Although the blurb describes it as his "main occupation" during the past two years, Mr. Greene's new collection (his first since 1949) contains only [A Sense of Reality] 119 smallish pages and only four stories—half of which the first occupies more than half the book, so that we may not unfairly concentrate our attention upon it. "Under The Garden" begins with a doctor explaining to William Wilditch, in a more or less breezy impersonal way, that he has cancer of the lung. The scene is in Mr. Greene's best flat sad manner, especially appropriate for the conveying of quiet horror. Before deciding whether or not to accept the operation, Wilditch revisits the house in which he spent his boyhood holidays—it has belonged to his brother for the past thirty years but he has always hitherto avoided it, as he was disappointed that it was not left to him. Everything (surprise, surprise!) seems much smaller than he had remembered it. We are made aware that something cataclysmic happened to the boy William on an island in the lake in the garden of this house, something that determined the whole future course of his life, something that has made him now return, under the sentence of death. (The lake turns out, of course, to be a mere pond, and the few square yards of the island can be reached with a flying jump.)

At dinner the conversation conveniently turns to this "something" and his brother informs him, what he himself has forgotten, that he once wrote an account of it for his school magazine. Even more marvellously conveniently, in his bedroom is the bound volume of this magazine and from it falls a letter from his then-headmaster concerning this very story, which he finds and reads. It is couched in a Treasure Island style, and the mature Wilditch is outraged by its falsifications of what he remembers really to have been the case. He sits down and passes the whole sleepless night in committing the true facts to paper.

This account of his boyhood dream (for it has to be a dream, although he would like to believe it reality) shows how he goes down a tunnel on the island and reaches an underground cavern, in which live two timeless creatures called Javitt and Maria. Javitt has only one leg (he was born that way) and a big white beard: he sits always on a lavatory seat and engages in an endless stream of gnomic conversation—"There was a kind of reason in most of what he said, as I came to realize later." The hole under the lavatory seat goes down into the center of the earth, apparently. Maria, on the other hand, is very dusty-fusty and has no roof to her mouth and can only say "squawk, squawk." They have lived down here together for goodness knows how long, but these two ugly rogues have produced a highly glamorous daughter, one who has become a beauty-queen under the soubriquet of Miss Rams gate.

After imbibing a great deal of Javitt's cosmic earthy half-nonsensical wisdom (the recording of which appears to be the nub of the story), the boy William escapes, taking with him "golden po" that has been lent him, out of Javitt's fabulous treasure, to do his business in. Here the written account ends, it is dawn, and the man William goes downstairs and out into the garden, where he first meets the old gardener, who has certain evident Javitt-elements about him, and then gets onto the island. Here to his astonishment he finds evidence to support him in his wish-belief that it was not all a dream: for here, under a stump, is the golden po—a battered object with most of its yellow paint flaked off it, but a golden po all the same. His reaction—which would flabbergast one if one were not prepared for every possible assault upon one's reason and sense of fitness by Mr. Greene in his capacity of Catholic writer—is that he has been wrong to live a life without religion and that there is a definitive decision that he has to make in this department also.

It will be seen that I have to regard this tale with a mixture of qualified admiration, and puzzlement plus exasperation. Admiration—because it is well-written and professional and compelling to read. Qualified—because, as I hope to show, it is not very well written and because "professional" has its pejorative senses too. As to the puzzlement, there is no puzzle about that. This is, within its rather creaking mechanical frame, or frames, simply an account of a dream, and we all know the breakfasttable horror of that. So that when a writer takes over we expect, not just the free association of a dream, but more. Anything less is self-indulgence, not literature. What in fact, to put it with a naïveté of crudity, does Mr. Greene mean? Who, or what, is Javitt? For, if he is nothing meaningful at all, then the story is nothing meaningful at all.

I don't want to make this question a wilfully uncomprehending one. This is a story, not a treatise. Javitt can be a whole lot of things, indeed the more the merrier, and the more mixed up the merrier too. For instance, he is partly simply the old gardener, transformed by the usual alchemy of dream. He is also, as I reckon it, Mr. Samuel Whiskers, villain of Beatrix Potter's The Roly-Poly Pudding, known to every rightly brought-up British child. (Tom Kitten gets lost in the black chimney-flues of the old house and eventually falls into the rats' den, whereupon Mr. Samuel Whiskers screams out "Anna Maria! Anna Maria!" just as Javitt roars "Maria, Maria!" And I wonder whether this was conscious on Mr. Greene's part, or just his subconscious keeping its eye splendidly on the ball.) And we can also make other systems to accommodate Javitt. But all efforts of this sort leave so much detail artistically inexplicable that we are forced to search for some much profounder symbology than this. And here the exasperation begins.

For, if we press this question resolutely, I am afraid that we are inescapably driven to the conclusion that Javitt equals God: or more precisely, when we consider his name and his sempiternality and his beard, that Javitt equals Jehovah. It is inescapable because the detail is so arbitrary otherwise. For instance, in the tunnel, "scrawled with the simplicity of ancient man—done with a sharp tool like a chisel—was the outline of a gigantic fish." And if that doesn't place us in the catacombs, Mr. Greene is deceiving with intent. Or how about this? "[Javitt] rose on his one leg, and now that he had his arms stretched out to either wall, he reminded, me of a gigantic crucifix." And above all, this identification is the only one that doesn't make utter rubbish of the tale's conclusion.

But, if Javitt is Jehovah, then what of Maria? Alas, is she, this hideous squawking crone, the queen of heaven? And Miss Ramsgate, their child who "went upstairs," the beauty-queen for whom Wilditch says he has been searching vainly all his life? The Lamb of God? We are caught between the inexplicably arbitrary and the inexplicably squalid: and, knowing the way that Greene tends constantly to identify the deeply horrid or the deeply holy, we suppose despairingly that we must cleave to the second. And I for one, speaking as a non-religious person, find it no more than an ingenious exercise in the unnecessarily nasty. The religious on the other hand, or some of them, will doubtless find this attitude pathetically squeamish.

But no, I don't see that I have to lie down under that. It is not the nastiness that offends, it is the unnecessariness. Nor is it that, over-rational, I am offended by puzzles without solutions—Pale Fire is fine with me, and I'll play crosswords with the rest of them (is the hero named for his wild itch or because he will ditch himself?). But simply, I feel that here the mystery, whether consciously posed or not, is of its very nature pointlessly unpleasant. Two of the characteristics of Mr. Greene's curious mind are that it is lavatorial and that it is grossly paradoxical. This coupling of divinity and excrement here satisfies both of them.

In "A Visit to Morin," paradox is rampant. This supposed interview with a Catholic writer who has lost his belief concludes with a piece of sophistry so hair-raising as to verge on the comic. (The novelist has not been to mass or confession for twenty years. As a result he has lost his belief. This proves that "the Church is right and the faith is true," for, "if a doctor prescribed you a drug and told you to take it every day for the rest of your life and you stopped obeying him and drank no more, and your health decayed, would you not have faith in your doctor all the more?" I stopped looking for fairies in the grass 38 years ago, and now I don't believe in them anymore, which doesn't, however, seem to me an altogether valid proof of their existence.)

In "A Discovery in the Woods," a post-atomic fable which is much the best thing in the book, it is the Mr. Grim Grin side of things again:

Liz tied (her skirt) up, with a knot behind just above the opening of her small plump buttocks.

She squatted on the ground with a bare buttock on each heel.

Anyway they wouldn't bash a girl. "Pa does," Liz said, twitching her buttocks.

Her thighs and bottom were scratched with briars and smeared with blood the color of blackberry juice.

She sat squatting on the thighbones of the skeleton, her naked buttocks rocking to and fro as though in the act of possession.

This brings us, space as ever pressing, to the question of professionalism.

Whatever one says against Mr. Greene—and I for one have always found him aggravating and unrewarding in the light of his obvious talent—he remains compellingly readable. Why? The quick answer is that he is a professional, that he constructs well, writes clearly and employs all the age-old tricks of the story-teller's art. But recently I have begun to wonder. Professionalism can easily go stale, until it becomes the mere tired academicism that, in painting, we expect of a Royal Academician. When you peer into it more closely, the writing doesn't look all that good, more a sort of slickness rubbed over cracks to conceal them. That "buttock"series isn't merely nagging, it is also plain careless:

He did not leave it at that or allow himself to get involved in a theological debate. He went on to indicate that. . . .

Where evidently what is meant is "He neither left it at that nor allowed himself," etc. Apparent exactness turns out to be a mere gloss of pseudo-exactness:

The water in which he landed was only a few inches deep. . . . He sloshed ashore, the water not even penetrating his shoes.

Some shoes! Or the opening sentence of "A Discovery in the Woods":

The village lay among the great red rocks about a thousand feet up and five miles from the sea, which was reached by a path that wound along the contours of the hills.

Which leaves me wondering whether or not that five miles was as the crow flew, and how a path that winds along contours can also manage to drop a thousand feet.

We can entertain similar doubts about the constructions. The first story begins with a doctor breaking it to a patient that he has cancer, and the third story with a doctor breaking it to a patient that he has leprosy: and two out of four seems an outrageously high score for this hoary old opening. The second story employs the ancient device of the "confession to a chance-met stranger," who tells the tale—a convention from which Mr. Somerset Maugham extracted the last drop of juice years before most of us were born. The creaking mechanics of "Under the Garden" I have indicated in my précis of it.

As I see it, there was a time when one was prepared to overlook the superficialities and shallownesses in Mr. Greene's view of life (and for that matter in Mr. Maugham's too) because of the readability, the golden knack. But now the readability sticks in the throat, and familiarity with it gives the knack away. I do not mean that Mr. Greene is deteriorating: on the contrary. But that ever good, Greene no longer seems good enough—at the theological level, though at the thriller level I dare say it is still all right. It begins to look pompous and old-fashioned. For me the writing will no longer "carry" things like this typical sample of Javitt's wisdom:

People are afraid of bringing May Slossom into the house. They say it's unlucky. The real reason is it smells of sex and they are afraid of sex. Why aren't they afraid of fish, then? you may rightly ask. Because when they smell fish they smell a holiday ahead and they feel safe from breeding for a short while.

—a typical gallimaufry, since most people aren't afraid of sex, and most sex doesn't smell of fish, and most people do "breed" on holiday like mad. (That is, if we take the text au pied de la lettre. If, on the other hand, we accept the malodorous double-entendre—as I dare say, Mr. Greene being Mr. Greene, we must—then it makes better sense, but God help us all. If that's all the smell of fish reminds him of, he'd better take a long, long dip in the sea.) Either way, I prefer to retire to the truer profundities of Tom Kitten—which are, incidentally, really well-written.