Customer Reviews

A Sort of Life

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Greene is a master of understatment and restraint. This book is a lovely if self-effacing coming-of-literary-age memoir that is fun and reader friendly. It's invaluable for its precious glimpses into the vanished world of the 10's and 20's England. Full of curious detail too: I didn't know that Greene was related to R.L. Stevenson for example. The book ends just around the time of his first literary success. I don't know if there are any further memoirs but I wouldn't mind reading them.

is for the empowered; the powerless use hyperbole. Aristocratic Greene understates. He promises, in his introduction, to relate the events of his life with emotions he felt at the time without irony, but his detatchment to events in his own life makes it impossible for him to keep his pledge. Irony is his lens on the world, and he must see through it, darkly, or grope blindly. Pain comes through--the pain of childhood, pain of attending school where his father was headmaster, pain of academic boredom long after he'd outgrown it, pain of rootlessness, many failures--as if he were betrayed by experience itself. His writing, in his two autobiographies, shows the craftsmanship that made him famous, but fails to sparkle like the prose in his fiction, as if he were off-duty. He seems to have embraced Catholicism for the same reason Wordsworth wrote sonnets, for form; it doesn't seem to have been a passion, but perhaps it would have been bad form to say so. Worth reading for insights into his friendships and characters.

My main complaint with this book is that a depressed author does not write a stimulating biography. When all instances in the time period covered by the book are downplayed, the reader loses a sense of what is important. Graham Greene's experimentation with Russian roulette, and a flirtation with foreign espionage are told in an attitude that makes it difficult to sense its importance. Was his spy work unimportant, or was it Greene's ho-hum attitude toward spying coming through. The tint of boredom and failure extends over every aspect of his very fortunate and privileged life. An Oxford education, career editor on the London times, courtship, marriage and a religious convert to Catholicism all seem to be performed robotically without any passion. It definitely is an apt title. The book really does stop short in his career as a successful author. I am unfamiliar with his later writings, but this book mentions the fact that he feels alive when traveling throughout the world's danger spots. In this autobiography, Greene mentioned in later years he would cover a local insurrection in Mexico, and viewed first hand the troubled years in Vietnam, Liberia and the Mau-Mau insurrection. I would rather have skipped this book and read his later works about his experiences. I would recommend this book only to someone interested in the psychological background of Graham Greene.

In this review I am looking for causality. What factors contributed to Graham Greene's greatness? The potpourri that follows is admitedly subjective. Graham grew up in Berkhamsted, England where his father was a head-master at the school. The father was somewhat a failure because he had wanted to become a barrister, and this may have had a shaping effect on Graham. In many ways Graham was a typical youth. For example, he liked toy forts and lead soldiers and collected stamps and coins. But in other ways he was different, and his father must have sensed this because Graham was placed in the transference school of psychotherapy for many years. Graham got along well and was very happy working with his therapist. Graham read many books, and some influenced his later choices for travel and writing. "King Solomon's Mines" influenced his decision to trek across Liberia, and "Montezuma's Daughter" affected his interests in and travel to Mexico. But "The Maneaters of Tsavo" prejudiced him against East Africa for years or until the Mau-Mau Rebellion. This was poor judgment because two male lions (brothers) halted the construction of the Uganda Railroad by terrorizing hundreds of Indian coolies and devouring some 100. The lions almost harvested the Great White Hunter by entering a railroad coach where the the GWH had secreted himself hoping to bag the lions (he did). Graham appears to have possessed a strange attitude toward animals--there were certainly lots of them in Liberia, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and Viet Nam. But Graham had a lifelong pathological fear of moths, and he reveals that while stationed in Sierra Leone he counted 100 flies he had killed. Dreams were very important to Graham, and he had rather frequent fainting spells, leading to a diagnosis of epilepsy, later apparently negated. Graham experienced bullying at a boarding school. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and often thought of suicide. He determined to write and to become somebody. Off to Oxford and greater familiarity with alcohol--he was often drunk from dawn until dusk. Alcohol was frequently mentioned in many of his novels. There was a great deal of mental illness on both sides of his family, and he began to show manic-depressive symptoms. He had a morbid fear of boredom that contributed to his travels. He drifted into some useless jobs, but began to write novels, one published. He got a job with The Times and was very happy there. He met his future wife, Vivien through her criticizing one of his film reveiws. Vivien was a Roman Catholic, and this undoubtedly contributed to his often emphasized conversion. Catholicism entered strongly into some of his novels as all GG readers know. He continued to write novels, some accepted for publication, some rejected. "The Man Within," usually considered his first published novel was actually his third. Strangely, his earlier novels sold more copies than did many of his later ones. Nevertheless, Graham had feelings of failure and of lurking madness accompanied by swelling of the brain. The autobiography ends with a jump of 20 years onto the future and his smoking opium with friends in Bangkok. "The smell of opium is more agreeable than the smell of success."

Graham Greene mentions that the title was inspired by the fact that he has spent as much time in the world of writing and his characters as he has in real life. Why this was a recommended memoir in a 'best book' anthology is beyond me, except that it is short and eschews the long-winded reflections of some writers who feel compelled to describe every detail of their lives. This volue traces the author's life to about the age of 29 or so, after publication of his first novel. This was not a particular upbeat period in his life; the book sold about 2,500 copies and he still needed a day job. The style, like Greene's novelistic style is pithy, precise, and literary. If you like books that are heavy on the inner life but without much outer life, you might like this meditation on finding your own way with little help.

Glossed over some years quickly but on the whole entertaining. Do I believe the Russian roulette episode, I don't know but then again Greene was one of the foremost novelists of the last century. recommend all of his books as they are true fiction best on real life.