A SORT OF LIFE - Book review

Graham Greene’s autobiography A Sort of Life came in two parts; this is part one, sort of, published in 1971.

It is evident from his books that he was observant and had a good memory. He reflects upon a photograph of him aged ‘about four, and I wore a pinafore and had fair curls falling around the neck... while I still have the ambiguity of undetermined sex’ (p14).

His uncle Graham lived to a ripe age of 92; ‘the first sign of his approaching end was when my old aunts while undressing him removed a toe with his socks’ (p17).

He recalled playing Fly Away, Jack, Fly Away, Jill with a piece of sticking-plaster on his father’s finger’ (p19). My father played the same ‘magic’ game, though used Peter and Paul instead of Jack and Jill; I later played it with our grandchildren when they were young. His father died in 1942 while Greene was in Sierra Leone ‘running ineffectually a one-man office of the Secret Service’ (p20).

‘The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching’ (p40). I tend to agree.

He admits that he hated the gym. ‘I was very bad at gymnastics and all life long my instinct has been to abandon anything for which I have no talent; tennis, golf, dancing, sailing, all have been abandoned, and perhaps it is only desperation which keeps me writing’ (p48).

Greene was born in 1904 and in 1926 was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Years later, when he spoke to the Pope, he was told ‘Some parts of all your books will always offend some Catholics. You should not worry about that’ (p58).

In his early days he suffered from chronic boredom. Why he couldn’t assuage it with a good book is anybody’s business! To disperse it once he resorted to going to the dentist and complaining of serious toothache that could only be relieved by an extraction. He lost a perfectly good tooth. (p113).

There are several examples of his observations; where he coldly analyses and interprets life going on. ‘I watched and listened...There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’ (p134).

His first book The Man Within (1929) was a modest success but didn’t set the world alight. And yet ‘Nothing in a novelist’s life can equal that moment – the acceptance of his first book’ (p139). Even so, subsequent books fared even less well. ‘I could have no foreboding of the failures and frustrations of the next ten years’ (p139).

In 1928 he would wait for a response from the publisher. The first time he’d waited nine months for a refusal. Yet ‘uncertainty was more agreeable to live with than the confirmation of failure’ (p139).

He makes a few observations of interest to writers. ‘For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary; success is only a delayed failure. And it is incomplete... There are faults in his work which he alone detects... like a skilled intuitive builder he can sniff out the dry rot in the beams. How seldom has he the courage to dismantle the whole house and start again’ (p156).

When he was still learning, he had a kind of epiphany. ‘Now I can see quite clearly where I went wrong. Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn’t be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm – little else. Even an adjective slows the pace or tranquillizes the nerve’ (p145).

He fleetingly examines some of his published work up to when he was about twenty-seven. The rest has to wait for part two, Ways of Escape.

Graham Greene died in 1991, aged 86.