7004
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
any real idea of how it came to be. Curtness, coolness, even care–
lessness mark the mode of expression. Fitzgerald: "Sometimes,
though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to
be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be
wanned on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the
dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to
hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice box under left–
overs." Querry in disgust: "The darkness was noisy with frogs,
and for a long while after his host had said good night and gone,
they seemed to croak with Rycker's hollow phrases: Grace: senti–
ment: duty: love, love, love." Self-condemnation, indifferent, im–
personal, given out as a Confession, a general statement of sinful–
ness, without names or places. Art has failed to bring peace ; success
does not bring happiness to wives, mistresses or children.
From
Death in Venice:
Art "engraves adventures of the spirit
and the mind in the faces of her votaries; let them lead outwardly
a life of the most cloistered calm, she will in the end produce
in
them a fastidiousness, an over-refinement, a nervous fever and
exhaustion, such as a career of extravagant passions and pleasures
can hardly show." This is a price, perhaps, but a noble, classic
fate-far from the sardonic ash-heap of Greene.
Or
compare
Mailer's
Advertisements,
a confession in which I, at least, do not
hear the voice of personal suffering and so suppose it wasn't in–
tended. The alcoholic reserve of Fitzgerald and the manic expres–
siveness of Mailer show the twenty years or more that separate the
personal documents. For Mailer, more and more experience, more
and more fame-the Congo as an assignment, perhaps, not as a
retreat. "Publicity can be an acid test for virtue," Greene says.
Poor Hemingway, honorifically carried to his grave by those wooden
angels, the restaurant owner Toots Shor and the gossip columnist
Leonard Lyons.
In
The H eart of the Matter
the weary hero faced damnation
because of his unconquerable pity for the women whom destiny,
capriciously, or due to his own wanting, left in his care. Pity
is
way beyond Querry. He doesn't want to pretend any longer; it is
all meaningless. Fornication is a burden and love is impossible.
And yet, what is it about? How to account for the flight, the cold–
ness, the refusal? We have Querry's "aridity" seen by .the..priests at
