A Sort of Life

by Graham Greene

"Writing A Sort of Life...was in the nature of a psychoanalysis. I made a long journey through time, and I was one of my characters." - Graham Greene in conversation with Marie-Francoise Allain

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Autobiography, Biography Memoir, British Literature, Unfinished

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book, starting at the cottage of a successful local architect - the designer of my Mom's new library building - being then every bit as bipolar as Greene, in alas, the unmedicated summer of 1974.

I finished it off quickly at home, deeply impressed.

Already a Greene freak, I loved his dour manner and sour quodlibets. For that was me, when medicated. I thought I could beat that system.

I was wrong, cause I was not on meds. I was like Richard Gere trying to fly in Mr. Jones. I will tell you how I saw that, that sultry summer:

My onetime amigo Bob - Bob B. was a regular in my life that year at the Department of Apiculture, where both of us worked - had offered to accompany me to singles lounges. Like most cities, ours had lots.

They were scattered across the river in what was called Hull back then, in Quebec. The wrong side of the tracks, a disco haven. Bob, parachuting into the office I shared with superannuated Miss Sparks, confided slyly that he had the gift of pickup.

He bored me. Having nil couth, in fact Bob had the gift of instantly alienating any and all single gals we would meet. Jumpy as a mink - and psychotic like me, coming from a broken home - he worked up his appetite by doing Hot Knives before leaving his apartment.

But that stuff made me absurdly paranoid - in spades.

There's no fool like a young fool, though, and when he suggested an outing with the afore-mentioned architect's daughter's boyfriend, I smelled a rat but agreed.

I was right. Bob and my bro said it was all cool, meaning, in hippy lingo that the Heat was not a problem. And it was a Hippy Home a!right. Nestled in a sleepy nearby village, it was part of a Boys' Night In the velvet underground, if you understand me.

Immediately blitzed there, I sweated nervously, froze up and bolted. In an unmedicated and misanthropic bipolar haze I wandered the streets of Kemptville. But my amigos were dazed in their cozy underground.

For hours it seemed, though I know full well how my sense of time stalls when that strange fit comes over me - yet my bro at least wasn’t born yesterday. When the two of them arrived they did an in situ curtage and reasoned I was having a bad trip. Hippy parlance for freaked out.

In the book Graham Greene, Bipolar Catholic, his biographer writes that Greene had as many bad (bipolar and opium) trips too.

Here he covers them up, paranoid as I. But my hands were empty, dead to rights. I was not a fast-thinking Graham Greene for I was and am just plain Green.

We’re regaled in a Sort of Life (by soi-même) with facts of his accomplishments and (of course, sex-fuelled and mad) acts of bravery which he trumpets.

Or were they just foolhardiness?

Just like my homophobic drug trip in Kemptville, maybe, was identical to Greene’s bipolar storms within his unending dark liaisons?

Now that I’ve learned my lesson with my meds, I’ll never know, except in realizing Greene’s efforts were unholy efforts toward sublimation.

But I don’t care! For these days I relax a bit -

For while medicated my sickness is surpassed…

And I am become an aged clock-watcher judiciously timing his meds.

[Georgia Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the great dinner party where we choose our guests from the living and the dead, relatives aside, I'd have writers on the list. John le Carre would be there to tell the stories he saved and never wrote. Others, too, for their robust appetites in all things. Think Hemingway and Colette. Greene, too, though he is difficult to place and seating plans are a must. Then, there's the problem of guests wandering. It's not the cognac in the kitchen that I'd worry about. Invite writers and expect them to drink. It's other things that I'd dread Greene coming across. I keep my knives sharp. There are no loaded guns but . . . .

To those that claim "Intelligent people are never bored," read Greene. And when you plan your own great dinner party, remember some guests, like him, don't do bored willingly.

[Mark Porton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've had mixed experiences with Graham Greene. As a "veteran" of three books now, this was by far the dullest. This memoir, had me thinking of other things I should be doing or reading. I gave it a good shake, but at 50% it beat me. DNF.

[Geevee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this very enjoyable and also revealing. Graham Greene writes, in this his "sort of" autobiography, with his usual fluidity that certainly maintained this reader's interest. He delves into the early years of his life up to c1930 with disarming, and at times alarming, honesty and insight as he moves from his school days to his first steps into the world of work and as a published author.

The pages flow but the reader is not left untroubled as there is talk of masters at school enjoying punishing boys, physically and likely sexually, and his loneliness and dislike of much of school life. His years at university resemble many memoirs of Oxford or Cambridge at this time, as he goes up to Balliol [Oxford] and grapples with extremes of excitement, and lust to great boredom, and much drinking. More disturbing revelations are his descriptions in playing Russian Roulette; and not just a single occasion. These descriptions are sharp and excruciating in detail suggesting real mental health concerns.

He dabbles next with tutoring but is clear he does not want to end up in teaching. As such he moves back to London working for The Times. Again, this period is interesting as he describes characters and events, at the paper, including getting the newssheet out during the General Strike of 1926. He also explains and explores his attempts to write and move to being a published author, which involves leaving The Times - where he describes a fascinating process in leaving with various interviews and counter-offers. This leads to his long and at many times financially straightened life with his young wife trying to get published and then keep to the publisher's requirement of three books that sell for profit. His late twenties and thirties, like his early years, beckon to be as interesting; as indeed we know from his later career during WWII and after.

I am quite sure that no author would today write such an open and explicit - in respect of suicidal thoughts and attempts - and yet because of this Greene's book is a fine tour of his life and his mind.

Recommended for readers who enjoy Graham Greene, depictions of pre-WWII English middle-class life and general autobiographies.

My copy was a faithful 1972 Book Club Associates hardback copy of the 1971 hardback Bodley Head first edition.

[Zoeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still to find anything from Graham Greene even remotely, even marginally disappointing. I pray to God that never happens and I am also secretly assured of my belief in that truism. "A Sort Of Life" gets overlooked, in the light of the much more comprehensive and illustrious "Ways Of Escape" which details, with equal candour, wit and deep insight, all of his travels, experiences and inspirations throughout his long and literally tireless life as a writer and chronicler of twentieth century's most devastating moral spiritual and geo-political conundrums. And I have read most reviews here on Goodreads complaining that while this slim, concise memoir is as elegantly written and compulsively readable as anything by Greene, it ends suddenly with him having enjoyed a brief initial success with the publication of his first properly finished novel and then facing the prospect of inevitable failure in the years after that. What they all must have failed to notice was that Greene himself had added the disclaimer that this is not a complete auto-biography and is concerned primarily with his childhood, boyhood, adolescence, youth and bare beginnings as possibly the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century, in my opinion at least.

And what a sort of life it turns out to be indeed. Beginning from the mesmerising and mellow descriptions of his childhood and his large, illustrious family, known to all as the ubiquitous Greenes, from his earliest experiences and sensations, the vivid childhood dreams and haunting nightmares, the small joys and fears right down to the boyish exhilaration of the first ever books he read and the games he played, they all form an enjoyable, effortlessly charming first act of this condensed, lucid book. Greene takes us on a whirlwind, dizzying tour of faces, memories, incidents, experiences and impressions recorded indelibly in his mind and any one who has already immersed herself or himself in even a substantial part of the writer's work would soon recognize the unmistakable influence of all these incidents and experiences in his fiction.

But this being a work of Greene, it is only a matter of time before we step into darker, grimmer realities and this begins as he chronicles his painful boyhood in school, tormented by bullies in the dark of the dormitory and the first ever stirrings of suicidal despair lurking in his soul. One almost feels the sky darken with pitch-black clouds as Greene confides perversely how, in the dark of the night, he would contemplate cutting open his knee and one feels equally thrilled and piqued with intrigue as he sets out on his truant escapes from the stifling boredom and the oppressive company of other boys to read his favourite books in the cover of the foliage in the countryside, only to be discovered and then destined to "heal" himself with psycho-analysis.

And so, we continue to follow him to the more easily recognizable and more-talked-about episodes of his eventful but never peaceful life. There is the first stirring of an unabashed yearning full of love and sexual desire for a woman; there is the subsequent despair leading to his first ever tryst with the danger of death, those attempts at Russian Roulette that he has chronicled more than once in both his memoirs and his fiction, leaving behind a permanent inclination of being on the dangerous edge of things. There is his inescapable habit of aimless wandering and drifting, the mundane monotony of his initial attempts to find work, his isolated exile in Nottingham which would also influence him when writing one of his later novels and finally, through it all, his own relentless struggle to write a proper novel that would find some day the fortune of being published...

The final chapters of the book take us to even more intriguing episodes of his life - his initially reluctant conversion to Catholicism which grew out of his earnest desire to understand the faith of his about-to-be wife Vivien and his own present-day thoughts and doubts about the same, his apprenticeship in the Times, forsaking which he still regretted and finally, the failure to which his early books were condemned and the constant sense of uncertainty that lingered over his livelihood. And through it all, not for once does the standard of skilled writing and nuanced, perceptive storytelling ever dip. Greene frequently does not get enough credit for writing the equally impressive travelogues, short stories, essays, film reviews and even memoirs apart from his novels but "A Sort Of Life" reminds us of all the reasons why he was such a consummate writer and such a gifted raconteur of an almost inexhaustible supply of stories that were built from his own exciting (to an outsider) and eventful life.

The prose is lucid and yet honest and unambiguous; the descriptions of experiences, sensations, sights, smells and sounds are vivid and evocative; the rich themes of aging, distortion of memory, nostalgia and retrospection on past failure, love, friendship and family are infused organically to thicken the autobiography into something even more substantial and true to the expectations, that we have now habitually had from him, it makes for a most delightful, genuinely compassionate and tenderly moving piece of work.

[Smiley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This is Graham Greene's first memoir, the second being "Ways of Escape" (Vintage 2002), in which I enjoyed reading 40 years ago. I still like its paperback copy with brownish paper and hope to reread it as a tribute due to my respect after reading his excerpt from "The Power and the Glory" (chosen by TIME magazine in 2005 as one of the hundred best English novels since 1923: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Powe...) assigned to study in one of our literature courses in 1969; mysteriously, I recall I had never heard/known his fame as a great novelist, no one introduced him to me, therefore, I had to find out myself who he was and possibly why we should read him or be familiar with one of his novels.

Unfortunately, I certainly need a new copy to reread because the mentioned copy seemingly delicious to a few white ants was systematically devoured from the cover down to page 48 like a round shallow 2-inch wide well-like hole, I didn’t know when they did their ugly operation like that. However, I still keep it and in the meantime try to write something on some interesting sentences I underlined, for instance:

… I always enjoyed his teaching, … , he opened my eyes to the importance of precision in my own language as well. (p. 79)

The experience of a long life may possibly increase one’s intuition of human character, … (p. 121)

Never again, I swore, would I read a novel of Conrad’s – a vow I kept for more than a quarter of a century, until I found myself with Heart of Darkness in a small paddle boat travelling up a Congo tributary in 1959 from one leper colony to another. (p. 172)

I also found these quote-like, a kind of tip-of-thought sentences worth pondering:

The influence of early books is profound. (p. 37)

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. (p. 107)

I was only saved by failure. ( p. 165)

And some of his interesting anecdotes:

In my dream I found a book for which I had long been searching on a particular shelf, and so in the morning, before I had breakfast, I walked down the street to see whether my dream might prove true. I was disappointed, the book was not there, ... I inquired after the manager whom I remembered well: he had died the year before, and I suppose the new manager had changed whatever was the source of the smell which had so long haunted my imagination. ( pp. 57-58)

Boredom seemed to swell like a balloon inside the head; it became a pressure inside the skull: sometimes I feared the balloon would burst and I would lose my reason. Then, if it were not term-time, I would beg my brother Raymond to take a train with me to London, an hour away ... We would have lunch in a restaurant in Soho ... and walk down Charing Cross Road looking at the second-hand books. I was soothed by the movements of the crowd and the hard resistance of the pavement under my feet. ... (p. 94)

Time since I left Oxford had moved slowly as the unemployed bands of those days, shifting, with hands spread out, along a pavement edge: the British-American Tobacco Company, the tutoring in the Pennies, the long evening hours on the Journal with little to do, the five hundred words a day on a novel which I was half aware belonged to the past and would never be published. ... (p. 139)

And some words probably newly-coined, uniquely-expressed we might have never read anywhere before:

I was still so heartfree that I could wonder, with cynical amusement, how long it would be before her emotions began to be transferred towards our bizarre and spotty analyst. (p. 81)

The doctor opened the door himself, a young Hindu, and showed me into a dingy consulting room where he must have been waiting with eastern patience for the sick to seek him out. (p. 150)

'There was a band of pea-pickers at he station, a rough-looking man with a wooden leg, his wife (a worn, curiously refined woman) and his three children, two girls of about six and four, and a boy who could not have been more than two. ( p. 169)

Enjoy!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like many British authors, Graham Greene was as interesting or maybe even more so than his novels and stories. This is apparent in the first volume of his biography "Sort of Life". Everyone should read this if they want to lead a life in the arts, for Greene was a man of many talents just as Maugham or Golding or Clavell. It is so refreshing to read an author who did not retreat to the ACADEMIC trenches to catch his breath. Greene helped make the world instead of just observing it.

[Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greene's first volume of memoirs covers childhood, schooling, university and his early career as a sub-editor and not particularly successful novelist. Like a lot of autobiographies it's not the most structured bit of writing, and Greene is oddly impersonal and unrevealing about some aspects of his life like his marriage and his conversion to Catholicism. Some interesting stuff about the difficulties of a young writer though, and his frequent failings before eventually becoming successful.
Other than that I learned the following bits of amusing trivia:

1) Greene's father was once had a drink cadged off him in Italy by Oscar Wilde shortly after his release from chokey.
2) Greene speaks highly of E.Nesbit's writings; as did Noel Coward. Perhaps it's time to crack open the Enchanted Castle?
3) Beyond a dalliance with Communism at Oxford in the era of Philby and Maclean, Greene also dabbled with working for German intelligence in the mid 20s. Greene eventually worked for MI6 in the 30s (though this volume ends in 1929).
4) He became briefly fascinated with playing Russian Roulette as a young man, an addiction to putting himself in recklessly dangerous situations which he never really overcame and he believes led to later adventures in Haiti and Indochina.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder what Graham Greene intended with the choice of title for this short autobiographical work. A Sort of Life certainly begins with childhood days, but it ends when he finally succeeds in publishing a novel in his early twenties. Furthermore, Greene is quite selective in what he chooses to write about, often magnifying something somewhat trivial, and then minimalizing an item of greater significance. But whatever he incorporates, his candor and honesty are undeniable.

The Greene family tree sprouted numberless branches. The clan was awash with numerous grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. In Graham’s own family, there were six children, and though quirky more than dysfunctional, they were nevertheless quite close-knit.

One thing was clear: formal education was not for Graham. His main preoccupation throughout his younger schooling days was truancy, devising increasingly creative ways to miss long or frequent spells of classroom education. This was all the more stunning since his own father taught at the school Graham attended. In one instance, he faked a serious but invented illness for such a long time, that one of his teachers expressed sympathetic wishes to Graham’s astonished father, who had no idea of his son’s escapades.

Graham’s periods of depression led to suicide attempts—that’s “attempts” plural. As well as overdosing on easily accessible domestic medications, Graham introduced himself to Russian roulette with a real gun and live ammunition. He practiced this terrifying, high-risk gamble several times, describing it in bland, understated language. Upon discovery of his antics, his father paid what cannot have been easily affordable funds to send Graham for analysis and private education for a couple of years. It’s not clear what good that did, but it did enable Graham to ultimately enter Oxford University at age 18. There, instead of suicide, he spiraled into alcoholism, spent much of the time under the influence, but graduated with a degree in History.

After a few years of job-hopping, Graham landed a journalism job as sub-editor at The Times, which he enjoyed over several years, and which also afforded him time to try his hand at writing novels. After a couple of false starts, he published his first novel, The Man Within, at age 25, the success of which secured him enough funding for the next two years to opt for becoming full-time novelist. Still, another two unremarkable novels preceded the one that assured his success. Stamboul Train was published in 1932 when Greene was only 28 years, and it secured his future as a novelist.

Graham Greene chose to end this short autobiography at this point, having teasingly only touched on other major life-changing events, namely, conversion to Catholicism and marriage. Notwithstanding, A Sort of Life is a remarkable book, filled with honest, intimate revelations and generous amounts of humor, especially in his childhood years. Greene has written several other autobiographical works, and I look forward to reading those—as well as his other novels—to fill in the remaining gaps of his life.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many years of writing dreadful novels has turned Graham Greene into an excellent writer. That's the message that I got from this autobiography. His career was a triumph of hard work over lack of natural ability.

This autobiography confirms my opinion that Graham Greene is a person I dislike. At least, the person in this autobiography is an irritating little squirt, prone to lying, prone to distorted rationalising, prone to manufacturing motives to account for his half-baked actions in a half-remembered past.

He would put his childhood mistakes down to youthful zest and inexperience, but I just don't like the person he portrays. He is so self-obsessed, so superior, and so shallow in his self-awareness.

He admits he was a plagiarist - in his early twenties - in order to win a scholarship, but it is all OK because the person giving him the award was an old boy from the school where his father was headmaster. Sheesh!

He scabs for the bosses in the General Strike, and fights against the poor, hungry strikers, but it is all OK, because he is young and it is all a game to him.

He converts to Catholicism, but has a hard time of it, because atheism seemed the correct philosophical point of view, but that's irrelevant to him. As a man of sixty-six he no longer cares about the truth. Which is the way I feel about everything that Graham Greene ever wrote. It is all a pack of lies, but I don't really care any more.

So he says he is a manic-depressive, but he denies that his fainting fits were of an epilectic origin. He doesn't want to be thought of as an epileptic, because he doesn't think epileptics have a right to procreate. Somehow manic-depressives are OK. But of course, he wasn't a manic-depressive at all. He is just trying to shock the reader.

He says that he can't remember any anecdotes of the rich and famous. Does anyone really believe him, because he does a good line in name-dropping throughout the book - Kenneth Tynan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinburne, etc?

His explanations for most things he does - or rather, pretends to do - sound feasible enough, but don't really bare any great scrutiny.

Does that mean that the book is bad? Not at all, but it does mean that I have no particular interest in reading it.

I am almost the same age as Graham Greene was when he wrote this autobiography. No, I won't call it an autobiography, it is just a story. It is so unreliable.

As I get older I get more and more begrudging with my praise. Maybe, I will read some more Graham Greene - Brighton Rock, perhaps - and try to be a little more appreciative.

Oh well. I'm off on my jolly old motor-bicycle and I will wait for the metaphorical tigers to growl at me.

[Pollo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aburrido, o quizás común, debería ser el adjetivo usado para describir, por lo menos, la primera mitad de esta autobiografía. Una infancia sin sobresaltos, el aterrador colegio, la monótona pero necesaria universidad (Greene pasó por Oxford y creo que nunca mencionó qué estudió, además de señalar que se pasó todo un año borracho) y las estaciones de paso predecibles y obligatorias en la carrera del escritor del siglo XX: la prensa local, el viaje a París ¿No leí ya esto en El pez en el agua, Vivir para contarla, Mucha suerte con harto palo etc.?

Pero lo que cuenta en la vida son los detalles. Y son algunos de estos los que me hicieron disfrutar de este texto: el robo de libros desde la infancia (difícil no sentirse identificado), el hastío escolar, las situaciones absurdas (con su sicólogo y con el Papa), la constante "tentación del fracaso" - no en vano hay extractos del diario del inglés- y el hartazgo de todo: desde los primeros seudointentos de suicidio, el gusto por el alcohol y jugar a la ruleta rusa; en suma, el supremo aburrimiento que es lo que nos hace leer, tal vez escribir y al autor, según confiesa, lo llevó sin experiencia práctica de África, a embarcarse en un absurdo y arriesgado viaje a través de Liberia "(...) a Tabasco durante la persecución religiosa, a una leprosería en El Congo, a la reserva Kikuyu durante la insurrección Mau-Mau, a la Malaya convulsionada y a la guerra francesa del Vietnam" (p. 121). No en vano la segunda parte de sus memorias se llama Vías de escape. Una vida más, un autor más. Pero no me cansa.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greene is a good enough writer to make just about anything interesting. Which comes in handy here, because otherwise this book would be unbearable. Greene has inexplicably (at least to me) decided to make an autobiography that chronicles only the first third (and for my money, the least interesting) part of his life. Nor does he paint for the reader a very flattering picture of himself. As a young man, he was weak and often ill (both mentally and physically), suicidal, utterly pessimistic, irresponsible, and a host of other things besides. Even looking back at it all as an old man, Greene still seems to regard both himself and his accomplishments in those early days as failures on myriad different levels, taking a distinct lack of pride in any of his early work. Never have I seen an autobiographer belittle himself so much in his work, yet still come across as something of a snob. Greene occasionally references in passing some or other aspect of his later adulthood that sounds far more interesting than the glimpses we are given of his youth--for example, he later became a secret service agent and traveled much of the globe)--but he doesn't dwell on any of the juicy stuff. Instead, we are mostly treated to insights into the far more mundane parts of his life, and none of these accounts are particularly inspiring or useful, except perhaps in an anthropological sense.

[Yve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in a couple hours today - in my opinion it's like the best part of any autobiography (childhood, adolescence, etc) without the drawn out enumerations of ever career stage that usually burden any artists' memoirs. He jumps around a lot chronologically and there is some reflection on writing and on his novels and plays that he would write much later than the events in this book, but it's nice and brief. I'd read anything written by Graham Greene. There's a lot of weird and funny stories, my favorite being about how, in an afternoon of boredom, he decided to go to the dentist and get a perfectly good tooth pulled under ether by faking an abscess! There were some things that I knew from reading his other works and forewords and stuff, like how he went into psychoanalysis as a child, but most of it was totally new to me, though not at all uncharacteristic. It's also crazy to think how much the university experience was changed, because Greene basically admits to getting his scholarship and degree with lots of help from plagiarism. It was so easy back then! Despite pretty constant morbidity (typical Greene) it falls on the lighter side of his work and, like any of his novels or short stories, gave me even more insight into his character.

[Mark F · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Memory is like a long broken night," writes Graham Greene, in his sometimes poetic, often navel-gazingish autobiography. I mean sure, an autobio is supposed to gaze hard and fast at the belly, like some Japanese warrior in the final moments before sepuku, but it means that sometimes the anecdotes drip with irrelevance. At the same time, some of the stories from Greene's youth are so beautifully and touchingly rendered to make it worthwhile...if you're in the right mood.

"As I write, it is as though I am waking from sleep continually to grasp at an image which I hope may drag in its wake a whole intact dream, but the fragments remain fragments, the complete story always escape."

I like how Greene describes how we try to make sense of things (Didion once similarly described nonfiction as the 'imposition of a narrative line on disparate images'):

" And the motive for recording these scraps of the past? It is much the same motive that has made me a novelist: a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity. We cannot love others, so the theologians teach, unless in some degree we can love ourselves, and curiosity too begins at home."

[Jordan St. Stier · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rather dull, meandering book that did not go anywhere. It was rather hard to follow, and seemed to drift from year to year without much distinction. It was rather short, thank heavens, and as a result, did not drive me to overthrow a monarchy somewhere in the World, but was interesting in how it catalogued his life through various different eras of it, and how it seemed to have a stiff timelessness of his general annoyance towards society. Some parts were amusing, but, most were quite dull and not easy to follow.

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greene's sort of autobiography reads like a Somerset Maugham novel, at least in its first half. It shows a very complex, confused child, suicidal even. His adventures with Russian roulette were particularly unnerving. The second half, which I found more engaging, deals with his struggles between regular work and writing. The last chapter is recommended reading for anyone who intends to pursue writing full-time.

[Domhnall · Rating 2 out of 5]

This short book describes Greene's childhood and early life. Most of it is banal and he does nothing to enrich the account, or to explain in any meaningful way important choices, notably his conversion to Roman Catholicism. He does little to bring the people around him to life. He closes with a number of works published but without any commercial or artistic success.

He writes about his childhood reading to a level of detail that I find surprising; I have to assume it is true but I suspect that much of his pleasure came from his own imaginative reading rather than the words on the page. [My own childhood reading of approved books was uniformly execrable with the exception of the William stories by Richmal Crompton; I have not yet grown out of them. It was my discovery of unapproved and unsuitable material that made me a serious reader and the novels of Graham Greene were a big influence in my teenage years. Things are better now, not least thanks to Roald Dahl.]

Greene describes his early published writing -a book of poems and four novels - as depressingly unsuccessful and he pins down the reason for this. "A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character alive. There is no spark of life in The Name of Action or Rumour at Nightfall because there was nothing of myself in them. I had been determined not to write the typical autobiographical novels of a beginner, but I had gone too far in the opposite direction." [p147] I would only add that there is not much spark of life in this autobiography for much the same reason: his determination to give as little as possible away, which somewhat undermines the point of the exercise.

He also offers some limited advice on writing technique. "Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn't be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm - little else. Even an adjective slows the pace or tranquillizes the nerve. ... Discrimination in one's words is certainly required, but not love of one's words - that is a form of self-love, a fatal love which leads a young writer to the excesses of Charles Morgan and Lawrence Durrell, and looking back to this period of my life I can see that I was in danger of taking their road. I was only saved by failure." [p143]

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite disappointing. Graham provides glimpses into his childhood and schooling, though marriage and his first several books. He touches on his conversion to Catholicism, but just a bit. He manages to get one up on a school chum who may have wronged him. The disappointment comes from what is not included.

It is incumbent on each writer to include in his or her autobiography at least a chapter describing how he or she writes. Is it plot first? Last chapter first? Based on three good scenes strung together? Putting the butt in the chair and grinding x hours or y pages? This rule holds true for musicians who are expected to discuss their approach to the instrument, doctors their approach to patients, and scientists their approach to experiments. Greene gives away nothing regarding his approach.

He writes very little about the business of being an author beyond being picked up for publishing. Did he read reviews? Court favor with the literati? Seek out the press? Or not? He writes 8,000 books were sold. He should have provided at least a bit more economic detail other than this is not enough sales to live on for a decade.

Greene is famous for his "social" life. Again, he gives away nothing. He writes almost nothing about his first wife, his courtship, his desire for women, and nothing about his thoughts on children or his wandering eye. Writing at age 67, one would think he would have gained the perspective necessary to provide some wisdom. He does not.

Greene does not mention much about his literary influences. He says he avoided reading Conrad for many years, but not why. He recommends J.D. Beresford's "The Hampdenshire Wonder" which is perfectly terrible. Greene had to be messing with people, just to see who really read his book.

Probably a better editor could have helped him out.

[Krishna Anujan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to like this book. I have liked Graham Greene's fiction in the past - Journey without Maps and Travels with my aunt were heartwarming and witty. But this memoir didn't go down easy and I found many parts just not very relatable or interesting.
There were definitely parts that shone through a beautiful inner world and an admirable self-awareness - where he talks of the long winding road of being a writer beyond the "break" of a first book. The admission in the beginning that he wants to render his memoir not in a sense of irony belittling his past self but owning it - was also a gem of a thought. And for these, I give it 2 stars.
But beyond this, I found myself uninterested in the details of his life. Many people and events in his world were so specific and needed much more explanation for me than I was willing to loook up. I was tempted to give it one more star because I read a beautiful hard bound copy with large lettering, with pages that smelled good. But the merit of this does not go to the author.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

The young Greene comes across as strange and troubled; not surprising, really. There's the game of Russian roulette on the common, the term at Oxford spent drunk at all times, and the conversion to Catholicism. Right at the end, two brilliant pieces of writing advice I shall treasure:

"Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps a rhythm--little else. Even an adjective slows the pace or tranquillizes the nerve."

"Discrimination in one's words is certainly required, but not love of one's words..."

[David Highton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written when he was 66, this book covers his life until his mid-twenties when his first book is published, including his conversion to Catholicism prior to his marriage. Clearly the work of a very good writer, it describes a loneliness despite being part of a large family and a young man for whom therapy proved very useful. An interesting introspection.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and well written picture of a world now long gone but residual in our memories. Written in 1971 and probably borrowed from my parents.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heart-wrenching, discouraging, and sometimes sordid pretty well sums up this first of two autobiographies by the great Graham Greene. ‘A sort of life’ recounts his early life—his monotonous days at school, his early terrors, his various attempts to kill himself, his failure as a writer after his first published novel, and his conversion to Catholicism. Be warned, it’s not a pleasant read; but it provides invaluable insight on Greene and his ‘war on boredom,’ a subject that many can relate too.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something both interesting as well as untrustworthy about the memoirs of writers.  On at least some level, this is due to the Heisenburg effect, in that the mere act of reflecting on something changes it, whether that is inside of us or outside of us.  Memories are unreliable, and even the most attentive person is not always a fair judge of their own motivations or achievements.  Even so, this is a generally enjoyable book to read as someone who shares a certain Greenean approach to writing and reading "sort of" or "of sort" works [1].  While there is something cringy about the way that this book serves a very personal look into the life of Greene, especially his youth, it is certainly a great deal more lively and more enjoyable than many of his works, even if it demonstrates the sort of cynicism that one would expect directed at himself.  Even so, if you are a reader and you want to read a life of a writer and get some sense as to the precariousness of the even the most successful writers' lives, there is much insight to be found here.

The book itself is a bit more than 200 pages and looks at the period of Greene's life from birth (including a look at his family history a couple of generations) to the period after his surprise success with the novel "The Man Within," which led to a couple of unsuccessful follow-ups until finding success again with Stamboul Train.  The book does include some rich details of the sort that readers of Greene's life will appreciate, including the importance of his schooling, his struggle with bipolar disorder that led him to play Russian Roulette several times with his brother's pistol, his hopeless crush on his younger siblings' engaged governess that led him to write some truly dreadful poetry that publicly embarrassed her because it was read on the radio, and his years of bullying at the hands of a classmate.  The author also talks about his ineffectual attempts to find suitable work as a journalist and his courtship that led to his conversion to Catholicism.  In general, one thinks of the author as not being all that unlike many other writers in terms of the raw material of his life.  I must say that if I took to writing a memoir of the same kind as the author did, that there would be a great deal of overlap, and I suspect many readers will feel the same.

This leads, of course, to some very natural conclusions.  Is it that people who become well-regarded writers have a great deal worse experiences than others, or is it simply that the tragedies of hopeless love, of mental illness, of bullying and abuse, of philosophical and religious crises, and of a struggle to find an honorable place in this earth are common and that only a few are able to turn that into something worthwhile and lasting.  I suppose that is a question for the reader to ponder and muse about, because it is clear that the late author mused about these matters as well, obsessed with failure, immensely critical about the quality of his own work and resolute in his need to write with an authentic personal voice, and sure that his writings would not be remembered as so many previous authors had been forgotten after their own bestsellers.  This book is no romanticized look at the life and upbringing of an author, but given the writings of Graham Greene, should we expect anything like that from him?

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/an-i...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkably revealing. I haven't enjoyed an autobiography this much in quite some time. Graham Greene provides a frank history of his early years up to the time of his first successful novel, The Man Within, and the immediate aftermath of failure and then the legal problems arising out of Stamboul Train. The book itself is filled with passages expressing wit, irony, melancholy, excitement, and failure, all reflective of the somewhat troubled and manic-depressive life of Greene.

There is something of a unique style to this work. Greene avoids a strictly linear description of his life. Instead, he offers passages and sections that are entirely associative in his memory. Thus the reader not only discovers about the books that interested him as a child and young man but incidents he later saw as populating his fiction--although he claims to have been unaware of it at the time of his writing.

Too, there are especially interesting notes towards the end. Greene learned much from his initial lack of success. And he describes what amounts to a guideline for writing that rejected the imitative failures he produced for Doubleday and Hienemann following the surprise success of The Man Within.

There is much atmosphere and mood to his description of working at The Times as a sub editor. And it is equally appealing to see his descriptions of working with his editors at Heinemann and Doubleday. This was the heyday of the novel, a literary age that is all but unrecognizable to the contemporary world. The Western world itself, of course, was much more literary. Newspapers provided for the immediacy of news, while novels and magazines devoted to short stories outpaced even the motion pictures as a venue for entertainment and enlightenment. And Greene was there in its midst, almost failing. So near was he to doing so that he came close to accepting a teaching appointment at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The book ends on his meeting with his friend, the department chair at the university, who offered him the job. It is some twenty years later, and Greene remarks upon the man's once promising career as a poet, which he allowed to slip away because of initial failures, leading to his exile in Siam. Only by the surprise success of Stamboul Train did Greene himself escape the same fate.

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written when he was 66, this is a reflection on the author's early life up to the unsuccessful aftermath of his first novel, 'The Man Within', published when he was 25. He ascribes his motive for writing the memoir as: "a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity." This curiosity is principally about himself and how he became a novelist.

Rather remarkably for a novelist, other people in his life, with the exception of his father and Father Trollope, who initiates him in the Catholic faith, remain shadowy; this is very much his own story about his development as a writer. "The girl I was to marry" almost appears to be introduced solely to explain why he started his instruction with Father Trollope. The publication of his first novel and ensuing retainer to write two more novels enabled him to get married but wedded bliss is summed up as: "I married, and was happy."

Reading this memoir in 2018, I was surprised how alien the world described seems: Greene's school, his experiences at Oxford, the sub-editors' office at the Times and even the publishing environment are so far from contemporary experience as to be of value as a historical record.

Yet, tucked away in the morass of this “sort of life” in the early decades of the twentieth century are some gems such as Greene’s reflection on memory: “Memory is like a long broken night. As I write, it is as though I am waking from sleep continually to grasp at an image which I hope may drag in its wake a whole intact dream, but the fragments remain fragments, the complete story always escapes.” Perhaps that is why Greene’s novels are, for the most part, so much more satisfying than this memoir. He was able to complete the stories.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read A Sort of Life during one of those long Covid evenings when time felt less like a line and more like a closed room. Outside, the world had shrunk into numbers—deaths, recoveries, infection rates—and inside, I had shrunk too. Into someone quieter, someone more attentive to shadows. That’s when Graham Greene entered the room, not with a bang, but with a whisper: a memoir that doesn’t try to dazzle or explain, only to confess, obliquely and painfully.

What struck me immediately was how little this memoir tried to be a memoir. No grand sweep. No birth-to-bookend arc. Instead, Greene moves like a man picking through the attic of his life, lifting one item, holding it to the light, and then replacing it without fuss. You get the sense that he doesn’t trust memory entirely—least of all his own.

It begins in childhood, as these things often do. But Greene’s childhood isn’t cast in golden tones. It’s not even sepia. It’s a wash of fear, betrayal, and detachment. His time at Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster, is rendered with quiet horror. He was bullied. He felt like a traitor to himself. There is a suicide attempt, a Freudian undercurrent, a deep estrangement from the very idea of home. "My childhood was unhappy," he writes, with a restraint that burns.

Greene’s style here is as lean and clinical as the prose in The Quiet American or The End of the Affair. There is no nostalgia, only observation. A sort of life, he seems to say, isn’t quite a life. It’s a placeholder. A rehearsal. He treats his own past as though it were someone else’s fiction—a working draft of character studies and false starts.

And yet, there are moments of such precise vulnerability, they sting. The account of his psychoanalysis, for instance, where he begins to shed some of the layers that decades later will become canonized as “Greeneland”: a place of moral ambiguity, emotional decay, spiritual ache. There, in those early sessions, you see the embryo of the man who will later write The Power and the Glory. Greene's sense of sin was never performative. It was wired into him from the beginning, as intimate as a heartbeat.

There are literary connections here too—quiet, but profound. The way Greene handles memory is not unlike what Orwell attempts in Such, Such Were the Joys, though Greene is subtler, less angry. And there’s a faint kinship with Coetzee’s Boyhood, that same sense of alienation from the self, the same refusal to sentimentalize. But Greene is more Catholic in the deepest sense—he confesses without asking for absolution.

One of the most unsettling aspects of A Sort of Life is how Greene views writing itself. For him, storytelling was less vocation and more survival tactic. He recounts his days as a sub-editor at The Times, where he would write in the margins of boredom and bureaucracy. Writing was not a celebration but a compulsion. Something he did not to express himself, but to keep himself from falling apart. The idea that writing could be therapy? Greene would scoff. It was more like a crutch made of paper.

There’s a passage about his early novels that stuck with me. He dismisses The Man Within—his debut—as overly sentimental, embarrassing even. And yet, it was a success. That tension—between what the world wants from you and what you secretly despise about yourself—runs like an electric wire through the book. Greene never trusts praise. He accepts success with the same suspicion he reserves for God. Or maybe it's the same thing.

Religion, of course, is the ghost in every room here. Though A Sort of Life ends before his formal conversion to Catholicism, you can already see the scaffolding being built. His need for structure. His fascination with guilt. His obsession with duality. It’s not the radiant Catholicism of joy and mystery. It’s the darker kind—the kind where faith is a form of self-flagellation. Greene was never one to believe in saints, only in sinners who knew they were sinning.

Covid, strangely enough, gave me the perfect state of mind to read this. The long days of uncertainty mirrored Greene’s own psychological landscape. His sense of isolation. His wariness of the crowd. His belief that the inner life is never fully knowable—not even to oneself. I found myself reading slowly, not out of reverence but out of respect. As if I were handling a letter someone had meant to burn but didn't.

The most revealing moment in the book, for me, comes when Greene admits he cannot write unless he feels slightly ill or afraid. That’s when the imagination sharpens. That’s when the edges of reality blur just enough to let something deeper in. During Covid, that line hit like a punch. Illness, fear, solitude—they were everywhere. But for Greene, these weren’t hindrances to creativity. They were its dark fuel.

Greene’s relationships are touched upon, but barely. His marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who led him to Catholicism, is mentioned with the same tone you’d use to describe weather patterns. Detached, factual, unsentimental. He’s not hiding anything—he’s simply not interested in elaborating. His emotional life is a locked drawer, and this memoir doesn’t offer the key.

And perhaps that’s the most Graham Greene thing about A Sort of Life. It withholds. It evades. It suggests rather than reveals. You don’t come away knowing the man, only the silhouette he cast on the wall. It’s a memoir that mimics the condition of memory itself: fragmented, selective, unreliable.

As a writer, this left me rattled—in a good way. Greene's refusal to mythologize himself is almost aggressive. No grand epiphanies. No inspirational quotes. Just a series of moments, written with the coolness of someone who believes that even pain, once written down, becomes artifice. He writes about suicide attempts the way others write about weather. About war the way others describe travel. And yet, it is never cold. Just precise. Measured. Almost liturgical in its rhythm.

When I closed the book, I didn't feel uplifted. I felt seen. In all the wrong ways, maybe. But seen nonetheless. Greene doesn’t invite you into his life—he lets you peek through a keyhole. And what you see is not a hero’s journey but a man wrestling with doubt, boredom, talent, and the slow crawl of becoming.

In the end, A Sort of Life doesn’t try to be definitive. It just tries to be honest in its own, deflected way. It says: here’s what I remember, here’s what I’m willing to admit, here’s what I can’t quite explain. In a time like Covid—when all of us were forced

into our own confessions, our own re-evaluations—it felt like the only kind of truth that made sense.

Not the whole truth. But a sort of truth. A sort of life.

[Tatiana Yudovina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greene had summarized his memoir early in the book and thus anticipated any possible criticisms of incompleteness:
"Memory is like a long broken night. As I write, it is as though I am waking from sleep continually to grasp at an image which I hope may drag in its wake a whole intact dream, but the fragments remain fragments, the complete story always escapes."

There are many memorable moments here, some very detailed and some that can be connected to his books. Detailed may not be the right word, there is usually just one bright detail associated with each person or episode that does all the talking. There is certainly more omitted than said and many events of his life he described in more details in interviews than in actual autobiography. It is detached and humble (an antipode to something like "Speak Memory"). It works as literature, as it leaves a lot to reader's imagination but it will leave you disappointed if you were expecting a straightforward autobiography. I picked it up because I wanted to learn more about his conversion to Catholicism, and while he talks about it and explains some, he leaves us with his own witty brand of "tra-ta-ta tra-ta-ta ta-ta" just when we think we are about to hear the Truth.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Sort Of Life (1971) is the first volume of Graham Green's autobiography that takes the readers from his birth to the publication of Stamboul Train (aka The Orient Express) open of his biggest commercial success. Greene is one of my favorite authors and now that I've read all of his novels I've decided to embark on his autobiographies, so next up is Ways of Escape, and I might give A World of My Own: A Dream Diary a miss. I think I'll like the next installment more, since he doesn't spend much time talking about the inspirations or travels that inspired his greatest novels. The early life didn't much interest me, however, one does get a sense of what was important to the writer and reveals that one of his greatest problems in life was an aversion to boredom, something I can easily relate to. And this, in a sense was, one of his greatest inspirations since he claims that is what inspired him to create other worlds in his novels and to travel to places like Africa, Southeast Asia, Haiti, Mexico, and other locales often in times of crisis.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly about Greene's childhood with admittedly dull figures. When he publishes his first novel, about murder and suicide, one of those relatives tells him (as a compliment), "It could only have been written by a Greene," to GG's confusion. The best part is the second half, on the failure of his career to kickstart after a somewhat successful debut and him having to find his bearings (he vows never to read Conrad again!). Buried in that is this treasure of a parenthetical remark: "The Pekingese, over exercised by fifteen-mile walks, developed hysteria and had to be destroyed."