Henry Green vs Graham Greene

There is an amusing letter from Leo Robson in this week’s TLS about the origins of “cunty fingers”

Green recalled a former manservant who volunteered alongside him in the Auxiliary Fire Service quoting an elderly butler who, when asked what he most liked in the world, replied: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers”. The passage prompted George Plimpton, the Paris Review editor, to hold a meeting. After screwing up his courage to say the word aloud, then, for the sake of clarity, chalking it up on a blackboard, he was given possible alternatives – all in the end rejected – by Jean Stein, Robert Silvers, Tom Guinzburg (who “said that any book with such an origin story was bound ‘to end up in the bins’”), and Peter Matthiessen, among them “crapy”, “shitty”, “pissy”, “hincty”, and – in a confusion with “cottony”, referring to “navel fluff” – “wolly” [all sic].

yes, enjoyed watching this this morning. interesting to see how different people had quite different impressions of him. perhaps that’s normal but it seemed quite heightened. the solitary, the gregarious, gentle, perhaps observant of others’ behaviour to something near a fault (the office store cupboard anecdote). making me want to go back and read him again. wonderful writer.

looool. it’s a wonderful phrase, those alternatives/remedies are hilarious.

And he tells PR that's where he got the idea for Loving: "I saw the book in a flash." !

...and the servant who gave him the idea for Loving remained a regular visitor to the Yorkes’ house in Knightsbridge, long after Green had fallen out of touch with the high society of his youth.

"They danced again and again until, as the long night went on they had got into a state of unthinking happiness perhaps".