Why This Is Hell

... I went back to a charity shop and bought Henry Green's Loving (1945) / Living (1929) / Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1950) / Doting (1952) / Blindness (1926), even though under the strict application of the two pound rule I don't have to. Together they come to £5.50, but as this is six novels that's actually about 90p a book...

Rather like Patrick Hamilton, he seems to be one of those literary blindspots - too late to be modernist, too early to be angry young man, a contemporary with Grahame Greene, who must surely have reviewed his near namesake (and don't forget Harry Lime). Both Green and his wife were descended from the first Baron Leconfield, the current title holder I recently heard speak about East Prussia (and I hope the merely Hon Henry Vincent Yorke is much more interesting).


My gut would be to start with Blindness, although it appears the omnibi have eschewed chronological ordering. I ought to be reading sf, of course. And Moonraker. But I need to wash the taste of a book I will not name out of my head.

The presence of T.S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations and Thom Gunn's The Sense of Movement on my 15 Books Meme list notes what poetry got to me first - although it was in a sense the lovesong and "On the Move" in particular, and now I'm more likely to go back to The Waste Land. I have all the Eliot and Gunn I want (although if I ever saw the juvenilia of the former at a reasonable price I'd pick it up - Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, and no doubt there are scattered late poems by Gunn).

But a handful of poems by Auden got to me first. Auden became a minefield, though - in terms of quality and texts. The general consensus is that he lost something once he had settled in the US - and I note that there is The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, but no corresponding American Auden. But he also rewrote and revised poems, even dropping those he no longer liked. Thus the available Collected Poetry have varying contents and aren't complete - as the English opts for the earliest texts, they opt for the latest. There are Collected Longer and Collected Shorter poems, but I'm not sure how complete these are. I've also picked up a couple of his travel books and a libretto or two over the years, and a Selected Poetry which covers the whole ground - but selectively.

At some point I picked up Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928 and Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings, 1939-1973, both of which I assumed to be part of the Complete Works edited by Mendleson. I've seen other volumes over the years - but priced so I talked myself out of them. I mean, when would I read them? But the find of Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume I: 1926-1938 led to me to follow it upo.

The Juvenilia turns out to be a separate project - and there is a different, expanded, paperback. There is no sign of the poem volumes, and the projected is projected to have eight volumes. Thus far:

• Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1927-1938 (1989)
  
• Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings, 1939-1973 (1993)
  
• Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume I: 1926-1938 (1997)
  
• Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948 (2002)
  
• Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955 (2008)

I guess there's Prose, Volume IV: 1956-1965? (2012?) and Prose, Volume V: 1966?-1973? (2016), then two volumes of the poetry? At this rate I shall die of old age...

On Tolkien, meanwhile, Christopher seems to be publishing every scrap - and I faithfully followed Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and Lost Tales before running out of steam. Curiously I stopped at the fourth volume, The Shaping of Middle-earth, just before The Lost Road, a text I'd always wanted to read. I'm sure I bought it, but I can't find a copy. In Liverpool and Tonbridge I picked up War of the Rings, Children of Hurin and the lectures on Beowulf etc (having found Return of the Shadow in a local secondhand bookshop), then in Whitstable last week found a run of them from Return to The War of the Jewels. As I'd nearly bought a couple in the Fantasy Centre at a fiver the week before, I was trapped in by the pesky two pound rule - each were £1.95. I'd sadly forgotten I already had War of the Rings, and still no Lost Road.

I have no idea when I shall read these - probably not before Dec 2010 - but clearly I need to get the remaining two volumes.