Appreciations: Graham Greene, With a Poignant Tale of a Holiday Affair, ‘Cheap in August’

“It was cheap in August: the essential sun, the coral reefs, the bamboo-bar and the calypsos – they were all of them at cut-prices, like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale. Great groups arrived periodically from Philadelphia in the manner of school-treats and departed with less bruit after an exact exhausting week when the picnic was over. Perhaps for twenty-four hours the swimming-pool and the bar were almost deserted, and then another school-treat would arrive, this time from St Louis. Everyone knew everyone else: they had bussed together to an airport, they had flown together, together they had faced an alien customs; they would separate during the day and greet each other noisily and happily after dark, exchanging impressions of ‘shooting the rapids’, the botanic gardens, the Spanish fort. ‘We are doing that tomorrow.’”— British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Graham Greene (1904-1991), “Cheap in August,” originally printed in The London Magazine, August 1964, reprinted in May We Borrow Your Husband (1967)

The exotic seaside setting might be familiar to readers of the globe-trotting Graham Greene, but the melancholy that gradually supplants the light wit in this short story? It’s a far different variety than the tortured moral dilemmas elsewhere in the Greeneland landscape in novels like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

An Englishwoman, Mary Watson, has come to a Jamaican resort: i.e., when it is “cheap in August.” At 39 years old, in a marriage to an American academic that has become increasingly lifeless, she has concocted an excuse to escape for the kind of “holiday affair” that friends her age have talked about.

She does not expect three weeks with “no opportunities for infidelity, only for writing post-cards” to her husband—a period in which she finds herself increasingly isolated from the “jolly bunches” at the resort who have abandoned any attempt to look attractive.

Nor does she expect at the end of that time to find herself being propositioned by an especially unprepossessing fellow tourist, an obese 70-year-old old enough to be her father who goes by the name of Henry Hickslaughter.

He is hardly an attractive figure: unsuccessful in business, distant from his siblings, and, as becomes increasingly apparent, lonely (“I don’t write love letters. Never did and I’m too old now”). Yet in spite of herself, she finds herself drawn to this “old shoe comfortable to wear.”

In terms of brevity or intensity of passion, what they share this night is not even a brief encounter but a temporary reprieve against the desolation encroaching on their lives. They will never see each other again, but Mary, out of pity, has alleviated the plight of “the fat old frightened man whom she almost loved.”

For Greene, cinema not only provided at times a livelihood (a short-lived stint as a critic in the late 1930s) and the extra assignment (his classic screenplay for the 1949 thriller The Third Man), but an eye for telling details that reveal character.

His use of simile and metaphor is especially pronounced in “Cheap in August,” such as, in the paragraph leading off this post, “like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale”; rear ends that “lurch by like hippos on the way to the water”; and, most surprisingly (to me, anyway), “the air-conditioners made a continuous rumble in the starry palmy night like over-fed hotel guests.”

Collectively, these go far towards depicting the dense humidity and downscale resort in which Mary and Henry, disappointed in where they are in their lives, take stock of themselves.

Moreover, in detailing so carefully these 24 hours in a pair of lovers thrown together by subdued discouragement with life, Greene demonstrates what he meant in this passage in perhaps his best-known novel, The Power and the Glory:

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

In recent years I’ve seen several screen adaptations of Greene’s work, including Our Man in Havana, The Fallen Idol, and, of course, The Third Man. (I would like to see the September 1975 Thames Television adaptation of “Cheap in August,” but it doesn’t look like it’s currently available on mainstream streaming services, or on DVD.)

But I haven’t read him since high school and college, when I went rapidly through The Power and the Glory, A Burnt-Out Case, The Honorary Consul, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, The Human Factor, and his second memoir, Ways of Escape. Clearly I knew to go back for more of his voluminous output, especially two of his most famous novels, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.