Conclusion: Forgotten Memories

Abstract

In Paul Theroux’s novel, Picture Palace (1978), the narrator, Maude Pratt, who is a famous photographer, looks back over her life, recalling particularly her incestuous passion for her brother and her encounters with her camera subjects such as D.H. Lawrence (a randy old man), Robert Frost (niggardly and mean-spirited beneath the folksy charm) and Ernest Hemingway (graceful under pressure). What has particularly stimulated this recollection, however, is not simply the prospect of a retrospective of her work but an encounter with Graham Greene, whose photograph she has been commissioned to take. As the above epigraph indicates, his physical presence is intimidating, particularly the piercing blue eyes. Over dinner, Greene (in Theroux’s knowing narrative) makes reference to encounters with Castro, Truffaut, Jacqueline Bisset and Kim Philby, and also offers his theory of creativity which a reader would have been familiar with from A Sort of Life — namely, the virtue and cultivation of a poor memory, so that ‘what you forget becomes the compost of the imagination’. In encouraging Maude Pratt to write, Greene says: The less you know the better. You have forgotten memories.r3 It is a telling phrase because it catches the sense of how Greene’s novels are often at the borderline — the dangerous edge, if you will — of inventiveness and fact, literature and biography. One might say that Greene’s novels are the ‘forgotten memories’ of his life.4