Word: aunt
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Hamlet's Aunt TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT by Graham Greene. 261 pages. Viking. $5.95. It is as if Shakespeare, after the tragedies, had chosen to write not The Tempest but Charley's Aunt. After 18 novels variously described as entertainments, authentic modern tragedies or murky theological melodramas, Graham Greene has at last put himself onstage in a comic masterpiece. Greene's aunt has a bit more Melvillean whalebone in her corsetry than Charley's. She belongs among those female siblings of steel shaped by P. G. Wodehouse who all seem to be named Agatha...
...Greene's comes set about with literary conventions-both defied and deferred to. Hamlet, for instance, was a tragedy about a man whose mother turns into his aunt; Greene's book is a funny novel about a man whose aunt turns into his mother. It is notorious that Americans have mothers rather than fathers, while literary Englishmen tend to have aunts. Greene's comedy is based on this English anthropological pattern -one unknown to less eccentric races...
...Like David Copperfield's Aunt Betsey Trotwood, all literary aunts should be brisk and, if possible, maiden. But to be really successful they must also have a dull, dim nephew as a foil. Also, it is the aunts' tragedy that their stories are invariably written by their dim nephews...
...very young woman, Hedda had been a kind of platonic muse to Eilert Lovborg (David Newman), a brilliant but dissolute writer and thinker. Out of temperamental fatigue ("I have danced practically all my life-and I was getting tired . . . My summer was up"), she has married an aunt-coddled pedant named Jorgen Tesman. She has moved from a danger that stirred her inner being to a safety that curdles her inner being. Lovborg has since found a new muse, Thea Elvsted (Anne Fielding), a married woman far inferior to Hedda in intellect but considerably more pliant sexually. Tesman...
...feet. Rather fussily elegant in his dress-flowered velvet suit, lots of ruffles, snuffbox to flutter over-Gibbon exuded a tepid blandness. Joshua Reynolds painted a deadly portrait of him. His profile is distinctly not that of a Roman emperor. He has the eyes of a maiden aunt, a tiny Cupid's mouth, and a second chin far more impressive than the first. Even his hands manage to look pudgily repressed...