Customer Reviews

Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait

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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.

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.