Autumnal View

MAY WE BORROW YOUR HUSBAND? & OTHER COMEDIES OF THE SEXUAL LIFE by Graham Greene. 183 pages. Viking Press. $4.50.

"Grim grin" is the way some of his stiff-lipped countrymen seem to pronounce his name, offering a capsule description of the man's work. Graham Greene's fiction over the past four decades has alternated between pain and painful pleasure. He has explored the depths of damnation--and salvation--but with gusto, he has also turned out masterly, this-worldly entertainments. Perhaps the difference between the two is not really as great as it sometimes seems.

This new collection of short stories is basically a tee-off from the second green, down-to-earth escapist fare. But it must not be dismissed too lightly. The mature Greene is never a mere Sunday writer; there is always an element of earnestness about his game. And in May We Borrow Your Husband?, he is still the consummate pro: his picture swing is smooth, his stroke is completely unmannered yet perfectly controlled, his style is at once artful and impeccable. Yet beneath all the skill lurks an unprofessional but engaging note of bittersweet poignancy.

Georgy Girl. Author Greene, 62, sounds that note in the title story: "At the end of what is called the 'sexual life,' the only love which has lasted is the love that has accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship."

The story concerns the observations of an aging writer at an Antibes hotel. He is a kind of latter-day Maugham, who is taken with a gangly Georgy girl honeymooning with her "very sensitive" husband. A pair of prattling pederasts are taken in turn with the husband, and the writer watches with quiet horror as they gaily go about seducing the young husband--even using the writer's own harmless affection for the girl as a cover. The writer at length bows out. "If [the husband] has the wrong hormones," he wistfully but urbanely muses, "I have the wrong age." The plot may be no more than a fey joke and the tone is often bantering, but Greene gilds the slender tale thoroughly with the sensibilities of an informed heart.

Two Gentle People, a paean to a love that might have been, and Mortmain, a chronicle of a mistress's revenge for a love that was, are too slick, but, on the whole, so well told that one scarcely minds. It is in Cheap in August that Greene delivers the full measure of his talents.

Sins Hushed Up. A married Englishwoman living in the U.S. and nearing the edge of 40 goes vacationing to Jamaica in August. She is more than half set on having a holiday affair; "it was the universal desire to see a little bit further, before one surrendered to old age and the blank certitude of death." After disappointedly encountering instead "the essential morality of a holiday resort in the cheap season," she finally meets an old blubbery American. He is over 70, fat and decrepit, scarcely the image of her dreams. But his disarming frankness as an unsuccessful American ("I'm afraid of the dark," "I'm afraid of dying, with nobody around, in the dark," "I pay not to be alone") impels her toward him. "It was as though she were discovering for the first time the interior of the enormous continent on which she had elected to live. Nobody anywhere admitted failure or fear; they were like 'sins hushed up' --worse perhaps than sins, for sins have glamour--they were bad taste." And she makes love to the fat old frightened man, wondering afterward what they had in common, "except the fact, of course, that for both of them Jamaica was cheap in August."

Everywhere in this collection, Greene is mellow and compassionate, comedic yet concerned. Though sex is billed into the subtitle itself and often seems close to the core of the stories, it is rather a disinterred sex, a sex of summers long past as viewed through memory from an autumnal vantage point. The total effect is like a swim in comfortable warm waters through which occasionally streak cold currents; the chill and final reminders of mortality add pungency rather than detract from the pleasures of the dip.

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