Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait

By Henry Green

Book Overview

In 1938 Henry Green, then thirty-three, dreaded the coming war and decided to "put down what comes to mind before one is killed." Pack My Bag was published in England in 1940. When he wrote it, Green had already published three of his nine novels and his style"a gathering web of insinuations"was fully developed.

Pack My Bag is a marvelously quirky, clear-eyed memoir: a mother who shot at mangle wurzels (turnips) bowled across the lawn for her by the servants; the stately home packed with wounded World War I soldiers; the miseries of Eton, oddities of Oxford, and work in the family factory--the making of a brilliantly original novelist. "We have inherited the greatest orchestra, the English language, to conduct," Green once wrote. "The means are there; things are going on in life all the time around us." His use of language and his account of things that went on in his life inform this delightful and idiosyncratic autobiography, which begins: "I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811215725
• ISBN13: 9780811215725
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Adoring

A paraphrase of this memoir would give the sense that 'Henry Green' was a typical British writer of the 1930s: a superposh old Etonian who precociously published his first novel at Oxford, and was driven by class guilt to work as a foundryman. Or, in his words, 'as was said in those days I had a complex and in the end it drove me to go to work in a factory with my wet podgy hands'. The prose style is what makes this book an absolute one-off - chatty, cleverly idiomatic, bathetic, loveable and self-effacing. 'Pack my Bag' isn't a book you'd read for the plot (unless you're interested in the faux-hardships of wealthy, hypersensitive schoolboys?), but its account of the Great War is full of compelling anecdotes (like the shellshocked soldier who stayed at the country estate of Green's parents - 'no longer human when he came to us'). If you like these subtle-ish modernist writers like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen you might fall for Green, as sophisticated a stylist as any of the big modernist names (Woolf, Lawrence etc), but with an intimacy and sweetness that you don't necessarily associate with experimental writing. And he's funny, too. No wonder the people who love Henry Green really, really love Henry Green.