A Sort of Life by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

read The Brethren (about the crusades), from which a great phrase remains in my mind to this day, ‘So they went, talking earnestly of all things, but, save in God, finding no hope at all’, The Wanderer’s Necklace (a romance of Byzantium in which the hero is blinded by the woman he loves), and Ayesha , the sequel to She . I didn’t at all care for romantic She , and found the metaphysical love story sloppy as I find it today (I have always preferred Freud to Jung). But the scene in Ayesha when the mad Khan goes hunting with bloodhounds the lord who had courted his wife held me with the strange attraction of suffering and cruelty. ‘What followed I will not describe, but never shall I forget the scene of those two heaps of worrying wolves, and of the maniac Khan, who yelled in his fiendish joy, and cheered on his death-hounds to finish their red work.’ Montezuma’s Daughter led me to read and reread a history of Mexico in the school library; the dark night of Cortez’ retreat from Mexico City along the narrow causeways haunts me still. What a happy chance it seemed in those days to be the son ofthe headmaster, for in the holidays all the shelves of the library were open to me, with thousands of books only waiting to be explored.
    To Stanley Weyman I must have been introduced fairly early, because I seem to remember my favourite, The Story of Francis Cludde (a story of the persecution of Protestants in Queen Mary’s reign) being read aloud to me, but it may have been during one of my periodic illnesses. (These agreeably broke up the endless years of childhood: two attacks of measles, a threatened mastoid, jaundice, pleurisy.) There were other Stanley Weymans which were nearly as important to me: Count Hannibal (with the masochism of the scorned lover who finally conquers the proud beauty) and The Abbess of Vlaye , which perhaps I valued because I had stolen it with some risk from the local W. H. Smith’s store. Other books which I have since bought and reread for old time’s sake are The Lost Column , a story of the Boxer Rebellion, and The Pirate Aeroplane both by Captain Gilson. The Pirate Aeroplane made a specially deep impression with its amiable American villain. One episode, when the young hero who is to be shot at dawn for trying to sabotage the pirate plane, plays rummy with his merciless and benevolent captor was much in my mind when I wrote about a poker game in England Made Me . I bought Chums every week and I remember in particular a fine pirate serial which rivalled Treasure Island – by what forgotten author? – and a fascinating account of a world war which began with a coolie strike in the Port of London. (I would force my brother Hugh to lie quiet on the sofa for hours while I read it to him.)
    The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching. I feel certain that I would not have made a false start, when I was twenty-one, in the British American Tobacco Company, which had promised me a post in China, if I had never read Captain Gilson’s Lost Column , and without a knowledge of Rider Haggard would I have been drawn later to Liberia? (This led to a war-time post in Sierra Leone. At Oxford I had made tentative inquiries about the Nigerian Navy as a future career.) And surely it must have been Montezuma’s Daughter and the story of the disastrous night of Cortez’ retreatwhich lured me twenty years afterwards to Mexico. The Man-eaters of Tsavo on the other hand fixed in me a boring image of East Africa which even Hemingway was powerless to change. Only an assignment to report the Mau-Mau rebellion in 1951 and the sense of continuous danger on the Kikuyu roads was able to remove it.
    Poetry at this period meant very little to me. There were many fatuous verses in the anthology we were given in the prep school, like Allingham’s ‘Up the Airy Mountain’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Brook’. On