There is, too, a tremendous sympathy in Green’s social inversions.
In his 1940 memoir, Pack My Bag, Green claimed that when workers describe the world around them, “they are literally unsurpassed in the spoken word.” It is a strange thing indeed that an aristocratic novelist should reveal, with uncommon sensitivity and understanding, the natural poetry of England’s vibrant, earthy dialects. 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. Urn:oclc:779981375 Republisher_date 20121009103644 Republisher_operator Scandate 20121008230625 Scanner 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.
OL1193321W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 97.74 Pages 534 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0330252992 Urn:lcp:lovinglivingpart00gree:epub:ebf03bcb-782f-4dc4-b2a6-6bd09498c1cf Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier lovinglivingpart00gree Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6m05ch63 Isbn 0140049169ħ8011885 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL4724274M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 18:01:48 Boxid IA159611 Boxid_2 CH115301 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Harmondsworth, Eng.
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