Travels with My Aunt

This week I attempted to read Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt, but could not get very far. I was in the mood to read something about a journey, especially a train journey, and picked it up for that reason. Greene thought of it as the one story he wrote purely for pleasure, and the first chapters are very amusing. Staid and quiet retired banker Henry Pulling meets his eccentric aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral. You can tell Augusta is an unpredictable character when she tells Henry—who is still holding the ashes—that the woman he thought of as his mother was actually his step-mother. Augusta had been kept away from him for years, because his parents knew she would blurt this out as soon as she met him.

The first journey Henry and Augusta take is across London in a taxi, to go to her house. I did not make it along on any of their other journeys, because at Augusta’s house you meet a Black man named Wordsworth who may or may not be her lover. Wordsworth is such a caricature that I lost all faith in where the narrative was going and had to abandon the book. Wordsworth speaks in a comically-rendered West Indian dialect, and the sheer cringe factor is extreme. It’s not merely that I had some moral or aesthetic objection to the character; after a while, I couldn’t physically read his lines of dialogue.

These things are subjective—up to a point. There is apparently an argument to be made that Wordsworth is the most sympathetic character in the book. I may see the problem here as a question of craft. Does the character have the same three-dimensional quality and suggestion of an inner life as the other inhabitants of the narrative? Is the sympathy and depth of observation evenly distributed or somehow in proportion? Sometimes you are in a comic novel where no one is very deep and everyone is basically a caricature. To some extent, that is true of Travels. For me, Wordsworth’s speech was still wildly jarring, even in that context.

When I started the week, I thought I would be writing more about Graham Greene’s body of work and themes in his novels, such as his Catholicism, but in this case I couldn’t engage with the work enough to reach this level of analysis. I read up on his moment of conversion and symptoms of bipolar disorder, but was not able to put it to use. I may try to revisit some of his other work later on. Ministry of Fear is one of my favorite movies, so I may seek out the novel it is based on.

One funny thing about my attempt to read this book is that as soon as Augusta appeared on the page, I thought Maggie Smith could play her in a movie. Then I discovered that there was a movie version with Maggie Smith, but from 1972—when she was only about 40 years old. The character is in her 70s!