702
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
estimate of the young Freud: "an extremely daring and fearless
human being" behind a deceptively timid appearance. "I have
often felt," Freud confessed to Martha, "as though I
had
inherited
all the defiance and the passions with which our ancestors de–
fended their Temple." From this heritage he drew the strength
with which he defended his integrity to the end.
Hans Meyerhoff
MORE LOVELESS LOVE
A BURNT-OUT CASE. By
Grohom Greene. Viking.
$3.95.
"The passenger wondered when it was that he had first
begun to detest laughter like a bad smell."
"... I suffer from nothing. I no longer know what suf–
fering is. I have come to the end of all that, too."
"The boat goes no further."
" ... I am sorry, I am too far gone, I can't feel at all,
I am a leper."
The passenger, a distinguished church architect named
Querry, is the hero of Graham Greene's new novel,
A Burnt-Out
Case.
Querry has been loved by many women; he is successful
and famous-above all,
famous.
And from it he has ended up tired,
morally despairing, filled with self-loathing, insisting upon his loss
of feeling, his deadness. Loss of feeling? What does it mean?
Fitzgerald's "Crack-up"-what is really meant, what has happened?
"And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized
that I had prematurely cracked." The cracked plate, the burnt–
out case, the reserved, evasive actually, description of some over–
whelming emotional crisis. Fitzgerald: "I saw that even my love
for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love...."
Querry: "She was once my mistress. I left her three months ago,
poor woman-and that's hypocrisy. I feel no pity."
Fame and emptiness. Fame bums out Querry; it surrounds
him with horrors who draw near to touch or to fall in love. "Fame
is a powerful aphrodisiac." Publicity, the bed sore of the fame–
sick, inflicts its pains. Querry has abandoned his career and gone
