ROMANCING: The Life and Work of Henry Green
Jeremy Treglown, ROMANCING: The Life and Work of Henry Green
When the enigmatic English novelist Henry Green (1905–1973) wrote his prewar partial autobiography, Pack My Bag , he approached his life with characteristic obliqueness, refusing to drop the names of his famous friends, such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, or even his real name, Henry Yorke. Treglown, professor of English at the University of Warwick and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement , was at one time Green's official biographer. That position was later retracted, but he continued to receive a great deal of help from friends and family. Treglown takes a direct approach to the Green/Yorke identity split and how central it was to this profoundly divided man and his writing. Born into a wealthy aristocratic family, Green was both a dutiful and disappointing son. He published his first novel while still at Oxford but failed to take his degree. He would later head the family engineering firm but first joined as a laborer in its Midlands foundry. Terrified of death, he spent the Blitz in London as a firefighter. His many novels include Party Going , Living , Loving
and Nothing , which, Treglown shows, were notable for their stylized yet colloquial dialogue and their combination of High Modernism, like that of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and social satire, like that of Waugh and Powell. While Treglown approaches Green with greater sympathy than he gave his prior biographical subject, Roald Dahl, he does not shy from his subject's serial extramarital romances with much younger women or his decline into alcoholism, which finally crippled both his business and literary careers. Terry Southern, a friend of Green's, called him "a writer's writer's writer," and Treglown does a fine job of establishing the previously blurred distinctions and connections between Green's personal and professional identity and his literature. Agent, Amanda Urban, ICM. (On-sale date: Mar. 20)
closeDetailsReviewed on: 02/26/2001
Genre: Nonfiction
When the enigmatic English novelist Henry Green (1905–1973) wrote his prewar partial autobiography,
Reviewed on: 02/26/2001
Genre: Nonfiction
