A Sort of Life by Graham Greene

I purchased A Sort of Life from Amazon while I was writing this post for a series on Maclin Horton's blog, Light on Dark Water. I read or re-read five or six novels to prepare for writing the post, and I had planned to read this short biography of Graham's early life, but I ran out of time, and I never got back to it. Greene's novels, especially his four so-called Catholic novels, have as deep a Catholic sensibility as any I have ever read, but although he apparently continued to believe, he most emphatically did not live his faith in his later life which by some accounts was rather sordid. So, I have really wondered if I wanted to read an autobiography. However, when I opened this one, I found that it only covered the first 36 years of his life, so I thought I would give it a try.

What I found was that from the time he started school, Greene's life was fairly miserable. His father was the head of the school he attended and his home was in the same building as the school, but the conditions in the dorm were bleak. From what I've read about English boarding schools, they don't seem to have been unusual, but Greene could not adjust himself to constant noise and crudeness of the boys. Because I know from other reading that there is evidence that his sexuality was perverse, I wondered if something had happened at school to cause this, but he specifically says that the dorms were completely chaste.

One story concerning his time at school was very interesting to me. There were two boys who constantly bullied him and made his life miserable. Later during the war, he met up with one of them, and the man kept talking about what great times they had had together, and how inseparable the three of them had been. He wanted to get together socially to talk about old times. I wonder about this great discrepancy in perceptions and what the real truth of the matter was. Did Greene's mental illness color the way he reacted to the other boys, or had this man just forgotten how bad their behavior was? Maybe a bit of both?

It is probable that much of Greene's misery wasn't caused by the people around him, but from something deep within himself. He talks of his entire life as an attempt to escape from boredom. He was beset by many fears: birds, bats, moth, fire, and ". . . a witch who would lurk at night on the nursery landing by the linen cupboard." He made several unsuccessful and undiscovered suicide attempts, and had a serious breakdown when he was about 16, at which time he ran away and when found, refused to returned to school. At this point, he was put under the care of a psychiatrist with whom he lived for a while, and was eventually diagnosed as manic-depressive. Although he found the therapy very helpful, he later, in an attempt to escape the ever-present boredom, played Russian Roulette with a pistol he had found in his older brother's drawer--six times.

He says little about his wife Vivien in this book, probably because by the time he wrote it they were estranged, but he does talk about how their engagement caused him to investigate the Catholic Church. He says that he did not have any intention of converting, but was only trying to learn something about the faith; however, the more he learned from the priest, the more convinced he became that what he was hearing was true.

I would not recommend this book to anyone who is not really interested in Green for some reason. It is very dark, and has a hopeless feel to it.

AMDG