The episode resulted in his being treated through psychoanalysis, a still-novel therapy in which he would retain a lifelong interest (especially in dream interpretation). Fortunately his treatment lay in the hands of the untrained but immensely empathetic--and literary--Kenneth Richmond.
The period between Greene's adolescent breakdown and his commitment to writing was a fairly short one, as he was able to adopt a literary career at the age of twenty-five. Surely one reason that his work from young adulthood to the end of the 1930s is so obsessed with childhood and adolescence is that his own youth was the primary experience he had to draw on, and he understandably sought new experience quite voraciously, taking an ill-advised trip through Liberia, for example, in 1935. Greene's brief account in A Sort of Life (1971) suggests that he spent nearly four years at Oxford's Balliol College (1922-1926) in a state of perpetual drunkenness and survived his oral exams through the efforts of his tutor Kenneth Bell, a former pupil and disciple of Charles Greene. Norman Sherry's biography makes it clear, however, that Graham was more enterprising than he admits--editing the literary magazine Oxford Outlook, reading poetry on BBC radio, publishing a book of verse titled Babbling April (1925), and making contacts outside the university with the likes of writer Edith Sitwell.
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