May We Borrow Your Husband?

This collection of short stories was lent to me under false pretenses: I'd been told that it was a volume of Graham Greene's erotic short stories. It's much more tame than that. May We Borrow Your Husband: And Other Comedies of the Sexual Life is just that--comedies of the sexual life, which is to say, not especially comedies about love, but about romantic relationships in which there isn't love. On second thought, I'd like to qualify that--the comedy is a very dark, sad humor. It is very funny, but the sort that you feel a little bad laughing at. It is probably at the shockingness level of Travels with My Aunt (although I read that a long time ago, so I can't say for sure).

The narrator is often an older man who is a writer and who observes the goings on of the short story and sometimes plays a small role in the story itself. One narrator writes (explaining the slightly creepy impression you often have of the narrator, even though he's pretty passive): "I watched her as covertly as I could--like most writers I have the spirit of a voyeur..."

Greene is endlessly funny: One short story deals with the son of a man who dies when a pig falls on him from an apartment building (and the son's attempt to be able to tell this story in a non-funny way). Another is about a fancy dog named Beauty, whose owner is a turban-ed woman past her prime. The narrator writes of his identification with the dog, who runs away (no obvious tale about beauty leaving there!): "I must admit I was wholly on his side. Surely anything was better than the embrace of a flat breast." So you can see--it's a little risque, very funny, and not that bad (the story is about a dog, for crying out loud!). Ah Graham Greene, let's be friends! (Unless you're as creepy as the narrators in these stories, in which case I'm alright with the fact that we never met.)

Quotes:

"Interrogation had always seemed to her a principal part of American social life--an inheritance perhaps from the Indian smoke-fires. 'Where are you from?' 'Do you know the So-and-so's? Have you been to the botanic gardens?' It came over her that Mr. Hickslaughter, if that were really his name, was perhaps an American reject--not necessarily more flawed than the pottery reject of famous firms you find in bargain-basements."

"'Original sin gave man a tilt towards secrecy,' he would say. 'An open sin is only half a sin, and a secret innocence is only half innocent. When you have secrets, there, sooner or later, you'll have sin. I wouldn't let a Freemason cross my threshold." (This is my motto in life!)


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