Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait [Hardcover]

Henry Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1993

A luminous autobiography by one of England's most original, delightful, writers.

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."

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Green, the late British writer (1905-1973) whose quirky novels, laced with incessant dialogue and swirling descriptions, earned him the regard of exacting stylists like John Updike but only a marginal place in the 20th-century canon, is suddenly in vogue. Compared to the heady concoctions of his novels-- Loving, Living, Party Going etc.--this "mid-term autobiography" (as Green's son Sebastian Yorke calls it in his fine introduction) is rather weak tea. Still, for Green aficionados, these recollections will have to do until a biography comes around. As a novelist, Green was known for his aesthetic immersion in the sounds of his characters. Similarly, Pack My Bag has a studied indifference to the personal--rare in autobiography, but somehow appropriate for Green. Written on the eve of WW II, the book conveys a poignant gloom. In the second half, after Green concludes the presentation of his childhood and school years, he talks more about his own writing. Of particular interest is his comparison of several attempts--over a five-year period--to render a certain mood in prose. Clearly evident is Green's peculiar, wayward genius.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this 1940 title, British novelist Green offers a mid-life portrait that describes his unusual dual existence as both a popular writer and as engineer Henry Vincent Yorke.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 1st US edition (May 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811212343
• ISBN-13: 978-0811212342
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,552,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adoring, June 25, 2004

By 

College Professor - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Meh, July 28, 2011

By 

Debra F. Monroe "Debra" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (Paperback)

I am a Henry Green completist. I am wild about his novels. So I expected to like this, and I'm enough of an egghead not to bore easily. I also love history and biography and autobiography. But it's not at all compelling. He wrote it because he assumed he'd die in the war. He didn't die in the war. The most interesting part of his life and his most mature observations were yet to come. He hadn't really lived yet. This book is full of typically adolescent introspection: all molehills, no mountains.