A Sort of Life-Graham Greene

Autobiography

 

A Sort of Life

Graham Greene

 

                Graham Greene calls his autobiography ‘A Sort of Life’ because unlike a biography ‘an autobiography is selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely’. He finishes his story with the years of failure which followed publication of his first book. He was then only twenty-seven, an early age to end the narrative of a life written at the age of sixty-five. But his reason is that ‘failure is also like death and thus provides for a very satisfactory ending’. And his motive for writing his autobiography, ‘a desire to reduce the chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity’.

                He writes in his inimitable terse and unaffected style. Book is short, some one hundred and fifty pages. He recalls his childhood spent in Berkhamstead, his days at Oxford, his years at The Times as a subeditor, the thrill of the publication of his first novel The Man Within, which received a moderate success and then a string of failures. He writes about extreme melancholia and boredom which afflicted him from the early childhood. He frankly narrates the depression and frustration he suffered in his first love, a crush on the governess of his younger siblings. He lays bare his manic-depressive personality and his attempts at courting death, that he indulged just to ward off boredom. Unabashedly he describes sessions of psychoanalysis he undertook in his teens, and finds it a beautiful experience.

                It’s exciting to peep in to the mind of an author whose work one has admired. Greene’s books are matchless in one particular aspect.  He consistently creates an atmosphere in his novels, called Greene Country by many critics, which not only pervades his complete novel but is like a trademark of the author, being noticeable in most of his books. This is not the imaginary world of many fiction writers, but a real place inhabited by men who possess a few admirable traits among innumerable vice like all their brethren. They plod through their lives looking for small joys. They are riddled with doubts on religion, ethics and human conduct. And if they bother about these subtle queries it is in pursuit of the most conspicuous and elusive objective, Happiness.  It’s riveting to watch as the curtain is raised and one glimpses the working of this great mind. I eagerly wait to begin Ways of Escape, his other book on himself.