Volume 25, Number 8 · May 18, 1978
Saint of the Mundane
By John Updike
If I say that Henry Green taught me how to write it implies that I learned, and it is not a business one learns—unlearns, rather, the premature certainties and used ecstasies unraveling as one goes, with each day new blank paper to confront. Including this blank paper, where reverence gives me pause. For Green, to me, is so good a writer, such a revealer of what English prose fiction can do in this century, that I can launch myself upon this piece of homage and introduction only by falling into some sort of imitation of that liberatingly ingenuous voice, that voice so full of other voices, its own interpolations amid the matchless dialogue twisted and tremulous with a precision that kept the softness of groping, of sensation, of living.
Feature, 3458 words
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