"A Sort of Life," the first volume of Graham Greene's autobiography, was not equivocal in its title alone. Depicted there was a typical Georgian childhood among the British intellectual middle class, a world of nannies, eccentric aunts and uncles, doting if remote parents who fostered an early love of literature, unhappy school experiences followed by an Oxford education: in short, the world depicted—with some variations—in Cyril Connolly's "Enemies of Promise," in Evelyn Waugh's "A Little Learning," in Peter Quennell's "The Marble Foot." Typical, perhaps, yet hardly complacent; on several occasions in his youth, the author claimed, he had played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver discovered in his brother's cupboard.

No self-respecting writer would lay claim to a happy childhood, but the image of a 19-year-old boy wandering out to a meadow and applying a pistol to his head has always seemed to me implausible, melodramatic...