Word: grahame
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...born (1904) in the town of Berkhamsted (accent on the Berk), about 26 miles northwest of London. Berkhamsted's chief distinction, then as now, was the unstylish but solid boys' public school which bears the' name of the town. Graham's father, Charles Henry Greene, had left Oxford in the 80s intending to be a lawyer. He came to Berkhamsted to teach for one term, and stayed at the school 38 years, the last 17 as headmaster. All six Greene children were born in Berkhamsted; Graham was the fourth. He hated the town...
...Berkhamsted's beautiful common, a "wilderness of gorse, old trenches, abandoned butts." (Once he ran away from home and hid out on the common; it was a deeply humiliating anticlimax when his big sister flushed him out after a few hours.) A boy could also escape by reading. Graham was 14 when he read Marjorie Bowen's * The Viper of Milan, a melodramatic yarn about a war between the dukes of Milan and Verona, and "from that moment I began to write...
...Miss Bowen's magnificent novel went into exercise books - stories of 16th Century Italy or 12th Century England marked with enormous brutality and a despairing romanticism. It was as if I had been supplied once and for all with a subject." At 14, a story had made Graham feel what most children learn much later, if at all. "Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white, but black and grey . . . I read all that...
Before he found his future, at 14, Graham had made serious attempts at suicide. Once he drank some photograph developing fluid and a bottle of hay-fever lotion. Another time he tried eating a bunch of deadly nightshade. He can still remember "the curious sensation of swimming through wool" after swallowing 20 aspirins and jumping into the school swimming pool...
After he tried to run away from home, when he was 16, he was sent to London to be psychoanalyzed. He lived at his analyst's house-"delightful months . . . perhaps the happiest of my life." It is doubtful whether they were happy months for the analyst. Graham emerged from psychoanalysis "correctly oriented . . . but wrung dry." He felt bored, and he stayed bored a long time...