SOURCE: "Graham Greene: The Short Stories," in Graham Greene: A Revaluation: New Essays, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, The Macmillan Press, 1990, pp. 93-103.

"The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" is a story by Kipling that comes at the end of The Jungle Book, and Graham Greene thought it his best. It is not hard to see why. An Indian administrator in the British Raj, of such high rank that he has had bestowed on him the rare honour of a knighthood, abandons his former way of life to become a hermit in the Himalayas. One night in the Rains the animals come past his hut, having lost all fear of men, and he realizes that a big landslide is on the way. All his old instincts of responsibility return, and he warns and saves the local villagers. For Kipling the story's moral is obvious—indeed rather glib—but as with many of the best short stores the atmosphere is much more important than the anecdote, and the atmosphere in the tale is that of the Hills, and the peace and liberation they confer. There is something genuinely transcendental in the feel of it.

Greene would have felt this. In his own story "The Hint of an Explanation," written in 1948, he tried for the transcendental by a rather different route, a variant on the route taken by G. K. Chesterton in the Father Brown stories. But Chesterton was coy about how he did it, in a way that Greene would never be. Greene, like a good party member, hardly ever wrote a paragraph that did not contain a statement, or at least an implication, about Catholic Truth. And this is particularly true of his stories, where, in the tradition of De Maupassant and Somerset Maugham, a point can be made, a truth about society or human nature exhibited, with essential force and economy. Greene's stories give the impression of being thrown off in the course of a busy writing life, with money as the main object, but perhaps for this reason they also seem like candles lit in church in the course of a brief routine visit.

Like most Greene stories "The Hint of an Explanation" makes no attempt to evade the time-honoured routines and conventions of the tradtional short story; in this case the long train journey, the cold, the two men huddled in their overcoats beginning to exchange conversation; the abrupt revelation in the concluding sentences. As always, Greene makes spare and economical use of these, and adds to them his own peculiar stamp of originality. As one might expect, the discomfort of the journey is emphasized, with Greene details like the stale buns bought hurriedly on the platform, the residue in its paper bag being pushed under the seat. Also stressed is the inarticulacy of the fellow-traveller, who tells the story within the story. His expository power and vocabulary are quite inadequate, as are those of most people when they start to talk about religion ("to me there seems to be a hint. That's all. A hint"), although this in itself is a convention, for naturally he tells the story well and with graphic effect.

"I had soon realised I was speaking to a Roman Catholic." The "I" who is the narrator, and who finds himself tête à tête with the other internal narrator, has a strong interest in the religion, from which he feels his own intelligence excludes him. As in Somerset Maugham stories, he is the persona chosen by the author, and thus partakes of at least a part of his author's nature. The Greene narrator is hungrily looking in, from outside, on some mystery that is humble, yet magical. The story quietly emphasizes, as is usual with Greene, the unredeemed and fallen nature of the world around, as it appears to the narrator and reader. The dereliction and grey contingency usual in a Greene setting here applies to an England exhausted by war ("The great useless conflict") and is stressed in details like the feeble lights in the railway carriage going out when the train rocks into a tunnel. The exclamation of Mephistophilis in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus—"Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it"—applies as usual to the Greene world. In his review of a life of Rider Haggard, one of the most interesting critical things he wrote, Greene noted the story of Haggard and Kipling trout-fishing together on the Kipling estate in Sussex, and seriously agreeing together that hell was this world, and no other.

The story the second narrator tells is in a sense predictable, for Greene is too able a writer, with too shrewd a sense of effect, to try to make it striking or original. The internal narrator sticks to the point, and the paucity of information he gives about his childhood is turned to advantage, so that the story acquires the artificial simplicity of a morality play. The villain, a baker named Blacker, is desperately anxious to get the boy to steal a consecrated wafer while he is helping to serve at Mass, and tries to bribe him with the highly desirable gift of a toy electric train set. The boy agrees, and manages to leave the altar area to slip the wafer from under his tongue between the leaves of a church magazine; but when the baker calls that night he refuses to give it up, and sees the man slink off into the dark like a defeated representative of the Evil One.

The baker's motives are evil, in that he hates Catholics and wishes to discredit them, but his frantic wish to get hold of God in the wafer argues a misery and a sense of emptiness which he longs to fill. More important for the story, however, although subtly connected with this, is the way in which Greene gets across his hint of the transcendental, the thing that must have struck him in Kipling's story of Purun Bhagat. The trick of the tale comes when the internal narrator—the man within—gets up at the end of the journey.

"Oh, well," he said vaguely, "you know for me it was an odd beginning, that affair, when you come to think of it," but I should never have known what he meant had not his coat, when he rose to take his bag from the rack, come open and disclosed the collar of a priest."

I said, "I suppose you think you owe a lot to Blacker."

"Yes," he said. "You see, I am a very happy man."

It is a good instance of how Greene's skill as a narrator works on a miniature scale. The trick of the priest's collar, although effective, is virtually predictable, but what he says is not. We may hardly have noticed, or now forgotten, the recollection of the external narrator at the beginning of the story. He had been giving his views to the other man on how the concept of God revolts him ("When you think what God—if there is a God—allows.") and the whole notion of a creator who can abandon his creation "to the enormities of Free Will." The internal narrator "listened quietly and with respect."

He made no attempt to interrupt—he showed none of the impatience or the intellectual arrogance I have grown to expect from Catholics; when the lights of a wayside station flashed across his face which had escaped hitherto the rays of the one globe working in the compartment, I caught a glimpse suddenly of—what? I stopped speaking, so strong was the impression, I was carried back ten years, to the other side of the great useless conflict, to a small town, Gisors, in Normandy. I was again, for a moment, walking on the ancient battlements and looking down across the grey roofs, until my eyes for some reason lit on one stony "back" out of the many, where the face of a middle-aged man was presented against a window pane (I suppose that face has ceased to exist now, just as perhaps the whole town with its mediaeval memories has been reduced to rubble), I remembered saying to myself with astonishment, "That man is happy—completely happy." I looked across the compartment at my fellow-traveller, but his face was already again in shadow.

In praising Kipling's story of Purun Bhagat, Greene singled out the small embedded bits of clear description, aspects of height and space, which—at least by implication—let a new dimension of silent meaning appear in the story. In this passage something rather the same is happening, lurking behind the syntax and even the punctuation—the two "hanging" dashes for example—and emerging like the face itself in the baldness of the exclamation, "Completely happy." The rumours of the world and its activities—the battlements, the middle ages, the recent war—drop away into non-existence, and become no more important than the cleverly unemphatic propaganda unconsciously deployed by the external narrator ("he showed none of the impatience or intellectual arrogance I have grown to expect from Catholics"). The reader believes in this happiness because of its arbitrary nature, and its necessary lack of contact with the point and moral of the tale. The success of the story pinches out its propaganda, like fingers extinguishing a candle. As Blacker longs for the Host, so the external narrator thinks he once recognized this amazing state of being happy on a single face, once seen. (The story makes ingenious use here of all but invisible contrasts and incongruities: the battlements, and the idea of a "back," the gloomy dead-end view of small houses seen from a train; the face pressed to the glass like a child's to a sweet-shop window, or like Blacker's in pursuit of the Host, and yet in this case looking at nothing and with nothing to look at. Happiness is like expectation without a goal or a point.)

As in the case of "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," the story has, so to speak, sidled past the success of its own specification, and achieved something much more difficult, but something only to be done in terms of the short-story form. Another example would be James Joyce's "The Dead," which is about life, and whose miracle of meaning celebrates the livingness of the daily moments that lead up to bed and to sleep—itself a guarantee of continued livingness. "The Dead" needs its subject, which its title declares in a manner both grave and ironic, but its epiphany transcends this subject. In "The Hint of an Explanation" the title leads us both away from and towards the revelation of happiness, a state which the external narrator recognizes, as Blacker the baker recognizes the mystery of the consecrated Host, and whose meaning in relation to the story can only appear through its anecdotal context.

Greene, like Kipling, and unlike Somerset Maugham, seems robustly indifferent to the quality of his tales. In his later years especially, Kipling would publish in a collection masterpieces of the genre alongside pieces merely slight or vulgar, and seemingly with no pretension to be anything else. Greene has evidently done much the same. In the Introduction to his Collected Stories he observes that the form bothered him when he began to practise it in the late 1920s, at the time when he was writing his first novel to be printed, The Man Within—"and a little bored me." He suggests, however, that it was the writing of short stories which taught him "the qualities which all my first novels so disastrously lacked—simplicity of language, the sense of life as it is lived." None the less "I remain in this field a novelist who has happened to write short stories, just as there are certain short story writers (Maupassant and Mr. V. S. Pritchett come to mind) who have happened to write novels." He also throws light on the success of a story like "The Hint of an Explanation" when he remarks that when it came to writing "scraps," as he called them, he knew too much about the tale before he began to write it, and hence had "days of work unrelieved by any surprise." When writing a novel "the unexpected might happen." Near the beginning of a novel, "for no reason I knew," he "would insert an incident which seemed entirely irrelevant, and sixty thousand words later, with a sense of excitement, I would realise why it was there. But in the short story I knew everything before I began to write—or so I thought."

There is indeed a sharp contrast between the "scraps," whose point was known from the beginning, and the comparatively few stories which seem to work in the same way in which Greene suggests his novels do. But, naturally enough, the stories still do things in their own way which the novels cannot, even though the technique, as the author here describes it, may be rather similar. The "surprises" inside "The Hint of an Explanation" are of a different order to any that come in the novels. Indeed I would say that none of the novels has a hidden subject in the sense that the story does, and that the particular effect the story achieves is remote from anything in the novels. This can be tested by comparing it with "A Visit to Morin," one of the collection published in 1963 under the title A Sense of Reality. A narrator with a similar persona to the one in the earlier tale is greatly taken with the novels of a French Catholic writer called Morin, who sounds a bit like a real novelist such as Bernanos or Mauriac. He is distrusted by some orthodox Catholics but to others makes a strong appeal. A serious-minded bookseller in Colmar tells the narrator that he sounds even better in German than in French, because the former language "has a better vocabulary for the profundities."

This seems the standard irony about the Church, and about spiritual matters generally, to which we are accustomed in the novels, and, however effective there, it might seem to have no place in the art of the short story. It condemns the tale to its own significance, without any escape into the unexpected and unforeseen effect which Greene in his Introduction describes (characteristically) as "cool drinks to a parched mouth." The story has something wearisomely predictable about it. The narrator encounters Morin at a Midnight Mass in a local village, where he and the writer are the only members of the congregation who do not take the sacrament. Afterwards he introduces himself and is invited back to Morin's house, where the pair drink brandy and discuss faith. Morin distinguishes it from belief, which he no longer has. The books he has written have helped to remove it. He is like a poet who writes of his feelings, "and when the poem is written he finds his love dead on the page."

Morin is a burnt-out case, with a lot of Greene in him. Like one of his characters he clings to the precisions of orthodoxy, while at the same time standing outside it. Like Greene he has used his predicament in his novels, and the self-dramatization involved has left him with a legacy of deadness and disgust. Like one of Greene's novels, the story is clever in the propaganda it makes for the Faith while seeming to reject it. Morin knows what human need is and requires. He knows that what the Church teaches is true, because he has kept away from it for twenty years, on account of a much-loved mistress, and, because he has been cut off, his belief has withered. Now his mistress is dead, but he dare not go back for fear his belief should not return. Only faith is left to him, for belief depends upon keeping the prescriptions of the Church, which he has deliberately avoided doing.

It is a nice point theologically, and it makes a nice little spiritual drama as it would in one of Greene's novels, but as a story it is a failure. It knows too well what it is about. And the little touch which ends it serves only to kill it more effectively. The non-Catholic narrator is a wine merchant, and Morin gives him a glass of excellent wine, promising to give him the grower's address before he leaves. But after Morin has described his "strange faith," which depends on the conviction that the Church must be right because his belief died when he left it, he drives the narrator back to his hotel. The narrator is rather relieved to find that Morin is not a "carrier" after all, one who infects others, without knowing he does so, with a sense of the possibility of belief. "He had forgotten to give me the address of the vineyard, but I had forgotten to ask him for it when I said good night."

Discreet as it is, the irony in those concluding sentences fails to move. Nor does the hint of a parable. At the end of Kipling's story "The Gardener," a woman at a military cemetery in Flanders asks a man working there where she can find her nephew's grave. He tells her to come with him and he will show her where her son lies. Having seen the grave she goes away, "supposing him to be the gardener." The symbolism clinches what the story has already told us: that the woman has an illegitimate son whom she has brought up as her nephew, concealing the secret from everyone in her life, almost from herself. It is still a secret when she goes away, for she has not grasped what the man said. It spite of its clever conclusion Kipling's story is moving, and does come off, because its real subject is not what is devised and constructed as an epiphany, but the horror of the cemetery itself—graphically brought home—and the sense of a perpetual, unchangeable lie which hangs over it, the lie not only of the woman but of the war and its dead. Kipling did not intend that discovery.

No doubt writers, more especially writers of Greene's calibre, take a different view of their work from the one taken by their public; but even so it is a surprise to read what Greene has written about his own stories, and the contrast they make, in his own eyes, with the novels. To his readers, I should think, they must seem just the same, only more so. With the exceptions so far noted they make the same points as his novels, in the same way. Greene speaks of himself as a "writer" in very much the way that Somerset Maugham used to, as if it were some odd and involuntary vocation, like being a priest, only of course very much more profitable. As a novelist he becomes "encrusted" with characters—Greene's very typical image is of a corpse in the Caribbean he had been told of, which came up from the sea so covered in lampreys that you could not tell it was a man's body. "A horrible image, but it is one which suits the novelist well." Is not this just what his adoring public—and Greene's public is as large and as various as Maugham's was—want to be told about their maestro? How he lives and suffers in the parts he creates from day to day, becoming his character as Flaubert developed in himself the "destructive passion" of Madame Bovary, picking up from his hero "his jealousies, his meanness, his dishonest tricks of thought, his betrayals"? Just the thing for an audience to smack their lips over, but is not it all, like so much about Graham Greene and his writing, curiously unreal, as if the writer were seen as a kind of damned soul who took upon himself the sins of his characters? No doubt the audience enjoy being told that the short story is a form of escape for this writer—"escape from having to live with another character for years on end"—but they must also enjoy the sense that their hero is just as present in his stories as in his novels, and in even more concentrated form.

The more so since his sense of release and relief, in doing a "scrap" of a story instead of toiling away on a novel, communicates itself to the reader. In many of the tales writer and reader seem to be able to be, as it were, wicked children together, let out of the grey responsibilities of school or church. Two of Greene's own favourites are "The Destructors" and "Under the Garden." In the first a gang of children under the leadership of a boy called Trevor—known as T because Trevor sounds soppy to himself and the gang—contrive to get inside an old man's house in his absence and destroy it entirely from within. The second is a long and elaborate childhood fantasy about a secret place under a garden lake, which in middle age is found to have diminished to a pond, hardly more than a puddle. Greene's access to childhood is far more direct and more disconcerting than in the case of most writers who return to it. And the same lurking hilarity infects the stories of May We Borrow Your Husband?, a collection "all written during what should be the last decade of my life," which Greene would no doubt be sardonically content to see as the product of a second childhood. These "comedies of the sexual life" have the same air of release as the childhood tales, or Kipling's elaborate little farces, but many of them pass the most stringent test of a short story: they seem even better made, and reveal more, at the second or third reading. "Two Gentle People" is a story that Somerset Maugham could not have written, although Greene invokes in it, almost as if deliberately, the "guide lines" of his stories, and shows how they can be transformed into something altogether more understanding.

In these late stories Greene abdicates from his earlier personae into a relaxed good nature, no doubt designed intentionally to surprise his fans. The feeling of wariness, of a perpetual anxiety, which hangs over the earlier ones, for all that they were intended to be a release from the strains of novel-writing, has disappeared. So has the itch to point a moral, or at least to make a point, the tone of propaganda which energizes and unifies all Greene's writing, even the "entertainments." It seems hardly possible that the author of "Brother," "A Drive in the Country," "Across the Bridge," and "A Chance for Mr. Lever" (another of Greene's own favourites) could much later have written some of the stories in May We Borrow Your Husband? But where stories were concerned Greene was a professional, getting the feel of an assignment, rather than a writer who has created a world of his own. "Brother," written in the 1930s, is almost a parody of the contemporary tale "of social significance," with a little Greene expertise and dropping of the right local place-names: Combat, Menilmontant. The atmosphere of the Front Populaire and the attack on the bourgeoisie is effortlessly conveyed, with something of that almost "camp" bravado which reminds the reader both of school stories and of the contemporary cinema, to which Greene had a strong if eccentric attachment. (In his memoirs Anthony Powell remembers Greene's film reviews in the short-lived magazine Night and Day, and his rhapsodies about Erich von Stroheim climbing the stairs in full uniform "to an innocent bed.") The scenarios of the early tales have the cinematic power of "focusing" on the action, while leaving the background and the minor properties of the story ignored or barely suggested. It is indeed a striking paradox that a writer as obsessed as Greene with the Catholic themes which appear—or used to appear—in almost every context of his work, has also been able to give it such a virtuosity and variety.

In one sense, but in another not. Greene the professional, like a dramatist or film-writer, always goes to the heart of his matter, ignoring everything else. The economy is a weakness as well as a strength, for oddly enough the best short stories (Greene himself refers almost wistfully to Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog") have the air of infinite apparent leisure, as if there were room to fill in every detail of the lives presented, and find room for every irrelevance. Greene would never write a story like Chekhov's, or like Joyce's "The Dead." His stories have no place for the poetry of the supper laid out that snowy evening at the Misses Morkans, or for the water-melon of which Gurov slowly eats a slice after his seduction of the lady with the dog. These are the mysterious ingredients of the short story at its most magical. With Greene, on the other hand, every detail has to tell, and tell they do. We know that the boy in "The Hint of an Explanation" is tempted beyond endurance by Blacker's offer of the model railway in exchange for a wafer of the consecrated Host, because he especially covets the turntable of the little model set—"so ugly and practical and true." And in "A Drive in the Country" we know that the girl leaving home really loves the young man she is going with because she loves the smell of the whisky on his breath—"his smell."

Such touches in a Greene story are unobtrusive, but they are the signs of a master at work. A master in his late period will often make a virtue of an obvious defect—one such appears in "May We Borrow Your Husband?," where the narrative contrivances of the tale—in themselves sufficiently implausible—depend on the narrator always breakfasting with the honeymoon wife, because her husband is titivating himself and regularly appears downstairs fifteen minutes after her. This processional regularity stresses the artificiality of the tale, as if it were a drawing-room comedy (Maugham again) and effectively defines the mode in which it is to work. The story, as it turns out, is all the more successful because of its impossibility: campness has taken over, and delivered through its own conventions its own kind of sour sharp insight. In these masterly tales Greene makes a positive asset of the point that he has always been "a little bored" with the short-story form. By letting the form know it, he releases a new kind of candour in the writing.