Travels with My Aunt-Graham Greene

Dictionary defines travel as: to go from one place to another, especially over a long distance. This is travel in space. We travel not only in space, but also in time. Einstein unequivocally equated time with space, making it the fourth dimension of the Space-Time matrix. But time and space have always been used interchangeably in language: Past is behind us while future lies ahead, opportunity passes-us by, and a deadline approaches insidiously. We intuitively speak of life as a journey through the landscape of time, as one is born, grows old, and dies. Unlike travel in space, travel in time is involuntary and inescapable.

Other than space and time, humans travel in another dimension in their lives. This is travel in relations with other human beings. Each one of us is veritably a different landscape; Each has a distinctive personality shaped by their unique experiences in lives. Knowing a variety of individuals, interacting with them, and nurturing relations with some, enriches life in no less measure than visiting a plethora of different countries.

A life led stranded in any of these dimensions is a life shackled in stifling dogmas of stunted thoughts. Travel frees the soul.

 

Graham Greene called his lighter novels, entertainments. I do not know how he would have labelled Travels with My Aunt; I consider it as one of his best.

Henry Pulling, narrator of the tale, for the story is told in first-person-singular, meets his elderly Aunt Augusta, at the funeral of his mother. In a few words, in the first paragraph of the book, Henry lays bare his life story, ‘I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For these reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother’s funeral’.

At the funeral, Henry meets Aunt Augusta, for the first time in fifty years. This meeting topsy-turvies his life.

In the characters of Henry and Aunt Augusta, Greene contrasts two lives which can not be more different. Henry has toiled behind a counter in a bank all his life, where he rose from a clerk to a manager. He has nurtured only one dream in his life: of growing dahlias after retirement. He says once, ‘This was my familiar world – the little local world of ageing people. … where one read of danger only in newspapers and the deepest change to be expected was a change of government…’. Aunt Augusta lived a colourful peripatetic life, unencumbered by moralistic dilemmas or scruples about the law of the land. When Henry expresses his anxiety on her caution to avoid luggage scrutiny at the airport, she reprimands him thus, ‘I have never planned anything illegal in my life. … How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?’

Aunt Augusta upends Henry’s life in more ways than one. She informs him that he is not the child of her sister, whom he thought his mother – ‘You were your father’s child. Not your mother’s’. Innumerable suggestions in the book announce who Henry’s mother was. Henry’s father, a building contractor, is dead for more than forty years. Henry remembers him as having ‘a lethargic disposition, who used to take naps in all sorts of curious places’. And he thought his mother ‘was an energetic woman, who used to seek [him] out to disturb him’. Henry tells Aunt Augusta that his father, ‘always thought a garden was a waste of good building space. He would calculate how many bedrooms one above the other he could have fitted in. He was a very sleepy man’. ‘He needed bedrooms for more than sleep. … In a bedroom he did other things than sleep’, quips Aunt Augusta.

In Aunt Augusta’s company Henry is confronted with a life he had never even contemplated. With her, he travels in the Orient Express to Istanbul, and to Paris and South America. He meets Aunt Augusta’s friends, who he thought inhabited only the pages of a two-penny potboiler. He sees the ways of his aunt’s life, which he would have, in a most charitable mood, only described as disreputable. She pooh-poohs his fears about smuggling, saying, ‘A little honest thieving hurts no one, especially when it is a question of gold. Gold needs free circulation’.

Henry has always led a tiring life of unvarying drabness. He has found happiness in satisfaction of his clients as he advised them on their investments. His greatest source of joy was the faith reposed in him by his rich client, Sir Alfred Keene. He always ate at the Abbey Restaurant and frequently ordered pre-cooked meals only from Chicken, year-in and year-out – ‘Too many books by too many authors can be confusing, like too many shirts and suits. I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, but the bank had taught me to be wary of whims. Whims so often end in bankruptcy.’

Towards the end, in a poignant scene Henry recounts his life to his aunt – “‘I sat on the bed beside my aunt and she put her arm round me while I went over the uneventful story of my life. ‘I’ve been very happy’. I concluded as though it [his life] needed an excuse.” Living with Aunt Augusta, Henry discovers how monochromatic his life had been – “I was sunk deep in my middle age. All the same I laid my head against her breast. ‘I have been happy.’ I said, ‘But I have been so bored for so long.’”

At seventy-five, Aunt Augusta thinks, life stretches ahead interminably, only to furnish her more joys – ‘Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, and food. … Love-making too provides as a rule a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five’.

Greene’s books are not always a plain joy, his prose not simple. This is one of his latter books, published in 1969, and is perhaps, one of his most effortless novels. There are hardly any long descriptions of mood, personalities, or the landscapes. Story unfolds in dialogues of its protagonists as does their characters. It is a comedy, a page-turner, a picaresque. Humour is suave, language elegant, all narrated with Greene’s trademark concision.

Like his other books, Greene uses comic in life to make serious comments. Returning to his house after a short absence, Henry observes, ‘I had been away two nights, but like a possessive woman it had the histrionic air of being abandoned’. In a letter Henry writes to Sir Alfred Keene’s daughter, – whom he liked to watch bent over her tatting, and who, he presumes, harboured a liking for him – he laments his humdrum life in the London suburb and his dreary future, saying, ‘The future here seems to me to have no taste at all: it is like a meal on a menu, which serves only to kill the appetite’. On his love for books, but only select few, which he has inherited from his father – like his meagre library – he comments thus: ‘One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: It is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. … and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books’.

In the telling of the roller coaster life of Aunt Augusta, Greene has created vivid portraits of many amusing characters. Curran, the crook, an early friend of Aunt Augusta, established a church for dogs in Brighton, to fleece the gullible dog-lovers. Middle-aged Monsieur Dambreuse lived in a Paris bungalow with his wife. In a hotel in the city, he installed his two lady-companions, including Aunt Augusta. He spent time with all the women, without any of them learning about others for months. Mr Visconti, a conman, a second-world war criminal, who twice robbed Aunt Augusta of all her money, was her most faithful lover. Henry’s uncle Jo, Aunt Augusta’s husband, was an obsessive traveller. He suffered a debilitating stroke before his death, but could not live a day without travelling. Aunt Augusta hired a house with fifty-two rooms, including bathrooms, and furnished all differently. Uncle Jo was moved to a new room or a bathroom every week, giving him an illusion of travelling. He died one night, crawling to the fifty-second location, a bathroom, though his doctor had advised him strict bedrest. Wordsworth, Aunt Augusta’s coloured valet-cum-lover, middle-aged, huge-bodied, pot-loving, unscrupulous, who speaks an ungrammatical English, loves her intensely and insists on calling the seventy-five-year-old aunt ‘my baby-gel’.

Travels with Aunt Augusta changes the way Henry now looks at his life – ‘She had come into my life only to disturb it. I had lost the taste for dahlias’. He begins to entertain a doubt that perhaps his mother, or the step-mother, had not been such a simple and wise woman he believed her to be. He now sums her up thus, ‘Imprisoned by ambitions which she had never realised, my mother had never known freedom. Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power’. He develops a delayed affection for his long-dead father, who, he now imagines, was imprisoned in a marriage with a martinet of puritanical disposition, while he himself had an easy nature, and a healthy zeal for the joys of life. He had thought his father had led a provincial life like his, who ‘never travelled further than Central London’. But Aunt Augusta says he, ‘travelled from one woman to another…all through his life. That comes to much the same thing. New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life has been a brief one’.

Using travel figuratively, Graham Greene, one of the most talented English novelists of the last century, has told a riveting tale, of a dull suburban life mired in pomposities of social class, and its redemption by the variety and freedom represented in the metaphor of a travel.