One of the literary heroes of my distant youth was Graham Greene, who once confessed that he had become a writer just for avengeing an abuson of the school’s courtyard, called Carter, who had martyred him. He decided that in all his novels there would always be a murderer, a traitor or a loser with this name. That abuser led him to think about suicide. In fact, at 16 his parents surprised him stroking a Smith & Wesson, 32 Caliber. Graham Greene played the Russian roulette four times with six bullets. If that were true, according to statistics, he would be mathematically dead, but he did not believe in mathematics. In view of the case he was taken to the psychoanalyst. The boy lying on the couch explained that he had a recurring erotic dream. “His wife enters my room with bare breasts and I kissed them.” The psychoanalyst asked him: “What does he associate first with my wife’s breasts?” The young Graham replied: “Two subway cars.” The psychoanalyst gave it a cure, just to take it off.
Graham Greene until the end was his mind in two, he became Catholicism just to marry a Catholic, he was unfaithful husband, spy, passionate lover, traveler to those murky places on the planet where there were murderers with Guayabera sweated under the fans of blades on the roof. He always walked his literature in the double game between love and hate, compassion, suffering and wet lust. As a good Catholic, he excited himself a lot with brothels. One of them in Paris took his lover Yvonne. He left her in the bar and he went into a cubicle and then went to Mass if it was Sunday.
Your novel Power and glory, That I read at the exit of adolescence, discovered how the divine grace between renegade, alcoholic priests, and the literary value so tasty that sin had. I always have Graham Greene associated with the cantinela of the Balalaica de The third man Already the hundred empty JB bottles that he kept as trophies of his apartment in front of the Antibes Sea. His death, which occurred in Vevey, a town in Switzerland where he had retired in the company of his daughter, happened as in his novels. During the funeral, on the side of the coffin was his first wife, Vivien, 86; on the other side, his lover Yvonne, 60, who had not divorced from her husband; In the middle, the coffin, who had two exits, one that gave heaven and another to hell.
Another of my heroes who also had a divided mind between the strict Protestant moral and hedonism, between dark pleasures and personal honesty, was André Gide. His double life sometimes acquired the art category. For one of his books, The immoralistI knew that true happiness lacks guilt, a finding, and The food terrestrial I read it as a song of the instinct to overcome morality through beauty. In one of my trips to Syracuse I celebrated that at the Villa Politi hotel there would be evidence that this writer had passed there, perhaps in search of the sunny bodies of those teenagers who bathed in the old port or perhaps it was about that trip that prolonged to Algiers in the company of Oscar Wilde, who took with his young lover Lord Alfred Douglas, who ended up being his ruin. There he was introduced by Wilde in certain coffees for initiates. Between the smoke of the Kif pipes and the aroma of tea with ginger touched the flute a naked teenager, called Ali. “Do you like the music? Take it. The way to overcome a temptation is to fall into it, ”Wilde told him.
He knew that with good feelings bad literature is always done and that there is no limit to stop beauty. It was the soul of the Gallimard publishing house, where the mistake of rejecting the original of In the shadow of the girls floweringwho had sent a Proust. “Do you think 20 pages can be used to describe how one changes posture in bed?” Then he regretted error. Indeed, you could, provided that one was precisely Marcel Proust, determined to become a worm willing to spend his life by manufacturing a golden cocoon. Gide began to be considered a teacher in that environment of Mauriac, Camus, Malraux, Paul Valéry. In 1936 he traveled to the USSR and back he stopped playing to be a communist. He denounced stalinism, which led him to the darkness of the party. He didn’t care in the least, since he was a radical of himself. So murky and the time so honest, he wrote with a pneumatic prose Corydonin defense of homosexuality. Then his books burned in a Berlin square along with Proust’s, united by the same fire of ignorance and fanaticism.