In Search of Himselves: The Autobiographical Writings of Graham Greene

In the ‘thirties Graham Greene reviewed Somerset Maugham's autobiography, The Summing Up (1938). It represented, he said, “an excellent example of his hard-won style at its best, clear, colloquial, honest.” ¹ The comment suggests interesting correspondences with the problems Greene encountered in his own autobiographical writings. Above all, one senses his striving, sometimes to the point of masochism, to achieve a similar “honesty” while at the same time avoiding what he described in Maugham's other work as the “deadening” effect of a too-easily paraded “humility and self-distrust.” ² Greene's apparent intimacy with his reader is somehow unembarrassing, severely controlled as it is by an obsessive modesty and reticence.