Green, Anne

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GREEN, Anne

Born 11 November 1891, Savannah, Georgia; died circa 1975

Daughter of Edward Moon and Mary Hartridge Green

Taken to France in 1893 after her father's financial ruin, Anne Green grew up in Le Havre and in Paris. Of the seven bilingual Green children the youngest was Julian, who became a noted French writer. Green's mother wrote "Letters from a Housekeeper in France" for a newspaper, and spun visions of her Savannah girlhood that would haunt Green's and Julian's writing. She and her sister served as nurses during World War I; "angels in their uniforms," wrote Julian, they were awarded the Médaille des Épidémies. After their father's death in 1927 Green and Julian lived together. Green traveled to America in 1922 to rediscover her Southern ancestry. She and Julian passed the war years (1940-45) with Baltimore relatives. She became a Catholic convert in 1947. The Greens' circle included many celebrated artists and intellectuals.

A translator and a correspondent for American and English magazines, Green also wrote comic/romantic novels, autobiography, and historical fiction. Her novels usually focus on the family life of American expatriates in France and incorporate her mother's nostalgia for the South. This nostalgia surfaces in memories, dreams, or visits to and from American relatives. Childhood is a pervasive theme. Her autobiography, With Much Love (1948), shows that her fictional families are based on Green's own—the gauche and sprightly sisters, the obedient little brother who, like Julian, displays an early interest in the devil, and the harried, loving parents just scraping by. Green represents the adult brother-sister bond fictionally by siblings who seem to be lovers, in 16 rue Cortambert (1937)—in fact an address of the Greens; by the married couple who seem to be siblings, in The Delamer Curse (1940); and by the fated heroine of Marietta (1932), her thoughts like hothouse flowers, who loves her brother-in-law.

Green's heroines are occasionally vulnerable but determined to grasp at happiness and self-sufficiency. They are young women who read Cosmopolitan, smoke to stay thin, rip and twist their clothing into ropes for escaping from high bedrooms, rouge their cheeks, carry their own latchkeys, engage in unhappy love affairs, get jobs selling books or drudging as companions to the tyrannical rich, whistle American spirituals in taxis, write notes in lipstick, and plan their novels. The sense of being truly not so scatterbrained as one is willing to appear is ruefully expressed by one heroine playing the pixie role: "Men will only love me for what they think I am." Green's archly innocent modern girl of the 1930s appears in such novels as The Selbys (1930), Reader, I Married Him (1931), Fools Rush In (1934), and That Fellow Perceval (1935).

Green writes about French families in A Marriage of Convenience (1933), Just Before Dawn (1943), and Paris (1938). The heroine of Paris is a poor, lame, but lovely girl, dedicated to her milliner's art, who hesitates between yielding to the man's control and becoming "a light eager soul, obliged to create." Here as elsewhere Green indulges her taste for decor: the primrose and white boudoir with its Venetian mirrors and ebony bed, a boat to carry the milliner into a sea of dreams. In her French novels of the 1950s and 1960s, Green reverts to the material of these and other earlier works in English. La Porte des songes (1969), for example, sets the action of Paris in an American city.

Atmosphere deepens menacingly in The Delamer Curse. The curse on the Southern family, living now as Parisian expatriates, descends from their slaveholding days and is transmitted through African beads soldered into a vermeil family coffeepot. The curse lifts, once these have been pried out and cast into the Seine and the heroine has expiated the ancestral guilt through her infants' deaths. Green's psychic fantasies, her summoning of evil presences, resemble her brother's literary preoccupations. Where Julian narrowly probes the anguished mind, however, to lay bare authentic nightmares of the spiritually and sexually tormented, Green's hallucinations are temporary, depending upon theatrical props and scenery. True horror is absent in Green, who, moreover, cannot keep the comic spirit from breaking through the fabric. For example, in the earlier Fools Rush In, the heroine's troubled quest for a demented father and the death of her mother are events interspersed with uncontrollable whimsy.

Green's difficulties are with plotting and pacing, with evenness of tone and the creation of convincing characters. She succeeds as a social documentarian of the milieu and manners she knows. Her works show a liking for the comic, the spontaneous, and the incongruous, and also reveal an interest in childhood and the lives of women at different periods. Love is often treated with ambivalence. Her characteristic subject matter—Americans abroad at their provincial worst, or the expatriate Paris family whose history belongs to the American South—is, as she has said, largely autobiographical.

Other Works:

A Crime by G. Bernanos (translated by Green, 1936). Winchester House (1936). The Silent Duchess (1939). France Speaking by R. de Saint Jean (translated by Green, 1941). The Lady in the Mask (1942). Basic Verities by C. Péguy (translated by Green, with J. Green, 1943). Men and Saints by C. Péguy (translated by Green, with J. Green, 1944). The Old Lady (1947). Le Goret (1954). Adeline (1956). A Certain Smile by F. Sagan (translated by Green, 1956). La Lanterne magique (with D. Mesnil, 1956). God Is Late by C. Arnothy (translated by Green, 1957). The Transgressor by J. Green (translated by Green, 1957). Le Vestiaire des anges (1958). Each in His Darkness by J. Green (translated by Green, 1961). Wonderful Clouds by F. Sagan (translated by Green, 1961). L'Or et l'argent (1962). Diary: 1928-1957 by J. Green (translated by Green, 1964). La Fille du grand marais (1964). La Bonne aventure (1966). Corinne et le prince persan (1967). To Leave Before Dawn by J. Green (translated by Green, 1967).

Bibliography:

Gaddis-Rose, M., Julien Green: Gallic-American Novelist (1971). Green, J., Diary: 1928-1957 (translated by Anne Green, 1964). Green, J., Memories of Happy Days (1942). Green, J., Personal Record: 1928-1939 (translated by J. Godefroi, 1939). Saint Jean, R. de, Julien Green par lui-meme (1967).