Green - Pack my bag: a self-portrait

Pack My Bag is a mid-term autobiography written by Henry Green, my father, at the age of thirty-three. It was published in 1940 when he was just beginning to get himself established as a novelist, having already published, with some difficulty, three books of fiction: Blindness, Living, and Party Going. After Blindness he had also started, but had been unable to finish, another novel called Mood. To his disappointment, the last novel, Party Going, which had taken eight years to write, had been rejected by his publishers, Dents, and accepted by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, only after strong representations from Goronwy Rees and John Lehmann, for publication at their Hogarth Press. In 1938 he became convinced that there would be another terrible war and moreover, having vivid schoolboy memories of the carnage of the First World War, that he was sure to die in it himself. The book entitled Pack My Bag, which were the last words uttered by the philosopher Bradley on his death bed, was born out of this morbid anxiety. Happily the outcome of the Second World War, for Henry Green at least, was to be less dramatic. He would survive it unscathed except, as he constantly reminded his friends, for untold damage to his hearing and stomach, write another six novelstwo of these during that same warand live on quietly for a further thirty-five years in Knightsbridge, London.

Henry Greens real name was Henry Yorke and he was the younger of two surviving sons of a family who lived in a large and imposing house in Gloucestershire, set in a 2500 acre estate beside the River Severn. The family had aristocratic roots and, on the male side, a strong leaning towards classical scholarship. His mother, who came from a titled and landed family in Sussex, was a remarkable figure. To her eldest grandson, she was all warmth and affection, but first appearances were disconcerting. Born with a curvature of the spine, her frame was small and bent, and generally she would dress in black or dark navy blue with a hat and a feather drawn well down over her eyes. On formal occasions a dyed fur stole mounted with the mask of a snarling fox would be slung over one shoulder. Her speech was blunt and clipped in military style. In her younger days she had been an avid sportswoman, hunting furiously, breeding racehorses from a stallion called White Knight, and shooting pheasants with a specially adapted twenty bore shotgun. In her old age, adamantly opposed to dentures, she was reduced to one tooth, stained brown because she chainsmoked Turkish cigarettes. But underneath this forbidding exterior, there was an active mind with a genuine fascination for people of all classes. Despite the lack of any formal education, she read voraciously (never novels), but above all she loved to gossip and talk, and she possessed an unique wit. It was said that she could more than hold her own in witty conversation with her sons friends, such as Maurice Bowra and John Sparrow, who visited the house when he was up at Oxford. Henrys father, who had no inherited wealth, ran the family engineering firm which had been bought for him by his father, and pursued a parallel City career in banking and insurance; a reserved and aloof figure, difficult to communicate with, he was in Birmingham and London during the week and back in Gloucestershire for long weekends where he attended to matters on his estate. He was humourless, and somewhat jealous of his wifes popularity, was wont to tease and bully her in heavy-handed, but harmless fashion. Their principal recreation was hunting and other field sports. The sons, who were close in their youth, but who grew apart later, were uneasy participants in the sporting life their parents led. Henry, who was less sociable than his brother, preferred the more solitary pursuits of billiards and fly fishing.

Pack My Bag is his account of what he observed and felt while growing up in those surroundings and attending two fashionable boarding schools and university. There are also descriptions in the book of the short period he spent in France with cousins learning the language and, briefly, of the two year period when he served his apprenticeship in his fathers Birmingham factory and wrote his second novel, Living. This privileged up-bringing, with which he never seems uncomfortable in the book, must have been typical of others of his generation, but it was a background which, in later life, he went to considerable lengths to play down or even suppress.

Written between 1938-39, the book in fact only covers the first twenty-four years of his life, from his birth in 1905 to 1929, and it ends tenderly with the words referring to his marriage to my mother in that year ..there was love. Nothing is said about the nine years that followed his marriage when my parents, a handsome couple much in demand by the smart set, settled in London and lived the lives of Bright Young Things about town. More surprisingly, perhaps, nothing at all is said in the book about his school friends or university contemporaries. However, truer to his style, there are memorable studies of his mothers gardener, the headmaster and gym instructor from his first school as well as fleeting glimpses of the maids from his schools, Dotty Boo and Dinge. Accounts of his two schools and university occupy at least half of the book but he does not identify them by name, although it becomes obvious that the main school is Eton College and the university, Oxford. These omissions mystified and irritated his contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, who liked the book but wrote critically, I read it [with] increasing delight. It got better and better, I thought, towards the end. I never tire of hearing you talk about women and I wish there had been very much more indeed about them and the extraordinary things they say. Thank you by the way for Charlies', an entirely new word to me. I wish there had been twice as much about Oxford, four times as much about Hunt Balls, twice as much about the factory. Only one thing disconcerted me more in this book than any of the novels. The proletarian grammarthe likes for ases, the bikes for bicycles, hims for hes, etc. and then the sudden resumption of gentlemans language whenever you write of sport. And I thought the school down the river a pity as tho you hadnt got over snobbery. Both these things upset me school by the river and the correct hunting terms. But it was a book no-one else could have written and it makes me feel I know [you] far less well than I did before which, in a way, I take to be its purpose.

There is indeed a feeling about the book that he was in a hurry to write it and get it out of the way quickly, after all the problems with his third novel, Party Going. One senses that he wanted to be free of his past, free to gear himself up for the war while he was writing it he was training to be an auxiliary fireman in London and free to concentrate on a new novel about the impending war. The first part reads more fluently than the last, which is somewhat uneven, suggesting that he finished it in a hurried fashion. Certainly this was the view of his new publisher, John Lehmann, who asked him to rework the later part. And it is possible now to see more clearly that the book did indeed mark something of a turning-point in his life. Having got it off his chest, he was soon swallowed up in the London blitz, where he served as an ordinary fireman manning a Dual Purpose (DP) pump. He moved to a smaller house, forsook the fashionable life and began to cut himself off from his family and old friends to plough his independent furrow in the boardroom and pub rather than the literary salon and smart cocktail party.