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 In 1993, Surviving, a collection of previously unpublished works, was released, edited by his grandson Matthew Yorke and published by Viking Press.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).
Read more about this topic: Henry Green
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)