Did Graham Greene play Russian rooulette when he was a young man?

Question

I have heard the rumour many times that Graham Greene played Russian roulette as a young man. Anyone know what the exact truth is behind this rumour?

Answer 1

Well the source for the tale of Graham Greene himself and so it comes down to one's willingness to accept his take on his youth...

Here is a link and snippet...

http://www.rbooks.co.uk/product.aspx?id=0099282577
"""Graham Green was born into a veritable tribe of Greenes - six children, eventually, and sic cousins - based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A SORT OF LIFE Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, THE MAN WITHIN was published in 1929. A SORT OF LIFE, like its companion volume, WAYS OF ESCAPE, combines reticence with candour and reveals, brilliantly and compellingly, the genesis of a life lived and an art obsessed by 'the dangerous edge of things. . the narrow boundary between lovalty and disloyalty, between fidelity and infidelity, the mind's contradictions, the paradox one carries within oneself'."""
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2002/01/06/AR2005041500456_pf.html
""To research her new book, "Traveling on the Edge: Journeys in the Footsteps of Graham Greene" (St. Martin's Press), Julia Llewellyn Smith followed the ghost of the controversial writer from Haiti to Sierra Leone to Argentina. David Wallis recently spoke to Llewellen Smith by phone from her home in London.

Q Suggest a Greene reading list for fellow travelers.

ATake the book for the place. If you are going to Mexico, read "The Power and the Glory," a fantastic novel about Chiapas. He also wrote "The Lawless Roads," a straight travel book about Mexico. It may be the most unpleasant travel book ever written. He wrote it in the 1930s. Even today, if you mention it to an inhabitant of Chiapas, they will tell you how they threw it across the room in disgust. The word Greene uses to describe everything is "hideous." Every page is just full of venom and bile.

What attracted you to a man who loved, as you wrote, "to visit brothels, to take drugs, to hurt and manipulate not just his readers but the people around him?"

You have to separate the author from the work. I don't think I would like Graham Greene at all if I met him . . . He was manipulative. He was selfish. He was definitely misogynistic. His women characters are appallingly portrayed. But it was his quality of writing that I liked, and his ability to convey the atmosphere of these extraordinary places.

Danger thrilled Greene, who as a kid played Russian roulette and as an adult gravitated toward countries in conflict. Did you find yourself in dangerous situations?

I did, especially in Sierra Leone -- which, when I visited, according to the U.N., was officially the most dangerous country on earth . . . [My photographer and I] found ourselves in a lot of very unpleasant situations at checkpoints when drunken soldiers, Nigerian soldiers who had been drinking all night or [were] high on drugs, would stop you and start searching the car. There was the sense that it could turn nasty at any minute."""


AND THIS LINK TALKS ABOUT N LENGTHIER FASHION, you'll possibly like this one the best...

http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/bestsellers/search.cgi?title=Travels+With+My+Aunt
""Henry Graham Greene was born October 2, 1904 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire England
the fourth of six children to Marion Raymond and Canon Charles Henry Greene, the
headmaster of Berkhamsted School. Graham has been described as a shy and sensitive
youth who was often truant in order to read adventure stories, evidence of his early love
of reading.“I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock, and I found
I could read-- not just sentences in a reading book... but a real book. Now the future
stood around on bookshelves everywhere.”The fact that his father was headmaster of the school he attended did not help his
ill-adjustment. At age 15 he suffered a nervous collapse and ran away from home. Upon
return he was sent to a therapist in London for six months of psychoanalysis. Greene
struggled with (and by some accounts enjoyed) a bipolar nature all his life, and continued
to seek psychoanalysis, if not to maintain his sanity, some of his friends suggest, than for
the experience of it and perhaps, to provide fodder for his writing. He kept, for example,
an alphabetized record of his dreams.“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write,
compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear
which is inherent in the human situation.”At age 17 Graham began to experiment with father’s revolver and Russian roulette out of
what seems to have been a sense of boredom. He continued this practice at the
University of Oxford, Balliol College where he was a student of modern history. During
his college years he was editor of the Oxford Outlook, and as a joke he became a dues
paying member of the Communist party for a time, at the estimated expense of 28 cents.
He doesn’t appear to have been very studious, or interested in being so, describing
himself as often drunk when he should have been in lecture. Before graduating with a
BA in 1925, however, his first work, Babbling April, a collection of poems
described as unexceptional, was published. That year he became a sub-editor at the
Nottingham Journal, but soon left in 1926 for the same position at the London Times. His first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929 and sold 8,000 copies.
The 600 pound per year contract for his next three novels from Heinemann that followed
allowed Greene to leave the Times in 1930, concentrate more fully on writing fiction,
and freelance a bit. In 1935 he becomes film critic for The Spectator, and is
subsequently promoted to literary editor in 1940. ------------"


Peace///////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Answer 2

Most reports and reviews of Greene's life refer to this Russian roulette "rumour". In fact it is pruported that the essay "The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard" is about his experimentation with this "game".

It seems like a lot of the information is based on Greene's claims he did this. I could not find any confirmed verifications by anyone else who had actually witnessed it. Opinions vary as to why he was motivated to do this - depression, boredom, experimentation.

However, Michael Sheldens biography discredits Greene's own claims that he did play Russian Roulette though so it is quite difficult to answer your question.

Answer 3

1

Answer 4

Well I am sure he didn't loose the game, anything other than that is pure speculation?