Henry Green put in an incongruous cameo appearance in Jeremy Treglown's 1994 biography of Roald Dahl. When an interviewer from the Houston Post asked the bestselling author of the low-life and hilarious 'adult' short-story collection Someone like You who his favourite British writer was, he answered loftily: 'Henry Green.' Treglown thought the reason might have been that Dahl (who anyway loved a put-down) shared a friend with Green, the painter Matthew Smith, whose work he did know and like. For surely Dahl could have had little time for an avant-garde writer like Green? Besides, Green was just the kind of Eton-and-Oxford Englishman who had made him feel so alien and unappreciated in the London literary world when he first tried to set up as a writer after the war.

The truth, as it turns out, is that by the 1950s Green was in his way as much of an outsider as Dahl. His literary friends and fans, too, were un-English - the Americans Eudora Welty and Terry Southern (author of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty book Candy); or the French New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute, who singled out Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett as (after the demise of Woolf) the most original and distinctive voices in British writing. Southern managed to coax out of Green, who was notoriously inarticulate (and not just from the booze), a 1958 Paris Review interview in which he confessed to admiring Céline, Joyce and Kafka: but they were 'like cats which have licked the plate clean. You've got to dream up another dish if you're to be a writer.'

LRB 25 January 2001 | PDF Download