Graham Greene is one of the most successful short story writers of all time. Very few writers achieve the ability to rivet readers' attention to a dramatic situation, turn it into meaning through ingenious manipulations of plot, and in the end leave them astonished, breathless. His range is extensive, moving from the introspective to the bizarre to the shocking. Greene's output is contained in five collections, issued from 1935 through 1967: The Basement Room and Other Stories (1935), Nineteen Stories (1947), Twenty-One Stories (1954), A Sense of Reality (1963), and May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life (1967). These were subsequently brought together into one volume, Collected Stories (1972). In addition, several uncollected stories have appeared. Eighteen of the stories were filmed for the series Shades of Greene, produced by Thames Television in 1976 and shown over the Public Broadcasting System in the United States, with the simultaneous publication of a collection by that title. Three of the stones may suffice to reveal the prevailing techniques and themes of Greene's short fiction: "The Basement Room," "The Destructors," and "Under the Garden." All three were made into films for the Shades of Greene series.

"The Basement Room" first appeared as the lead and title story in Greene's first published collection, in 1935. In 1948 it was released as a film, and a highly successful one, under the title The Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed, who also directed The Third Man. "The Basement Room" serves as a guide to the major themes of many of Greene's novels: the innocence of childhood and its subsequent corruption when it confronts the adult world; the insidious nature of evil and its mixture with good; the relative impotence of good in the face of evil; and, most significantly, the inevitability that trust will be rewarded with betrayal, no matter how unintended that betrayal might be.

Greene chooses to narrate this story from a third-person-limited point of view, from the vantage point of the main character Philip's deathbed, sixty years after the events of the story, and to focus subtly one's attention on the lifelong impact of this episode on Philip, who has never forgotten it and who must live with its effects until his dying day. In "The Basement Room" the situation concerns then seven-year-old Philip and two household servants, Baines and Mrs. Baines, to whom he has been given over during "a fortnight's holiday." Philip is isolated from his parents and "between nurses," which means that he must, from the context of childhood, deal prematurely with an adult world of marital hatred, duplicity, and adultery, and must make crucial choices as to how to maintain allegiances that the adults require of him.

With its five sections the story is reminiscent of Renaissance tragedy, carrying its construct of rising action, crisis, falling action, and catastrophe, out of which a new awareness, however dim, arises for both protagonist and reader. The story focuses on one crucial event, the accidental death of Mrs. Baines, and its test of Philip's loyalty and his ability to interpret the event within the context of adult morality. The crisis occurs with the surprise return of Mrs. Baines to the house, where she catches Baines and Emmy in flagrante. It only remains for the catastrophe of Philip's betrayal to occur, and its result: the misinterpreting of Mrs. Baines's death by the police and the downfall of Baines and Emmy.

The focus of the story is on Philip; its narrative technique binds the readers to him, although they do not discover fully the narrative situation until the close of the story. What happened there on that day succeeded in some unconscious way of killing all Philip's innocence and destroying his childhood love of life. His innocence has no difficulty dealing with Mrs. Baines's clearly malicious nature; it fears it, while it betrays Baines both at the end of the story and earlier, when Mrs. Baines discovers the crumb of pink sugar on his lapel. Emmy, the young girl who is Baines's lover, is a great mystery to Philip throughout his life, and he dies with the question on his lips he has asked himself over and over again for the past sixty years: Who is she? The answer is that she is, like her descendant Rose in Brighton Rock, the potentiality for love and happiness, but she is so frail and identityless that she cannot survive in a world in which the force of evil is so strong that it traps the good (Baines) and subverts the innocent to its own cause (Philip). Philip dies an old, loveless man, never having created anything, and carrying with him the unforgettable memory of Mrs. Baines's shrill voice, a voice he could mimic with devastating effect.

The story closes with the death of innocence, the powerful sickness of the heart induced by Philip's betrayal, and foreshadows future stories to be written: Brighton Rock and Rose's goodness, that also of Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair and of Bendrix's opacity; of Scobie's innocence in The Heart of the Matter, and that of Pyle in The Quiet American, the deadliest innocent. Philip, too, as a child foreshadows all Greene's children, from the childlike Pinkie and Rose, to Coral Fellows and the Mexican boys, to the shrieking child in The Third Man, who almost does in Rollo Martins.

"The Destructors" first appeared serialized in two parts in Picture Post, July 24 and 31, 1954. Its first appearance in a collection was in Twenty-One Stories in 1954. Perhaps no story since Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 has produced such a disturbing effect on readers. Next to "The Basement Room" it has attracted more critical attention than any other story by Greene, and is his most frequently anthologized story. "The Destructors" may be Greene's best story and perhaps one of the finest in the language. It has all the qualities that have come to be expected in the short story: focus, compression, pace, and that element of surprise, that epiphany that brings one to recognizing a powerful truth. It works as both parable and allegory, parable in the sense that it is a narrative in a relatively contemporaneous setting that makes a clear moral point, allegorical in the sense that it "signifies" on several levels.

As parable the story is a mirror of experience which reflects the condition of England during the immediate postwar period, at a time when England was only gradually recovering from the destruction of the blitz and the ravages more generally of the war. The locale, Wormsley Common, has been bombed, and the house of Mr. Thomas (a.k.a. "Old Misery") sticks up like one last sound tooth in a rotten mouth. More significantly, the house symbolizes the traditions of civilization, having been designed and built by the distinguished seventeenth-century English architect Christopher Wren; yet these traditions have not been upheld over the years, and readers know that Old Misery has been sadly remiss, as have others before him, in their obligation to maintain the edifice in its proper style. The young protagonist, Trevor, or T., as he prefers to be called, sees the rude absurdity of the grand house, and he persuades his gang of boys to set themselves the task of reducing it to rubble, not by destroying it but rather by systematically gutting it and weakening its structure, so that at the close of the story it only requires the tug of the lorry at one corner of the foundation to bring the whole structure down. Old Misery, locked in his outdoor toilet, emerges to find complete destruction. It is a horrendously cruel trick to pull on an old man, but the lorry driver says at the end, "There's nothing personal, but you got to admit it's funny." The younger English generation has succeeded in extending the actions of the older to their logical conclusion, and the landscape of Wormsley Common has rational consistency now that the Wren house is gone.

At one level readers, especially older readers, with their powerful sense of the sanctity of property, react in horror to what the gang achieve. But a deeper reading of the story reveals that much more is at stake here than property; it is the loss of a work of art, the destruction not just of a building but of a wonderful idea poorly stewarded, the loss more generally of an entire culture, not to war alone but to the wanton destructiveness of a new generation who are products of that war and have no understanding of and little stake in preserving that which they do not love.

What is perhaps more appalling than the destruction is the manner in which it is carried out. T. is caught up in both a struggle for and an exercise of power and in a rejection of his heritage, of his father, a former architect, and of his mother, with her class snobbery. Politically the story is a microcosm of the acquisition and uses of power as T. succeeds in wresting control of the gang from Blackie and shapes it and motivates it to carry out his plan. What is most unsettling is that such skill and intellect are exercised by the gang in carrying out their plan. The dinnertime harangues from parents about the value of work and of dedication bear ironic fruit in their efforts.

Most powerful in the story's impact is its multilayered allegory that allows readers to see this not only as a parable on the bitter fruit of the postwar generational struggle; in a broader context it represents the death of property in a class struggle between the custodians of that property and a newer generation that sees the absurdity of that concept. On a political level it is an allegory on totalitarianism and the fruits of power, and the way in which that power, once unleashed, is difficult to control and assumes a life of its own. In another sphere it is the corruption and destruction of the good by a Manichean evil that is present in the world, ready to use those who have some small impulse toward harm and to assume a power even greater than that of those who pursue evil ends. In "The Second Coming" Yeats says, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Greene's story is saying much the same thing here. "The Destructors" will remain a disturbingly powerful story and take on even more significance as time passes.

"Under the Garden" is Greene's longest story and, given its length, ought perhaps to be thought of as a novella. It first appeared in 1963 in A Sense of Reality. This story is as seminal a piece of Greene's fiction as any he has written. It brings together motifs of childhood and adulthood, of the meaning of literature and art, of the interplay of the conscious and unconscious life and the significance of dreams as clues to a character's nature, of the nature of myth and its meaning in real life—all major concerns in Greene's work. Additionally, it combines the strategies of three of Greene's favorite works, two of them, appropriately, children's books: the geography of Alice in Wonderland, the escape motif of Henry James's "The Great Good Place," one of Greene's favorite stories, and the romance of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. It is at the same time one of Greene's most puzzling stories and one of his richest.

Structurally the story is multilayered. It relies on three separate narrations: that of the writer Greene, following his character William Wilditch through the trauma of learning that he has life-threatening, probably terminal lung cancer and his escape to his brother's estate, Winton Hall; that of Wilditch as a thirteen-year-old, recapturing and romanticizing a childhood dream through his story "The Treasure in the Island," printed in his school magazine The Warburian under the nom de plume "W. W." (for which one may surely substitute "G. G."); and that of Wilditch as an adult as he rewrites the childhood story into a new version, the product of accretions over the fifty years since the time he had the original dream about his subterranean experience. Three separate voices, three separate stories, all drawn from one source: a dream of a most compelling kind, one that has drawn its dreamer back to it time after time, since the age of seven to the present, when he is now past fifty-seven.

The geography, taken as it is from Lewis Carroll's story, provides a parallel to the dream, for it is a journey into a new land, a timeless underground world that exists below the estate garden, accessible only by squeezing into an entrance beneath a tree root on an island in the middle of a lake. It is also an escape in the Jamesian tradition because it represents a release from the pressures of the world above, where life sucks out vitality and where, in the final version of the story, Wilditch, like his author Greene, looks back over a life of travel to escape and confront certain realities, only to wonder if he has lived at all.

In the original story—that is, the childhood story of part 1, section 5—W. W. Moves quickly through the experience to the discovery of treasure, but in his later version the treasure Wilditch discovers is of little avail. The "golden po" turns out to be an old chamber pot, painted yellow. In the second story the adventure of the cave far overshadows the treasure. The cave is inhabited by primeval parents, Javitt and Maria, both eternal but both maimed physically and symbolically, Javitt by being partially immobilized because he lacks one leg, Maria lacking the power of speech because of her lack of a palate. The one sits and speaks wisdom from his toilet seat, as Wilditch says, like a great prophet; the other races about screaming nonsense. And all this is the product of a childhood dream, written up some years later by the dreamer, mulled over during a lifetime and then rediscovered and written up again. What began as a relatively straightforward but imaginative adventure story has turned into a Freudian fable of significant proportions. Wilditch, facing what seems to be his imminent death, after a lifetime of travel in all parts of the world returns to this single experience to find meaning in it. What he discovers is that he has taken the "facts" of reality and converted them into a new reality for himself. Ernest the gardener becomes the source for much of Javitt, the garden becomes the world, and Friday's Cave and Camp Indecision become efforts on Wilditch's part, at two separate times in his life, to analyze his life and re-create that analysis as narration.

Efforts have been made to unravel this seemingly slightly disguised roman à clef, and most certainly will continue. What is more important to one's understanding of it is its way of dealing with reality and the reconstitution of reality through art. What Greene does here is remarkably similar to what one sees in the allegorical layerings of his best novels. To put it in Wilditch's own words (hence Greene's): "A puddle can contain a continent, and a clump of trees stretch in sleep to the world's edge." In other words, one can sense a truth as broad as the world in a story as confined as Wilditch's. More importantly, it is the life of art and the making of it that is most important, as the story proves its own point. Wilditch's mother, determined to kill all vestiges of the imaginative impulse in him, failed miserably, where the gardener Ernest succeeded by providing him with a character, and the pond and the little hillock provided a place for a powerful creative experience. And at the end of the story Wilditch, having returned to his island and found the old chamber pot, is overcome by a curiosity that can only be satisfied by rethinking and rewriting his story, yet again. A new understanding and new experiences demand a new narration. "Across the pond the bell rang for breakfast and he thought, 'Poor mother—she had reason to fear,' turning the tin chamber-pot on his lap".