INSCRIBED TO EDDY SACKVILLE-WEST
A Sense of Reality
Bodley Head, 1963.
First edition. Original green cloth lettered in gilt in abstract pictorial dustwrapper. Author's presentation copy to friend and fellow novelist, Edward Sackville West, inscribed on the front end paper, "For Eddie with love from Graham." Sackville West's stylish modernist bookplate to the front pastedown and his inscription "Cooleville 20.v.63" to the front endpaper. A fine copy in a fine dustwrapper.
An excellent association. Greene and Sackville-West had just missed each other at Oxford, but their literary careers overlapped from the mid-20s, and both converted to Catholicism. Sackville-West was one of very few whose literary opinion Greene sought and respected: he notes in Ways of Escape that when in doubt about The End of the Affair (1951) he had "sent the typescript to my friend Edward Sackville-West and asked his advice. Should I put the book in a drawer and forget it? He answered me frankly that he didn't care for the novel but nonetheless I should publish - we ought to have the vitality of the Victorians who never hesitated to publish the bad as well as the good. So publish I did."
Stock ID: 40233
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