Admiring

Stephen Wall

• Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green edited by Matthew Yorke
  Chatto, 302 pp, £18.00, February 1992, ISBN 0 7011 3900 5
• Pack my bag by Henry Green
  Hogarth, 242 pp, £9.99, February 1992, ISBN 0 7012 0988 7
• Loving by Henry Green
  Harvill, 225 pp, £6.99, February 1992, ISBN 0 00 271185 0

Henry Green’s literary career began precociously and ended prematurely. According to his son Sebastian Yorke, the future novelist was already ‘writing hard’ at eleven or twelve, under a different pseudonym from the one he later adopted. At Eton he was a founder member of a Society of Arts, and his adolescent pose as an aesthete fostered some paragraphs which are subjected to a withering critique in his remarkable self-portrait Pack my bag, written in 1938-9 under the threat of war and now reissued. He began his first novel Blindness while still at school; it came out while he was at Oxford. His account of undergraduate life there in Pack my bag is a little rushed, but it wonderfully evokes the euphoria of licensed idleness in beautiful surroundings (he was at Magdalen) while remaining beady-eyed about its snobbery and self-absorption. He went down without a degree, failing to get on both with Anglo-Saxon and with his tutor C.S. Lewis, and understandably preferring to spend every afternoon at the cinema.