Henry Green - Reception

Reception

In the introduction to his Paris Review interview with Green, Terry Southern notes: "An ancient trade compliment, to an author whose technique is highly developed, has been to call him a 'writer's writer'; Henry Green has been referred to as a 'writer's writer's writer.'" Green was always more popular amongst fellow authors than with the general public; none of his books sold more than 10,000 copies, although he was more widely read in the forties, when Loving appeared briefly on the US bestseller lists. He was admired in his lifetime by W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, and Rebecca West. The latter said of him, "He was a truly original writer, his prose was fresh minted, he drove his bloodless scalpel inches deeper into the brain and heart, none of it had been said before. He is nearly forgotten". V. S. Pritchett called Green "the most gifted prose writer of his generation".

After his death Green's works went out of print and were little-read. However, since the early '90s there have been attempts to revive his reputation. In 1993, Surviving, a collection of previously unpublished works, was released, edited by his grandson Matthew Yorke and published by Viking Press. His other works have been reissued. Many contemporary authors have cited him as an influence, including John Updike, who also wrote the introduction to an edition of three of Green's novels: 'Living', 'Loving' and 'Party Going'. The novelist Sebastian Faulks, who also wrote an introduction to an edition of these three novels, calls Green "unique": "No fiction has ever thrilled me as the great moments in Living and Loving".< David Lodge calls him "an exceptionally gifted and truly original writer".

In his essay The Genesis of Secrecy, British literary critic Frank Kermode discussed Green's novel Party Going and suggested that behind its realistic surface the book hides a complex network of mythical allusions. This led Kermode to include Green in the Modernist movement, and consider the novelist strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's idea of a "mythic method". Green's work has otherwise received comparatively little critical attention from academics; one of the few academics engaged with Green's work is Jeremy Treglown, author of Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (Faber and Faber, 2000).