A Sense of Reality: Stories

by Graham Greene

With his “sheer mastery of narrative,” the British novelist takes a detour into the uncanny and wondrously absurd in these “compelling” stories (The Guardian).
 
An ambitious departure for an author renowned for his realism, this collection of short fiction “collectively . . . [engages] in a reconnaissance through the dustier reaches of man’s experience with [the] spectres of doubt, defeat, failure and paradox” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
In “Under the Garden,” William Wilditch, a restless loner given to wanderlust, takes one final journey as he approaches death—back to his childhood home where he discovers that the memories of his youth are simply not to be believed. In “A Visit to Morin,” an admirer and old friend of a once-renowned Catholic writer is unprepared for the startling confessions of the spiritually bereft, now-reclusive scribe. On a vast plantation, a peculiar wish is granted a poor leper by his physician-in-charge—and for one rowdy winter night, a “Dream of a Strange Land” becomes a reality. Finally, for a group of children scouting the apocalyptic ruins at the edge of their village, “A Discovery in the Woods” opens their eyes to a lost world they never knew existed.
 
With these versatile forays into myth, memory, magic realism, and dystopian futures, Greene once again proves himself “a storyteller of genius” (Evelyn Waugh).

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Fantasy, 20th Century, Literature, British Literature

137 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".

Reviews

[Zoeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each story collection by Greene contains something fundamentally unique for the reader to read and unearth unexpectedly. This proves just how criminally overlooked he has been as one of the modern masters of the short fiction format, a far more compelling short story writer than Hemingway. "21 Stories" revealed his flair for chronicling the twentieth century's geopolitical and moral upheavals with satirical wit and incisive seriousness; "May We Borrow Your Husband?" served melancholy amusing tales of love, sex, infidelity and nostalgia and "The Last Word & Other Stories" revealed an eclectic series of stories, succinctly summing up his career as an author, from the 1920s to the last decade of his life.

This small collection of four stories only, each written with a dexterous but thoughtful hand and rendered indelible by his finely chiseled prose, too is something unexpected - four stories, rich with meaning and nuance, that deal with the eternal themes of despair and defeat of the human soul, the disillusionment and doubt that plagued the human race in the previous century.

From a dying man revisiting a surreal childhood experience that went on to define his own adulthood and life to an old Catholic writer who confesses a lack of faith that drives his belief, from a strange country where the law can be bent and broken in the name of hollow servitude to a fallen world populated by deformed dwarfs, Greene superbly chronicles pathos and predicament and presents to us an unsettling and elegiac portrait of the human condition. Essential reading for all.

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book collects four fiction short-stories from Graham Greene.
Under the Garden I have read a couple of times in both a Penguin 60 and in Shades of Greene, which collects the Greene stories that Thames TV dramatised in a series. The P60 review describes the story. ****

A Visit to Morin Set in Germany a man meets a once famous Catholic author who made an impact on his childhood through his writing. Their discussion, late one night after midnight mass, doesn't go the way expected. Very religion based this one, and not really in my wheelhouse. **

Dream of a Strange Land, which again was featured in Shades of Greene. This story is about a doctor who find himself with two dilemmas - whether to compromise the law for a poor patient with leprosy, or for a powerful General. ****

A Discovery in the Woods. Again a short story that might have been developed into something more, has something in common with Under the Garden. In this case it appears to be set in the post-apocalyptic future, where a group of deformed children explore beyond the bounds of their village and discover a large house full of artifacts. ****

I think the four star reviews outweigh the other, as I enjoyed it more than 3 stars!

[Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This was a 4-novella brownish, 1986 reprinted pocketbook by Graham Greene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_...) unexpectedly found one Sunday two weeks ago at the Booklovers secondhand bookshop on Soi Rambutri, Banglampoo, Bangkok. I think it is the second best after the Dasa Book Cafe on Sukhumvit Road.

There are four stories all together, namely: Under the Garden, A Visit to Morin, Dream of a Strange Land, and A Discovery in the Woods. While reading him once again (and some of his unread works, for example, "England Made Me"), I couldn't help thinking these were typical Greene, that is, lengthy narratives with unusual words here and there, fearless use of grammar as well as lively, unique dialogues; therefore, I preferred 'A Visit to Morin' to the other three due to the following points:

1. Its title is literally mischievous, Morin is a protagonist, not a destination.
2. I think his grammar in this sentence is typically daring: "They were not the kind of help I needed, nor was the chaplain the man to give it me." (p. 71)
3. A notable use and unique position of preposition: "He looked quickly, and I thought defensively, up." (p. 72)

To continue . . .

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four excellent short stories.

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is essentially a mini short story collection from one of my favourite authors, bringing together four different pieces: Under the Garden, A Visit to Morin, Dream of a Strange Land and A Discovery in the Woods.

What’s cool here is that they don’t feel like typical Greene stories, although there are a few little references to Catholicism and the church. I particularly enjoyed Under the Garden, possibly because it takes up over half of the book, although each of the stories were strong, unusually so. Worth reading!

[Melanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small collection of just 4 short stories.

Oddly enough, only one of the four reminded me of Greene's typical writing. He was evidently really experimental in his short fiction, which bodes well for the other collections of his I've picked up. He even got in on the post-apocalyptic craze of the 60's !

The first story about the (possible) dream was my favorite, though.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novella consists of 4 tales, one of which takes up half the book then 3 shorts ones. Each is surprisingly unique. You'd be hard pressed to imagine they were written by the same author.
Each i guess has something to say about how we perceive the world around us (hence the title of the collection) but its a very tenuous connection.
The long tale is about a man who revisits his childhood home and tries to remember a strange incident that happened when he was young. Its like a Roald Dahl story for adults, pretty twisted but good. Each of the others has something to say about faith or perception but is wildly different in location and characters.
I don't process short stories as easily as long ones, so i wouldn't buy something like this but a very interesting borrow from the library, and i look forward to checking out some of Greene's other works :) .

[Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

“A Sense of Reality” is a collection of only four short stories by Graham Greene, published in 1963. The collection is significantly different in subject matter from his better known and more “realistic” fiction in that it explores fantasies, beliefs, and dreams.
At 55 pages, “Under the Garden” is the longest story of the four. It’s more a novella than short story. William Wilditch, diagnosed with a life-threatening lung “obstruction,” presumably cancer, takes the train from London and returns to his childhood home in East Anglia, still owned by his brother. The two of them realize while talking about their old house and their childhoods that their recollections are quite different. “The great gap between their memories astonished him. They seemed to be talking about different places and different people.”
Wilditch finds a story he had written for his school magazine about the inhabitants of an underground cave on the old estate, based on a dream he had as a 13-year-old student. But he dislikes the story because it is not how he remembers the dream. He spends the night writing the story as he recollects it at this later date.
The story goes on much too long, I think, but I will give Greene credit for venturing outside his usual fictional world into a world of fantasy and dream and memory – more reminiscent of Lewis Carroll.
To me, the most interesting story was “A Visit to Morin” from 1959, about religious belief and nonbelief. The first-person narrator, a nonbeliever named Dunlop, had admired a writer Pierre Morin when he had read him in French as a boy in a French class. Morin’s writing had contained an exciting blend of Catholic orthodoxy with just a hint of heresy. But Dunlop had forgotten about him as an adult, as had the literary world. “But it is the fate of revolutionaries that the world accepts them. The excitement was gone from Morin’s pages,” Graham writes.
The narrator has become a copywriter for a firm of wine merchants, and business brings him to Colmar in northeastern France during the Christmas holidays. He comes across a book of Morin’s at a bookstore and learns from the bookstore owner that the elderly author lives nearby.
At Christmas Eve Mass, Dunlop spots the author seated in the back of the church, which was in a village far from Morin’s residence. Morin and Dunlop are conspicuous in not receiving communion at the Midnight Mass.
Morin invites Dunlop to his home and reveals that he has lost his belief in the Catholic church but not his faith, a distinction he tries to explain to his English visitor.
It’s not a stretch to think of Pierre Morin as Greene in French disguise. Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 at age 22, but he was always a strange Catholic. As Pico Iyer writes of Greene in his introduction to this short story collection, “He pledged himself to a faith that would always leave him disappointed: in a careworn hope somewhere between the complacency of the solid believer and the nonchalance of the skeptic.”
These stories reveal a different Greene, although these four stories are not as compelling to me as some of his more “realistic” short stories and novels.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I come back to Graham Greene after a hiatus of several months, I always become newly enamored of his writing. A Sense of Reality consists of four short stories, two of which have somewhat fantastic elements from a child's point of view. The longest story, "Under the Garden" is about the narrator's memory of being in a strange underground cave inhabited by a one-legged man named Javitt and his wife/mother/consort named Maria who speaks in quacks. Of course, when the narrator comes back to the same location decades later, the large island on a lake is now a small island in a pond which couldn't have a system of tunnels underneath it.

The other three stories are also well-written and run the gamut from irony ("Dream of a Strange Land") to religion ("A Visit to Morin").

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four short stories, some of which I rated as 5 stars, and some as 3 stars.

Under the garden -- a man discovers that he has a serious illness and goes back to his childhood home, where he recalls a fantastic dream that he had as a child. 5 stars.

A visit to Morin -- a man who learnt about the works of an author at school later meets the author in the flesh, and has a strange conversation with him. 3 stars.

Dream of a strange land -- a doctor has retired to the country, but a few patients still come to see him. He has bad news for one of them, who comes back to see if he can persuade the doctor not to send him to hospital, which he fears will cause him to lose his job. But he finds the house is unrecognisable, and the doctor seems as bewildered as he is. 3 stars.

Discovery in the woods -- some children in an isolated seaside community go exploring in the woods up in the mountains where no one from the community has been before, and find something that makes their childhood games and old legends come to life. 5 stars.

[Frederick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because Graham Greene revised his works with some frequency (mainly for reprints by Viking Press in the sixties and seventies, reprints which often had the addition of a new introduction by the author) I read a version of A SENSE OF REALITY which contained three additional stories which had never before been gathered in a collection. These stories were "The Blessing," "Church Militant" and "Dear Dr Falkenheim." To further complicate things, this version of the collection was first issued only in a 1973 collection containing three collections. It is called COLLECTED STORIES and it was published in 1973 by Viking Press. No explanation is given for the insertion of these three stories in A SENSE OF REALITY section of the book, but dates are given at the end of each of the three added stories, whereas no dates are given at the end of the stories which were originally part of the collection. (To give you an idea of how odd some of the changes Greene made over the years were, he published a collection called NINETEEN STORIES in 1947 or so and then republished it as TWENTY-ONE STORIES in 1954, which, while adding stories, also subtracted one. TWENTY-ONE STORIES itself is sometimes printed with the stories going from the earliest written to the latest, and sometimes from latest to earliest. Greene revised his novels extensively for the Viking reprints as well.
So, the first version of A SENSE OF REALITY (published in 1963) contains a novella and three short stories. The novella is "Under The Garden" and the three stories are "A Visit To Morin," "Dream Of A Strange Land" and "A Discovery In The Woods." It seems to me that "Under The Garden" and "A Discovery In The Woods" are companion pieces of a sort. They are speculative; hence the title of the collection. Both excel in descriptions of landscape. Greene is one of the few writers whose descriptions of terrain are essential to the impact of his stories. "A Discovery In The Woods" is, perhaps a comment on LORD OF THE FLIES. Greene's story was published in LONDON MAGAZINE in May, 1963, the novel LORD OF THE FLIES came out in 1954, Peter brooks' film of Golding's novel came out in August of 1963. Obviously the film came out a little later than Greene's story, but there would have been talk of the making of this film and there are several points so similar that I think Greene, who makes points about belief in all his fiction and very clear points about it in this collection, wanted the reader to recognize his story as a comment on LORD OF THE FLIES. In any case, "Under The Garden" and "A Discovery In The Woods" deal with alternate realities. "A Discovery In The Woods" seems to be set in the future. "A Discovery In The Woods" is set, largely (but not entirely) in the dream state. I found myself impatient when "Under The Garden" dealt in detail with alternate reality, but the parts of it dealing with the world as we know it resonated with me. Greene catches the family dynamic very well in the realistic part of the story. Of course, the dream-world is memorably introduced in a description of undergrowth. Greene was a prose poet.
"A Discovery In The Woods" had me similarly impatient. It became obvious to me that the characters were several generations in our future and the proofs of this began to bore me. But they served Greene's point, unquestionably.
"A Visit To Morin" has Greene in true form. He is funny on the subject of a writer meeting one of his idols, and yet, as is always the case with Greene, a point is made about man's conception of God.
"Dream Of A Strange Land" is a very ironic story. Greene has a similar scene in a novel from about thirty years earlier, ENGLAND MADE ME. Both deal with an impoverished, compromised man trying to appeal to an authority. Greene perfects it here. I wouldn't say "A Visit To Morin" or "Dream Of A Strange Land" are overtly about different realities, as the other two stories are, but "A Visit To Morin" certainly deals with how we think of ultimate things. "Dream Of A Strange Land" puts one man in an impossible situation and the other in an intolerable one.
The three stories which COLLECTED STORIES added to A SENSE OF REALITY provide comic relief (although, as I've said, "A Visit To Morin" is relatively light.) "The Blessing" seems almost an outtake from THE QUIET AMERICAN. "Church Militant" is more or less a humorous anecdote. I have to say I didn't get the ending. "Dear Dr Falkenheim" is very typical of Greene's mid-1960s mode: He trusts his comic ability will convey his more serious point. It is, indeed, about belief.

[Ashwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

At a mere 110 pages, this is a collection of 4 short stories by Greene.

In Under The Garden, a man afflicted with cancer returns to his old country home to relive a fantasy involving treasure he had experienced in his childhood. A Visit To Morin is a story where a man meets an old author whose books had impressed him in his young age. Now it turns out that the author has none of those earlier beliefs and the two debate about it over pegs of brandy. In Dream Of A Strange Land, a patient who has discovered that he has leprosy tries to convince his doctor to allow him to continue to work in public. And finally, in A Discovery In The Woods, a bunch of children in an isolated fishing village make a fascinating discovery. I loved this one the best in the book.

This is the first book by Greene I've read. I had only heard about him whenever R K Narayan was mentioned. The short stories certainly have a bit of that Narayan flavour and a lot of the quaint old English taste too. If you liked RKN, it's hard to not like this one. Excellently suited for an afternoon read.

[Owain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greene's short stories are quite different from his novels. Of which I've read quite a few now. Several of these stories are complete within the fantasy genre which is novel because I didn't think that was really Greene's style. Only one, A Visit to Morin dwells on Catholicism which I find rather tedious in the author's work, but you have to deal with it if you want to read him. The aforementioned story did have one quite memorable quote in it though,

'No. Not if you want to believe. If you are foolish enough to want that you must avoid theology.'
'I don't understand.'
He said, ' A man can accept anything to do with God until scholars begin to go into the details and the implications.'

I also like the first story, Under the Garden, as it reminded me of the film Pan's Labyrinth. Although of course Greene's story probably predates the story from the film.

[Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories are filled with tongue-in-cheek humour and twisted perspectives, making for a fun read - however most, if not all, are have inconclusive endings. So if you don't like the kind of stories that don't tie up all loose ends, you may not like this. The endings, I suppose, fits with the "imagination stretch" theme each story takes.

[Laff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the great man's best collection by any means. Of the four stories here, two roam into the realms of fantasy and science fiction and have a feeling of being experimental. However, the others are pure 'Greeneland', especially 'A Visit to Morin', in which he writes about a Catholic author who has lost his belief, but not his faith - classic Graham Greene.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of four short stories exploring alternative realities such as dreams and recollections. Interesting.

[A.E. Reiff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I read this book I have an uncanny sense of reliving buried past shadow events as unlikely as this narrator's. Those raw, untempered provocative things are dreams of an underworld savage if brought into day. In the urbane surface texture here, as I read "Under the Garden" I admire the care he takes of me with little metaphors, x-rays as maps, doctor's reports as bombing runs, intelligence, and all the while he says how it couldn't have happened the way he remembers it. In reading I remember along and above the text on the page of my own mind where projections and correspondances play out cinematically. If I try to capture one in writing the whole castle disappears. Like he says dreams are bigger than the eye.

This is more than evocation. When I read reviews looking for validation of my experience it seems nobody got that. It's like T. H. White's Book of Merlin in this, the line of the imagination goes so far down into the lunar mount as to run off the hand. Charles Williams evokes such impressions where the young bride opens the book standing dead in All Hallows Eve, a spirit on the bridge. Caves and spirits, Orpheus and Cerberus, subtexts done to others as they done. Epitaph of a Small Winner is totally different from this even if resembling on the surface, that is, a man writing his life after his death. No dream states at all, but a way to retell the fictional life. Whether this is fiction or religion is at issue, as if the Celtic immram could be turned into Tarot, which of course they have.

That's got to be what appeals in the subterranean passages of Tolkien's evocation of the dark. But what's to say that Sterne's Tristram in telling about his birth before birth is any different from the telling of death after death. Or in this case that the dream, being the thing that connects the totality of things, isn't our prison that we wake up from in the day. Kwang-tze says those whose flesh and skin are smooth as ice and white as snow (I,i), confront this bodily sense, that "when we sleep the soul communicates with what is external to us; when we wake the body is set free" (Legge, I, 178). A Sense of Reality evokes daylight as a respite imagination. So in "Under the Garden" the old man who looks like a carrier pigeon says, "we are deeper here than any grave was ever dug to bury secrets in. Under the earth or over the earth, it's there you'll find all that matters" (30). And to cut to the bottom it's the ancestors, who went before who live in our brains if we recognize them there? That's why I'm to go to North China to teach, I will meet up with Zhuangzi, but what will we say? It is enough to stop.

Necronauts or necrophants? The capital persons who arbitrate taste say necronauts, fictionauts. They kid about the grave, like Yeats, and have their hands mashed in the frozen mat of Lucifer's shag in Dante's hell. Death is their dominion but the death boats sailed before. "Come back to tell you all." Hades, which was once thought America, where the dead live, oxymoron that, is domiciled in imagination at the foot of the lunar mount. Those who scale it, under the garden, are in more than danger of death. Garden we may take as symbolic. Under that garden the bodies are buried. Necronauts propose to visit there in imagination. Greene has already gone.

The narrator is his ancestor of a seven year old boy that he was, as he is, and writes in his garret. By part 5 of Garden we are cooking up a disbelief in death. Jarvis says of the monk's skulls, "they don't believe in death any more than I do" (45). While nobody will admit it the whole of the underground is symbolic, allegoric even of Celtic cauldrons, Dantean monoliths. And of course he is addressing parts of himself and we believe just as much as we believe Kwang-tze when he says "the sagely man keeps his mouth shut and puts aside questions that are uncertain and dark; making his inferior capacities unite with him in honoring (the One Lord)" (I,193). Kwang-tze whose philosophy says there is none, then reverts to "an appeal to the Infinite" (196). Now either this is another case of Stephan Hawking who cannot make up his mind about God or it is a case where anyone who speaks of it doesn't know and those who don't do, which being interpreted means that in the metaphor and the symbol he says what otherwise he cannot say. Thus we believe the metaphor and disbelieve the rhetoric of everything underground. The Sun boat of Ra, the pushcarts obsidian, the rowboats paid with blind pennies, the rows of stones in every graveyard navigate the dead. It is just as simple as remembering your grandfather.

It's as though all our lives were living some dimly remembered impression received in a suspended state. He seeks to find the daughter. It has been the whole passion and expression of his life but not consciously known, not even now in the sense of the present of his writing, recollecting when he has been ajudged cancer terminal. Doesn't that sound like every life? You can deny it! The underworld is eldritch with impression, cross between hobbits caught in the brewers' hall and Alice in Wonder, AND THEN Javitts spills from a shoebox the jewels onto the floor, "reds almost as deep as raw liver, stormy blues, greens like the underside of a wave" (51). This allegory: "ABSOLUTE REALITY BELONGS TO DREAMS AND NOT TO LIFE." There were necklaces and bracelets,"lockets and bangles, pins and rings and pendants and buttons" (52). You see it or feel it. I can say as anyone I went to my Aunt's attic http://perkiomenapocrypha.blogspot.co... and occupied two hundred fifty years of the Hereford Mennonite past http://perkiomenapocrypha.blogspot.co.... Great trunks full. Shelves full. Linens and hand painted china, chests of art. It explains a half million words spilled of the Pennsylvania past. I think, as Javitts says, "it's nothing to what lies below out of sight." The Acanthus markings http://animalwilderness.blogspot.com/... in those pots come from a single woodblock cut by this Aunt kept in a box till I started hammering clay, bending edges into eyes and staining squares with cobalt. I started this years after.

To get further, all this is below the garden. I started a garden again after the universes went into space, especially corn, standing in it up to ankles and calves. For entertainment I took desert tagetes out to the street and planted it next to a full lippia that hangs over the curb. Its gold will surmount with white balls the lippia as if the two were dancing. They are up out of the flood to love the dry! And having found the gold treasure Wildditch is off, back to moment when he departed and back to the desk where he writes. And for validation he goes outside and meets the gardener and the story repatriates him into the mundane just the way the hobbits come home in the end and set right the shire, or Borges at last in the end goes back to Borges http://www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinund... becomes Borges, merely Borges. So Wildditch revisits the spot in the real that he knew in the irreal, finds it shabby and small, like waking in the dark to a room before dawn when a second before the eyes saw all the universe streaming.

I have undergrounds in the yard inhabited by tortoise. I do not go there out of respect for their sanctity but feel the dark of their snugness and the ripe odor of the den. I have a cavity upstairs, the crawl space where I laid a floor of boards to walk, but before they put in more duct. I left a bag of silver there, forgot it ten years, then one day remembered and sent an expedition. He kicked it with his foot he said. I keep thinking there are trap doors in my aunt's house where she has hid the great treasure that I must find, dream continually of my grandfather's arts and crafts lodge on a lake with its secret compartments filled with sculptures and prints. Last night I dreamed of a sculpture of my mother's, a head of ebony and Abyssinian and there I have looked into my wife's heart.

Then he is about to go from the island, finding none of the artifacts of the past life below, he sees the oak, riven by lightning, sawn down and finds the "po", the chamber pot he escaped with, and so "he had a sense that there was a decision he had to make all over again" (61). Go back or go on. Years between reading this I planted my own red oak, on a whim that now rivals electric lines. It is light and of dark. Not to fear the dark, but not to deny, I went in my seventieth year but one, with Chuang Tzu and David, Yeats, the elders, into the abyss I had only dreamed. It was deep pits, caves like the Balrog inhabits underground, but that is denial by metaphor. The real is Jonah Runoff, as Hercules turned the rivers to clean them, but this is not about cattle, stables or manure, but the imagination. So these things in the depth, in the Augean stables, how to simply clean them? Isn’t their memory their existence? Doesn’t taking away the memory take away the life? But living with stink is a problem when consciousness comes.

In PTSD, consciousness breaks involuntarily in upon dreams, smells, memories, fears. The example comes to mind of Arthur Rimbaud who divides his life in two over the “hope of recovering the key to his lost innocence” (Henry Miller, “When Do Angels Cease to Resemble themselves? A Study of Rimbaud." New Directions 9, 39). So to quote Rimbaud: “if my spirit were always wide-awake…I would not have given in to degenerate instincts, to a forgotten epoch.” Miller says, “what it was that sealed his vision, and thereby brought about his doom, no one knows-and probably no one ever will know.” All our lives are filled with such events, maybe not all, but they are neutralized by denial, selection, amnesia, drugs. In other words Rimbaud gives himself up to debauch and every vice just to forget the pain, the lost innocence. He made himself monstrous. He made himself a comprachicoes, who change the physical appearance of human beings by mutilating children, but on his own. He mutilates his soul inexpertly, which is his salvation because his making monstrous doesn’t take and he turns to faith.

There are many likenesses to psychological disfigurement in the underworld comprachicoes' applied mutilations, none greater than those of the German grandchildren of Rudolph Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_germany.... These things must either be faced or denied. Rainer Hoess shows the immense pain but also the courage of the great. The view is that silence is complicity. The comprachicoes removed the memory of dislocated joints, stunting the spine, burning the face, incisions, manipulations and restraints with a drug, a stultifying powder, an anesthetic escape, so that the mind's ability to recall the depravities imposed on it was deadened, and if remembered, remembered with an anesthetic so the meaning of the pain was masked with forgetfulness. Consciousness reconstructs, reconnects the pain with its meaning by removing the bandage of inoculated, anesthetic memory. Then the pain of realization begins. This happens over a lifetime and is rather different from immediate traumas of assault and consequent memories treated with propranolol. This drug is said to pose an identity dilemma since our memories make us who we are and their removal prevents learning from our mistakes, the point being that if the comprachicoes could have administered propranolol they could have gone on mutilating and maiming ad infinitum, like the mandarin who is taken to another planet to be tortured forever in exchange for peace on earth. Peace at the price of no memory. So our sufferings make us whole in this view.

There is a social issue raised by the suicide of Clay Hunt http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelook..., the vet activist who saw his friends killed in front of his eyes. How much can the drugs, the escapes and consciousness heal?

There is no lack of disinfectant of the making monstrous and its memory among the unfeeling, but to take a view through metaphor, wind is greater than water, that is, the wind of consciousness is greater than the water of memory and identification of the pain. You can know that on mountaintops. Down at the pain, at sea level, mere humidity swallows you up without a fish in sight. Swallowed by a fish, wake up in the belly, cradle and earth. Similarities to a fish belly are darkness, humidity, vistas to cross. Subject to forces and denial makes a Jonah. Staying away from the beach won’t help. You get to be a hundred, two hundred and start to wake a little to these forces. Three hundred and even in Bilbo Baggins belly light dawns in the darkness.

So here’s the promise, God will rescue him out of his trouble. The trouble is himself and the forces. He doesn’t come without a past even if he doesn’t know. He doesn’t come without a present even if he doesn’t feel. It gives meaning to blindness. If it weren’t for friends along the way, women usually, who save his life, he wouldn’t survive at all. He doesn’t want to give account of the women though, he wants to account the forces. He wants to take out after his enemies but he has to face himself. All unmentionable, all dark shot with rays, lots of rays, but the light doesn’t blind him. The dark does. Even in darkness light dawns for the upright. He gets to be compassionate because of the dark, the affliction, the pain that lines tiled hallways of cement floors, all along the halls in different states of dementia, drooling, moaning. This is no dream but an image from the past. He’s not nobody from the Midwest, he’s worse. He comes out of the grave shorn, unshorn with the memory of his sins. His sins unless you say the innocent are the oppressed and what is done to the kindreds, the strange fruits of their tortures, beatings, is the fault of some enemy. That’s the one, the enemy of forces. So he looked at three hundred into the dark and it was getting light. By then he had lived twenty lives, thirty. By then the illuminant hadn’t filled every corner of the hallway in the belly. They were all still there, but without the same power, like they had lost mass, like oxygenated a river were diverted in their midst. This river he could float but not like some aging Huxley or Eiseley reimaging evolution, floating on his back down the canyons of rock. Even at three hundred the light that dawns is still earth light the pains gibber at. He walks down the center of the hall like he did the first time. What did the boy see but what we know? They could not touch him. They had to wait for that. That hadn’t happened yet.

What was it like in Noah’s childhood? Playing with too much water. Jonah, playing at the wharf with pelicans for pets would come home with shells in a bag. Nobody can say if we’re all that way. Oh do not call them naive who kick in the belly womb. The fish is their life. Life is their fish. Moses floated early. How far is it to where he kicks the rock. He hit the rock with his stick. He hit the rock! Ouch. The rock has a sense of humor about it even at the time it puts Moses to bed in Egypt. We go down to get his body in a few years the way we go down to get our memory of the dirty hallway with its stretchers and wheelchairs. The results of the finished work of the comprachicoes are all along both sides of the hall, misshapen, drooling. Funny it has no smell. That was from all the disinfectant. There was no lack of disinfectant among the unfeeling. Then of course there were all the drugs pumped into the skin. That was before drugs were so common. All the pains took them. Palsy took him drugs. Rage took Valium. Lust had a range of pharmacopoeia. Hatred must have eaten some. Sicknesses all. Diseases all. Rampant in the hall. Covered when the Lord entered that hall long before and found a species of Noah and Jonah. A hall more like a tunnel of misery. My sin was there that I resurrect here. My sins were theirs. The enemies inoculate you with pain. Redemption is not cleansing like a nuclear flash, or a flood. It feels more like a plant growing.

Jonah Runoff

If water is the symbol of pain then there are different sizes of vessel in which the volume of water collects. That does not indicate the pain is greater, it just means it is felt more because of the larger vessel. The water from a kitchen spigot is nothing compared to a thunder storm on the mountain, when the runs off the mountain and collects in the vessel. The vessel feels the more than when a slicker laid on the ground. Jonah was this kind of runoff. He had to be sunk to make an impression.

Shekhinah

So all this revealed with the good in the underground substrate, finding it out, as Greene's narrator does after he is terminal. The good is even greater. What nurse gets in bed with a patient? One could embrace the heart being of a soul? Necronauts boast they ride in Charon's boat, cross and recross with Dante. Are they 40, 50, 60, 70, in full flesh after meal, wine and love made possible and satiate until long sleep and talk of Beckett dying? David has just this boatman, this flower. How his hair is growing thin. Cheeks hang. You think the mind diminished but he sees what frightens all, his life and work are not enough. He sees the cold, no alibi. Everybody knows. Faulkner frowns. None good. Gone down in ships. Vanity, said the man's son.

Shekhinah is the girl in David's bed. It is a parable of age. He was cold at the end, no longer dreamed of what he lived. Not full of himself, the athlete supple beyond bend, who led a troop fifteen fugitive years, slept on the ground, fasted for days could not get warm. He shivers in the kingdom with memories and when he opens his eyes he is not home. He is in a tent with a flag on the top like a Bedouin, surrounded by sweets he can't eat, lords and courtiers he can't stand. So they bring a girl to warm him. She lays beside the memories of Absalom and Gath, Saul at night, air and men, intrigues and women. He is freezing. She feels the bone. Compassion flows around them. She feels the wasted muscle of the sinew arms. Compassion flows around them, feet and hands. She loves the man, else how stand? Now he sleeps. She has fulfilled rest to the king. But he stirs. His dreams are light. He thinks of Absalom. She is a nurse, a blanket, a pillow. The lights are out. A guard stands. What kind of love has the girl in his bed? For a friend, to sing and hold when they go where none has gone. Go not alone is the wisdom of the home. The everlasting in the bed, his fingers ache, digestion unsettles, gaps in his teeth, eyes dry on good days. No cough, dementia or out of breath moaning. Her comfort does not prolong.

He sees beyond the bone. The miracle of the words so great he has set apart the godly for himself. You have filled my heart with greater joy. I will lie down and sleep in peace. These are good. Four sons lost! How do we know he lives a life of faith? Hang around all night. He says with amazement what spring and winter behold in each other in the sea they can't cross. She holds tight in these fits. Heart reaches. Wishes herself two. You call this a king and bone shop. Think, having done, of ancestral memory, as there is of birth and life, that folk wisdom of death initiates itself. While old ladies in the home, all men having gone, whisper to one another that they know. They boast. We never quite find out, till flesh melts quick as it can. She doesn't leave. She has been thousands of years. http://apoeticalreadingofthepsalmsofd...

In III parts: Part II Continued here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

[anna nas]

The first two stories were lovely, the last two i got lost. A bit outdated, but the writing was beautiful.

[Heidi]

Neljä lyhyttä tarinaa. Fantastisia elementtejä, rajojen ylityksiä, olemassaolon pohdintaa kun perusta (henkinen, psyykkinen, eettinen jne), jolle elämä rakentunut murenee pois. Lapsuuden ja aikuisuuden todellisuuskäsitysten vertailua, uskonnon (katolinen) pohdintaa ja pohjustuksia moraalisille pohdinnoille esimerkki eriarvoisuudesta ja osattomuudesta.

Ekassa tarinassa kuolemansairas mies palaa lapsuutensa maisemiin ja muistelee lapsuuden seikkailukokemusta puutarhan alapuolella olevassa maailmasta, jossa hänen unen/muistonsa mukaan elää/eli hyvin eriskummallinen pariskunta omanlaisessaan todellisuudessa. Tämä kohtaaminen on jättänyt nuoreen poikaan lähtemättömän vaikutuksen, jonka pohjalta hän on elämänsä elänyt. Toisessa tarinassa kohdataan uskonsa menettänyt tai suhteensa uskoonsa menettänyt katolilainen kirjailija (Greene?). Kolmannessa tarinassa yläluokkainen eläköitynyt lääkäri antaa korkea-arvoiselle kenraalille kotinsa juhlapaikaksi, koska tämä ei pääse sairastuttuaan bilettämään Monte Carloon, mutta köyhää sairasta miestä lääkäri ei auta tämän ahdingossa. Neljännessä tarinassa seurataan lapsijoukon seikkailua meren äärellä olevan kotikylän rajojen ulkopuolelle. Aarteenmetsästys päättyy lasten hämmennykseen valaanruhoa muistuttavan talon sisälle, jossa he kohtaavat heille kummallisia asioita. Lukija tajuaa loppua kohden, että mitä lapset ovat.

Kirjassa on hyvät hetkensä. Erikoinen tunnelma, jännite, odotuksen tuntu, moraalista ja eksistentiaalista pohdintaa herättelevää tekstiaineista. Olen tottunut lukemaan kummallista kamaa, jonka joukossa myös vanhempaa englantilaista fantasiaa hyvine (subliimi tajunnanräjäytys) ja huonoine (rasismi, sukupuolten epätasa-arvo, kolonialismi yms) puolineen. Tämä ei aiheuttanut subliimeja kiksejä, mutta facepalmeja muutamilta osin. Lopputulema: Ihan hyvät tripit, mutta kyllä tästä tuli myös krapula.

[Pete Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slim volume of four short stories predates the twenty-five year period in which Greene kept a comprehensive dream diary, although dreams are clearly one of this collection’s thematic strands. His usual realism takes a back seat in favour of a more imaginative approach to his writing although, on this evidence, it doesn’t actually feel like something he was particularly comfortable with or even adept at: I puzzled at the glowing cover quotes and wonder if they were actually describing the same book I was reading. The most imaginative story, ‘A Discovery in the Woods’, a post-nuclear war piece, feels uncomfortably stilted throughout yet the idea is a decent enough one (it was also reprinted in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1967 and later anthologised in a science fictional context three times); I didn’t much care for the rather forced nature of the dream-inspired ‘Under the Garden’ and ‘A Dream of a Strange Land’, but the most successful story, ‘A Visit to Morin’, is a much more familiar kind of Greene, a sharp tale dealing with Catholicism and the loss of religious belief – now that’s a story to remember.

[Jan Kittler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this collection on and off for about three months — I plan to go through more collections of short stories in this manner. I was mainly interested in Under the Garden, which just surpassed all of my expectations — an incredible, puzzling, dense, existential outlook on individual experience and perception of life (and also very playful). And frankly, that counts for all three of the stories in this collection. Greene starts his story, for a few pages I'm just orienting myself, trying to see what's he telling me, and then he just hits with something profound you least expect. All of these stories seem to have a very clear symbolism behind them, which can be interpreted quite easily in the two shorter stories, but Under the Garden is way more far-reaching, I think. Nevertheless, the interpretation is never fully clear. These are gripping stories that make you think you totally get what Greene is talking about, while you still get more thoughts as you think on them.

Each of the stories started with me saying: "Man, where is he going with this?" and ending with: "Oh, I see... what the fuck, this is brilliant!"

[Julia Greig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of the collection belies the nature of the four short stories in that there is more of unreality than otherwise which for me made it an intense and uncomfortable read, but I couldn't give it fewer than four stars. Physical dimensions are challenged; the world is changed, recognisable but different and unsettling. Childhood memories; a possibly post apocalyptic world (or recognisably imagined world. This is also a book about power; the power adults have over children, the power of those who make the rules in society (and who can break them), the power of leadership and the power of faith. Typical Greene? I am not sure. Will I read this book again? I am not sure. Did I enjoy it? I am not sure. Will I keep the book on my shelves? Definitely. One day someone might pick it up and tell me that they found it difficult, and ask me what I thought.

[Etienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Under the Garden" is an eerie bit of magical realism. "A Discovery in the Woods" is a must-read for fans of speculative fiction (explaining why would probably spoil the ending). The other two short stories don't exhibit readily identifiable genre elements, but the tone is definitely oneiric. Graham Greene's prose reminded me of Maupassant at times.

[Paul Westwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stories: 1. Weird but compelling fantasy, an old couple live underground. 2. Forgettable; a writer's contradictory religious faith. 3. A bleak end for the leper while the prof gambles? 4. Planet of the Apes like fantasy, simple premise but has depth.
I'm giving it three stars based on this review which I wrote years ago.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four short stories, including one fantasy and one SF. I did not know that Greene had written in either genre. The fantasy story may have influenced Stephen King's bestseller Fairy Tale. The SF story could have easily appeared in Astounding, and it did appear a few years after its initial publication in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

An excellent small collection.

[Alex Ghio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Graham Greene. The stories seem more about just saying one thing no matter whether the story gets in the way or not. However, that being said "A Visit to Morin"was good and when taken with A Burnt-Out Case you can see Greene's turn. Maybe a turn from Catholicism to something else.

[Lars]

I LOVED it. Very quick read, entertaining, definitely thought provoking. A great sunday afternoon read to get lost in and come back to your own reality.

[Ann Straight · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories that made me say "what?" Not what I expected from the writer of "The Quiet American"

[Shashidhar Sastry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Varied and interesting stories, except the first, which didn't grip me and is too long.
Something different from what I've read of Graham Greene, which is quite a lot.

[A.E. Reiff · Rating 3 out of 5]

II. (Part I here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...)

PURGATORIO Explorations

Is the underworld polluted? It goes without saying, but if it reaches up to daylight it is not only under ground. The upper Allegheny in early spring, cold as ice, made steam from the effluent that poured from bordering factories. This happened on the Clarion river too but not the upper Susquehanna. Factory after factory rose from the steam and a white brown foam over the river. This is my introduction by canoe to the drains and the storms that fuel.

Why would you explore storm drains along elaborate branches of effluent? Because you are a boy and can. The neighboring towns of Chartiers Creek installed drains that boys walked miles up until the concrete tubes got small, as if a sphincter checked the flow, the water a trickle at feet. Creeks, rivers, air and earth that flood their banks in season over farms that bordered that creek, flooded the golf course on the other side and froze in winter to a nine hole skating rink. In summer the flood ran over felled tree trunks and railroad scrap from train wrecks of railroad cars and giant cubes of metal in the flood. One walked the tracks with a .22 to shoot glass insulator bulbs of the power lines beside, with flares and torpedoes picked up, strapping torpedoes to a rock, dropped upon another rock from twenty feet above to see how it would explode.

It wasn't just storm drains and polluted rivers and wrecks, slag piles from strip mining were still fresh in their deep pits. There were swells of green water a hundred feet below, down sides too slippery to run, even then, for fear of not surviving the Pittsburgh slag and fire.

Water, earth and air! Freight trains boiled black soot from stacks. And fire! The overground of that world raged a hundred feet above the hill, fought on the ground by boys and men, where before, in the 50's, the oil well across from the two room school shot against the window pane of the school where they read the Psalms each morning. That was where I began to read them in the valley. The hills had paths around the back to a cave where white scorpions swam. Symbols of scorpion, come with a friend. It was there on the red dirt floor of the firehouse under the school, among crank engines and hoses, and under the stage in the basement, where events are covered by pitch and musty dreams of sailing a glider down stairs lined with boots and coats I sailed.

Underworld, overworld down to caves, inside and out of Delaney's Cave http://books.google.com/books?id=dbf1... outside Uniontown, an intimate, School House Cave in W VA, where drips to a trough of water overflowed in deionized refrigerated waves. No photographs, memory extant, one record left in the Easter Sunday 1953 Pittsburgh Press, where Gilbert Love reprinted an article written then. These caves, psychologies, ideas that "could quite well have filled in the entrance too, with a thin layer of hard earth on top and with loose soil further down...but that plan is impossible." Now from Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, realization comes with speaking.

When the walls go up that separate abuse and torture the child suffered in memory they are also permeable in an odd way. The memory exists but as cut off.

Is it outside or is it in we must face disfigurement, the making monstrous, the comprachicoes? Shall it be a life of ease, an earth vacation, riches, dreams of ease unopposed we come or is there reason for being's obstacle? "Load every rift of your ore with gold," Keats tells Shelley, a life of such difficulty it drives us to the end of vanity of flesh and spirit. If we can't know who we are until then life must be prove character. Proof of suffering in the prisoners of B. Traven, The Fixer, Solzhenitsyn, the martyrs,
http://pennsylvaniafathers.blogspot.c... Timmerman. The sufferers, least of sufferers, cry, "why have you forgotten me?" But where the bottom is below which no one can sink, (http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2...), the humanity of the dispossessed shows the life of ease for what it is, hallucination, the truth being that what we take from life are our choices and the character formed by our mistakes and inquisitions. This informs Operation Proper Exit http://www.troopsfirstfoundation.org/... where Iraq vets revisit the site of their wounding. However revisiting the killing fields of all kinds heals even in virtual visitations http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/02/...

The images of disfigurement where he is marred as a man, are not fictional, they are images of programmed ritual abuse. Des Essentes's Huysmans, growing poison plants in his greenhouse connects with the Montressor of Poe walled up below and to the great gargoyle of pain of churches in the Villa Palagonia outside Palermo, Sicilian Baroque, garden of chimeras, 600 human beasts, we should have said hearts of every bizarre form of that wasted spirit in imagination, a public ignoble sculpture garden, not Rodin. What monster's this? Artists are still making dragons in every pottery club, making monstrous so Rimbaud can rue he ever took the uninitiate to this sink. It is a revelation of the middle class consumer in an avalanche of denial, monstrous groves of maple, the mission of Updike, at least he could write, but he was misshapen. Being so you would think poetry schools would fire up their MAs to work in soup kitchens, volunteer at earthquakes with FEMA instead of take summer workshops on the Hudson to confect, but not live the real. The life of illusion.

Deniers of pain have to make it up while "on the back of this monster he puts another, if possible, still more hideous, five or six heads, and a bush of horns, that beats the beast in the Revelations all to nothing" (T.H. White, The Scandal Monger, 111). Everywhere in front of their eyes, if not in the gardens, no hydroponic, you can buy reproductions to take home from the labyrinth to find out who you are and come out changed if you don't forget. This admits Gardner's Grendel humanity as appealing as our own http://encouragementsforsuch.blogspot..., it admits the filth of the Ganges, the asylums we walk through. How not to contaminate is no question of Mandeville's Travels, the Immram, Dante's descent,those avoidances of the human where "you make your back like the ground, like a street to be walked over," "appalled at his appearance so disfigured beyond that of a man, form marred beyond the human," "poured out like water," "heart turned to wax," "in the dust of death."

Why look at it? To get straight off this path burn the fumes of illusion http://orionheadless.com/jonahs-child....


Part III continues at: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...