Romancing - The Life and Work of Henry Green

by Jeremy Treglown
Faber, 2000

Henry Green must be classed as the most tragically overlooked author of the last century, perhaps ever. It is often said, most famously by Terry Southern, that Green is a 'writer's writer' (or, in Southern's phrase 'a writer's writer's writer'). This excuse is lamentable. Sebastian Faulkes recently cited Green as his most profound influence and it is certain that were Green alive today, he would be hailed as the greatest writer of his age. Treglown's book (along with the brilliant introductions he wrote to the new Harvill Press editions of the novels) goes most of the way towards explaining why Green has been so eclipsed by lesser literary lights (including his contemporary Evelyn Waugh). James Wood claimed convincingly that he was the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century after Woolf and Lawrence but Green's problem was that he was not a literary figure in the same way as those two Modernist luminaries. Although he classed amongst his friends some of the leading artistic figures of his age, he never courted publicity. This underlines the dichotomy (which Treglown highlights) between the pseudonymic writer Henry Green (who chose that name because of its very lack of character) and the industrialist aristocrat Henry Vincent Yorke. Treglown refers to the two as separate figures: 'he was beginning to find that the office routines of Henry Yorke were useful, even essential, to the imaginative work of Henry Green.'

With the modern cult of biography ensuring that Treglown's book will receive far greater prominence than the work of Henry Green himself, some discussion should be made of the literary career of the author, before considering Treglown's excellent treatment of his life. Green's work can be traced from the working-class novel Living, through the nightmarish inertia of Party Going and Loving (with its obsession with the servants in a country house in Ireland) to the disaffected novels, Nothing and Doting, that he wrote before ceasing to write, prematurely, in the late 1950s. Green wrote nine novels in all and an autobiography, Pack My Bag. His work is characterised by a fascination with language and society reflected in the experimental style of Living, which dispenses with the use of the definite article and dissects the contrasts (and similarities) between the working classes and their aristocratic employers. Party Going is set in a hotel next to Victoria Station and concerns a group of bright young things about to depart for the Cote d'Azure. The novel is shrouded in fog and shadows and recalls Woolf in its use of non-specific symbolism. Green's influence can be seen in the work of John Updike and Martin Amis, and he must surely be re-evaluated as a major figure in the literary history of the twentieth century.

Whether Treglown's biography will help with that re-evaluation is debatable. This is by no means because it is a bad biography. On the contrary, it is accomplished and at times extremely revealing when considering the early novels. The problem lies with the aforementioned dichotomy between the writer and the life. Henry Vincent Yorke, aristocrat turned factory worker, was a fascinating writer but kept his life as divorced as possible from his work. As he once stated: 'the writer has no business with the story he is writing'. Treglown summarises the problem: 'in a century of publicity he himself was one of the causes of his neglect: through his extreme, though far from straightforward, reticence'. It is a mark of his autobiography that it reveals almost nothing of the author, and merely looks with self-deprecating humour at the life of Henry Yorke.

As previously stated Henry Green was close to many of the most prominent literary figures of is time: Evelyn Waugh (who proofread Party Going), Harold Acton, John Betjeman, Cyril Connelly, Anthony Powell (who was at prep school with him). His tutor was C.S. Lewis, no less. Treglown's book does well not to emulate Humphrey Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation in its romanticising of this age when literary greats rubbed shoulders at Eton and Oxford. Romancing is at its best when considering the novels from a critical standpoint. Treglown makes an interesting comparison between Party Going and Beckett's work which should be taken further, asking whether Green was in fact writing a novel of the absurd. The critical discussion of Loving is spot-on. Treglown makes a great deal of the class issues raised in Green's masterpiece and nicely interlinks the biographical detail with his reading of the novel. Occasionally the tone of the biographical work veers into the overly verbose or the hackneyed: 'In many ways, the two years he spent in the factory were the happiest of his life' is straight from 'A Bluffer's Guide to Biography' while 'He oscillated between an adolescent daze of furtive, obsessional, self-mockingly voyeuristic longing and occasional soberer interludes' is unnecessarily wordy