Hamlet's Aunt

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.

Far 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 conversation overheard in a pub. "Peter can talk about nothing," a girl complains about her absent boy friend, "but-- the Ashes."* The urn is recovered, but not before Auntie's servant (and lover), an enterprising Sierra Leone black named Wordsworth, has emptied Mother out and replaced her with some hot pot. The police get into the act and the chase runs from London to Paris to Istanbul, and finally to Paraguay. Greene is not only putting the reader on. He is putting himself on. We are back in The Orient Express (Greene's fourth novel), but an Orient Express without the Conrad Veidt monocles or the concupiscent dancers in the wagonlit. Just the respectable Mr. Pulling, smoking his first stick of pot, gift of an American girl who calls herself Tooley. With a boy friend who paints Brand X soup cans and a father in the CIA, Tooley is the ultimate in flower-child hippiedom. The pot she gives poor Pulling happens to have been pushed to her by Wordsworth. Pulling is taking his first trip with Mother.

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. Now he is on the run, having been classified as a war criminal.

By the 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 16.

This picaresque tale seems to sprawl all over Christendom. But it is actually a parable as neat as Faust. It is a demonstration that the surface of a man's life, however wildly comic it seems, is not really funny unless it is a parodic replay of The Man Within. In "the mirror surface where creation rests," no man sees his true reflection. Only when the mirror is distorted as in a fun fair can a man laugh in the 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.

* An astute reader may not need to be told about the Oedipus complex, but may need to know that "the Ashes" is a term given to the five-match series between England and Australia for world supremacy in cricket. * Excerpt: "Fantong refilled two glasses with double whiskeys the colour of her skin. The doctor remembered that in his house the Commissioner's Marie was waiting--for nothing; after Fantong there was nothing left he could give to any woman."

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