Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (Twentieth Century Classics) - Softcover

Henry Green (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing nine novels in his spare time. Anthony Burgess found his books “as solid and glittering as gems.” He also wrote an astonishing memoir, Pack My Bag, published by New Directions.

Green (Surviving, 1992, etc.) wrote this autobiography--one of the oddest and most beguiling in English--at age 33, in 1938, fully expecting WW II to annihilate him and everyone else in England. Provisionality in this strange, loopy, charming, quite beautiful memoir is therefore bred in the bone: everything will be only partially said and, what's more, only partially remembered. Partialness was Green's very aesthetic, and woven into this seemingly stunted account of a privileged growing-up of fox-hunting, upper-class-schools, Oxford, and first stabs at literature are some of the frankest expositions of his beliefs about how abstractly and humanely approximate writing ought to be (including the justly renowned: ``Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both have known''). Green's prose in this book can be so swerving and lovely that it captures two tones at once--first comedy, then absolute nailhead truth: ``Although I can remember hardly anything of what passed it was the first time I had experienced the release, the sense of constipation eased, which at that age frankness with a girl in no more than words can bring and this feeling next morning, with the guilt of clothes covered with scent, is a thing most people carry with them to the end of their lives.'' Published in England in 1940 but inexplicably unavailable in the US until now: one of the most remarkable and timeless of memoirs--a classic. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.