Henry Graham Greene 's father, Charles, became the headmaster of Berkhamsted School in 1910 when Graham was six years old, the year of his earliest morbid memories of encounters first with a dead dog, then with a suicide who slashed his throat in full view of the boy. But in his frequent recourse to childhood and adolescence throughout his fiction and nonfiction Greene would subsequently invest his school experience with the greatest morbidity. His father's situation as headmaster set the course of Graham Greene 's life not so much in an orientation to intellectual endeavor as in the profound sense of betrayal he experienced when he left the family quarters to become a boarder in 1918. Unusually sensitive to begin with, Greene suffered prolonged if fairly mild physical and verbal torture from the affluent (or moderately affluent, in this case) barbarians for which English public schools are notorious; by 1921 he...