"I present these tales," says Graham Greene at the beginning of this new collection of his short stories [Nineteen Stories], "merely as the by-products of a novelist's career." There are eighteen stories and a fragment of an abandoned novel. Most of them are very good in themselves—two of them brilliant—but it is not only for their solid virtues as English short stories, their quietness and lucid ease, that they are important. It is also for the light they throw on one of the most interesting novelists of our generation.

The stories give us fresh glimpses of Greene's special world: the world of peeling billboards and jerry-built houses, of "dying jungles," of harassed and frightened, vainglorious and peevish, hungry and unlikable men, each with his own clumsily hidden burden of futility, damnation, or flabby love, scuttling or lounging through eternity.

Greene is now 45, and has been writing novels, "entertainments," and travel books—and these stories—for twenty years. But until the publication last year of his novel, The Heart of the Matter, his American readers were limited to a comparatively small coterie. Many of his books were filmed, and most of the films were bad and not Greene. In fact, The Fallen Idol, based on the longest of the stories in this volume, "The Basement Room," and soon to be released here, is the first real Graham Greene movie: a very characteristic account of a little boy who too suddenly discovers that life means sin and responsibility and retreats from it forever.

It is easy to misunderstand Greene in either of two ways, by taking him as a superior writer of spy and murder thrillers, or as a St. Augustine condescending to the novel. Greene makes a distinction between his novels and his entertainments—a distinction the reader might find it hard to make for himself, but the author obligingly puts labels on each book: The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear, for example, are entertainments. The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter are novels. The next thing to know about Greene, then, is that the novels are serious studies of the human soul going about the business of eternity; they often have melodramatic plots as vehicles. The entertainments are melodramas, made tense by the cheerless Greene psychology.

Greene has been criticized on his novels (it shows what serious fiction has come to) for using coincidence too freely; in other words, for being a storyteller. Coincidence is just what the reader enjoys most directly of a plot. The entertainments, on the other hand (it shows what crime fiction has come to), have been accused of pretentiousness; and it is still rarely noticed how they have served as rehearsals for the novels.

Several of the pieces in Nineteen Stories are closely related to the novels in substance and spirit. "A Drive in the Country" is a brilliantly unpitying treatment of suicide. "A Chance for Mr. Lever" is a story of that choking West African forest through which Greene himself walked 350 miles without maps to look for a "seedy" (it is an important word for Greene) society nearer to our ancestral innocence than "the smart, the new, the chic and the cerebral." This trip is the basis also of "The Other Side of the Border," the 1936 fragment with which the collection closes, and of the astonishing Journey Without Maps a travel book which records the voyage of a soul.

A few of the stories, like "Alas, Poor Maling" and "When Greek Meets Greek," are lighter and more playful than anything else Greene has written, yet even they are peculiarly astringent.

Now why does Greene's world, this criss-cross of tired intrigue, of flickering eternal motives, fascinate us? First, it is darker and so makes us feel that we have got deeper into the human soul than the well-lighted case histories can take us. Second, the crimes seem more wicked: they are more shocking than a dozen murders in a detective story, or the cheap mechanical swaggering sadism of the Cain-Hammett school.

To some extent, these effects are tricks of an extraordinary style. Greene's style seems bare and dry, but in reality it has the rich concentration of poetry. Perhaps he strains too hard to make every adjective a fresh observation. Sometimes the mental processes of his characters are lost in new metaphors. After all, the conventionality of a metaphor saves the reader the work of abstracting its meaning. But Greene will be neither conventional nor abstract; the sharpness of his sight and sound images reminds us that he was for years a film critic. And his images not only describe but interpret; and sometimes the reader is not sure how deep a comparison is meant to go. For instance, in his novel, England Made Me (1935), Anthony Farrant carried his smile "always with him as a leper carried his bell; it was a perpetual warning that he was not to be trusted." That is clear enough. But in The Heart of the Matter, Father Rank laughs and "swung his great empty sounding bell to and fro, ho, ho, ho, like a leper proclaiming his misery." Here we are not sure what is being said about the jovial priest; and this is a mannerism of Greene's which his readers must work to master.

Greene is a paradox. He is born a modern psychological novelist and a Roman Catholic. Catholicism, especially in the English-speaking world, has emphasized the edifying and the wholesome in literature, but Greene is preoccupied with sin. He is obsessed with the seedy, the weak and the hellish. It is difficult to express the force of that obsession. It pervades everything he writes. In his travel book, Another Mexico, Greene tells how, as a boy at his father's school, faith came to him—"shapelessly, without dogma, a presence above a croquet lawn, something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way. One began to believe in heaven because one believed in hell. . . ."

"Literature," says Greene, "has nothing to do with edification." With Cardinal Newman, he believes that a sinless literature of sinful man is impossible. Greene is an almost unique figure in his milieu, in some ways seeming to belong to the French scene; he disturbs his co-religionists; he shows Catholics as sinful and Catholicism as difficult. He is much too unlike Chesterton. Chesterton's picture of sin was scarlet, as bright as a child's paint box; Greene's sin is black, gray—all the colors of human nature.

If being a modern psychological novelist gives an unusual tinge to Greene's Catholicism, certainly his theology accounts for much of the literary shock. It is, in fact, the key to Greene. Greene is as fully aware of social evil as any of his contemporaries; his story, "Brother," written in 1936, shows that he can even feel the idealism of the Communists. He is aware of everything the Freudians are aware of; the earlier stories, like "I Spy," show it. But Greene believes in Free Will and in Original Sin. He believes that human actions are caused—up to a point. And then, at that point, the will is involved. He escapes the great, softening folly of the modern psychological novel, that we are the neutral victims of our circumstances; that to understand all is to forgive all. The better we understand some of Greene's characters the more corrupt we see them to be. Pinkie, the adolescent gangster of Brighton Rock, one of Greene's best achievements to date, wills his own damnation; he worships evil as his Catholic parents worshiped good. The "modern" reader who cannot understand this deliberate choice of evil cannot understand Graham Greene.

There is one final difficulty about Greene's thought. But the most recent story in this collection, "The Hint of an Explanation," does hint at an answer. Since Brighton Rock in 1938, Greene has concerned himself with the distinction between knowing good from evil and knowing right from wrong. Pinkie knows good from evil; he chooses evil. The good-natured, blowzy Ida, his Nemesis, knows only right and wrong. They are on different planes; their shadows fall on one another, but they cannot touch. Scobie, in The Heart of the Matter, is both a policeman, a professional distinguisher of right from wrong, and a Catholic; and he chooses sin again and again, knowing what he is doing, sure he will be damned, rather than do wrong to his wife and mistress. Is he damned? In the short story about a "free-thinker" who tries to make a little boy sell God, Greene seems to go further in explaining the relations of an evildoer and his Lord than he has yet gone.

If the reader mentally rearranges these stories in chronological order, he will find them a reflection of Greene's development as a novelist. He begins with the personal emotions, especially the emotions of family life in childhood. "I Spy" and "The Man Within" give us a boy's conflicting love and identification with his parents; later Greene turns increasingly to open didacticism as in "The Hint of an Explanation"; the slight, topical satires of the war years correspond to a period of silence in the larger frame. This over, with The Heart of the Matter he will continue to seduce us into more satanic intimacies.