Summaries of Graham Greene stories


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Draft version: version 2 (2nd April 2026; v 1 March 2026)


A shocking accident. Jerome is a reliable schoolboy of 9 years old, attending an expensive preparatory school. Mr Wordsworth, a housemaster (not sure what that means), conveys the news to him that his father had died. A pig had fallen on him while in Italy. Wordsworth is somewhat emotional. Jerome asks, "What happened to the pig?" though not from callousness, which is Wordsworth's interpretation. We later learn that his father was a writer. Jerome aims to be able to tell the story of his father's death without causing laughter and devises two approaches. The second presented is brevity basically - "My father was killed by a pig" - the first to reduce surprise, building up details of Italian livestock practices, on balconies, before introducing the father and what happened. (Jerome's second approach says the father was on the way to Hydrographic Museum.) Jerome becomes a chartered accountant and meets a young pleasant "girl" of 25 called Sally. They are set to marry. When with Jerome's old aunt Sally inquires about a portrait of a-man-with-umbrella (to protect against sunstroke) and the aunt tells of his father's books, including tender travel books, singling out Nooks and Crannies. The aunt uses the brevity method to convey what happened: "I had so many letters from readers after the pig fell on him." Sally does not laugh. In the taxi home, Jerome kisses Sally passionately because of this. She asks, "What happened to the pig?" (Max Beerbohm moved to Italy, and Bernard Williams died in Rome. There is probably a suggestion that the Italians and analogous others have trouble with processing certain not great authors.)


Awful when you think of it. The narrator is of the opinion that one can tell from a baby a person's future and that a hobby of his, in trains, is to try to determine the future of babies: "the bar lounger, the gadabout, the frequenter of fashionable weddings…" A baby is left alone with the narrator, on the tacit understanding he would look after it for a few moments. The narrator decides to take his researchers beyond mere observation and interact with the baby. He seems to regard the baby as a future alcohol drinker and asks the baby what he will be having, concluding a pint of the best bitter. He regards the baby as sure to become a member of the same club as himself and proceeds to begin an anecdote, only to be met with a yawn. He tells the baby, "I thought it was new. You tell me one." The baby laughs lots, instead of conveying any story (even something the author could speculatively interpret as story), and is described as "belonging to the school who find their own stories funny." "Tell you later old man" is what the narrator attributes to him. The mother returns. (By the way, earlier the narrator said to the baby, "My brokers are Druce, David, and Burrows," worried about her possible return.)


Doctor Crombie. Doctor Crombie teaches (or taught) at an all-boys school, which had started as a grammar school during the reign of Henry VIII and by the 20th century was scraping into the list of "public schools." (The term "public school" is confusing; it is used in Britain to refer to a set of distinguished private schools - schools which one must pay to attend. This is a boarding school, with day-boys.) Doctor Crombie writes long articles which he fails to publish, sending them to Lancet and the British Medical Journal. He is known to believe that masturbation causes cancer. He advises boys against playing with themselves: the narrator is an only child and asks his parents what the doctor means. His mother absents herself. His father asks, "Cancer? Are you sure he didn't say insanity?" (We are told "It was a great period for insanity."My remark: as the peak of Woody Allen was a great period for neurosis, and we are in a great period for autism? A period of autism overdiagnosis, it seems to me.) We are told a boy called Fred Wright, in the sixth form (final years), "had his first woman in a street off Leicester Square on a half-day excursion" and experienced pain in his testicles, presumably afterwards. Crombie warned him that sexual relations in marriage cause cancer. The narrator asks Crombie about this and learns that Crombie's view is that any sexual relations cause cancer, also introducing the narrator to the concept of female masturbation - "You mean girls play with themselves too?" -  and defining a maiden as a virgin who does not do this. (What about no sexual dreams too?!!) The narrator asks Crombie how he expects the human race to continue. Crombie sounds keen on their extinction. Crombie declares himself no believer in Genesis, the Bible. The opening paragraph tells us that when the eccentricity of his ideas became generally known (known by most parents?), he ceased to be school doctor and his practice was reduced to a few other old people, almost as eccentric.


The Innocent. The narrator takes a woman called Lola to the little town of his childhood in the countryside, but memories come back to him and he feels she is out of place there. (Who is Lola, apart from a lover? Towards the end, we are told, "There is something about innocence one is never quite resigned to lose. Now when I am unhappy about a girl, I can simply go and buy another one.") Lola does not like the town she has been brought to, initially unaware that it is his hometown, saying that it is grim. When she learns, she says, "You must get a kick out of bringing me here. I suppose you used to think of nights like this when you were a boy." One of his memories is this: "When I was five I saw a middle-aged man run into one [an almshouse] to commit suicide; he carried a knife, and all the neighbours pursued him up the stairs." (This makes me think of Nightmare on Elm Street films: number 3 (1987)? Released from court and then burned by a mob. He kills people when they dream, interestingly - in their dream, but they really die!) Although the narrator brought her, he soon wishes he was alone. And this is repeated later: "More than ever I wished that Lola were not with me, less than ever did she fit." They drink at the bar. The narrator remembers a former love: "I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since, I believe, for anyone." She was a little girl though! Later, as she grew older, they danced? He finds a hole where he used to leave messages and a message to the girl from him remains: "my initials below the childish, inaccurate sketch of a man and woman." The story ending sounds contradictory: "when Lola turned away from me and fell asleep, I began to realize 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." 1937. Reminds me also of Litost, part 5 of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.


Proof positive. Colonel Cranshaw, president of the local psychical society, receives a message which asks for an urgent meeting of the society, written in trembling handwriting. He would have hesitated to comply but it was written by Major Phillip Weaver, Indian army retired. He speaks little more than a week later. The story is more or less from Cranshaw's perspective, according to which Weaver is "not more than sixty, tall, thin, and dark, with an ugly obstinate nose and satire in his eye, the most unlikely person to experience anything unexplainable. What antagonized Crashaw most was that Weaver used scent; a white handkerchief which drooped from his breast pocket exhaled as rich and sweet an odour as a whole altar of lilies." Weaver has trouble speaking and this is actually the story's opening point: "The tired voice went on. It seemed to surmount enormous obstacles to speech." Cranshaw suggests a comparison with his own mountain climbing experience: "When a young man he had climbed in the Himalayas, and he remembered how at great heights several breaths had to be taken for every step advanced." Weaver speaks in platitudes, of how the spirit is stronger than the body, quotes Shakespeare and St Paul to the Galatians. Ladies are bored. He is perceived as obviously sick by Cranshaw and another man, Dr. Brown, who sends a note to Cranshaw to halt proceedings. When Major Weaver sits down, it is evident he is dead. Brown inspects and says, "The man must have been dead a week." 1930.


A Day Saved. A narrator called Robinson follows another man, whom he believes to have something of importance to him, though it is unclear to the narrator what exactly this is: "he carried something I dearly, despairingly, wanted. It was beneath his clothes, perhaps in a pouch, a purse, perhaps dangling next his skin. Who knows how cunning the most ordinary man can be? Surgeons can make clever insertions." The man followed is described as ordinary and short and stupid and goodnatured. Robinson is troubled by two things, being unable to know his name and the fact that "he saves a day." Regarding the latter, the man followed is planning to leave at 2 from Dover - by ship, presumably - but his friend advises that it will save a day if he uses the aeroplane and the man followed accepts the advice. Robinson sounds as if he already has a ticket to follow the man by the same ship. Quite a bit of time is spent expressing irritation at this decision to take the plane instead. "Save it from what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then what? You cannot die a day earlier." There is an air of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground to me. Robinson follows in the seat behind this apparently good-natured man and when he has trouble at customs, Robinson translates. He thereby gets to know the man better, but "Of course I never believed that talk would be enough. I should learn a great deal about him, but I believed that I should have to kill him before I knew all." Robinson has several drinks with the man. The name issue crops up: "Presently I began to call him Fotheringay. He never contradicted me and it may have been his name, but I seem to remember also calling him Douglas, Wales and Canby without correction." The man tells him he plans to take a train to a certain town. Robinson says he is going that way too, not to the man's surprise, and Robinson is prepared to kill him if necessary. They travel third class; the carriage is never empty. It is 2 when their journey ends. Robinson and the man meet with the man's friends. There is drinking and Robinson, when drinking, regards him as a friend, but is preoccupied with this apparently wrongful saving of a day. 1935.


References
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1864. Notes from Underground. Constance Garnett translation available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/600/pg600.txt
Ebert, Roger. 1987. Review of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Available at:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-3-dream-warriors-1987#google_vignette
(The beginning of Ebert versus video games?)
Greene, Graham. 1954. 21 Stories. Available at:
https://dn711303.ca.archive.org/0/items/GrahamGreeneShorts/21%20Stories.pdf
And:
https://ecvlad.ru/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/greene_graham_21_stories.pdf
Greene, Graham. 1981. Collected Short Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
(Stories probably date to 1930s, 40s, or 50s.)
Kundera, Milan. 1996 (translated from French by Aaron Asher). The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. London: Faber and Faber.