Abstract
No English novelist of the last fifty years has been more scrupulous in his craft, and more reticent about its character, than Henry Green. His novels and his views about them are equally enigmatic. The expression of these views is rare and occasional, to say the least. Even so, from time to time he has made a comment or two on the writing of fiction: his autobiography Pack my Bag (1940) secretes a few cryptic suggestions, and there are two fascinating broadcast talks he gave in 1950 and 1951 which, though brief, contain some provocatively intelligent comment on the writing of dialogue. These occasional glimpses into the mind of the author are unsupported by any reference to the subject in the novels themselves, since none of them contains a single character whom one could believe capable of discussing anything in intellectual or analytical terms. Apart from Sebastian Birt, an unassertive economics tutor employed by Misses Edge and Baker at their school for young ladies in Concluding, no one makes the effort to do this, and he does so only on one occasion. Also Green himself, whilst obviously an eclectic and sophisticated reader, tends to use literary references uncertainly in his novels. A scrap of dialogue in Nothing (1950), where Mrs Weatherby mistakes her son’s quotation of ‘To be or not to be’ for a line from Richard II, is one of the few implausible events in a novel where dialogue is a sharply accurate register of the characters’ states of mind.
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© 1984 Patrick Swinden
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Swinden, P. (1984). Henry Green. In: The English Novel of History and Society, 1940–80. Studies in 20th Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-17514-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-17512-3
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