Pack My Bag

The autobiography of Henry Green, one of the twentieth century's finest writers, is as unconventional and brilliant as its author-subject.

Shines with the same marvellous originality, intuition, sensuality and finish as his novels

Green's works live on with ever-brightening intensity

Green's books are solid and glittering as gems

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born in 1905 near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become managing director of an engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926) was written whilst he was still at school and published whilst he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the London Fire Brigade. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, and a memoir, Pack My Bag. Henry Green died in December 1973

Henry Green wrote his autobiography in 1940, aged only thirty-five, because he was convinced he wouldn't survive the war. The result is a delightfully wayward and incisive portrait of English society and of the man himself. From reminiscences of a childhood spent among the gentry, to searing descriptions of Eton and Oxford, to reflections on the author's first experiments with prose and with sex, all Green's unique talents as a writer are on offer here, at their most dazzling and accessible.

Blindness

Henry Green was born in 1905 and spent his youth in his family home in the West Country. After his education as Eton and Oxford he worked with his father in an engineering company, but pursued a parallel career as a novelist.

Blindness is Henry Green's first novel. Begun when the author was still at school, it tells the story of a clever and artistic boy who, blinded in a senseless accident, turns to writing with powers extraordinarily heightened by his affliction. With a total lack of sentimentality Henry Green explores the youth's adaptation to his changed and darkened life. 
 
Blindness has been much referred to and much discussed by Green's admirers, but for many years has been impossible to obtain. Its reissue coincides with the increasing recognition of Green's stature as a major modern English novelist.

Party Going

The most gifted prose writer of his generation

Each of Green's books stands apart from the others as a separate feat in itself

Green's novels are sufficiently unlikle any others, sufficiently assured in their perilous, luminous fullness, to warrant the epithet incomparable...they have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England...Green's human qualities - his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss - make him a precious witness to any age

Green's works live with ever-brightening intensity--it's like dancing with Nijinsky or Astaire, who lead you effortlessly on.

A group of rich, spoiled and idle young people heading off on a winter holiday are stranded at a railway station when their train is delayed by thick, enclosing fog. PARTY GOING describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below.

Doting

Satirizing the tedium of upper-middle-class life in post-war London, this novel depicts a world in which substance is far less important to anyone than appearance. The question asked throughout the text concerns the differences between doting and loving.

Living

LIVING, as an early novel, marks the beginning of Henry Green's career as a writer who made his name by exploring class distinctions through the medium of love. Set in an iron foundry in Birmingham, LIVING grittily and entertainingly contrasts the lives of the workers and the owners

Nothing, Doting, Blindness

A contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, admired by Elizabeth Bowen and W.H. Auden, Henry Green is a neglected master of 20th century literature who is ripe for rediscovery.

Experimental in tone; spare and sensuous by turns, irradiated by stylistic fireworks... his novels are dazzling exercises in form

One cannot think of another modernist writer so neglected and yet so warmly humane

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century... his writing is wonderfully seductive - as oblique, suggestive and full of surprises as life itself

The most curious imagination in the English novel

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY D. J. TAYLOR 
 
These three brilliant novels span Henry Green's career as a novelist and display his unique talents as a writer. Nothing is a tale of the merry-go-round of love, marriage and infidelity, and the ceaseless tussle of innocence versus experience. Doting sets the middle-aged male infatuation for pretty girls against the comfortable affection of wives and old friends, delving into the complications of burgeoning affairs and boring marriages. In Blindness, Green's first novel, a young man is blinded in a senseless accident but thereafter discovers new imaginative powers.

Loving, Living, Party Going

Henry Green explores class distinctions through the medium of love in this volume of novels.

Green paints an unforgettable portrait of a doomed, amoral world whose characters, trapped in the fog, are somehow waltzing blithely towards oblivion...cinematic in its intensity

Heartbreaking, funny and written with such luminous prose - he's the most brilliant, and neglected, of English writers

Perhaps the best introduction to another great original of the English novel, who learned from Firbank’s economy, but who had his own quite different imaginative world. Loving, set among the servants of an Irish country house, combines his superbly truthful ear for how people really speak with an unforgettable vein of surreal poetry

The most original, the best writer of his time

Green's books remain as solid and glittering as gems- They are not, like so many contemporary novels, mere slices of life but highly successful attempts at making art give meaning to life

About Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him... With Green, we’re presented with a singular kind of artist who, like the poets of ancient India and Greece, has nothing to offer us but delight. We don’t know what to do with such a writer

Henry Green (Author) Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born in 1905 near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become managing director of an engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926) was written whilst he was still at school and published whilst he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the London Fire Brigade. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, and a memoir, Pack My Bag. Henry Green died in December 1973 Sebastian Faulks (Introducer) Sebastian Faulks has written nineteen books, of which A Week in December and The Fatal Englishman were number one in the Sunday Times bestseller lists. He is best known for Birdsong, part of his French trilogy, and Human Traces, the first in an ongoing Austrian trilogy. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a journalist on national papers. He has also written screenplays and has appeared in small roles on stage. He lives in London.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS 
 
Henry Green, whom W. H. Auden called 'the finest living English novelist', is the most neglected writer of the last century and the one most deserving of rediscovery by a new generation. This volume brings together three of Henry Green's intensely original novels. 
 
Loving explored class distinctions through the medium of love and brilliantly contrasts the lives of servants and masters in an Irish castle during World War Two, Living of workers and owners in a Birmingham iron foundry. Party Going is a brilliant comedy of manners, presenting a party of wealthy travellers stranded by fog in a London railway hotel while throngs of workers await trains in the station below.

Caught

When the war breaks out, Rose, a well-to-do widower with a young son, Christopher, volunteers for the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, and is trained under a professional fire officer, Pye. The two men discover that a quite different link already exists between them: it was Pye's strange, disturbed sister who once upon a time abducted Christopher and kept him in her room until Pye rescued the terrified child. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz the relationship between the two men develops as each of them grapples with his own troubled emotional attachments, the one to his dead wife, the other to his unhappy sister. Inevitably matters come to a head when history shows signs of repeating itself. The subtle handling of relationships, the brilliance of the dialogue and description - including one of the best accounts ever written of London under the Blitz - established Caught as one of Henry Green's most powerful novels.

Loving

One of his most admired works, LOVING describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe; invading one another's provinces of authority to create an anarchic environment of self-seeking behaviour, pilfering, gossip and love.

Back

Back is, according to Jeremy Treglown in his introduction, "Henry Green's most extended attempt to plumb the world of the hunted - and haunted". First published in 1946, it has indeed remained one of Green's most haunting, elegiac novels and one of the most enduring to have focused on the individual human tragedy of the war.

Concluding

That Green is completely master of his material is proved by Concluding...which has been acclaimed as his masterpiece. From the point of view of pure technique the claim is just. It is a marvellously well written book

Peculiar and beautiful... I love Concluding for the glorious, syntax-straining sentences that flare out of nowhere, and are full of those same wild energies

He has found in Concluding a theme whose sinister beauty exquisitely fits his equivocal powers, and he has handled it with care and inspiration

He interprets better than any other contemporary writer the relationship of the individual to the chaos of our time

Old Mr Rock, a widower, lives in a cottage with his granddaughter Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig, Ted the goose and Alice the cat, but an additional member threatens in the person of Sebastian Birt, the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian spinsters, the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker. 
 
One sunny summer's morning, the morning of the Founders' Day Ball, as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy, it is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage, Henry Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts, the suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an absolute mastery in the depiction of character, he imbues this apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and superb comic effect.

Surviving

Edited by the author's grandson, the novelist Matthew Yorke, and with an Introduction by John Updike, this book is an excellent selection of Henry Green's uncollected writings. It includes a number of outstanding stories never previously published, written during the '20s and '30s ("Bees", "Saturday", "Excursion", and the remarkable "Mood" among them). It contains a highly entertaining account of Green's service in the London Fire Brigade during the War; a short play written in the 1950s; and a selection of his journalism, including revelatory articles about the craft of writing, a marvellous evocation of Venice, a description of falling in love, reviews which illuminate his literary enthusiasm and the entertaining interview with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. It is rounded off with a biographical memoir by Green's son, Sebastian Yorke. Fascinating and invaluable as an introduction to Green, Surviving casts new light on his work and illustrates the many facets of this exceptional writer, one of the two most important English novelists of his time.

"Living introduced a whole school of proletarian literature, and yet remains apart from, and superior to, any of its followers" Times Literary Supplement 
 
 
The Duprets, upper-class owners of a Birmingham iron-foundry, struggle to keep the business going in the 1920s, while young Lily Gates keeps house for three men who are employed there: the patriarchal Craigan, who owns the house; her worthless father Joe; and stalwart Jim, who is bashfully courting her. Sensing, however, that life must hold greater excitement than she can hope for in this closed little world, Lily succumbs to the bolder approach of a rival suitor, Bert, who takes her to the pictures and, eventually, to Liverpool with a view to a new life in Canada. Bert is not destined to stay the course, though, and the affair ends in tears. Bravely Lily returns to her threadbare household. 
 
 
"Living is a book about how people really live: their hopes, but also their compromises and defeats" Jeremy Treglown 
 
"The best novel of working-class factory life we have" Walter Allen 
 
"His terrain here is close to D.H. Lawrence's, with the difference that whereas Lawrence escaped from the working class, Green escaped into it...His feat of equilibrium was to show lives whose impoverishment he fully recognized as nevertheless sites of comedy, excitement, complex feeling, and beauty" John Updike

Henry Green

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

His novels made more of a stylistic impact on me than those of any writer, living or dead

These novels offer a glimpse of class in wartime and postwar Britain with wit and style thrown into the mix.

Dazzling, daring and full of original insight and wit, Henry Green offers a unique view of a class-ridden Britain enduring both war and its aftermath. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz, so brilliantly evoked in Caught, gossip spreads like wildfire and the lives of two men are torn apart. In Back, Charley, an amputee, returns from a prison camp to his village and the grave of the woman he loved. Concluding was Green's own favourite of his novels and tells the story of a summer's day and a schoolgirl's disappearance. 
 
The text of Caught used in this edition is based on Green's original manuscript, which was censored by the publisher on first publication, but can be read now for the first time in unexpurgated form.

Henry Green

Praise for Caught, Back, Concluding

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

The finest living English novelist

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

The finest living English novelist

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

The finest living English novelist

Books by Henry Green

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