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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Characters who grow in the dark

I'm reading, for the first time, Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana." It's about an obscure expat in pre-Castro Havana who is recruited, against his will, as an agent by British intelligence. He finds he is expected to recruit sub-agents and to send London reports about them. He has no intention of acting as a secret agent at all, but since he does need money, he makes up a bunch of agents and then files reports for their fictional expenses. Then London sends him a female agent to act as his secretary, and things start to get difficult for our Mr. Wormold. There follows a fascinating passage in which Greene compares the imagination of the penny-ante con artist-cum-agent, Wormold, with that of the novelist:

The more Beatrice asked Wormold about (Raul Dominguez), the more his character developed, and the more anxious she became to contact him. Sometimes Wormold felt a twinge of jealousy towards Raul and he tried to blacken the picture. "He gets through a bottle of whisky a day," he said.

"It's his escape from loneliness and memory," Beatrice said. "Don't you ever want to escape?"

"I suppose we all do sometimes."

"I know what that kind of loneliness is like," she said with sympathy. "Does he drink all day?"

"No. The worst hour is two in the morning. When he wakes then, he can't sleep for thinking, so he drinks instead." It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness -- he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action. Soon after Beatrice arrived Raul had a birthday and she suggested they should give him a case of champagne.

"He won't touch it," Wormold said. He didn't know why. "He suffers from acidity. If he drinks champagne he comes out in spots. Now the professor on the other hand won't drink anything else."

"An expensive taste."

"A depraved taste." Wormold said that without taking any thought. "He prefers Spanish champagne." Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn't care to think. Her unabashed description of what life was like with her two lovers sometimes shocked him. But the immediate problem was Raul. There were moments when Wormold thought that it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.

Wormold always thought best in his bath. He was aware one morning, when he was concentrating hard, of indignant noises. A fist beat on the door a number of times, somebody stamped on the stairs, but a creative moment had arrived and he paid no attention to the world beyond the steam. Raul had been dismissed by the Cubana air line for drunkenness. He was desperate; he was without a job; there had been an unpleasant interview between him and Captain Segura, who threatened....

"Are you all right?" Beatrice called from outside. "Are you dying? Shall I break down the door?"

Raul, "the professor," and Teresa are, of course, merely figments of Wormold's imagination. But they fix his attention, they concern him, and -- most wonderful of all -- they "grow in the dark without his knowledge" until he is asked about them, and immediately a character sketch comes to mind.

This passage shows the similarity between any kind of professional bullshitting -- whether one is, say, a comedian or actor who improvises, a con artist (think of Ratso Rizzo's request for money to cover "management expenses"), a parent, a salesman -- and the creative writer.

One of the ironic touches is that Wormold, whose real line of work is selling vacuum cleaners, is a terrible salesman. He just isn't interested enough. But the need for money, and the growing need to keep from being caught in his subterfuge, focuses his imagination as selling never did.

Labels: fiction writing, Greene, novel writing

Comments:

this is probably my favorite Graham Greene book. I really, really loved it.

# posted by Marilyn Jaye Lewis : 3:50 AM

this is also a wonderful movie. the jim wormald part played wonderfully by sir alec guiness.

# posted by Badri : 8:21 AM

I'm reading Orient Express right now! I've always wanted to read Greene, then I read The Quiet American and loved it. Great insight about the secret/dark characters. Greene just writes so well, so simply and yet there's many layers. And the plots are delicious.

# posted by anna : 12:25 AM

I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.
But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf's line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.
Read more How to write a Novel

# posted by Poons : 1:29 PM

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