SOURCE: "Loosing the Devils," and "The Last Word" in Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, 1992, pp. 3-16, 70-87.

Rarely has a writer been more obsessed with his lost childhood than has Graham Greene. In this respect he is clearly the child of the romantic period, whose poets, such as Blake and Wordsworth, celebrate the bright joys of innocence that quickly give way to the dark pains of experience. Greene also found his obsession mirrored in the novels of Charles Dickens, where Victorian society seems dead set upon destroying the bodies and souls of children. Similarly, Greene's admiration for the minor Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, whom he calls the only adult poet of the age, derives from his own spiritual malaise. During Clough's years at Oxford he lost the serenity of his Christian faith and turned to writing poetry as a means of defending himself against the doubts that raged against his desire for belief in God. Like Clough, Greene's sense of dislocation from his childhood and from his Christian faith intensified during his Oxford days, and he sought to overcome his depression and to exorcise his psychic demons through his writing.

As a highly sensitive, imaginative youth, and coming from a respected, comfortable, upper-middle-class family, Greene enjoyed the opportunity to develop more exotic emotional problems than are allotted to children of the lower classes. When he first discovered that he could read, he hid this fact from his parents out of fear that they would make him enter preparatory school. He began to live a covert life, secretly reading books about adventure and mystery that his parents would not approve. As a child he also developed inordinate fears of the dark, of birds and bats, of drowning, and of the footsteps of strangers. He developed recurrent nightmares about a witch who would lurk at night near the linen cupboard in the nursery.

As a student at Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster, Greene's emotional problems were compounded by his sense of divided loyalties. His filial devotion was constantly challenged by his desire to be one of the boys. He was never able to resolve these conflicting loyalties, and, to make matters worse, two schoolboys, named Carter and Wheeler, sadistically exploited Greene's anxiety with cruel psychological precision. Greene has not disclosed specific details of their torment, but Norman Sherry, in his biography of Greene, has shown that these two boys, especially Carter, exercised a powerful control over Greene during a critical time in his development. More experienced in worldly matters, they took pleasure in attacking Greene's naïveté and trust. Lionel Carter not only tormented Greene for being the headmaster's son, but, after winning his confidence and discovering his secret dreams and desires, he disabused Greene of many of his romantic and chivalric ideals. As the murderer of Greene's childhood and as the arch-betrayer, Carter would appear in many guises throughout Greene's stories and novels and become one of the powerful demons Greene would spend his life as a writer attempting to exorcise. Years later Greene was to observe, "Every creative writer worth our consideration . . . is a victim: a man given over to an obsession."

In 1920 Greene's manic-depressive and suicidal behavior led his parents to send him to a psychoanalyst named Kenneth Richmond for treatment. The experience proved beneficial and Greene began self-consciously to record and analyze his dreams and feelings. It was also during this period that he began to write short stories, which served, perhaps unwittingly, to shape and help control his inchoate fears and depressions.

The short stories Greene began writing then and later during his years at Berkhamsted School and Oxford University have been largely ignored by critics and scholars, and yet they are fundamental to an understanding of his character and his development as a writer. Uncollected and not easily accessible, these stories, written during the period 1920-25, reveal the youthful obsessions that were to inform all his later work. It seems important, therefore, to examine these early creations for what they reveal about Greene the man and the writer, for, as Wordsworth says, "The child is father of the man."

Several of Greene's juvenilia, being only a page or two in length, fail to develop character, plot, or scene; rather, they sketch a mood, fear, or anxiety, usually in a self-conscious literary or allegorical form. "The Tick of the Clock," for example, which was published in Greene's school magazine, the Berkhamstedian, in 1920, when he was only 16 years old, reveals his youthful morbidity. The story is about a lonely old lady facing death with no companion but her ticking clock. Her only wish in life was to love someone, but young men had never come her way and children now fear her. The clock attempts to console her by relating the fate of a king and a poet who unhappily died with an uneasy conscience and a failed sense of glory: "But you, you have no sin upon your conscience, you have not sought for fame or wealth, why then do you find death so hard?" When the woman replies that she cannot face death "without Love to hold me up," Fate speaks to her in Christ-like tones: "O woman of little understanding, wherefore are you sad? Do you not know that I am Fate and Fate is Death, and Death is Love Eternal? Your quest is ended, you have found that which you sought." The next morning she is discovered dead in her bed and those who see her exclaim, "How happy she looks."

The heavy-handed allegory, the melodrama, and the unconvincing consolation offered to the old woman by Fate all mark this story as a youthful exercise. Beneath the literary posturing, however, one can detect the young Greene's concern about his own rather loveless life and the void that enhances its misery. Greene's romantic assertion that death is eternal love is a bit like whistling in the dark. It is an idea belied by his later work in which his expiring heroes and heroines are sent to anxious and uncertain fates.

In his autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), Greene looks back upon "The Tick of the Clock" with mixed emotions. He abhors the story as literature but recalls its publication—his first—as inspiring him with confidence and a sense of glory:

I was beginning to write the most sentimental fantasies in bad poetic prose. One abominable one, called "The Tick of the Clock," about an old woman's solitary death, was published in the school magazine. I cut out the pages and posted them to the Star, an evening paper of the period, and for God knows what reason they published the story and sent me a check for three guineas. I took the editor's kindly letter and the complimentary copy up to the Commons and for hours I sat on the abandoned rifle butts reading the piece aloud to myself. . . . Now, I told myself, I was really a professional writer, and never again did the idea hold such excitement, pride and confidence. . . . that sunny afternoon I could detect no flaw in "The Tick of the Clock." The sense of glory touched me for the first and last time.

In "The Poetry of Modern Life," published in the Berkhamstedian in 1921, Greene implicitly acknowledges Carter's disturbing effect upon his ideals. The narrator of the story is overwhelmed by a voice that declares the death of poetry in modern life: "It was just a voice in the street that I heard as I passed along, 'Poetry and Romance are dead' . . . when I heard that voice, the busy movement of the streets pressed in upon me, seeming to shut out all colour, and changing everything into a dull monotony . . . it even penetrated into my slumbers so that I seemed to be surrounded with legions of devils, all crying out, 'Poetry and Romance are dead.'" In a desperate attempt to deal with his painful disillusionment, the narrator reverts to the literary past and seeks counsel from a chivalric knight. The knight, however, merely confesses that he and his kind are dead and offers the narrator the weak consolation that there is heroic virtue in the poetry of defeat: "As long as heroic deeds are done, as long as the great world struggle between Good and Evil lasts, so long will there be poetry in life. . . . Ye know the poetry of victory, the wild enthusiasm of a people when long looked for peace arrives. But have ye yet learned the poetry of defeat?" The story concludes with this theme by describing three men dying of hunger and cold, "yet one was still striving to write some last letters to those at home, thinking in his last moments, not of himself, but of the man who had sent him and trying to save him from vain, useless regret.

Norman Sherry suggests that Greene might have been thinking of the deaths of Captain Scott and his associates Wilson and Bowers in the Antarctic, since Scott's dramatic death in the Antarctic in 1912 made him a great hero among English schoolboys. More significantly, however, Sherry connects this story by Greene with his persecution by Carter:

Perhaps the dying man's attempt to write letters home reflects Graham's desire to write to his parents about his misery, though he could not. In the face of Carter's undermining of Greene's cherished boyhood beliefs, it is not surprising that he turned to a less romantic vision. The knight in the story offers some hope, arguing that "as long as the great world struggle between Good and Evil lasts, so long will there be poetry in life." It is possible that Carter, with his inexplicable cruelties, his nihilism, his ability to feign innocence, put Greene on to his fundamental theme, the nature of Good and Evil and the conflict between them.

In another story, "Castles io the Air" (1921), which earned him a first prize in a school competition, Greene reverts to the subject of disillusionment and death, heralded again by his personal devil, Lionel Carter. During the festivities at the Great Grinsted's Midsummer Fair, a grotesque piper begins to play strange music that brings an end to the noisy pleasures of the crowd and makes everyone aware of his mortal sadness. Greene's memorable description of the piper anticipates the grotesque character of the mestizo, another betrayer, in The Power and the Glory: "a short, hunched man, one-eyed, covered in dirt, with a great red bulbous nose protruding aggressively from his face. . . . The man grinned, disclosing great, dirty, fang-like teeth."

As the piper plays, his music conjures up in the minds of the crowd visions of beauty and romance: "to each onlooker he was different. To some he seemed a princess, with beautiful braided hair, to others as a glorious knight in shining coat of mail, but to all he was their childhood's dream of love. He was the mistress, he was the lord of those lovely twisted white marble palaces which all had constructed once, stone upon stone, in the clouds. The piper's seductive tune offers intimations of childhood immortality for all of his listeners, but then he disappears and the crowd is left in dismal silence "each with his private grief." The devil incarnate, the piper steals the very dreams of childhood love and romance he conjured up in the imaginations of his listeners.

Greene believed that his personal tormenter, Lionel Carter, destroyed his childhood joy and dreams. It is interesting to note that Greene presents the devil as a piper. The legendary piper plays music that is both seductive and destructive, thereby suggesting that Carter's imposition of his adult view of life upon Greene's youthful fantasies combines both alluring and terrifying prospects.

While he was under the psychiatric care of Kenneth Richmond, Greene wrote a story entitled "The Creation of Beauty: A Study in Sublimation." Unlike the other early tales, with their emphasis upon mortality and disillusionment, this one lives up to its subtitle by offering a defense against fear and unhappiness through the escapist ideal of feminine beauty. Greene's repressed sexuality—during his teens he was infatuated with several women, including a ballet student who used to visit the Richmonds—thus finds an outlet in this story about cosmic creation.

The chief architect of the universe confronts God with his misery. Following God's orders he had created man and the universe but now he is distressed that God gave man no other happiness than a woman to love. Furthermore, God has ordered the existence of darkness and sleep, which contain fear and evil dreams to torment man. All of nature, in fact, seems to conspire to harm man and defeat his work and his dreams. God answers that "because you have given him the beauty of woman, you have given him the beauty of the universe." God declares that good and evil are reconciled in man's devotion to woman:

He will love the cold, because it is like his wayward mistress; he will love the heat, because it is as warm as her breast. He will write songs to the dark, because it is as deep, unfathomable and mysterious as love, and drowns him in the blackness of her hair. He will let himself down into sleep with a fear, because, though it bring evil dreams, yet will it also bring dreams of her for whom he lives. He will glory in the birds, for he will decorate her in their feathers.

In the midst of this lyrical celebration, Greene attributes to his femme fatale the power to assuage and reconcile many of his most profound fears: of sexuality, of the dark, of bad dreams, of drowning, and of birds. The story reads almost like a psychoanalytical exercise whereby through the sublimation of his fears into a cosmic hymn to female beauty and through the act of writing itself Greene may obtain a sense of control over his demons. Like his character God, Greene can assume the role of creator through his fiction, imposing order upon the chaos of his experience and illuminating the dark corners of his fears.

The two stories Greene published in 1922, "The Tyranny of Realism" and "Magic," extend some of the former themes and reveal his continuing sexual repression, guilt, desire for punishment, and sense of betrayal and disappointment. Roland Wobbe was the first to note the significance of "The Tyranny of Realism." He sees it as a self-conscious and paradigmatic dream story important to an understanding of Greene's later work: "The story's characters reappear in a number of later variations, and its plot becomes a schematic for the conflicts in the later novels and entertainments."

"The Tyranny of Realism," published in the Berkhamstedian in 1922, is an allegorical fantasy that focuses upon a young boy held captive by an omnipotent tyrant named King Realism, "from whom no secrets were hid, no dark places safe." Sharing the boy's captivity and lying at the King's feet in a cold marble hall filled with the smell of a prison, corruption, and repression, is a beautiful maiden called Fantasie. The boy asks the King why his great love, Fantasie, has been stolen from him and complains that he has been robbed of his dreams and of a mystical homeland of dark caves and hidden ways, full of beauty and sweet fears. King Realism informs the boy that he is no longer imprisoned and the small room melts into rolling plains and a star-filled sky. When the boy kneels before him he discovers that the King has become God and on the throne next to him sits Fantasie, "and their lips were pressed each to each in a long passion of joy."

Wobbe's interpretation of this final scene lays the biographical framework for understanding the story:

The final action leaves no doubt that both the God-king and the girl have betrayed the boy, and the allegorical significance of the characters begins to crystallize. The maid stands for fancy, romance, the erotic and a certain ambivalence; the God-king represents a changeable (perhaps arbitrary) authority, discipline, repression, cold, puritanical objectivity and male competition. One easily identifies the boy prisoner as the depressed young writer who feels both captive and spy in his father's school. The story contains heavy Freudian associations of repressed sexuality, guilt, and punishment.

King Realism seems to be a composite of Lionel Carter and Greene's father. Both of these figures served to undermine Greene's sense of freedom, spontaneity, and fantasy. They both exercised authority over him and demanded his loyalty. Greene's youthful dreams and chivalric eroticism, embodied in the character of Fantasie, are destroyed by the father-bully. The boy asks King Realism, "Why did you send that cold, peering slave, that Spiritualism there, to drive away my dreams, the ghosts, who used to kiss my lips and hair?" The question elucidates the psychological allegory. Berkhamsted School is the prison ruled by Mr. Greene (King Realism) and the students are the slaves "who lined the walls." Greene's father is then held responsible for destroying Greene's romantic idealism by his authoritarian rule and especially by imprisoning him with Carter, "the cold, peering slave."

The boy's release from his imprisonment turns out to be the cruelest irony, for he has been released into the larger world of adult experience where betrayal can now be recognized and innocence lamented. The boy's discovery of King Realism in an impassioned embrace with Fantasie suggests his painful role in the oedipal triangle. Greene later modifies this oedipal relationship in "The Basement Room," where he has Philip discover Baines and Emmy together in a restaurant. In that story Baines is the figure associated with fantasy who betrays the boy's innocence.

Greene's next story, "Magic," published in the Weekly Westminster Gazette six weeks after the appearance of "The Tyranny of Realism," is another dream story. A writer of children's fairy stories is haunted by the spirits of children who have read his books and who are now imprisoned within his fictional fairylands. These child ghosts express their various disillusionments: one has discovered that his mythical princess is actually an old woman who wears a corset and paints her face; another has found that the king's daughter, for whom he slew dragons, first ignores him and later runs off with someone else; and a king's daughter exclaims that the young man who rescued her from a dragon turned out to be an abusive, alcoholic husband who eats his peas with a knife.

While most of the ghostly readers bitterly complain of their disillusionment with the romantic view of life the author had instilled in them as children, one of them announces his loss of religious belief as well: "I entered the gardens of heaven to fight with the archangels, and there was nothing there save weed-grown paths. I entered the halls of God, and there was only an empty throne."

Finally, the author asks if he has given happiness to anyone and he is answered by the ghost of his own youth: "You showed me the door to happiness and I went in, and faeryland was more beautiful than any dream of yours. I went in, but they pulled me out and closed the door, and for me also there was nothing left." This young spirit, unlike the other speakers, goes on to rationalize his disillusionment be arguing that the intensity of love and beauty in fairyland is too powerful for mere mortals and that one had best settle for a life of more ordinary happiness. "Love there was like a beacon fire," he says, "here like a smouldering hearth. Yet we may warm ourselves at that hearth for a little while, you and I, and perhaps forget the beacon. It is safer so. It might have scorched us."

Besides battling his personal school dragons once again in this story, Greene is gradually discovering the subject matter and central themes of his future fiction. His overpowering sense of fantasy, which he nourished during the covert period of his childhood by reading such books as Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Charlotte Yonge's The Little Duke, Captain Frederick Marryat's The Children of the Forest, the fairy stories of Andrew Lang, and the tales of Beatrix Potter, must now be counterpointed by his profound disillusionment embodied within a fiction that accommodates cruel and brutal realities. It is little wonder, then, that a novelist such as Joseph Conrad would emerge as Greene's literary hero, a man who takes the dreams and illusions of a character like Charles Marlow, in The Heart of Darkness, and crushes them against the savage cruelty of a figure like Mr. Kurtz.

By the time he began his studies at Oxford University, Greene had all but lost any belief in God. His undergraduate atheism derived from several causes: his psychoanalysis under Kenneth Richmond, which hastened his disillusionment with the Protestant church; his rebellion against the unquestioning faith of his parents; and the opportunity afforded him at Oxford to explore new intellectual ideas and to challenge conventional principles.

In his first story for the Oxford Outlook, called "The Trial of Pan" (1923), Greene attempts to shock the traditional members of Balliol College by describing the seductive charms of a pagan who liberates God's followers from his stern, tyrannical rule. Greene here has at least two literary antecedents: Shelley, who, as an undergraduate at Oxford proclaiming the necessity of atheism, relished his Promethean role in attacking symbols and figures of authority, and Swinburne who, in his early poetry, asserted the superiority of the free and lustful pagan gods over the repressive and puritanical God of Christianity.

Greene's story opens on a light satirical note and establishes a tone characteristic of his later comical work in May We Borrow Your Husband? God, in the company of his angels and his worthies, is busily judging the souls of prostitutes, murderers, robbers, and swindlers. The story then moves to Gabriel's defense of Lady Hope-Smithies against the charges that she boxed the ears of an Anglican curate, lost money playing bridge, and gave money to a cousin. Michael, however, demolishes the defense, accusing the defendant of always reciting "Little Annie's Deathbed" at village concerts and of keeping six pet dogs. "God summed up against her, and the jury pronounced her guilty, without leaving the box."

Greene then modulates the tone of the story to one of heavy melodrama as Pan comes before God for judgment. Greene contrasts the youthful, sexual, and energetic character of Pan with the old, gloomy, and lifeless figure of God. Asked to defend himself before judgment is passed, Pan announces that he can best express himself through his music. His sensual melodies soon capture the minds and hearts of all the inhabitants of Heaven: "Never before in all Eternity had such a tune been heard in the realms of Heaven. There was not a sound in the room. The jury, the counsels, all leaned forward in a dream. And the light in their eyes changed with the changing music."

God, however, reveals himself to be out of touch with the dreams and desires of his people. He laughs at the momentary power of Pan's music and laughs at the idea of sensual pleasures set against the joys of Heaven: the cross, the sacred music, the purity, love, and peace. But as Pan's music continues to seduce the heavenly host back to a dark, primitive world of sexual pleasure and youthful freedom, God begins to feel old and weak: "He put his hand to his head. It was aching and he was feeling old. He felt that if the music went on much longer he would weep. There was something wrong with his nerves to-day." When the music finally ceases God realizes everyone has deserted him to follow Pan. The story ends with a description of an old, saddened, betrayed God sitting alone in the empty hall playing ticktacktoe with himself on his blotting pad.

The tale is essentially an allegory of Greene's rite of passage in which he overthrows the restrictive authority of his religious father in order to assert his sexual identity. The only segments of this heavy-handed story that point to Greene's later style are the brief satiric account of the judgment of Lady Hope-Smithies and the description of a decrepit God attempting to recall the dim past: "It was such a long, long time since he had made the world. After all, one couldn't remember everything, and it had turned out very nicely. But still he wished he could remember why he had done it all. It might be important." No other Oxford undergraduate could have written these sentences.

"The Improbable Tale of the Archbishop of Canterbridge," published in the Cherwell in 1924, adds a few interesting twists to Greene's atheism. The Archbishop of Canterbridge solemnly announces to a small gathering of his peers that England and the world are doomed:

Our cause in England, the cause of Peace and the cause of Christ, is defeated; England is doomed, she has doomed herself. A lunatic has led her dancing to dabble her feet in blood, and the notes of his mad pipings have begun to penetrate even to Europe. Gentlemen, in a month's time the world will be fighting like a pack of mad dogs. The madman with his talk of the joys of war has bewitched mankind. If it were not that this is the twentieth century I should call him Satan.

The Archbishop tells his associates he will go to the home of this incarnate devil and murder him while he is taking a bath. "I realize," he says, "that I am risking my own soul, by meeting blood with blood. But, as I have said, I do it for the good of the world."

Despite the allegorical nature of the story, the final scene is presented in graphically realistic terms that anticipate the style of Greene's later stories. After the Archbishop fires a shot he sees his victim cough up a stream of blood: "He lay still for a moment in the blood-stained water, with his head, white with soap, resting on the brass taps."

Greene then reverts to an allegorical conversation between the representative of the Church of England (Canterbridge for Canterbury) and evil incarnate. After expressing his fear that by taking justice into his own hands he might have damned his soul, the Archbishop receives a stunning revelation from his victim: "You will find no God. . . . I am God." The Archbishop asks him how he can be dying if he is God, and the story closes with the bleeding man's response: "'I made myself man,' murmured he who was once God, and sleep crept into his tones. 'A miracle . . . Very rash . . . I have done better in my day.' They were a child's eyes that twinkled up from between the H and C taps. 'Such miracles I've done. You wouldn't believe. Woods, and wars, and sheep paths, and—and you, my dear Canterbridge.' And in a bubble of bloodstained laughter God died."

Despite its melodrama, bizarre theology, and allegorical characters, this story marks a significant development in Greene's thinking about the nature of good and evil. He now portrays God and Satan as one and the same. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the creator and the destroyer are paradoxically incarnate as one in the mortal body of man. The story self-consciously allegorizes Greene's own manic-depressive personality.

Long after he became a convert to Catholicism, he continued to develop this paradoxical theme through such characters as Trevor in "The Destructors," Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock, and Raven in A Gun for Sale. All three characters possess a childlike innocence and yet they all are dangerously destructive. Greene's theology is largely conditioned by his sense of a ravished childhood, thereby leading him to portray evil in rich, palpable detail that blocks out any light from the City of God. Greene's most compelling image of paradise is not based on orthodox Christian theology but instead represents his own Eden of dreamy innocence. Expelled from the Garden of Berkhamsted, Greene seeks God in the past, in the myth of his lost childhood, and not in some future paradise. The world once was bright and good, he seems to argue, but now is brutal and evil. Therefore God is Satan, the creator and the destroyer, who made the sheep paths and woods to frame humanity's innocence and then trampled it with wars and murders.

Two final stories from Greene's Oxford years, "The New House," published in the Oxford Outlook in 1923, and "The Lord Knows," published in the Oxford Chronicle in 1925, show him moving into his stride as a more restrained writer, abandoning heavy-handed symbolism, allegory, and fantasy for a down-to-earth dramatization of the clash between dreams and reality.

"The New House" deals with a middle-aged architect named Handry, who has long harbored a dream of designing and building a house that would harmonize with a particular tract of land. Josephs, the wealthy owner of the land, grants the architect a commission to develop the tract and build the house, but Handry soon discovers his aesthetic dream house is not what his client desires—he wants a structure that will symbolize his wealth and power, a landmark that can be seen for miles.

The conflict between dream and reality, beauty and power, overwhelms Handry and he leaves his meeting with Josephs and "dashed into the road as if from an evil spell, and yet he knew that all this struggle was in vain. He was trapped, held fast by the ropes that bind all, his wife, his family, the world. Soon he would come slinking back, mouthing embarrassing apologies, to perpetrate the betrayal."

In the denouement, years after the building is completed, two passersby comment on the monstrosity: "This used to be one of the most beautiful views in the country. That fellow Joseph's [sic] philanthropy goes too far. His architect was a fellow in the village here, with no more views on art than the average rustic. And the abomination is a waste, for Josephs never lives in it, never comes near it."

Handry, now an old man "with pathetic, puzzled eyes," who happens to be standing near the two passersby, reveals his corruption as he echoes the values and language of his former employer: "It is so imposing, and such a landmark. It can be seen for miles. . . . Once I disliked it, but I had queer ideas in those days. . . . Do you read Longfellow? You should. He has very inspiring ideas."

As Roland Wobbe points out, "In this story Greene brings the power of his 'devils' down to earth, as the power of wealth is equated with the economic pressure of the whole society." Throughout his life Greene retained the romantic notion that capitalism is the Satanic enemy of integrity, creativity, and art. Greene resurrects the prototype of Josephs for the character of Eric Krogh, an industrialist with dwarfed aesthetic tastes, in England Made Me (1935) and for the Satanic capitalist Doctor Fischer in Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980).

"The Lord Knows," published in the Oxford Chronicle in 1925, is another tale of disillusionment. A young man who is about to get married enters a local pub to celebrate his future happiness. He is soon set upon by the local cynic and a drunk, both of whom poke fun at his sexual innocence and suggest his fiancée may not be a virgin. To make his point, the drunk lures a spider to his finger, which he has dipped into his whisky. The young man's celebration is ruined. The romance of marriage has been undermined by brutal jokes and disturbing sexual questions.

The touch of genius in this tale lies in Greene's depiction of the drunk's seduction of the spider. As the young man is discussing his forthcoming marriage with the bartender and the cynic, the drunk in the background continues to attend to the spider until he possesses it: "Off its thin scaffolding in the roof stepped delicately a spider. It swayed slowly down through space, undisturbed by the two high voices. It was very deliberate." At that moment the young man cries out in a childish voice for the men to stop spoiling things, walks out of the pub, and exclaims, "Anyway, I've won her." The drunk, however, now holds the large spider in his hand and says, "She's come, I knew she'd come; I've won her."

In reading "The Lord Knows," one is again reminded of Carter's battering of Greene's dreams of chivalric romance. While at Berkhamsted Greene used to go off by himself to read the romantic poetry of Lewis Norris, whose Epic of Hades celebrates the loves of Helen and Cleopatra. Norman Sherry speculates that Greene may have confided his secret erotic dreams to Wheeler in the first flush of their friendship and that later Wheeler betrayed Greene by reporting the details to Carter, who cynically used them to ridicule and humiliate Greene.

As beneficial as it may have been for Greene to work out his terrors and frustrations through the psychodrama of his early fiction, most of the stories, because of their crude symbolism and abstractions, fail to connect with the experience of his readers. But Greene was learning that his personal devils might be recognized by others if they were presented in the guise of crass capitalists, cynics, and foolish drunks rather than as allegorical figures. In the future he would embody these devils in such forms as cruel policemen, greedy smugglers, untrustworthy mestizos, pious priests, and foreign dictators. As Greene matured and began traveling about the world, he discovered his personal demons had taken up residence everywhere, from Haiti to Indochina.

Ultimately, however, Greene's early stories serve only as a temporary defense against his demons, sort of like whistling in the dark. Greene's sense of alienation, his fears, and his obsession with his lost childhood continue to comprise the central themes of his fiction for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the compulsive act of writing served him well in his lifelong battle with what he calls "the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition." Throughout most of his life he dutifully wrote a minimum of 500 words a day. His manuscripts are filled with notations of word counts: the compulsive act of writing provided him with a sense of psychological equilibrium, but he always had to be on guard for the next onslaught of the demons of his youth and to defend against them with another story, another novel, another trip to a dangerous country to distract him from his plight. He developed an addiction to writing: it became his drug of choice in escaping from the sense of reality he acquired under the sinister influence of Lionel Carter, an unremarkable boy except for his role in unwittingly helping to shape the mind and soul of a distinguished writer.

The Last Word (1990) represents Greene's "last word" as a writer of short fiction, and as such conveys a synoptic view of the stages of his life as a writer. Many of the stories, in fact, resemble sketches of atmosphere or character preliminary to the novels or memoirs he was writing at the time.

The first story, "The New House" (1923), written during his undergraduate days at Oxford University, is one of his first stories to discard the heavy-handed trappings of allegory and melodrama for a realistic portrayal of an idealist being corrupted by money. . . . "Murder for the Wrong Reason" (1929) reflects Greene's interest in the dual personality, a subject he explores in greater detail in his retracted novel The Man Within, published the same year. "The Lottery Ticket" (1938) shows Greene's engagement with the politics and violence of Mexico and anticipates his more comprehensive vision of that land in The Power and the Glory. "The News in English" (1940) and "The Lieutenant Died Last" (1940) reflect Greene's patriotism and interest in espionage during the war. "Work Not in Progress" (1955) and "The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower" (1956) display his whimsical mode during the time he was writing his comic masterpiece, Our Man in Havana. "An Appointment with the General" (1982) is a section of a novel abandoned in favor of a book-length memoir, Getting to Know the General (1984). Reminiscent of the melancholy comedy of the stories in May We Borrow Your Husband?, "The Moment of Truth" (1988) reflects the 83-year-old Greene's thoughts about death. "The Last Word" (1988) is also about death, but the melancholy and loneliness of the preceding story is here replaced with a strong Christian faith that welcomes death as a release from a futuristic godless world. In "An Old Man's Memory" (1989) Greene all but abandons the pretense of fiction to assume again the role of a Jeremiah, predicting on a smaller scale this time, not the end of Christianity, but the destruction of the Channel Tunnel. Finally, in "A Branch of the Service" (1990), a story published for the first time, Greene reverts to the comic style of Our Man in Havana in depicting the absurdities involved in undercover operations.

"Murder for the Wrong Reason" appeared in three installments in the Graphic in October 1929. Although Greene disparages and wishes he had suppressed his first published (though third-written) novel, The Man Within (1929), he has seen fit, after 60 years, to reprint the short story he wrote at the same time, a story that embodies the theme of the divided self he also explores in his novel. The editor of the Graphic prefaces the story with the following comment: "The young author of this story of murder with an unusual twist in its detection won an instantaneous success this year with his first novel, The Man Within, and a brilliant future is predicted for him."

Unlike the rather straightforward stories he wrote during his years at Oxford, "Murder for the Wrong Reason" is overwritten, complex, and dependent upon a surprise ending. It is a story that requires at least two readings before one can feel confident about understanding it. The manner in which the story was originally presented in the Graphic, with synopses of each preceding installment and with illustrations of the various characters, significantly shaped the readers' expectations and understanding of the action. Both the synopses and the illustrations create, as will be discussed shortly, plentiful red herrings that lead one to misread the story and to have to backtrack.

Here is the synopsis that appears at the beginning of the third installment:

Detective Inspector Mason, entering the offices of Hubert Collinson with a search warrant, finds the body of its owner huddled in the swivel chair, with a knife in the heart. Mason telephones to Scotland Yard, and also summons a constable from a neighbouring beat. He tells the constable that Collinson had been a blackmailer. Together they search for clues while awaiting the arrival of an able detective from the Yard. The constable finds a letter to the dead man signed "Arthur Callum." Mason says he knows Callum, who actually lives quite near. The constable, with visions of rapid promotion, asks his superior if they cannot pay a quick visit to Callum's flat before the arrival of the fast car from Scotland Yard. The Inspector re-reads the letter, and confronts Callum in the latter's flat. After fruitlessly interrogating him Mason leaves the flat, and on the stairs meets Rachel Mann, an ambitious actress who had become Collinson's mistress, though Callum had loved her and asked her to marry him. He tells her that the tragedy was her doing and goes into a reverie of the past. Returning to the scene of the crime he tells the constable that Callum is not the man they want, but promises him a spectacular triumph, saying that the air is full of clues. . . .

Among the five illustrations that accompany the story is a depiction of Mason's confrontation of Callum that shows the two men to be distinctly different. There is also an illustration of Mason's meeting with Rachel Mann outside Callum's flat. At the end of the story, however, the reader discovers that Rachel Mann has been dead for 10 years and that Mason's meeting with Callum and Mann occurs only in his mind and that Callum is, in fact, Mason's youthful alter-ego and not an actual character in the story. Both the synopsis and the illustrations, therefore, are red herrings designed to trick the reader, leaving him feeling cheated at the conclusion of the story.

In the final installment Greene reveals that Mason is himself the murderer. Mason melodramatically offers himself up for arrest by the constable, assuring the latter of his promotion. In retrospect, one realizes that Mason not only committed the murder but that he also set up the constable to "discover" the clues. Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Greene has Mason create the mystery and then urge the constable to solve it.

Mason/Callum could have killed Collinson years before "for the right reason"—jealousy over a woman. As it stands, he killed Collinson for "the wrong reason." As he says to the constable, "You don't see a jealous lover here, constable, only an elderly, corrupt police officer who has killed his blackmailer." Greene never makes clear why Collinson was blackmailing Mason nor how Rachel Mann died. At the beginning of the story Mason declares that "'Collinson deserved all that he got. Blackmail,' he added, 'and women.'" Clearly Mason's dealings with Collinson have involved these two separate issues, and the blackmail may have been about women, or a woman, or the death of a woman.

One of the ways in which Greene deals with the theme of the split personality is through the symbolism of a painting depicting the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead that hangs on the wall of Mason's/Callum's flat. The painting also appears in one of the illustrations. Mentioned several times throughout the story, the painting suggests the resurrection of Mason's dead, youthful self. Mason frequently speaks of his "private inquiries," which suggests not only his investigation into the crime but, more significantly, his introspective dialogues, his encounters with the man within. It may be that this interesting psychological subtext combined with an experimental detective story explains Greene's decision to include the story in this collection. Reading the story more than 60 years after he wrote it, Greene comments: "I found that I couldn't detect the murderer before he was disclosed. During those early years in the twenties and thirties I was much interested in the detective story (I even began Brighton Rock expecting it to be a detective story)."

During the winter of 1938 Greene spent five weeks in Mexico to undertake research for a book about the Mexican Revolution. Mexico was a dangerous country to visit at the time, for President Plutarco Elias Calles, in the name of his socialist revolution, was closing down the churches and exiling or murdering priests and practicing Catholics. Greene's brief visits, nevertheless, yielded three significant works: "The Lottery Ticket" (1938), a short story, The Lawless Roads (1939), an account of his travels through Chiapas and Tabasco, and The Power and the Glory (1940), one of his finest novels.

"The Lottery Ticket," though written in 1938, was not published until 1947, when it appeared in the Strand Magazine and Cosmopolitan. It was also included in Greene's collection, Nineteen Stories, which was published in England that same year. Curiously, Greene omitted the story from the American version of Nineteen Stories (1949) and from subsequent collections of his short fiction until the publication of The Last Word in 1990. Greene explains that he excluded the story from his earlier collection because "I thought then that there were too many echoes in it of The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory. Well, those two books today belong to an even more distant past, so I decided to give 'The Lottery Ticket' a second chance."

Many of the details of setting and character in "The Lottery Ticket" are, indeed, reflected in The Power and the Glory: the seedy, derelict atmosphere of the Mexican towns, the omnipresent vultures waiting for another death, the roaches on the hotel walls, the banana plantations, the dentist, the fat chief of police preaching social progress, and the themes of fatalism and betrayal. Despite the evocative character of Mexico Greene develops in this story, it cannot compete with the fully realized character of the land he conjures in his novel.

Greene does not handle point of view in "The Lottery Ticket" with his usual skill. The story is basically told by an omniscient author. Nevertheless, Greene opens his tale with a first-person narrator who soon gives way to the omniscient author. After introducing Mr. Thriplow, an Englishman on holiday in Mexico who has just purchased a lottery ticket, the narrator comments, "I don't often believe in fate, but when I do I picture it as just such a malicious and humorous personality as would choose, out of all people in the world, Mr. Thriplow to fulfill its absurd and august purposes." There is no indication who this narrator is, and after the opening paragraph he simply recounts Mr. Thriplow's adventures.

Shortly after his arrival in a dirty and depressing village, Mr. Thriplow learns he has purchased a winning lottery ticket worth 50,000 pesos. Enjoying comfortable circumstances in England, he does not really need the money and feels ashamed at having won the lottery in the midst of so much Mexican poverty. To overcome the guilt of being a foreign exploiter and gringo, he goes to a bank and offers the money to the manager so that some good might be done with it locally. Perhaps the money could be used to establish a free library or a hospital. As he becomes involved with the Governor and the Chief of Police, however, Mr. Thriplow discovers his money will be used to "defeat reaction."

The Mexican state's view of social progress turns out to be quite different from that of Mr. Thriplow, whose British liberalism and naïveté lead to ironic consequences. It appears the money he turns over to the government is used to pay the wages of the police and the military. When Thriplow sees the government soldiers moving down the street to arrest another of the Mexican patriots, a defender of the church, he rushes to the rebel's house to warn him. The man's daughter answers the door and the dialogue that follows carries Greene's attack upon foolish British liberalism:

"It was you who gave the money, wasn't it?"

"It was, but you understand . . . no personal feeling. I am a Liberal. I cannot help sympathising with . . . progress."

"Oh, yes."

"I detest Fascism. I cannot understand how a patriot—I am sure your father is a patriot—could take arms from Germany, Italy . . . "

"What a lot you believe," she said with faint derision.

She then reveals to him that the soldiers have already carried off her father, presumably for execution.

This simple woman, a former nun, exhibits a political savvy and human understanding that overwhelms Thriplow in his moment of bitter disillusionment. Determined to make the affair easy for him, she asks for some money to help bury her father, saying, "You have done your best for us. You could go home quite happy. . . . I can see you are a kind man. Only ignorant . . . of life, I mean." With his innocence devastated, Thriplow's feelings turned to hate "for all who had so unexpectedly broken into his life, hate of the new ideas, new words. Hate increased its boundaries in his heart like an annexing army . . . and hate spread across Mr. Thriplow's Liberal consciousness, ignoring boundaries. . . . It seemed to Mr. Thriplow . . . that it was the whole condition of human life that he had begun to hate."

Like The Power and the Glory, this story has its clear-cut villains—the Chief of Police, the Governor, and the military—and its heroes—the executed patriot and his daughter. What complicates this story is the focus upon Mr. Thriplow. His presence diffuses the tension that should arise from the opposition between the government and the rebels, the hunters and the hunted, and shifts the reader's attention to his disillusionment. The damaged feelings of a British liberal on holiday in Mexico thus becomes more significant than the political and human fate of a nation and the Catholic church. Perhaps here is another reason why the story disappeared from the American edition of Nineteen Stories and failed to appear in subsequent collections until 1990.

Greene published two short stories during the war, "The Lieutenant Died Last" and "The News in English," both of which show the British to be courageous opponents of the Germans. These tales might be read as simple morale boosters, as Greene's literary contribution to the war effort. He explains that he excluded them from Collected Stories not because he found them unworthy but because "Time (and with it Memory) passes with horrifying speed. How many people below the age of sixty would remember Lord Haw-Haw, whom I listened to nightly in 1940 on the radio, and understand the title and subject of 'The News in English'? In that war, they might well ask, was it plausible for a squad of foreign soldiers to descend by parachute on an English village? None had occurred in the German war and we had been engaged in at least three conflicts since then. The questions are even more relevant today than in 1967, but I am taking the risk of reprinting them because I like the stories." For those under 60, Lord Haw-Haw was an Anglo-American named William Joyce who broadcast German propaganda in English from Berlin during the Second World War. He was captured by British soldiers in Germany in 1945, convicted of treason, and hanged.

"The Lieutenant Died Last," published in Collier's in 1940, is a whimsical tale about German parachute troops attacking an English village. While out poaching rabbits on Lord Drew's grounds in the small village of Potter, Bill Purves sees a small group of Germans parachute onto the field. While some of the soldiers round up the villagers and imprison them in the local tavern, Bill Purves engages the others in a gun battle and kills or wounds them. He then returns to the tavern, where the soldiers stationed there, seeing that Purves is armed, surrender to him. The narrator's conclusion to this tale displays a British pride and patriotism with a comic touch and a laconic hero. Despite his heroism, Purves is charged with poaching: "He was quite gratified: he didn't expect medals and as he said, 'I've got one back on them bloody Bojers.'"

An action-filled and humorous story, "The Lieutenant Died Last" also contains a brief note of seriousness. The wounded German lieutenant calls out to Purves to kill him. The narrator comments that "Old Purves always felt pity for broken animals, but he hadn't a bullet left." He then picks up the officer's revolver and kills him. Afterward he looks through the dead man's pockets and discovers a photograph of a naked baby on a hearthrug. His sense of humanity, suppressed during his battle with the Germans, overcomes him and he becomes sick to his stomach. Purves keeps this souvenir of his encounter with the Germans but never shows it to anyone. "Sometimes he took it out of a drawer and looked at it himself—uneasily. It made him—for no reason that he could understand—feel bad." The theme of pity, which became an obsessive one for Greene in his later works, surfaces even here, in this comic salute to British patriotism, and demonstrates that in Greene's mind pity transcends national boundaries.

"The News in English," published in the Strand Magazine in 1940, is one of Greene's earliest tales of espionage. Unlike his later spy novels, such as Our Man in Havana (1958), which satirizes the British Secret Service, and The Human Factor (1978), which makes a hero of a British traitor, "The News in English" celebrates the heroic patriotism of a British double agent.

Set during the Second World War, the story opens with Mrs. Bishop and her daughter-in-law, Mary, listening to a radio broadcast from Germany. The voice they hear on the radio is that of a typical English don who is proclaiming the resurgence of youth throughout the new Germany. Mrs. Bishop recognizes the voice as that of David, her son and Mary's husband. A mathematics don at Oxford, David was reported in the newspapers to have gone to Germany to evade military service, leaving his wife and mother to be bombed in England. At the time, Mary fought in vain with reporters, arguing that David must have been forced to leave England. Mrs. Bishop, however, condemns her son for his cowardice and betrayal while Mary persists in her attempt to make sense of his bizarre actions.

One evening during his broadcast David announces that somewhere back in England his wife may be listening to him: "I am a stranger to the rest of you, but she knows that I am not in the habit of lying. . . . The fact of the matter is. . . ." At that moment Mary suddenly realizes that her husband is speaking to her in code. When he was away from her on trips he employed a scheme whereby the phrase "the fact of the matter is" always meant "this is all lies, but take the initial letters which follow." Mary discovers that David is sending her details of Germany's military secrets.

Reporting this information to the War Office, Mary is told to keep David's subterfuge secret, even from his mother, otherwise his and many other lives will be lost. The War Office agrees to broadcast a message using the same code to Germany in the hope that David will hear it. The message explains how he can obtain a safe passage home.

Meanwhile, Mary must silently endure her mother-in-law's contempt for David. On his final broadcast, after reporting some military secrets, he says goodbye to his wife, indicating to her that he never received the War Office's message and that he is now lost to her forever. Mrs. Bishop exacerbates Mary's pain by commenting, "He ought never to have been born. I never wanted him. The coward," driving Mary to cry out, "if only he were a coward, if only he were. But he's a hero, a damned hero, a hero, a hero. . . ." Mary is left with an agonizing truth that she cannot reveal and looks to a future time when she can restore her husband's good reputation.

The painful note on which this story ends anticipates the conclusion of The Human Factor, where Castle, the British defector living in Russia, telephones his wife in England, knowing he will never be able to see her again. Castle's motivations for spying are complex and involve his loyalty to the Communists for helping to get his wife, a South African, out of her country. One of the problems with "The News in English" is that Greene fails to establish any motivation for David's presence in Germany. Since the War Office had no knowledge of his coded messages until Mary reported to them, David could not have been an official double agent. One can only assume that the newspaper reporters were right, that he left England to avoid military service. Once there, however, his conscience presumably led him to join the war effort by spying on the German military and hoping that his wife remembered their childish code. The story, unfortunately, does not make this very clear.

Lying behind the patriotism of this tale is Greene's obsession with the subject of divided loyalties, a subject dramatically fixed in his mind while at Berkhamsted School, where he had to deal with conflicting loyalties to his father, the school, and his peers. Greene later found a way of escaping the conflict and puts his solution forward through the character of Javitt, in "Under the Garden": "If you have to earn a living, boy, and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double-agent—and never let either of the two sides know your real name." David is Greene's first attempt to create such a character, but it would be many more years before Greene could flesh him out with complex and believable motivation.

The comic phase of Greene's career is represented in The Last Word by two stories that appeared in Punch, "Work Not in Progress" (1955) and "The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower" (1956). It was about this time that Greene was writing Our Man in Havana, a novel that captures a comic view of life that Greene, in his depressive mood, denied his previous heroes. His cocky state of well-being at the time is brilliantly embodied in the character of that novel's hero, James Wormold, a fellow with the unique sanity of the clown. Unfortunately, Greene's two pieces in Punch seem hollow when compared to that novel.

Conceived as a sketch for a musical comedy, "Work Not in Progress" offers this bizarre plot: a group of 12 Anglican bishops are kidnapped by 12 thugs who hope to steal their chasubles belonging to the Church of England. The thugs are so poorly educated they have mistaken the word "chasuble" for "chalice." After a successful kidnapping, the thugs put on the bishops' clothes. The ringleader and brains of the gang is a woman (the only woman in the cast), and she assumes the role of Archbishop of Canterbury. Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Melbourne, who has come to observe the convocation of bishops, attempts to track down the kidnappers. He locates them in Canterbury where, in the rose garden, he falls in love with the false Archbishop of Canterbury. Later the rest of the gang realize they have been betrayed by their leader and attack her. She is defended by the Bishop of Melbourne until the arrival of the true bishops in their underclothes scares away the impostors. The musical ends with the lovers singing a melodious duet and then heading off to live together in Australia.

Hardly up to the standards of W. S. Gilbert, this fantasy sketch of a musical comedy may have titillated some readers of Punch at the time but the piece does not hold up very well. It seems more suited now to undergraduate tastes that have come to savor the Monty Python brand of comedy. The slapstick humor of presenting 12 bishops running across the stage in their underwear and of having a female thug dress up like the Archbishop of Canterbury shows Greene shamelessly indulging in the pleasures of low comedy.

"The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower" opens with a riveting sentence and then lapses into disappointing frivolity: "It was not so much the theft of the Eiffel Tower which caused me difficulty; it was putting it back before anyone noticed." The narrator describes how he hired a fleet of trucks to carry the Eiffel Tower out of Paris to a quiet, flat field on the way to Chantilly. Having great affection for the structure, he is pleased to see it "after all those years of war and fog and rain and radar, in repose." Greene's anti-Americanism then surfaces as he has the narrator return to the empty site to enjoy the confusion of stupid American tourists. Finally, the narrator returns the Eiffel Tower before the employees who work there lose their wages.

The comic stories are the weakest in the collection. They are not especially funny, their humor is undergraduate and patronizing, they feature no notable characters, and their whimsy and fantasy are contrived. Perhaps Greene had poured all of his comic genius into writing the novel Our Man in Havana (1958). In any event, one suspects he included the comic pieces in The Last Word to reflect what he calls his manic mood, the dynamic state of mind that gave birth to such brilliant comic characters as James Wormold (Our Man in Havana) and Aunt Augusta (Travels with My Aunt).

"An Appointment with the General" was originally published in 1982 under the title "On the Way Back: A Work Not in Progress" in Firebird 7, as part of a collection of fiction by contemporary authors. Greene's subtitle refers to the fact that this story is actually a chapter of an abortive novel that was to have been called On the Way Back. He conceived the idea of writing the novel in 1976, when he was invited to visit Panama as the guest of General Omar Torrijos Herrera. The invitation led to a curious friendship between the two men that lasted until the general's mysterious death in a plane crash in 1981. Greene eventually abandoned his novel On the Way Back in favor of writing a memoir of his friendship with Torrijos entitled Getting to Know the General (1984).

While being shown around Panama by the general's companion, a man named Chuchu, Greene picked up the title for his novel: "I heard Chuchu tell Captain Wong that we should see him again 'on the way back'—Captain Wong, the miraculous Christ, the Haunted House, all were promised on the way back and my projected novel with that title again emerged from the shadows. In my book the promised return would never be fulfilled—there would be no going back for my chief character." Later Greene entered a note in his diary for the new novel: "Start novel with a girl from a French left-wing weekly interviewing the General. She's escaping the pain of an unsatisfactory marriage in Paris and wants to avoid further pain. In the end she goes back to her pain and not to happiness."

Greene's note provides the outline for the surviving chapter "An Appointment with the General," but in Getting to Know the General he tells Chuchu the plot of the rest of the novel. He believes that in telling the story to his companion he had no further need to write it: "it is a substitute for the writing." Greene's idea was to have the general assign Chuchu to show the French journalist around Panama. She and Chuchu fall in love but he is later killed by a bomb someone planted in his car. The general has the journalist flown back to Panama City by helicopter and she must see from the air all the places Chuchu promised they would enjoy on the way back.

"An Appointment with the General" opens with the French journalist, Marie-Claire Duval, awaiting her interview with Torrijos. She feels dislocated, not knowing the language and feeling threatened by the men, dressed in camouflaged uniforms and carrying revolvers, who stand around her. One of the men, Sergeant Guardián (drawn after Chuchu), announces in perfect English that the general will see her but she cannot bring her tape recorder into the interview. She thinks, "I'll have to trust to my memory, my damnable memory, the memory I hate."

The story then flashes back in time a month to the lunch she has with the editor of a left-wing French newspaper. Eager to discredit Torrijos, the editor praises Marie-Claire for her destructive interview with Helmut Schmidt and assigns her to interview the general. During the course of their conversation Greene makes it clear that the journalist will be no match for the general. She only knows French and English, knows little of geography, is dependent upon her tape recorder, and is psychologically flawed by a failing marriage. She accepts the assignment, in fact, to escape the memory of her loveless marriage.

The last section of the story focuses upon the interview, during which Guardián serves as the translator. Greene portrays the general as a wise, almost mystical figure, whose eyes are "laden with the future." In his quiet way, he undermines the destructive agenda of Marie-Claire. Her attempts to label him a Marxist or socialist are met with clever parables: "My General says the Communists are for a while traveling on the same train as he is. So are the socialists. But it is he who is driving the train. It is he who will decide at what station to stop, and not his passengers." Out of her own failed sexuality she desperately conjures up questions that would link the general's political power with sexual promiscuity: "What does he dream of? At night I mean. Does he dream of women. . . . Or does he dream of the terms he is going to make with the gringos?" "The tired and wounded eyes looked at the wall behind her," Greene writes. "She could even understand the single phrase he spoke in reply to her question. 'El Muerte.' 'He dreams of death,' the sergeant translated unnecessarily, and I could build an article on that, she thought with self-hatred."

This story reflects Greene's own failed marriage and his hero-worshipping friendship with Torrijos. Like Marie-Claire, Greene enjoyed an exciting escape from domestic concerns upon receiving an invitation to meet with the general. It must have been an exhilarating experience for him to be taken into this leader's confidence, to be shown secret military plans, and be taken into the inner sanctum of political revolution. The character of Marie-Claire, however, not only embodies some of Greene's initial trepidations at meeting the general but serves to typify what Greene assumes are the Left's mistaken preconceived notions about Torrijos. Her vulnerability and weakness in the face of a third world savior mark her as one who, had the novel been completed, would have discovered the powerful inner resources of Greene's political hero. Ending as it does, however, the story merely sets up a straw-woman whose own decaying marriage leads her to self-hatred.

In "The Moment of Truth," originally published in the Independent Magazine on 18, June 1988, the 83-year-old Greene turns his thoughts to the subject of death. He opens his story with a characteristically surprising simile: "The near approach of death is like a crime which one is ashamed to confess to friends or fellow workers, and yet there remains a longing to confide in someone—perhaps a stranger in the street." The hero of this story is Arthur Burton, a waiter in a London restaurant, who develops a fondness for an American couple, the Hogminsters, who, in appreciation of his solicitude, habitually sit at one of his tables.

A lonely man, Arthur lives in a small bed-sitting-room, and in the evenings enjoys a vicarious life by thinking of his various customers: dull married couples, young lovers interested only in each other, and, sometimes, married young women accompanied by older men. Arthur's sense of isolation is painfully exacerbated by his doctor's recent suspicion that he may have cancer: "the crime of death had touched him." Like a criminal, he becomes desperate to confide his illness in someone. Touched by the use of his first name and the smile of real friendship that he received from Mrs. Hogminster, he decides to make her his confidante before he returns to his doctor for the final results of his medical tests.

The next day he discloses only a small portion of his secret to her when he announces he will not be at the restaurant tomorrow because he has to go to the hospital for a checkup. The Hogminsters offer him some platitudes of reassurance and tell him they will return for another meal before they leave for America. On his day off, they add, they plan to take his earlier advice and shop at some men's stores in Jermyn Street. That night he has a dream about Mrs. Hogminster: "It was as though he had spoken to her and somehow she had given him words of sympathy which lent him courage to face his enemies, who were about to disclose the shameful truth."

The doctors inform Arthur that he does, indeed, have cancer and must be operated upon immediately. Although he is not frightened at the prospect of death, he wants "to share his knowledge and his secret with a stranger who would not be seriously affected like a wife or a child—he possessed neither—but might with a word of kindly interest share with him this criminal secret." Convinced Mrs. Hogminster is just such a woman ("he had read it in her eyes"), Arthur arranges to return to work in the hope of talking to her.

To his dismay, he discovers the manager has seated the Hogminsters at another table. When he goes over to speak with them he is disappointed at their failure to inquire about his health. All they talk about are the details of their shopping spree in Jermyn Street. Arthur excuses himself and goes into the kitchen in a state of depression: "He was going to say nothing to the manager: the next day he would simply not turn up. The hospital could inform them in due course if he were dead or alive."

Some moments later, however, the manager enters the kitchen and hands Arthur a letter from Mrs. Hogminster. Feeling immense relief, he reasons she could not discuss his secret in the restaurant for others to hear and therefore discreetly placed her inquiry and sympathy within this letter. He returns to the hospital for his operation and that night, before putting out the light over his bed, he opens and reads the letter. Mrs. Hogminster wrote: "Dear Arthur, I felt I must write you a word of thanks before we catch our plane. We have so enjoyed our visits to Chez Augustine and shall certainly return one day. And the Sales, we got such wonderful bargains—you were so right about Jermyn Street."

The droll humor of this story is reminiscent of Greene's tales in May We Borrow Your Husband?. And, as in the latter volume, the comic pathos is worked out within the confines of a restaurant, an establishment that Greene employs as a workshop for his imagination. The technique of a doctor giving a death sentence to his patient was employed much earlier in "Under the Garden" where, stirred by his diagnosis, Wilditch seeks wholeness by returning to his childhood. Now the older Greene depicts his hero's impending death as a crime, something too shameful to be told to one's family or friends, as if death were a conscious betrayal of one's communal bond, a betrayal that would inflict pain and elicit hopeless sympathy. The irony of Mrs. Hogminster's letter, however, amplifies the folly of Arthur's attempt to secure sympathy and encouragement from outside the circle of his family or friends. Greene makes it clear in his story that Arthur was in the habit of observing his customers superficially. Like the hack writer in "The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen," Arthur fails to see what is really going on around him. Unlike the self-deluded writer, however, Arthur's failure to read the truth in Mrs. Hogminster's eyes leads to his utter disillusionment and desolation at the end of the story. The panic fear inherent in the human condition, from which Greene finds release through his writing, blossoms like a cancer in the moment of truth and disillusionment effected not by the doctor's diagnosis but by Mrs. Hogminster's letter.

"The Last Word," published in the Independent Magazine on 10 September, 1988, moves the subject of death beyond the dreary, localized confines of the preceding story to a futuristic brave new world where great spiritual heroism offers the hope of life after death. The last surviving Christian, an old man who turns out to be the last pope, has been living in a state of amnesia for the past 20 years, ever since he was shot during an assassination attempt. He is brought out of his humble apartment to meet the general of the new godless world union. He gradually recalls fragments from the past that reveal to him that he is indeed the pope, and he discovers that the general now plans to execute him.

As in The Power and the Glory, The Comedians, and Monsignor Quixote, Greene reverts to one of his favorite themes: the dramatic struggle between secular and spiritual power. Vaguely recalling Huxley's and Orwell's secular utopias, Greene's futuristic world boasts of peace through the elimination of poverty, nationalism, and Christianity. The general preserved the old man until he was sure that all of his followers were dead. On this occasion of their historical meeting, the general has the old man dressed in his formal papal robes, the clothes having been borrowed from the Museum of Myths. Over the years the old man has kept his Bible and a crucifix with one of Christ's arms broken off.

When the general tells the old man he feels sorry for his having lived so long in such dreary conditions, the man replies "They were not so dreary as you think. I had a friend with me. I could talk to him." The general, failing to understand the reference is to the broken Christ on his cross, protests that his men assured him the old man was living alone all those years. Upon learning that he will now be executed, the old man expresses his relief: "You will be sending me where I've often wanted to go during the last twenty years." "Into darkness?" asks the general.

"Oh, the darkness I have known was not death," says the old man. "You are sending me into the light. I am grateful to you."

As a symbol of final friendship between two born to be enemies, the general pours out two glasses of wine, a moment that suggests the Last Supper of Christ. The old man raises his glass as though in salute and says in a low voice some words in a language that the general cannot understand: "Corpus domini nostri. . . ." These are the words of the priest during the Communion service of the Mass. As the old man drinks his wine the general shoots and kills him. In this reenactment of the Last Supper, the old man presumably reverts to his former priestly duties and consecrates the wine as the blood of Christ. By shooting the old man (the pope, Christ's representative on earth), the general reenacts the combined roles of Judas and Pontius Pilate.

Greene adds a final paragraph to his story, however, that undermines the secular convictions of the general: "Between the pressure on the trigger and the bullet exploding a strange and frightening doubt crossed his mind: is it possible that what this man believed may be true?" This suggestion of a lingering doubt in the general's vision of a godless world seems totally unprepared for by the rest of the story. Greene seems to be reaching back a few years to Monsignor Quixote for his conclusion here. In that novel the representative of the Marxist state, the mayor, attends a final Mass said in pantomime by the dying Monsignor Quixote. Having no chalice or Host, Monsignor Quixote nevertheless places an imaginary wafer upon the mayor's tongue. The mayor, feeling the pressure, wonders later if he might not in fact have received Communion. Greene deftly leaves the Marxist mayor with a troubling ambiguity that suggests his capability for belief in God. The amicable relationship between the mayor and Quixote, however, is established throughout the novel, making its conclusion credible. The relationship between the general and the pope in "The Last Word," on the other hand, is abstract and undeveloped, and the conclusion seems forced.

Greene would have done better to have followed the more rigid pattern of The Power and the Glory. Like the general of "The Last Word," the lieutenant in The Power and the Glory has spent his life eradicating Christianity from his country. Also like the general, he is dedicated to eliminating the poverty and suffering of his people. What makes him so effective in his work is his total, unflagging belief in the Tightness of his socialist program. Having brought about the capture and execution of the whisky priest, the lieutenant may miss his quarry but he entertains no misgivings about his faith in the secular state. Greene's general thus comes across as someone with an even grander accomplishment than that of the lieutenant—a worldwide socialist state—and on whose character Greene grafts the susceptibility of the genial Communist mayor from Monsignor Quixote. The hybrid character is not convincing.

"An Old Man's Memory" originally appeared in the Independent Magazine on 25 November, 1989. Although designated "a new short story by Graham Greene," the piece, less than a thousand words long, reads more like a dire warning to the English government about the potential for sabotage of the Channel Tunnel between Dover and Calais, scheduled for completion in 1994. The narrator of Greene's story, writing in the year 1995, announces that the year 1994 will never cease to horrify him: "The event of that year has a quality of nightmare about it—deaths in the darkness, in the depths of the sea, deaths by mutilation and drowning. The rotting bodies of the unrecognizable lie even today on both sides of the Channel."

The narrator (clearly no prophet) recalls Margaret Thatcher, having won her fourth electoral contest, greeting the French train as it comes up from the sea and halts at Dover to join the celebration. On the other side of the Channel the president of France awaits the British train, but it never arrives. Bombs have exploded under the Channel and the British train is destroyed along with the lives of all the people aboard it. Two years have passed since the disaster and the terrorists have not been identified or captured.

Greene borrows several details from recent terrorist activities to build his case for the dangers involved in the tunnel. Semtex appears to have been the explosive used in the tunnel and the narrator reminds us that in the late 1980s only 300 grams of Semtex were needed to blow up the Pan American plane over Lockerbie, Scotland. Now, he argues, explosives can be timed days, not hours, in advance.

The prime suspect, of course, is the IRA, but he also points to the Iranians, who had never forgiven England for its support of Salman Rushdie nor the Americans for having shot down their innocent airliner. There were, he observes, more Americans on board the train than there were English.

After noting the British and French governments' plan to reopen the tunnel by 1997, he concludes his account by predicting the public's reluctance to reenter the tunnel. Quite clearly Greene is here putting his fiction into the service of propaganda. Over the years Greene wrote hundreds of letters to newspapers and magazines in which he protested or criticized the actions of many governments and institutions. "An Old Man's Memory" is simply a more interesting form in which to cast his argument than the conventional letter to the editor. Several people in England had already pointed out the possibility that the IRA could blow up the tunnel. Greene's idea is not new, but the weight of his reputation as a novelist and his futuristic point of view perhaps give the story more political clout than a nameless activist could achieve in a television interview. But he does weaken the credibility of his narrator by having Margaret Thatcher still prime minister in 1995. The view of Westminster from Antibes had apparently grown somewhat hazy.

Published for the first time, "A Branch of the Service" is a comic account of an employee of a restaurant-rating association who is recruited by the Secret Service to eavesdrop on suspicious diners. Now retired, the narrator announces that he reluctantly left his profession because he lost his appetite for food.

Reminiscent of the professional eavesdroppers (and Greene himself) in the restaurants of Antibes (May We Borrow Your Husband?), the narrator observes his fellow diners with the analytical eye and ear of a writer. In one case his astute observation leads him to retrieve a cigarette containing some secret information of interest to the government. The cigarette leads to a new suspect, a doctor who had connections with the chemical industry, and the narrator is assigned to watch him. During the lengthy meal, however, the narrator is struck by diarrhea and after he returns from the toilet the doctor has vanished. Embarrassed by his failure, the narrator decides to retire.

Bathroom humor has a long tradition in England and Greene seems to delight in it. Years earlier in Our Man in Havana he drew a very funny scene in which the hero, James Wormold, is recruited into the Secret Service in a public toilet. Javitt, in "Under the Garden," sits upon a filthy commode, and Beauty, the pampered Pekinese in "Beauty," rolls in a clump of offal during an unscheduled spree.