Green, Henry

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T H E W O R M W O O D  R E V I E WVolume 11, number 4 .................... Issue forty fourEditor: Marvin Malone............. Art Editor: A. SypherCopyright ©1971, The Wormwood Review Press.............Editorial and Subscription Offices: P. 0. Box 8840......Stockton, California 95204 U.S.A.From A Letter By Henry Green To G.W.-- dated June 9, 1954 in W.R. ArchivesA man falls in love because there is something wrong with him. It is not so much a matter of his health as it is of his mental climate; as, in winter, one longs for the spring. He gets so that he can't stand being alone. He may imagine he wants children, but he does not, at least not as women do. Because once married and with children of his own, he longs to be alone again.A man who falls in love is a sick man, he has a kind of what used to be called green sickness. Before he's in love he's in a weak condition, for which the only prognosis, and he is only too aware of this, is that he will go on living. And, in his invalidism he does not feel he can go on living alone. It is not until after he is married that he really knows how wrong or sick he has been.I am, of course, assuming that love leads to marriage. Unrequited love is to be avoided at all costs. If a125married man falls in love with a third party and hasn't the courage to leave his wife, he is like a man who takes off his belt, ties it round the branch of a tree, and hangs himself to death in the loop while his trousers fall round his ankles. If an unmarried man finds unrequited love then there is even more the matter with him.The love one feels is not made for one but made by one.It comes from a lack in oneself. It is a deficiency, and therefore, a certifiable disease.We are all animals, and therefore we are continually being attracted. That this attraction should extend to what is called love is a human misfortune cultivated by novelists. It is the horror we feel of ourselves, that is of being alone with ourselves, which draws us to love, but this love should happen only once, and never be repeated, if we have, as we should, learnt our lesson, which is that we are, all and each one of us, always and always alone.—  Henry GreenLondon, EnglandPound's Spiritual Return To ParisThe poets watch him on his yellow bicycle rocketing down around the Park Monceau a cometblack cape fluttering behindtrailing Provencalinto the autumn chestnuts.His madness was his blessing one driving the other protector of innocence that was his madness.He won't last the year they said twelve years ago.Now he is eighty.He walks on air they clump behind with canes dying in little clumps like twisted daffodils (these American poets —  how many there are: weeds) their worn out booksread over them and flung into the tomb.

[A man falls in love...]

http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/wormwood/wormwood_a1971v11n4i44/wormwood_a1971v11n4i44p125.pdf

[A man falls in love...]

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