than as either
vindication or condemnation of colonialism.
Likewise, the defenders of the status quo like Nina’s cousin Slapton
seem to espouse the politics into which they were born with little regard for
rightness or wrongness, while Chester’s class consciousness seems like simple
resentment of a piece with his pettiness otherwise.
Nina Woodville is
not only the narrator; she is the center of the novel, though she reacts to
others and allows herself to be swept along by the current of her life, taking
no decisive action. Though even her
love-making, with both Jim and Chester, is altogether passive, she is a
fascinating character, as little in control of her destiny at the end as
at the start.
Along the way the
reader is exposed to a good deal of history (wars, change of government, social
movements) as well as developments like the introduction of lipstick among
respectable women, but these documentary elements are consistently secondary to
the psychological portraits, principally of Nina, but also of Chester and Jim
on down to lesser characters like Aunt Latter and Bootham.
