When it was over, I said to Ray Soleil that We Need To Talk About Kevin was the most anhedonic movie that I’d ever seen. There was hardly anythink about it to take pleasure in, although, later, when I was thinking about it, I was fairly blown away by Ezra Miller’s performance as Kevin. I said to Ray that I was in no hurry to see Lynne Ramsay’s picture again anytime soon, but I’m not so sure about that, now that I’ve thought about the movie for a day. In fact it woke me up this morning, thinking about Kevin.

Perhaps there are people who can come away from a movie in which a teenager slaughters fellow students — hardly a commonplace in American life, but a few stories go a long and wearisome way — without wondering how the catastrophe could have been avoided, but I’m not one of them, and I think that I’m in the majority. Of those of us who can’t help wondering, some will conclude that the teenager in question was just bad — evil. Others, like me, will go for “troubled,” meaning that someone might have done something to help. I don’t really think that there was any way to save Kevin Khatchadourian, not by the time he got to high school and perfected his archery. But I read the flashback scenes in which his mother was pregnant with him and then responsible for his colicky infancy as evidence or proof or something that Kevin was an unwanted child. There must be lots of unwanted children, and most of them — most of them? — don’t grow up to be murderers, much less angry, functionally sociopathic murderers. But Eva (Tilda Swinton) and her little boy are both very smart, and they’re engaged almost from the start in a contest for control. At one point — Kevin will later tell his mother that this is the only honest thing she ever did — Eva is so provoked by her son’s insolence that, instead of changing his diaper (again!), she throws him against the wall and breaks his arm.

Some people (Ray, for example), will be drawn to the idea that by the time of the arm-breaking incident, Kevin is already lost as a human being, whoever the cause. But he seemed to think — Ray, that is — that you could simply insitutionalize such a child. I think that he’s wrong about that, at least in the United States. There was a time, yes, when “Reform School” was an effective invocation, but it was already a fiction when my parents were frightening me with it. There are very expensive private schools for difficult children, but really bad kids get thrown out of them.

I want to see We Need To Talk About Kevin because I was distracted by thinking that things were going to get worse for Eva — worse than they were at the “beginning,” when her little house by the tracks and her car are splashed with red paint. This is of course the beginning of Eva’s self-inflicted atonement, her refusal to run away to a town where nobody knows her. (You don’t realize until the end how awfully free she is to make this resolution. She thinks that Kevin’s crime is her fault — she has no doubt about it. But in fact things don’t get worse for Eva. She finds a job, keeps it; she scrubs the paint away. She visits Kevin — in a twist, he has not taken his own life, but, in another, he has not stopped at fellow students — every week, and eventually they talk. At the end, Kevin is old enough to be shipped off to a real prison. He’s scared about that. Eva doesn’t think that he’ll be in for very long; being a smart kid, he went on his killing spree days before his sixteenth birthday, and flooded his bloodstream with Prozac. Time’s up on their interview. Kevin gives his motehr a hug, a real, desperate hug. I have to see this movie again.

I will say this: I think that Eva ought to have nixed the archery. No real arrows, at least.

***

What a weekend! It could not have been more bon bourgeois on the outside, quiet and at home. So much for (non-)appearances. In reality, I spent much of yesterday and most of today in a Polish space capsule of how-dumb-am-I humiliation. If there is a moment that I’d like to have preserved on film, it would be the shot of me when I realized that the late Princess Margaret has what in the theatre is called a big speaking part in the finale of Edward St Aubyn’s third “Melrose” novel, Some Hope. Surely she must have died before it was published; she might have sued for libel otherwise, even if every line attributed to her was notarized verbatim. St Aubyn simply skewers her, shifting his polarizing lens between “beastly” and “inane.” The effect is too cumulative for quotation. I haven’t been so shocked since Vile Bodies, which I read as a teenager. St Aubyn one-ups Waugh by replacing the fantastically burlesque with the plausibly ludicrous. 

WHY DID IT TAKE ME SO LONG TO READ THIS BOOK? I’m haunted by the honte of being the last boy on the block. And as if that weren’t bad enough, I saw Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (Day For Night) for the first time. Why? Because, when I was writing up (or down, more likely) Pico Iyer’s book about Graham Greene, and leafing through Shirley Hazzard’s far more vivid book, I came across her mention of scolding Greene for his stiff performance in the movie. He plays an insurance broker who has to tell the director played by Truffaut himself that scenes involving the star (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who has just died in an auto accident cannot be re-shot with another actor; the film will have to be “simplified” to make use of the existing footage. I didn’t think that Greene was bad, really, but, Lordy, hearing his ripe RP accent was a shock. Here’s this “hard case,” sounding like a footman in Buck House. When I mentioned my surprise to Kathleen at dinner, she asked if Damon Runyon spoke like his characters. A point, as Addison DeWitt acknowledged…

Plus the whole weekend’s Timeses and two chapters of The Princess Casamassima plus most of Andrew Pettegree’s chapter about Luther’s impact on the printing business throughout Europe (wildly varied), Season Five of Lewis (sinking me in the conlcusion that nobody but nobody can play Patrick Melrose except Laurence Fox, which you probably regard as a total duh). Plus the regular Saturday tidying (to Lohengrin) and two tasty dinners, not to mention laying the bacon out in the pan last night so that all I had to do this morning, in order to make sure that we were done with breakfast in time for Kathleen to go to Mass, was to turn on the oven. Plus a letter or two, and spending really rather longer than intended on a superb playlist featuring Jessica Molaskey, Jane Monheit, Kurt Elling, Stacey Kent, and a number of other stylish troubadors. Not to mention finally uploading seven of our ten Manhattan Transfer CDs, along with the latest Pink Martini.

Plus.

***

Eg:

“Are you going back to Ireland?” his father asked.

“No, I’ll be in the cottage through August,” said Seamus. The Pegasus Press have asked me to write a short book about the shamanic work.”

“Oh, really,” said Julia. “how fascinating. Are you a shaman yourself?”

[PATRICK/LAURENCE ->] “I had a look at the book that was in the way of my shoes,” said his father, “and some obvious questions spring to mind. Have you spent twenty years being the disciple of a Siberian witch doctor? Have you gathered rare plants under the full moon during the brief summer? Have you been buried alive and died to the world? Have your eyes watered in the smoke of campfires while you muttered prayers to the spirits who might help you to save a dying man? Have you drunk the urine of caribou who have grazed on amanita muscaria and journeyed into other worlds to solve the mystery of a difficult diagnosis? Or did you study in Brazil with the ayabuascaras of the Amazon basin?”

“Well,” said Seamus, “I trained as a nurse with the Irish National Health.”

“I’m sure that was an adequate substitute for being buried alive,” his father said.

It’s wintry cold outside again today, but on Wednesday we had our first taste of spring. I was too old and experienced to take it seriously; I knew that it wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — last. But I wasn’t too old to be quickened. The coming of spring occasions so much bosh that I’m almost as frozen as today’s air by the determination not to spout nonsense, but it really did feel, walking my Wednesday rounds, as if I was appreciably more alive that I’d been. I suppose the balmy afternoon was simply reminding me that this would be true anyway: this week, I finally felt that I had emerged, once and for all, from the mineshaft of grief and rhinovirus in which I’d been immured since November.

Exultation didn’t last. Yesterday, there came a dreadful phone call from the bank. I referred the clerk to Kathleen at the office; Kathleen is our banker. I tried to get hold of her myself, but couldn’t; it was lunchtime, and no one answered. For nearly two hours, I simmered in a miserable anxiety that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Then came the call from Kathleen, back from lunch. She had sorted the whole business out in two strokes when she received the redirected call and then gone off to lunch. Unaware that the call was redirected — that I knew anything about what did indeed turn out to be 100% clerical error — she never thought to call me beforehand to say that all was well.

I was still pretty rattled at bedtime. You may be asking if Kathleen possesses a mobile phone. The answer is, Sometimes.

To beguile myself during this agony, I turned to a book, to a series of novels in fact, that I’ve been avoiding since I first heard about it a decade or so ago. Every few years, I would read an enthusiastic review of the latest installment in Edward St Aubyn’s sequence of novels about Patrick Melrose, who it seemed was an even more alter-egoish creation than most. I would read that St Aubyn is darkly funny but also just plain dark about his not-so-fictional world of rude and dissolute epigones of the English aristocracy. No reviewer failed to mention child- and drug-abuse. Not for me, I would think, and another few years would go around before the excitement would bubble up again in the otherwise quiet patch of literary life that’s devoted to beautiful English prose.

For some reason, I imagined the writer to be a weedy neurasthenic, a small and petulant person. Perhaps it was the author photograph that ran with the latest round of reviews — the fifth and final novel, At Last, has just been published, and the previous four have been bound up into a convenient omnibus — that changed my mind about these books. I think that the real Edward St Aubyn looks something like Orson Welles, and I’ve found that he writes with something like Welles’s heroic gusto. There is a wealth of polished detail, but no small-mindedness. Opening the book at random, I come upon this passage from Never Mind, the first of the Melrose books. Eleanor is Patrick’s disorganized and deeply unhappy mother, her mind drifting from her own dinner party.

Eleanor thought about her stepfather barking at her mother across the wastes of English silver, French furniture, and Chinese vases that helped to prevent him from becoming physically violent. This dwarfish and impotent French duke had dedicated his life to the idea that civilization had died in 1789. He nevertheless accepted a ten per cent cut from the dealers who sold pre-revolutionary antiques to his wife. He had forced Mary to seell her mother’s Monets and Bonnards on the ground that they were examples of a decadent art that would never really matter. To him, Mary was the least valuable object in the fastidious museums they inhabited, and when eventually he bullied her to death he felt that he had eliminated the last trace of modernity from his life, except, of course, for the enormous income that now came to him from the sales of a dry-cleaning fluid made in Ohio.

It’s almost as though Hemingway had taken up Waugh. Unthinkable, but there it is. Never Mind goes on in this breezy but infernal way right up to the end. By that point, I’d been put out of my ninety minutes of misery, but I was well-primed to flinch and quail at the frightening scenes of substance abuse that take up most of the first half (anyway) of Bad News, the second volume.

He was so tired, he really must get some sleep. Get some sleep. Fold his wings. But what if George and the others sent somebody to look and they found the sick-spattered basin and hammered on the door of the cubicle. Was there no peace, no resting place? Of course there wasn’t. What an absurd question. 

Having put it off for over a week, I finally got on with the end of my Morse jag and watched “The Wench Is Dead,” the penultimate episode, last night. I’d delayed because it’s unusual in several ways at once. It was the first episode that I got to know well — meaning, among many other things, that I had no idea who Adele (Judy Loe) was (the first female interest to reappear in a second episode, that’s who). Written by Malcolm Bradbury, of all people, it’s unlike all the other Morses in involving a very cold case — a murder occurring in 1859. “The Oxford Canal Murder,” it’s called — nothing to do with the University. And there’s a big American part, played by Lisa Eichhorn. As it turns out, Lisa Eichhorn really is American (she was born in upstate New York), but half the time, on Morse, you have to wonder about those accents, which, although plausible, come from what the French call nulle part.

Seeing the show in order, knowing that Morse really was terminally ill, I bawled like a baby and could hardly eat my spaghetti alla carbonara. (Kathleen had a business date.) Lord knows how I’ll carry on during “The Remorseful Day,” the finale in more ways than one. (Not only does Morse actually die, but actor John Thaw himself died two years afterward.)

I thought I would share my Morse Questionnaire. I hope to have forms printed up the next time I go through the series. The database will be amusing.

1. University SOC. (Y/N)
2. Pathologist. (Name)
3. Outremer. (Only two shows leave the British Isles, but “The Wench Is Dead” goes to Ireland.)
4. Canal SOC.
5. Rich and Famous. (Y/N)
6. Tension with the police hierarchy. (1-10, with “Masonic Mysteries,” in which Morse is himself put under arrest, the sole 10.)
7. Lewis’s doubts. (Correlation, 0-1).
8. Crossword Puzzle Clues. (Y/N)
9. Drugs/Alcohol. (Correlation)
10. University off-use. (Summer schools and such)
11. Beaumont. Lonsdale. Gresham. This is actually item 1a.
12. Love Interest. (Name of character, actress; suspect? accomplice? murderer? Victim? All of the above?)
13. Music. (1-10, with “Twilight of the Gods” and “The Death of the Self” the two 10s.)
14. Does the chief superintendant insult Morse by calling him “matey.” (Y/N)

If you can think of anything to add to this questionnaire, please let me know! 

If I were younger, I’d let myself be annoyed by Pico Iyer’s stab at memoir, The Man Within My Head. But I’m older, and it is no longer necessary to couple a lack of sympathy with a show of impatience. I picked up the book because I wanted to know who Pico Iyer is. I’ve been reading his pieces in the NYRB for ages, and I’ve wondered about his name and where he comes from. I didn’t recognize “Iyer” as the Tamil Brahmin surname that it apparently is. Now I know. As to how somebody of such lineage came to be named after a Florentine humanist, that’s an unusual story but it is plausible enough. (Anyway, his real first name is “Siddhartha,” no?) Pinning down Iyer’s roots seemed all the more important to me as his topics were far-flung, a globe-trotter’s in fact. What I didn’t know, until I was well into The Man Within My Head, is that the author worked for a decade or so, in exalted positions, at Time Magazine. When I learned that, the lack of sympathy that I’d been feeling as one well-written page followed another became perfectly explicable.

I can’t say much about Time; only that, like New York and, lately, The Economist, it was a publication that I wouldn’t allow in the house. New York is openly trivial, but, like The Economist, Time is a magazine in which good writing is deployed with the aim of preventing the reader from doing any real thinking.

You could say that he gained from school not just his schoolboy’s sense of adventure, his love of mischief, his uncertainty about what to do with the most foreign country of all (the other sex), but his almost superstitious revulsion from success.

I would argue that this sentence, in which “he” is Graham Greene, the eponymous man within Iyer’s head — or at least one of them, the other, possibly, being his father (he waits forever to raise this question) — is the key to the book. To write of women as “the most foreign country of all” is almost as clever as it is thoughtless. The summing up of the things that Greene learned in school reminds me of that notorious remark of John Ashbery (in a conversation with Kenneth Koch):

I am assuming that from the moment that life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions.

It seems that some people are simply wired that way — how sorry one is for them. Not that Iyer is at all like Graham Greene. He appears to have led a level, satisfying interior life with lots of exterior excitement. He writes of Greene as perpetually escaping the past; Iyer is always looking for new possibilities. His restlessness is the consequence of rootlessness — it’s the kind of freedom that Marilynne Robinson has in mind when she talks about the advantages of being a “deracinated” Westerner.

That’s what would be annoying about The Man Within My Head, if I were immature enough to let annoyance cloud the real pleasure that I took in Pico Iyer’s exotic but wholesome company (a pleasure dependent upon my invisibility as his reader). Iyer is bewitched, if only to a manageable degree, by “Graham Greene.” A writer and a man who, despite many personal failings, seemed to strike everyone who knew him as remarkable. Iyer, who grew up — well, that’s just it: he grew up flying back and forth between Oxford and Santa Barbara. When he was nine years old, and newly transplanted to California, he not only got homesick for England but figured out in currency-exchange calculations that it would be cheaper for him to return to his prep school and fly home for vacations than to pack his lunchbox every day for the American public school. Whether his parents proved these numbers to their own satisfaction, they acceded to his request, and Iyer became one super-cool kid, always and everywhere an ambassador from a highly intriguing elsewhere. (After all, he could have shuttled between Tulsa and Athens, say — two places with little curiosity about the other.)

In short: if Graham Greene had taken up residence inside Pico Iyer’s head, then he must have found there the peace that he sought in vain throughout his life. I suspect that what inspired Iyer to write this book was the allure of borrowing a measure of Greene’s troubles, with a view to complicating his own worldliness. But the graft doesn’t take, and, despite the intensity of his engagement with The Quiet American, which he can appreciate deeply from both sides, Fowler’s and Pyle’s, Iyer cannot contain Greene, much less house him in his head. It would have been much better to approach Greene’s as the life that Iyer was, through luck and constitution, spared.

All right: here’s what’s unpardonably annoying about The Man Within My Head: the refusal to name “Eton College,” at least until the very end of the book, when we see that Iyer has saved it up for a joke — he has been holding it back so that it can be mentioned for the first time by the Bishop of Potosí, of all people, in the most unlikely circumstances. The joke is not very funny, and it does not dispel the annoyance piled up by a string of references — our distant patron Henry VI; the book that Cyril Connolly wrote about our school; between Slough and Windsor; New Buildings/oldest classroom in the world; eighteen prime ministers and the nineteenth taking office as I write — that act as shibboleths, designed to distinguish the sophisticated from the parochial. It seems almost rude. I was never for a moment mystified; I saw through each hint as it appeared. But I drew no satisfaction from this knowingness; quite the reverse. I was embarrassed; I felt like a know-it-all.

Grahame Greene, of course, did not attend Eton. His father was housemaster and eventually headmaster at Berkhamsted School, in an outer suburb of London. Greene took a second-class degree in history from Balliol and then jumped into journalism, from which the success of his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, delivered him for life. He married and had two children but did not live with his family. He had amazingly clear eyes. If you’re interested in his elusive charm, captured by a great writer who spent time with him over many years, by all means seek out Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri, a book that I think it’s slightly churlish of Pico Iyer not to mention.