Running from the Familiar

...Ways of Escape begins in the 1930s with Greene having given up a job as a sub-editor at the London Times to pursue his writing in a Gloucestershire cottage...

...Greene's but-toned-up attitude toward despair and other distressing feelings is particular to Englishmen of his time and class...

...He chose Liberia and his 23-year-old cousin, Barbara, as companion...

...in Israel, "lying against a sand dune in the autumn sky under Egyptian fire from antitank guns, mortars and small arms...

...He received an invitation from Herbert Read to dine with T.S...

...A love of secrets is more common to children than adults, but Greene has retained the taste for them: There is much he won't, or can't, divulge...

...There is a splinter of ice," he observed in/1 Sorto/Life, "in the heart of a writer...

...There was a wide view of the huge Freetown bay, where sometimes the Queen Mary would be lying at anchor as though she had been hijacked from the North Atlantic, and the old Edinburgh Castle??now a naval depot ship??lay rotting on a reef of empty bottles...

...Still, we do learn lots about the evolution of his style, the false starts, sure hunches and discarded influences that led to an increasingly honed craft...

...Ways of Escape (Simon and Schuster, 320 pp., $12.95) is the second volume of an autobiography that Greene began some years ago with A Sort of Life, the latter leaving him in his late 20s at work on a third novel...

...I hadn't the courage for suicide," he explains, "but it became a habit with me to visit troubled places, not to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on London...

...In truth, Greene might just as well have stayed home...

...He was 31 when he conceived an idea for a travel diary, Journey Without Maps, that would require taking a trip??any trip...

...Their friendship continues in letters through the start of the War, when Grieg is given a commission to oversee the delivery of gold to the Bank of England, and ends as arbitrarily as it began: "He was shot down in an air raid over Berlin in 1943...

...Greene has in mind not so much coldness as recollection in tranquility, a distance writers must maintain from inchoate emotions if they are to make art out of ordinary pain and bewilderment...

...A few years later found him ??where else...

...He manages to make his duties there, comprised mainly of decoding telegrams, sound inconsequential to the point of parody, yet he seems to have found a setting decrepit enough to match the tone of his soul: "At four-thirty I would have tea, then take a solitary walk along an abandoned railway...

...It is easy to see why journalism??where such scrupulous detachment becomes a virtue??attracted him...

...Throughout this memoir people and events present themselves very much "out of the blue," as though fate willingly obliged Greene's delight in its inexplicable ways...

...As the sun began to set, the la-terite paths turned the color of a rose...

...It was the hour and place I liked best...

...He covered the French withdrawal from Vietnam for four years, apparently caught up by the puzzling incongruities within so small a country...

...My temperature was a long way below normal, but the worst boredom of the trek for the time being was over...

...I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living...

...how ingrained a trait it is can be discerned in his admiring appraisal of Evelyn Waugh, whom he saw as "an excellent and witty host, one who disguised his own inner torment in drollery rather than disturb his guest...

...The constant peregrinations occupying Greene's adult years started later than one would imagine...

...p reene spent the '50s tracking down political unrest as an observer at revolutions for various newspapers...

...During World War II Greene was recruited into the Secret Service and spent 15 months in Freetown, West Africa...

...rather, they invoke an atmosphere of depletion and limitation that looms up no matter how great the distance traveled...

...One more successful creation and like an overloaded boat the story lists...

...He remains, determinedly, the ever-elusive Graham Greene, casting a weary but hawklike eye on the remotest corners of the human estate...

...Even the good can corrupt and perhaps I had been corrupted by much reading of the metaphysical poets...

...The titles of both volumes are a clue to their peculiar reticence, and anyone who comes to them with hopes of discovering the man within the writer will find more of the writer than the man...

...Toward the close of the journey he became very sick and in a passage from that book, quoted in Ways of Escape, one can clearly see the depressive tendency underlying Greene's longing for the foreign: "The fever would not let me sleep at all, but by the early morning it was sweated out of me...

...Thus Nordahl Grieg, the Norwegian poet, appears one day in 1931 at the novelist's door, his "sudden arrival" seeming "unaccountable, dreamlike and oddly encouraging...

...although the undramatized way he describes this psychology could fool one into taking it for a simple boyish love of escapade or an unusually high tolerance for danger, it strikes me as stemming from a desperation so long-standing as to be hardly worth the acknowledgement...

...Nothing, one gathers, scares Greene as much as the familiar...

...Speaking of his second novel, The Name of A ction, Greene notes "my terrible misuse of simile and metaphor...

...In the late '50s he sniffed out the action in Cuba, just as in the early '60s he would be drawn to , Papa Doc's Haiti...

...A revolver drooped like a parched flower to the pavement.' (I like to reverse this simile??'A parched flower drooped like a revolver to the pavement...

...Then, too, there is the fact that Greene, in his life as in his art, savors an enigmatic "human factor" that renders all attempts at coherence ??one's autobiography, for instance??less than the sum of their parts...

...And here's a piece of pomposity which I had learned from Conrad at his worst: 'A clock relinquished its load of hours.'" Some pages later he refers to his affection for EnglandMade Me, his fifth novel, but is struck by a character in the book who "refused to come alive": "The sad truth is that a story hasn't room for more than a limited number of created characters...

...The relationship suggests more than it actually consisted of...

...he has the temperament of an unobtrusively curious tourist, easily engaged on the intellectual level but unlikely to form compromising attachments...

...He went to Malaya, Indochina, Kenya and, briefly, Stalinist Poland...

...Greene can remember meeting Grieg only three times, yet the poet takes on symbolic importance in his mind:" Like the appearance of three crows on a gate, Nordahl Grieg was an omen or myth, and he remained a myth...

...It is as though he has chosen the most intimate of literary forms only to wiggle free, Houdini-like, without giving anything away...

...He smoked a lot of opium and watched "the triumph of guerrilla tactics," finding an almost esthetic satisfaction in the subversion of conventional military expectations: "At the moment when the weapons of war had increased immeasurably in power and efficiency, the ill-armed guerrilla depending on surprise, mobility and the nature of his native ground had exhibited the limitations of the armament factory...

...he roams the globe only, it appears, to test and confirm that least adventurous of sensations??ennui...

...His essay on The Portrait of a Lady unexpectedly dwells upon "the inherent disappointment of existence, the betrayal of hope" that he detects in Henry James: In this comment can be glimpsed one of the negative convictions that gives his own work the quality it frequently has of taking place on a sunless afternoon...

...I can't remember what we talked about that first time," Greene writes, "but I immediately felt caught up into his intimacy, which seemed as impersonal??in the sense that I did not have to deserve it or work for it??as sunlight...

...I had made a discovery during the night which interested me...

...I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable...

...Throughout the '30s Greene's literary star was in the ascendant...

...here is something dreary about Graham Greene's wanderings in search of the exotic, a moodiness that pervades and eventually flattens the thrill of it all...

...I think chance encounters intrigue Greene because they are perfect occasions for regarding the fragile nature of one's bonds to other people, their susceptibility to being broken, as a function of disinterested destiny rather than privately experienced losses...

...Ways of Escape abounds in ellipses and gaps, especially in the areas of marriage and romance: "Those parts of a life most beloved of columnists," Greene warns in his Preface, "remain outside the scope of this book...

...As a novelist he has been consistently lured by faraway places and colorful situations, yet his books do not offer much in the way of ex-pansiveness...

...Eliot: " 'Eliot is coming, but no one else, and everything very informal.' To me it was a little like receiving an invitation from Coleridge??'Wordsworth is coming, but no one else.'" In addition to writing movie reviews (one, of the Shirley Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie, incurred a libel action), he also worked on a film script, The Green Cockatoo, for Alexander Korda, the first of many screenplays...

...He shares with Flaubert, a writer he does not in other ways resemble, a massive sense of boredom and melancholy...

...What is startling is Greene's need to pit himself against extremity in order to appreciate that he is not, after all, six feet under...

...Ways of Escape is, indeed, more circumspect about personal details than the earlier segment??in part, I would guess, because it impinges directly upon the present and therefore is more liable to the consequences of indiscretion...