Pack My Bag
A Self-Portrait
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A luminous autobiography by one of England's most original, delightful, writers.
In 1938 Henry Green, then thirty-three, dreaded the coming war and decided to "put down what comes to mind before one is killed." Pack My Bag was published in England in 1940. When he wrote it, Green had already published three of his nine novels and his style"a gathering web of insinuations"was fully developed.
Pack My Bag is a marvelously quirky, clear-eyed memoir: a mother who shot at mangle wurzels (turnips) bowled across the lawn for her by the servants; the stately home packed with wounded World War I soldiers; the miseries of Eton, oddities of Oxford, and work in the family factory—the making of a brilliantly original novelist. "We have inherited the greatest orchestra, the English language, to conduct," Green once wrote. "The means are there; things are going on in life all the time around us." His use of language and his account of things that went on in his life inform this delightful and idiosyncratic autobiography, which begins: "I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Green, the late British writer (1905-1973) whose quirky novels, laced with incessant dialogue and swirling descriptions, earned him the regard of exacting stylists like John Updike but only a marginal place in the 20th-century canon, is suddenly in vogue. Compared to the heady concoctions of his novels-- Loving, Living, Party Going etc.--this ``mid-term autobiography'' (as Green's son Sebastian Yorke calls it in his fine introduction) is rather weak tea. Still, for Green aficionados, these recollections will have to do until a biography comes around. As a novelist, Green was known for his aesthetic immersion in the sounds of his characters. Similarly, Pack My Bag has a studied indifference to the personal--rare in autobiography, but somehow appropriate for Green. Written on the eve of WW II, the book conveys a poignant gloom. In the second half, after Green concludes the presentation of his childhood and school years, he talks more about his own writing. Of particular interest is his comparison of several attempts--over a five-year period--to render a certain mood in prose. Clearly evident is Green's peculiar, wayward genius.
