Foreword
A few days before he died, when his daughter, Caroline, and I were with him at L’Hôpital de la Providence in Vevey, Graham Greene asked me to prepare this dream diary for publication. Only a strong desire to keep a promise made to him induces me, therefore, to write a modest foreword to this posthumous book he entitled
A World of My Own
.
Graham guarded his privacy as fiercely as he respected the privacy of others. He always refused to write an autobiography—after he had ‘closed the record at the age of about twenty-seven’ with
A Sort of Life
—because, as he said, it would have inevitably involved incursions into the privacy of other people’s lives. The private world of his dreams, however, was one that he nurtured carefully, recording it almost daily in the dream diaries that he kept over the last twenty-five years.
From those several volumes, he made this smallselection for public reading, choosing carefully and deliberately. The project engaged him in the last months of his life. It interested him. And one of the pleasures of this book is the pleasure that he himself clearly took in making the selection.
In this world of the subconscious and the imagination—a world
farfelu
as he used to call it—where everything intersects and gets tangled up beyond time, Graham obviously feels at ease and happy. ‘In a sense it is an autobiography,’ he says in his Introduction; and it’s true that between the secret world of dreams and the real world he lived in the divide is narrow. And the barriers have been lifted. Here he can gossip about others, or give free rein to his eagerness for adventure or his delight in the absurd. Dreaming was like taking a holiday from himself. As he confided to a friend: ‘If one can remember an entire dream, the result is a sense of entertainment sufficiently marked to give one the illusion of being catapulted into a different world. One finds oneself remote from one’s conscious preoccupations.’
I told him once that I was astonished by the clarity with which he remembered his dreams, the preciseness of detail he retained. He explained that the habit of remembering went back to the time he first kept a dream diary—when, as a boy, he underwentpsychoanalysis and was required by his analyst to retell his dreams (sometimes with embarrassing results—as when he had to confess to an erotic dream about his analyst’s beautiful wife). Later, when he again began to keep a dream diary, he always had a pencil and paper at hand on his bedside table so that when he awoke from a dream, which happened on average four or five times a night, he could jot down key words that in the morning would allow him to reconstruct it. He would then transcribe it into his diary. I remember the very first diary that he had—a large notebook of dark green leather, given to him by friends. Another was the colour of Bordeaux wine.
It is well known that Graham was always very interested in dreams, and that he relied a great deal on the role played by the subconscious in writing. He would sit down to work straightway after breakfast, writing until he had five hundred words (which in the last while he reduced to approximately two hundred). He was in the habit of then rereading, every evening before going to bed, the section of the novel or story he had written in the morning, leaving his subconscious to work during the night. Some dreams enabled him to overcome a ‘blockage’; others provided him on occasion with material for short stories or even an idea for a new novel (as with
It’s
a Battlefield
, and
The Honorary Consul)
. Sometimes, as he wrote, ‘identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his dream and not one’s own’—as happened during the writing of
A Burnt-Out Case
, so that he was able to attribute his own dream to his character Querry and so extricate himself from an impasse in the narrative.
The most startling aspect of his dreams was their warning nature.
A few days before he died, when his daughter, Caroline, and I were with him at L’Hôpital de la Providence in Vevey, Graham Greene asked me to prepare this dream diary for publication. Only a strong desire to keep a promise made to him induces me, therefore, to write a modest foreword to this posthumous book he entitled
A World of My Own
.
Graham guarded his privacy as fiercely as he respected the privacy of others. He always refused to write an autobiography—after he had ‘closed the record at the age of about twenty-seven’ with
A Sort of Life
—because, as he said, it would have inevitably involved incursions into the privacy of other people’s lives. The private world of his dreams, however, was one that he nurtured carefully, recording it almost daily in the dream diaries that he kept over the last twenty-five years.
From those several volumes, he made this smallselection for public reading, choosing carefully and deliberately. The project engaged him in the last months of his life. It interested him. And one of the pleasures of this book is the pleasure that he himself clearly took in making the selection.
In this world of the subconscious and the imagination—a world
farfelu
as he used to call it—where everything intersects and gets tangled up beyond time, Graham obviously feels at ease and happy. ‘In a sense it is an autobiography,’ he says in his Introduction; and it’s true that between the secret world of dreams and the real world he lived in the divide is narrow. And the barriers have been lifted. Here he can gossip about others, or give free rein to his eagerness for adventure or his delight in the absurd. Dreaming was like taking a holiday from himself. As he confided to a friend: ‘If one can remember an entire dream, the result is a sense of entertainment sufficiently marked to give one the illusion of being catapulted into a different world. One finds oneself remote from one’s conscious preoccupations.’
I told him once that I was astonished by the clarity with which he remembered his dreams, the preciseness of detail he retained. He explained that the habit of remembering went back to the time he first kept a dream diary—when, as a boy, he underwentpsychoanalysis and was required by his analyst to retell his dreams (sometimes with embarrassing results—as when he had to confess to an erotic dream about his analyst’s beautiful wife). Later, when he again began to keep a dream diary, he always had a pencil and paper at hand on his bedside table so that when he awoke from a dream, which happened on average four or five times a night, he could jot down key words that in the morning would allow him to reconstruct it. He would then transcribe it into his diary. I remember the very first diary that he had—a large notebook of dark green leather, given to him by friends. Another was the colour of Bordeaux wine.
It is well known that Graham was always very interested in dreams, and that he relied a great deal on the role played by the subconscious in writing. He would sit down to work straightway after breakfast, writing until he had five hundred words (which in the last while he reduced to approximately two hundred). He was in the habit of then rereading, every evening before going to bed, the section of the novel or story he had written in the morning, leaving his subconscious to work during the night. Some dreams enabled him to overcome a ‘blockage’; others provided him on occasion with material for short stories or even an idea for a new novel (as with
It’s
a Battlefield
, and
The Honorary Consul)
. Sometimes, as he wrote, ‘identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his dream and not one’s own’—as happened during the writing of
A Burnt-Out Case
, so that he was able to attribute his own dream to his character Querry and so extricate himself from an impasse in the narrative.
The most startling aspect of his dreams was their warning nature.
Similar Books
