BOOKS

Greene's desk drawer

James Buchan

THE LAST WORD AND OTHER STORIES by Graham Greene

Reinhardt Books, £11.95, pp. 150

Graham Greene has written half a dozen great short stories, more than Waugh, fewer than Kipling. None of the stories in this latest collection is great: it's enough that the man is publishing in his mid-eighties. The 12 stories are offcuts. They are interesting as the rejected designs of a master architect or cabinetmaker are interesting.

The collection consists mainly of stories that Greene thought not good enough for the three earlier collections: Nineteen Stor- ies (which was published in 1947 and re-issued, with adjustments, as Twenty- One Stories in 1954), A Sense of Reality (1963) and May We Borrow Your Hus- band? (1967). There are four stories from the 1980s, three of which were recently published in the Independent, and a story called 'A Branch of the Service', which has not been published before.

In a preface to this collection, Greene gives some reasons for holding the stories back. 'The Lottery Ticket', for example, was included in Nineteen Stories but drop- ped seven years later because, he says, it held too many echoes of The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory. It is set in Mexico, and it surely came out of the same journey in 1938 to investigate the persecution of the Roman Catholic church in the Mexican states. The echoes are loud: flies, dentists, chiefs of police.

A typically lonely and alienated English- man buys a lottery ticket in Vera Cruz for the first and only time in his life and wins.

In an access of impatience, liberality and disgust, he gives the proceeds to the state.

He thinks modestly of a new school or a drinking fountain, but the money is actual- ly used to cover arrears of pay to the police and soldiers who are then despatched to liquidate a Catholic politician.

Greene says the story now deserves a second chance. The problem with it is that Greene can't quite find the right tone, whether of rage or irony, or rather he strikes it intermittently:

He was dressed in dirty white drill stretched to bursting round his thighs and he carried a billiard cue: his belt shone with bullets and a heavy holster rattled against his side. He waved the cue cheerfully at Thriplow. He said, 'I speak English — very fine. I am the Chief of Police in this —' he smiled idiomatic- ally, 'lousy hole.' Somebody struck a bil- liard ball, and the Chief of Police peered with anxiety into the room.

The Mexican story he did keep in the first collection, 'Across the Bridge' (1938), is better because Greene has found a comfortable distance from his character. Two American agents track an absconded financier to a fly-blown town on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. None of the three knows Spanish and they keep running into each other, or sitting down together at cafés, while the whole town watches with languid interest.

Of the other rejects from the first collect- ion, there is a student effort called The New House', which was published at Ox- ford in 1929; a melodramatic detective story, 'Murder for the Wrong Season', which is a reminder that detective fiction (like tabloid journalism) is harder than it looks and is best left to professionals; and 'Bloody Hell — Jehovah's Maso-ns!' two wartime stories, 'News in English' and 'The Lieutenant Died Last', which were published in magazines in 1940.

Both are in Greene's wartime mode, which might be called patriotic-ironic. Both are implausible, but 'The Lieutenant Died Last', is also intriguing. A small German detachment parachutes into a village in London's outer suburbs, detains the people in the pub and sets off to destroy the main railway line north. They are thwarted by the local poacher.

There are folkloric and sentimental ele- ments — the boozy but sly poacher, a constable, postmistress, pub — which are hard to read now, though the essential Greene gradually asserts itself: the Ger- mans are as frightened as the villagers and the poacher who defeats the invasion single-handed is troubled by a vague re- morse (though he thinks he's still in the South African war). The chase across the suburban common is so vivid that Greene must be thinking of his own childhood in Berkhamsted:

Old Purves working his way, like a 'bloody Bojer' himself, from gorse bush to gorse bush, followed. The sun was setting over by Fenham Heath station three miles away; it shone just over the curve of the horizon on the last prams going home, on the circulating library where the Vicar's wife was changing her detective story, and on the little stream of commuters back from town, carrying attaché cases.

Looking back at Twenty-One Stories, I was surprised to find that the very best of them — 'The Destructors', 'The Hint of an Explanation', The End of the Party' and, above all, 'The Basement Room' — are all written from a child's point of view.

From the 1950s and 1960s, there are just two pieces that appeared in Punch: 'The Man who Stole the Eiffel Tower', which is delightful, and a tiny spoof fragment of musical comedy, 'Work Not in Progress', about a girl gangster who impersonates the Archbishop of Canterbury. I don't like the collection of stories Greene published in 1963, A Sense of Reality, which is weighed down by a long and windy thing called 'Under the Garden'. There is no humour, and no lightness or irony, which makes the brilliant next collection seem all the more remarkable.

In the second volume of his autobiogra- phy — if that is the right work for such a reticent and teasing book — Greene says that the stories in May We Borrow Your Husband? were written mainly in 1966, in a single mood of sad hilarity, while I was establishing a home in a two-roomed apart- ment over the port at Antibes. Taking my

dinner nightly in the little restaurant of Felix au Port, some of the tales emerged from conversations at other tables (even from a phrase misunderstood.)

Maybe it is France that rejuvenated the Graham Greene short story. The collection is lively, worldly, ironic, sexy. The title story is so cleverly made that I've been picking it up and looking at it at odd times of the day, as another person might admire a clock with a fine movement.

The story is well known. A hotel in out-of-season Antibes brings together a writer struggling with a biography of Lord Rochester, an English honeymoon couple and two homosexual interior decorators.

The decorators duly seduce the bridegroom, and the seduction is fascinat- ing to observe; but the other relationships — between the decorators, between the writer and the girl and so on — ramify with mathematical precision. The characters de- velop and change, which is unusual in a short story. The brittle tone gives way to sympathy. Only Greene could treat the older decorator or the type of English girl who would now be called a Sloane with such interest and respect. It is a wonderful story, as good in its way as 'The Basement Room'.

The late stories are not up to much. Of those that appeared in the Independent, one is a vague and rhetorical fantasy about a disaster in the Channel Tunnel. 'The Moment of Truth', which like so many Greene stories concerns a man diagnosed with cancer, is of no great account. The unpublished story, 'A Branch of the Ser- vice', is about a police spy under cover as a restaurant inspector: it displays that horror of food that erupts now and then in Greene's fiction (most spectacularly in Dr Fischer of Geneva). The paranoiac 1930s atmosphere seems quaint.

The collection is held together, begin- ning and end, by two stories that have for their subject lonely men confronting death. 'The Last Word' recreates a totalitarian world in which the last Pope, who has survived assassination, lives broken and • amnesiac in a single room with only a damaged crucifix for company. At last he is brought before the General, and executed, but he leaves behind a troubling question: Is it possible that what this man believed may be true?

The final story, 'An Appointment with the General', addresses death from the other side. A French journalist is despatch- ed by a left-wing review to interview another General, this time in Panama or somewhere, and finds him a difficult sub- ject. She falls back on an old trick: she asks him what he dreams of. 'He dreams of death,' the sergeant translated unneces- sarily.

Death and belief: these are, more than ever, Graham Greene's preoccupations. And he leaves us with a typically mis- chievous biographical riddle. Is The Last Word the last word?