Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait Book

As I read Henry Green's early-life memoir, Pack My Bag, I found that I liked it a good bit when he was describing the challenges of being a boy, less so when he was describing the regimented life at Eton, and not at all when he was describing a wastrel's life-however literary-at Oxford. The final passages, devoted to his time working in his father's factory after Oxford, simply seemed tacked-on, leaving me to think, as I read toward the end, about my burgeoning disappointment.

My greatest complaint has to do with style, for which Green ultimately became famous. This memoir is chockfull of peculiarly phrased, very long sentences that do their best, whenever possible, to eschew commas. Later on Green learned to write in unpunctuated cadences that turned the action from one thought to another like a good skater changing direction. But here he seems to get muddled in tortured prose that reminded me of Cicero. Often I would be forced to reread a sentence to determine the subject, the dependent clause (s), the object, the swooning verb fainting just before the period, and then, of course, the meaning. At age thirty-three, Green wasn't yet good at managing his predilections and idiosyncrasies of punctuation and syntax. And no editor took him in hand to point out that every other writer who'd been through Eton and Oxford knew the rules of grammar and composition no matter how much he (boys' schools, remember) drank and smoked while a student and undergraduate.

As a boy in the fields or streams near his parents' estate, Green had a great love for what it was to be on his own in nature, starkly contrasted with the exigencies of life in the house surrounded by formalities and servants. He then went, as the scions of the wealthy class did, to a somewhat Dickensian little boys school commanded by the Tyrant (headmaster). My sympathy with the ongoing plight of youth cast out of home was fairly strong, but already I began to feel intimations of discomforts he would experience come Eton-time. There the jocks ruled and the uncoordinated struggled to become aesthetes. Well, boarding school life is claustrophobic and its pecking orders and disciplines and snobbishness are dreadful. (I know, having gone to boarding school at thirteen.) Green's portrait of himself at this point in his life is appropriately vague (adolescents are rather vague, not yet knowing who they are) but unfulfilling. Perhaps here, too, the weight of those awkward sentences began to wear me out.

Ah, then, Oxford: First six months, drunk every night. Balance of time, luncheon in one's room with one's dearest companions--the menu chiefly being duck and hack, day after day. All along Green somehow managed to write a novel that was published (while he was still an undergraduate), but he doesn't tell us much about this. Instead he begins to expostulate on how important certain dons could be, but we don't get many specifics--nothing in comparison to his very specific and well-done accounts of his boyhood fishing expeditions.

The overshadowing background to Pack My Bag, throughout, is war. He was a boy during WWI and boys knew about the war, even heard guns from across the Channel. And he wrote this memoir more or less in the pre-WWII spirit of "We who are about to die salute you." This was natural for Englishmen of his age. At thirty-three, assuming that 1938-39 signaled yet another conflagration, Green wanted to pull his thoughts together. If he had lived (and was about to stop living), he wanted to leave a bit more of himself behind. But as his son writes in a preface to this volume, Green lost control of his material the closer WWII came, and he apparently rushed through an awkward ending.

Well, his other books are gems (those I've read) and perhaps it's worthwhile to read a great writer's clunker every once in a while. By way of comparison, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's awful The Beautiful and Damned (starting with its over-the-top title). Eventually, Fitzgerald wrote lovely stories and The Great Gatsby. Writing is a difficult task.