Word: aunt
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...last sentence of the piece that "Martha, Minna and the man they shared are silent in the grave." This is factually true, as to their deaths, but the use of the word "shared" is a false conclusion drawn from false premises. For your information, my maiden aunt, Minna Bernays, lived with the family of her sister-my married aunt, Martha Freud-as was the custom when maiden ladies had no careers...
...from Maiden. Greene's dimly tragic nephew is Henry Pulling, an unmarried London bank manager who has retired to look after his dahlias. His comic aunt is Miss Augusta Bertram, who at 75 concedes that her life expectancy may be only 25 years. She is far from maiden. Nephew first meets her at the cremation of his mother. The ashes are intended for a tasteful urn among his dahlias, but somehow, in the overpowering presence of Augusta, Henry leaves the urn behind in his aunt's apartment. He is only reminded of his dead mother by a chance...
...Greene, meanwhile, is proceeding with a sociopsychological striptease of Aunt Augusta. For while she has the pouter-pigeon arrogance of a Wilde dowager, she is revealed after a dance of the seven veils as a smuggler, a member of a group of traveling tarts, and a lover of men who are unlovable to others. Somewhere along the line, like Greene, she has become a Catholic but, again like Greene, she has a weakness for touching the "untouchable." Her last untouchable is an Italian of fathomless duplicity named Visconti, who has bilked everyone from cardinals to oil sheiks...
...time Henry Pulling has learned that his outrageous aunt is really his mother, he has been thoroughly corrupted (or liberated) by the old girl. Except for Wordsworth (who is conveniently knifed), everyone lives happily ever afterward on the proceeds of the family smuggling business. As the story closes, Henry is about to marry the daughter of the chief of customs-as soon as she turns...
...face of his own tragic mask. Recently, in the pages of London's New Statesman, Graham Greene (pseudonymously, of course) entered a competition for the best parody of Graham Greene's style. He did not win, though his entry was printed.* In Travels with My Aunt, he has masterfully parodied himself again, body and bones, style and structure. This time he should win a prize-for the funniest book in many a long glum year...