Henry Green (1) (1905–1973)
Auteur van Loving / Living / Party Going
Voor andere auteurs genaamd Henry Green, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.
Over de Auteur
Writing under the pseudonym Henry Green, Henry Vincent Yorke kept his life as a wealthy industrialist separate from his literary persona. Although he had friends who were authors, he did not travel in literary circles and refused to be photographed, to protect his anonymity. Yorke was born in 1905 toon meer in Gloucestershire, England, and worked as a laborer before becoming managing director of a food engineering firm. From the publication of his first book Blindness (1926), which was begun when he was 17 years old and a student at Eton, he was admired for his unfailing sense of dialogue and characterization for all classes of British life. Green's last novel, Nothing, was published in 1950. Although he is still relatively unknown in the United States, he is recognized by authors such as John Updike and W. H. Auden as a masterful storyteller and one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century. He died in 1973 (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder
Werken van Henry Green
Green Henry (Henry Vincent Yorke) 1 exemplaar
Gerelateerde werken
New Writing and Daylight : Summer 1943 — Medewerker — 2 exemplaren
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Officiële naam
- Yorke, Henry Vincent
- Geboortedatum
- 1905-10-29
- Overlijdensdatum
- 1973-12-13
- Geslacht
- male
- Nationaliteit
- UK
- Geboorteplaats
- Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England, UK
- Plaats van overlijden
- London, England, UK
- Woonplaatsen
- Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England, UK (birth)
London, England, UK (death) - Opleiding
- Eton College
Oxford University - Beroepen
- managing director (engineering business)
novelist
Leden
Besprekingen
During WWII, the British Tennant family - the widowed Mrs Tennant, her son's wife Violet, and Violet's two young daughters - is living on its Irish estate. Mrs Tennant's son is in Britain in the armed forces, waiting to be sent overseas. Ireland is neutral, so the Tennants are avoiding the wartime shortages, the bombing and the blackouts, but are in fear of the IRA. The Tennants provide the background: the main characters are their servants.
The book begins with the death of the old butler, Eldon. Rauch, the footman, is next in line for Eldon's position. As we know from Downton Abbey, there is a strict hierarchy amongst house servants, with the butler at the top. Any other comparisons to Downton Abbey are, however, erroneous, because you cannot compare book so witty, perspicacious and subtle with a soap opera. Green's characters have depth and complexity. His imagery is striking. He always uses the right word, never a cliche.
Well worth reading.… (meer)
The book begins with the death of the old butler, Eldon. Rauch, the footman, is next in line for Eldon's position. As we know from Downton Abbey, there is a strict hierarchy amongst house servants, with the butler at the top. Any other comparisons to Downton Abbey are, however, erroneous, because you cannot compare book so witty, perspicacious and subtle with a soap opera. Green's characters have depth and complexity. His imagery is striking. He always uses the right word, never a cliche.
Well worth reading.… (meer)
Right at he start you're thrown into a conversation on the factory floor between people you've never met, whose names you're coming across for the first time. After a chapter or so, people start to emerge from the crowd: Lily Gates, who keeps house for her father Joe; her father's friend Mr Craigan who is in charge; the boarder, Jim Dale, who wants to marry Lily; Bert Jones, a foundry worker whom Lily hopes will take her away from Birmingham and her dreary future. The factory workers and their political machinations emerge: Mr Bridges, who runs the foundry and listens to no one; Tarver, who wants Bridges' job; Tupe, the snivelling boss's man who runs to Bridges with tales about his fellow-workers. Then there's young Dupret, son of the factory owner, who's ordered around by his father, ignored by Bridges, and patronised by his father's assistant. If his father, who is old and ill, is to die, Dupret will be in charge and able to exert his authority over all the old men who he believes are holding him back.
It took a while to get into the book because I was very confused, but after a while everything started to make sense. It's about the working and home lives of the foundry workers, their bleak, poverty stricken futures, their lack of choice and control, their dependence on the good will of their managers and the foundry owner.
I've started Living a few times, and am pleased to have read it. It was well worth the effort.… (meer)
It took a while to get into the book because I was very confused, but after a while everything started to make sense. It's about the working and home lives of the foundry workers, their bleak, poverty stricken futures, their lack of choice and control, their dependence on the good will of their managers and the foundry owner.
I've started Living a few times, and am pleased to have read it. It was well worth the effort.… (meer)
Long before Seinfeld came along with the show about nothing there were modernist writers writing novels about nothing. The plotless novel, bereft of much in the way of story, depends instead on a focus on daily life and psychological states, and a demanding experimentalist mode of writing sure to trip up less talented authors. Thankfully Henry Green was not one of these, as evidenced by the application of that trite phrase “a writer’s writer” one can find applied to him in various articles and essays.
Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.
Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.
So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:
The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:
Good Lord that’s good.… (meer)
Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.
Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.
So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:
Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:
Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.
Good Lord that’s good.… (meer)
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Max Adey has organised the continental trip. He is enormously rich and is paying for everyone. He has tried to escape his lover, Amabel, in order to pursue Julia, and has invited Angela as a backup. Evelyn, Alex, Claire and Claire's husband Robert, have been invited as a smokescreen. At least, that's my interpretation, because the reasons are as many as the characters. Miss Fellowes, Claire's aunt, is ill and being looked after by two retired nannies who came to see off their ex-charges. Claire wants to go to France and tries to persuade herself that she has no responsibility for her aunt. Amabel turns up, to Julia's disgust. Everyone is talking about Embassy Richard, who has made an enormous social faux pas. It's all strange, opaque, almost certainly allegorical, and very funny.… (meer)