The looping impetus of Henry Green's writing (his self-portrait Pack My Bag) reaches you slowly and you get to feel for this awkward aesthete with a conscience, with a forelock and a downward tall stance, who wrote novels the way a composer might work on a single tune for life (Berlioz was like that). Always caution, reluctance, persistence. Apology almost. Deference. He wrote longhand, at night. I have mostly read him at night. He is a burrowing kind of writer, seeking out himself and his reader. Prose is a long intimacy between strangers, he said.
In his novels there's always something large missing, like the definite and indefinite articles, or narrative without conversation. His memoir can afford to be poignant. This was just before World War Two. He might die. And in case he does, here is what he feels like setting down of his life: this is what comes to mind. Semi-patrician family life in Gloucestershire, private schools, Oxford. These men in the 1930s and 40s (Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell) they were basking, you might think, in their privilege, armed with irony and self-consciousness. Of all those Henry Green is the one I would like to have known.
He didn't die in World War Two, he wrote a clutch more novels, all with one word titles; and then wrote nothing for twenty-two years. He did not write a self-portrait before his actual death. I guess he didn't feel like it by then. His novels and their titles would have to speak for him. Living. Loving. Doting. Back. Nothing. Concluding.
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