Back

NOTES

¹Horizon, 15 (1947), p 75.

² Another favourable critic was Marie Scott-James in Time and Tide, 30 November 1946, p 1161, who praised the book’s “curious and arresting blend of the lyrical and the realistic” and claimed that “no other living novelist has caught the contemporary idiom so well”.

³Spectator, 29 November 1946, p 590. In the New Statesman, Reyner Heppenstall went further: “Mr. Green’s readers are entitled to sulk …. The hallucinations in Back depend upon two low-grade coincidences, a likeness between half-sisters and the fact that the name Rose occurs in the past tense of a common verb. Out of this confusion arises no unperplexing ecstasy …” (23 November 1946, p 386).

⁴ Henry Green, Pack My Bag, 1940, pp 66–7.

⁵ Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980, 1985, p 194.

⁶Concluding, Harvill edn. (1997) p 46.

⁷ James Lees-Milne, Fourteen Friends, 1996, p 123.

⁸ Matthew Yorke, ed., Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, 1992, p 115. It seems from a letter to Evelyn Waugh (11 November 1946: Yorke Archive) that Green did not know that the book — written by a M. de Courchamps — was a fabrication.

⁹ Information from Alice Keene.

¹⁰ Letter to Nancy Mitford, 27 November 1946. Waugh said much the same to Green himself in a letter dated 8 November 1946 (Yorke Archive), but more diplomatically.

¹¹ For example Rod Mengham in The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green, 1982, pp 173–4.

¹² Marie Scott-James, for example (see note 2), who said of “the beautiful opening passage which is poetry rather than prose” that “One is reminded of T.S. Eliot by the abrupt transitions from the sublime to the ridiculous and their purpose is the same.”

¹³ Letter from Lehmann to Green dated 5 October 1944, now at Austin, Texas. Lehmann said, though, that the Hogarth Press might have been interested in a book-length translation from the Souvenirs.

¹⁴ Henry Green to John Lehmann, 6 September 1945. (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas.)

¹⁵ Henry Green to Rosamond Lehmann, 14 March 1945 (Library of King’s College, Cambridge).

¹⁶ John Lehmann to Henry Green, 19 September 1945 (Princeton University Library).

¹⁷Paris Review interview reprinted in Surviving (see note 8), p 244.

¹⁸ See note 5.

¹⁹ John Russell, Henry Green: Nine novels and an unpacked bag, 1960, p 169.

²⁰ Evelyn Waugh to Henry Green, 8 November 1946 (Yorke Archive).