Henry Green

by Henry Vincent Yorke

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Henry Green's Enchantments: Passage and the Renewal of Life

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SOURCE: "Henry Green's Enchantments: Passage and the Renewal of Life," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1983, pp. 430-46.

[In the following essay, Wall traces the development of the themes of passage and renewal in Green's novels, stating "Green's fiction locates a neglected area of adult experience in which we continue the kind of living we did as children, in which not ideas but symbols move us."]

Despite Henry Green's originality, he is a traditional writer. His tradition is the romance. That this has not been recognized is perhaps due to the low repute of the romance in the mainstreams of twentieth-century literary criticism. Its mode of thought and, even more, its argument about the process and reality of life have been depreciated, perhaps because they depreciate reason and individuality. The romance is oriented, in Mircea Eliade's terms, to cosmos rather than history.

In the romance, life is natural process in which rebirth cyclically succeeds death. The continuity of life is assured, but the process of change which secures that continuity by replacing the outworn with the new brings great pressure to bear on human beings, whom it disorients. The endless drama of the romance occurs as it keeps watch on humankind's capacity to move with change to keep close to life.

The romance is also concerned with the depth of life. Life is deep when, again in Mircea Eliade's terms, the temporal, profane world coincides with the timeless, absolute reality of the sacred. We experience that conjunction by means of our mysterious capacity for symbolic vision. The romance deals especially with symbol making and symbol using. It presents the realm of wonder and finds the wondrous in the symbolic mind. Belief in one's closeness to life is what gives Green's characters the ability to reorient themselves when their worlds are altered; that belief depends upon the fluid functioning of their symbolic vision. That vision endlessly fascinates Green; it is the chief source of his fiction's energy.

To move with life's change is to make a passage. In the novels from Living through Concluding, Green creates rich dramas of passage, all of which are stories of symbolic vision. The characters are oridinary people: servants, businessmen, civil servants, factory people, husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and workers. Modern, they live in the habit of the moment, conscious only of the ordinary, profane world of routines, commonplace identities, and mundane realities. Yet, when the need arises, their minds produce symbols of life's continuity and depth to guide them through the turbulence of change so that they arrive at new identities and understandings in which they renew their closeness to life.

Some event, large or small—the advent of war, or merely the drop of a thick fog—brings the death of an old world or an intimation of mortality. In the romance there is a darkness in which one sees what is normally hidden. In Green's fiction that darkness appears in blinding sunlight, in moonlight or fog, or in the equally transfiguring color shed by light through stained-glass windows. When it appears, the characters' minds shift from history to cosmos. The profane loosens its hold, and they are in the sacred presence of a web of mediating symbols that have apparently lain dormant and hidden but waiting and vibrantly alive in the bottom of their rationally, materially, and historically oriented minds. These symbols constitute a saving knowledge.

In their presence, the perfectly ordinary, solid things of this world become extraordinary; they become luminous hierophanies speaking of life's power and renewal. The dreaming and searching mind sees suddenly a strange and yet familiar reality. In these periods Green's characters have expanded sensory perception, and the sensory intensity seems to activate the symbols, which filter their vision of the world about them. The symbols are those the romance inherits from early religion, symbols of life's phases and its inexhaustibility. So interurban travel manifests the road of the spiritual journey; pigeons, peacocks, and starlings present the bird that embodies the flight of the human spirit; the roses of gardens and cemeteries and names like Lily and Rose disclose the flower that in blooming manifests life's urge toward fulfillment; the movement of people in a railway station or the depths of someone's eyes reveals the sea of the depth and motion and renewal of life; in the dance is the spiral of life's tendency upward; in Birmingham factory, London railway station, Irish castle, and English country mansion appears the Axis Mundi itself; and for men, women become woman, the gateway to passage.

Green's characters do not recognize symbols; they respond to realities manifested by the symbolic visitation that informs their world. In the superreal world overwhelming the ordinary one, everything gives them a reading of threat or help, danger or enticement, evil or good. They are puzzled by their own responses in moments when they return to the single plane of profane reality; nonetheless, they are compelled by the symbols to revalue the world around them.

The action starts when, in one way or another, death cuts the characters' connection with deep life. Losing that connection, they are threatened, anxious, depressed. In each book, some of the characters suffer mild or severe forms of madness, the evidence of their separation from life. But for the central characters, the symbols do their transforming magic so that the connection is renewed and the concluding experience, when the characters find themselves at the center of life, is ecstasy.

That much—the reality of death and the countering reality of renewal—Green knew from the beginning. But as he wrote one story after another, he continued to work on the problem of death. The implicit question for him is, To what extent can life's power of renewal transform the nature of the death that every individual must inevitably suffer?

Living (1929) is the story of Lily Gates and her spiritual father, a skilled craftsman in a Birmingham factory. "Home" is the book's central theme. Potentially, and sometimes actually, home creates an experience of depth that exercises the futile linearity which a young man who has not found himself sees in life: "And what was in all this … you were born, you went to school, you worked, you married, you worked harder, you had children, you went on working, with a good deal of trouble your children grew up, then they married. What had you before you died?" Living's chief event is Lily Gates's passage from dreamy girl to mature woman ready for wifehood and motherhood, and she is able to make her passage because Mr. Craigan has made a real home for her.

Lilly is unaware that passage requires not movement to a different place but rather revaluation of the one she knows. Yet her intuitive progress toward her goal—Green likens her to a homing pigeon—demonstrates that. At first she feels her need to leave her childhood home and to establish one of her own as a desire not to live like all the others and to get away to a new, wonderful place unlike this well-known "Brummagem" where people worry and have bad accidents and breakdowns. But when she persuades the livelier and less steady of her boyfriends to attempt that journey, she finds no magical Otherworld where life is exotic; instead, she finds chaos. She finds she likes the things she knows and quickly goes home to Mr. Craigan. "Dreams don't come true," he tells her; and, to the extent that Lily is disappointed and puzzled, in some measure she has had the setback he perceives. But, in fact, she is right on course. Before she can have a new life in Birmingham, she has to dissociate home and childhood, and in her elopement she had done that.

Living is a book of rhythms, Green finding all kinds of going out and coming back in ordinary movie-going, picnicking, joking, singing, and coming home. Lily's revaluation of the life she has always known is part of that deep rhythm of ordinary life and as sure as the turn of the seasons. Early on, needing to get away, she has a bad dream associating life here with death: "Yes and in every house was mother with her child and that fluttered hands and then that died…." Then her abortive elopement gives her another perspective on Birmingham, and from the time she flees home she is moving toward the discovery that for her this factory town and its life are the center of deep life. When the new spring emerges, so does her new adult self, and this place in which she is rooted, having shown her the face of the diabolical, now shows her, by means of the same symbols, the face of the divine. There is a baby and a homing pigeon, the baby crowing and grabbing at the bird: "This was moment of utter bliss for her. She was like dazed by it…. Suddenly with loud raucous cry she rushed at baby to kiss it." Like the homing pigeon, Lily is bound by the life she knows. But in this concluding moment of bliss she knows her love of that ordinary life. Living is full of secondary characters suffering psychic homelessness, so we know the great value of the understanding Lily achieves.

Life may be deep, but it does end. The book's second major event, which coincides with Lily's passage, is Mr. Craigan's forced retirement. For him, the end of work means the end of life, and when he faces that reality, he goes into a sudden decline and takes permanently to his bed, literally turning his face to the wall. This is death unmitigated, sharply juxtaposed with Lily's ecstasy. It is arresting and painful because Mr. Craigan's has been an especially valuable life. His vitality has given him thoughtfulness, discipline, dignity, and respect. Unlike the elderly child who is Lily's natural father, Mr. Craigan has personal depth: "E's like the deep sea," Lily says, and "We all live by Mr. Craigan."

The symbolic vision of life that is the ground for Green's drama of passages insists that death is not the end but rather a part of life. Life, above all, continues. So Green makes Lily's passage redeem Mr. Craigan's death. He presents death as a part of life and this relationship is a mystery. Lily has to die as a child in order to be reborn a woman. Her neighbor, Mrs. Eames, happy with her young children, knows death as mystery. Addressing her older baby one morning while nursing him, she says,

"An' when you're grown you'll marry and we shall lose you and you'll 'ave kiddies of your own…. Why do we bring kids into the world, they leave you so soon as they're grown, eh?… Sons and daughters why do we bring them into the world?" She was laughing. "Because, because" she said laughing and then lay smiling and then yawned.

From this point Green leaps to the mystery in the connection between Mr. Craigan's death and Lily's passage. He has been an apostle of home. His training has readied her for safe passage. So when he moves out of living at the same time that Lily moves further into it, it is as if the vitality of his life is passed directly on to her. He will die but his passion, his depth, will go on in her living.

Caught (1943) is separated from Living by fourteen years (I will deal later with Party Going), and when Green brought his romance vision to bear on the Second World War, he had lived through some real version of the experience he fictionalized as Richard Roe's. The issue is moral life; the revaluation is of other people and of one's relation to them. Richard Roe's passage takes place under the signs of water and fire as Green uses, for once, a set symbolic system—the one Colin Still calls "the symbolism of the elements." This symbolism belongs to the traditional story of the soul's search for the truth. Offering a sacred extension of the realities of profane, warchanged London, it allows Green to develop more fully than his natural setting alone can the crucial drama of the symbolic setting on which passage depends. The symbols may not only illuminate but even incorporate; they may take possession of the seer. Again and again, Caught evokes the power of the vision, the drowning in it and the recovery by firelight, by the water of false emotion and the fire of intuition of the truth.

Roe's story incorporates that of Albert Pye; both are adult versions of the kidnapping of Roe's son, Christopher, with which the book begins. In a toy department, under blue light from stained glass windows, Christopher sees a boat, and is

… lost in feelings that this colour, reflected in such a way on so much that he wanted, could not have failed to bring him who could have visited no flower-locked sea on the Aegean, and yet, with every other child, or boy at school, with any man in the mood, who knew and always would that stretch of water, those sails from the past, those boats fishing in the senses.

Lost in the spell, the child lets himself be kidnapped.

War gives Pye a new responsibility for others. He accepts promotion to substation chief in the Auxiliary Fire Service and then finds too late that he is not prepared for the position. He does not know how to give the people of his substation the confidence and security they demand from him. At this time, when everyone's sense of imminent death is high, Pye cannot shrug off his problem. He cannot deny the sense that life is precious and must be protected. So his inability to comfort his people becomes to him a betrayal of a sacred trust, and he comes to see himself as a betrayer. He personalizes his growing guilt, developing the fixed idea—factually false but symbolically an expression of his failure and therefore compelling—that on that night so long ago, when he had his first lovely sex, he must have forced his own sister. The guilt proves unamenable to rational disproof. Then, having lost his identity as a good and reliable man, he puts his head in an unlighted gas oven.

Roe is the one who finds him there. Roe's story is that of someone who fights free of the warped vision to which symbolic flooding can give rise when it serves to embody false emotion. Roe's great good fortune is to have been "kidnapped" by sexual love of a woman who "opened" to him as his wife. That knowledge of love ultimately carries him beyond his wartime imprisonment in self-pity. At first, his recent loss of his wife and (just by absence) of his son makes him idealize them and his prewar life, and so, by opposition, to monsterize the working-class men who have become his fellow firemen. The symbols available to him pull his class bonds tighter, and he hugs his misery. But after the training and the anxious waiting, when there are finally fires to fight, he finds his own manhood, his competence, and his capacity for leadership, in working with the others. Having gained self-confidence, he moves to an ecstatic vision of his brotherhood with them. On the strength of that, he frees himself from those of his bonds to his sister-in-law and son which demean and reduce him and his brother firemen.

Pye's sister was his son's kidnapper, and Pye himself has been to Roe a figure of distaste and even of shame. He has embodied for Roe the ineffectuality Roe feared in himself. But in the end Roe can see Pye not as a bad image of himself but as a real, separate man whose death must be redeemed because he too was one of the firefighters. As the book ends, Roe admits Pye to the brotherhood and so gets himself straight.

The high that Caught gave Green—or, more formally, the significance and comfort he found in Roe's passage—can be judged by the ebullience of Loving (1945), which takes passage straight into hilarity. Green has genuinely lighthearted fun in transforming one Charley Raunce, at middle age, from a carefree, adolescent lackey into a mature man who loves with a passion he never knew he could feel. He makes it happen in that very castle which tradition makes the fairy tale share with the Gothic romance. By and large, Green's story of passages is anything but fanciful. Passage is a necessity. Disorientation, gloom, and madness form a constant threat to life in this turning world, and only passage enables life to continue. So it is again in Loving, where life and loving are a game of blind man's buff, one's chance of capturing the loved one a matter of luck. The profane realities of his characters' physicality and morality—their mismatched eyes, baldness, wrinkles, and the like, and their predatory opportunism—spoof the fairy tale's and the Gothic romance's claims for the superreality of beauty and for the rule of a moral law. In Loving you had better latch on to what you can get of what you want. But the analogy works both ways, and the castle performs its magic; Charley's passage from captivation by the wicked witch, Mrs. Tennant, to that other kind of captivation by love of the beautiful princess, Edith, collects both the terrors of the Gothic romance and the triumphant beauties of the fairy tale for these ordinary people.

The plot is simple: Mrs. Tennant, the rich employer, gradually loses control of her small empire as her loyal old servants begin to die off and the younger ones make lives of their own, while at the same time Charley, bewildered and confused, with the guidance of an also bewildered Edith, gradually gains control of his own life. The action incorporates plot details as well as symbols from the Gothic romance and the fairy tale—from the former, terrors, surprises, moral intonings, shocking visitations from the outside, internal machinations by the wicked; from the latter, the transformation of Charley Raunce into Prince Charming, who carries away the imprisoned Princess.

Green's eye is trained on discriminating the dead from the vital. The art works of this rich man's folly, for instance, are dead—ludicrous in their empty gestures. The people, on the other hand, are alive. They display their vital energy in their loving. Charley's love for Edith encloses the stories of all the other loves. To do so, it has to incorporate not only the comical but also the pathetic and potentially tragic—the old people's loss of their place in life and young Albert's going off to probable death as an air gunner because Edith does not choose him. But it can do that because the power of life's vitality shines forth for Green, as when, for example, Edith and Kate dance together and are "multiplied to eternity" as they are reflected in the drops of five great chandeliers, or when Paddy, the lampkeeper, takes a nap in the sun so that "It might have been almost that O'Conor's dreams were held by hairs of gold binding his head beneath a vaulted roof on which the floor of cobbles reflected an old king's molten treasure from the bog."

Loving yokes together the darkness of life's changing and this glowing vitality. In the last scene, Charley is still a comical sight, he still has his dyspepsia, and love anguishes him. But his love for Edith is the great and final thing, and it takes us back to the opening, where the old butler, Eldon, dying, keeps calling out "Ellen." His love has lasted him all his life, and so, too, we should see, will Charley's last him.

In Back (1946) Green came back to the material of Caught. In creating Charley Summers, he returned to the problem of Pye's distrust of himself and faced more directly than ever before the problem of madness. Charley Summers is repatriated to England from a German prison camp in a state of self-distrust that he cannot articulate to others or even to himself. His profound unease is revealed in his response to Nancy Whitmore, onto whom he projects his self-loathing. The Romance of the Rose and, more generally, the symbol of the rose garden shed their confidence in the reality of goodness on this action, which belongs to the vein of literature in which good is found in the despised. Because in the romance the split between good and evil is paired with the conjunction of opposites, Nancy is able to heal Charley and bring him "back" to a security in life he has never before known.

Green is interested not in the overt facts of war cruelties but in what the mind makes of them. The facts of Charley's imprisonment are vague. Back in England, when Charley's former girlfriend's father is dying and his old wife cries out like an animal in anguish, Charley has to close a part of his mind to endure it and keep control of himself. Here is evidence that in prison he has heard men being tortured, at least, and perhaps that he has been tortured himself. It may be his own voice that the woman's reminds him of. At one point he manages to tell Nancy, "I had a mouse out there." He remembers his hands clutching bars, and I think we must connect the bars and the mouse to see that Charley participated, in a sense, in the torture. He may have imprisoned the mouse and may be appalled at the evil, minuscule in performance but symbolically great, in himself. It may be that he has betrayed himself and others under torture—acknowledging lies as truths? informing on others to avoid further punishment?—and is transferring that greater, unfaceable horror to the trivial imprisonment of the mouse. Even before the war he was unsure of himself; now he is imprisoned in a self-conception which, projected, only turns the whole world into a threat. He is very nearly helpless to heal himself; his return to life depends upon the ministrations of Nancy.

Nancy is the sturdy type of woman, like Lily Gates. But she is illegitimate, and her illegitimacy has told on her. Knowing herself to be a good person, she is nonetheless wracked by an irrational sense of unworthiness, so that when her young flier husband died, she gave up his name, feeling herself unworthy of wearing it because she failed to be with him when he died in battle. Her own trouble has given her a knowledge of people's need for the love not of romantic self-indulgence but of generosity, loving kindness. Her life comes together with Charley's because their needs match—his to be helped and hers to help. Good and evil merge as entangled matter of life, then good separates itself out as a reality Charley can depend on, because Nancy is the half-sister of Charley's prewar redheaded girlfriend, Rose.

During the war and when he first returns to England, Charley clings to his false idea of self-indulgent Rose as a glorious, wondrous lover of himself in order to cling to his idea of himself as he was when he knew her. When he meets black-haired Nancy, otherwise Rose's look-alike, of whose existence he has never known and who denies any knowledge of him, Charley can only believe that this is Rose, inexplicably turned whore. By a gradual process wherein she first makes herself the legitimate daughter of her natural father's wife, Nancy leads Charley to see herself as someone separate from Rose and so someone not betraying him but caring for him. Back does not deny the reality of evil and betrayal or indicate that they can be transformed into something else. Charley's missing leg is analogous to the missing part of his mind, the war horror he simply has to close off. But the book does insist on the reality of love as well as horror. By the end, when he has become Nancy's intended husband, Charley has come to see himself as an acceptably good man. It is this recovery of an acceptable self that he articulates when at the very end he calls Nancy "Rose."

I earlier omitted Party Going (1939) in its sequential place in order to consider it here with Concluding (1948). These books, because their actions cover only hours, do not allow the characters time for thorough revaluation. Instead, they present another kind of passage, a mental traveling that is a variation of the traditional magic flight. These flights are prompted by a seemingly small disruption of normal activity—the drop of a fog and the probably temporary disappearance of a girl. In both events, the characters find intimations of mortality. Their response is the same as that of the characters whose old lives dissolve: they feel the urge to renew contact with deep life. By means of the flight into Nature, they make that contact. One action is set in a city railway station, the other in the grounds and buildings of a state school, but in both books, even more intensely than in those I have already discussed, the fiction is full of birds and beasts and vegetation, which help to define the action. The fog in Party Going and the disappearance in Concluding evoke what Victor Turner calls moments of liminality, a state in which people move outside structure:

Thus it is in liminality that one finds profuse and symbolic references to beasts, birds and vegetation…. Symbolically [people's] structural life is snuffed out by animality and nature, even as it is being regenerated by these same forces. One dies into nature to be reborn from it.

Both books deal with structure's threat to life; in one case the manners and lifestyle of the wealthy London young in the 1930s, in the other the routines of a future bureaucratic State, exclude humanity. Both books reveal the dimension of life that is not structural. Green's characters know Nature's sexuality, its motion, its rituals; and in taking magic flights they dissolve their structural life in Nature. In doing so, they show that life is inalienable and that, even unwittingly, people find their way to the center of it when they need to.

Party Going is a dazzling book, a tour de force of coalescence. A group of wealthy young London socialites, intending a pleasure trip to the South of France, have to wait in the station and its hotel when a dense fog stops the trains. Green puts a prismatic perspective on their activity during these few hours (one man overwhelmingly in love "felt as though he was gazing into a prism, and he could see no end to it,") splitting it into three actions in one. Uniting them in the movement of the sea, he displays rather than simply evokes an idea of the depth of life.

First comes the love game that is the ordinary activity of these party-goers. In Edward Stokes's description of it, "For several hours, the group … talk about one another, score off one another, play up to one another, exploit one another, lie to one another, vie with one another for the center of attention, try to save their faces and to justify themselves." The pursuit is real; nonetheless, it is stylized slow motion. These people are obeying a code of manners; here is structural life in its restrictiveness. This is action of delay and deferred commitment, of striking postures that have very nearly become ends in themselves. Max may be a little more distant from Amabel and closer to Julia at the end of the day, but then he may swing back toward Amabel again. In any case, it is hard to imagine that any marriage deeper than one of manners could come out of this posturing. Green contrasts his party-goers with hordes of others also having to wait in the station, ordinary people trying to get home at the end of a working day. His descriptions suggest that the workers' emotions are direct and spontaneous, vital. The party-goers, not having to work, are cut off from deep contact with life and so have become precious and ridiculous. They are Green's waste-landers.

However, Stokes is right when he points out, "If much of the imagery conjures up an impression of death, desolation and aridity, much also conjures up a counterbalancing impression of vitality and wonder." The book's second action is spiritual traveling. When the fog drops, changes the way everything looks, and puts a stop to their physical journey, it sets off in these characters' minds thoughts both of death and of the Otherworlds story associated with the journey beyond death, beyond it to the mysterious depths of life. Some of these flights of fancy and glimpses of the symbols of deep life are fleeting, but others are long and profound. Characters only moderately susceptible to the suggestion of death have landscape fantasies; in their traveling they remain earthbound. But those most deeply moved—Julia, Miss Fellowes, Amabel (and Max through Amabel)—become assimilated to the bird. These characters make full passages in taking magic flights.

Julia, still attached to her "charms," is a child just about to turn sexual adult; Miss Fellowes is an "old" woman (fifty-one) beginning to turn away from sex and toward death; Amabel, at the supreme peak of loveliness and power, is at the age between these two, sweeping men before her tide. Julia turns gulls into doves and takes a big parachute jump; Miss Fellowes follows obediently the call of her dead pigeon. Amabel, naked after her bath under her rich fur coat, is the powerful and enticing counterpart of that dead pigeon wrapped in paper. Each of these women, according to her own age and condition, has a sexual experience during these hours in the station which shows that, no matter the social strictures of her lifestyle, she is close to the quick of life. These flights are releases, periods of suspension of socially prescribed awareness. In Party Going, as elsewhere according to Victor Turner, the structural and antistructural times coincide.

The sterile love game and the vital flight are clearly opposed to one another. Putting these two actions against one another, Green sharply registers the discrepancy. Linking them, the third action puts the characters through a sequence of moods that manifests life's rhythm of beginnings, middles, and ends. Coming to the station and getting together as a group, they are excited and full of anticipation. Intimations of mortality merely lead to intimations of immortality and they mock death. In the midsection, when the love game is on full steam ahead, power absorbs their attention and excludes death. Then, after the waiting gets to be a strain and they all begin to wish they were elsewhere, the idea of death recurs, this time as a threatening reality rather than a mystery. They have no sooner gone through this sequence than the fog lifts, the trains begin to run, and they come back to the anticipation with which they started. The sequence will repeat endlessly, through every so many hours, on any day. This sequence of moods—excitement and invulnerability, confidence and then gloom, evoked by levels of energy as well as perspectives on death—controls their assessments of life. They apprehend life in its promise, its power, and its desolate endings according to the moment. One assessment is no truer than any of the others; all are true to the moment of perception.

This third action links the love game to the flights in being the solid ground of experience out of which both the other actions come. So the three actions must be seen as one. They occur simultaneously, and they all obey the sea rhythm of waves and tides surging in, cresting and washing back, surging in…. Every bit of Party Going moves to this rhythm. The one action, through the prismatic refraction of these characters' living, entangles death with vitality in seemingly myriad ways. Party Going is full of tacit connections—between the wealthy and the workers, who are alike as well as different; or between everyday language full of metaphors its users do not think about and magic flights; or between dying and loving—and all of them refract the single duality of life and death. In the series of planes of reality Green creates here, in which the whole appears miraculously in the detail, there is all the depth of extended vision on which the reality of the deep life in these books depends.

After the war, Green saw the Socialist State coming. In Concluding he wrote about that threat to life, creating a State abhorrent for its blindness to human complexity, diversity, and vulnerability. The action takes place at a State institute for the training of female State servants. The State system threatens everyone, from the girls, who must conform to rules to keep their places; to the principals, who are subject to reports and investigations; to the book's central character, old Mr. Rock, a retired scientist from the "bad old days" before the new system. He has a lifehold on a cottage granted him by the former owner of the estate, which the State has acknowledged in confiscating the property. But the principals, Edge and Baker, are trying to get him off "their" place by getting him elected to an institute for retired scientists. He is resisting, for his granddaughter Liz's sake as well as his own, since he will leave her homeless if he goes and she is recovering from a nervous breakdown suffered in the State service. The threat imposed by the State is fully realized in the action, but on this holiday—it is Founder's Day, the tenth anniversary of the institute—all the personnel of this social microcosm play their parts in an elaborate ritual that exorcises the diabolism of the State. As in Party Going, the characters are assimilated to birds; this time it is a communal magic flight.

This State institute is installed in the former great house of a country estate, the mansion is surrounded by a gorgeous park, and this is a day in midsummer, when Nature's force stands extraordinarily revealed in the burgeoning of life in trees, flowers, and birds, and in the characters as well, in whom sexuality is running strong. Despite their beauty, all these splendors of Nature put a great strain on the school's personnel. The flowers are too fragrant, the sun is too hot, the moonlight too intense in its flooding. Sexuality is too rife and keeps threatening trouble. There are headaches, faints, tears, terrors. And it is this profuseness of life on which the State system is built. Sebastian Birt, the economics tutor, says:

Consider for a moment our whole position here…. A complete community related in itself, its output being … the unlimited demand for State servants, fed by an inexhaustible supply of keen young girls. Staffed, as well, by men and women who are only too well aware they can be replaced almost at a stroke of the pen by the State, from which there is virtually no appeal. In fact, we have here a sad bevy of teachers lying wide open to be reinvigorated … by new blood of which, worse luck, there is only too plentiful a supply in the pool.

State and Nature so coalesce that it is clear there is only Nature as a source from which humankind intuits realities and expresses them in the structuring of institutions. The human mind open to the insignificance of the individual life so replaceable in Nature's fecundity, transfixed by that horror, has produced the State. Describing a roomful of girls awakening from a nap, Green says, "The tide of late afternoon disclosed great innocence in a scene on which no innocence had ever shown, where life and pursuit were fierce, as these girls came back to consciousness from the truce of a summer after luncheon before the business of the dance." The State is only the vehicle; Nature's profuseness is the threat.

The student Mary's disappearance alerts everyone to her danger and their own. Overworked, she evokes the sacrificial victim once traditionally offered to life by societies soliciting the rain of new vitality upon them. In response to the threat, unconscious of what they are doing and why, the characters transform their life in this institution by enacting the sort of New Year's ritual Mircea Eliade talks about. They all together, but each on his or her own, violate structural expectation and habit. License is allowed on this special day. But they are moved further to a variety of orgies of pleasure that turn into whirlwinds of destruction. There is an exaggeration of the usual rumors, whispers, and echoes. The air is full of scrambled communications, "vile crosscurrents," deliberate and inadvertent mystifications. Because the characters do not consciously know the ritual they are acting out, they perceive the Rule of Misrule while hijinks and license seem to threaten the evening's dance.

In fact, the hijinks and license, like the patterned, ordering, reuniting ceremony of the dance, are archetypal. First the characters reenact the chaos of the time before the founding, dissolving the forms of the old year, and then they proceed to re-create the order of their life in this establishment in the dance. The old order, Eliade says, is destroyed through sexual license. Here Mary may have run off with a boy; Edge suggests to the local constabulary that at his advanced age Mr. Rock may have become a sexual menace to her girls; Edge faints out of a fear of dead rabbits (sign of pregnancy) when Mary's doll is found beneath a pile of blooms; and Liz and Sebastian, naked, make love out in the park where Baker nearly walks right over them. The new order is established through a reenactment of their hierogamy, the marriage of sky and earth, from which Life's vitality mythically pours. Intuiting the necessity for marriage, Liz and the girls begin to talk about a marriage between the lovers; the girls, continuing their pranks, send Mr. Rock's pig home with a white satin slipper tied around her neck; and Miss Edge herself, under the euphoric spell of tobacco, proposes marriage to Mr. Rock!

Their enactment of this ritual demonstrates that these characters know the divine as well as the diabolical. Unaware, they know community, for their behavior on this holiday constitutes what Turner calls "communitas." They know that life continues through the sequence of death and rebirth, and so impose that rhythm on their activities. They also know flight as they dance:

… oblivious yet well aware, they danced out together the dull year that was done…. [The music] came … first as a sort of jest, a whispered double meaning almost…. After which, at any rate for the women, a far rustling of violins once recognized called as air, beaten through stretched feathers, might have spoken to the old man's goose, that long migratory flight unseen. So they rose … and made haste toward their obligations in the excitement of a year's end; not without a sense of dread in every breast….

Before the day ends, old Mr. Rock's goose, who has never flown, comes flying by him. The State bureaucrats, entrenched and budding, just as domestic and earthbound as this goose, fly too. They fly because the munificence of life—in its divinity, now, rather than its diabolism—gives them knowledge of life as a gift. All day long they are moved to feel that. Mr. Rock even offers to lecture to the girls on the care of pigs, moved by a recent vision. Coming across the park to the dance, he and Liz witness a great twilight descent of starlings into a huge tree, in three shell-shaped waves, and Mr. Rock receives this flight of birds as a gift: "Then a third concourse came out of the west … which trebled the singing. The old man wondered, as often before, if this were not the greatest sound on earth…. 'I'm glad I had that once more,' Mr. Rock said aloud."

Mr. Rock's story illuminates the significance of the characters' hidden knowledge and ritual action. For him the threatening inexhaustibility takes the form of the female. This institute now organizes his confrontation with women. The mansion in which it is installed is built in the female, lunar form of a great crescent. The principals and most of the rest of the staff are women. The three hundred students are all girls. Mr. Rock knows the opposing force; in caring for his three white female pets, he is expressing his fealty to the white goddess. When Mary disappears, the vibrations of danger reach him too, and although he has never before participated in the Founder's Day ritual, this time he takes his part in it. Intuiting the deadliness of the State, he calls it "the curse of our times," but knowing life as a gift, he makes a gift of himself to it, bringing his fertilizing male presence to the female establishment. His profane consciousness never quits him, so he feels he is humiliating himself to an institution he despises, but by the time, at the end of the day, he gets home and gets his pets in and is ready to go to bed, he is "satisfied" with his day.

And he should be. Dancing to the tune of the State diminishes these characters. But dancing in the New Year's dance is joining in the cosmic whirling of life and is restorative. Here personal action is dissolved in impersonality so that the characters exercise a further dimension of their being. So in his usual practice in relating to the State, Mr. Rock begins the day by begging for his breakfast in the institute's kitchen, but after participating in the dance, he proudly scorns Edge's proposal of marriage. He begins the day as a pauper and ends it as a king. Once again, a central character's triumph redeems the reality of death, but by this time the one who dies—at almost seventy-six, Mr. Rock is coming to the time of his "long migratory flight" into death—and the one who triumphs are the same.

I call Green's novels "enchantments" because they tell the same story and make the same kind of appeal as children's fairy tales. According to Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, the fairy tales are about children's passages. They assure children of help in the turmoil of transformation and of what Bettelheim calls "higher states of humanity" that can be attained. They communicate the tendency of human lives toward both change and renewal. Green's fiction locates a neglected area of adult experience in which we continue the kind of living we did as children, in which not ideas but symbols move us. We continue to be challenged to make passages, to engage in revaluation. We sometimes think that for each of a succeeding set of stages of life there is a specific program of appropriate tasks to accomplish. There is no such programmatic regimentation of living in Green's fiction. There is only one task; it is always the same—to renew contact with deep life. The fiction shows that experience to be as varied as the people who achieve it.

Without denying the desolation of living, Green recovers the validity of the romance tradition and the associated values of beauty, generosity, loving, and bliss. When old Mr. Rock gets his breakfast, "his tea made his old blood run again, in this morning's second miracle for Mr. Rock." Green does not explain, but surely the first miracle was his waking up and finding himself still alive. Life is the continuing miracle in all these books.

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