Henry Green

by Henry Vincent Yorke

Start Free Trial

An Ear for Anonymity

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: "An Ear for Anonymity," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4636, February 7, 1992, pp. 17-18.

[In the following favorable review of Surviving: The Uncollected Writings, Parker claims "we need Henry Green to remind us what prose can do."]

Every so often, a Henry Green revival is announced. There is momentary excitement, his admirers cheer, and then, very quietly, the books slip out of print once more. The latest rescue package includes a uniform paperback edition of the novels, with introductions by Jeremy Treglown, an unhelpfully overpriced paperback edition of Pack My Bag, a volume of uncollected writings, and Trapped, a television documentary, produced by BBC's Bookmark…. This flurry of activity might have surprised Henry Vincent Yorke (1905–73), the Old Etonian businessman who hid behind the pen-name of Henry Green. Between 1926 and 1952, he published nine novels, several short stories and a premature autobiography; then stopped. "I find it so exhausting now I simply can't do it any more", he confessed in 1960. Bookmark's rather dispiriting film makes it clear that in later life Yorke felt that Green was unappreciated, if indeed he was still read at all. Few people meeting Henry Yorke imagined that he was an author, let alone the author of the sort of books Henry Green wrote, and the relationship between the man and his work is likely to remain an enigma until we have a proper biography. In the meantime, clues are to be found in Surviving, which gathers together about 75 per cent of Green's uncollected writings, sandwiching them between an appreciative introduction by John Updike and a lively memoir by Green's son, Sebastian Yorke.

Arranged chronologically, the volume starts with a slight but pleasingly odd piece of juvenilia from 1923 and ends with a brief but rambling statement about Green's present circumstances written for The Spectator forty years later, when (in the words of his friend Alan Ross) he had become "a tottering, unshaven recluse, hard of hearing, short of breath and teeth", who measured his days in large tots of gin. By this time, so grateful were his admirers for any scrap that one fan wrote to the magazine describing this sad morsel as "a document in the history of modern literature". Surviving is inevitably something of a bran-tub, but those prepared to delve in will be rewarded with the odds and ends of genius. It contains unpublished material, including stray chapters from abandoned novels, stories and dramatic sketches; and reprints previously published stories, reviews, broadcasts and articles along with a splendidly inventive (and instructive) "interview" cooked up by Green and Terry Southern for the Paris Review. Admirers will find the book fascinating; those who do not know Green's work should perhaps read the novels before entering this intriguing workshop.

Henry Green, who made his reputation with a novel described by Christopher Isherwood as "the best proletarian novel ever written", came from an aristocratic family and was sent to Eton, where he became founding secretary of the Society of Arts—a group which included Brian Howard, Robert Byron, the Actons and Anthony Powell. A rather unadventurous talk he gave on Dutch Art (not included here) can scarcely have impressed so determinedly avant-garde a gathering, but the Society itself proved "a watershed" for him: "after this there was no turning back. I was determined to be a writer." Undeterred by a discouraging professional opinion of his work solicited by his parents from John Buchan, Green embarked on an impressionistic novel about a boy blinded in a senseless accident. Completed at Oxford, Blindness was published in 1926. "How did you come to write anything so good?" asked Edward Garnett, when presented with the manuscript. It seems through practice. By the time he was twenty, Yorke was writing prose that is recognizably, and inimitably, that of Henry Green:

We were in the car swinging through the traffic, & the air inside drooped with folded wings at the shut windows & the scent she used, sweeping through the streets that swirled in eddies of changing light, talking nervously she & I of what was coming.

The germ of Blindness is contained in another piece collected in Surviving, "Adventure in a Room", a surreal short story written in about 1923. "One would like to know what incident gave Green, a painterly writer of great visual intensity, his fantasy of blindness", Updike writes, "and what frustration 'exasperated' him, an advantaged youth of seemingly callow character, 'into desperate striving after the beautiful'." The answer, surely, is that Green's early aestheticism was in some way a youthful reaction against his family background, which was dominated by field sports and horse racing, and that his "fantasy" was inspired by an idea rather than an incident. The loss of one sense sharpens the others, and "Adventure in a Room" contains a scene in which the blind boy sits on the lawn, listening to a blackbird singing: "He lost all sense of personality, he was just a pair of ears and a brain, absorbent as a sponge." This describes what Green set out to do in order to write.

He first submerged his personality by leaving Oxford and entering the family business on the shop-floor of a Birmingham factory. He lived in working-men's digs, and put in an eight-and-a-half-hour day in the heavy engineering workshop. In contemporary company photographs, it is not easy to pick him out from his workmates, and his desire for anonymity persisted throughout his life, enabling him to pass unseen among people of differing backgrounds, his finely tuned antennae picking up material for his books wherever he went. His second novel, Living (1929), is a boldly experimental evocation of working-class life in Birmingham. "I wanted to make that book as taut and spare as possible, to fit the proletarian life I was then leading", he explained in 1958. "So I hit on leaving out the articles." He also dispensed, on occasion, with nouns and even verbs, and these omissions serve to high-light what remains, just as the loss of sight in Blindness heightens the protagonist's other senses. The result is prose of remarkable power and beauty, rendering—as the book's resonant title suggests—the very texture of life. Treglown rightly questions the label "proletarian novel", in that, unlike other writers who crossed the class divide at this period, Green was not motivated by political ideology. Eddy Sackville-West once pointed up the difference by remarking that Green had lived among the working classes and knew them, whereas members of Auden's group had merely slept with them and so romanticized them. Green was interested in the gradations of class; he never set out to challenge them. He had a genuine empathy with working-class characters, however, which started early. Among the "large amount of juvenilia" left out of Surviving are "The Wood", a fairy-tale in which the protagonists are a pair of parlour-maids, and "Their Son", a savagely funny tale (which perhaps should have found a place here) about a butcher's son who goes to a public school and finds a social gulf opening up between him and his parents.

In Party Going, which took some seven years to write, Green sets the action largely among members of his own class and shows that his ear was as acute for the laconic patois of the upper classes as it was for the colourful idiom of factory workers. A group of Bright Young Things about to go on holiday find themselves marooned by fog at a railway station, while outside a large mass of third-class ticket holders become restless. "Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet", runs the eerie first paragraph, and Green's style remains elliptical, perfectly complementing the clipped exchanges between his characters. The novel was published in 1939 and, as with Evelyn Waugh's earlier Vile Bodies, there is a sense that these amusing, frivolous people are dancing on the edge of an abyss.

Pack My Bag (1940), which Green described as "A Self-Portrait", opens characteristically: "I was born a mouth-breather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both. But not too late for the war that seems to be coming upon us now and that is the reason to put down what comes to mind before one is killed, and surely it would be asking much to pretend one had a chance to live." It is one of the few autobiographies in which facts and names are suppressed for aesthetic rather than legal reasons: "Names distract, nicknames are too easy and if leaving both out as it often does makes a book look blind then that to my mind is no disadvantage." While he writes entertainingly about his eccentric family, therefore, he makes no mention of his famous contemporaries and even suppresses the name of Eton ("The public school I went to was down by a river in a deadly stretch …"); instead, he describes what made him as a writer, and what being a writer means. The style is quite as challenging as that of the novels, and bemused critics expressed astonishment that someone who seemed unable to grasp the rudiments of syntax and punctuation should be published at all.

The book's melodramatic opening sentence was to some extent justified, since Green served with the Auxiliary Fire Service during the war, as hazardous a calling as that of any soldier. Once again, he was plunged into proletarian life, although his immersion was not as complete as it had been at Birmingham, since at the end of a shift, he returned to his house in Knightsbridge, and on his days off he continued to run the family firm. Out of this experience came several short pieces, most of which were published in John Lehmann's magazines, and Caught, perhaps the best novel ever written about the London Blitz. A former colleague interviewed on Bookmark recalls that the other firemen found Green rather stand-offish, and referred to him as "The Honourable", and this is reflected in the uncomfortable circumstances of Roe, the novel's upperclass protagonist. This remarkable book once again characterizes Green's oblique dealings with a story, what he referred to as his "crabwise approach". Green saw the writer's task was "to create life in the reader", and at this point in his career believed that the reader's imagination was "best lit by very carefully arranged passages of description". The dramatic landscape of London in flames afforded many opportunities for creating such passages. In Caught, however, Green concentrates upon the tedious quotidian life at the sub-station, as firemen wait to be summoned, plot against each other, and pursue romance. All this is described in electrifying prose and with a marvellously sly wit, vividly recreating the sense of carpe diem engendered by war, but he witholds any description of the firemen in action until the end of the novel, and then filters it through the recollections of the shell-shocked Roe, who is attempting to describe his experiences to a bored female relative. For the reader, however, this final description of a vast dockyard fire reflects back on, and gathers together, all the carefully placed images of light—stained glass, firelight, moonlight, nightclub spotlights and table-lamps—in which the characters are "caught" at crucial moments of the narrative. Updike's lack of enthusiasm for this novel is a mystery.

The crabwise approach also characterizes Loving (1945), which takes place during the war (not, as the publishers seem to think, during the First World War), but is set largely below stairs in Kinalty Castle, a country house in Ireland. The war appears scarcely to touch the characters, but we gradually realize that even at this distance, in a neutral country, it will affect them all. Inaccurately castigated by Evelyn Waugh as "an obscene book … about domestic servants", it is concerned with loving in its many forms, and swirling about the events is a vast flock of doves, emblems of the novel's various amours, just as the homing pigeons in Living suggest domesticity. Green claimed never to plan the narrative of his books in advance, preferring to "let it come page by page", but Loving is at once characteristic and straightforward, with a clear plot and many comic scenes. It is probably where readers new to Green should start.

"Does any modern novel have more roses in it?" Treglown asks of Caught. Well, possibly Back (1946), Green's other "war novel", which opens with a shell-shocked, one-legged veteran returning to an English village in search of his lost love, Rose, who lies in a churchyard overrun with the flowers from which she took her name. When asked in 1960 to "define the compulsion behind your writing", Green replied succinctly: "Sex", and there can be few novelists who have written about women with such celebratory delight. Although he was obliged to revise Caught in order to expunge an adulterous relationship (which he did by summarily widowing his protagonist), there is a sort of innocence about Green. Happily married, he nevertheless was unable to resist attractive women and pursued numerous romances, which, his son suggests on Bookmark, were probably not consummated. Something of this is surely present in his last novel, Doting, an extremely funny and much underrated comedy of manners about amorous entanglements. "Doting, to me, is not loving", the middle-aged protagonist remarks to a young woman with whom he has become involved; "loving must include adoration of course, but if you just dote on a girl you don't necessarily go so far as to love her. Loving goes deeper."

It may be significant that Green's own favourite among his novels was Concluding (1948), in which a deaf old man lives in the grounds of a Firbankian institution entirely populated by jeunes filles en fleur. Just as the protagonist of Blindness finds that his disability can enhance as well as limit, so Green used his increasing deafness to good effect in Concluding, which contains numerous comic misunderstandings. His last two novels, Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952) disappointed the critics, who no doubt expected "experimental" novels to be less obviously enjoyable. "I think nothing of Nothing", commented Waugh, and others agreed with him. This seems remarkably obtuse. The tone of the books may be insouciant, but Green was wholly serious in his attempt to write "abstract novels" in dialogue. His aims are set out very clearly in "A Novelist to His Readers" (reprinted in Surviving).

"Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night", Green insisted. The novelist "has the typesetter to put down his symbols exactly for him, so to communicate direct with the imagination of his readers". This interplay of imagination is what makes reading Henry Green so rewarding; there can be few novelists who give such line-by-line pleasure as he does. "We have inherited the greatest orchestra, the English language, to conduct", he wrote. "The means are there; things are going on in life all the time around us." At the fag-end of a century, when a large number of our most highly praised contemporary novelists seem to do little more than bring the first violins in on cue, we need Henry Green to remind us what prose can do.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Henry Green: Eros and Persistence

Loading...