(5 of 9)
After he tried to run away from home, when he was 16, he was sent to London to be psychoanalyzed. He lived at his analyst's house—"delightful months . . . perhaps the happiest of my life." It is doubtful whether they were happy months for the analyst. Graham emerged from psychoanalysis "correctly oriented . . . but wrung dry." He felt bored, and he stayed bored a long time.
Russian Roulette. At 17, he tried the most drastic cure for boredom he could think of: Russian roulette. He put a bullet in a revolver, spun the chambers, then put the muzzle to his head and pulled the trigger. "It was a gamble with six chances to one against an inquest." He learned that he could enjoy the world again for a while by risking its total loss. But even toying with life became a bore. The fifth time he tried it, "I wasn't even excited." The sixth time was the last.
He went to Oxford, a tall, gangling taffy-hair of 17. He and Oxford seem to have struck up only a nodding acquaintance, and quickly forgot one another. Greene edited the literary Oxford Outlook, but otherwise slid immemorably through his three years there. He "took a second" (good, but not excellent) in modern history. One of the few people at Oxford who remember him at all is the porter at Balliol ("He lived on Staircase 20, he did"). But the porter is greatly surprised to hear that Greene has made a name for himself.
For six weeks at Oxford, as a prank, Greene was a dues-paying member of the Communist Party. When he found that party membership would not get him a free trip to Moscow, he dropped out. And at Oxford, when he was 20, he published his first book, his only book of poetry. Babbling April owed both its mood and title to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and it was pretty frail stuff.* The really big thing that happened to Greene at Oxford was meeting Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a dark, pretty girl with a flawless complexion, and a Roman Catholic.
After Oxford, Greene's main idea was to get away from England. He took a job with a tobacco company because it promised three years in China. But he never got there. Next he tried tutoring a small boy, but that lasted only a few weeks: "I don't particularly like small boys, and I had forgotten all my Latin." So then he proposed to Vivien, and she accepted him. Then he got a job with the Nottingham Journal, without pay, "just for the experience." But his prospective marriage confronted Greene with a deeper problem than the one of making a living. During the winter of 1926, he became a Roman Catholic.
Home to Innocence. Greene took his instruction from a priest named Father Trollope. For three months, he argued his uncertainties almost daily. "Riding on trams in winter past the Gothic hotel, the super-cinema, the sooty newspaper office where one worked at night, passing the single professional prostitute trying to keep the circulation going under the blue and powdered skin, one began slowly, painfully, reluctantly to populate heaven." A few weeks after Greene completed his instruction, he and Vivien were married by Father Trollope.