I only have time to post on the fly, and so will settle, for now, for sharing some quotations from my current reading: Henry Green’s memoir Pack My Bag, written when he was 33. Why so early? Because it was 1940, his son tells us in the introduction, and 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 resulting memoir has at once an urgent and an unfiltered feel about it, as though Green had mined for any scrap of memory–and then imbued each surfaced fragment, however trivial or fleeting, with the value he found in it by writing about it vividly.
Here are some nice lines from the book’s first quarter:
“It is at that age if ever that one is fancy-free because little boys hardly ever think about themselves as everyone else does all the time.”
“In his presence we were small mirrors changing in colour to the hues of his moods.” (On a schoolteacher of “a violent appearance.”)
“Can it be true that people genuinely feel they were happiest at school or is it because they are so miserable grown up?”
“That is the pity of sobering down to middle age, there must be a threat to one’s skin to wake what is left of things remembered into things to die with. The crime is to forget.”
Writing for his life, Green attains an eloquence that seems founded less in artfulness than emotion. It’s bracing.