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Surviving: the Uncollected Writings of Henry Green
A collection of work by Henry Green is introduced by John Updike and includes never-before-published short stories, pieces on London during the Blitz, journalism, book reviews, a play, and more. 10,000 first printing. $10,000 ad/promo.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 7, 1994
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149 people want to read
About the author
Henry Green
56 books207 followersHenry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke.
Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with successful business interests. His father Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, the son of John Reginald Yorke and Sophia Matilda de Tuyll de Serooskerken, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist in Birmingham. His mother, Hon. Maud Evelyn Wyndham, was daughter of the second Baron Leconfield. Green grew up in Gloucestershire and attended Eton College, where he became friends with fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, Blindness. He studied at Oxford University and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh.
Green left Oxford in 1926 without taking a degree and returned to Birmingham to engage in his family business. 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. In 1929, he married his second cousin, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph, also known as 'Dig'. They were both great-grandchildren of the 1st Baron Leconfield. Their son Sebastian was born in 1934. In 1940, Green published Pack My Bag, which he regarded as a nearly-accurate autobiography. During World War II Green served as a fireman in the Auxiliary Fire Service and these 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. Politically, Green was a traditional Tory throughout his life.
Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with successful business interests. His father Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, the son of John Reginald Yorke and Sophia Matilda de Tuyll de Serooskerken, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist in Birmingham. His mother, Hon. Maud Evelyn Wyndham, was daughter of the second Baron Leconfield. Green grew up in Gloucestershire and attended Eton College, where he became friends with fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, Blindness. He studied at Oxford University and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh.
Green left Oxford in 1926 without taking a degree and returned to Birmingham to engage in his family business. 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. In 1929, he married his second cousin, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph, also known as 'Dig'. They were both great-grandchildren of the 1st Baron Leconfield. Their son Sebastian was born in 1934. In 1940, Green published Pack My Bag, which he regarded as a nearly-accurate autobiography. During World War II Green served as a fireman in the Auxiliary Fire Service and these 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. Politically, Green was a traditional Tory throughout his life.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 31, 2024
bout time I read this. I'll be dipping into it - one of those sort of books - taking my time. As some of you know he's my favourite author, for lots of reasons, one of them being he's from my home town (Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire).
It is ridiculous to give this book five stars made up mostly as it is of abandoned projects, ephemera (a dedication, a couple of book reviews: he dislikes the new pretenders Amis (kingsley) and John Wain, loves Terry Southern’s first novel. Indeed Southern is the interviewer in the Paris Review interview included here) and rejected material (stories and a play - quite rightly rejected as well). There are some accepted stories, mainly of fire fighting in London during the war, and these are wonderful. But my love for him is irrational - I think he wrote 4 of the greatest novels of the 20th century: Living, Loving, Back and Concluding (Party Going wasn't bad either). This book has several dry runs for these experimental books and I was enthralled to see Green working on his material. There are passages here you want to read and re-read and type out and hang on your wall. Especially interesting is the abandoned novel ‘Mood’ which shows a 21/22 year old Green having a go at describing the sensations of swimming/holidaying on the Mediterranean in 1926. You can't give a book containing the following passages less than 5 stars:
As you came down the beach so when you got into the sea it was like you had a halo round you, where the sun had been and now the warm sea lapped you you felt you could roll like dolphins for that round fat feeling. Oh she had gone plunging out, her wet rubber cap had shone like any god, there were no waves nothing but this blue sea, she rolled on it, the sun played like cymbals on her flanks and on one breast and then from a surfeit of all this she'd lain on her back and floated. She'd closed her eyes. But then there was a hum like thousands cheering miles away and she looked up and up above in that tremendous blue there was an aeroplane, aluminium painted, all along its wings winking blinding light, high,high above, ever so slowly moving quite straight, like a queen.
They had gone out to the outmost edge of the garden and the lights over that porch which led to the hotel were caught in a tiny reflection in their glasses on the marble table which gleamed like skin in the dark. They sat on a bench which had been made to encircle a tree, when they leant back the bark, which was not hot or cold, pressed in to their backs in long furry tongues. The marble table kept a hoard of coolness and their glasses of the dark wine looked like huge soft eyes, the pair of them, marvellously soft.
There are two things that mark out Green from the other writers around him, one was his willingness to experiment - Green was - as he says in the interview - always looking to bring his writing 'alive', to make it jump from page to head, prose invigorated by new methods. For example in 'Living' he famously dispenses with the definite article to wonderful effect (see passage I quote in the 'Living' review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... ). Lots of writers at the time were experimenting too - most notably Woolf and Joyce with the stream of consciousness. Green combined this playing with technique with an empathy and insight into his protagonists that makes the books almost vibrate with love. The characters may be tedious and undeserving (eg the butler Raunce in Loving) but Green gives everyone their full due.
Towards the end of his writing life he believed that novels should consist of mostly dialogue and his last two books follow this (Nothing and Doting). A mistake I think because although his dialogue is always accurate and nuanced (he was always praised for having a 'good ear' even though he was increasingly deaf) Green's power lay in his descriptive passages (I notice a lot of those I love are about light, the sun/moon, light reflected or fire) and his insight into the motivations and actions of his characters, often driven by love and obsession from right across the class spectrum.
PS he would have made an amazing GRer - he read a novel a day after he retired from business and became a recluse.
It is ridiculous to give this book five stars made up mostly as it is of abandoned projects, ephemera (a dedication, a couple of book reviews: he dislikes the new pretenders Amis (kingsley) and John Wain, loves Terry Southern’s first novel. Indeed Southern is the interviewer in the Paris Review interview included here) and rejected material (stories and a play - quite rightly rejected as well). There are some accepted stories, mainly of fire fighting in London during the war, and these are wonderful. But my love for him is irrational - I think he wrote 4 of the greatest novels of the 20th century: Living, Loving, Back and Concluding (Party Going wasn't bad either). This book has several dry runs for these experimental books and I was enthralled to see Green working on his material. There are passages here you want to read and re-read and type out and hang on your wall. Especially interesting is the abandoned novel ‘Mood’ which shows a 21/22 year old Green having a go at describing the sensations of swimming/holidaying on the Mediterranean in 1926. You can't give a book containing the following passages less than 5 stars:
As you came down the beach so when you got into the sea it was like you had a halo round you, where the sun had been and now the warm sea lapped you you felt you could roll like dolphins for that round fat feeling. Oh she had gone plunging out, her wet rubber cap had shone like any god, there were no waves nothing but this blue sea, she rolled on it, the sun played like cymbals on her flanks and on one breast and then from a surfeit of all this she'd lain on her back and floated. She'd closed her eyes. But then there was a hum like thousands cheering miles away and she looked up and up above in that tremendous blue there was an aeroplane, aluminium painted, all along its wings winking blinding light, high,high above, ever so slowly moving quite straight, like a queen.
They had gone out to the outmost edge of the garden and the lights over that porch which led to the hotel were caught in a tiny reflection in their glasses on the marble table which gleamed like skin in the dark. They sat on a bench which had been made to encircle a tree, when they leant back the bark, which was not hot or cold, pressed in to their backs in long furry tongues. The marble table kept a hoard of coolness and their glasses of the dark wine looked like huge soft eyes, the pair of them, marvellously soft.
There are two things that mark out Green from the other writers around him, one was his willingness to experiment - Green was - as he says in the interview - always looking to bring his writing 'alive', to make it jump from page to head, prose invigorated by new methods. For example in 'Living' he famously dispenses with the definite article to wonderful effect (see passage I quote in the 'Living' review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... ). Lots of writers at the time were experimenting too - most notably Woolf and Joyce with the stream of consciousness. Green combined this playing with technique with an empathy and insight into his protagonists that makes the books almost vibrate with love. The characters may be tedious and undeserving (eg the butler Raunce in Loving) but Green gives everyone their full due.
Towards the end of his writing life he believed that novels should consist of mostly dialogue and his last two books follow this (Nothing and Doting). A mistake I think because although his dialogue is always accurate and nuanced (he was always praised for having a 'good ear' even though he was increasingly deaf) Green's power lay in his descriptive passages (I notice a lot of those I love are about light, the sun/moon, light reflected or fire) and his insight into the motivations and actions of his characters, often driven by love and obsession from right across the class spectrum.
PS he would have made an amazing GRer - he read a novel a day after he retired from business and became a recluse.
June 4, 2020
Henry Green might come across as a name much less familiar when one considers the whole gamut of the modernist literary movement in early twentieth century and also its most illustrious peers viz. Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Ford, Woolf, Faulkner, Proust, Galsworthy and Powell. But he was widely known during his time as a master innovator of prose and one who was a central pioneer in the art of the novel, although his works did not enjoy the amount of commercial success that fiction of quality deserved, especially when compared to other writers of his time. His novels viz Loving, Living, Party Going, Nothing, Doting, Blindness, Caught, Back, Concluding, and even his autobiographical novel Pack My Bag are important works in the modernist literary canon, as important as perhaps Woolf's Mrs Dalloway or Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End.
This important collection, in particular, is a 21st century reworking his uncollected other writings besides his most important fiction. It is comprised of three sections: the 1920s-30s (mostly juvenilia and some important pieces that were latter to be a forerunner to one of his early novels), the 1940s (when he had already achieved critical acclaim for his work), and the 1950s (when he was writing his last completed works and his novelistic powers on the wane; this section is marked by quite a few interviews, esp the one with Paris Review stands out).
There are several pieces of fiction interspersed among the interviews and essays. Among these are a few stories and early versions of his famous novels. In the first section the pieces 'Adventure In A Room'(1923) (a forerunner of his first novel Blindness, published in 1926) and 'Mood'(1926) (an unfinished work, which he intended as a second work following Blindness, and one on which he continued to work till the 1930s) stand out. Other pieces, especially from the latter half of the novel, include 'A Novelist To His Readers 1 & 2', 'Invocation To Venice' (a gorgeous travel portrait of the famous Italian city), 'A Writer's Diary', 'Journey Out Of Spain' (an interesting play), his 'The Art of Fiction' interview for the Paris Review, 'An Unfinished Novel' among others. The book ends with 'A Memoir' - a brief portrait of Henry Green by his son.
It was quite interesting to note that Green singles out Céline as one of his most pertinent influence. Elsewhere he recounts Faulkner as his second most biding influence after Céline.
'INTERVIEWER:
No one, it seems, has been able to satisfactorily relate your work to any source of influence. I recall that Mr Pritchett has tried to place it in the tradition of Sterne, Carroll, Firbank, and Virginia Woolf – whereas Mr Toynbee wished to relate it to Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, and Henry Miller. Now, are there styles or works that you feel have influenced yours?
MR GREEN:
I really don’t know. As far as I’m consciously aware I forget everything I read at once including my own stuff. But I have a tremendous admiration for Céline......'
(Taken from the interview 'The Art Of Fiction' published in 1958 in The Paris Review.
This important collection, in particular, is a 21st century reworking his uncollected other writings besides his most important fiction. It is comprised of three sections: the 1920s-30s (mostly juvenilia and some important pieces that were latter to be a forerunner to one of his early novels), the 1940s (when he had already achieved critical acclaim for his work), and the 1950s (when he was writing his last completed works and his novelistic powers on the wane; this section is marked by quite a few interviews, esp the one with Paris Review stands out).
There are several pieces of fiction interspersed among the interviews and essays. Among these are a few stories and early versions of his famous novels. In the first section the pieces 'Adventure In A Room'(1923) (a forerunner of his first novel Blindness, published in 1926) and 'Mood'(1926) (an unfinished work, which he intended as a second work following Blindness, and one on which he continued to work till the 1930s) stand out. Other pieces, especially from the latter half of the novel, include 'A Novelist To His Readers 1 & 2', 'Invocation To Venice' (a gorgeous travel portrait of the famous Italian city), 'A Writer's Diary', 'Journey Out Of Spain' (an interesting play), his 'The Art of Fiction' interview for the Paris Review, 'An Unfinished Novel' among others. The book ends with 'A Memoir' - a brief portrait of Henry Green by his son.
It was quite interesting to note that Green singles out Céline as one of his most pertinent influence. Elsewhere he recounts Faulkner as his second most biding influence after Céline.
'INTERVIEWER:
No one, it seems, has been able to satisfactorily relate your work to any source of influence. I recall that Mr Pritchett has tried to place it in the tradition of Sterne, Carroll, Firbank, and Virginia Woolf – whereas Mr Toynbee wished to relate it to Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, and Henry Miller. Now, are there styles or works that you feel have influenced yours?
MR GREEN:
I really don’t know. As far as I’m consciously aware I forget everything I read at once including my own stuff. But I have a tremendous admiration for Céline......'
(Taken from the interview 'The Art Of Fiction' published in 1958 in The Paris Review.
January 8, 2009
John Updike's fawning introduction notwithstanding, most of these pieces went uncollected for the excellent reason that they're totally dispensable. If you happen to be one of the three or four people outside academia who take an interest in the evolutionary phases of Green's stylistic mannerisms - and this is a guy who had more distinct periods than Picasso, like that time in the thirties when he arbitrarily decided, hey, let's stop using the definite article, that oughta be wild and experimental - then, by all means, indulge. But be advised that this collection was assembled on the principle of editorial non-intervention, so you'll have to deal with an unholy bolus of material - fiction, reviews, reminiscences and interviews - all jumbled together at random.
I still can't decide whether I like Green's novels all that much - as opposed to admiring them on a theoretical level. His brand of aristocratic machismo, however - now that I can almost dig, when I'm in the right mood. Here's Green contemplating his future in an autobiographical piece:
I write at night and weekends. I relax with drink and conversation. In the war I was a PFC fireman in London; the relaxation in fire stations was more drink and conversation, and so I hope to go on till I die, rather sooner now than later. There is no more to say.
And so he did go on, giving up writing and becoming a reclusive alcoholic. At least he had his priorities in order! Reminds me of that Polish director - what's-his-name, the one who did the Red, White and Blue trilogy (Kieslowski, saith google) - who retired from movie-making in order, he claimed, to sit in a room and smoke cigarettes for the rest of his life. Exactly what I told my guidance counsellor I wanted to do...
I still can't decide whether I like Green's novels all that much - as opposed to admiring them on a theoretical level. His brand of aristocratic machismo, however - now that I can almost dig, when I'm in the right mood. Here's Green contemplating his future in an autobiographical piece:
I write at night and weekends. I relax with drink and conversation. In the war I was a PFC fireman in London; the relaxation in fire stations was more drink and conversation, and so I hope to go on till I die, rather sooner now than later. There is no more to say.
And so he did go on, giving up writing and becoming a reclusive alcoholic. At least he had his priorities in order! Reminds me of that Polish director - what's-his-name, the one who did the Red, White and Blue trilogy (Kieslowski, saith google) - who retired from movie-making in order, he claimed, to sit in a room and smoke cigarettes for the rest of his life. Exactly what I told my guidance counsellor I wanted to do...
July 30, 2008
OK I'll try one MORE time to add this! This is the original version of a novel Faulkner apparently reworked drastically for publication, aiming at maximizing its marketability, then consistently maligned. I haven't read that one but really liked this. It's dark -- a study of evil, in a sense -- but the prose is gorgeous and entrancing as ever. This is the first Faulkner I've read in a long time, and I've missed him!
October 29, 2023
Just as titled: unpublished stories, plays, essays and just plain fragments. Like any such collection, best read selectively. My favorites were his article on his time spent in WWII with the AFS (the London fire service auxiliary), and a candid, loving biographical appreciation of Green written by his grandson Sebastian Yorke. In any case, largely of interest only to hardcore Green readers.
March 15, 2023
nice parallels between firefighting and the war, but the stories felt a bit slow and i wasn’t really invested in any characters
October 11, 2012
Most posthumous collections of this sort are of little interest to anyone but keen readers of the author in question. This is no exception. I’m a great fan of Henry Green – ‘Loving’ and ‘Living’ are perhaps two of my favourite books of all time – and while this collection contains a few curios and remarkable anecdotes, there’s not much here that will come as a revelation to a newcomer. There’s a few stories from his days as a firefighter in WWII, some unfinished fragments from his early days as a writer, an unperformed play, and some rather ponderous literary essays recorded for BBC radio.
For me, the most interesting piece is ‘Mood’, an extract from an unfinished novel which Green began around 1926. It’s written in an impressionistic, vaguely Joycean style, describing as it does the meanderings of a young woman about the London streets; to some extent it foreshadows ‘Loving’, but it was particularly interesting to read this alongside an essay from the author in 1959 where he reexamines his reasons for leaving it unfinished. He is merciless in his self-criticism, and though he laments what he considers some terrible lapses in style, he also blames his own falling out of love with the real-life counterpart of the protagonist for his ultimate failure to finish the work.
Green felt that what he was trying to capture at that age was essentially unimaginable, impossible for any writer (let alone one so inexperienced) to effectively communicate to the reader. And I found this remarkable because I think he’s wrong: I really quite like ‘Mood’ for what it is, and I really don’t like so much a lot of what the author came to write in his later years. To some extent, the story of this collection is one of how Green moved away from a lush early style toward his more austere, dialogue-driven later works, and perhaps my problem is that the latter don’t seem to contain quite so many multitudes as the former. I sometimes feel like aspects of his dialogue haven’t aged all that well, and I don’t always feel like it contains the great revealing ambiguities he finds in the imagined words of others. I was disappointed to see him dismiss aspects of ‘Living’ as ‘affected’ here: all fiction is an affectation of some kind, and all Green did was to replace one sort with another.
On a different note, I feel I must reproduce this quote from his interview with the Paris Review because it is astonishing:
‘I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy liked most in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.’
Ladies and gentleman, Henry Green.
For me, the most interesting piece is ‘Mood’, an extract from an unfinished novel which Green began around 1926. It’s written in an impressionistic, vaguely Joycean style, describing as it does the meanderings of a young woman about the London streets; to some extent it foreshadows ‘Loving’, but it was particularly interesting to read this alongside an essay from the author in 1959 where he reexamines his reasons for leaving it unfinished. He is merciless in his self-criticism, and though he laments what he considers some terrible lapses in style, he also blames his own falling out of love with the real-life counterpart of the protagonist for his ultimate failure to finish the work.
Green felt that what he was trying to capture at that age was essentially unimaginable, impossible for any writer (let alone one so inexperienced) to effectively communicate to the reader. And I found this remarkable because I think he’s wrong: I really quite like ‘Mood’ for what it is, and I really don’t like so much a lot of what the author came to write in his later years. To some extent, the story of this collection is one of how Green moved away from a lush early style toward his more austere, dialogue-driven later works, and perhaps my problem is that the latter don’t seem to contain quite so many multitudes as the former. I sometimes feel like aspects of his dialogue haven’t aged all that well, and I don’t always feel like it contains the great revealing ambiguities he finds in the imagined words of others. I was disappointed to see him dismiss aspects of ‘Living’ as ‘affected’ here: all fiction is an affectation of some kind, and all Green did was to replace one sort with another.
On a different note, I feel I must reproduce this quote from his interview with the Paris Review because it is astonishing:
‘I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy liked most in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.’
Ladies and gentleman, Henry Green.
January 9, 2017
I purchased this book at the Gotham Bookstore soon after it came out in 1993 and after reading a review in the WSJ. The Gotham was a remarkable bookstore managed by a remarkable woman and frequented by authors known and obscure. The books on the first table on entering were always a tempting selection. Unfortunately, the owner's efforts to have it maintained after her death did not work out and the story of why this happened never seemed to have been adequately explained. Anyway, this book sat on my shelf in Onteora until late November when I picked it off the shelf and started browsing. I was drawn to its style and the author's thoughts about the craft of writing. I gave it to Pierre for Christmas.
November 23, 2017
had been meaning to give Green a try for a while and maybe this wasn't the best place to start. found his experiments with omitting articles not only ineffective but maddening. in the journalism, he seems educated but also anti intellectual and suburban. in his best prose here, however, there is evidence of why he is revered = 'sensual' writing which sometimes feels like it gets deep inside layers of consciousness where language can't usually go
September 10, 2015
It was a mixed bag, but worth the trouble.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews