Henry Green's mid-life autobiography, Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait, was written in 1938 and 1939, just prior to the second world war as he was preparing to join the London Fire Brigade, where he performed his wartime service. The book was published in 1940. Green was convinced that he and many of his friends would likely lose their lives, just as a previous generation had in the Great War, and that was his principal motivation for writing this memoir and record of his childhood and school years.
The looming war with Germany was the reason for much of the book's tone of foreboding, but not all of it. Green seems to have been susceptible to melancholy and pessimism. According to his own account, he was not a popular boy, did not enter easily into social activities, nor play sports. Like many writers, he was passive and reflective, and preferred to be indoors. The only outdoor activity he describes with enthusiasm is fishing, which he apparently enjoyed even in early childhood. Not having a sister, his interaction with girls and women was as difficult as with his classmates, and he saw himself as socially awkward until after he left school, and to some extent even at university.
Pack My Bag covers some of the same ground as Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, which appeared in 1938, a few years earlier. Both books detail some of the angst of the post World War I generation of schoolboys, especially those like Connolly and Green, who did not fit in with the general public school ethos of sports and popularity. Both tried to find alternate ways to achieve success, and both were marked for life by their experiences at Eton and Oxford. Some of the same general atmosphere pervades Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which was published in 1945, and which was grounded in similar experiences of public school boys at Oxford.
Each of these authors attempts in his own way to account for certain deformations in the character of Englishmen of what would once have been known as the ruling classes. Of course, their point is that such notions of social class were breaking down, especially after the first world war. But young boys continued to be subjected to an educational system designed to perpetuate familiar attitudes toward social class, attitudes absorbed from an early age in boarding schools followed by public schools like Eton and later the various colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. As with Connolly and Waugh, class hierarchies and finely tuned examples of snobbery are at the center of Green's recollections, even as he recounts ways he either rebelled or succumbed to their influences. After all, in England there is nothing quite like a title, and then there are so many gradations of titled friends and acquaintances one comes in contact with in school, from royal offspring on down to upstart scholarship boys and the children of the merely rich.
Money seems never to have been an issue for Green, and coming from a family with aristocratic connections and a big house in the country, he seems to have moved easily among his classmates, even if he sometimes felt it was a bit awkwardly. Green appears to accept the status quo, although he observes its peculiarities and tendency to favor boys who were good with balls of various sizes, especially football and cricket. Even the game of fives, a form of handball invented at Eton, is fraught with social climbing and implications of acceptance or exclusion from important social groups who form to play together. Scholarship was sometimes valued, but only by masters and a small group of elite boys. Green never reveals the names of those he knew, but I assume that they are some of the same boys Cyril Connolly wrote about in Enemies of Promise. Like Connolly, Green joins a group of aesthetes who form an art society as a way of rebelling and establishing their own alternate sense of identity. But he recognizes that they will always remain on the outside, and that the society itself will likely wither once he and the others leave school.
Looking back now from his vantage point on the verge of another war, Green observes that he has somehow matured to the point where he can at last move beyond his school and college experiences. Nevertheless, he leaves the impression that even he was formed by those experiences, and he recognizes that he must continue to live in a world where he will be forever in the midst of others similarly formed and educated who may not have moved on or been inclined to change their attitudes or progress in any significant way. What I find appealing in Green's account of his childhood and growing up at that time in England is both what seems familiar and also what is much more alien. Pack My Bag is a window on another time and place, but a place I can still recognize and begin to understand just a little better after reading this very entertaining book.
No comments:
Post a Comment