Word: aunts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...