I am not quite sure why it is I like Graham Greene’s novels so much. If his novels are described – all tortured men in the mid-twentieth century – they don’t sound like something I’m going to really enjoy. Yet I really do like them, almost more than I want to. They’re drenched, all of them, in guilt and regret. This doesn’t sound very appealing, I know, but somehow I always find them very consoling. There’s some absence of judgement them, some generosity: like life’s so incredibly hard, he’s proud of you for just getting through it. It’s soothing.
A SORT OF LIFE is the first installment of his autobiography, and tells the story of his own life up to his thirties or so. It made me understand him a little better. First, for a man whose books feel so modern to me, in being so equivocal and undecided, he is older than I thought. He was born 1905, and has a childhood of illnesses – measles (twice), pleurisy, appendicitis, etc: you wonder what his parents were doing, and then remember how very modern a miracle vaccination is.
Perhaps, until one starts, at the age of seventy, to live on borrowed time, no year will seem again quite so ominous as the one when formal education ends and the moment arrives for the whole future.
He finds employment at a newspaper, and then his first book is a success. This is the beginning of failure, as he tells us in his cheery fashion; he quits his day job on the back of that first success, and thereafter writes two flops in a row. He converts to Catholicism, and is much happier; but your heart breaks for him:
The first general confession, which precedes conditional baptism, and which covers the whole of a man’s previous life, is a humiliating ordeal. Later we may become hardened in the formulas of confession and skeptical about ourselves: we may only half intend to keep the promises we make, until continual failure or the circumstances of our private life finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon confession and communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens. But in the first confession a convert really believes in his own promises.
Like the bar of the City Hotel in Freetown which I was to know years later it was the focal point of failure, a place undisturbed by ambition, a place to be resigned to, a home from home.
i will love to share my testimony to you all the people in world. My name is Clara James form new York i got married to my husband about 2 year ago we start having problems at home like we stop sleeping on the same bed,fighting about little things he always comes home late at night,drinking too much and sleeping with other women out side i have never love any man in my life except him. he is the father of my child and i don't want to loose him because we have worked so hard together to become what we are and have today .few month ago he now decided to live me and the kid,being a single mother can be hard sometimes and so i have nobody to turn to and i was heart broken.i called my mom and explain every thing to her,my mother told me about PRIEST WISDOM how he helped her solve the problem between her and my dad i was surprise about it because they have been without each other for three and a half years and it was like a miracle how they came back to each other. i was directed to priest wisdom and i explain everything to him,so he promise me not to worry that he will cast a spell and make things come back to how we where so much in love again and that it was another female spirit that was controlling my husband he told me that my problem will be solved within 2 days if i believe i said OK So he cast a spell for me and after two days my love came back asking me to forgive him i Am so happy now. so that why i decided to share my experience with every body that have such problem contact priest wisdom the great spell caster on his email Id: supernaturalspell1@gmail.com or whatsapp him +2348124644470 or you can read more of him on supernaturalspell1.blogspot.com/
i will love to share my testimony to you all the people in world. My name is Clara James form new York i got married to my husband about 2 year ago we start having problems at home like we stop sleeping on the same bed,fighting about little things he always comes home late at night,drinking too much and sleeping with other women out side i have never love any man in my life except him. he is the father of my child and i don't want to loose him because we have worked so hard together to become what we are and have today .few month ago he now decided to live me and the kid,being a single mother can be hard sometimes and so i have nobody to turn to and i was heart broken.i called my mom and explain every thing to her,my mother told me about PRIEST WISDOM how he helped her solve the problem between her and my dad i was surprise about it because they have been without each other for three and a half years and it was like a miracle how they came back to each other. i was directed to priest wisdom and i explain everything to him,so he promise me not to worry that he will cast a spell and make things come back to how we where so much in love again and that it was another female spirit that was controlling my husband he told me that my problem will be solved within 2 days if i believe i said OK So he cast a spell for me and after two days my love came back asking me to forgive him i Am so happy now. so that why i decided to share my experience with every body that have such problem contact priest wisdom the great spell caster on his email Id: supernaturalspell1@gmail.com or whatsapp him +2348124644470 or you can read more of him on supernaturalspell1.blogspot.com/