A Sort of Life

Published in 1971

In this autobiography, Greene describes his childhood, youth and the success and disasters of his first three years as a novelist. Although the book is chronological, the chapters are a compendium of anecdotes and stories. Greene only includes what he remembers (and if he speculates, he says so). Our memory doesn’t function according to a rigid structure. Memories leave impressions, not schematics, so many of Greene’s memories from early childhood through his first couple of jobs, before he became a writer, seem like the record of dreams. Once he becomes a writer, the anecdotes read like short stories: teleologic, with beginnings and endings and a point.

Greene’s youth was neither happy nor sad, but complex. The son of a schoolmaster, he had a difficult time socially at his father’s school. His intelligence and early engagement with literature and history made the arbitrary rules of school and his peers very painful to him. His difficulties worked their way up to a near break-down when he was a teenager which led to his parents sending him off for six months to a psychoanalyst.

Psychoanalysis helped him recover and, during this time, he became acquainted with several authors who were friends of the psychoanalyst, which also provided him a model to which to aspire. His school career afterward was less fraught, although he was quite alcoholic during his time at Oxford. After school, he had a couple of abortive career attempts, before landing an unpaid position on a newspaper in Nottingham. Although he stayed in Nottingham less than a year, his experience there was formative in several ways. He established himself as a journalist and he became a Catholic, under the guidance of a lively priest in that city. Soon he moved to London to work at the Times, well on the road to a promising career in journalism. But success was not something he was ready for yet.

His description of becoming a full-time writer is a portrait of the artist as a failure. Greene mentions how, since adolescence, he has had a tremendous fear of failure. Although we can look back and see the successful novelist (as artist) in his works from the 1930s, commercial success did not find him until after WWII. His first book, The Man Within in 1929, was a minor commercial success, which led to a fat contract for three more books. The next two books were such dismal failures that, even though his later novels were well-received and, over time, sold well, the initial print-runs of his novels did not exceed that of his first book until the 1940s. For his third and fourth books, Stamboul Train and It’s a Battlefield, he received no money for the first editions because he was paying back the debt he incurred by the failures of his second and third books.

Thus, failure seemed like a constant companion, someone with whom he could wallow in an opium den. Failure, fear of failure, professional failures, successful men who see themselves as failures is central to most of his novels. The fear of failure haunts Conrad in It’s a Battlefield and Pinkie in Brighton Rock. The priest in The Power and the Glory, Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, Wormold in Our Man in Havana are all professional failures. Querry in A Burnt-Out Case knows he is a failure, even if the world cannot see it. What sets apart Travels with My Aunt from his previous novels is the transcendence of failure. Although some of the characters in that book are failures in Greenean fashion, their failure is irrelevant within the book.

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It has been apparent to me when reading Greene’s novels that certain descriptions of characters or cities, certain incidents or humorous anecdotes, must have come from real life: they have too much authenticity in a novel that otherwise plays out in a more restricted world. In A Sort of Life he reveals several of these sources. Such as the town of Notwich in A Gun for Sale, based on the experience of his first arrival in Nottingham. In addition, the advice of Pinkie to Rose in Brighton Rock to put the barrel of the revolver in her ear to keep it steady was knowledge Greene gained while playing Russian roulette as a youth.