The Portable Graham Greene ed. by Philip Stratford

Abstract

245 Reviews I must tell you, sir, You have been somewhat bolder in my house Than I could well like of; I suffer'd you Till it stuck here at my heart; I tell you truly I thought you had been familiar with my wife once. (A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, v.i.141-45) What are we to make of this fellow? The mental effort to encompass him, or rather to construct a value-system that can encompass him, is prodigious. But that is Middleton's way, a kind of baroque excess let loose on conventional morality. For the rest, I felt that Shakespeare (as presented here) looked ill at ease in the citizen-comedy gallery. I am sceptical of the "moral comedy" aspect of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and incredulous at the claim that the play is "fundamentally serious" (p 149). No doubt there is a sense in which The Importance of Being Earnest and The Critic are fundamentally serious, but in practice one does better to stay with the frivolity of the piece. The final impression is of a mass of dramatic material which, deftly and judiciously handled, yields a product of continuous historical interest. That product is essentially the preoccupations of domestic drama: bourgeois tragedy, after all, does not amount to much. Through comedy, which increasingly takes on a satiric rather than romantic tone, one glimpses the stereotypes and obsessions, the butts and whipping boys of a community. And always the dramatic debate returns to the primal themes: money and who gets it; class and who belongs where; sex and its single great question. Leggatt moves surely towards the commanding generalization from which the terrain must be sur­ veyed: "The assertion of morality and the subversion of morality are the poles between which citizen comedy moves" (p 150). Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare is a well co-ordinated attempt to hold some of the fluid energies of the great era in the cupped hands. Some is spilt, and some escapes through the clasped fingers. But something is caught by the gesture, which could not otherwise have been retained. The reader will leave this book with a sense of certain subterranean connections, certain tendencies and affinities, that he did not have before. r a l p h b e r r y / University of Manitoba Philip Stratford, editor, The Portable Graham Greene (New York: The Viking Press 1972). xxiii, 610. $3.25 The editor who prepares an edition of the work of Graham Greene for the Viking Portable Library has no easy task. He must present the novelist, the journalist, the short-story writer, and the author of fictional "entertainments" as representatively as he can within the covers of a book that may be slipped into a coat pocket. He must balance scholarship and journalism. If he takes a few pages from a novel for his anthology, he must convince the reader that he has given a sample, not a digest, luring the reader on, if possible, to the complete work, beyond the pages of the portable library. If the editor decides to include a complete novel, he must keep a reasonable eye on his publisher's list, the length of the novel, the length of time it has had to mature in the public mind, and his author's preferences. (For this collection Greene's choice among his major novels would apparently have been The Power and the Glory or Travels with My Aunt, but a critical edition of the former had been issued by Viking, and the latter had been published only recently. Therefore, The Heart of the Matter was chosen.) In his criticism the editor must ordinarily be a guide rather than a leader, central rather than eccentric or individual, competent rather than bril­ liant, one who instils confidence and does not dazzle his readers. Professor Stratford has managed this complex task well. His consultations with Graham Greene were fruitful; another good volume in a useful series testifies that his relations with the publisher must also have been happy. It is a measure of Professor Stratford's probity that he mentions the reasons for his choice of The Heart of the...