IN 1952, W.H. AUDEN WAS ASKED by Life magazine to name his favourite writer. He was spoilt for choice: he could have singled out Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, J.R.R. Tolkien — who he was a great admirer of — or any number of internationally famous and lauded figures, including some women, too. But his choice was far more unconventional.
Auden said simply that “Henry Green is the finest living English novelist.”
It was a tremendous accolade from one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, but, unknown to Auden — and perhaps to Green — his nominee would not write another novel in the remaining two decades of his life. (Coincidentally, Auden and Green died a matter of a few weeks apart, at the end of 1973.) The endorsement therefore became a quasi-epitaph for the career of a man described, probably aptly, by the American satirist Terry Southern as “a writer’s writer’s writer.”
