Adventures in Greeneland

By Paul Gray

WAYS OF ESCAPE by Graham Greene; Simon & Schuster; 320 pages; $12.95

An award for the most diffident title of an autobiography hi the past decade should go to Author Graham Greene. A Sort of Life (1971) did not exactly cry out "buy me" when it hit the bookstores, though thousands of Greene fans snapped it up anyway. They were treated to an odd, beguiling performance. The author coolly portrayed his childhood and youth as a succession of blunders, chiefly his own: he tripped over his own psychoanalysis at age 16, fiddled unsuccessfully with Russian roulette as a way out, failed at writing a play, botched nearly everything he touched. The self-deprecation seemed sincere but puzzling: How could the young man in this book have grown up to be a successful, world-famous writer? How, for that matter, could he have survived at all?

Ways of Escape takes Greene from his mid-20s to the present, while making him seem just as inept and hapless as ever. This is not easy, given his spectacular career. So he dwells whenever possible on failure. He finds in two of his early novels "a badness beyond the power of criticism properly to evoke." He studies himself as a beginning writer and concludes: "I am not sure that I detect much promise in his work." He characterizes his low-echelon work with the British Secret Service during World War II as "futile." Occasionally, he has to confront the specter of one of his triumphs. He does so suspiciously: "The Heart of the Matter was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers."

Constant poor-mouthing can either grow tedious or, worse, seem like trolling for compliments. Fortunately, that is not the case here. Greene's guarded, skeptical attitude toward his material (in this case, his own life) is consistent with the one he has shown in his novels, short stories, plays, criticism and travel books. The smug, the self-satisfied, the overblown, even the merely happy are setting themselves up for ridicule and a long fall. Minimal expectations are a hedge against disappointment. In fact, Greene's past has been dashing and colorful beyond the daydreams of most; without the ironic filter of his personality, Ways of Escape might read like a schoolboy romance.

He decided early on to be "a spectator of history" and succeeded admirably. His itinerary is a check list of modern crises. He was in Mexico in 1938, during a persecution of the Catholic Church, and in London during the blitz. He learned to love Viet Nam and opium during the last years of French occupation and spent 24 nervous hours at the doomed camp of Dien Bien Phu. Then it was on to Kenya for the Mau Mau uprising and later to a leper colony during the final days of the Belgian Congo. He sampled pornography in Batista's Havana, just before Castro and his forces came down from the hills. He fetched up in "Papa Doc" Duvalier's Haiti in 1963 and found himself under Egyptian gunfire in Israel in 1967. It would be hard to think of a contemporary writer who has exposed himself to danger so thoroughly, in so many troubled spots.

Greene, of course, will not hear of any hint of bravery or courage on his part. His flirtations with sudden death were nothing more than "ways of escape" from boredom and what he calls his manic-depressive self. He merely sought "that feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket." He even uses his extensive experience of the world as a way to undercut the imaginative scope of his novels: "Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered. 'This is Indochina,' I want to exclaim, 'this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described.' "

These places are Greeneland nonetheless, and this autobiography is proof enough that only he could have lived and imagined them into the public domain they now occupy. The book shows some signs of carelessness. Much of it is composed of a series of introductions Greene wrote for an English edition of his works, and the stitching between these set pieces and interpolated transitions is often loose. Little matter. The story is fascinating, whatever Greene says, and spiced with ir resistible anecdotes. Producer Sam Zimbalist once asked Greene to revise the end of a script for a remake of Ben-Hur: "You see, we find a kind of anticlimax after the Crucifixion." There was the tune the author was sued for libel by Shirley Temple; Greene recalls, "I had suggested that she had a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men." And the time he was deported from Puerto Rico by U.S. authoritie, Greene, 76, has survived professionally for some 50 years by never telling a bad story. Ways of Escape keeps that splendid record alive.

--By Paul Gray

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