Henry Green

[ish mailian]

At the time, Green was in his late forties and the author of nine
novels, including “Living,” “Party Going,” and “Loving,” and a memoir,
“Pack My Bag.” His stock was high among fellow-writers. In a 1952 Life
profile, W. H. Auden was quoted calling him “the best English novelist
alive.” The following year, T. S. Eliot, talking to the Times, cited
Green’s novels as proof that the “creative advance in our age is in
prose fiction.” But Green had never been a popular success. In 1930,
Evelyn Waugh had reviewed “Living,” Green’s novel about Birmingham
factory life, under the headline “A Neglected Masterpiece.” It was the
first of several dozen articles that bemoaned Green’s lack of
acceptance and helped bind his name as closely to the epithet
“neglected” as Pallas Athena is to “bright-eyed.”

Waugh blamed philistine book reviewers, but he knew that Green’s image
hadn’t helped. “From motives inscrutable to his friends, the author of
Living chooses to publish his work under a pseudonym of peculiar
drabness,” he wrote. Green was born Henry Vincent Yorke, to a
prominent Gloucestershire family, and he worked as the managing
director of H Pontifex & Sons Ltd., a manufacturing company purchased
by his grandfather; he presented himself as a Sunday writer. (Where
other novelists might serve as secretary of PEN, Green did a stint as
chairman of the British Chemical Plant Manufacturers’ Association.) He
claimed that he wrote under an assumed name in order to hide his
writing from colleagues and associates. The Life profile, “The Double
Life of Henry Green,” had the subtitle “The ‘secret’ vice of a top
British industrialist is writing some of Britain’s best novels.” But
Green’s first book, “Blindness,” was published in 1926, while he was
at Oxford, and a desire for privacy characterized much of his
behavior. After a certain point, he refused to have his portrait
taken. Dundy had first recognized him from a Cecil Beaton photograph
that showed only the back of his head.


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-novelist-of-human-unknowability
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