Over the past couple of years I have been reading my way through Graham Greene’s novels. I am not doing this in any systematic way, but I pick them up in charity shops from time to time when I see them. Last year, or possibly the year before, I found a collection of them in the Oxfam Bookshop in Keswick. Included in the ones I purchased was A Sort of Life which is an autographical account of the author’s childhood and early adulthood – he finishes it at the time that his first book is published. I have a hardback edition, published by Book Club Associates in 1972, complete with dustcover. I note that it was previously owned by someone called Percival Turnbull who has written his name on the inside cover.
I do enjoy biographies of authors but it is unusual for me to read one written by the author themselves. Because it is a memoir, the author obviously picks and chooses what he wants us to know and, on occasion, he alludes to events in his future, after the book finishes, which made me want to know more about his later life. The prose is brilliant and very descriptive and the book contains a lot about how he felt about things, and often how he feels about those things at the time of writing when he was in his seventies.
Graham Greene’s father was the headmaster of a boy’s public school. The author and his siblings lived in a house attached to the school and, because they were middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century, they had a very comfortable life with servants to make things easier. The Greene family was a large one and there were many relations, especially maiden aunts, in the vicinity.
The author attended his father’s school as a day pupil and later as a boarder. He was bullied and desperately unhappy and when he ran away he was taken out of school and had psychological help. He later developed what the author calls lifelong boredom but which we would call depression, I think, and he took extreme risks to find some excitement in his life, including playing Russian Roulette with his father’s revolver. After university his first book was accepted for publication and he thought that he had found what he would do for the rest of his life but, he tells us, he wrote nothing worth publishing for the next ten years which were very difficult for him – he doesn’t share the details with the reader in this book.
An autobiography, or memoir, is about what the author felt and experienced, and what he remembers. This book is good at showing you the author’s view of his childhood and early manhood. I enjoyed it a lot and will now shelve it with my small collection of biographies of authors.
Anne Is Reading 