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November 13, 2007

Autobiography Archives--Graham Greene: A Life of Letters

Has anyone out there NOT become totally obsessed with and engrossed by a sudden blog discovery? Lately my penchant for penning handwritten letters has been supplanted by an addiction to reading newly discovered personal blogs. And I mean READING -- the entire archives, start to finish, like a book. We're talking several years' worth of blog posts: after finding the right URL, I caught up on three years of a coworker's life and travels in two sittings. The week before, I hungrily clicked through the extensive archive on the blog of a one-time acquaintance's new girlfriend. These are personal blogs about nothing in particular, written by bloggers I barely know. But I like to think of their posts as letters to the universe; letters addressed to no one and anyone, and that includes me.

Now that I'm caught up -- up-to-date, I guess--on both of them, I'm yearning for a new blog to scour the same way you crave a new book right after finishing a good read. So I picked up Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. It's a collection of the English writer's correspondence, from his schoolboy letters home to his "Mumma" to tacky and lewd love letters to mistresses. It's also got a lot of business correspondence -- letters to his various book and newspaper editors, from the 1920s on through until Greene's death in 1991. This was a man who received, on average, 180 letters a month.

I am hopeful that reading Greene's archive of personal correspondence will be a more substantive undertaking than the obsessive blog stalking I've been doing. But I'm already noticing the comparisons: both "genres" of archived material offer access to someone else's feelings, their dreams and frustrations and the way their mind unfolds. It's crude -- but delightful -- autobiography: autobiography as it happens, without the polish of hindsight or an editor's eye shaping life events into a story arc.

Greene's letters are also as deeply personal, or insanely frivolous, or utterly mundane as what the bloggers are posting in the present-day. Greene's lovelorn and whiny letters to a girlfriend -- written when he was 20 -- are just as melodramatic as today's painfully self-conscious teen blogger: "Now I'm writing to you gloomily, worrying you, when I want more than anything else that you should be always happy. It's all so tortuous & paradoxical." And later, an existential crisis: "Don't you ever wonder, in moods, now & again, what the use of going on is?" How we obsess and how we write about ourselves -- whether you're a great literary talent or just your average, reasonably intelligent blogger -- is fairly timeless.

Really, what's the difference between opening up a box of brittle, yellowed paper letters and finding an online archive of what are essentially diary entries? I guess I'm reading a published collection -- not a bundle of letters I found in the attic -- but it's still fun to chip away at the mystery of someone else's mind, someone else's experience, through what they choose to write about themselves. It's the intersection of psychology, autobiography, and documentation. (Any English majors or librarians out there agree?)

More on Graham Greene: A Life in Letters:
+ Extract from Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene [Times Online]
+ Adventures in Greene-land [UK Guardian]