My Three Favourite… Graham Greene Women
Graham Greene’s most memorable female characters are stuffed full of the love, filth, wiles and grit that compose everything that is good and bad in all humans. Zadie Smith summed up this whirlpool of fallibility when she wrote “there is no real way to be good in Greene, there are simply a million ways to be more or less bad.”
In picking my three favourite Greene women, I have made some high profile rejections – Sarah Miles, for instance, with her self-obsessed meandering between her lust for god and love of her lover.
And, in Brighton Rock – perhaps as a result of a certain cantankerousness that comes with the passing of naivety – I would bet you ten sticks of the pink stuff, that you couldn’t find a lady reader, over the age of twenty-five, that has any sympathy for the sniffling trials of “the little fool” Rose.
Give me the “indomitable will” of Ida Arnold any day. Everybody knows an Ida – a curvy meddler with that clichéd “heart of gold”, crap with money, better with men with a love of the things (booze, cream cakes, gambling, sex and cheesy old love songs) that make life, by turns, wonderful and unbearable.
She is an awful, fantastic synthesis of the Wife of Bath and Peggy Mitchell. Ida sets out to save Rose (very much against Rose’s will) and investigate the death of Hale partly out of her fundamental sense of justice – “I believe in right and wrong” – partly out of a very Greene-esque sense of doing right by your friends but mostly, unabashedly because an unofficial murder investigation is absolutely exciting and an affirmation of life, very much as Rose herself is.
That’s not to say that I don’t have a respect for Greene’s younger, minxes in training; being awestruck, in particular, by the ploys of Our Man in Havana’s barely sixteen-year-old Milly Wormold.
The actions of, pious, beautiful Milly include setting fire to a boy that pulled her hair, passing nude art photos around her class and running flirtatious rings around, “the red vulture,” Captain Segura, who is seemingly so menacing that despite being “on his best behaviour” with her, he has a cigarette case made out of human skin.
Milly’s skill is to use religious remonstrations to get everything that she wants from father – the book opens with her having bought a saddle, bridle and bit, along with the horse itself, on his credit and, when challenged, threatens to “deny the existence of god” if her prayers to keep them aren’t answered.
Within twenty-four hours, membership of the Country Club is added to the list sealing Wormold’s descent from hoover salesmen into faux-spy which is, in the main, to enable himself to finance his daughter.
There’s a worldly wiseness to Milly by the end of the novel, as she callously deals with Segura’s proposal and accepts her father’s relationship with Beatrice, reasoning “Oh, pagans can do almost anything and you are pagans. Lucky you.”
But, for me, the absolute uber-femme of Greene’s world is deliciously disreputable Aunt Augusta (played by Maggie Smith, above), from Travels with My Aunt. It would be easy to see Augusta as a bawdy caricature with a zest for everything adventurous – spanning travel, sex- and risk-fuelled law breaking – but she is more complex than this.
Henry, who does know not know he is her son, has grown up without his mother and she is in turn badly-treated by men (swindled by Mr Visconti) and spooning out a casual contempt for breaking their hearts (her rejection of her servant and bed partner Wordsworth).
In her seventies, she’s got the kind of looks that would stop traffic from cabs in Brighton to boats on the Panama Canal: “brilliant red hair, monumentally piled, and her two big front teeth which gave her a vital Neanderthal air”.
Aunt Augusta, who coaxes Henry away from his dahlia-growing regime to the precarious thrills of her world, has all of the flamboyance, strength, lack of judgement, gluttonous enthusiasm for life and a distinctly individual moral compass that makes her the best of Graham Greene’s women.
This was a guest post by Fran Harris. Fran is the editor of Lady Adventurer, a site showcasing the best travel writing by women.
What do you think?