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Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography - A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) - two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.
In no sense an autobiography - Those parts of a life most beloved of columnists remain outside the scope of this book - this is a suavely arranged, roughly chronological group of personal essays, most of them previously published: the introductions to the British collected edition of Greene's oeuvre; reportage from international trouble spots (Greene has sought peril as one way of escape from a vaguely defined angst); salutes to two or three friends; plus a few anecdotes and reflections. A book, then, largely for longtime, passionate readers of Greene's novels - who will learn here how he now rates each book, what real-life circumstances did (or didn't) lie behind the fiction, how Greene differs with his critics, which books came easy and which were all torture. (The Confidential Agent was written in six weeks on Benzedrine, as though I were ghosting for another man. ) He is often self-deprecating, especially about the early novels: Here are examples of my style in those days and my terrible misuse of simile and metaphor. He tells how, in the mid-1930s, his writing changed with his desire to be a spectator of history (specifically, then, the theo-political crises in Spain and Mexico). He bridles at the critics' characterization of all Greene locales as Greeneland : 'This is Indochina,' I want to exclaim, 'this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described.' He wearyingly shakes off the label of Catholic writer ( detestable term! ), having found himself used and exhausted by the victims of religion who looked to him for spiritual guidance: I was like a man without medical knowledge in a village struck with plague. (A moving, convincing appreciation of Evelyn Waugh centers on devout EW's pain over Greene's openness to doubt and sympathy for atheism: we inhabited different wastelands. ) And, along with the often-eloquent record of each novel's evolution, there are brief comments on short stories, playwrighting, screenwriting (a mini-sketch of chum Alexander Korda, whose work Greene didn't admire), touchstones (Ford's The Good Soldier), and fame ( A reputation is like a death mask ). But, while all of this hangs together nicely enough as a purely writer's-eye view of a life's work, the pieces which take Greene abroad and sometimes into action - in Malaya, 1950s Vietnam (the French war), Kenya, Haiti - are less satisfying: fragmentary, digressive, politically opinionated, these vignettes often tease without then delivering (a mere passing reference to tea with Ho Chi Minh); and Greene himself pops up in personal situations (smoking opium, frequenting brothels) that hardly jibe with the self-concealing tenor of most of the book. Overall, in fact, the problem here is that this is a consideration of ways of escape with no real sense of what is being escaped from - just the tip of an intriguing, elusive iceberg. Still - the Greene prose is as deceptively clean-cut and subtly ironic as ever; and his own commentaries on the fiction are of course an invaluable complement to the widely divergent opinions of the Marxists, Catholics, and others. So: not the memoir some might hope for - even less a sort of life than A Sort of Life (1971) - but, on its own terms, sufficiently alluring. (Kirkus Reviews)
