Volume 40, Number 6 · March 25, 1993
Writer's-Writer's Writer
By David Lodge
Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green
edited by Matthew Yorke
Viking, 302 pp., $24.00
Henry Green occupies a special but somewhat puzzling place in the history of modern English fiction. That his real name was Henry Yorke is symbolic of the general elusiveness of his literary identity. He seems to stand to one side of his fictional oeuvre, smiling enigmatically and challenging us to put a label, and a value, on it. He has been called a 'writer's writer,' and even, according to Terry Southern, 'a writer's-writer's writer.' W. H. Auden, Eudora Welty, V. S. Pritchett, Rebecca West, and John Updike have all described him, at various times, and in various ways, as the finest novelist of his generation, yet he never enjoyed either the commercial success or the literary fame of contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Christopher Isherwood.
Review, 3381 words
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