The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Death among the Beat Poets
thought this would be a good thing, a triumph of pragmatism over ideology and brinkmanship, and certainly not what has fallen out under Vladimir Putin’s “territorial ambition … repression … and greed”.
Elsewhere, as in the Congo, his flash-forwards seem out of place and too quickly mugged-up, as when he talks about the fated prime ministership of Patrice “Lamumba”. To get wrong the name of a figure so widely honoured in Africa and on the left (there was a Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow) seems careless.
The book is on much stronger ground when dealing with the evolution of what Greene referred to as “the doubt in my disbelief”. This shouldn’t be taken to refer exclusively to Catholicism – Greene oscillated between a kind of blank atheism and belief in stigmata and other miracles – but says more about his alternating faith and disbelief in humanity. Greene never won the Nobel Prize, perhaps because the committee could never clearly judge whether the work unambiguously reflects the affirmative values its charter calls for.
Richard Greene does a very useful job in suspending the irrelevant distinction between “novels” and “entertainments”, which Greene himself came to regret. When the work is considered all of a piece, instead of putting the dark and serious stuff – Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter – over here, and the lighter stuff – Stamboul Train, A Gun For Sale, Travels With My Aunt – over there, the work and the life begin to cohere more satisfactorily.
A more meaningful distinction might be between novels and reportage, which many of them were in disguise. We forget now what a formidable journalist
Greene was. He was also almost unique in enjoying success on stage and screen as well as in serious fiction. He disliked many of the films adapted or maladapted from his work, but he did brilliant screen work of his own: The Third Man is one of his major works.
IN short, punchy chapters, Richard Greene delivers a remarkably whole and believable Greene, stripping away some of the mystique and “doubleness”. Greene was unique in attracting a platoon of doppelgangers, tall, rangy men who turned up at lectures and signings insisting they were Graham Greene.
It was a phenomenon Greene himself actively encouraged, one of his great jokes. Identity, he seemed to be saying, was a matter of confidence and confidence was by definition a trick. He did retain a double view of humanity. It’s worth recognising that “the power and the glory” itself, the formula behind his greatest work, is a Manichean rather than Catholic concept. Greene lived in a world at war with itself. Good and evil grappled in the ring and sometimes there was fun to be had between rounds.
ANGEL’S INFERNO William Hjortsberg
No Exit Press, £9.99
ALTHOUGH not well known by name even in his native America, the work of New York-born William Hjortsberg will be familiar to film fans on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to Alan Parker’s 1987 adaptation of Falling Angel, Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel. Originally serialised in Playboy, of all places, it was re-titled Angel Heart by Parker, who cast Mickey Rourke as damned private investigator Harry Angel and Robert De Niro as Louis Cyphre, a thinly-veiled alias for Old Nick himself. Parker relocated the action from New York to New Orleans and cut away some of the ambiguity of Hjortsberg’s original but otherwise left the story intact, right down to the 1950s setting. And now, more than four decades on, here’s the sequel, completed just before Hjortsberg’s death in 2017 aged 76.
In defiance of that time gap, Hjortsberg picks up the story in the same scene in which Falling Angel ended – in the spring of 1959, a week or so before the Easter release of Some Like It Hot, with Harry suspected of murder and shackled to a New York cop in his own apartment as he views the grotesquely mutilated body of his teenage lover Epiphany Proudfoot. That she is also his daughter and he is not Harry Angel but Johnny Favourite, a former crooner who sold his soul to the Devil and then tried to welch on the deal, are facts that are slowly becoming clear to our wise-cracking protagonist.
The reader familiar with Angel Heart’s take on the Faust story should find Angel’s Inferno easy enough to follow, and Hjortsberg drops in occasional expository passages to clue in any laggards. Again, the story is presented as a pithy, punchy first-person narrative which apes the style of the hardboiled detective fiction of the period. Though, taking a leaf from Hannibal Lecter creator Thomas Harris, Hjortsberg has Johnny kill his captor and flee the US for Europe. In this case it’s Paris and a high-rolling life in a series of ritzy hotels, paid for courtesy of an ill-gotten windfall.
Also in Johnny’s pocket, a very special and very old silver coin that will guarantee him access to an exclusive club of Devil-worshippers.
Hjortsberg, who once wrote a whodunnit involving Houdini, Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe’s ghost, has tremendous fun with some of the real-life characters kicking around Paris in the late1950s. There’s no space for French New Wave luminaries Francois Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard, who were shooting their early films on the streets of the Left Bank at the time, but Hjortsberg lets Johnny hang out with jazz greats Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell and Zoot Sims and there’s a starring role for William S Burroughs, then resident at the so-called Beat Hotel. It isn’t a flattering portrait, and Hjortsberg has Johnny involve Burroughs and his friend Gregory (presumably delinquent poet Gregory Corso) in a murder outside legendary Montmartre cabaret Lapin Agile.
Elsewhere, Johnny lingers over exquisite meals in Michelin-starred restaurants, quaffs countless glasses of cognac, champagne, Bordeaux and claret – so far, so very James Bond – and smokes Lucky Strikes in preference to the local “pills”, Gitanes. He falls in with, and then into bed with, Bijou Jolicoeur, the African-American owner of a voodoo cabaret. And he sets about cutting a bloody path towards his ultimate goal – a show-down with Louis Cyphre, who hired Harry Angel to track down Johnny Favourite knowing full well they were one and the same, and the man Johnny has fingered for the killing of Epiphany and others. It’s this quest that will eventually take him to Rome and a climactic final scene in an ancient chamber below the Vatican.
A suspenseful and very welcome second outing for Johnny Favourite though, given the audacious and twist-tastic finale, it’s clear Hjortsberg’s death has robbed us of what would have been a rip-roaring (and decidedly sulphurous) third instalment.