Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene

Many Minerva members gathered to discuss this novel. It was a happy meeting after an enjoyable read.

The story revolves around a middle-aged, retired bank manager Henry who meets his Aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral.  His father died 40 years earlier.  Henry cultivates dahlias but has little else in his life. Aunt Augusta tells Henry that his father ‘needed bedrooms for more than sleep’ so many of us guessed that Aunt Augusta was more than she let on. (At 7% Henry says ‘My poor stepmother … I shall never be able to think of anyone else as my mother’.)

They both wanted to see more of each other after a walk at the cemetery so began their visits to various places, including Paris and Brighton. The Aunt has never married either but has had many relationships. Wordsworth is the current man in love with Henry’s Aunt and he floats in and out of the story. Henry and Augusta visit Boulogne and meet a lonely old woman still pining for his father. This shocks Henry and Aunt Augusta. The story gets complicated with comings and goings and they end up in South America surprisingly. Augusta has returned to one of her elderly former lovers and Henry is about to wed a 16 year old and be involved in a smuggling racket.  And finally there is confirmation that Aunt Augusta is Henry’s Mum.

The main point of this book we thought was its treatment of Love. Love comes in all shapes and sizes. There are so many types of love described – aunt’s love, mother’s love, romantic love, romantic fantasies, and love for objects (eg dahlias and money). There is also Aunt Augusta’s love for all men. There is also the love of travel and variety.

It is a very funny novel and this was even more obvious in the audio version according to one of our members. The two dominant voices are Henry and Aunt Augusta. They are great characters and we enjoyed the funny situations and the funny language such as ‘Pekinese eyes’. Aunt Augusta smuggling gold ingots in the base of candles across Europe is both shocking and funny. The idea that a staid bank manager couldn’t propose to a young woman, Miss Keane, even if she basically asked for it was probably strange rather than funny. The house of multiple rooms is also funny where an elderly man could live out his last few years, spending a week in each different room, pretending he is travelling. Greene claimed that this book was written for a laugh even though it has some darker tones.

Other funny things include Henry’s love of dahlias and his concern for his mower in the rain. Most of us like dahlias but one member put them in the same category as gladioli, which are inherently funny (post-Dame Edna). We laugh at Henry rather than with him but he does evoke sympathy for his innocence and silliness. Henry’s naiveté is amusing in a sad way – was he a closet homosexual? Probably not, we decided later when discussing the unusual ending.

The book portrays England in the 60’s (it was published in 1969/70). Wordsworth, the only black man in the book, is treated with some contempt we felt. For instance, his language is strange, quite different from everyone else. He is also treated badly by Aunt Augusta. One critic said that it is typical 1960’s stereotyping, whereas another critic said that he was treated humanely.

 

We had a general discussion about ‘Aunts’ in literature with Lady Catherine de Burgh being the supreme example. We decided that this aunt was right in deciding to hand over the baby. She would not have been a good mother.  She was a free spirit and an outrageous character in comparison to her very conforming and moral ‘nephew’. The comparison of the characters led to a discussion about nature versus nurture.

Graham Greene himself has strong links to this book in that his first name is Henry and he lived quite a wild life not dissimilar to that of Aunt Augusta. He had been a spy and a friend of spies as is the character of Tooley’s dad (O’Toole) whom Henry meets briefly on board a vessel in South America.

There is also a dark side to this story. There is the contrary conclusion, which shows Henry’s morals have certainly changed under the influence of his rather lawless relative. Aunt Augusta though is a survivor and helps Henry to survive and gain a family, which presumably he wants. There are comments about American imperialism, which shows Greene’s antipathy to the CIA and American ‘ways’. Greene also shows great cynicism towards the ordinary Catholic and their beliefs.  Aunt Augusta’s faith is portrayed as being very shallow, but useful when necessary. Life in England at that time was also shown to be pretty awful. For instance, Henry’s mother does not have true freedom, she is very constrained and makes Henry equally restrained so he cannot enjoy life as a young man. The message seems to be that a good life could be had only if you were rich, like Henry’s former bank customers, and maybe flouting the law like Aunt Augusta.

There were many unanswered questions. Does Henry choose the new life in South America? Is he creating a real family for himself after all his years of loneliness?  Is Aunt Augusta a survivor versus the boring and mundane Henry? How does he accommodate her lack of moral fibre?

We all thought that Henry was an unreliable narrator in that he tells us some of his innermost thoughts but doesn’t know as much as the reader does in some circumstances. He is very dependent person, firstly on his mother and then his Aunt. This contrasts with Augusta’s dependence on men, who invariably are criminals.  

We finished our discussion with mention of product placement – in this case Omo, which is probably one of the first times such advertisements had been placed in a novel. Also, we pondered on the questions of the morally corrupt inheriting the world. It certainly seems so in politics in 2017.