Graham had many pleasures and, perhaps, even in later years, some euphoric moments. But enjoyment was transitory and not, to him, a necessity: a disposition, deeply attributable to temperament, which should also be referred to his background and generation. As with other Englishmen of his age—who had become adolescent during the slaughter of the 1914-18 war, and adult with the Great Depression—pleasure could not be an assumption and was not a goal; whereas suffering was a constant, and almost a code of honour. Suffering was the attestable key to imaginative existence. “Happiness” had an element of inanity, verified by Greene in life and in his fiction: “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.”