Pack My Bag and Surviving

...T he prose collection Surviving is valuable only as it prefigures its author's later accomplishments...

...His mother was a Wyndham, and had a sharp tongue and little education...

...Green did not leave the house in the final years of his life—explicitly fearing violence...

...Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide—now forbidden—of a Hindu wife on her husband's flaming bier...

...The best is probably Loving, set in a large Irish country house—owned by a Mrs...

...GREEN: I don't follow...

...Six of Green's novels have just been reissued again by Penguin, in two volumes with lichen-pale spines...

...Artistically among the most uncompromising of his contemporaries, Green was never particularly comfortable with the aesthete's pose...

...GREEN: Oh, "subtle...

...Each small event, each line of dialogue, is used for what people will make of it...

...Edith finds the ring and hides it...

...How dull...

...He studied those around him, whether the flat-cap-and-cloth-coat underworld of the English working man, or the cosmopolitan London set he was a part of...

...For the important thing is less what caused Green to descend into the Marianas Trench of life in a bathyscaphe of Gordon's gin than how he was able to get across to us that he'd been there...

...by Penguin, and John Updike has championed them...

...The butler dies by page five, and the saturnine head footman Charlie Raunce takes his place...

...Of Oxford he said, "The days were a stupor, until, in the evening with a few quick drinks, the niind was lit again by the daylight of whiskey with friends...

...It takes a great deal of agoraphobia for a man to treat a privileged life of the twentieth century as a trek through some waterless Empty Quarter, "where it was held a merit to kill Christians for their faith, and fair sport to murder any trayeller, whatever his religion, for loot...

...His novels have been periodically reissued Richard Lamb is a writer living in New York...

...p ack My Bag is a memoir Green wrote in the late thirties under the impression that he would be killed in the coming war...

...his snobbery was so unbearable he bent it back on himself, admiring those whom he could also feel superior to, the neat trick of the anti-snob...

...In another story, "The Great Eye I," a man lies hung over on his bed, in "bad odour" with his wife who "seemed to take care not to look at him," and considers his drunken actions of the previous night...

...Henry liked to fish and to play billiards...

...events bud and flower with a quiet inevitability that includes the human tendency to misunderstand...

...A better question today is: How did Green—whose technique is unsurpassed by any writer of his celebrated generation—get so obscure...

...At "the school down the river" which is Green's coy name for Eton, he was variously sheltered by the reputation of his athlete brother, tortured by snobbery, and a member of the Arts Society, which also included Acton, Powell, Connolly, and Brian Howard, none of whom is mentioned by name...

...The war looms...

...Henry Green—in the early 1920s, Edward Garnett, celebrated for his abilities as a literary talent scout and his eccentricity of manner, asked "How did you come to write anything so good...

...Green compared his first school to a fascist state...

...He also played billiards for the school, and says he sent a band of hearties intent on doing damage on their way by saying they might harm his hands...

...There is pilfering from the pantry...

...Thanks to the tireless Brideshead industry, the outlines of his story—Etonian who worked in his father's factory, then ran it—have been widely disseminated, and there is a familiar photograph of him showing a boy of pallid Lugosian handsomeness, at once callow and-enigmatic...

...His anomie was so pronounced it drove him from the company of his natural companions, whom he eventually called his "much hated old friends...

...Tennant loses a valuable ring...

...to a husband going to the pub...

...The book ends with Green leaving Oxford to go work in his father's factory in Birmingham...

...Tennant and staffed by English servants—during World War II...

...The story doesn't work, but the quality of the prose leaves one a bit agog at the 18-year-old who produced it...

...All of these events reverberate through the house, experienced with distant concern by the well-named Tennants and with vivid immediacy by the servants...

...They were distant, "selfish" in his opinion, and inhabit the background of the book like the Tennants in Loving...

...An insurance investigator comes...

...he didn't really like to hunt...

...Green grew up in a large house near the Severn River in Gloucestershire...

...There is none of the epigrammatic glitter or condensation of Green's contemporaries...

...What lasting fame he has received has been as a fringe member of that Oxford set of the early twenties that included Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Harold Acton, and Cyril Connolly...

...His father was a businessman of aristocratic and Dutch descent...

...It might be too much to expect a man who always kept his bedroom "bare of possessions" that might give away his personality to write a particularly revealing memoir, and Henry Green did not...

...It strikingly evokes a girl's inner life through her memories of a beloved friend who has been married...

...Green, who saw two movies a day at Oxford, drank in the morning throughout adulthood, and later described himself as a "novel-a-thy man," cannot be described as having been on good terms with "reality...

...Pack My Bag, in fact, reads like one of those privately printed memoirs by the prosperous head of amiddling company—which is what Green was...

...With a romanticism that reminds one of great English travel writers like Richard Burton or Wilfred Thesiger—or Charles Montagu Doughty, whom he particularly revered—Green spent his life traversing a personal Arabia Deserta created by the imperatives of his oddly formed psyche...

...Cook's Albert finds it and takes it...

...However, if one reads Green's accounts of persecution of aesthetes at Oxford, considers the philistinism of his country and class, and substitutes the words "artist" and "writer" for "Christian" and "traveller," it will perhaps become apparent what he was on about...

...Being a child, he wrote, "is to have things taken from one all the time...

...His words on Doughty are appropriate in light of his own wanderings: What might be held affectation, his pleasure that he was no longer taken for a rich stranger amongst them, is found to be the expression of a great need he had to get away unnoticed, for, unlike almost any traveller, he had no love for those whose company he chose, so far from the habitation of those others whom, sitting before their coal fires in the month of June, although he never says so, he liked no better, this monumentally lonely man...

...One of the best pieces is a Paris Review interview by Terry Southern, who asks Green, "Is your work too subtle for American readers...

...Her daughter-in-law is found in bed with a neighbor...

...In the end, the details of Green's life are sufficiently explained...

...In World War I, their house served as a hospital filled with wounded men abashed by their surroundings, intent on seducing the maids, desperate at the prospect of returning to the trenches...

...Common speech, by its very frequency of usage, takes on meanings beyond itself, and also obscures its meaning, and Green is alive to the misunderstandings...

...Physical actuality—details of light, of interaction—takes on a neurasthenic vividness in his work, especially the actual words of communication, which Green studied with an anthropologist's fascination...

...English, and not English at all, like his writing...

...Raunce lusts after Edith, the underhousemaid, fiddles the books, yells at his "yellow pantry boy" Albert, not to be confused with the cook's nephew Albert, though of course he is...

...Green was intensely aware of the different ways that very simple things can be said, once enumerating 138 ways that a wife can say "Will you be long...

...At Oxford he drank heavily, went to those two movies a day, according to his friend Powell, and belonged to the rambunctious Hypocrites Club...

...A peacock is killed...

...I don't want my wife to do that when my time comes—SOUTHERN: I said subtle...

...There is the early story "Adventure in a Room," a precursor to his first novel Blindness...

...Its cultivation of a personality calculated to cause amusement or outrage was unsuited to his self-effacing nature...

...There is the short story "Mood," which Green envisioned as a novel but couldn't complete...

...Garnett's question goes unanswered, though, which is disappointing...

...Green is an odd man out among his contemporaries, but it's wrong to say that the subjects that animated them—anomie, snobbery—did not animate him...