Reviews for Selected Letters of Samuel Johnson

The average rating for Selected Letters of Samuel Johnson based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-25 00:00:00 D. Bruce Q: Shortly after this letter he wrote a public protest against the treatment of Charlie Chaplin, who had lived for forty years in the United States. The Attorney General ordered that Chaplin be detained when he tried to re-enter the United States because of speeches he had given in support of Russia when it was invaded by Germany. Doubtless as a result of the publicity, Graham was himself granted a visa for only eight weeks. (c) Q: Finally separated from Vivien, who refused, on religious grounds, to allow a divorce, he found that Catherine, though willing to conduct an affair, would not marry him for fear of losing her children, and that Dorothy simply would not let him go. On several occasions he came near to suicide... (c) Poor guy. All the gals did him in. Almost. Q: Around 1958, Greene also started a novel about school life, but found the subject so grim that he abandoned it in favour of leprosy. (c) I'm sorry but it's really hilarious that it's implicated that school is worse than leprosy. And it's even more hilarious that I agree with this point, to some extent. Q: Restless by temperament, he yearned for excitement, but he also believed that something essential about life is revealed in privation, and his travels did not serve merely as a painted backdrop to the stories but were necessary to the work of imagining human reality... (c) Q: ... he wrote of Sierra Leone: 'Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst'. (c) Q: It is hard to imagine that the greater part of what Graham Greene wrote in his life remains unpublished. Greene once guessed that he wrote about two thousand letters each year. Some have simply vanished, but many thousands have recently come to light, some in dusty filing cabinets, others in out-of-the-way archives. One extremely important collection of letters to his son, wife and mother was recently discovered inside a hollow book. …(c) Seriously?? Q: I met a farmer at lunch the other day who was employing two lunatics; what fine workers they were, he said; and how loyal. (c) Q: In the midst of a simmering dispute over money, the Viking Press proposed that Greene change the title of Travels with My Aunt to something more saleable. He cabled his agent: 'Would rather change publisher than title. Graham Greene'. (c) Q: Although an admirer of Dubliners, Greene, like Roddy Doyle, thought Joyce's Ulysses one of the most overrated classics and a 'big bore'. (c) Q: I believe I've got a book coming. I feel so excited that I spell out your name in full carefully sticking my tongue between my teeth to pronounce it right. The act of creation's awfully odd & inexplicable like falling in love. (c) Q: Some of Greene's biographers have imputed to him, without other evidence, all the moral flaws to be found in his characters. Indeed, his situation has been like that of Dame Muriel Spark, who observed: 'There's a lot of people think they can take my books and analyse me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer. (c) Q: One can't believe 365 days a year, but my faith tells me that my reasoning is wrong. (c) Q: 'I've had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.' (c) Q: His daughter recalls that he looked on his own death with great curiosity as to what, if anything, lay ahead. It was, for him, another journey without maps. (c) Q: The Abbey itself lighted up brilliantly, but outside the door nothing but a great bank of mist, with now and again a vague steel helmeted figure appearing, only to disappear again. (c) Q: There's a most marvellous fog here to-day, my love. It makes walking a thrilling adventure. I've never been in such a fog before in my life. If I stretch out my walking stick in front of me, the ferrule is half lost in obscurity. Coming back I twice lost my way, & ran into a cyclist, to our mutual surprise. Stepping off a pavement to cross to the other side becomes a wild & fantastic adventure, like sailing into the Atlantic to find New York, with no chart or compass. Once where the breadth of the road was greater than the normal, I found myself back on the same pavement, as I started, having slowly swerved in my course across the road. I've got to sally out now & find my little Editor to give him some tea. If you never hear from me again, you will know that somewhere I am moving round in little plaintive circles, looking for a pavement. (c) Q: Do you know anyone in England who owns a revolver? The consensus of opinion seems to be that one must have a revolver. My own feeling is that it would be more dangerous to me than to anyone else, and I certainly can't afford to buy one. An amusing result of this trip seems to be that one is likely to be offered the most amazing variety of jobs, varying from the most august to the most farcical, adoption by old Harris as his successor as Parliamentary Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society. But this in confidence. I have to be stared at and my private life examined by a committee of philanthropists; I'm afraid I shan't get by this. (c) Q: Scandinavians are terribly Scandinavian. (c) Q: I had a painful purgatorial lunch yday with Grigson, Spender & Rosamond Lehmann, my mind clouded with aspirins. I hadn't met S. before: he struck me as having too much human kindness. A little soft. (c) Q: The baby is crying, & I have ten books accumulated for review & this damned thriller to write. (с) Q: The other fly in the ointment is a libel action. I don't know whether you remember the drunk party at Freetown in Journey Without Maps. I called the drunk, whose real name was quite different, Pa Oakley. It now turns out that there is a Dr P. D. Oakley, head of the Sierra Leone Medical Service. The book's been withdrawn (luckily all but 200 copies have been sold), writs have been served, and he's out for damages! Anxious days. (c) Wow. Who would have gussed that an author's life is so rife with strife. Ridiculous. Q: Casting is proving very different. Menzies finds lovely people with appallingly tough faces, but when they open their mouths they all have Oxford accents. (c) Q: I was driven distracted by rats when I discovered in the house of a Norwegian, the widow of an American coffee planter, a copy of The Hotel, the only book of yours I hadn't read. ... Your book was so infinitely more actual than the absurd situation. (c) Q: I see things rather as follows: immediate conscription is certain. Therefore a. one may find oneself in the army with or without a commission. This means small earning power and only a small allowance. In that case one must make one's savings go as far and as long as possible. Under those circumstances I should feel very grateful if my family were boarded out either with Eleanor or you on some sharing basis: we'd contribute of course to rates, labour etc as well as board. And this house would be shut up or let. b. one would find oneself in some ministry - of information or propaganda at a reasonable salary. In that case I should take as cheap lodging as possible in town or get someone to share expenses of this house, and find a cottage, perhaps at Campden for the children. (c) Q: In confidence, life at the moment is devilishly involved, psychologically. War offers the only possible solution. Glad you liked The Lawless Roads. Considering it was written in six months. I don't think it's bad. (c) Q: I have always found too that Americans - I have noticed it in proof readers - resent any departure from the usual practice. How often have I had an adjective queried and some banal cliché suggested in its place. (c) Q: You are missing nothing here. Only the faint susurrus of the intellectuals dashing for ministry posts. (c) Q: To send the sympathy of strangers at such a cruel time seems like a mockery. (c) Q: I like the conscienceless savoir faire. (c) Q: I was thinking out an idea yday of an organisation of war authors parallel to the war artists. They would be given acting rank & assigned to the various fronts, to do an objective, non-newsy & unpropaganda [?] picture of the war - for publication in England & America - composite books probably. I can't help feeling there's something here: they should be people who are published in America anyway on their name [?]. Of course the idea behind it is to avoid being sent for six weary months of training to Catterick or some other hole. (c) Q: I must stop & read an incredibly funny & indecent Hugh Walpole (I am doing Spectator fiction to earn some money). 'Standing up they embraced until they were indeed one flesh, one heart, one soul. But it hurts to make love standing, so Joe said: "Let's not bother about lunch."' … Another gem: 'For weeks they had been constantly together, & during the last week had been without a break in one another's arms, spiritually when it had been too public to be so physically.' (c) Q: In fact you are objecting to him on the same grounds as people who object to a book because it has no nice characters. The answer is: they are not meant to be nice. (c)Q: You certainly live now in a stranger world than that priest's. (c) Q: … I feel over-awed without my books. (c) Q: I am now literary editing this rag … which isn't quite as I pictured war.(c) Q: The whole war is good for someone like me who has always suffered from an anxiety neurosis: I turn down work right and left just for the fun of not caring. (c) Q: the pay being good but with a sinister absence of competition. (c) Q: Then for reasons only known to themselves the C.O. thought it would do me good to get a military background, so I was sent for four weeks to a college here & taught how to salute with a little stick under my arm on the march (a thing I shall never have to do.) They also tried without success to teach me to motorcycle on Shotover - this always ended in disaster. As I seemed to be surviving better than the bicycles they gave it up, & gave me flu instead. This was definitely the military background - the hideous little M.O. with dirty yellow fingers, the no heating, the lavatories on the other side of a cold quad, the struggle for water to drink, the dreadful cold soggy steak & kidney pudding on iron trays … I packed a suitcase and fled here, but they'd already added bronchitis to the flu. (c) Q: ... yesterday on the way to the lavatory I caught sight of myself in a glass huddled in an old yellow overcoat like a humble character in Dostoievsky pursuing the scent of a samovar into somebody else's flat … (c) Q: It's sad because it was a pretty house, but oddly enough it leaves one very carefree. (c) Q: Well this has been a moan. I hadn't meant it to be. ... I've had an odd life when I come to think of it. Useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring. (c) Q: Dearest Mumma,... Only people in Victorian novels do seem to behave so oddly whenever sex rears its ugly head! Tremors and horrors and indignations. (c) Q: And at night there are far too many objects flying and crawling for my liking. Wherever one wants to put one's hand suddenly, to turn on a switch or what not, there always seems to be a gigantic spider. (c) Q: ... the prizewinner always looks a little silly. And it's odd that one feels pleased - apart from the hundred pounds which is always useful. ... I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success - any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one's own pleasure. (c) Q: A thief got into my living room and stole a loaf of bread, a table cloth... and my sole remaining pair of glasses. (I cabled for more). So I got wire put up over all the windows which gives the impression that one is either living in a prison, a nursery, or a loony bin. (c) Q: I heard of your commando activity. It must have been fun. I wish they would take me on as a kind of war historian-observer. With honorary rank and no dull regimental duties. These are the idle dreams of an exile. (c) Q: Do write again and let me know more about your nurses' constipation. (c) Q: Then make head office give you over-lapping leaves. Not leaves at the same time, that's too purposeful like making a date to sleep with a new lech on a certain day. (c) Q: I'm assuming for the sake of argument that you are just engaged. In which case, for God's sake, remember that it's a distinct possibility to fall badly in love after sleeping with a man, and that's the kind that goes on. A man improves enormously too under that treatment in the way of nerves, thin-skinnedness, sociability and the like. Only, of course, it mustn't be done as an 'experiment', but because one's feeling cheerful and a little drunk perhaps and in the mood... (c) Q: … actually the prospect of peace now would fill me with utter gloom. War has not yet touched enough people of ours to alter the world. Here the complacency, ignorance and well-being is incredible. (c) Q: God bless you, dear. God bless you, dear. I've told a lot of lies in 38 years - or I suppose in 35 years, one couldn't lie from the cradle - but this is true. I hate life & I hate myself & I love you. Never forget that. I don't hate life ever, when I'm with you and you are happy, but if I ever made you unhappy really badly & hopelessly or saw life make you that, I'd want to die quickly. There's a cat moving outside the door. If it were you how quickly I'd let you in. (с) Q: No, our life is too organized already. Let us leave literature alone. We needn't worry too much. Man will always find a means to gratify a passion. He will write, as he will commit adultery, in spite of taxation. (c) Q: But, mainly through my fault, we have lived for years too far from reality, & the fact that has to be faced, dear, is that by my nature, my selfishness, even in some degree by my profession, I should always, & with anyone, have been a bad husband. I think, you see, my restlessness, moods, melancholia, even my outside relationships, are symptoms of a disease & not the disease itself, & the disease, which has been going on ever since my childhood & was only temporarily alleviated by psycho-analysis, lies in a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life. Unfortunately the disease is also one's material. Cure the disease & I doubt whether a writer would remain. I daresay that would be all to the good. … So you see I really feel the hopelessness of sharing a life with anyone without causing them unhappiness & disillusion - if they have any illusions. (c) Q: I have loved no part of the world like this & I have loved no woman as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here (c) Q: How it applies to people of our kind - 'of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.' (c)

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-14 00:00:00 Joseph Lavecchia If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review. Screw Your Brains Out: "Graham Greene: A Life in Letters" by Graham Greene (Original Review, 2007-05-15) There are some odd little insights: about how people used to travel by sea and get horribly ill, but then air travel came along and changed all that; Greene's very Catholic attitude to extramarital sex - screw your brains out, go to Confession, go to Mass, go to Communion, come home, screw your brains out with partner not your wife, go to Confession ... (I'm Catholic so I think I can say these things)