The making of a novelist

Graham Greene explains the odd title of his 1971 memoir of his youth, A Sort of Life, in its very first sentence: "An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' -- it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely."

The word selective certainly describes the great British novelist's attempt at autobiography. It begins with Greene's earliest memories from his childhood, and he seems to remember more than most of do from that period and seems to tell us everything he remembers. Later the selectivity begins. Certain individuals and incidents from his early life are singled out for mention, sometimes in great detail, while others are all but ignored. A notable example is the detail with which he describes his first love for a woman about a decade older than him, his siblings' governess, while barely mentioning the woman he later married or the child they had together.

To be sure, his severe depression after the governess left to get married contributed to his prolonged dependency on Russian roulette to snap him out of it. Apparently his wife led to nothing as dramatic, so was worth mentioning only in passing.

Other than the Russian roulette, easily the most mentioned part of A Sort of Life whenever the book is discussed, the book's significance lies in what it tells us about Greene's becoming a novelist. He wrote some early novels that went nowhere, while working for newspapers to pay the bills. Eventually The Man Within found a publisher in 1929. Lest you think "the rest is history," his struggles continued, and not until 1932 with the publication of Stamboul Train did he finally feel he had arrived, and there his memoir ends, with his most important works such as The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair still to come. Yet his experiences during these early years did find their way into some of those later novels, and these insights, too, make this memoir worth reading for Graham Greene admirers.