Graham Greene will be raising sixty-three this year, a remarkable old stager altogether and still doing a stint of writing every day and doing it, on the whole, very smartly, as the twelve stories in this collection [May We Borrow Your Husband?] show. Though three of them are skip and four are fill, that leaves five stories as shrewd and funny as any being written today. And five for twelve makes .416, and who else is hitting .400 this year?

The three skip stories are "Beauty," about a rich American woman and her pekingese dog; "The Over-night Bag," about a citizen who carries a dead baby back to England from France in his luggage; and "A Shocking Accident," about a young man whose father is killed in the street by having a pig drop on his head. As one ready to concede that many rich American women and all Pekingese dogs are deplorable, I nonetheless found "Beauty" over-charged with the nastiness that Greene can fall into when he starts carving up comfortable people. Stories about dead babies and about people killed by falling pigs, on the other hand, are a kind of national specialty of the English, and I was more surprised than anything else to find Greene, that most un-insular and un-English of authors, serving them up. It is a little like learning that somebody you like thinks Alfred Hitchcock is funny. But scratch an Englishman and you are likely to find something of Hitchcock, the boy who will tell you about the terrible and of course very droll things he has been doing to the cat.

The four fill stories—I call them fill because they're so flat I cannot believe Greene much believed in them and only threw them in in the Falstaffian way, "Tush, man, they'll fill a pit as well as better"—are "The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen," "Awful When You Think of It," "Doctor Crombie," and "The Root of All Evil." The last-named of these seemed to be a parable. Of the others, I remember nothing at all. But here the body count stops because the rest of the stories have a remarkable life in them, with action and characters that move not only on the page in the reading but in the eye and mind and affections long after that.

"May We Borrow Your Husband?," though not the best of these stories, best represents the way they are put together and work. An English couple are honeymooning at Antibes. She, Poopy by name, is comely and likable but not very bright—Greene tells us that she thinks Sir Charles Snow is a writer. Her young man, Peter by name, is handsome but has more than a touch of pansy in him. Two interior decorators, Tony and Stephen, also English, undertake to steal him away from the bride, while William Harris, "the William Harris," a worldly-wise old author watches from the sidelines and helps the girl as much as he can.

If the girl knows what is going on, Greene writes, her story is a tragedy because of the pain of that knowledge. If she doesn't know, it's a farce. But partly she knows, and partly she doesn't know, so the story resolves itself as a wonderfully shrewd comedy by mixing pathos and ribaldry. A lot of Greene's recent writing has used this tragedy-farce tension and got comedy from it, The Complaisant Lover, for example, and Carving a Statue, among his plays.

Greene's stories in [May We Borrow Your Husband?] work a number of variations on the basic pattern, the almost straight farce of "Chagrin in Three Parts," for example, in which two French ladies, one widowed and one thrown over by her husband, meet for dinner and talk, sadly at first, about their lost husbands but then by wine and food and bawdy reminiscence fall into gales of Gallic laughter and go home tipsily together. "Two Gentle People," on the other hand, by the pitiable mis-marriages it sketches in, arrives at something like the terror of tragedy.

"Cheap in August" touches both tragedy and farce and manages to fill up all the ground between. It's a great story. Set in Jamaica, it involves the thirty-nine-year-old wife of an American professor of English looking or half-looking for romance on her vacation. She and her husband are beautifully observed and typed, she in her sexual yearnings, he in his getting out the bumf, a book on James Thomson, to advance his career. The wife ends up in bed with a gross and sinister seventy-year-old remittance man from St. Louis who spends most of his nights crying and drinking whiskey because of his fear of dying alone in a hotel room. It's the best story in the book, by three furlongs. And "Mortmain," except for some slickness in the conception and plotting, might have been almost as good.

On the whole, Greene seems in these stories to have written his way back to comic North Temperate Zone, away from the heat and the emotional intensity of his theological thrillers. He has perhaps lost something of range and emotional power along the way, but he has certainly gained in control of his matter and even in mellowness, and for knowledge of the world, who can touch this man?