Henry Green vs Graham Greene

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".