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Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait
A luminous autobiography by one of England's most original, delightful, writers. In 1938 Henry Green, then thirty-three, dreaded the coming war and decided to "put down what comes to mind before one is killed." Pack My Bag was published in England in 1940. When he wrote it, Green had already published three of his nine novels and his style"a gathering web of insinuations"was fully developed.
Pack My Bag is a marvelously quirky, clear-eyed a mother who shot at mangle wurzels (turnips) bowled across the lawn for her by the servants; the stately home packed with wounded World War I soldiers; the miseries of Eton, oddities of Oxford, and work in the family factory―the making of a brilliantly original novelist. "We have inherited the greatest orchestra, the English language, to conduct," Green once wrote. "The means are there; things are going on in life all the time around us." His use of language and his account of things that went on in his life inform this delightful and idiosyncratic autobiography, which "I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon."
Pack My Bag is a marvelously quirky, clear-eyed a mother who shot at mangle wurzels (turnips) bowled across the lawn for her by the servants; the stately home packed with wounded World War I soldiers; the miseries of Eton, oddities of Oxford, and work in the family factory―the making of a brilliantly original novelist. "We have inherited the greatest orchestra, the English language, to conduct," Green once wrote. "The means are there; things are going on in life all the time around us." His use of language and his account of things that went on in his life inform this delightful and idiosyncratic autobiography, which "I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon."
264 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 2011
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299 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 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 29, 2017
As I read Henry Green's early-life memoir, Pack My Bag, I found that I liked it a good bit when he was describing the challenges of being a boy, less so when he was describing the regimented life at Eton, and not at all when he was describing a wastrel's life-however literary-at Oxford. The final passages, devoted to his time working in his father's factory after Oxford, simply seemed tacked-on, leaving me to think, as I read toward the end, about my burgeoning disappointment.
My greatest complaint has to do with style, for which Green ultimately became famous. This memoir is chockfull of peculiarly phrased, very long sentences that do their best, whenever possible, to eschew commas. Later on Green learned to write in unpunctuated cadences that turned the action from one thought to another like a good skater changing direction. But here he seems to get muddled in tortured prose that reminded me of Cicero. Often I would be forced to reread a sentence to determine the subject, the dependent clause (s), the object, the swooning verb fainting just before the period, and then, of course, the meaning. At age thirty-three, Green wasn't yet good at managing his predilections and idiosyncrasies of punctuation and syntax. And no editor took him in hand to point out that every other writer who'd been through Eton and Oxford knew the rules of grammar and composition no matter how much he (boys' schools, remember) drank and smoked while a student and undergraduate.
As a boy in the fields or streams near his parents' estate, Green had a great love for what it was to be on his own in nature, starkly contrasted with the exigencies of life in the house surrounded by formalities and servants. He then went, as the scions of the wealthy class did, to a somewhat Dickensian little boys school commanded by the Tyrant (headmaster). My sympathy with the ongoing plight of youth cast out of home was fairly strong, but already I began to feel intimations of discomforts he would experience come Eton-time. There the jocks ruled and the uncoordinated struggled to become aesthetes. Well, boarding school life is claustrophobic and its pecking orders and disciplines and snobbishness are dreadful. (I know, having gone to boarding school at thirteen.) Green's portrait of himself at this point in his life is appropriately vague (adolescents are rather vague, not yet knowing who they are) but unfulfilling. Perhaps here, too, the weight of those awkward sentences began to wear me out.
Ah, then, Oxford: First six months, drunk every night. Balance of time, luncheon in one's room with one's dearest companions--the menu chiefly being duck and hack, day after day. All along Green somehow managed to write a novel that was published (while he was still an undergraduate), but he doesn't tell us much about this. Instead he begins to expostulate on how important certain dons could be, but we don't get many specifics--nothing in comparison to his very specific and well-done accounts of his boyhood fishing expeditions.
The overshadowing background to Pack My Bag, throughout, is war. He was a boy during WWI and boys knew about the war, even heard guns from across the Channel. And he wrote this memoir more or less in the pre-WWII spirit of "We who are about to die salute you." This was natural for Englishmen of his age. At thirty-three, assuming that 1938-39 signaled yet another conflagration, Green wanted to pull his thoughts together. If he had lived (and was about to stop living), he wanted to leave a bit more of himself behind. But as his son writes in a preface to this volume, Green lost control of his material the closer WWII came, and he apparently rushed through an awkward ending.
Well, his other books are gems (those I've read) and perhaps it's worthwhile to read a great writer's clunker every once in a while. By way of comparison, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's awful The Beautiful and Damned (starting with its over-the-top title). Eventually, Fitzgerald wrote lovely stories and The Great Gatsby. Writing is a difficult task.
My greatest complaint has to do with style, for which Green ultimately became famous. This memoir is chockfull of peculiarly phrased, very long sentences that do their best, whenever possible, to eschew commas. Later on Green learned to write in unpunctuated cadences that turned the action from one thought to another like a good skater changing direction. But here he seems to get muddled in tortured prose that reminded me of Cicero. Often I would be forced to reread a sentence to determine the subject, the dependent clause (s), the object, the swooning verb fainting just before the period, and then, of course, the meaning. At age thirty-three, Green wasn't yet good at managing his predilections and idiosyncrasies of punctuation and syntax. And no editor took him in hand to point out that every other writer who'd been through Eton and Oxford knew the rules of grammar and composition no matter how much he (boys' schools, remember) drank and smoked while a student and undergraduate.
As a boy in the fields or streams near his parents' estate, Green had a great love for what it was to be on his own in nature, starkly contrasted with the exigencies of life in the house surrounded by formalities and servants. He then went, as the scions of the wealthy class did, to a somewhat Dickensian little boys school commanded by the Tyrant (headmaster). My sympathy with the ongoing plight of youth cast out of home was fairly strong, but already I began to feel intimations of discomforts he would experience come Eton-time. There the jocks ruled and the uncoordinated struggled to become aesthetes. Well, boarding school life is claustrophobic and its pecking orders and disciplines and snobbishness are dreadful. (I know, having gone to boarding school at thirteen.) Green's portrait of himself at this point in his life is appropriately vague (adolescents are rather vague, not yet knowing who they are) but unfulfilling. Perhaps here, too, the weight of those awkward sentences began to wear me out.
Ah, then, Oxford: First six months, drunk every night. Balance of time, luncheon in one's room with one's dearest companions--the menu chiefly being duck and hack, day after day. All along Green somehow managed to write a novel that was published (while he was still an undergraduate), but he doesn't tell us much about this. Instead he begins to expostulate on how important certain dons could be, but we don't get many specifics--nothing in comparison to his very specific and well-done accounts of his boyhood fishing expeditions.
The overshadowing background to Pack My Bag, throughout, is war. He was a boy during WWI and boys knew about the war, even heard guns from across the Channel. And he wrote this memoir more or less in the pre-WWII spirit of "We who are about to die salute you." This was natural for Englishmen of his age. At thirty-three, assuming that 1938-39 signaled yet another conflagration, Green wanted to pull his thoughts together. If he had lived (and was about to stop living), he wanted to leave a bit more of himself behind. But as his son writes in a preface to this volume, Green lost control of his material the closer WWII came, and he apparently rushed through an awkward ending.
Well, his other books are gems (those I've read) and perhaps it's worthwhile to read a great writer's clunker every once in a while. By way of comparison, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's awful The Beautiful and Damned (starting with its over-the-top title). Eventually, Fitzgerald wrote lovely stories and The Great Gatsby. Writing is a difficult task.
January 29, 2019
Green is one of the most extraordinary, charming and disquieting of 20th century British authors. This little autobiography, written as the Second War began and he felt death must be imminent is always engaging and provoking. Worth a thousand historical novels on the period... He gets exactly the mixture of embarassment and pride at being a member of the wealthy classes, and captures the mood of the period between the wars with droll wit. Perhaps worth looking at the novels before coming to this; the two complement each other.
September 8, 2008
Henry Green is one of those writers I should like but haven't read - a pre-war British wit, a little more serious than E. Waugh. But damn if this mid-career memoir wasn't a precious and overwritten waste of time (both for Green to write and me to read). His son's introduction as much as admits that the book could've used more editing, but I'm not sure that would've helped me dislike it less. Perhaps it's the subject matter - hardships at Eton and Oxford, and the difficulties of living on an estate, don't make for especially compelling reading. An epilogue about the couple of months Green spent working at his family's factory doesn't redeem it; Orwell he ain't.
I wouldn't have been able to say when I got this book except for the receipt I found inside - September 14, 2007, at the Biography bookstore, for $5.96.
I wouldn't have been able to say when I got this book except for the receipt I found inside - September 14, 2007, at the Biography bookstore, for $5.96.
January 3, 2024
I found Green’s writing to be idiosyncratic, yes, but not nearly to the good as so many have written. Even by the end, I was still trying to figure out what he was saying.
And, what he said was mildly interesting, to me. I was interested by his experience as a rich kid who grew up (as far into his life this book reaches) not only to realize that being being born to money was not a guarantee of happiness, but to prefer the company of his fellow workers in the factory his father owned to that of his mates at Oxford. Beyond that, meh.
This has happened before, where I’ve been guided to an older work by adoring readers, but it hasn’t always led to a great reading experience. Harold Brodkey’s short stories, for example. but then there have been those on the other side, such as “The Master and Margarita,” that were worth the wait.
And, what he said was mildly interesting, to me. I was interested by his experience as a rich kid who grew up (as far into his life this book reaches) not only to realize that being being born to money was not a guarantee of happiness, but to prefer the company of his fellow workers in the factory his father owned to that of his mates at Oxford. Beyond that, meh.
This has happened before, where I’ve been guided to an older work by adoring readers, but it hasn’t always led to a great reading experience. Harold Brodkey’s short stories, for example. but then there have been those on the other side, such as “The Master and Margarita,” that were worth the wait.
November 4, 2020
Henry Green is the pen name of English modernist Henry Yorke (1905-1973), who wrote nine novels between 1926 and 1952 -- the first one, "Blindness," while still a student at Oxford. "Pack My Bag" is an early memoir. The author wrote it at age 33 because he fully expected to die in WW II.
He ended up serving in the London fire brigade during the bombings, surviving and going on to write more books. Death hovered over his early years, however, with a profound influence on his psyche. An older brother died when Henry was at his first boarding school (they used to send upper-class kids away when they were little more than babies). And even more significantly, the Gloucestershire estate of his wealthy industrialist father was used as a convalescent hospital for horribly traumatized WW I officers. The goal was to get them well enough to be sent back to the front, and young Henry saw how they dreaded it.
Green describes himself as a shy boy who longed to fit in at elementary school and later at Eton, finally beginning to feel comfortable in his skin at Oxford. The descriptions of Eton were pretty funny as, according to him, the whole focus was on sports, which was not his thing. All the teachers, he says, were hired for their prowess in sports and completely unable to teach the subjects they were assigned whether French, math, history, or whatever. The structure of school life at Eton, with its prefects and juniors and competition between "houses" foreshadows Harry Potter's Hogwarts to a T.
Green includes short samples of his writing as he begins to develop his skills, which are formidable. You don't need to take my word for that. Try John Updike: "Henry Green was a novelist of such rarity, such marvelous originality, intuition, sensuality, and finish, that every fragment of his work is precious, as casting a reflected light upon his achievement, the nine novels and the memoir that he published in his lifetime." So there.
For me the fun is in Green's descriptions of the culture of that privileged class between the wars and the tidbits about his early forays into the foreign world of women. (Oxford compatriot Evelyn Waugh said he wished Green had written even more about women.) An amusing example: the author is dancing at one of the hunt balls he detests and his partner is so thoroughly unpleasant that he is at a loss to find a topic of conversation. At last he remarks awkwardly that he likes the chandelier, and his dancing partner responds, "How nice for the room"!
He ended up serving in the London fire brigade during the bombings, surviving and going on to write more books. Death hovered over his early years, however, with a profound influence on his psyche. An older brother died when Henry was at his first boarding school (they used to send upper-class kids away when they were little more than babies). And even more significantly, the Gloucestershire estate of his wealthy industrialist father was used as a convalescent hospital for horribly traumatized WW I officers. The goal was to get them well enough to be sent back to the front, and young Henry saw how they dreaded it.
Green describes himself as a shy boy who longed to fit in at elementary school and later at Eton, finally beginning to feel comfortable in his skin at Oxford. The descriptions of Eton were pretty funny as, according to him, the whole focus was on sports, which was not his thing. All the teachers, he says, were hired for their prowess in sports and completely unable to teach the subjects they were assigned whether French, math, history, or whatever. The structure of school life at Eton, with its prefects and juniors and competition between "houses" foreshadows Harry Potter's Hogwarts to a T.
Green includes short samples of his writing as he begins to develop his skills, which are formidable. You don't need to take my word for that. Try John Updike: "Henry Green was a novelist of such rarity, such marvelous originality, intuition, sensuality, and finish, that every fragment of his work is precious, as casting a reflected light upon his achievement, the nine novels and the memoir that he published in his lifetime." So there.
For me the fun is in Green's descriptions of the culture of that privileged class between the wars and the tidbits about his early forays into the foreign world of women. (Oxford compatriot Evelyn Waugh said he wished Green had written even more about women.) An amusing example: the author is dancing at one of the hunt balls he detests and his partner is so thoroughly unpleasant that he is at a loss to find a topic of conversation. At last he remarks awkwardly that he likes the chandelier, and his dancing partner responds, "How nice for the room"!
July 24, 2009
"We who must die soon...should chase our memories back, standing, when they are found, enough apart not to be too near what they once meant." One of those elegant memoirs, whose best moments come when describing other people.
March 24, 2021
This book both gave me more Henry Green then his novels do, and much, much less. Nicely told memories, all filtered through a conviction that he is about to be sent to war and die (he was about to be sent to war, but he survives), Pack My Bag is in many ways less personal than many of the more recent memoirs I’ve read. Hardly a person is named, for example; he keeps everything very anonymous (and writes about this decision, as well).
I think I expected more about the impending war, and didn’t get it, although I don’t know how I could have gotten more than the overshadowing of impending death without it becoming some sort of long complaint. I also wish there had been more about his time working in his father’s factory; the first two thirds of the book, maybe more, is very school-heavy, and then the last third is packed full of travels in France and working in factories and interesting observations about language and what a group’s sense of humor says about them. I really enjoyed that last third and wished there had been more, but maybe part of what I liked so much was that it just hit some of the highlights.
The earlier musings on WWI, in which Green’s oldest brother was killed, were atmospheric and interesting. He was young enough to not really be aware of everything, and to experience through that lens of childhood where it isn’t exactly immediate or distance, just sort of present in a way you only sometimes notice. It was very interesting to read about.
Three stars is a bit harsh, but I don't know, it doesn't have the same excellence as his fiction, so... Let's say 3.5
I think I expected more about the impending war, and didn’t get it, although I don’t know how I could have gotten more than the overshadowing of impending death without it becoming some sort of long complaint. I also wish there had been more about his time working in his father’s factory; the first two thirds of the book, maybe more, is very school-heavy, and then the last third is packed full of travels in France and working in factories and interesting observations about language and what a group’s sense of humor says about them. I really enjoyed that last third and wished there had been more, but maybe part of what I liked so much was that it just hit some of the highlights.
The earlier musings on WWI, in which Green’s oldest brother was killed, were atmospheric and interesting. He was young enough to not really be aware of everything, and to experience through that lens of childhood where it isn’t exactly immediate or distance, just sort of present in a way you only sometimes notice. It was very interesting to read about.
Three stars is a bit harsh, but I don't know, it doesn't have the same excellence as his fiction, so... Let's say 3.5
November 6, 2021
We apologized for blood relationships, they had no place and that Gerald should remember them at a time, as everyone thought, when he must be preoccupied even all through the winter with being in the cricket eleven, was like the eccentricity of a seventeenth-century Emperor of China as one reads of it after a day's telephoning at the office.
April 19, 2025
I picked this up in a 2nd hand bookshop and enjoyed it. An account of the author's early life at an English school and Oxford in the early part of the 20th century. Long descriptive sentences, many which hit their mark, other which don't. After I finished I looked him up to find that the nameless school was Eaton and that he was on of the bright young things of the 1920s.
November 25, 2025
I wanted to read this because Henry Yorke was good friends with Anthony Powell - but I learnt nothing about the latter, other than that he was a better writer than his friend.
Some evocative passages - such as the young schoolboy Yorke and others being able to hear the guns of WW1 from school on the south coast and thinking they've seen the ghostly Angels of Mons - but overall quite a slog.
Some evocative passages - such as the young schoolboy Yorke and others being able to hear the guns of WW1 from school on the south coast and thinking they've seen the ghostly Angels of Mons - but overall quite a slog.
October 28, 2017
awful writing style.
August 29, 2024
2 1/2 stars
September 10, 2024
Autobiography of a great English novelist written as he thought he was about to be sent to his death in WWII.
February 27, 2017
The famous first paragraph, irritated with irony and foreboding.
Green's odd little novels, most which have gerunds for titles, have been tucked on my shelves in obscure omnibuses since the millennium at least. I never managed to finish a single novel, until NYRB started republishing them with new introductions. I'm reading Caught now and am deeply delighted by its oddity. Being the richly distracted reader I am, I decided I had to read Green's memoir before I finished the book, as there are obvious autobiographical elements in Caught. It was a disappointment after the startling English of the novel.* Most of his memories are about his eccentric upper-class childhood, his days at Eton (never named) and of course Oxford. Interest is fugitive; excitement absent. But the tale has its moments, including this credo for the would-be writer:
Praise again for NRYB.
___________
* One early reviewer could not get past the style: "In that passage can be found every possible puerile inadequacy. No schoolboy could do worse."
I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both. But not too late for the war which seems to be coming upon us now and that is a reason to put down what comes to mind before one is killed, and surely it would be asking too much to pretend one had a chance to live.Pack My Bag were (according to Green's son in the introduction) "the last words uttered by the philosopher Bradley on his death bed." Green isn't joking. Dread turns up regularly in this minor memoir of a 33-year-old writer who didn't expect to make it to 40.
Green's odd little novels, most which have gerunds for titles, have been tucked on my shelves in obscure omnibuses since the millennium at least. I never managed to finish a single novel, until NYRB started republishing them with new introductions. I'm reading Caught now and am deeply delighted by its oddity. Being the richly distracted reader I am, I decided I had to read Green's memoir before I finished the book, as there are obvious autobiographical elements in Caught. It was a disappointment after the startling English of the novel.* Most of his memories are about his eccentric upper-class childhood, his days at Eton (never named) and of course Oxford. Interest is fugitive; excitement absent. But the tale has its moments, including this credo for the would-be writer:
Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.There is indeed intimacy here, however the feeling most expressed – with justification – is the futility of being an artist in the run-up to another bloody war.
What is despairing in my case is that I should acquiesce, in the old days I should never have done so, and that is my farewell to youth in this absolute bewilderment of July 1939, that I should be so little unwilling to fight and yet likely enough to die by fighting for something which, as I am now, for the life of me I cannot understand.Green died in 1973, a legend to British novelists who understood his talent and completely unknown to Americans.
Praise again for NRYB.
___________
* One early reviewer could not get past the style: "In that passage can be found every possible puerile inadequacy. No schoolboy could do worse."
June 12, 2017
There are a few amazing sentences in this book, but as a whole, it was a trudge.
June 6, 2015
Odd little number. Far less lucid than his novels. For a book so short, I often found it sluggish and distracted (to be fair, it is written amid a bleak anxiety about looming war) - those sentences and that comma drought really not helping.
All the while, it's a pretty interesting account of public school life and coming of age between the wars (and one to add to your Tom Brown's Schooldays and your Copperfield). And it points to that love of vernacular and the factory and the working life which make his novels so fine.
Still, less rewarding than I'd expected as a fan.
All the while, it's a pretty interesting account of public school life and coming of age between the wars (and one to add to your Tom Brown's Schooldays and your Copperfield). And it points to that love of vernacular and the factory and the working life which make his novels so fine.
Still, less rewarding than I'd expected as a fan.
September 9, 2021
Well written. But I found Green's story of his youth and childhood dull. And I'm not a fan of "coming of age" memoirs. I only got through it because Green is such a good writer, and its fairly short.
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