In 1926, the British author Henry Green (1905-1973) published the first of nine novels that would gain him critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. His mother didn’t quite know what to make of them. She loved to read, but didn’t partake of much fiction, so wasn’t sure how to assess her son’s literary reputation. “Are Henry’s books any good, dear?” was a question she frequently asked her grandson.
More than four decades after his death, the question lingers, its relevance renewed by New York Review Books’ reissue of much of Green’s work. Green’s books haven’t remained reliably in print, evidence of his limited popular appeal. But those who like Green’s novels really like them, and his following, though small, has been distinguished. John Updike, not prone to jacket-blurb hyperbole, celebrated Green’s novels with almost religious zeal.
V. S. Pritchett, another literary observer who didn’t dole out compliments easily, called Green the “most gifted prose stylist of his generation.” He saw in Green’s fiction the very qualities that readers see in Pritchett’s criticism and short stories: “He was not in the least sentimental: his eye was hard, his ear sharp,” Pritchett noted. “Some very fine artists impose themselves, but Henry Green belonged to those who masochistically seek to let their characters speak through them.” In a 1961 essay on Green, Eudora Welty was no less enthused:
Although Welty excelled at closely observed assessments of fellow writers, her extended treatment of Green’s novels fails to summarize what they are about or focus on a memorable character. Like many of Green’s fans, she doesn’t so much argue for Green’s excellence as simply assert it. To truly know what all the fuss is about, we’re pointed by necessity to the novels themselves, many of which NYRB, a patron saint of bright literary obscurities, has been bringing out in its typically elegant softcovers over several seasons. Loving and Back, among the first reissues, are a promising place to start, although newcomers to Green might find an even better introduction to his life and work in Pack My Bag, a 1940 memoir that New Directions reissued several years ago. New Directions will reissue Concluding, Green’s 1948 novel, in October.
Pack My Bag readers quickly learn that Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Yorke, who grew up within a family that, as his son Sebastian mentions in a charming introduction, “had aristocratic roots and, on the male side, a strong leaning towards classical scholarship.” The family “lived in a large and imposing house in Gloucestershire, set in a 2500 acre estate beside the River Severn.” Green wrote Pack My Bag at the start of World War II, its title wryly hinting at his strong suspicion that he would die in the war. During his youth in World War I, the family home had housed injured officers, an experience that gave Green a deep sense of life’s fragility. He was fascinated by how prosaic routine and the prospect of tragedy could coexist—domesticity and disaster within shouting distance of each other, sometimes creating an eerie sense of exhilaration. That reality informs one of the loveliest passages in Pack My Bag when Green recalls his boyhood at a boarding school on the English coast, close enough to the fighting that “the hills round brought no louder than as seashells echo the blood pounding in one’s ears noise of gunfire through our windows all the way from France so that we looked out and thought of death in the sound and this was sweeter to us than rollers tumbling on a beach.” Later, remembering Sunday walks in the same area, he elaborates the thought.
This is Green’s signature style, and probably one reason why other people of letters have liked him so much. His sentences sometimes unwind in long, gossamer strands of prepositions and subordinate clauses, as tenuous as a spider’s web—beautiful at their best, yet stretched close to the breaking point. For fellow writers who chafe against the limits of language, there’s a special thrill in following Green across the page to see if his sentence will survive in one piece. Green was glum about more than the war when he was writing Pack My Bag: He had struggled to bring his novel Party Going into print, finally getting Hogarth Press, the small house run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, to publish it. Green’s novels can seem very much in Virginia Woolf’s modernist school, if one means by modernist a story in which experience looks more like a collage of impressions than a coherent world.
In Loving, Green’s sense of the tragic running parallel to the mundane is evident, too—a notion established in the opening sentences:
What follows is an upstairs/downstairs tale of aristocrats and their servants, although it is mostly about Raunce, who succeeds Eldon as the new butler, and his romance with a new hire, Edith. It ends as Raunce and Edith “were married and lived happily ever after,” the once-upon-a-time opening of the novel coming full circle. In appropriating the language of fairy tales, Green suggests that Loving is more artifice than actual, a sensibility that makes us wonder if anything in the story is really at stake.
Although many of Green’s admirers point to the realness of his fiction, one often gets the sense that he’s keeping his characters at arm’s length, which can incline the reader to keep his distance as well. Green titled several of his novels with gerunds—Living, Loving, Doting, Party Going—which seemed to signal a desire to reduce experience to a clinical abstraction, like an avant-garde art installation.
In Back (1946), POW Charley Summers returns from war minus one of his legs and Rose, the love of his life. He meets another woman who looks like Rose, which occasions some thoughts on the duality of identity reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer. There are poetic descriptions throughout, often exploring Green’s preoccupation with what Deborah Eisenberg, in introducing the novel’s new edition, calls “the twining interdependence of life and death.” An early sentence about a graveyard is 104 words. It’s typical Green, unfolding like a prose poem that pushes grammatical convention to its limits:
The prose of a Green novel lingers more vividly than the characters within his stories, maybe because they can seem less like people than constructs—convenient hooks on which the author hangs his writerly art. Maybe that’s why he’s always been more popular with writers than readers. His craft evokes the cozy insularity of the literary workbench, a place of pleasant privacy where Henry Green, living every author’s fantasy, felt liberated to write for himself, and no one else.
Danny Heitman, columnist for the Advocate in Baton Rouge, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
