The Imaginary Girlfriend Read Online Free Page A

Conrad,” says the unkind reviewer, “disquisitions on ethics and psychology and metaphysics are conspicuously absent.”
    Not all “disquisitions” on such subjects are unbearable to me. It was
Death in Venice
that led me to the rest of Thomas Mann—particularly to
The Magic Mountain
, which I have read too many times to count. The literature of the German language wouldn’t attract me with full force until I was in university, where I first read Goethe and Rilke and Schnitzler and Musil; they would lead me to Heinrich Boll and Günter Grass. Grass, Garcia Märquez, and Robertson Davies are my three favorite living authors; when you consider that they are all comic novelists, for whom the 19th-century tradition of storytelling—of narrative momentum and developed characters—remains the model of the form, I suppose you could say that I haven’t ventured very far from Dickens.
    With one exception: Graham Greene. Greene was the first contemporary novelist I was assigned to read at Exeter; it would probably have provoked him to know that I read him not in an English class but in the Reverend Frederick Buechner’s extremely popular course on Religion and Literature. I took every course Fred Buechner taught at Exeter, not because he was the school minister but because he was the academy’s only published novelist—and a good one. (I wouldn’t realize
how
good until, long after Exeter, I read Buechner’s quartet of Bebb novels—
Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast
, and
Treasure Hunt.)
    We were a negative lot of students at Exeter, when it came to religion. We were more cynical than young people today; we were even more cynical than most of us have since become—that is to say that my generation strikes me as
less
cynical today than we were. (Is that possible?) Anyway, we didn’t like Freddy Buechner for his sermons in Phillips Church or in our morning chapel, although his sermons were better than anyone else’s sermons I’ve ever heard or read—before or since. It was his eloquence about
literature
that moved us; and his enthusiasm for Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory
, which engendered my enthusiasm for all (or almost all) of Greene, was unstoppable.
    I feel that I know Greene’s people better than I know most of the people I have known in my life, and they are not even people I wanted (or would ever want) to know: it is that simple. I cannot sit in the dentist’s chair without envisioning the terrible Mr. Tench, the expatriate dentist who witnesses the execution of the whiskey priest. It is not Emma Bovary who epitomizes adultery to me: it is poor Scobie in
The Heart of the Matter
, and poor Scobie’s awful wife, Louise; it is Helen, the 19-year-old widow with whom Scobie has an affair, and the morally empty intelligence agent, Wilson, who is a little bit in love with Louise. And then there is the ghastly sleaziness of
Brighton Rock:
the utterly corrupted 17-year-old Pinkie, and the innocent 16-year-old Rose . . . the murder of Hale, and Ida drinking stout. They have become what an “underworld” means to me, just as
The End of the Affair
is the most chilling antilove story I know. Poor Maurice Bendrix! Poor Sarah and poor Henry, too! They are like people you would shy away from if you encountered them on the street, knowing what you know.
    â€œHatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions,” Greene wrote. I used to have that typed on a yellowing piece of paper, taped to my desk lamp, long before I understood how true it was. Something I understood sooner—as soon as I began to write—is this cutting I also made from
The End of the Affair:
“So much of a novelist’s writing . . . takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent