Henry Green: A Novelist of Imagination
[Welty was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist who is known for such works as The Kobben Bridegroom (1942) and The Golden Apples (1949). In the following laudatory essay, he analyzes the main components of Green's novelistic style, highlighting such elements as characterization, plot situations, and diction.]
Through the novels of Henry Green from Living on, a strong originality has poured in a stream at once pure and changing. Other good novelists in England who were brought up at the same time and in the same mold of home and school and University wrote and still write at times rather like one another, but not one has produced one novel that in the conception or in the writing seems now in the same world of art with Living or Party Going or Caught or Loving or Back or Concluding or Nothing or Doting or, in quite the same way these novels seem, in the world with us. His novels are not only unlike those of other writers, they are to an unusual degree unlike one another, and while each has been made to stand as clear as possible out in space, yet there could be above all no mistaking of the hand. The intelligence, the blazing gifts of imagery, dialogue, construction, and form, the power to feel both what can and what never can be said, give Henry Green's work an intensity greater, this reader believes, than that of any other writer of imaginative fiction today. For thirty years the nature of each next work has been unpredictable, and this is still the case. His remains the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time.
He brings to bear on that imagination a knowledge of the wide world as intimate as Jane Austen enjoyed of her own. To be sure, their sex and their centuries divide them, so does the different order and play of their powers, but any two unfooled novelists may meet somewhere, and it is no little thing to have a sense of the absurd in common. While they could meet as wits, and he could get away as she passes judgment, it would be he who finds human behavior extraordinary and she who finds it not too different from what she'd expected. The at-homeness possible to him in the wider world allows him irony and apprehension as well, and has made him richly aware of the comic and also of the outrageous, the bizarre, the awful, the inhuman—all that "home" is not. She never saw the landscape which has so often carried him away; with her own good eyes she was as innocent of that world as she was of the symbolic that he can also see. And then another divider would have opened between them, this time the true Grand Canyon, love. Without ever taking us back, this not being his direction, Henry Green may seem more congenial in mind, perhaps, with a century of order, form, and reason than he does with ours, and a sense of order appears to lie deep in his writing; nevertheless we may feel that it is not so deep as where the spring rises.
For his seems a lyric voice that first and last praises the phenomenon of life, and the effect of his fiction is that we have been charged in various and astonishing ways with seeing the phenomenon and in time, before its radiance is spent. And in this he is not typical of our century either; indeed he is nowhere this.
You could say that he starts with the visible and present world, the variety of its people, and time. Then you could take one theme of his to be the extreme, almost triumphant vulnerability of man to this mortal world and variety, what with the power of the feelings and fates and the plain nuisances that come in the course and confinement of time to assail him. The characters in his novels live to a degree aware of their own exposure even when not too steadily aware of the world, even when deaf and blind to it. A character with defenses up on three sides will be found in the end helpless as a baby on the fourth side; and generally—here is a mark of this writer—feeling the better for it. Vulnerability is a personal and valuable and selfish possession—perhaps more; perhaps in effect it is the self. At any rate tolerance for the condition comes not too hard.
Signs, omens, charms and works, hopes, confidences, deceptions and self-deceptions, truth and lies, loving and harmdoing, everything sweet or formidable that we go provided with, all in the end will tell what we tried to provide against. All, down to the most frittering talk and most antic behavior of daily living, are eloquent of the complicated, almost oriental threats that are constantly being made against our living at all. Death by inches is waiting just beyond the door, and someday the dead pigeon, or the fire bomb, will come tumbling down from the sky straight for somebody's head.
For of course he is writing against death, and this the artist whose medium is the word is always doing. A painter may paint merely against boredom and come up with a master-piece—we have read that. But whoever turns to incantation, just as whoever turns to reasoning, seizes the word. (And might it not be that all Mr. Green's titles go back in turn to one word, that Living is the generic title of all his work?) With its vigor, its true gaiety, its satire quick as a nerve, with its tireless glow of beauty, with its blessed oddity, work which has many a strange and never a ponderous line in it, you are left free to find as you will: it is presented as and for itself only, and this to me fills it to the brim with "what it means": itself.
Here the world is always right up against our eyes. The characters are shown doing the daily kind of thing, dining, working, bathing, sleeping, dancing (they can nearly all dance, barring a missing leg, and you know they are going to keep on dancing), making love, sitting in pubs and nightclubs and movies, meeting, talking, talking, but nearly always failing to get much further along with it. As Henry Green proceeds with them we are given matchless descriptions of indolence itself, of sleep itself, of moving through woods, through streets of cities, through rooms and gardens of houses, through times of secrecy and of driving emotion, of hallucination, of pain and plain giddiness, through a dream or a factory, a toy shop or a railway station, through fire. What is typical and what is incalculable about people are set forth with no favoritism shown. Mr. Green has imagined characters of a free range in kind and sensibilities and age, of an average sanity (some at both ends), and all of them—Birmingham factory workers, the young of Mayfair, the men of the Auxiliary Fire Service, the servants in an Irish castle, the bereaved soldier coming back to life from the war, tomorrow's forgotten sage surrounded by schoolmistresses of the State and schoolgirls lost or hiding in the wild—all these are people who are ordinary inside their world and might have stepped into being as part of their year of origin. Though Party Going may happen in Limbo, and Concluding—that novel of projections, protractions, long shots, and shadows flying ahead, a slow fall—does happen, we are told (1948) in the near future, these obliquely seen settings only increase the sense of today's life dying. In these novels—and only their titles can, and do, begin to describe them—place and time are mortally real, and the characters and happenings of the imagination rise up by the grace of the time and place, but their life is on the instant their own, each is a single and separate spirit, and in much the same way the life of each novel is peculiarly and intensely its own. How strong everywhere do we feel the power of the personal, its power all but incredible. When London starts to burn at the end of Caught, with the holocaust in our faces, what we cry is "At last!" for Richard Roe.
Mr. Green takes delight in his characters, and it is not more than we take. He explains none, exploits none; he is just without solemnity, satirical without malice, he never deprecates them or sums them up, doesn't inflate them, diminishes nothing that they feel, he can be at one with their spirits, he is at home with them all. He seems equally free of bitterness, boyishness, ridicule, and religious pranks where they are concerned. His sympathy is even quicker than his wit, not to be caught up with. Only a man of reason, we feel, is likely to be so aware of and so fascinated by the irrational in human motive and behavior; only an artist could show the extraordinary aspects of behavior in ordinary people and suggest, without robbing them at all, where they keep the kernel of their singularity, which as in the fairy tales is well guarded but not too well guarded.
The events in these novels could be said to hang upon how well the characters find out and keep hold of who they are, often by feeling where it hurts or how it pinches; whereupon they take up some fresh responsibility for the self to the self and (always) at least one other; and not a man among them will so slip as to do this heroically, but rather by the accident of circumstance, by the pull of the instinct of self-preservation, by falling for a girl.
In each novel, the characters within its world are busy, no matter what happens, making a world—with the hands perhaps, but certainly with the emotions; something will get positively pulled into shape, patched together, to hold onto against time and death. The characters would like well enough to speak to each other but most of them are like us, not good at it. But they can create. To create is after all easier than to communicate—fantastic truth. Even if it is a creation of self-deception, they can throw together for the time being a little peace, goodness, gaiety, creature comfort, they can feather the nest, and this success is the sweeter because it is loneliness that is getting cheated and what they are making turns out, some way, to be love. They can make at least a partial settlement with life, on the basis that intimacy comes to be a fair substitute for understanding.
Even when the events in their lives are themselves of frail import, what underlies these is major, some plain deal from what life has in store. This may be unstated, may be ambiguous, and ambiguity may be the novel's origin, as in Back. Always at the core of the book is common experience, mystifying or not—but then it always will be, for in every novel it is given that much powerful immediacy.
There is no lack of the sinister in Henry Green's work, of horror and violence; they are present as the fact that the day brings forth, the fiction showing the characters' response to the daily fact. Their horror as well as their delight can tell what they feel they are looking for, the implication they find or miss or lose and mourn, how much they can resist or share or get the better of. Their tragedy this writer knows and accommodates, their comedy he runs out to meet.
Henry Green has shown to what lasting pleasure that nothing about the revelation of humankind requires that it be solemn. Some of his most brilliant insight makes for highest comedy. Nor is the comic confined to the novels of comedy; he makes it appear to enter at will, its own, as in life, and even in the midst of horror we will meet with an insight of such intensity that it could have come in at that moment by no other door. Humor is not a relief, as beauty is not a decoration; all that can be said is that there occur, when these qualities appear, highly sensitive spots where you are surest to hear the pulsebeat of the fiction.
In his love scenes, and there have been many of many kinds since Lily began beating time on Mr. Dale's arm to the cinema band in Living, there is never any question as to love's presence. How well he can convey pleasure and pain and the suspense both carry! Love and anger, at the moment we confront them in everyday life, are apt to seem as experiences brand new; and were they so, they could not half so seriously challenge the novelist. Perhaps what Henry Green is able to do, through some power of concentration, is to see them new. In his scenes, when emotion strikes us, it may be by the shock of what first seems new that we are led so truly to recognize the familiar.
There is nothing mystical but everything mysterious in what this writer sees and makes of a given set of experiences. For it is a fact in life, certainly, and is Richard Roe's complaint when he tries to describe the blitz on London to his sister-in-law: you can't explain "difficult" things "ordinarily." And what is not difficult? The Green characters in their experiences—some that hurt or try to walk over them, some that hold out promise of comfort and change and, who knows, maybe more—live through fits and starts, fevers, caprices, dreams and terrors and chases and obsessions, oblivion malign or benign, while simply doing the daily thing. And there is always a wild appropriateness about the business. Nobody steps out of line for long to take a roaring stand or to wave his fist, hardly anybody is going to make that kind of fool of himself. I suppose failure of the understanding is what they go on enjoying or suffering from—a wasting disease: we have it. It's like vulnerability, though—being our own private complaint it has its charms. But meanness of heart, inhumanity, is the foe, the real and awesome foe; it is all the dangers of the future in one, and so real at any given moment as to all but paralyse the spirit—yet so far we can still cheat paralysis. Whether it be from the inhumanity of the war in Caught or from that of hateful, withered Miss Edge in Concluding, something is saved. Native, cranky, frolicking, magnificent will-fulness has been our blessing. And the pet peeve, the private joke shared, the hope of a stolen kiss, like the thought of tomorrow, is as hard to dislodge as any passion.
Henry Green seems to me to be a romantic artist who has chosen to write from inside the labyrinth of everyday life, whose senses and whose temperament are and have remained romantic and whose reason and experience are lying in wait for the romantic at every turn. So all the novels make new departures. Too much must have always been at stake to stop for the conventions of the novel, and he has done away with scaffolding, with one prop after another, as rapidly as his contemporaries seem to have added them, as promptly as he disposed of the "the" in Living. (A still earlier novel, begun while he was at Eton, was published while he was still up at Oxford, not available here as far as I know, but with the title one whale of a prop went down: Blindness.) What matters most is that the feeling which the early Living revealed must have already been more than he could use; but for the feeling there could never have come the need that has kept pressing this writer to experiment again. For what he wanted in writing his fiction was to communicate: "Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry, but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone."
After a rapid-fire quintet of almost uncannily seen novels, each a major work of his, and how dissimilar they are—Party Going, Loving, Caught, Back, Concluding—the next, and then the last so far, are provided with key settings and then the characters open their mouths and raise their novels from scratch. Henry Green can do this because, for all his justly renowned ear for the way people talk, he has the gift beyond that of turning what people say into the fantasy of what they are telling each other, at the same time calling up out of their own mouths their vital spirit. His ear is the organ of his sense of comedy as, it might be imagined, his eye is that of tragedy.
And how well this novelist knows and conveys what is wordless, as he makes us aware of those tracts in mind and heart too dark since the beginning for eye to see into. His novels are as charged with feeling beyond the feeling stated as their landscapes are alive with birds.
I seem to remember that readers who only wanted Loving again said that Nothing and Doting, when they appeared, were frivolous novels. But aren't these novels about frivolity, which is part of the everyday world along with the murder in the next street and the rose in the garden—with us, within us. As when in Caught Henry Green makes a tragic novel out of wartime London and its night lit by unnatural passion and inhuman fire and "the intense impartiality of moonlight," in Nothing and Doting he makes comic novels out of the pinch and press of a postwar middle age. The working class was unfamiliar matter for a novel too, in 1931 when Living rushed forth like a pear tree into bloom on a black morning. It was from this novel, set as it was in drabness and monotony, that it became clear that Henry Green had a gift of gaiety more dazzling than any of his contemporaries, and is more dazzling today than his youngers too, I think.
Different as they are from one another, all Henry Green's novels are likely on first impact to seem at once odd and oddly familiar. One reason must be that they touch; as they always do, uncommonly close to the quick of experience. Another reason may be that when after moving you as they do they come to an end, they do not (I think) release you, like the more orthodox novels and like the greatest novels. Particularly do you stand a chance of being left in the power of Concluding—of all that has deliberately not been said, has been mysteriously implied. The spell comes each time from his style, a fact which explains nothing, for style is as mysterious a thing as any spell.
The structure of a Green sentence is as eccentric and as purposeful as a Faulkner sentence. But the physical character of Henry Green's prose is no more like William Faulkner's than it is like anybody else's. The short, spare, dealing-out sentences, made up of one- and two-syllabled words, the only long words being perhaps the given names of women or the young, are designed to convey what is happening in the action, of course, but designed just as often to convey emotion. The sentences are short but they are glancing—the effect can be magically exhilarating: as when the knife thrower does not pierce but surrounds the living target, and it is the reader whose heart is thereby found. If these short sentences have the look of simplicity, let no simplifier try to copy what they do. And the long sentences, lengthy with unsimple modifications and qualifications, that this master of imagery constructs with hardly ever a use of the word "like," are above all precise in their ordering. Indeed he has shown best of any writer I know that no power may be exercised with greater precision than the power of suggestion. Never was live presence better called up than by those ringing blades in the shape we saw them reach. Henry Green's imagery is evocation by precision and also by grace of daring, which as in every true artist's case may be the ordinary act of the passion to see. Not to copy what is there to his knowledge, but to show you what is there as alive, basically inviolate, a person or a moment in time—this is what he does in prose, and to show you a thing this tender and fragile is to invite disaster and to escape it by a hairsbreadth. Yet novels that have been this risky for the writer to write seem in an odd way so reliable for the reader to read, the only safe place to lay some faith in this world, and I find in the paradox something characteristic of Henry Green.
Certainly he risks more than we readers can know. (Indeed it goes without saying, there is a superb lack of fuss in any of his work.) Party Going is a novel that might be all an image in itself, satirically conceived, mysteriously complicated, held like the long breath of enchantment. The shape of it might be a turning arabesque, delicate and shimmering as the threads in the stem of a wine glass, that, after the novel becomes part of your memory, seems as sobering and sad as a monument destined to stand in its lonely park after you have passed by. You may look back on this satiric yet tender story of the young and gilded and see the monument in it, raised indeed to their "going," and since you have been inside you know the interior vistas, whose dimensions may take on more and more a Piranesian scale.
While Party Going is a continuous visual experience, Nothing (which might be about some of Party Going's characters twenty years later—this is where they went) and after it Doting assume forms you are aware of almost kinetically, as you are of the juggling act in Doting. In this latest novel of Mr. Green's, through dialogue alone one pair of characters, now another, are set in bantering motion, at the right moment the odd third is introduced, then the even fourth gently insinuated and presently the whole set are brought into play with a brilliant finale that recalls and smiles back on the beginning. (Arthur Middleton has only to make one spill to bring down the whole thing and he is allowed precisely the moment to do it.)
We may not be used even yet to imagery that can be small as a proper name, large as a whole novel, or even something we cannot see; to forms of construction as fully and subtly realized; to symbols as looming or as fleeting or as weightless and free as his, and as subject to mutation; even to the sources he so readily takes them from—geography, the animal kingdom, the machine parts in a factory, anywhere but out of a book. There are some of great power that are more felt than seen, that are so strong that the curiosity is stirred as to whether these might be not too far removed from those first pictures in the mind that later became the novels.
In all that he writes the senses play their part and a great one. Amabel coming out of her bath in the station hotel in Party Going is something that on the face of it I feel Colette has never done better, yet Colette, I believe, at such moments submerges identity when Henry Green intends to state it. He can walk through walls of consciousness and down the corridors of the senses, as it is obvious he can walk through walls of class in English society, with a step so light that it is like the future's, and nothing in the novel appears altered by it; his regard goes in, his word comes out, the effect is of transmutation.
He has both solved and set up a fair number of problems in the novel, along his way. He leaves out a good deal that we are accustomed to, such as omniscient explanations of motive in the characters; and human behavior thereby seems for the moment as phenomenal as it must be in truth. The moon seen in partial eclipse tells us something moonlike that the big broad shiner doesn't, and the phenomenal is simply the usual on view with the coziness sheared off. Mr. Green does not tell you what his characters think nor assume their points of view; he sees through no single mind. (Yes, in Back he does—do not generalize about this author; but the mind of Charley Summers, that the war has set to working in strange ways, is that novel's territory, is back of Back.)
And all the time, with all his resources, he is telling us, I think, how extraordinarily different all ordinary human beings can be from one another. It takes the extraordinary writer to tell us this, and never to mention it in words; but indeed it is only as long as there are writers like himself able to imply that the unique is blessed and gives us blessing, that life on earth is still being celebrated.
What is unmistakable is that Henry Green is inside his character's world, totally and literally, down to the last inch they fill up in their boots and from the moment they open their nearly always big eyes. In Loving, the landscape pulses with a fairytale glow and the characters, themselves aglow, rarely even see it. The sinister world of Concluding is, if possible, still more beautiful, side-lit and colored like an undersea kingdom (it is the welfare state of the future)—and Mr. Rock sees it, as with the finally satisfied gaze of farewell; but Loving, in scene after scene spread as at the strokes of a wand, is the seducing one; and it is through your eyes you know it for the world of sans souci. Loving's own characters simply respond to it—in play, through the motions of a dream or game of blindfold, in dancing together, or perhaps in the sandy-eyed oblivion of a picnic by the edge of the sea; on further thought, it's a hundred times better than that: Edith, when she looks out on the morning, "the soft bright morning that struck her dazzled dazzling eyes," is at least near to being herself what that world is.
There is no need to say whether such writing is of the exterior or the interior world. With the old man of Concluding, his granddaughter, and the starlings at evening, with "the enormous echo of the blood, or of the sea," where does the line come? What the poet, and he is this, has found most explicit about life was clear to him before the line between exterior and interior was ever invented.
You never see Henry Green, he takes up no space as the author. But though he has never intruded the self, you feel his authorship continuously and pervasively because his novels have a mind—an acute, subtle, impartial mind, a partial disposition, and a temperament that streaks the most marvelous color through the work. He is there at the center of what he writes, but in effect his identity has turned into the fiction. And while you the reader know nothing of Mr. Henry Green's life, as he has taken good care to see to, in the long run a life's confidence is what you feel you have been given.
This author seems to say: if the transitory cannot be held fast, it can be made to seem more itself, can have its intensity matched in words, to persist there. He uses artifice, uses "naturalism," symbols, every device at his command and there are many, but his work in long and best result lies at the other extreme from the artificial, in the open country of poetry. In Pack My Bag, the "self-portrait" from which came the lines quoted above, the author suggests it is the common memory he addresses himself to and that will respond. Surely his concern, like his delight, his hope implied, his deepest feeling, seems to abide in indelibility in the face of chaos, and through his novels, in every one, a shape for indelibility is what he has made.
And this, discovering a shape or pattern to some set of experiences, is the way we all take of imagining what life is up to. I think the novelist through the long act of writing evolves his pattern, and it is this resulting and unpredictable thing, which was intuitive but discernible only through art, that is impressed, without announcement, on the mind of the reader in a way not to be put into words but all the more greatly to be felt. Indelibility itself is subjective, is an image; and with the kite up it is so much better not to talk kite at all. Because if it flies, a marvelous one-time-only construction in thin air, that is everything, that is enough, and we never deserved it.
It is true that passages like the one about Mr. Rock and the starlings at evening are not only indelible in themselves, they have the aura of indelibility about them. The ears seem to ring when we come to them on the page. They seem frank soaring over and above the thing at hand, intensifications both deliberate and justified; not showing off, though who else could write them, but serving a purpose, the most serious. Virtuosity, unless it move the heart, goes at the head of the whole parade to dust. With Henry Green we always come back to this: this work is so moving. Some scenes and paragraphs have a quality of being offered—to the moment itself? To life?
Surely each novel written stands as something of a feat. For what has been done? First ask, what was the heart's desire? Not the creating of an illusion, but the restoring of one; something brought off. We are not children once we have pasts; and now as we come looking in fiction with more longing than in any experience save love, but to which love adds, looking for reflections and visions of all life we know compounded through art, performance itself is what we ask for. We ask only that it be magic. Good fiction grants this boon, bad denies it. And performance is what the novelist would like to give—a fresh performance; not to show off skill, which would be (as obviously in the case of the pseudonymous Henry Green) a thing to be despised, but, out of respect, love, and fearlessness for all that may be tried, to command the best skill.
As told in Pack My Bag, Henry Green was born in 1905; this is only 1961. His novels so far are dissimilar enough to suggest that their whole, whenever he chooses to draw this line, which one hopes is a time out of sight, will have a meaning then to be looked at for the whole; yet it has always seemed that his whole meaning expressed will be more than the sum of its parts. These eight together make it plain that his focus, instantaneously seen to be sharp and clear, is also wide and clear; they show us the sweep of his sympathies and the drive and control of his feelings, and we know that there has been no stopping of him technically. His grasp of imaginative construction alone is altogether astonishing. He has not shown a sign of repeating himself, unless this could be said in some respects of Nothing and Doting, and it was said; even so, the repeat in itself is remarkable, as if Daniel had got out of the lions' den twice in a row.
As to what his work is doing all along for the development of the novel, I doubt if it is able to do much. And why would we think this an additional good? Better than any influence is the living artist, and we here are the ones who can now read. The novel will take care of itself, or else it will perish. And it is for themselves to tell what the readers of the future will think of Henry Green. But a writer so consistently intuitive does seem to have a good chance of speaking to the future, and one so original, it is to be hoped, will to any generation have something to say. It can be believed that he will if they have something to say. This much can also be remarked now, that from the first his best has stood for experiment and must continue to stand for this, that it will not be on Henry Green's head if the novel for its life does not look to its own future rather than to its past.
While you are reading these novels, the novels of no one else ever come to mind, but over the years points not of similarity but of kinship with some other writer might strike you about Henry Green. With all their differences, it is with William Faulkner that I see him holding anything at all in common today. Each of these born romantic writers has back of an intensely personal and complex style an intimate, firm, and uninhibiting knowledge of the complicated social structure he is part of and writes in, and an unquestioned fidelity to it, the ear for its speech, the eye for its landscape. Each takes over by poetic means his tract of the physical world. Each reflects on the fate of individual man set down very much alive in a dying society. They are not too far apart, perhaps, in their tragic conception of life, or in the unpredictable relationship they variously find and show between the tragic and the horrendous, the poetic and the absurd. The laughter of a man in the middle of it shouts from the pages of both. On the subject of love here comes the Grand Canyon again. But they join in clear belief that it is man's inhumanity to man that degrades him. Man's dignity lies for the one in endurance, for the other in resistance, resourcefulness, devilment, in a bit of consolation. Their styles are two living organisms growing in different clays wide apart. But to some extent in vision of life, and perhaps still further in vision of art, they are a little nearer to each other, this reader thinks, than Henry Green is near to any of his fellow English writers.
Reading and writing can each teach us something, eventually, about the other, though it is nothing to brag about. Because fiction flows so close by our door, jumping with words that we use every day and all of them to do with men and women like ourselves, there is too much thanking Heaven for the novel as one art that is easy to understand, to explain, even explain away. But a novel ought to at least start out by being able to stump us. As for explaining one, I could say that Concluding is like Venus on a clear evening going down over water, and if you agreed—still worse if you disagreed—where are we now? No, we must go back into the pages of the book to recognize it. A novel outside its own terms, which never were explanatory, no longer exists; in the course of being written it apprehended all the reality it could, drank up all the existence around it. Further words, even the author's, could add nothing to what is now complete, any more than they could by being hung around the neck of a statue. Reading can teach us something, and it is endless, about reading, about meeting with art.
After Monet was impelled to break up pigment to convey light, so that a new kind of color poured alive through those fissured walls, now a Monet painting is a place you can never go. And neither is a novel by Henry Green the land you thought you knew. His work indeed does not represent life, it presents life. What you discover about it is not the "key" to it, not the "secret" of his work, which is his only, anyway, but the experience of giving your regard to beauty, to wonder. There you have come slap up against the reality of fiction.
And everybody who can read knows that by fishing a sentence out of a novel, to spread like a captured sea serpent on the bank with the color going out of it, the creature's scales can be counted; but in the element where it lived it was, to begin with, not a monster. The element is illusion, the words that bathed in it were induced into these waters at the source, and these brought the river with them. And the landscape as far as you can see it is its dream.
Now that each passing day makes some threat or other not only against continuing reality on earth but against our illusion of it, it is the reading of novels by one of ourselves that we live on as never before, and this is not absurd, for in novels, if they are good, life on earth is intensified in its personal meaning, and so restored to human terms. We are surer of the existence of our world for the thousand evidences to which Henry Green swears in his fiction, and I think swears is not too strong a word. Also we are that much surer of what we can laugh about. For at least our lifetime, and who can say further about the roof we sit under to read, his fiction will be part of the mind; it will travel as fast as we do as far as we go, in its excellence and delight and beauty.
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