Henry Green

by Henry Vincent Yorke

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Limbo States: The Short Stories of Henry Green

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SOURCE: "Limbo States: The Short Stories of Henry Green," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1983, pp. 447-54.

[In the essay below, Russell assesses the short stories "A Rescue," "Mr. Jonas," and "The Lull" in terms of their evocation of a "limbo-like" state.]

The first two stories of the Blitz that Henry Green published, early in 1941, are about a rescue job he had to undertake and a more confusing rescue—lacking the other's ordonnance, queerly observed as though lighted up from the side—of which he was a witness. Because the storyteller in "A Rescue" is directly imperiled, its narrative has focus, "grip" as it were, of a lyric kind; whereas the equally short "Mr. Jonas" affects the reader differently. The focus here is on the "we," first on firefighters who have been ordered out and watch from their drawn-up pumps the night's holocaust augment—men "seated hands on knees, silent beneath that awful, the wide magnificence" of the skyline ablaze. Then it is on one crew, arrived at their assigned address, a building invisible as the men lay hose up a smoke-filled alleyway toward it ("we went by instinct into the deepest dark").

From this eerie activity, the water from the pumps at last about to flow, the focus changes once more: indistinct figures are seen near an arch, inside of which can be made out the top half of a man who "seemed … to be sitting on a taut sheet of steam." The narrator's crew chief now appears:

… he told me the Rescue people had a man in under there, pointing to where the smoke was a rising wall. I was sure the individual sitting on his sheet, still coughing hopelessly … was someone who had been brought out. Then he spoke…. I realized that he must be the leader….

There was a shout of "water" behind … the jet sprang out solid, white. The leader got up. He stood. His legs were still hidden but I could now see they were in steam which was drawn in by the draught of the doorway, steam running compactly like a swollen brook. He said, "Not too near or you'll drown him, he's just below you there…." We played the water where he said and then were blotted out immediately….

… In under a minute we were breathing air … and the leader was visible again…. He asked us to keep our water still farther off [and] got into the hole…. He called out, incongruously, "Can you hear me, Mr. Jonas?"

And so do we get the title, about the jonah who is rescued, a man who now emerges, "bone dry…. As he came up and out … we all began talking to him, telling him where to tread." But Mr. Jonas says exactly nothing, and in one more paragraph the story has ended, though it took the firemen the rest of the night to fight back to that spot, from which barely in time "had risen, to live again whoever he might be, this Mr. Jonas."

The reason for the bulk of the foregoing quotation—with its "Then he spoke" and other formulae, its allusiveness and nearmagic, and its hieratic conclusion—is to indicate the presence of the epic. In one sense I mean this comment to be taken lightheartedly. (Not that the story is lighthearted of course.) One guards a bit against calling work of but six pages' sweep "epical." Still, Joyce's famous distinction (the one accounting for the emergence of epic) is quite patent in Henry Green's second story. The recurrent focus on the experiential "we," plus the belated transference of the firemen's story to that of the imminent rescue, presided over by the man first seen coughing on his steam-throne (who turns into the "leader," and a hero if ever there was one)—all these bear out the shift from "immediate" to "mediate" form that Stephen Dedalus spoke of. In the Portrait Joyce had Stephen say the epic displaced the lyric when the artist brooded over events till "the centre of emotional gravity" became "equidistant from the artist himself and others." This almost hypnotic drift of the artist's attention, onto the hero who has materialized, is a common sign of epic, and the different register of Henry Green's prose in "Mr. Jonas" (as compared to "A Rescue") attests to this shift. The story's otherworldly "telling," as set forth in a kind of lantern-slide display, makes it hieratic.

While the stories are atmospherically different, the themes of "A Rescue" and "Mr. Jonas" do have some consonance. Both stories are apprehensive of what might be called limbo states. Henry Green's then most recent novel (he was working on Caught when he published these two stories) had been a novel also limbo-like as it arrested its null party-goers in their station hotel. The "arrested state" of Green's first story, "A Rescue," is only partly due to its victim, an unnamed man who has fallen down a manhole. His "mid-air tomb looked very bleak," says Green, assessing the job that has fallen to him, as a senior crew member, of getting him out. Is the whole thing straight autobiography? A strong clue would seem so to indicate: one crewman at the start says, "Let's get on out, Henry"—words that would have been appropriate down in the manhole, where someone later will simply say, at the crisis point, "Hullo, Henry." (The witness of the Jonas rescue is given no name.)

Morally, the story approaches Joycean "lyric" because an easy task has been assigned and the narrator wants to get his crew out in the early going of a raid, before orders can be countermanded. "If we could get out of sight we might be forgotten." Someone as sensitive as Green knows the upshot of this wish in advance.

The upshot is a kind of selfish dread.

Green's contingent are looking forward to a hazard-free night, because they are to pump out the basement of a burnt-out store, the management to provide unaccustomed hot meals. The crew bicker in their anxiety to get rolling, in no way ready "on this particular evening for what was coming to us." Just short of their destination, a flashlight motions them to a halt. "I realized it was this I had dreaded all evening," says Green as a policeman illuminates an open manhole.

Fifteen feet down, "like a rag doll made full size," and draped over a pivoting sewer cover, is the jonah of this story, an injured man who needs to be brought up by firemen's lines and ladders. Green fumbles at, but finally manages to tie successfully, the bowlines and hitches that the rule book calls for, then descends on a ladder set upon the four-inch ledge on which the uptilted cover was meant to rest. In the anxiety of the work he forgets the stench of the sewer; but the limbo moment, unbeknownst, will soon be at hand. It comes once the task is done, the hurt man hauled up without a sound. To steady himself, Green puts his hand out—he is in fireman's boots on the four-inch ledge—to that cover the man had been hanging over: "It swung slightly on its pivot. I had not realized that it was loose. I was at once, for the first time, aware of the sewer twenty feet below though I could, I know, no longer smell it." Henry Green does not say that he smelled fear, but he knew he "dare not touch the cover, had my back wedged into a corner with one foot at right angles to the other. I was stuck." He needs to be and is (with a "Hullo, Henry") extricated by his second-in-command. The title of "A Rescue" must have held this in mind all along.

One reward for Green the rescuer was to have been spared something during his exploit which he'd forgotten to take into account. Breathing gear was mandatory for such a venture—and later on headquarters roundly berates him for having put himself in so much jeopardy. "What we had forgotten, and what I had not had … was sewer gas." We recall the coughing leader of the Rescue Squad, standing awash in that scouring river of steam, and understand that Green for all the "lyrical" experience in the manhole shaft does not put himself on a par with that mini-epic figure. (That man had known the ropes, and "said he would have to have oxygen breathing apparatus" just before he went down to raise up Jonas!) And so the last sentence emphasizes the words "to live again" in the case of "Mr. Jonas"; whereas of the principal in Green's own salvage story, the reader is told at the end, "We have not heard anything of him. He may have died."

Take, for quick comparison, a pair of stories like "The Wall" and "Building Alive," written by Green's friend William Sansom, who also served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. These brilliant first-person accounts in a way deserve more than Green's the adjective "experiential." Sansom's are stories that get the phenomena right—they exist for that purpose. So determined is Sansom to etch the phenomena that the doubts he expresses pertain to his own perceiving apparatus. A wall in one story, "like a rubber wall in a Disney cartoon," bulges in toward the narrator, then springs back flat. "Whether … it had actually expanded into so round and resilient a curve, or whether the noise and the windclap of the explosion jarred this round illusion within my own round eyes—I do not know" ("Building Alive.") In the other story, a wall falls like an intact grid. "Whether the descending wall actually paused in its fall I can never know" ("The Wall.") Not that Sansom makes these perceptions isolated ones of his own:

My number two, Barnes, looked at me quickly—the building was alive…. Walking in such houses, the walls and floors are forgotten; the mind pictures only the vivid inner framework of beams and supports … how, under stress, they might behave; the house is perceived as a skeleton.

                                       ("Building Alive")

These become everyman's experience, and Sansom's camera record is marvelous. But there is no resemblance to a Green story, because the incipience in the case of the Sansom recordings is not moral and not, to use a related word, mythic, in the sense of their being deepened by foreknowledge. Sansom's stories are like one another; Green's are not like one another, and are not like his friend's either (though all four stories have as their focal points rescue attempts and magical survival). Sansom's forgetting the floors and walls is an engineering reaction, perhaps we could say to put it another way; Green's forgetting of the sewer gas was metaphysical. In the absence-of-self that occurred while he had managed the rescuing, he'd won a reprieve as though granted from an outside source. Thus arrives the element of myth that separates one kind of narrative from the other.

"A Rescue" and "Mr. Jonas" are the only renditions of firstperson narration to be found in Henry Green's fiction. If the reader has anticipated me, he may have guessed that the third and last of Green's stories falls into the Joycean category of the dramatic.

Again one comes dangerously close to overstatement, in suggesting that a trio of very short fictions has run a gamut and accrued strange artistic merit to itself. But these are good stories, and do run in the odd pattern of self-interest ("A Rescue"), enchantment ("Mr. Jonas"), with, after the petering out of the Blitz, an ingress of the familiar old self-interest. Green could be said to present it now as disenchantment. Caught had by this time intervened—its dates of composition were "June 1940-Christmas 1942," and one of the novel's themes had been the enchantment that could be wrung from danger and cause commitment and the abrogation of self-interest. But it too was a "waiting" book, held as it were in the vestibule of war, and not providing much "releasing" action till the end. So Caught itself had stretches of time sensed by its protagonists as "this lull of living"; and with the passing of the Blitz Green's final story would have for its title "The Lull."

Dramatic in construction, but evocative now of nothing so much as aftermath, "The Lull" conjures up a limbo state that has become pervasive and is hardly metaphoric. The work it resembles most closely—the formal affinity ought not be missed—is Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." And with this story Green for the first time would set himself to work within a purely scenic format (which was of course the last direction he chose to go in, with those mosaics Nothing and Doting).

It's curious that a lull also accounted for the ambience of James Joyce's only dramatic story. The limbo state there was owing to Parnell's non-replaceability: the ex-Parnellites gather, the curiously low-key spats develop among them, with the dialogue rendered so sparely that the reader needs to reassure himself as to which of the arrivals is now speaking. The committee room remains the scene, and the story ends elegiacally as the trying last days of the Chief are recalled.

So also does "The Lull" begin (and so also will it end). The dialogue participants, all firemen, filter in one by one to their station-house bar. Each is given a name: Joe (the barman), Gerald, Gus, Ted. But "Joe" as such almost never speaks, nor do the others by name—it is within the dialogue that we hear their names—while as interlocutors Green makes them be "the man in the check shirt," "the fourth man," and so on. This is the "limbo-secret" of the story's construction. It will extend to govern later scenes, in which, in a populated barroom now, a "fifth man" and then "a sixth" hold forth. (We will hear them called "Charley" and "Alfred.")

Little shards of contention come up between barman and first customer because this "Gerald" is excused from all drills while doing carpenter work for the station chief; the barman, for his part, always being let off "fatigues." So, on Gerald's exit:

"What's 'e making now?" the third man asked.

"Bedside table…."

"Yes. The Boy Marvel."

Thus the instant collusion, showing how factions will form against the absent when, among comrades, time lies heavy.

Only once, in the transition to his central scene, does Green break his "Ivy-Day" pattern (though I am not suggesting he was remembering Joyce's story). Part 3 of "The Lull" moves things along by way of these thematic paragraphs:

But it was noticeable that, whenever a stranger came into the bar, these firemen, who had not been on a blitz for eighteen months, would start talking back to what they had seen of the attack on London in 1940. They were seeking to justify the waiting life they lived at present, without fires.

A stranger did not have to join in, his presence alone was enough to stimulate them who felt they no longer had their lives now that they were living again, if life in a fire-station can be called living.

Where the earlier dialogue scenes had battened on tall stories, these were about on a par with arm-wrestling: things done to induce contention. (The barman had aggressively changed the name of a man known remotely to them all—chiefly to gloat when the others wouldn't bet money he was wrong.) But the presence of a stranger would in turn, as Green says, induce cohesion among the men.

And so a newcomer in their bar causes a bygone raid to be rehashed. The tellers are accurate and given their names now—they "have their lives again" in effect—though the tale is about only a stricken balloon, the weird sound of which terrifies seasoned men.

Alfred answered himself…. "The shrapnel had got at it. The blubbering noise is occasioned by the fabric rubbin' together as it comes down, or the gas escapin' out of the envelope, one or the other. I couldn't rightly say. But it didn't half put the wind up me."

"And me," said Joe.

Note the meticulous observation—it is the kind Sansom tried for, hoping to contain phenomena, and for the moment, in this centerpiece of "The Lull," cohesion reigns.

But that is due to the lure of the past, and it fades; there now occurs a dilution within the vaster one, as the ground shifts to a "fireman in mufti" called Henry, talking to a girl in a park. In this moody modulation, carried on mainly through the girl's quotations from French poetry, the wane of something else is understood. Verlaine's "Chanson des Ingénues" provides lines which tell how sharp clandestine memories only foretell the advent of sets of future lovers: "des pensers clandestins, / En nous sachant les amantes / Futures des libertins." Consequently "this man Henry" is "caught out," in a related way, in the lull, once lassitude is admitted to be sliding in where passion was.

The cohesive and the clandestine are related (Joe and Alfred remembering the barrage balloon are not vastly different from the nostalgic couple in the park); they depend on strangers (and estrangement), which make it possible for trials to be undergone together. They also involve a kind of shared fore-knowledge. In Party Going (1939) the party-goers expected a train and a boat would take them to where sharing could occur. In the war that came to their generation instead, physical embattlement would take the place of those traditional vehicles; and fire trucks would be the ones by which some broke out of limbo, but only if other vehicles, files of warplanes overhead, caused the fire trucks to be called. That kind of foreknowledge has built-in resistance in it. Subjectively, Henry Green wanted a "party-going" night of it on the evening he had to make the rescue. There was not much cohesion during action then, though there was some (when he talked to the injured man, telling him it would hurt when they hauled him up, and then saw him drawn up soundless). On the strange night of "Mr. Jonas" there was a more drug-like entry into the destructive element, and a blind shift to other-involvement: "Some living things turn to the light, we went by instinct into the deepest dark."

By the time of "The Lull," the difficulty of cohesion, once a man is on the safe side of the destructive element, becomes objectively understood. (The author, if he is the one in the park, participates only in an analogous way.) A stranger makes men go back in imagination to what it was that bonded them. But they have foreknowledge too. They know their bouts of one-upmanship are stale, and in the very first scene, the barman's words are backed up when he says, "We want another blitz." By the seventh and last scene, two firemen are discussing a mate who was found atop a roofpeak, lowering a long rope and garbling out the words that he'd "saved five" but was surrounded. "Surrounded by fire he meant." Thus even the last Henry Green story is preoccupied with rescue, the need to be delivered from this maddening lull. Right here the tenth fireman says to his companion:

"Wal, d'you think there'll ever be another blitz?"

"Well, mate, if he doesn't put one on soon we shall all be crackers."

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