Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green

After recently reading *Pack My Bag,* a detached memoir written by a fairly young Henry Green, I felt I didn't know too much more about this fascinating author than I did before I started it. So I was delighted to hear that there was a recent biography of Henry Green. Treglown clearly gathered together a tremendous amount of information for this project and picked out what he thought would be appropriate for this biography. I think he did a good job and I learned a great deal about one of my favorite writers. One other reviewer complained that Treglown made up words for this book. Well, so what? Isn't that appropriate for a book about Green? If Green didn't make up words he certainly made up grammatical constructs. One thing I liked about this biography was how it placed Green's life and his novels within their historical setting and the one regret I have regarding *Romancing* is that there wasn't more of this. Also, the structure and style of *Romancing* is not exactly what I would call intriguing - this is no "page-turner" - and this book encourages a certain amount of skimming and speed reading. Overall, however, this book is required reading for fans of Henry Green - the "writer's writer's writer."

Henry Green always hovers somewhere at the margins of the British modernist canon, just as he did during his own lifetime. Despite the exceptional admiration expressed for his strange novels by writers as diverse as Eudora Welty, terry Southern, John Ashbery and John Updike, as Green himself bemoaned in his later years he never received any of the major British writing awards nor is he taught with the consistency his beautiful novels deserve. Here is the first real biography of Green, and the fine critic and biographer Jeremy Treglown appreciates the inherent glamor of Green's career. Born Henry Yorke, the son of a wealthy industrialist's family with aristocratic connections, Green went to school with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh. He and his well-born wife "Dig" were considered among the most goldenhaired of the "Bright Young Things" beloved by London gossip columnists in the Thirties, and during his lifetime he enjoyed relationships with women as talented and diverse as Rosamund Lehmann and Kitty Freud.Treglown may focus perhaps too much on the more gossipy aspects of Green's life, to the detriment of an understanding of his writing process. Although the novels are each given extensive (and intelligent) analysis, one wishes more space had been given to how Green originated his distinctive writing style. (The withdrawal of assistance and authorization from Green's only son, Sebastian Yorke, may explain some of this brevity.) But for all of that, the biography is one of the most readable and enjoyable of a modernist British writer I've encountered in some time: Treglown has a lovely sense of narrative direction and impulse which makes the book genuinely involving.