Loving, Living, Party Going

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HENRY GREEN IS a writer who always seems to need ‘introducing’, like a stranger at a party: dark, louche, awkward. It is odd, this need for an outrider to go ahead and smooth his way, because in his life he had friends enough, while his novels were viewed by people of dependable judgement as being among the best — perhaps the very best — of their time. Is it just that to later generations he is a little too ‘difficult’? Is it merely that Green requires a fraction more concentration than Greene? Perhaps so; but it is puzzling, this chronic shyness, when what his admirers are chiefly claiming for him is that he brings pleasure — a pleasure more intense, more original and more rewarding than that offered by any of his contemporaries.

Your first Green novel is in some ways your most memorable. I can still remember the incredulous pleasure with which I read Living in a battered library edition about thirty years ago. Here was a novelist who was doing something I had never experienced in fiction before. He seemed to have redrawn the familiar triangle between reader, writer and character, so that you somehow had the impression that you knew his characters better than he himself did. So real were they, so grand yet so fragile, that one felt protective of them — protective even against the plotting of the author whose skill had allowed one to know them in the first place.

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