"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 in a way Greene's novels rarely are. Yet reading ["Ways of Escape," the] sequel to "A Sort of Life," I found myself persuaded by his claim to a flirtation with suicide. The figure portrayed in "Ways of Escape" is a "manic-depressive temperament" who "enjoyed" the London blitz because it provoked a "sense of insecurity"; who found in Indochina during the troubled 1950's "that feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket"; whose incessant quest for adventure has served the same purpose as those suspense-charged afternoons when he spun the chamber of his revolver and waited for a click or an explosion: "escape from boredom, escape from depression."
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