Opening the Door to “The Basement Room”

Ronald G. Walker

Although Graham Greene published more than fifty short stories over a long and

distinguished writing career, his short fiction has not received the attention it deserves in

this country. In his native Britain, thanks in part to The Fallen Idol (1948), the award-

winning film based on “The Basement Room” and directed by Carol Reed, as well as

Shades of Greene, a television series adapted in the 1970’s from a selection of his stories,

Greene’s achievements in the form are much better known. In Loren Logsdon’s survey

of the 100 most widely anthologized short stories between 1975 and 1990, there were

none at all by Graham Greene. A list generous enough to include the relatively obscure

“Astronomer’s Wife” and “The Portable Phonograph” did not have a spot for such

notable Greene stories as “The Basement Room,” “The Destructors,” “A Chance for Mr.

Lever,” “Under the Garden,” or “Cheap in August.”1 The omission may be understood in

part, perhaps, as a reflection of the attention Greene received during the 1950’s and early

1960’s in the U.S. and elsewhere as a “Catholic writer.”2 Judging from the evidence, that

vogue did not last into the period covered by the Logsdon survey. Of the five anthologies

including Greene stories I was able to find (in an admittedly informal search), only one

was published as late as 1979; the others appeared in 1950, 1960, 1962, and 1967,

respectively.3 One thing these five anthologies had in common, however, was that they

all included “The Basement Room” (1936), and thus it is likely that this story at least had

found its way into some American classrooms, though evidently not so much over the

last quarter century. In what follows I hope to demonstrate that Greene’s short fiction

generally, and this story in particular, merits a wider audience and should be taught more

frequently in today’s classrooms.

Undeniably, Greene is best known as a novelist, and such works as The Power

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and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The Honorary Consul are no strangers to

course syllabi in surveys of modern fiction or the 20th century British novel. That The

End of the Affair and The Quiet American have recently been made into successful films

only reinforces the primacy of Greene’s novel-length fiction in the public eye.4 It must

be admitted, too, that Greene himself did not exactly go out of his way to promote his

short fiction. In a notoriously self-effacing author’s note for an early collection, Nineteen

Stories (1947), he confessed that “the short story is an exacting form which I have never

properly practised: I present these tales merely as the by-products of a novelist’s career”

(vii). This too harsh judgment became somewhat mollified by the time he prepared his

Collected Stories twenty-five years later. Still, in his introduction to that volume, later

reprinted virtually intact in Ways of Escape (1980), Greene admitted that early in his

career “the short story as a form bothered me and a little bored me. I knew too much

about the story before I began to write—and then all the days of work were unrelieved by

any surprise” (Ways 280). In contrast the longer novelistic narrative allowed space for

the unexpected to emerge from the unconscious, beyond his deliberate plans, and he

learned to give rein to characters who might change in unforeseen ways, or scenes that

might crystallize during the course of composition, developments often derived wholly or

in part from the author’s own dreams (284). As he describes it, the creative process—at

least in the case of the novel—is an unavoidably prolonged and exhaustive process, yet

one that despite its “sense of roughness, unevenness, gaps” (282) could be exhilarating

when the disparate elements finally coalesce.5 On the other hand, in writing the short

story

I feel that I’m confronted by something which is going to go very

rapidly. And finish in a rather short space of time, say a week. And

that in a way . . . one has got to be more concentrated, to get over the

effect one wants rapidly, that there’s a kind of time element pressing

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on one while for a novel I like to feel a whole period of time confront-

ing me where I can change my mind, when a character can suddenly

alter. There is a kind of feeling of leisure. . . . (qtd. in Sejourne 404)

Thus for the novelist, writing short stories is “often a form of escape—escape from

having to live with another character for years on end, picking up his jealousies, his

meanness, his dishonest tricks of thought, his betrayals” (Ways 283). This association of

the differing impact of the two forms with their length is reminiscent of Poe’s famous

pronouncements in his review of Twice-Told Tales, regarding “the unity of effect or

impression” more readily attainable in texts that can be perused in a single sitting; and

Greene’s emphasis on a single effect as the focus of the short story is equally Poesque.

Yet curiously, despite his stated views of the short story genre, most of Greene’s own

best stories (including “The Basement Room”) tend to fall at the extreme end of the

generic scale in length. Nor is this the extent of the anomaly presented by the actual

length of Greene’s narratives, for in fact many of his novels tend to be unusually slender

volumes.6 This bending of generic norms, as it were, is especially striking when one

looks further into Greene’s statements about the relation between narrative length and

genre. For him, the issue of genre, of narrative length, was “not a superficial distinction

or even a technical distinction . . . [but one] between two different ways of life” (Ways

282). Notwithstanding this radical precept, it would appear that his natural rhythms as a

spinner of narrative seemed to incline toward—or, in resisting, to confirm a

predilection for--the medium length tale we call the novella. In this as in so many other

ways, Greene’s writing practice emulated the example of his avowed master Henry

James.7 At the same time, and in stark contrast to James, Greene’s disparagement of the

short story on the basis of his knowing too much beforehand may account for the feeling

one has that some of his briefest efforts in the form suffer from being too conspicuously

contrived to put across a single effect, a formulable moral. If the author regrets the lack

of surprise, so does the experienced reader, who may find such thesis-driven pieces as

“Brother” and “The Hint of an Explanation” too predictable. As we shall see, even “The

Basement Room” did not altogether escape this didactic bent.

On the whole, Greene’s stories reflect many of the same qualities that

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distinguish his novels. In his excellent book on Greene’s short fiction, Richard Kelly

concludes that his best stories “reveal Greene’s genius for probing human psychology,

creating atmospheres that illuminate and help to shape his vivid characters, and working

out the mythic themes of lost innocence, betrayal, and rebirth” (97). Indeed, Kelly uses

the stories to trace the stages of Greene’s development as a writer over the course of

seven decades. Early stories like “The End of the Party” (1929) and “I Spy” (1930) show

triumphantly his talent for crafting riveting narrative and psychologically suggestive

characters. As Greene himself would later admit, they do so far better than two of the

novels he was writing at his time, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, which he

would later suppress. “I Spy,” he notes, “has the qualities which all my first novels so

disastrously lacked—simplicity of language, the sense of life as it is lived” (Ways 281).

These stories and others produced during the next couple of decades are essentially

traditional in form; they would not—any more than the contemporaneous novels—

exemplify the anti-fictional or postmodernist tendencies of some recent fiction.

Yet in “Under the Garden,” and to a lesser extent the other stories collected in A Sense of

Reality (1963), we see Greene pushing the limits of realism toward his own kind of

meta-fiction, drawing in a surprisingly explicit manner on his personal memories and on

fantasy (especially as expressed in dreams) as the subject of the fiction. A subsequent

collection, May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life

(1967), exhibits Greene relaxing in the mode of comedy and farce, with sometimes

hilarious results, as in the title story and “A Shocking Accident.” Along with “Cheap in

August,” a minor masterpiece, these stories provide fitting companions to that memorable

novel of autumnal comedy, Travels with My Aunt (1969). It seems fitting too that the

final book Greene published in his lifetime was a collection of short stories, The Last

Word (1990), just as the first posthumously published volume was A World of My Own:

A Dream Diary (1994), which reads almost like a collection of short stories.

II

Conceived in 1935 “on a cargo steamer on the way home from Liberia to relieve

the tedium of the voyage” (Greene, “Preface” 123), “The Basement Room” was in fact

written almost a year later when Greene was commissioned by the daily News Chronicle

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to produce a story to be published in a serial of five parts (Kelly 23). The gap between

conception and composition is worth noting because it does not seem consistent with

Greene’s aforementioned view of the short story as something produced quickly, perhaps

in only a week. That it was to appear serially in five distinct parts no doubt contributed

to the story’s length (more than 10,000 words) and structure. It shares with Greene’s

other stories of the 1930’s and 1940’s—notably “The End of the Party,” “The Innocent,”

“A Drive in the Country,” and “The Hint of an Explanation”--a central concern with

the vulnerability of innocence at the hands of reality. Of course, such stories are often

treated as tales of initiation and are grouped accordingly with others that focus on the

coming of age of young people: e.g., Joyce’s “Araby,” Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and

Porter’s “Virgin Violeta.”8 More than these others, however, Greene’s treatment of the

theme is thoroughly laced with irony, and it would be more appropriate to see “The

Basement Room” as what has been called a “tentative initiation story,” in which the rites

of passage do not “carry the protagonist into maturity and understanding” but instead

leave him “enmeshed in a struggle for certainty” (Marcus 192).

Certainty of a kind seems available to seven-year-old Philip Lane at the story’s

outset. Although his parents have gone off for a two-week holiday, Philip has been left in

the care of their servants, his friend Baines the butler and Mrs. Baines, who cooks and

keeps the “great Belgravia house” in order (Collected Stories 457). As the story opens

Philip, who is “between nurses” (457), feels free to enter for the very first time the

basement room where the Baineses live. To get there he must pass through a green baize

door and a pantry before descending a flight of stairs. The house’s largeness, its vertical

configuration (the nursery is on the top floor, the living room and parlor on the first),

and the repeated mention of stairways, doors, railings, ledges and windows offer the

reader a visible reminder of the hierarchical class system to which Philip is heir. As the

only child of an aristocratic family, Philip is in effect experiencing for the first time how

the lower orders live. Initially, he finds the experience exhilarating and full of promise:

“Again he had the sense: this is life. All his seven nursery years vibrated with the

strange, the new experience. . . . He was apprehensive, but he was happier than he had

ever been. Everything was more important than before” (458). Since the boy is taking

something of a liberty in entering the basement room uninvited, it is important that

Baines immediately puts him at ease, addressing him informally as “Phil,” inviting him to 8

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make himself at home, offering him a snack. Baines himself is dressed in his

shirtsleeves, reading the newspaper, clearly enjoying the free time made possible by his

employers’ absence. Also important to Philip’s sense of tasting life as never before is his

image of Baines as a hero, a man’s man, an image that Baines promotes by telling tall

tales about his adventures in West Africa: “[Philip] was aware that Baines was talking to

him as man to man. . . . Baines had seen the world; he had seen beyond the railings”

(459).9 As this last image suggests, Philip regards Baines not only as an heroic

male role model but also as a sort of guide to assist him in his own quest to discover

“life” beyond the railings.

A major obstacle to this quest however is Mrs. Baines who, unlike her husband,

spends the day of her employers’ departure hard at work, covering the furniture with

sheets while she dusts, cleans the silver, polishes the parquet floors, getting everything in

order. For her, the rule of the day is “work first, pleasure afterwards” (462), and so she

shoos “Master Philip” out of the basement room and back up to the nursery, and chides

Baines for feeding the boy treats between meals and telling him stories: “Sick to death of

your ways, Baines,” she says; “spoiling the boy. Time you did some work about the

house” (460). Not surprisingly, Philip dislikes and mistrusts Mrs. Baines, “who was

servile when she was not authoritative” (459). It soon becomes apparent to the reader, if

not to Philip, that the Baineses are locked in a fierce subterranean battle: crockery is

smashed, insults and epithets are muttered sotto voce, lies and secrets proliferate—all just

beyond the boy’s field of vision. Yet already he has begun to transform Mrs. Baines into

a kind of harpie in his imagination: “Philip climbed the stairs to the baize door. He

heard Mrs. Baines’s voice like the voice in a nightmare when the small Price light has

guttered in the saucer and the curtains move; it was sharp and shrill and full of malice,

louder than people ought to speak, exposed” (460). Meanwhile he “pitied Baines; it

occurred to him how happily they could live together in the empty house if Mrs. Baines

were called away” (461), an effective bit of ironic foreshadowing. As long as she

presides over the house, compulsively cleaning and straightening, there is a “sense of

bareness, of nowhere to hide a man’s secrets” (459). Leaving the house defiantly after

telling Mrs. Baines that he hates her, Philip walks toward the shopping district more than

ever certain that “it was life he was in the middle of” (463). How could he know that this

would be as close as he ever gets to certainty about life.9

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Although his departure from home in part 2—anticipating the more desperate

flight of part 4--seems to offer hope of self-realization, what he discovers when he

unexpectedly comes across Baines and a young woman together in a tea-shop is only

an unwelcome adult secret. Oblivious to the true situation and trying to play a trick

on his friend by imitating the carping voice of Mrs. Baines, Philip merely succeeds in

casting a pall over the clandestine couple, and before he knows it “the sawdust was

spilled out of the afternoon; nothing you did could mend it, and Philip was scared” (465).

The effect on Philip of his backfiring joke is to reinforce his demonic image of Mrs.

Baines at precisely the moment when Baines’s behavior, if understood for what it really

is, could have complicated and perhaps undermined Philip’s facile hero-worship.

Instead, the butler swears him to secrecy about having seen Baines with Emmy, for

reasons beyond the boy’s ken since he is allowed to assume that Emmy is only

Baines’s niece instead of his mistress. And when, back home that evening, Mrs. Baines

tricks him into breaking his promise to Baines and insists the boy keep her knowledge of

the liaison secret, Philip’s confusion and terror are palpable:

[Mrs. Baines] was darkness when the night-light went out in a

draught; she was the frozen blocks of earth he had seen one

winter in a graveyard when someone said, “They need an electric

drill”; she was the flowers gone bad and smelling in the little

closet at Penstanley. There was nothing to laugh about. You

had to endure her when she was there and forget about her

quickly when she was away, suppress the thought of her, ram

it down deep. (466)

This passage makes clear Philip’s demonizing of Mrs. Baines, just as he has romanticized

her husband. Moreover, it makes clear that his need to polarize them and suppress

further inquiry is essentially self-defensive. He is so dependent upon this dichotomy that

he resists any complication of it. When Baines shows his joy upon learning, the next

morning, that his wife has been called away from home to tend her sick mother (another

of her clever tricks), Philip resents his friend’s gleeful mood: “It wasn’t right for a man

of Baines’s age to be so merry. It made a grown person human in the same way that you

were human. For if a grown-up could behave so childishly, you were liable too to find

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yourself in their world.” As long as the two worlds are kept apart, the quest is effectively

stalled, and as a result Philip finds himself “divided by the fear and the attraction of life”

(470-71). It is the quintessential Graham Greene dilemma.

III

By now it should be apparent that narrative viewpoint is crucial to the primary

effect of “The Basement Room.” Tempting as it is to describe that effect simply as

sustained irony, achieved by a kind of balancing act between the naïve perspective of the

boy and a tacit adult perspective, the case is not nearly as straightforward as this

description would suggest. Not surprisingly, critics have disagreed on the precise nature

of Greene’s “focalization technique”10 in this story. For instance, Cedric Watts asserts

that Philip’s viewpoint is “well maintained” throughout (36), while Ralph H. Singleton

faults Greene for failing to sustain his point of view consistently, lapsing repeatedly into

omniscient intrusion (28). The story is told in the third person, but is the point of view

restricted or omniscient? Even this basic issue has not yet been satisfactorily resolved.

For their part, Paul O’Prey (57), Gerard A. Barker (64), and Stuart Y. McDougal (503)

regard the contrast between the young Philip’s subjective viewpoint and the occasional

shifts to the more detached, retrospective view of an aged Philip on his deathbed as

crucial to the story’s ironic effect. R. H. Miller goes so far as to assert that the story is

told “from the vantage point of the main character Philip’s deathbed, sixty years after the

events of the story” (150), an interesting but demonstrably untrue claim.

There are in fact just four brief passages flashing forward to the aged Philip’s

retrospection. Two of them appear as early as part 2, the first as Philip stands on the

threshold of the tea-shop looking at Baines and Emmy together for the first time. “He

would never escape that scene,” we are told. “In a week he had forgotten it, but it

conditioned his career, the long austerity of his life; when he was dying, rich and alone, it

was said that he asked: ‘Who is she?’” (465). This external prolepse, again to use the

narratologists’ terminology,11 foreshadows the story’s last paragraph and calls attention

to the fact that back in the narrative present, the seven-year-old Philip scarcely broaches

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that issue, accepting without question—despite the mounting evidence to the contrary—

that Emmy is merely Baines’s niece. Even when he sees them kissing, in part 3, his

thoughts are on the whereabouts of Mrs. Baines rather than on her husband’s infidelity, or

the true nature of Emmy’s relationship with him. He has never understood what “she”

signifies. The second prolepse appears at the end of part 2 after Mrs. Baines browbeats

Philip into agreeing not to reveal her secret, that she is aware of the liaison. Again, the

boy pulls back from this encounter with adult deviousness in order to protect himself

from a guilt whose real source he cannot possibly comprehend: “He never opened his

Meccano set [a toy with which Mrs. Baines has bribed him to reveal Baines’s

secret] again, never built anything, never created anything, died the old dilettante, sixty

years later with nothing to show rather than preserve the memory of Mrs. Baines’s

malicious voice saying good night, her soft determined footfalls on the stairs to the

basement, going down, going down” (470). We may well wonder, is this who she is?

Part 3 is pivotal in showing the path Philip will pursue hereafter, whether the

outward-bound one associated with “life,” or the egocentric one directed by his fear of

life. Of course, thanks to the flash-forwards we already know which path he ultimately

takes, and the horrible result of that choice; but we are not yet in a position to know

precisely how or why he takes it. As Robert B. Heilman points out, if Greene had used

the elderly Philip’s viewpoint throughout the tale, he would have dissipated the

immediacy of young Philip’s innocence and terror. Had he remained entirely within the

boy’s perspective, he would have sacrificed our awareness of the deeper significance of

Philip’s action, which utterly escapes the boy himself (265).12 The combination of a

narrow and a long-range perspective, with the former predominant, is telling (see

McDougal 503). Yet even apart from the four prolepses, we are not in fact limited to

young Philip’s point of view. In the first half of the story (parts 1 and 2), Greene

basically uses scenic presentation and focuses on the boy’s viewpoint, except for the

aforementioned prolepses and a brief description of Emmy and Baines as “two brains

battl[ing] over the tea-cups, loving each other” (465), lines which clearly articulate not

Philip’s thoughts but the narrator’s commentary. Beginning in part 3, however, Greene

uses more summary presentation and a version of “free indirect discourse,” that is, a fluid

alternation or fusing of voices—those of the characters and of the narrator—representing

“a preverbal perception or feeling” (Rimmon-Kenan 111). Dorrit Cohn calls 12

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this a “narrated monologue,” defined as “the technique for rendering a character’s

thought in his own idiom while maintaining the third-person reference and the basic tense

of narration” (100). Thus, in “The Basement Room,” after Baines wakes Philip early to

enjoy “a long, long day” (471) with Mrs. Baines gone (or so he thinks), we move from

a narrated monologue of Baines idly musing about Africa during a trip with the boy to the

zoo, to an ostensibly chance encounter with his “niece” Emmy, to their arrival at dusk

back at the empty Belgravia house, where Philip’s “preverbal” feelings are presented

directly, with no explanation by the narrator: “The hall lay there in quiet and shadow

prepared to show him something he didn’t want to see. Some letters rustled down, and

someone knocked. ‘Open in the name of the Republic.’ The tumbrils rolled, the head

bobbed in the bloody basket. Knock, knock, and the postman’s footsteps going away.

Philip gathered the letters. . . . He ran to the baize door and the stairs” (473). The

contrast between the butler’s sense of ease and peace and the boy’s ominous imaginings

about violence and danger lurking in the shadows is very well orchestrated. Even as he

descends the stairs into the basement room to deliver the letters, including one from Mrs.

Baines explaining that she will be away for another day—only to find Emmy and Baines

kissing--Philip knows before anyone else that they are not safe.

The contrast continues, with another narrated monologue: “[Baines] couldn’t

keep his eyes off happiness [i.e., Emmy]. He’d played around as much as other men; he

kept on reverting to the Coast as if to excuse himself for his innocence. He wouldn’t

have been so innocent if he’d lived his life in London, so innocent when it came to

tenderness. ‘If it was you, Emmy,’ he said, looking at the white dresser, the scrubbed

chairs, ‘this would be like a home’” (475). Here it is difficult to determine whether these

are Baines’s thoughts or the narrator’s commentary. Throughout the scene, the lovers

have been allowing themselves the luxury of affectionate gestures, openly touching hands

and making eyes at one another in Philip’s presence, biding their time until the boy can

be put to bed and they can be alone together. Far from recognizing these signs of

imminent coupling for what they are, Philip desperately clings to the illusion that the pair

will somehow protect him, like loving parents, until he falls asleep. Greene’s rendering

of the nightmare that follows brings together all the hints and terrors of the past two days,

and concludes with a horror that destroys forever the illusion that “life” is a place of

safety:

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a man with a tricolour hat beat at the door on His Majesty’s service, a

bleeding head lay on the kitchen table in a basket, and the Siberian wolves

crept closer. He was bound hand and foot and couldn’t move; they leapt

round him breathing heavily; he opened his eyes and Mrs. Baines was

there, her grey untidy hair in threads over his face, her black hat askew.

A loose hairpin fell on the pillow and one musty thread brushed his mouth.

“Where are they?” she whispered. “Where are they?” (476)

This is a truly terrifying moment for Philip, obliterating as it does the all too permeable

boundary between illusion and reality. Mrs. Baines has become the witch of his bad

dreams. The imagery of wolves’ eyes and decapitated heads and himself bound helpless

among hungry predators won’t go away any more: “It wasn’t fair, the walls were

down again between his world and theirs, but this time it was something worse … that

the grown people made him share; a passion moved in the house he could recognize but

not understand. . . . Life fell on him with savagery, and you couldn’t blame him if he

never faced it again in sixty years” (477-78, my emphasis). Again the perspective in this

passage modulates from that of young Philip to that of the narrator, as we move directly

from his overwhelming vision of “life” as a ravenous beast to a more detached, proleptic

view that puts his terror in a broader context without diminishing it.13

The recourse to free indirect discourse continues in the last two parts of the story,

as Philip’s traumatic feelings are starkly contrasted with those of various adults he

encounters, whom he now regards as powerful enemies: not only Mrs. Baines, but

also Emmy, the police, even his old pal Baines.

IV

In ancient shadows and twilights

Where childhood had strayed,

The world’s great sorrows were born13

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And its heroes were made.

In the lost childhood of Judas

Christ was betrayed.

(AE, “Germinal”)

When Mrs. Baines falls to her death at the foot of the main stairs after con-

fronting her enraged husband, it is but an extension of the nightmare that has now

taken over Philip’s world. “She went over the banisters in a flurry of black

clothes and fell into the hall; she lay before the front door like a sack of coals which

should have gone down . . . into the basement” (479). The spatial imagery here, as

elsewhere, is precise and significant. Bannister, stairs, door, and basement all play a part

in the story’s final scene, as we shall see. But first there is Philip’s flight from home, far

more urgent than his earlier walk to the tea-shop in search of “life,” which takes him

initially to a small public garden enclosed by railings. This temporary refuge seems far

safer than his home, where “the whole house had been turned over to the grown-up

world; he wasn’t safe in the night-nursery; their passions had flooded in” (479). For a

few moments the little garden seems to keep him hidden from the demons that have been

pursuing him, and he feels grateful to be lost: “there wouldn’t be any more secrets to

keep; he surrendered responsibility once and for all. Let grown-up people keep to their

world and he would keep to his, safe in the small garden between the plane trees” (480).14

But it doesn’t work for long. He soon sees “two illuminated eyes peer[ing] out at him

like a Siberian wolf” and, afraid that Mrs. Baines may be closing in on him, he leaves the

garden and walks blindly on for hours, ever deeper into the city, utterly lost, finally

passing through the poorer sections where the air “was full of voices, but he was cut

off; these people were strangers and would always now be strangers; they were

marked by Mrs. Baines and he shied away from them into a deep class-consciousness”

(481).

Philip’s night journey will culminate in a return home accompanied by a police

constable, there reluctantly to confront again the scene of the horrors he has witnessed.

But, interestingly, Greene defers this climactic encounter and inserts the comic scene in

the police station, where the blowsy policewoman Rose tries unsuccessfully to comfort

the boy and offers to take him home. Philip’s adamant refusal (“I won’t go with her. . . . 14

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I don’t like her” [484]) is directed as much at her gender as at her class status. There

would seem to be no reason otherwise for this gratuitous description of her: “Rose . . .

was like a female impersonator, she bore her womanhood with an unnatural emphasis

even while she scorned it in her creased stockings and her weather-exposed face” (485).

Or this: “Her large morgue-like mouth was full of blackened teeth” (484). Despite the

Keystone Cops element of this scene--to which Philip is of course oblivious--it is a

further demonstration that the specter of Mrs. Baines continues to haunt him, even in the

place where “Justice” ostensibly presides (482) and little lost lads from great Belgravia

houses are sure to receive privileged attention.

The last scene is a fitting denouement, as it brings to fruition many deep-laid

seeds of plot, character, and theme. Close attention to the story’s formal elements

leading up to this moment—imagery, focalization, narrative structure, character

development—helps students to appreciate how style not only serves the work’s multiple

meanings but in effect enacts them. Here, Philip’s reaction to the house, the basement

room (to which Baines has moved his wife’s body to avoid suspicion), and especially to

Baines himself has been so fully prepared for that there is an unmistakable sense of

inevitability to it. Though he detects the butler’s mute appeal for his complicity in the

cover-up—yet another adult secret--the boy immediately “shut his mind to it. He loved

Baines, but Baines had involved him in secrets, in fears he didn’t understand. That was

what happened when you loved--you got involved; and Philip extricated himself from

life, from love, from Baines” (486-87).15 Ironically it is the constable’s attempt to spare

Philip from seeing the corpse of Mrs. Baines by asking the butler take him around to the

front door (“You’re a gentleman. You must come in the proper way through the front

door like the master should” [487]) that precipitates the ultimate betrayal. The basement

is for servants; “Master Philip” belongs upstairs, in the nursery. The boy’s resistance to

returning to the spot where he saw Mrs. Baines fall “like a sack of coals which should

have gone . . . down into the basement” exposes the butler’s ruse, which was designed to

protect Emmy as well as himself. That is why it is fitting that Philip tell the whole truth,

of which he entertains no doubts whatever: “It was all Emmy’s fault” (488). As the

policeman interrogates Baines, the exhausted boy falls asleep where he stands; the last

words he hears before he does so are these: “who is she?” (488). Although we are told

that Philip will “hardly remember a thing” when he awakes the next morning (488), the 15

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story concludes with this haunting refrain, the fourth and final prolepse:

the old man, sixty years later startled his secretary, his only

watcher, asking, “Who is she? Who is she?”’ dropping lower

and lower into death, passing on the way perhaps the image

of Baines: Baines hopeless, Baines letting his head drop,

Baines “coming clean.” (488-89)

In his “struggle for certainty” (Marcus 192), Philip has sacrificed far too much.

Greene’s spatial imagery emphasizing separation, division, insulation and so forth calls

attention to the boy’s inability to deal with the ambiguities inherent in life. The

configuration of his own home, as we have seen, embodies the differences and

inequalities of the society into which Philip is about to enter. It is a society that

conveniently separates and labels people by class, gender, and race (even Baines’s stories

about having “forty niggers” under his command in West Africa [459] amount to an

extension of the hierarchy to include subject peoples generally). Philip’s two forays

into the world outside his home, first to the tea-shop, then to the small enclosed garden,

the poor neighborhood, and the police station, have done nothing to bring him closer to

seeing the realities of this world and the moral implications of his inherited role in it; on

the contrary, he has learned only that “when you loved . . . you got involved,” and

involvement in the messy adult secrets that love may entail is exactly what he abjures—

but what the story implicitly embraces. The perennial relevance of this theme is another

point in favor of the story’s being taught to generations of students whose moral

exemplars are increasingly derived from the mass media.

Among the spatial images we have mentioned, the green baize door, which

appears prominently elsewhere in Greene’s work,16 also operates here as a potent

psychological symbol. In such a reading the underground room beyond that door

would represent not only a lower social orders but also the mystery of sex, that “strange

passion [Philip] couldn’t understand moving in the basement room” (462). The nursery

on the top floor and the middle floor with its shrouded furniture and polished surfaces

correspond to the conscious mind. As we have seen, Philip’s persistent

polarization of Baines (male, hero) and Mrs. Baines (female, witch) is in effect another 16

14

defense mechanism preventing the boy from knowing either of them as human beings

apart from the facile images he has projected onto them; his “love” for Baines is as jejune

as his fear of Mrs.Baines is exaggerated. As for Emmy, “who is she” indeed? She has

been interpreted by at least one critic as a symbol of “the potentiality for love and

happiness” (Miller 152). However that may be, the scenes in which Philip observes

Emmy and Baines together—jealously?--have obvious oedipal implications.17 The

extended absence of the boy’s real parents only makes this substitution more plausible.

In Jungian terms, Emmy and Mrs. Baines are but different manifestations of the anima

archetype, the Good and the Terrible Mother, respectively. If the ultimate psychological

goal is integration of the self and its various archetypes, the baize door must remain open.

The barrier of Otherness—whether that of class, gender, race, or one’s own subconscious

longings and fears—must be lowered. Philip’s betrayal of Baines and Emmy is

ultimately a betrayal of himself. It is a decisive slamming of the door to life.

Western Illinois University

Notes

1 Greene himself believed that he had “never written anything better” than the

last four stories listed. See his introduction to the Collected Stories (viii). I would add to

this list of his best the following short stories: “The Innocent,” “May We Borrow Your 17

15

Husband?” “A Visit to Morin,” and “The Lottery Ticket.”

2 For obvious reasons Greene disliked being pigeon-holed as a “Catholic writer”

with the expectation it carried, for some, that he should conform to orthodox opinions in

his writing. For a definitive (and still controversial) statement of his views on this

volatile issue, see “The Virtue of Disloyalty” (1969), rpt. in Reflections (266-70).

3 See Heilman (1950); Buckler and Sklare (1960); Singleton (1962); Schorer

(rev. ed. 1967; orig. 1950); and Barker (1979). All of these anthologies include study

questions or critical commentary on Greene’s short story. In addition to “The Basement

Room,” other Greene stories appearing in the Buckler and Sklare anthology are “Across

the Bridge,” “When Greek Meets Greek,” and “The Hint of an Explanation.” The same

anthology includes three stories each by James, Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner, and Warren.

4 Most of Greene’s novels have been adapted to the screen. Those for which

Greene himself wrote the screenplay are Brighton Rock (prod. 1947), The Fallen Idol

(1948), The Third Man (1949), Loser Takes All (1956), Our Man in Havana (1959), and

The Comedians (1967). Other memorable adaptations of his fiction include This Gun for

Hire (1942), and The Ministry of Fear (1943). For useful commentary on Greene and the

cinema, see Falk and Phillips.

5 Greene was quite explicit about one of the sources of this exhilaration:

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write,

compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear

which is inherent in the human situation” (Ways 285).

6 “Length has always bedeviled me,” Greene admitted in Ways of Escape; “My

early novels as a rule fell a long way below those seventy-five thousand words which

publishers used to consider a minimum length” (239). If 75,000 words is the standard,

more than two-thirds of Greene’s novels do not meet it. Notwithstanding Greene’s

generalization about the brevity of his early work, this tendency was especially

pronounced in the titles published during his last decade: Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the

Bomb Party (1980), Monsignor Quixote (1982), The Tenth Man (1985, but written in the

16

1940’s), and The Captain and the Enemy (1990). These four novels average about 160

pages, considerably under the stated norm for novels, as determined by publishers.

7 See “Henry James: The Private Universe,” “Henry James: The Religious

Aspect,” “The Portrait of a Lady,” and “The Plays of Henry James” in Collected Essays.

Greene’s essay on Francois Mauriac contains this memorable assertion: “For with the

death of James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious

sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world of fiction

had lost a dimension. . .” (115).

8 Several critics have offered possible analogues to “The Basement Room.”

Watts (208) finds James’s The Turn of the Screw as a possible influence. Barker (67)

pairs Greene’s story with Kurt Vonnegut’s “Next Door.” Hoskins (290) sees “The

Basement Room” as anticipating Greene’s last published novel, The Captain and the

Enemy (1988). Perhaps the most frequently noted parallel is that with L.P. Hartley’s The

Go-Between (1953), with which Greene’s story shares elements of character, theme, and

even plot. See Davidson (102-03), Sinyard (93), and Falk (52).

9 This is one of several places where, in revising for Collected Stories, Greene

made substantial cuts in the text. In the previously published version, the passage

continued: “beyond the tired legs of typists, the Pimlico parade to and from Victoria”

(Nineteen Stories 5). This cut effectively calls attention to the image of the “railings” that

Philip feels as constricting bounds of his insulated world. He idolizes Baines as one who

has moved successfully through the world beyond such boundaries. The excised details

about the typists and the other pedestrians probably seemed to Greene something of

which Philip would most likely be unaware.

10 On focalization, see Prince (31), Rimmon-Kenan (71-85), Genette (185-211),

and Phelan (51-64).

11 According to Gerard Genette, an “external analepse” is a kind of narrative

anachrony in which a future event is evoked or narrated in advance of its actual

occurrence in the story. It is “external” in that it occurs after the end of NOW-time, or

17

the narrative present (36-83). In “The Basement Room,” the end of the narrative present

is the boy’s falling asleep while Baines is being interrogated by the police, in part 5; the

prolepses evoke a time sixty years later, when Philip lies dying and puzzles over these

events from his youth.

12 The prolepses do not appear at all in the film adaptation of the story, The

Fallen Idol. According to McDougal, this makes possible the use of a “modified first

person point of view. . . . [Director Carol] Reed conveys the boy’s point of view by his

use of subjective shots, taken from low angles” (506). Without the glimpses of the dying

Philip, however, the film shifts the focus away from Philip’s ultimate withdrawal from

life towards what Zambrano acutely calls “the question of truth in a society where

deception is a way of life” (331).

13 Interestingly, Greene would eventually eschew this technique. His remarks

from an interview granted late in his career are worth quoting in full: “I think that during

a scene one must always place oneself in the ‘point of view’ of a single character; this

doesn’t totally exclude the author, whose viewpoint may emerge in a metaphor, a

comparison, or what have you. But if you have a scene involving several characters, and

you describe it first through one person’s eyes, then through another’s, and so on, the

whole structure of the scene becomes muddled and loses in intensity” (qtd. in Allain

124). Although I would disagree that his use of free indirect discourse in “The Basement

Room” results in a loss of intensity—far from it!—perhaps this view accounts for the fact

that Greene did not include the story among his personal favorites.

14 In the original version the passage continues as follows: “‘In the lost

childhood of Judas Christ was betrayed’; you could almost see the small unformed face

hardening into the deep dilettante selfishness of age” (Nineteen Stories 26). This version

appeared in all of the early anthologies reprinting the story. Greene is quoting from

“Germinal,” the poem by AE (George Russell) that I have used as my epigraph for this

section. Greene quotes the entire six-line verse at the end of his autobiographical essay,

“The Lost Childhood” (Collected Essays 19). This is perhaps the most significant of the

excisions made in the revised edition of “The Basement Room,” deleting one of the

prolepses as well as the suggestive allusion; however, other deletions are also

significant—particularly in part 5—and deserve a close textual analysis comparing the

18

two versions of the story and their effect on the work’s meaning. Most of the changes are

stylistic and non-substantive, but a few, like the one quoted above, eliminate passages in

which the narrator’s comment is an explicit statement of theme. N.B.: I have used the

revised version of the story in this article, as it presumably represents the version that

Greene wished to preserve.

15 The words “with a merciless egotism” concluded this passage in the version of

the story published before 1973 (Nineteen Stories 33). This is another example of

Greene’s attempt, in revising, to make the story less transparently didactic.

16 The image of the green baize door has its origin in the actual door separating

the Greene family’s home from the adjoining Berkhamsted School, of which Graham’s

father was the headmaster (Sherry 33-34). For the young Greene the door represented the

divided loyalties he felt between his family and his peers at the school, a conflict that

proved traumatic and contributed to his lifelong fascination with such topics as

secrecy, betrayal, “the virtue of disloyalty,” double-agents, etc. The image also

figures centrally in The Lawless Roads (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943), and A Sort of

Life (1971), Greene’s remarkable autobiography. To my knowledge Ian Gregor, in “The

Greene Baize Door” (1955), was the first to note this recurrent image as a crux in

Greene’s personal mythology. Its relation to map imagery and the theme of exploration

is discussed in Boardman (1-50). Walker (163-75 et passim) relates it to various

symbolic borders in other Greene writings, particularly The Power and the Glory (1940).

17 In his analysis of The Fallen Idol, Falk briefly considers this possibility:

“[Philip] is shown to be resentful, more likely jealous, of the adult relationship [between

Baines and his mistress]; whenever he turns to seek a reaction from Baines, the butler is

always some way off with Julie [the Emmy of the film version], communicating

wordlessly, desperately” (54).

19

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Allain, Marie-Francoise. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. Trans.

Guido Waldman. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1983.

20

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van

Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.

Barker, Gerard A. “Instructor’s Manual” for Twice-Told Tales: An Anthology of Short

Fiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. 64-66.

Bayley, John. “Graham Greene: The Short Stories.” In Jeffrey Meyers, ed. Graham

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Phillips, Gene D. Graham Greene: The Films of His Fiction. NY: Teachers College P,

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Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln, Neb: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

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Schorer, Mark, ed. The Story: A Critical Anthology. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

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23