Henry Green

by Henry Vincent Yorke

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Henry Yorke and Henry Green

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SOURCE: "Henry Yorke and Henry Green," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1983, pp. 387-92.

[Lees-Milne was an English novelist, autobiographer, and nonfiction writer. In the following essay, he reminisces about his initial reactions to Green's novels.]

I got to know Henry Yorke in the early 1930s. Henry Green I never knew at all. Henry Yorke then lived with his beautiful and gentle wife, Dig, in a house in Rutland Gate. We had mutual friends, one of whom, Robert Byron, introduced me to them. Henry had been brought up in Worcestershire in a large, rambling, romantic, slightly spooky house which had been in the Yorke possession for two centuries. My old home was fifteen miles away in the same county. We had both been at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. These basic facts were some sort of link. But Henry was three years older than I was, and in boyhood three years make a large gap. We did not know each other as children. Throughout the 1930s we met fairly frequently. The Yorkes were by my standards rich. They gave delicious dinner parties with silver candlesticks and parlormaids. Then the war came, and we met less often. The last time I sat at the same table with Henry was in a London restaurant in 1943 at a small dinner party I gave on my birthday. On that occasion Henry was charming, but reserved. He spoke little. When the war was over he became more and more of a recluse. I fell out of touch, as indeed did most of his old friends, apart from a handful of intimates. In fact I think I only once met him again (I guess about 1948) on the top of a bus. I found myself next to him. For twenty minutes he talked, not in his customary mild manner, but vehemently. And he revealed a side of himself which I had not experienced hitherto. I shall refer to this meeting later.

During the 1930s I was not even aware that he was a writer. I only knew that he was a younger son who had to work in some family business, and moved in social and intellectual circles. He was certainly very bright, observant, but inscrutable. Inclined to be morose. I did not fathom what was going on in that dark head, under that sleek black hair, behind that straight, patrician nose, those deep-set, hawk-like eyes and that strange mobile mouth, which changed shape and expression according to his thoughts, even when he was not speaking. I imagine he discussed his writing with very few people.

Although Henry's first novel, Blindness, had been published in 1926 when he was only twenty-one, I had not read it or its successors until Caught came out in 1943. I saw Caught in Heywood Hill's bookshop, where Nancy Mitford was then working. She was amazed I did not realize that Henry Green was really Henry Yorke (indeed it was a difficult thing to grasp). I remember her remarking at a luncheon party in her languid Mitford voice that if only Henry had spelt the title Court and had written about royalty and the aristocracy instead of firemen, the novel would, at that time of austerity when everyone voraciously read books recalling glamor and glitter, have sold like hot cakes. As it was, Caught only appealed to the fans, who were few in number. Nevertheless I bought it. And then I bought all Henry's previous novels; and thereafter all his successive ones as they were published. Ten years ago I got rid of the lot for £1 each. Now I am told that the first editions are worth their weight in gold. Why did I get rid of them, apart from the fact that I was moving from a large to a small house? Because I never really enjoyed them.

The moment I opened Caught I realized that it was out of the ordinary. I was fascinated, but not enchanted. It was one of Henry's semi-autobiographical novels, about his wartime occupation in the London Fire Service. As an impression of pre-Blitz, Phoney War boredom it was unsurpassed. It was a random record of working-class conversations which had no beginning and no end. The episodes were disconnected, and lacked sequence. The dialogue was fragmented, telescope. There was little story, only symbolism, which then bored me because, doubtless, I was too stupid to understand the implications. Living, to which I next applied myself, was the same. It too was autobiographical in that the author's counterpart, a weak character, became by inheritance the head of an Iron Foundry, just as Henry, albeit a strong character, became Managing Director of H. Pontifex & Sons, manufacturers of equipment for the food and drink trade. In Living the sentences are compressed, the scenes even more abbreviated than in the later Caught, and the author adopts a tiresome trick of omitting the definite article. Evidently he had no use for plots. And I for one unashamedly like a tale to fasten my teeth upon.

For years I persevered with Henry Green—always fascinated, but not enjoying. Party Going was about a lot of maddening, spoilt goodtimers in a fog of indecision and fatuity. Pack My Bag about a fog of alcohol. Loving was about an Irish country house, remote from the war, where everyone seemed to sleep with everyone else. Back, Concluding (a day in the life of old Mr. Rock), Nothing, Doting were ambiguous to me, but not to clever people like Mr. R. S. Ryf, who said that the title of each novel explained the story inside. To me reading these novels was like walking down a long lane shrouded with boscage on either side, hoping, hoping for a turning which would reveal ultimate sunshine and sense. Now Mr. Ryf has casually observed that God is, if not dead, then absent in Green's novels. This, I think, explains my inability to enjoy them. I find a total lack of concession to the spirit inordinately depressing. There is no promise in Henry Green's novels. The tide forever recedes leaving nothing but flotsam behind. Women who have nits in their hair miss the irritation when the insects are removed. Birds—they figure repeatedly throughout the novels—seldom fly or sing. They drop down dead from station roofs, not to be swept into a dustbin and forgotten, but to be stowed by old ladies in suitcases, to be brought out and gloated over, maggots and all.

Edward Stokes in The Novels of Henry Green has written that no mid-twentieth century novelist has shown such stylistic variations. But to my mind Henry Green's style never seems to vary at all. It is always staccato, enigmatic, and maddeningly elusive. One episode slides into another. The reader is perpetually brought up against blank walls. In venturing these criticisms I do not mean to imply that Green's style is a bad one. Far from it. Quite apart from being—to use a pedantic term—sui generis, it is seldom strained. It is damnably direct, colloquial, and powerful. Moreover, and this is why I persevered in reading everything he wrote, the novels contain sheer poetry of a morbid kind. They are embellished—if that is the right word—with passages which take my breath away. Let me quote at random one from Living:

Smell of food pressed on her. All were eating. All was black with smoke, here even, by her, cows went soot-covered and the sheep grey. She saw milk taken out from them, grey the surface of it. Yes, and the blackbird fled across that town flying crying and made noise like noise made by ratchet. Yes and in every house was mother with her child and that was grey and that fluttered hands and then that died, in every house died those children to women. Was low wailing low in her ears.

Then clocks in that town all over town struck 3 and bells in churches there ringing started rushing sound of bells like wings tearing under roof of sky, so these bells rang. But women stood, reached up children drooping to sky, sharp boned, these women wailed and their noise rose and ate the noise of bells ringing.

This is fine writing and reminiscent of G. M. Hopkins, only without the devout confidence of the Jesuit who through life's terrors certainly glimpsed light at the end of his tunnel. Henry Green saw none. Consequently all his synonyms are gray, or soot-covered. Could any passages in English literature be more depressing, and more devoid of redemption and hope? And yet could any be more horribly arresting?

Henry Green, until he threw his hand in and gave up life, took his writing extremely seriously. In 1950–51 he delivered a series of addresses on the Third Programme, called A Novelist to His Reader. They were spoken in a suave, silken, silver-spoon voice of a man apparently at peace with the world and his maker. How deceptive can a voice be? Green's message was that, art being nonrepresentational, descriptions of situations ought to be reduced to a minimum of words. He claimed that since no one wrote letters any more (not strictly true, considering Harold Nicolson, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, and James Pope-Hennessy) and communications was only by telephone, the time had come for a change from traditional methods of storytelling to an emphasis upon oblique dialogue. Dialogue "must mean different things to different readers at one and the same time," he said. "It is only by an aggregate of words over a period followed by an action, that we obtain, in life, a glimmering of what is going on in someone, or even in ourselves." The novelist should use tone in the way that a painter uses dabs of color to convey fleeting impressions.

Thus we get from him dialogue like the following (again from Living):

"Where are you goin'?" said Mr. Dale.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Aren't you goin' out?"

"I'm not goin' anywhere without you go."

"Don't trouble about me," Mr. Dale said. "I'm used to that."

"I didn't mean you particular, I meant all o' you."

"I'm stayin' in with me pipe," Gates said half asleep.

"You go and get the beer." Mr. Craigan reached out and took wireless headphones which he fitted about his head.

"I thought you couldn't mean me," said Mr. Dale.

"No, I should think I couldn't."

"But don't you put yourself out for us. You go on out."

"I got nowhere to go."

"What, ain't 'e waitin' for you at the corner?"

"Who's that?"

"Who's that!!" he said.

"Well what business is it of yours if 'e is?"

"I wouldn't keep 'm waitin'."

"I tell you I'm not going out this afternoon."

"Then what's it all about? 'Ad a lover's quarrel or what?"

There is no reason why this boring conversation between an indeterminate number of uneducated individuals should not have continued for another ten pages. We have all overheard such snippets of chatter between people who lead dreary lives and are incapable of expressing themselves. In fact it is difficult to go through a single day and avoid them. But do they really amount to communion of ideas worth recording? And does the dismal aggregate contribute to whatever action may follow? For me it doesn't.

I return to my last encounter with Henry Yorke on the London bus. He was on his way home from the office. I asked him how he was. "Bloody awful!" he answered. I said I was sorry, for he looked all right. "I am not at all all right," he almost shouted, "and I will tell you why." There was no question whether I wished to hear the reason, or not. I had to. Henry then launched upon a diatribe of hate against his octogenarian father because he refused to retire from the family firm, in order deliberately to ruin his son's prospects. I have in my time heard people rage against their parents, but never with the concentrated venom which Henry gave vent to on the bus. It was evident that he was being deeply thwarted in his middle age by the tyrannical and senile parent who would not relax his grip of the wheel, Henry's wheel by the rights of nature. Henry's position in the firm, which was his livelihood, was made intolerable. The whole business was suffering. The bus reached Henry's destination. He jumped up and left, throwing at me as he did so the words, "It's unmitigated hell, I can tell you!"

While I continued my journey I reflected upon this unsolicited outburst. Henry must be in a very bad way to nourish so monstrous a grievance. I decided that he knew he had not much time to enjoy a free hand in Pontifex & Sons even if his old father should retire the next day. He was boiling over with resentment against fate. Henry Yorke's ambitions were being frustrated.

Yet by now Henry Green was recognized to be one of the most fulfilled novelists of his generation. But he was approaching the end of his gamut of fiction writing. He actually reached it when at last Mr. Yorke senior retired from Pontifex. I assume there was some very subtle connection between Henry Yorke's father and Henry Green's novels. Without the nits in the hair inspiration flagged.

By 1951 Henry told a journalist that he had ceased to believe in anything at all. He was quite a hermit. He stayed at home all day with his saintly wife, and did not want to see anyone. When asked what were his reasons for not going out he said that one was because the woman at the tobacconist shop along the road had been dragged by the hair from behind her counter and stabbed to death. She had been the same age as himself. Danger threatened. It was clearly safer to remain at home. This he did until his death in 1973. And during the long, dark twilight he wrote no more novels.

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