Sharing Apples Poem by gershon hepner

For redemption we may search
while we also stockpile sin,
hoping in the synagogue and church
that the Lord accepts our spin.

Opium and booze don’t stop
worshippers who throng the chapel,
asking for a lollipop
while like Eve they share an apple.


Martin Nolan writes about Graham’ Greene’s book “The Quiet American”. Greene ‘s books were the source of more movies than any other 20th century writer. The runner up was Rudyard Kipling. Nolan writes:

The current version is not anti-American, Sir Michael insists, but 'anti the 300 to 400 people who started America's entry into the Vietnam War.' Sir Michael describes himself as 'the most pro-American foreigner there is.' The same could not be said for Fowler who, in the book, recalls explaining to Vigot the sarcastic title used to describe Pyle: 'He's a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental, ' he remembers saying, mentioning the hotel where the United States correspondents gathered. ' `A quiet American.' I summed him precisely up as I might have said, `a blue lizard, ' `a white elephant.' '
Greene's characters, in their staggering search for redemption, often stockpile sin. While Fowler wallows in opium, booze and brothels, he is uninterested in nationalism, imperialism or Communism. For Greene, God and guilt always trump politics and its affectations.
'Be disloyal, ' a troll-like guru rants at a boy in 'Under the Garden, ' an autobiographical Greene short story of 1963. 'It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living, boy, and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent — and never let either of the two sides know your real name. The same applies to women and God. They both respect a man they don't own, and they'll go on raising the price they are willing to offer. Didn't Christ say that very thing? Was the prodigal son loyal or the lost shilling or the strayed sheep? '
Fowler tells Pyle, 'I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.' Greene occasionally wandered toward good intentions himself. In 1953, he told Waugh that he wanted to 'write about politics and not always about God.' Waugh waspishly replied: 'I wouldn't give up writing about God at this stage if I was you. It would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.'

1/31/03