Blindness By Henry Green Viking, 207 pp., $8.95 Henry Green is, need I say, a household name. In someone else’s household: Mrs. Green’s chiefly. I may be assuming too much: I have an almost encyclopedic ignorance; I pronounced Goethe, Goh-thee, until 1976. But a hangnail sketch will follow for your benefit. Green wrote Blindness at Eton and Oxford. It was published in 1926, when
he was 21. Of Green, Auden would say, “The finest living novelist.” Eudora Welty: “. . . the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time.” Rebecca West: “The best writer of his time.” And John Updike would opine that—if such things are feasible—Henry Green had taught him how to write. Clanks on the fake crystal of your mind now, doesn’t it? Oh, that Henry Green.
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