Free A World of My Own by Graham Greene Page B

loneliness but couldn’t make up their minds to return. One terrible and true phrase sticks in my memory: ‘Loneliness is not shared with another—it is multiplied.’

    To my astonishment my publisher, Frere of Heinemann, began to praise the novels of C.P. Snow. He said they had a world-wide reputation. I denied this. In France, I said, he was practically unknown, and I began to point out the absurdities of his style. There was a character in the book Frere was reading who ‘had’ or ‘took’ his wife. However, I couldn’t shake his inexplicable admiration.

    I wanted to read certain poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s
A Child’s Garden of Verses
to my small son (no longer small in that Common World we share). I couldn’t find the collected poems, which had been edited by Janet Adam Smith, although I knew I had a copy both in Antibes and in Paris. All I could find was a selection with very bad illustrations, and it left out all the poems I liked (including the one I wanted to read, which contained the line ‘a sin without pardon’). My son was pleased with the illustrations, which made me all the more disappointed not to find the poem. I at last, but too late, after he had gone, found the edition I wanted tucked away in a cupboard.

    With a French friend I had been wandering through Paris. Only in retrospect do I realize what a Victorian Paris it still is. We came to a kind of market with second-hand bookshops on the periphery, and in the centre people engaged in the manufacture of books:Stalls where type was being set, stalls where books were being bound. In the first second-hand stall I stopped at, I saw with delight bundles of old
Strand
magazines tied with string. Nothing was in very good condition, but all the same it was a shop after my own heart. Mixed in with one bundle was a Nelson sevenpenny—I think by Booth Tarkington—but not one I wanted. However, I found a Dick Donovan for my collection of Victorian detective stories, and another detective story by an author unknown to me, but to my great disappointment the bookseller told me that his stock was for lending only. I continued round the market, but the other stalls contained mainly reference books.

    In My Own World recently my mother read poetry to me—poems I had liked when a boy and perhaps neglected since, for they now seemed to take on a new quality. One poem was by Robert Bridges: ‘Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding.…’

XIII

Science
A Nobel Prize Winner
    I had been reading a very interesting book written by a woman doctor who thought she had found a cure for a fatal disease of the intestines caused by a virus know as Fugger. She injected a wasp with Fugger—from which she was suffering herself—and induced it to sting her on the stomach. She was cured. She consulted a medical friend who asked her whether she really believed in the cure, and she admitted she was only a half-believer. However, he encouraged her to continue her research. Two patients were cured, the third died, but then a fourth was cured. She was awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine, but then two more patients died. The doctor friend suggested that the cure depended on the psychology of the patient and the degree of his or her belief. She was depressed by the bad results and herown half-belief. Her husband volunteered to help her by being injected with Fugger and treated by the wasp sting. His heroic act was rewarded—he was cured.
Outer Space
    A friend showed me two objects which had fallen from the sky through his roof. One was a ball of rock which might have been a natural product; the other was a beautifully fashioned skull in a white substance like marble. This could only have been carved by an intelligence resembling the human. It really seemed a proof of intelligent being existing in outer space.
    Studying the moon’s surface through binoculars, I suddenly discovered a human face carved on a great crag. I was immensely excited by this discovery