Friday firebreak i

One likes to be down there

at dawn. It can cauterise

the week and steel the day

with something impregnably

perfect.

    

republished July 1st

Nice work when you can get it, Mr Chief Justice

Who knew?

Photography  Steve Pyke

The New Yorker©

Is there a passing scene?

Is there a passing scene,

and which came first (the

scene of passage) and if

so what could that have

been?

Right now Renzo Piano will 

have a new museum and Cal-

vin Klein a new waistband,

and are they getting in my

way of seeing this stride?

Then please do not expect

that I will show them, too.

"Go sit down and wait to be examined."

I have lately become very interested

in tidepool effects which the drap-

ing of a T shirt can recall in some

lightings, as the previous entry and

this one will suggest. 

  

ii  Jeremy Young

Portrait from a marriage: matching the profession to the estate

Mirth - not an experience so

often associated with Graham

Greene as it is with mascul-

ine disappointment in our Age

of Bob Dole - is what floats

to the surface as Peter takes

Poopy to Antibes, to dispatch his honeymoon chores. Oops. Yet, with aid of a pair of 

humane interior designers 

(and I know, this is not merely plural but redundant), his conjugal distraction is

relieved in the usual way, and he returns to his bride with such elation in the acquisition of two new chums as to impart it with no trace of his previous reserve. And what a blessèd convenience, that the new couple's manse must be so extensively redone.

You can well imagine my bemusement, on discovering this classic of Greene's virtually on the day of my marriage's dissolution in Santa Clara County; and such a svelte little Penguin it is, as almost the cornerstone of my decor to this day. Yet as Tolstoy says, not all alliances dissolve for the same reason; in mine, one of us didn't care for California. I beg you to believe. How enormously I'd have preferred a clever pergola for our tidepool than to have paid a pack of lawyers to leave us alone. I cannot drive down to Monterey Bay, and see the sea otters crack the abalone open on their chests, without the sense that gastronomy, too, saves a California marriage.

Graham Greene

May We Borrow Your Husband?

1967

Penguin and Bodley Head, 1969©