Henry Green
Henry Green | |
---|---|
Johnny Drury-Lowe; front: porters. | |
Born | Henry Vincent Yorke 29 October 1905 Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England |
Died | 13 December 1973 | (aged 68)
Occupation | Author |
Education | New Beacon School |
Alma mater | Eton College |
Literary movement | Modernism |
Notable works | Living Party Going Loving |
Spouse | Hon. Adelaide Biddulph |
Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke (29 October 1905 – 13 December 1973), an English writer best remembered for the novels
Life and work
Green was born near
Green left Oxford in 1926 without taking a degree[4] and returned to Birmingham to engage in his family business.[1][5] He started by working with the ordinary workers on the factory floor of his family's factory, which produced beer-bottling machines, and later became the managing director. During this time he gained the experience to write Living, his second novel, which he worked on during 1927 and 1928.[6] In 1929, he married his second cousin, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph, also known as 'Dig'. They were both great-grandchildren of the first Baron Leconfield. Their son Sebastian was born in 1934.[7] In 1940, Green published Pack My Bag, which he regarded as a nearly-accurate autobiography.[8] During World War II, Green served as a fireman in the Auxiliary Fire Service.[1] His wartime experiences are echoed in his novel Caught; they were also a strong influence on his subsequent novel, Back.
Green's last published novel was Doting (1952); this was the end of his writing career. In his later years, until his death in 1973, he became increasingly focused on studies of the Ottoman Empire, and became alcoholic and reclusive.[9][10] Politically, Green was a traditional Tory throughout his life.[11]
Novels
Green's novels are important works of English
Living documents the lives of Birmingham factory workers in the interwar boom years. The main plot concerns Lily Gates and her courting with Bert Jones, one of the factory workers. They seek an opportunity to escape the British working-class existence by travelling abroad. Crucial to their attempted elopement is Lily's desire to work. She is constantly stifled in this venture by the man she calls 'Grandad', Craigan, who is her father's best friend and with whom she lives. Another plotline concerns 'Dick' Dupret, the son of the factory owner. His father dies, leaving the business to his son. There are many disputes between Dupret and Mr Bridges, the factory foreman. Mr Bridges fears for his job as Dupret seeks to renovate the factory and its workers. The language of the novel is notable for its deliberate lack of definite articles to reflect a Birmingham accent. In addition, very few articles are used: "Noise of lathes working began again in this factory. Hundreds went along road outside, men and girls. Some turned into Dupret factory". Green later explained his reasons for using this technique: "I wanted to make that book as taut and spare as possible, to fit the proletarian life I was leading. So I hit on leaving out the articles."[10]
Party Going tells the story of a group of wealthy people travelling by train to a house party. Due to fog, however, the train is much delayed and the group takes rooms in the adjacent large railway hotel. All the action of the story takes place in the hotel.
Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the
Back (1946) tells the story of Charley Summers, a young Englishman who comes back from Germany, where he was detained as a POW for three years after having been wounded in combat in France. Due to his wound, Charley's leg had to be amputated. While he was prisoner, Rose, the woman he loved, died; moreover, Rose was married to another man, so Charley cannot even express his bereavement for fear of scandal. Charley calls on Rose's father, Mr Grant, who encourages him to make acquaintance with a young widow. When he does, he is astonished at the uncanny resemblance between the woman, whose name is Nancy Whitmore, and Rose. He discovers that Nancy is the illegitimate daughter of Mr Grant, who sent Charley to her thinking he might console her for the death of her husband, an RAF pilot killed in action. The rest of the novel describes the complex and troubled relation between Charley and Nancy, as it unfolds against the background of a war-torn Britain.
Green had his own opinion of what writing should be: "Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations [...] Prose should be a direct intimacy between strangers with no appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to fears unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone."[13]
Reception
In the introduction to his interview with Green in the
After his death Green's works went out of print and were little-read. However, since the early 1990s there have been attempts to revive his reputation. In 1993 Surviving, a collection of previously unpublished works, edited by his grandson
Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books, said Green was "one of the 20th century's great unpeggable originals, each of whose novels (each of whose sentences, you could even say) takes off for new and unexpected places". Frank said his favourite book was Back.[17]
Bibliography
- Blindness (1926)
- Living (1929)
- Party Going(1939)
- Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)
- Caught (1943)
- Loving (1945)
- Back (1946)
- Concluding (1948)
- Nothing (1950)
- Doting (1952)
- Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green (posthumous, 1992)
Compilations
- Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin, 1978; Picador, 1982; Vintage, 2005)
- Nothing; Doting; Blindness (Penguin, 1980; Picador, 1979; Vintage, 2008)
- Caught; Back; Concluding (Vintage, 2016)
References
- ^ a b c "Molten Treasure: Loving (248 pp.)—Henry Green—Viking ($3)". Time. October 10, 1949.
- ^ a b "Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green" – Review, Insight on the News
- ISBN 9781857252118. Retrieved 20 January 2018.
- ^ West Midlands Literary Heritage site Archived 4 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "James Wood on Henry Green". The Times Literary Supplement.
- ^ Faulks, Sebastian (24 September 2005). "Caught in the web". The Guardian. London.
- ^ a b Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green by Jeremy Treglown, 2000
- ^ a b c The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 22, Summer 1958 No. 19
- ^ "All Time 100 Novels". Time. 16 October 2005. Archived from the original on 22 October 2005.
- ^ a b c d David Lodge, "Henry Green: A Writer's Writer's Writer", in The Practice of Writing (London: Vintage, 2011), pp. 113–122.
- ^ The Sewanee Review, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), pp. 114
- ISBN 0-425-03043-1. Page 415.
- ^ a b Faulks, Sebastian (24 September 2005). "Sebastian Faulks on Henry Green". the Guardian. Retrieved 6 December 2022.
- ^ a b Wood, Christopher (17 November 2000). "Working to create life in the reader". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 20 March 2012.
- ^ [1], Leo Robson, The New Yorker, 17 October 2016
- ^ Charlie Rose Archived 4 September 2009 at the Wayback Machine
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 27 February 2020.
Further reading
- Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday by Nick Shepley, 2017, Oxford University Press
External links
- Terry Southern (Summer 1958). "Henry Green, The Art of Fiction No. 22". The Paris Review.
- "Henry Green, the last English Modernist". by James Wood, The Times Literary Supplement.
- British Library list of holdings including scholarship on Henry Green
- Article in The New Yorker, October 2016
- "Why you must read Henry Green". by Nick Shepley, OUP Blog, October 2016.