![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Green was something of a rarity as a novelist, a patrician whose lasting fascination lay with working-class speech, the textures and burred rhythms of the Birmingham factory workers, Irish country manor servants, and Auxiliary Fire Service volunteers that animate his novels. Significantly, his greatest works mimic a world quite unlike his own. He wrote under a pseudonym (he was born Henry Vincent Yorke to a successful industrialist), and throughout his career he displayed an aversion to even the rudiments of publicity, even preferring to be photographed from behind, “like a surrealist clerk,” as James Wood has it. It is also symptomatic of Green’s inborn reticence. Of course, this invisibility is a consequence of the highest literary artistry. They seem to spring into existence as we read them, fully formed, brimming with a vigorous oddity. “His work does not represent life,” Eudora Welty wrote of the great modernist’s uncanny literary effect, “it presents life.” Indeed, it is as if these novels, adorned with their terse, gerundive titles ( Living, Loving, Doting, Party Going, and so on), are simply too vital, too thrillingly vascular to countenance the presence of their author. FOR ALL the imagistic compression and dizzy wonder of the prose, what the reader may find most remarkable about Henry Green’s work is its curious translucence. ![]()
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