The Story Behind The Story of Graham Greene’s “READING AT NIGHT”
GREENELAND! How Graham Greene disliked that clever but trite Arthur Calder-Marshall soundbite summing up his style: a seedy terrain filled with complex and troubled characters. Greene countered that he was reflecting reality as opposed to presenting a misleading, “blinkered” world view.
But no such philosophical debate clouds “Reading at Night,” which was Greene’s sole venture into the supernatural-themed genre. Although an admirer of M. R. James, celebrated ghost story writer of the early 20th century, the story is not a Jamesian pastiche. Instead, the foreign setting is an out-of-season Côte d’Azur on a stormy night, “nothing blue or warm about the coast in November,” isolation in an unfamiliar house, and an unsettling story which the narrator comes across “by chance” and fatally chooses as his bedtime reading. He is rendered hopeless as he battles primeval fear with a more rational “sense of reality.”
“Reading at Night” is in many ways classic, ghost story fare. And some of Greene’s tropes are downright creepy: the “very small grating sound” as the penknife lifts the latch, the sound of rain on the wind
likened to fingernails tapping, the figure already mounting the windowsill outside. There is physical threat too: “he can’t bear them when they’re scared,” unknown footsteps in the corridor, and the physical paralysis when imagination overrides rationality as he contemplates needing the distant toilet in the night or how he is going to pluck up the courage to switch off that central light and plunge the room into darkness.
Greene wrote “Reading at Night” in 1962 and the date is significant. He had had a curiously dismissive attitude toward the short story format hitherto, calling it once, “the byproducts of a novelist’s career.” His first, significant collection was Nineteen Stories (1947)—a curious title indeed but these were all the stories Greene could muster at the time.
Fifteen years later, Greene found himself both physically and mentally exhausted in the wake of the publication of his novel A Burnt-Out Case, confessing in the introduction to his essay about the writing of the novel In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961) that he “had reached an age when another full-length novel was probably beyond my powers.” Fortunately, this was not to be, as the publication of The Comedians in 1966 and his later works attest.
In the meantime, however, Greene threw himself wholeheartedly into short story writer mode. A book with the working title Under the Garden and Other Stories would have consisted of twelve new short stories together with an “autobiographical fragment” amounting to over 70,000 words. It is not clear from the relevant correspondence on the subject whether “Reading at Night” would have been included. But, the fact that the holograph of the story, together with two revised typescripts and a further bound copy, again revised, are included in the Greene Collection at the University of Texas at Austin all point to the author’s intentions about this unusual little story.
The lengthy Under the Garden volume never materialised. Instead, a much slimmed-down collection consisting of just four stories, titled A Sense of Reality (that phrase again), was published in 1963. “A Discovery in the Woods,” Greene’s only venture into science fiction writing, was included. He might well have decided that to include an experimental ghost story as well was a step too far.
Although experimental in terms of genre, “Reading at Night” shows the author in 1962 at the very height of his skills as a writer. Typically, there is not a wasted word as, from the outset, he draws the reader into familiar territory where our otherwise rational minds fail to cope and primitive fear takes over.
—Jon Wise