Edited by the author''s grandson, the novelist Matthew Yorke, and with an Introduction by John Updike, this book is an excellent selection of Henry Green''s uncollected writings. It includes a number of outstanding stories never previously published, written during the ''20s and ''30s ("Bees", "Saturday", "Excursion", and the remarkable "Mood" among them). It contains a highly entertaining account of Green''s service in the London Fire Brigade during the War; a short play written in the 1950s; and a selection of his journalism, including revelatory articles about the craft of writing, a marvellous evocation of Venice, a description of falling in love, reviews which illuminate his literary enthusiasm and the entertaining interview with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. It is rounded off with a biographical memoir by Green''s son, Sebastian Yorke. Fascinating and invaluable as an introduction to Green, Surviving casts new light on his work and illustrates the many facets of this exceptional writer, one of the two most important English novelists of his time.
Industry Reviews
Who knows that it won't be Henry Green (1905-73), not Joyce or Woolf, that history finally will favor as the greatest English prose-extender of the century? For mysteriousness, fidelity both to complex sensation and simple speech, humane comedy, and what John Updike in the introduction here perfectly encapsulates as "marvellous originality, intuition, sensuality, and finish," Green's novels are almost without equal. And yet by 1952, with Doting, he was done - to live out another 20 years as a businessman, then retiree: an eerie coda, largely of silence. But from the whole career, his grandson now has collected what scraps, rejected work, and bit-journalism he did (along with the amazing Paris Review interview he gave in 1958 to Terry Southern). There are some minor fiction drafts here (a trying-out of the articleless prose of Living; a 1927 sketch describing a swarm of starlings that seems a premonition of the great birds-in-a-tree passage in the much later Concluding). But most interesting may be Green's ever modest insistences, in the occasional article or book review, on fiction as a "non-representational art," "life which is not" - an art of misapprehension, mistake, mishearing: an antidote to the imperialism of authorial direction more convincing than the French deconstructionism of later decades. And, in a 1961 chiding of fiction critics, there's this jewel: "Living one's own life can be a great muddle, but the great writers do not make it plain, they palliate, and put the whole in a sort of proportion. Which helps; and on the whole, year after year, help is what one needs." No Green fan will want to be without it. (Kirkus Reviews)
