Background
Green was born on October 29, 1905, at Forthampton Court, Gloucestershire, into an educated family.
(A collection of work by Henry Green is introduced by John...)
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.
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Green was born on October 29, 1905, at Forthampton Court, Gloucestershire, into an educated family.
Green was educated at Eton and Oxford.
Green worked in the family engineering business at Birmingham, of which he became managing director.
He served throughout World War II as a fireman in London. His novels are Blindness (1926), Living (1929), Party Going (1939), Caught (1943), Loving (1945), Back (1946), Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952), a short career but lasting in achievement. A highly subjective autobiography, Pack My Bag, appeared in 1940 (U. S. pub. , 1993).
Green's artistic progress was unpredictable from novel to novel. From Living, a novel of factory life, he passed to Party Going, an account of a group of rich and frivolous young people marooned by fog in a London terminal hotel while waiting to leave for the Continent, then to Caught, on the surface a presentation of the London fireman's life during the air raids of 1940 but, beyond that, an exploration of what it means to be caught in various extreme emotional situations.
In Loving, considered by many his masterwork, the scene moved to a castle in neutral Eire during the war, the action taking place among the English servants. Nothing and Doting are comedies of manners set in London's West End. The novels' themes are rendered poetically in terms of symbolism and imagery rather than naturalistically, and in an allusive prose that is, to use Green's words, "a gathering web of insinuations. " Party Going, for example, begins: Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet. There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had departures lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon. Party Going is social comedy but the "departures" of loss, separation, and death lurk at its edges. Green stopped writing after 1952, giving as his reason that he could see no more point in it.
(A collection of work by Henry Green is introduced by John...)
Quotations: "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. "
In 1929, he married his second cousin, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph. They were both great-grandchildren of the 1st Baron Leconfield. Their son Sebastian was born in 1934.
