BOOK REVIEW : Discovering the Passion and Paradox of Henry Green’s Writing : SURVIVING, The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, edited by Matthew Yorke , Viking: $24; 302 pages

Once he became celebrated enough for the newspapers to want pictures of him, the British novelist Henry Green invariably posed with his back turned. Last week, The New Yorker managed to come up with a rare frontal shot. Green, it turns out, quite resembled himself from the rear.

In such books as “Living,” “Loving,” “Party Going” and “Nothing,” he was entirely his own man all the way around. His style most famously consisted of dialogue that was simultaneously ornate and terse and, like the work of the painter Balthus, lethally revealing of all that it left unspoken. It was unique, had no mate and generated no progeny.

Even his reputation, fervently upheld by the best of his fellow writers, has dematerialized since his death in 1973. It remains a disquieting shadow with a distinct grimace of a smile.

“Surviving,” a gathering of uncollected and in some cases unpublished writing, does not, with a few exceptions, add much substance to the smile. It is mostly bits and pieces assembled by his grandson, Matthew Yorke.

Green worked much of his life in the family engineering firm under his father’s thumb; for his writing, he amputated the thumb and the “Yorke” and adopted a pseudonym.

Writing was both a necessity and an unnatural act, a powerful artifice. There were not a lot of surplus juices apart from those that were painfully distilled into his novels. After the last one appeared, when he was 48, he fell virtually silent until his death 20 years later.

He tried to write but the dozen or so pieces in “Surviving” that date from this period--and quite a few from before--are thin, strained and in several cases dismayingly bad. Yet John Updike is right to say, in an introduction, that to the 10 books published in Green’s lifetime “This now adds a glinting, uneven, but in part priceless 11th.”

The phrase is revealing two ways. Updike doesn’t write like that but Green does. It is something between a stylistic tribute and a stylistic contagion. Green’s convolution is not an elaboration, much less an affectation. It is the simplest way in which the convoluted reality of what he has to say can be expressed.

In “Loving,” he uses the passions and intrigues in the servants’ quarters to reveal what is crumbling in the Great House, and in society at large. It is like using smoked glass to watch the sun’s eclipse.

Green was a terrible book reviewer, as the few examples in “Surviving” show. He had no use for reviewing and used it, at best, to give a friend a hand. As several other pieces show, he was comically and laconically unobliging when asked to talk about himself.

Paradoxically--an adverb as unnecessary for Green as to write that snow falls whitely--the most powerful piece in the collection, and Green’s most naked bit of autobiography, are his thoughts about another writer, the 19th-Century explorer, Charles Doughty.

Doughty’s account of his two years’ travels among the Bedouins in the Arabian desert is written in a style that we may find flowery and contrived. Green sees in it a monument to the passion of an uncorrupted artist: patrician and, in its refusal but to be anything but its elaborate self, supremely honest.

He admires Doughty’s coldness toward the sheiks and tribes men he writes about so exotically. He contrasts it with T. E. Lawrence’s “posturing” hero-worship in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” But he sees a tremor under the elaborate chill.

Doughty explains the telegraph to one chieftain by telling him to imagine a giant whose head touches one city and his feet another.

“If we burned his feet at Heyil, should he not feel it at the instant in his head, which is at Stanbul?”

In the same way, Green writes, Doughty’s words “entering by our ears if they are read aloud, or slipping by our eyes if they are scanned in print, express their meaning in our bones.”

As do the dying butlers and enigmatic children in Green’s novels. That is one kinship; the other is his suggestion that Doughty undertook his desert ordeal to win authenticity for his--paradox again--perfumed style.

Perhaps World War II will do the same thing for its writers, he suggests. He spent two years as a firefighter in the London Blitz; and there is fire and devastation under the deflections of some of his best work. There are four accounts of the firefighting in “Surviving,” all of them written with a subtle elaboration and layering, and all of them devastating. “He is harsh, simple to the point of mystery, and not clear,” Green writes of Doughty. “He is often obscure. He is always magnificent.”