Graham Greene’s A Sort of Life will be published by Slightly Foxed in a new, limited edition of 2,000 copies as a pocket hardback with a Preface by Frances Donnelly on 2nd September 2010.
A Sort of Life was originally published in 1971, and is the first of two autobiographical texts by Graham Greene, who once said that writing this memoir of his early years was in the nature of a psychoanalysis: “I made a long journey through time and I was one of my characters.”
Slightly Foxed tells us: “Certainly the younger self that emerges is as complex and intriguing as any of those he created in his novels. Greene grew up in Berkhamsted among a large colony of Greenes, and he attended Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. As it turned out, the conflicting loyalties this produced, combined with the secrecy and subterfuge encouraged by the school’s puritanical regime, were the perfect grounding for the spy - and the novelist - he was to become. But the price was high. By the time he was out of his teens he had had what would now be called a nervous breakdown, undergone psychoanalysis – which was unusual for the 1920s – and become addicted to playing Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver.
“A Sort of Life, first published in 1971, takes Greene through Oxford, the early years of marriage and his conversion to Catholicism, to the point where he recklessly gives up his first Fleet Street job as a sub-editor on The Times in order to write full-time. What marked Greene out above all else was his utter determination to pursue his craft and there can be no more fascinating or illuminating account of what it takes to become a writer.”
For more information about Slightly Foxed and/or to see a copy of the latest Issue, please contact Steph Allen by telephone on 0044-(0)20 7549 2121/2111 or by e-mail: stephanieallen@foxedquarterly.com
A Sort of Life was originally published in 1971, and is the first of two autobiographical texts by Graham Greene, who once said that writing this memoir of his early years was in the nature of a psychoanalysis: “I made a long journey through time and I was one of my characters.”
Slightly Foxed tells us: “Certainly the younger self that emerges is as complex and intriguing as any of those he created in his novels. Greene grew up in Berkhamsted among a large colony of Greenes, and he attended Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. As it turned out, the conflicting loyalties this produced, combined with the secrecy and subterfuge encouraged by the school’s puritanical regime, were the perfect grounding for the spy - and the novelist - he was to become. But the price was high. By the time he was out of his teens he had had what would now be called a nervous breakdown, undergone psychoanalysis – which was unusual for the 1920s – and become addicted to playing Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver.
“A Sort of Life, first published in 1971, takes Greene through Oxford, the early years of marriage and his conversion to Catholicism, to the point where he recklessly gives up his first Fleet Street job as a sub-editor on The Times in order to write full-time. What marked Greene out above all else was his utter determination to pursue his craft and there can be no more fascinating or illuminating account of what it takes to become a writer.”
For more information about Slightly Foxed and/or to see a copy of the latest Issue, please contact Steph Allen by telephone on 0044-(0)20 7549 2121/2111 or by e-mail: stephanieallen@foxedquarterly.com
Michael Brearley OBE will discuss Graham Greene’s second autobiography Ways of Escape (1980), when he talks to the Graham Greene International Festival in Deans’ Hall (Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, UK) on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd October 2010. His title will be “A (second) Psychoanalyst looks at Graham Greene”. Michael Brearley was President of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and formerly he was England’s cricket captain and the President of the Marylebone Cricket Club. He is the author of The Art of Captaincy (1985) and Phoenix from the Ashes: Story of the England-Australia Series, 1981 (1982).
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