"A Sort of Life," the first volume of Graham Greene's autobiography, was not equivocal in its title alone. Depicted there was a typical Georgian childhood among the British intellectual middle class, a world of nannies, eccentric aunts and uncles, doting if remote parents who fostered an early love of literature, unhappy school experiences followed by an Oxford education: in short, the world depicted—with some variations—in Cyril Connolly's "Enemies of Promise," in Evelyn Waugh's "A Little Learning," in Peter Quennell's "The Marble Foot." Typical, perhaps, yet hardly complacent; on several occasions in his youth, the author claimed, he had played Russian roulette with a loaded revolver discovered in his brother's cupboard.

No self-respecting writer would lay claim to a happy childhood, but the image of a 19-year-old boy wandering out to a meadow and applying a pistol to his head has always seemed to me implausible, melodramatic in a way Greene's novels rarely are. Yet reading ["Ways of Escape," the] sequel to "A Sort of Life," I found myself persuaded by his claim to a flirtation with suicide. The figure portrayed in "Ways of Escape" is a "manic-depressive temperament" who "enjoyed" the London blitz because it provoked a "sense of insecurity"; who found in Indochina during the troubled 1950's "that feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket"; whose incessant quest for adventure has served the same purpose as those suspense-charged afternoons when he spun the chamber of his revolver and waited for a click or an explosion: "escape from boredom, escape from depression."

Greene's compulsion to visit the most troubled corners of the world—Vietnam in the years of French occupation; Malaya in the early 1950's, during the Communist insurrections against the British; Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion; a leper colony in the last days of the Belgian Congo—may have been a way of "tempting the end to come," but it had a literary motive as well. Just as Dostoyevsky seemed to draw inspiration from the threat of financial ruin, Greene has drawn his best material from these arduous voyages. Tranquil domestic environments don't interest him; even "The End of the Affair," a tale of adultery set in London, unfolds against the backdrop of the blitz.

A master portraitist of the dreary, Greene returns in "Ways of Escape" to the sorry realm of his novels, those exotic, shabby outposts in Africa, Haiti, Latin America, the Far East…. The narrative voice—guarded, laconic, world-weary, depressed—is the voice of Greene's protagonists; of Fowler, the British journalist in "The Quiet American"; of Bendrix, the tortured novelist in "The End of the Affair"; of Querry, the famous architect who escapes from the pressures of celebrity in "A Burnt-Out Case."

But where the novelist's versions of himself are men confused by their own contradictory impulses and humbled by the savage events they witness, men unnerved by the pitiless waste of history, the autobiographer disposes of the crises in his life with the bland dispatch of a civil servant out of one of Greene's own novels rubbing his hands and efficiently resolving some difficulty over a passport. Despite his persistent intimations of despair, the dour, death-haunted novelist is less in evidence than the club man dining out on well-rehearsed anecdotes. (pp. 1, 28)

What Greene has decided to offer his readers in "Ways of Escape" is a desultory chronicle of the events that inspired his plots and the people on whom his characters were based (a chronicle, it should be noted, that draws liberally upon various prefaces to his novels)….

Candid about his literary problems, Greene is resolutely impersonal about everything else. "Ways of Escape" is one of the most evasive autobiographies I know…. In 1946, he reports, he was suicidal—"at a loss," a "carrier of unhappiness to people I loved"—and briskly moves on to the political situation in Malaya. Twenty years later, he confides, "a difficult decision in [his] private life" prompted him to leave England and settle in France—and there he leaves the matter.

His descriptions of others are no less grudging: Herbert Read, an admired mentor, invites the young novelist to dinner with T. S. Eliot—and that is the last we hear of them, apart from the disclosure that the company "talked of Arsène Lupin." In Hanoi, Greene obtains an interview with Ho Chi Minh and goes on at great length about his efforts to procure the beer and opium that gave him "the energy to meet Ho Chi Minh at tea." Of the interview itself, not a word. The failure to explain verges on provocation.

Well, never mind, one is tempted to say: The truth is that novelists are seldom great autobiographers…. The autobiographer discovers some necessity to chronicle his life, and usually does it only once; the novelist does it in every novel. Greene has recounted in his work the crucial episodes of his life. Anyone acquainted with his principled, arrogant, suffering protagonists already has an autobiography of their creator. (p. 28)