A SORT OF LIFE by Graham Greene. 220 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.
Even the title is pure Greene: low-key, self-deprecating, perfectly descriptive. Indeed, readers hoping for massive disclosures about the author's marriage, love life, experience of miracles, abortive World War II spy career, trip to a leper colony, et al., had best go back again to the novels. This brief autobiographical fragment ends in 1931. Greene was 27 years old at the time, and about to face a decade of relative failure following his early hit with a book called The Man Within. As he writes somewhat archly in the preface, more or less explaining why he stops where he does: "Failure, too, is a kind of death."
Few writers have been so successfully failure-haunted as Greene himself. No novelist, either, has grown so rich or so critically secure by dramatizing spiritual insecurity. A Sort of Life has considerable shortcomings. Yet it makes overwhelmingly clear how Greene the child became creative father to Greene the writer—and to that tortured crew of characters whose rueful collective motto might well read: "With God for a friend, you don't need an enemy."
Russian Roulette. "The first thing I remember," Greene begins, "is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet." He soon progresses from such minishocks to a brief near-caricature of the English literary boyhood—that beautiful, remote mother, for instance, not to mention the wretched loneliness and the usual hatred of the cruel school. In Greene's case, the problem was quadrupled because his Church of England father was headmaster of the Berkhamsted School, where Greene went, and that, he recalls, made him feel like a perpetual "Quisling." By his own account he was surrounded by a busy, broad-gauged, reasonably happy upper-middle-class family life. Yet he seems to have been born—and long remained—constitutionally terrified of a remarkable number of things: of bleeding, drowning and burning, even of moths and horses. Disarmingly, he later also admits that even now he never starts any book without acute fear that he will be unable to finish it.
It is but a step to another sad preoccupation. "Successful suicide," Greene writes, "is often a cry for help that has not been heard in time." With some slight prurience, he describes his schoolboy attempts to cut a vein in his leg, swallow deadly nightshade berries, handfuls of aspirin and, finally, a draft of darkroom hypo—all with no serious results. But when he ran away from school at age 16, his father sent him down to London in 1920 to be psychoanalyzed. The six-month period of analysis, Greene revealingly admits, was the most peacefully pleasant time of his life, along with a brief, comfortable, post-Oxford stint as a subeditor of the London Times. (When he left the Times in 1929 to try a full-time career in fiction, the editors were deeply distressed, not only because of Greene's quality, but because he was the only subeditor within memory who had ever left the paper voluntarily.)