I miss reading Greene. I miss discovering his stories for the first time. He's still one of my favourite authors - not because I loved all of his books without fail and without criticism, but because his writing has a quality to it that is just beautiful while still being totally on point.

So, when I picked up Ways of Escape, I hoped to reconnect with that wonder of entering Greeneland, a term Greene used himself (as I found out in this book). 

To some extent this was successful. Ways of Escape is one of Greene's autobiographical books (there are several volumes) in which he explores, in parts, his biography, and in parts his own works. 

While the biographical background was interesting (his travel experiences were fascinating, his deliberations about Catholicism not so much), his analysis of his own works largely left me wishing I hadn't read them. This isn't because they were disappointing - they weren't!

But when the magician discloses the workings of his tricks, some of the magic gets lost.

It was, I think, in 1954 that I was deported from Puerto Rico, an occasion I shall always remember with pleasure. Life is not rich in comedy; one has to cherish what there is of it and savour it during the bad days.

Greene's tale of being deported for having been a communist for four weeks at the age of 19 is hilarious, even tho it was likely no laugh for him (or anyone else) at the time.

Evelyn Waugh once wrote to me that the only excuse he could offer for Brideshead Revisited was ‘spam, blackouts and Nissen huts’. I feel much the same towards The Heart of the Matter, though my excuse might be different – ‘swamps, rain and a mad cook’ – for our two wars were very different.

That, indeed, explains a lot about both books.

On how he came to travel to Liberia with his 23-year-old cousin:

I had never been out of Europe; I had not very often been outside England, and to choose Liberia and to involve my cousin Barbara, a twenty-three-year-old girl, in the adventure was, to say the least, rash.

My invitation to her can only be excused because I had drunk too much champagne at my brother Hugh’s wedding, and I never expected her to accept. I did my best afterwards to discourage her. I sent her a League of Nations report on conditions in the interior, on the unchecked diseases, on Colonel Davis’s savage campaign against the Kru tribes and on President King’s private export of slaves to Fernando Po.

The report had rendered me nervous, and Sir Harry Johnston’s account of his travels in the interior, his endless difficulties with carriers, whom he could only take from village to village, made me realise that perhaps Liberia was a tough venture for a young man who had never been further than Athens on an Hellenic cruise.

I felt the need of a companion, but I panicked, when the champagne had worn off, at my choice. Luckily for me my cousin appeared unmoved by the reading material I sent her, [...].

LoL.

Wow. Let the below sink in for a minute! Despite my familiarity with quite a few biographies about Greene, I did not know about the libel suits!

When the news came to me that the English Book Society had chosen Stamboul Train, I thought I was temporarily saved, and yet fate had still a flick of the tail in store, a threatened libel action from J.B. Priestley. Priestley, whom I had never met, had taken the character of Savory, in Stamboul Train, as a portrait of himself – I had described Savory as a popular novelist in the manner of Dickens, and Priestley had recently published to enormous acclaim his novel The Good Companions, which led some reviewers to compare him with Dickens.

I was to learn in the years that followed how dangerous the libel laws could be to a writer. In this case Priestley, I am sure, really believed that this all-but-unknown writer was attacking him; he acted in good faith. The good faith of others was often more dubious. After the moderate success of Stamboul Train I began to be regarded as a monetary mark (no libel cases are ever brought against a failure). Between 1934 and 1938 one book, Journey Without Maps, had to be withdrawn and small damages paid to a doctor whom I didn’t know even existed, twice I was threatened by libel actions for reviews written in the Spectator, and finally there was the case of Miss Shirley Temple who, aged nine, brought a libel action against me through Twentieth Century-Fox for a criticism of her film Wee Willie Winkie in the magazine Night and Day.

In those black days for authors – they ended with the war and a change in the libel laws – there was one firm of solicitors who went out of their way to incite actions for libel, checking the names of characters with the names in the London telephone directory. An acquaintance of mine was approached at the door of his flat by a solicitor’s clerk who carried a novel which, he said, contained an undesirable character of the same name (the more uncommon the name the greater the danger, which was one reason why in my novel The Comedians I called my principal characters Brown, Jones and Smith). The solicitor’s clerk told my friend that if he wished to institute proceedings his public-spirited firm would be glad to assist. There would be no expenses if the case were lost, but he assured my friend it was unlikely to reach the Courts.

Unlikely indeed, for most publishers in those days had little zest for fighting. They were always prepared to cut their losses and make a small settlement. In the case of Stamboul Train about twenty pages had to be reprinted because of Priestley’s threatened libel action, and Heinemann deducted the cost from my royalties, or rather added them to my increasing debt to the firm.