Word: greenly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...answer to this question about Henry Yorke will be found in the novels of Henry Green, which now number seven and embrace an astonishingly wide reach of British life and customs. There are as many distinctive social classes in Britain as there are regions in the U.S., and most British novelists, no matter how imaginative and observant, are as incapable of portraying life in any strata other than their own as, say, a Brooklyn-bred novelist would be of showing how a tree grows in Independence, Mo. But the novels of Henry Green, which are still little known in Britain...
...each of his works Henry Green has tried to investigate a new condition of life. His special "experiment" (apart from tricks of punctuation that are usually more irritating than useful) is to catch his variegated Britons in a situation (blindness, old age, a dense fog) from which they cannot escape-"imprisoned in a rudimentary part of life," says Critic Henry Reed. Thus, Green's characteristically terse titles-Blindness, Living, Caught, Back, Party Going, Concluding-are like simple signposts indicating the general direction in which he intends to explore...
Last Gasp. In Loving, the first Henry Green novel to be published in the U.S. and perhaps the best of his seven, readers will see for themselves just what the "rudimentary" trap of blended yearning, lust, selfishness and self-sacrifice, i.e., love, looks like in the hands of an experienced man with a musical ear, an impressionist painter's eye, and a poet's obsession with life's hidden undercurrents and emotional mysteries...
...life that actually has ceased to exist. He is now "Mr. Raunce," butler-king of the castle; as he surveys the long table-the older servants mourning the dear departed, the housemaids coy and giggly-life takes on a new shape. "And the wicked shall flourish even as a green bay tree," cries the old housekeeper as Mr. Raunce, the notebooks snug in his pocket, rises to carve the fragrant joint...
...innuendo ("Let me tell you," he assured young Albert, referring to the departed French governess, "there was many an occasion I went up to Mam-selle's boudoir to give her a long bong jour . . ."). Charley alone is enough to show why Novelist Elizabeth Bowen considers Henry Green "one of the living novelists whom I admire most." But Housemaid Edie, who builds their furtive little affair into a full-blown storm of love and wedding bells (in Britain), is an even more subtle and profound creation, warm as toast towards her Charley but cold and calculating as a stockbroker...