The Idiom of the Time

Henry Green (1905–1974) was the writer of nine technically outstanding novels, and of an autobiographical text. In the role of author he was intensely private, even secretive (Henry Green being a pseudonym), and his strange and heady writings derive their power in some way from their very secretiveness. In this 1982 study, Dr Mengham sets out to uncover the systematic basis of this quality in Green's writing, and to account for it in terms of the 'conditions of knowledge' of each text. Green, he argues, writes to maintain an 'idiom of the time', which constantly renews itself in a critical relation with the changing understanding of what goes to make us up - intellectually, socially, unconsciously. On the one hand, each of Green's books is treated on its own chronological succession; on the other, there is a continuous examination of manuscripts and typescripts making clear the development of certain writing procedures.