A sort of life

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Graham Greene writes: '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. If one cannot close a book of memories on the deathbed, any conclusion must be arbitrary, and I have preferred to finish this essay with the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first növel. . . In another sense too a book like this can only be a "sort of life", for in the course of sixty-six years I have spent almost as much time with imaginary characters as with real men and women . . . There is á fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defence. "Look how absurd I was when I was young" forestalls cruel criticism but it falsifies history. We were not Eminent Georgians. Those emotions were when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age? I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony.' Cover design by Derek Birdsall For copyright reasons this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A. Vissza

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PENGUIN BOOKS A SORT OF LIFE Graham Greene was born in 1904 and educated at Berkhamsted School, where his father was the headmaster. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, where he published a book of verse, he worked for four years as a subeditor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth növel, Stamboul Train, which he classed as an 'entertainment' in order to distinguish it from more serious work.In 1935 he made a journey across Libéria described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Román Catholic Church and was commissioned to visit Mexico in 1938 and report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and served out in Sierra Leone in 1941-3. One of his major post-war novels, The Heart of the Matter, is set in West Africa and is considered by many to be his finest book. This was followed by The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, a story set in Vietnam, Our Man in Havana, and A Burnt-Out Case. The Comedians has recently been filmed, and he has published a collection of short stories under the title, May We Borrow Your Husband? His latest publication is his autobiography, A Sort of Life {1971). In all Graham Greene has written somé thirty novels, 'entertainments', plays, children's books, travel books, and collections of essays and short stories. He was made a Companion of Honourin 1966. Vissza