Graham Greene
A hitherto unpublished short story by Graham Greene has received some very welcome press in the past week. ‘Reading at Night’, which the author wrote in 1962 is a ghost story – a genre which one does not associate with Greene. He wrote it shortly after he had finished A Burnt-Out Case (1961) at a time when he was struggling not only with physical tiredness but, probably more importantly, with his fragile mental state. He decided that writing another another novel was beyond him and that in future he would concentrate exclusively on short stories. This, of course, was a short-lived decision.
‘Reading at Night’ has some conventional ghost story ‘tropes’: a stormy night, creaking furniture, footsteps real or imagined, a story within a story etc. It is quite short and not immediately identifiable as ‘Greeneian’ – the only clue for the more knowledgeable reader is its setting – an out of season Côte d’Azur.
Greene’s bibliographers Mike Hill and Jon Wise re-discovered the story at the Graham Greene Archive at the Harry Ransom Center part of the University of Texas at Austin on a research visit in 2014 which was sponsored by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust. The results of their research at Austin’s very large Greene archive was used extensively in the writing of the second volume of their bibliography, The Works of Graham Greene Volume 2: A Guide to the Graham Greene Archives (2015). (By the way, a paperback version of this book has been published this year by Bloomsbury at £27.99, vastly cheaper than the hardback copy which costs £104.99!)
‘Reading at Night’ is published in the latest edition of The Strand Magazine, a quarterly journal based in Birmingham, Michigan. If the name is familiar it was originally a British publication. After several different owners it was brought back into publication in 1998 as a quarterly magazine, featuring stories from emerging crime and mystery writers in addition to rediscovered stories by established writers. An incomplete short story/
novella The Empty Chair was similarly discovered by the late Professor François Gallix and also published in a serial version in The Strand in 2019-2o10.
The ghost story has received unexpectedly wide press coverage over the last few days – thanks to the efforts of the editor Andrew Gulli. It is worth seeking out a very good review which appeared in The Guardian last week as well as buying a copy of issue containing Reading at Night, of course.
Unpublished writings by Graham Greene are now comparatively few and far between – although a few short stories and essays do still exist. It is clear from the papers held at Austin that Greene fully intended that Reading at Night should be published – there is his original holograph, a version with corrections and finally a typescript. It is a very good ‘read’ and illustrates Greene’s flexibility in producing a story in a totally unfamiliar genre.