(2 of 3)
After describing how he was psychiatrically shriven of fear, at least for the time being, Greene quotes Dr. Freud: "Much is won if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness." Alas, the post-couch Greene found himself afflicted with what he describes as a lifelong case of crushing boredom. Antidotes have included staying more or less drunk during his whole first year at Oxford, as well as a famous incident—described in an earlier literary collection and incorporated almost verbatim into this book—about playing Russian roulette with his brother's revolver. After six attempts, Greene insists he gave up the game, all passion spent. Yet the need to take revolving risks, he adds, was to send him on repeated world travels.
Spiritual Hypochondria. Greene's first published novel, The Man Within, created an archetypal Greene character, the divided man, naturally weak and self-dramatizing, whose other self heavily corrects toward courage and understatement. In A Sort of Life, Greene suggests that this split personality runs through his whole family. It certainly shows in the book. But what provides fascinating ambiguity in fiction is merely troublesome in personal autobiography. Despite his deliberately quiet voice, there is something unconvincingly stagy about Greene's spiritual hypochondria, and about his insistence on the personal angst and failure that he has endured. It is almost as if, like many of his characters, he believes that worldly failure is a sign of God's grace and is trying to impress Someone other than the reader.
Paradoxically, as an autobiographer Greene is better at emotional reticence than at revelation. Without much discussion he mentions that he has been deeply influenced by dreams. He keeps a dream diary and simply asserts that on several occasions in dreams he has witnessed events—including a specific ship sinking in the Irish Sea—which, he later learned, occurred at the moment he was dreaming them. He barely mentions his marriage to a Catholic girl named Vivien Dayrell-Browning, except as the events affected his need to find both work and religion. Greene's conversion to Catholicism began at age 22. In discussing it he is the soul of brevity. To begin with, he did not believe in God at all. He took instruction from a former actor turned priest—part of whose penance was abstinence from theatrical productions. Philosophic proofs and arguments had little effect on him, but suddenly he found himself able to believe. After that Greene says, saying it all, nothing in the world "could seem impossible."