A Lost Child Greene’s Earlier Works

Abstract

Graham Greene’s period of apprenticeship was a relatively lengthy one. His two autobiographies A Sort of Life¹ and Ways of Escape² , written at the height of his literary career, point to the difficulties of the well-established, highly professional writer, when faced with his raw, immature self of thirty years earlier, the young writer who was still grappling with the elements of his craft. Greene felt that two of his earliest novels, The Name of Action (1930)³ and Rumour at Nightfall (1931)⁴ were ‘of a badness beyond the power of criticism properly to evoke’⁵ and suppressed them a few years after their publication. In a manner only slightly more lenient he confesses that Stamboul Train⁶ was ‘written to please’⁷ in a period of extreme financial duress, and lists the obvious faults of It’s a Battlefield⁸ and England Made Me⁹ which failed both with the public and with the reviewers.