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Tunes for Bears. Except perhaps for writing, a craft and a calling at which Greene is past and present master. His brief notes and perceptions about his own literary influences and evolutions are among the best things in the book. Greene presents again those perfectly precise and unkittenish notations about the influence of Charlotte M. Yonge on The Ministry of Fear, those traces of Beatrix Potter's Tale of Tom Kitten on Brighton Rock. He gets closest to the heart of the matter when he describes how, briefly confined to a hospital for an appendectomy, his young writer's curiosity overcame both a gentleman's squeamishness and a man's compassion, as he eavesdropped on the agonies of a woman whose child has just died in a nearby bed. "There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer," comments Greene, also noting that the mother's genuine grief came out only in women's magazine cliches. Then he quotes Flaubert: "Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity."
It is only against that kind of aspiration that Graham Greene's sense of his own failure seems acceptable.