Henry Green vs Graham Greene

Funny Greene: Our Man in Havana and Travels with My Aunt

not funny in spite of the title: The Comedians

can't imagine reading funny Greene, he always comes across as the most po-faced of miserable gits

Our Man In Havana is very funny but it's the only one I've read and now I'm kinda bummed out to discover it's not all like that.

i think Monsignor Quixote was wryly amusing but i read it about 30 years ago

*shudder*

I love them both, can't choose

The writer's-writer's writer ftw.

loving was a highlight of a very well-selected modern literature course i took as a college freshman, it's stayed with me for a long time.

of Greene (I've read) The Third Man and Brighton Rock, both excellent suspense narratives, the latter more comic/'low-mimetic' incl. some brilliantly observed details (the children running around in paper sailors' hats will haunt me) -- The Power & the Glory aimed a bit higher and I don't think entirely hit the mark, though it had its moments

of Green, idk the first thing

of greene, the power and the glory was a decent-to-v-good school set text

of green, concluding is a flat-out masterpiece

i shouldn't vote, but i'll vote green

otm on concluding.

Concluding, Blindness, Loving, Party Going -- all masterpieces, even the one that isn't a gerund.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i actually started re-reading loving today thanks to this thread, i'll probably have more to say about it soon

read Doting bcz I hadn't and it was lying around. Damn, there's something about him, really - there were stretches where it felt like a fine but nothing-special mid-century English social novel (handled with neat formal tricks) but then these moments where it's utterly bleak and death-ridden, pulls away into into a void staring at the pointlessness of its own action.

I'vve reading Brighton Rock after tearing through Our Man in Havana and The Ministry of Fear.

the first sentence and the last of ‘brighton rock’ are among the greatest of my reading life.

"She's a nice girl I agree yet I also know she's not nearly good enough for you. What are we to do about it, that is the question?"
"To be or not to be Mamma."
"Philip don't dramatise yourself for heaven's sake. This is no time for Richard II."

wow found out last week that Vintage had done 3 collections of his novels.
Looked him up on amazon after seeing a separate single novel on the shelves of the local 2nd hand/remainder shop last week.
Went back in to look at the shelf to see if it was there, or maybe to look at the more current edition stuff. But did go and look at where i saw the book last week and found a collection there instead Loving, Living, P:arty Going and it was teh same price as teh single thing which was gone.
There's lovely for you.

There are two three book Green collections, issued by Picador in the UK to begin with - the Living Loving Party Going set seems to be pretty common, the Nothing Doting Blindness one not so much.

https://www.boekenwebsite.nl/files/imagecache/detail/loving-living-party-going.jpg

https://bugeyedmonsters.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/henrygreen001.jpg

You missed out possibly the best one of the lot...

https://www.penguin.co.uk/content/dam/catalogue/pim/editions/262/9781784871031/cover.jpg.rendition.460.707.png

Unless Picador didn't publish this?

Yeah, that's one of the later Vintage issues, don't think Picador ever did that set (if they did, I've never seen one)

Yes, looks like they didn't, that's weird.

"Passing through this he shuddered, a sense of foreboding gathered in him. What will they grow up to he thought in mind — they'll work, they'll marry, they'll work harder, have children and go on working, they'll die. He shuddered. Then he forgot all about them and thought about himself".

Is that LIVING? It's great.

among several great novels

Yes, "Living", peerless stuff.

Irritatingly this is all I can find of this BBC profile of Henry Green, but I suppose it's better than nothing. Can't help but notice how many women there are speaking fondly of him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOMmgZm8D4M

Thanks for the excavation, had now idea such a thing existed. Would definitely like to see the full prog.

Re: Henry and the women - I wonder if they spoke to Elaine Dundy? In a preface to the Virago reissue of Dundee's first novel The Dud Avocado, Rachel Cooke writes: "The finding of a voice for the book - and it is a remarkable voice - she credited to her friend the novelist Henry Green. At their lunches together, she made it her business to make him laugh. 'I began to recognise that I was hearing a voice that was me but wasn't me', she wrote in her 2001 memoir, Life Itself! 'It was a voice Henry gave me, yet I'd heard it before.'"

Fabulous teeth.

Really nice discovery, thanks Tom D

His Paris Review interview is a trip too---the whole thing is in his remarkable posthumous collection Surviving, but here's a PR excerpt for us non-subscribers (interviewer Terry Southern thinks Pack My Bag is an autobiographical novel, not a memoir, but Green has no prob running with that or anything else)---and we're off!
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4800/the-art-of-fiction-no-22-henry-green

There is an amusing letter from Leo Robson in this week’s TLS about the origins of “cunty fingers”

Green recalled a former manservant who volunteered alongside him in the Auxiliary Fire Service quoting an elderly butler who, when asked what he most liked in the world, replied: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers”. The passage prompted George Plimpton, the Paris Review editor, to hold a meeting. After screwing up his courage to say the word aloud, then, for the sake of clarity, chalking it up on a blackboard, he was given possible alternatives – all in the end rejected – by Jean Stein, Robert Silvers, Tom Guinzburg (who “said that any book with such an origin story was bound ‘to end up in the bins’”), and Peter Matthiessen, among them “crapy”, “shitty”, “pissy”, “hincty”, and – in a confusion with “cottony”, referring to “navel fluff” – “wolly” [all sic].

yes, enjoyed watching this this morning. interesting to see how different people had quite different impressions of him. perhaps that’s normal but it seemed quite heightened. the solitary, the gregarious, gentle, perhaps observant of others’ behaviour to something near a fault (the office store cupboard anecdote). making me want to go back and read him again. wonderful writer.

looool. it’s a wonderful phrase, those alternatives/remedies are hilarious.

And he tells PR that's where he got the idea for Loving: "I saw the book in a flash." !

...and the servant who gave him the idea for Loving remained a regular visitor to the Yorkes’ house in Knightsbridge, long after Green had fallen out of touch with the high society of his youth.

"They danced again and again until, as the long night went on they had got into a state of unthinking happiness perhaps".