Books: Black Squares & White

NINETEEN STORIES (247 pp.)—Graham Greene—Viking ($2.75).

Graham Greene deprecates these 19 stories as “byproducts of a novelist’s career.” This amounts to fair warning to readers of Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter not to expect anything of comparable quality.

The first of the 19 was written in 1929, the last in 1948, and like the chase-and thriller-books that Writer Greene calls his “entertainments” (The Ministry of Fear, etc.), many of them seem to have been written with his left hand, or written to sell. But Greene is obviously not at ease with the short story; it brings out his second-rate gift for contrivance and cramps his now clearly first-rate gift for dramatizing the lives of the weak—abandoned, as one of his characters puts it, “to the enormities of Free Will.”

Killed by Duty. People interested in Graham Greene’s view of such enormities will find six pieces in the book worth careful reading. One is an early story of childhood called The End of the Party, concerned with a small boy’s helpless integrity in face of an overpowering terror. Another, The Basement Room (recently made into a movie called The Fallen Idol), suggests the disastrous effect on a small boy of being made a responsible agent in an adult affair. A third, Brother, examines the troubles of a man who acts according to his principles, does his duty as a citizen, and gets another man killed. A fourth, A Chance for Mr. Lever, stacks everything in favor of the choice of sin by a middling good little man and notes his exhilaration after making it. A fifth, written last year, is called The Hint of an Explanation and deals briefly with the same theological theme as The Heart of the Matter. Besides these, there is a fragment of a novel written in 1936 (he gave it up, wisely, to write Brighton Rock), in which the author intended to use the West African locale later picked as the scene of The Heart of the Matter.

Of these six, four were written in 1936, apparently a crucial year for Novelist Greene’s development. What gives them literary value is the clarity with which they confront the author’s religious faith with the paradoxes and atrocities of reality, including a certain “drab empty forest … where it is impossible to believe in any spiritual life, in anything outside the nature dying round you . . .”

Saved by Disloyalty. “It does seem to me,” says Graham Greene in Why Do I Write? (just published in Britain by Percival Marshall), “that one privilege [the writer] can claim, in common perhaps with” his fellow human beings, but possibly with greater safety, is that of disloyalty … I belong to a group, the Catholic Church, which would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty … There are leaders of the Church who regard literature as a means to one end, edification. That end may be of the highest value, of far higher value than literature, but it belongs to a different world … As a novelist, I must be allowed to write from the point of view of the black square as well as of the white: doubt and even denial must be given their chance of self-expression, or how is one freer than the Leningrad group?”