For forty years I have been a determined purchaser and borrower of works by Graham Greene (1904-1991). I have even managed to read a few: the memoirs A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980) and the superbly strange and unnerving short novel Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980). Mostly, I was an avid and repeated watcher of films made of The Third Man (1949), The Honorary Consul (1973), and The Human Factor (1978).
Des Lewis's blog notes about Greene's story "The Hint of an Explanation" sent me again to Philip Hensher's The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: II: From P.G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (2015). Lewis previously sent me there for "The Point of Thirty Miles" by T. H. White, which I wrote about here.
"The Hint of an Explanation" (1948) depicts a cold, uncomfortable night train journey. Two strangers share a compartment. Greene deftly paints the scene.
I had soon realized I was speaking to a Roman Catholic – to someone who believed – how do they put it? – in an omnipotent and omniscient Deity, while I am what is loosely called an agnostic. I have a certain intuition (which I do not trust, founded as it may well be on childish experiences and needs) that a God exists, and I am surprised occasionally into belief by the extraordinary coincidences that beset our path like the traps set for leopards in the jungle, but intellectually I am revolted at the whole notion of such a God who can so abandon his creatures to the enormities of Free Will.
The narrator quickly poses the old theological chestnut: 'When you think what God – if there is a God – allows. It's not merely the physical agonies, but think of the corruption, even of children …'
He said, 'Our view is so limited,' and I was disappointed at the conventionality of his reply. He must have been aware of my disappointment (it was as though our thoughts were huddled as closely as ourselves for warmth), for he went on, 'Of course there is no answer here. We catch hints …' and then the train roared into another tunnel and the lights again went out. It was the longest tunnel yet; we went rocking down it and the cold seemed to become more intense with the darkness, like an icy fog (when one sense – of sight – is robbed, the others grow more acute). When we emerged into the mere grey of night and the globe lit up once more, I could see that my companion was leaning back on his seat.
I repeated his last word as a question, 'Hints?'
'Oh, they mean very little in cold print – or cold speech,' he said, shivering in his overcoat. 'And they mean nothing at all to another human being than the man who catches them. They are not scientific evidence – or evidence at all for that matter. Events that don't, somehow, turn out as they were intended – by the human actors, I mean, or by the thing behind the human actors.'
'The thing?'
'The word Satan is so anthropomorphic.' I had to lean forward now: I wanted to hear what he had to say. I am – I really am, God knows – open to conviction. He said, 'One's words are so crude, but I sometimes feel pity for that thing. It is so continually finding the right weapon to use against its Enemy and the weapon breaks in its own breast. It sometimes seems to me so – powerless. You said something just now about the corruption of children. It reminded me of something in my own childhood. You are the first person – except for one – that I have thought of telling it to, perhaps because you are anonymous. It's not a very long story, and in a way it's relevant.'
I said, 'I'd like to hear it.'
'You mustn't expect too much meaning. But to me there seems to be a hint. That's all. A hint.'
The remainder of "The Hint of an Explanation" is the narrator's fellow traveller recounting a strange and menacing experience from his childhood. The story's end seems at first to be an example of inconclusiveness, but rereading dispels that conclusion.
* * *
"The Hint of an Explanation" features some of Greene's sharpest writing.
The travellers, for instance, can barely see one-another in the poorly lit compartment. Of the night time world outside, "an occasional signal lamp, a light in a window, a small country station torn backwards by our rush...."
The phrase "torn backwards by our rush" is admirably arresting, perfectly conveying the experience of train travel through a dark landscape.
I feel similar subjective enthusiasm for a phrase later in the story: "the weapon had been turned against its own breast."
Like the best strange stories of Machen, Bowen, and Aickman, "The Hint of an Explanation" rewards careful and patient reading.
Jay
30 May 2022
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