[In the positive assessment of Nineteen Stories below, Burnham discusses stylistic and thematic elements in the short stories.]

The variety of mood in these stories [19 Stories] of Graham Greene, the first of which was written in 1929 (Greene was born in 1905) and the last in 1948, will surprise readers acquainted only with Greene's best-known works, The Heart of the Matter, The Labyrinthine Ways, Brighton Rock. A list of American magazines in which some of the stories appeared gives a good hint of this variety: The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, Tomorrow, Town and Country, The Commonweal (Cosmopolitan has also printed him but, perhaps for copyright reasons, the story is not included in the American edition of 19 Stories).

The Esquire story, "When Greek Meets Greek," is a genial account of how two wily old frauds outsmart themselves in the attempt to outsmart one another. The New Yorker story, "Men at Work," is a burlesque, somewhat reminiscent of early Evelyn Waugh, of wartime operations in the British Ministry of Propaganda. There are other humorous stories, in one of which, "Alas Poor Maling," the humor is on the level of slapstick. The Harper's story, "Proof Positive," and also "The Second Death" and to a degree "The End of the Party," involve the miraculous. One of the stories, "A Day Saved," is in the Kafka tradition. The remainder, more typical, deal with various degrees of moral weakness and corruption. The style varies from the succinct, packed manner of Greene's best novels to anecdotal (sometimes, with disconcerting effect, within the same story).

In a note prefacing the collection, Greene acknowledges: "I am only too conscious of the defects of these stories. . . . The short story is an exacting form which I have never properly practiced: I present these tales merely as the byproducts of a novelist's career." His modesty is justified by stories which exhibit him as not quite sure of himself, whereas in his novels he is always in complete mastery. Yet some of his stories are hauntingly perfect. "The End of the Party," for example, a tale of identical twins whose shattering climax is followed by a climax even more shattering—a device which Greene used with like effect in Brighton Rock and several other of these stories: a double-twist one might say, where "twist" must be given a double meaning, the second being the twist of the knife in the wound. This, yes, is a device, but no more so than false rhymes in a poem, asymmetry in a painting. The validity of an artistic device depends upon its success and purpose. O'Henry's twist endings succeed but are usually as shallow as a practical joke; in the best of Greene, the twist provides a sudden illumination of the symbolic meaning of the whole story or novel; or else sharply intensifies the meaning, anchoring it in one's mind.

Graham Greene cannot, however, entirely be absolved of using his devices for inferior purposes. For example, his "entertainments" (thrillers) take on a special intensity from several causes, of which the significant one in this connection is his use of language and especially his syntax which causes every sentence to seem packed with meaning even when it may not be so. Several critics have complained of the monotony of his style, but this very monotony, like his monotony of atmosphere, has a cumulative force of its own and also a symbolic force: it expresses the spiritual poverty, the fear, the seediness, the obscure guilt, the disorientation of his characters better than any words of theirs could do, especially since inarticulateness or else a conscious or endemic inability to see and speak truthfully usually accompanies these qualities. Sometimes, though, the stylistic elements become virtuosity: the compression, the vivid original metaphors, the photogenic intensification of reality, too far outrun the meaning: manner becomes mannerism.

The most memorable stories in the collection have children as protagonists. This is today a hackneyed theme, but Greene gives it a deeper meaning (meanings, I should say) than the usual death-of-innocence, escapism, or routine allegory. I have already cited "The End of the Party," primarily a study of fear vs. convention with overtones of adult incomprehension, the mystic bond between twins (a theme Greene treats in another of these stories and at book length in England Made Me): so many of these stories appear minor rehearsals for his novels), and as a final fillip, a guess about the nature of immortality. "The Innocent," until its ending, is a fairly routine although unusually vivid and compressed contrast of the innocence of childhood to the heedless corruption of adulthood; the final paragraphs qualify (and yet illuminate) innocence in a manner typically Greene.

"The Basement Room," soon to appear on the screen as The Fallen Idol, comprises without sacrifice of central effect a remarkable variety of important and suggestive themes. On the surface it is the story of a childhood trauma which causes a boy to betray the one person he loves and to retreat forever from the terrible responsibility of involvement with other lives. The deeper meaning is suggested in Greene's story which appeared several weeks ago in this magazine. The agnostic narrator states: "Intellectually I am revolted at the whole notion of a God Who can so abandon His creatures to the enormities of Free Will." The title of the story is "The Hint of an Explanation." Does not this phrase perhaps offer the hint of an explanation of Greene's own obsession? Greene himself tells us (in Another Mexico) that he arrived at the belief in Heaven through the belief in Hell. He too, it might seem, is intellectually and also (perhaps most of all) humanly revolted by the enormities of free will. But he cannot wish free will out of existence. Terrestrial evil, his works seem to teach us (more and more explicitly), springs chiefly not from the conscious willing of evil, but from the failure to accept the basic, frightful responsibility of knowing good and evil—far more devastating than original sin because it caused original sin, together with all the sin which has occurred since.