754
PARTISAN REVIEW
of our age. Which is to say that Greene is at his best when he is least
himself.
For once the perspective is immediate. We come directly to the
unhappy child and his trouble without having to make the usual detour
through the secondary symbol formations of flight and pursuit, etc., of
the thrillers. Childhood, for Greene, is the time of the innocence and
horror of sex. The innocent, in the story by that name, is the young boy
capable of leaving a love message for his sweetheart in the form of a
crude drawing of a man and a woman in the sex act. The grown man,
returning to the scene with a prostitute for a one night stand, discovers
the message still intact in its hiding place and realizes, " ... later that
night, when Lola turned away from me and fell asleep . . . the deep
innocence of that drawing. I had believed I was drawing something with
a meaning unique and beautiful; it was only now after thirty years of life
that the picture seemed obscene." In "The Basement Room" (a parable
of the unconscious), young Master Philip finds not a unique and beauti–
ful meaning but something from which he spends the rest of his life
in a frozen recoil; and this again is sex, now linked with murder and
guilt. "The Hint of an Explanation" is the story of how a man found
happiness and security in the Catholic Faith; which he would not have
found, had he not been strongly tempted by the perverted village anti–
Papist to commit a sin against the Host; which he would not have had
the strength to resist, had he not had so strong a sense of sin; which he
would not have had-Greene does not carry the matter so far, but
there's no way out-had he not been an unhappy child. Where again,
sex ... etc.
An unhappy childhood is a writer's gold mine, and one valuable
thing Greene gets out of it is an honest basis for his stories. When he
faces himself, as he makes some attempt to do here in the figure of the
child, he finds he can get along without antisemitism
(Orient Express)
and the rest of the vicious trash of his entertainments. Also the arrogant
moralism disappears, the gratuitous (for him) Baudelairean will to
damnation and the unearned Catholic eminence from which he sees
Protestantism-when the Jews don't get in his way-at its demon's
task of bringing sexual ease into tl1e world. He is much better off for the
chance childhood gives him to feel sorry for himself. But though child–
hood themes do him good as a writer, he fails to return the favor and
leaves the scene bare and devoid of quality; it is reconstructed in the
adult manner, and the distance between man and child is not overcome.
This is the fault, it seems to me most likely, of his desire to write con–
fession. Accordingly, his child exists only at the moment of encountering
