Balham Going Gay Poem by gershon hepner

Graham Greene said Sierra Leone
was comparable to Balham going gay.
Did he mean like lilies Monet
might once perhaps have painted? Anyway,
since Balham is the gateway to
the south, I do regret I’ve never been
to see what all it’s people do,
celebrating there the gateway scene
which in the ’50’s Peter Sellers
made as famous latterly,
as D.H. Lawrence, via Mellors,
once made the ungay Lady Chatterly.
My judgment would have been esthetic,
like Graham Greene’s of all the places he
described, most rarely sympathetic
because the people seeking liberty
were mostly less attractive than
the sort of people with whom he connected,
quiet if American,
with leaders democratically elected.

Pankaj Mishra, reviewing Graham Greene’s “A Life in Letters, ” edited by Richard Greene (“Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me, ” NYT Book Review, January 4,2009) , writes:
Greene was not much interested in the arduous and often self-defeating post¬colonial struggles for dignity and equality. He had “no sympathy for either side” in the war in Algeria. He irrationally disliked Arabs, hero-worshipping Moshe Dayan. Richard Greene cautiously argues that he “never admired Islamic culture, ” but there is no evidence he knew much about it. His principal objections to British imperialism seem to have been aesthetic rather than moral. Writing from British-ruled Sierra Leone, he complains of “little plump men in shorts with hairless legs, and drab women, and the atmosphere of Balham going gay.” (Greene does not mean homosexual, of course, the word gay not having this connotation at the time he made this comment. GWH.) Drawn mothlike to war and revolution (the Congo, Kenya, Indochina, Malaya, Israel, Haiti, Cuba, Argentina, Panama and Nicaragua) , Greene occasionally arrived, as in Vietnam, ahead of most journalists. “The Quiet American” is driven by an old posh British disdain for America combined with a new resentment of the inheritors of European empires. It is not his best novel: implausibly virginal and earnest, the American Pyle resembles, as A. J. Liebling shrewdly observed, a French author’s idea of an Englishman. As it turned out, the blunders of the best and the brightest in the 1960s helped give Greene a reputation for geopolitical prescience and obscured the fact that he was mostly wrong about the urgent issues (decolonization, Communism, the political potential of Catholicism) of his time.

1/5/09