Surviving
-
- £4.99
-
- £4.99
Publisher Description
Edited by the author's grandson, the novelist Matthew Yorke, and with an Introduction by John Updike, this book is an excellent selection of Henry Green's uncollected writings. It includes a number of outstanding stories never previously published, written during the '20s and '30s ("Bees", "Saturday", "Excursion", and the remarkable "Mood" among them). It contains a highly entertaining account of Green's service in the London Fire Brigade during the War; a short play written in the 1950s; and a selection of his journalism, including revelatory articles about the craft of writing, a marvellous evocation of Venice, a description of falling in love, reviews which illuminate his literary enthusiasm and the entertaining interview with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. It is rounded off with a biographical memoir by Green's son, Sebastian Yorke. Fascinating and invaluable as an introduction to Green, Surviving casts new light on his work and illustrates the many facets of this exceptional writer, one of the two most important English novelists of his time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Under the pseudonym Henry Green, businessman Henry V. Yorke (1905-1973) wrote 10 distinguished Symbolist novels in the period from 1926 to 1952. (In February Penguin will reissue six of them, including his major work, Loving , in its Twentieth-Century Classics series.) Green's strength was to cluster seeming trivia in image patterns redolent with meaning; and in Doting and Concluding , he treated sex in uncommonly modern and matter-of-fact terms. For the current volume, Green's grandson has assembled published, unpublished and rejected pieces; synopses and drafts of embryonic work; reviews, and polished jottings. Green's unfinished Mood recalls the world of Virginia Woolf, and there is a review of Woolf's Writer's Diary . In ``Excursion'' he creates a microcosmic knot of people at a train station, anticipating his novel Party Going. Pieces on the art of fiction include a two-part BBC talk, ``A Novelist to His Readers,'' which reveals the importance Green placed on dialogue. Essays about the fire squad on which Green served in the WW II blitz (``A Rescue,'' ``Before the Great Fire'') parallel the topic of his novel Caught. His work for American magazines include ``Falling in Love,'' written for Esquire (he was aggrieved not to be paid for it) and ``Invocation to Venice'' for Vogue . Among the rejects are a TV drama ``Journey Out of Spain'' (too long, they said), and ``The Jealous Man,'' turned down by New Yorker editors who promised to keep in mind Green's interest in ``books by dead authors.'' The collection sheds light on the publishing scene in Green's day and adeptly serves the cause of English letters. A memoir by his son closes the volume.
