Henry Vincent Yorke (29 October 1905 – 13 December 1973), who wrote under the pen name Henry Green, was an English writer best remembered for the novels Living (1929), Party Going (1939) and Loving (1945). He published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952. He is considered as one of the group designated in the 1920s/30s as the 'Bright Young Things' by the tabloid press.

Life and work

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 the New Beacon School in Sevenoaks. He then went to Eton College, where he became a friend of fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, Blindness. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh of Hertford College.

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 first 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. Politically, Green was a traditional Tory throughout his life.

Novels

Green's novels are important works of English modernist literature.

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."

Reception

In the introduction to his interview with Green in the Paris Review Terry Southern wrote: "An ancient trade compliment, to an author whose technique is highly developed, has been to call him a 'writer's writer'; Henry Green has been referred to as a 'writer's writer's writer.'" In a 1952 profile of Green published by Life, W. H. Auden was quoted as saying that Henry Green was "the best English novelist alive".

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 Matthew Yorke, was published by Viking Press. Other works have been reissued. Many contemporary authors have cited him as an influence, including John Updike, writing, "His novels made more of a stylistic impact upon me than those of any writer living or dead" in an introduction to an edition (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics USA, 1993) of three of Green's novels (Living, Loving and Party Going). The novelist Sebastian Faulks, who also wrote an introduction to an edition (Vintage Classics UK, 2005) of these three novels, calls Green "unique" and says: "No fiction has ever thrilled me as the great moments in Living and Loving".

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

Further reading

  • Nick Shepley. Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday, Oxford University Press, 2016
  • "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.