Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
Friendship
By David Lodge
Greene on Capri: A Memoir
by Shirley Hazzard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 149 pp., $22.00
Shirley Hazzard's first encounter with Graham Greene was, as she says, just like 'an incident from a novel: from a real novel, a good novel, an old novel.' She was sitting in a café overlooking the piazzetta of the town of Capri one wet December morning in the late 1960s, doing the Times crossword puzzle, when two tall Englishmen entered and occupied the table next to hers. She recognized Graham Greene at once. He was, intermittently, one of the most famous residents on the island, having acquired a villa there in 1948. She had first seen him in the 1950s, when she herself was an occasional visitor to Capri, dining with Catherine Walston (with whom he was still having the affair that inspired The End of the Affair) at his favorite restaurant, Gemma. Now, with her husband, Francis Steegmuller, Hazzard returned more often to Capri, but she had not yet made the novelist's acquaintance.
Review, 1808 words
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