Henry Green

by Henry Vincent Yorke

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The Novels of Henry Green

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SOURCE: "The Novels of Henry Green," in Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 5, May, 1949, pp. 487-97.

[Toynbee was an English novelist, journalist, editor, and critic. In the following essay, he discusses the "linguistic oddities" of Green's novels, finding them distracting but effective.]

A Golden Age in literature might be defined as a period in which there was no necessary struggle between a writer and his medium. In the first half of the seventeenth century English writers could say what they wanted to say in a language which was naturally both apt and beautiful. It is equally true that English politicians spoke with a natural eloquence which should be distressing to their modern counterparts. Whatever may be said about the English language in our own time, it is bitterly clear that it no longer offers itself as a willing bride but cowers coyly and unalluringly behind an armory of chastity belts. Jean Paulhan discovers the same intractability in modern French, and he has invented a useful term to describe one method of approaching the recalcitrant and unappetizing victim of our passion. The Terrorists are those writers who confront their language as a wrestler confronts his adversary, knowing that they must twist it and turn it, squeeze it into strange shapes and make it cry aloud, before they can finally bring it to the boards. An opposite view is provided by the few surviving dandies among us, and was perhaps most eloquently expressed by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. To them the present English vocabulary is like a box of delicious sweetmeats, which may be culled one by one in delicate fingers and exquisitely melted on the tongue. Yet another, and perhaps the predominant view among modern novelists, is that the language of contemporary speech must be directly transcribed into literature, since any deliberate avoidance or transmutation of it will lead inevitably to something either dead or at best unnatural. Finally there remain among us a tiny band of archaists who are so shocked by the present condition of their language that they prefer to ransack the past for words and word formations which seem to them more vivid and more accurate.

During the last fifteen years a majority of our respected novelists have belonged to the third of these categories.

He had only, he told himself, to find a girl; there must be hundreds waiting to be picked up on a Whitsun holiday, to be given a drink and taken to dance at Sherry's and presently home, drunk and affectionate, in the corridor carriage. That was the best way, to carry a witness round with him. It would be no good, even if his pride had allowed him, to go to the station now. They would be watching it for certain, and it was always easy to kill a lonely man on a railway station…. [Graham Greene, Brighton Rock]

Mrs. Barton Trafford had a grand time, but she did not get above herself. It was useless indeed to ask him to a party without her; he refused. And when she and Barton and Driffield were invited to a party together they came together and went together. She never let him out of her sight. Hostesses might rave; they could take it or leave it. Usually they took it. [Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale]

If Brenda had to go to London for a day's shopping, hair-cutting or bone-setting (a recreation she particularly enjoyed) she went on Wednesday because the tickets on that day were half the usual price. She left at eight in the morning and got home soon after ten at night. She traveled third class and the carriages were often full, because other wives on the line took advantage of the cheap fare. [Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust]

His hysterical fury infected me suddenly. Stopping back I flung the door to with a violent slam, hoping to catch his thrust-forward, screaming face on the point of the jaw. But there was no impact. His voice stopped like a gramophone from which the needle is lifted. Nor did he utter another sound. As I stood there, behind the closed door, my heart pounding with anger, I heard his light footsteps cross the landing and begin to descend the stairs. [Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Morris Changes Trains]

These four quotations are taken (as nearly at random as any critic ever takes a quotation) from four extremely well-known novels written by four of the most respected novelists of our time. Now it is obviously possible to make a distinction between these voices; they are about as distinct as the different voices of real people in a conversation. The first quotation is fluent and easy and direct; the second is ironic; the third is flat and rather tired, and the fourth is quick, violent and vivid. No one of them has been chosen for any obvious fault in the writing, and by our usual standards there is nothing particularly wrong with any of them. They seem to do their different jobs well enough; they carry the reader along without either offending or surprising or boring him. Yet, distinguishable though they may be, how intimately they share a lack of all distinction in the secondary and nobler sense of the word. They are the work of journeymen, smooth, yarning voices, telling a good story over the port.

There is no cause to write any further here about the two small categories of the Dandies and the Archaists. They have played a negligible role in the modern English and American novel. The real linguistic war is being fought between novelists of the kind I have quoted—whom we might not unfairly call the Men in the Street—and the smaller but formidable band of Terrorists. The Terrorists are, by their nature, a diverse and unwieldy category. All they have in common is that they have made a conscious assault on their linguistic medium. Some have been defeated by it, and their bloody corpses lie strewn by the roadside, derided and desecrated by antiterrorist critics and novelists. Undoubtedly an appalling risk is taken, for the defeat of a Terrorist is a gross and humiliating defeat. He can be justly accused of affectation, of pretentiousness and of exhibitionism, and several modern novelists have shied so desperately away from the pedestrianism of their contemporaries that they have tumbled headlong into all these vices. But the Arch-terrorist stands now like a monolith in the waste of contemporary prose, and we can clearly make out the uncoordinated but by no means disreputable platoon which is scattered in his wake. Such diverse writers as Thomas Wolfe and Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller and Henry Green, may be grouped in this context under the banner of James Joyce.

The intention of this preamble is to prepare American readers of Henry Green for the shock which they are almost bound to feel at their first approach to him. He is the most self-conscious of modern English novelists, the most mannered, the least digestible. I believe that he is also—and I shall try to dissolve any paradox which may seem to be involved here—among the most natural of our novelists and conceivably the most important of them.

The linguistic oddities of Henry Green are not by any means his most important contribution to the novel, but to many readers they have proved the most important stumbling block to Henry Green. What is required from a new reader is, at first, no more than indulgence, and indulgence can perhaps be induced by occasional reperusal of the passages I have quoted above. Rather than write like this he has chosen to take risks with his medium. To put it more fairly, and with more dignity, I would say that Green has never doubted that his vision was a new one and that it needed a new kind of exposition. In his best books I believe that he has perfectly adjusted his medium to his vision, and that the result has been three or four of the most satisfactory English novels of our time. In his less successful books the language is often strained in a way which seems arbitrary. But Green has never written a book with the sole and deplorable purpose of exhibiting linguistic oddities. A sympathetic reading even of his worst novel reveals that his motive in writing it was that he had seen something and that he wished others to see it too. In this case he has failed to make his vision clear, but the reality and the freshness of his vision cannot be doubted.

Bridesly. Birmingham.

Two o'clock. Thousands came back from dinner along streets.

"What we want is go, push," said works manager to son of Mr. Dupret. "What I say to them is—let's get on with it, let's get the stuff out."

Thousands came back to factories they worked in from their dinners.

This is the opening passage of Green's very early novel, Living. It is an intelligent and perceptive study of working class life, well documented (in private life Mr. Green is a Birmingham manufacturer), startlingly free of any preconceptions. It is at least arguable that in this book Mr. Green (an old Etonian as well as a capitalist) has written about the proletariat with more insight than has any contemporary writer of proletarian origin. There is no compassion in his vision, no indignation and certainly nothing patronizing. As in all this writer's novels, the characters appear at first to be moving in an odd and unfamiliar way; their motives and their conduct seem to be just out of focus, just to one side of center. They are not predictable, in the sense that they do not conform in their actions to the behavior of the fictional characters we know. Nor would it be true to say that this failure of conformity is due simply to the fact that the characters do conform, but that their conformity is to "life" rather than to fiction. Or at least this is only true in a highly complicated sense. At some point in this book a reader may find that the characters and the actions are suddenly in focus; that they have found their center. And in the same moment he will understand that it is not the characters and the actions which have shifted, but the focus and the center. In other words what has happened is that Green has succeeded in imposing his peculiar vision on his reader. We are seeing people from a position which we have never adopted before, and, by doing so, our stereoscopic vision has been startlingly clarified. So long as we are able to preserve Green's vision, superimposed on whatever our own one may have been, however simple or however complex it was, then our total apprehension of life has been immeasurably enriched.

Yet it remains none the less true that the beginning of the book is not inviting. We feel at once that an effect is being striven for, and, by the inevitable action of readers' resistance, we determine that the effect shall not be achieved. The assault has been too sudden. Even the great Terrorist himself began Ulysses in a prose which was familiar to his readers, and exercised considerable discretion in escorting them by devious paths to the guillotine. And in this case the eccentricities seem somehow trivial. This omission of the definite article irritates us by its self-consciousness, and seems to contribute nothing to the perfectly ordinary statements which are being made. Nor are we likely to be reassured as we read further. "Mr. Bridges went down through works in Birmingham till Tupe he found." "Again was first day outside, another fine evening." Many such sentences as this confront us on every page of the book, and it would be difficult to excuse them. In the first of them I can think of only one conceivable reason for such an inversion. Had the reader been led to expect that Mr. Bridges was likely to find not Tupe, but someone else, then this bringing forward of, and consequent emphasis on, the proper name might conceivably have been justified. But in the text no such reason exists. One can only feel that the writer was alarmed by the flatness of the sentence he so carefully avoided, and that this inadequate motive was the only one which moved him to make his distortion. As for the second sentence, I find it frankly incomprehensible. If it was first day outside, how could it also be the evening?

Yet the general motive for Green's oddities of diction in this early book do not seem to me to be very difficult to discover. He had felt an aversion to the looseness of modern English prose, and to avoid this weakness, he has tried to write in what is virtually a kind of shorthand. His sentences are short and staccato. Many of his inversions do save the use of a word or two. He omits articles, and sometimes the connecting particles. To my mind, and to the later mind of Henry Green, this was a wholly mistaken method of confronting the contemporary linguistic problem. Telegraphese is simply one of the diseases of our time, and homeopathic remedies are patently inapplicable to literature. Certainly it is true that a great fault of current speech lies in the proliferation of superfluous and meaningless sounds. Phrases like "as a matter of fact" and "taking everything into consideration" have lowered the currency of speech, and some severity is needed. But "the" is both an innocent and a useful word, and to concentrate so heavy a gun against it seems a curious misdirection of this writer's fire-power.

Green's two earliest books, Blindness and Living, revealed a young writer of obvious originality but confronted by obvious dangers. Would he surrender to his idiosyncrasies and dissipate his talents in a mere striving at any price for the outward appearance of novelty? His next two books were not encouraging. Party Going is a whimsical description of a group of rich young people leaving from Victoria Station for the continent. One has the gloomy feeling when reading it that what was aimed at was quite unashamedly a tour-de-force; and nothing in the world is more discouraging than a tour-de-force manqué. The language of this book is not so much distorted as archly contrived, and although there are moments of superb and individual humor the whole book leaves a rather sickly taste in the mouth. When Party Going was followed by a slapdash and totally immemorable autobiography, any critic would have been justified in suggesting that Henry Green's name might be regretfully added to the long list which is headed Hopes Dashed or Promise Unfulfilled. Fortunately this judgment would have proved grotesquely premature.

Almost all the admirers of Green would agree that his three best novels, the oeuvre by which he may be allowed to stand or fall, are the three which followed in fairly quick succession on his unfortunate autobiography. To these three, Caught, Loving, and Back, some of his more extreme devotees would add his 1948 novel, Concluding.

A great difficulty in writing about Henry Green is that a mere precis of his "plots" serves almost no purpose at all. Caught, for example, might be described as the dégringolade of a fire officer during the early raids on London. In it there are vivid and terrible descriptions of fire fighting (Green was an active member of the London fire service throughout the war); there is a sub-plot which is concerned with the abduction of a child by the fire officer's crazy sister, and there is a climax in Pye's final folie de grandeur. Loving is a comedy about the servants in a large Anglo-Irish house, a comedy in which almost nothing happens except the discovery by the servants of adultery among the gentry. Back is the description of an English prisoner of war's first months in England after several years' absence, While Charlie has been away, his girl has died, and the theme of the book lies in his refusal to recognize this fact, his insistence that the girl's half sister is herself, still alive but refusing to recognize him. From these descriptions it might be supposed that Caught was the most conventional of the three books, since its plot, though unusual, is at least describable in other than the book's own terms. Certainly it would be impossible to describe the devious and apparently trivial episodes which follow each other so inconsequentially in Loving, and it might well be imagined that the curious notion which inspired Back would suffice at most for a somewhat tenuous short story. But the fact is that any approach to Green in these terms is certain to be abortive. By this I don't imply that the subject matter of his novels are of no importance; they are vitally important, but important principally as the vehicle for something else.

Already on several occasions in this article I have been obliged to use the word "vision" when writing of Green's achievement. In this context it is a word which requires definition as sternly as it defies it. Certainly Weltanschauung will not do instead, implying as it does a consciously held and readily expressible body of belief. Henry Green is totally and remarkably without a Weltanschauung; it has proved one of the most awkward facts about him to those critics who are forever anxious to explain in their own words the precise message which their victims intended to purvey. I am not suggesting that this is a bad form of criticism. When Mr. Trilling writes almost exclusively in these terms about E. M. Forster he is applying his keen and argumentative mind to an admirably suitable field. In fact the majority of novelists are not only amenable to this type of criticism, they demand it. It would be possible, for example, to write of Conrad entirely in terms of his "vision" (which I would now hesitantly define as a writer's sensual, emotional and instinctive apprehension of the world, as opposed to the intellectual superstructure which he constructs on top of it). But such a criticism of Conrad, though apt and instructive would also be grossly inadequate, since Conrad was a novelist of strong and consciously held moral views. When Mr. Trilling epitomizes the work of Forster in a single phrase, "The underdeveloped heart," his epigram is wholly justified. No reader would be so foolish as to suppose that this epitome will absolve him from reading Forster's novels, that it is an adequate summary of what Forster has to say. Because he is a good novelist what he has to say can only be said as he said it. Yet the epitome is justified because the novels of Forster are the vehicles, the necessary vehicles for expounding, deepening and realizing our inadequate apprehension of Trilling's single phrase. My point is that no such phrase exists by which the burden of Henry Green's song can be epitomized.

Earlier in this article I wrote that there is no compassion in Green's vision. Perhaps it is by this fact that his achievement can be both understood and "placed." It is both his strength and his ultimate limitation.

Henry Green's almost unique gift is for hallucination. By this I mean neither fantasy nor obsession, but a bewildering ability to see far and wide over the landscape, and to see everything through strange-colored glass. Or one might say that in Green's case one has the impression that he has stepped confidently through a looking-glass and is staring back at us from there with a certain calm and appraising satisfaction. Or again, to pursue this purely visual analogy, this writer might be pictured spread out in the middle of a ceiling and seeing the people below him in what they would hold to be distorted and unnatural shapes. In fact I do not use the word hallucination in opposition to something else which is to be called reality, but in opposition to normal vision. What is really amazing about this writer is that he can comfortably remain in the extraordinary positions he chooses for the whole duration of a book. Many writers attempt this, but in most of them one is aware either of the mounting strain which they are feeling, splayed up there on the ceiling, or of their plain inability to sustain their vision for more than a quaint passage here and there. Yet the whole of Caught is made lurid by the freakish character of the fire officer; Loving is a kind of particolored mosaic in which the quirks, the ignorances, the perversities of the servants are not simply described but actually describe themselves, are both the matter and the manner of the whole book. In Back Charlie's obstinate error of mistaken identity so colors his vision that the whole panorama of postwar England is seen from a strange and hallucinatory angle.

In fact the analogies which I used to exhibit Henry Green as a spectator are useful but incomplete. For he is also a participant. Poised aloft he not only surveys the scalps of his victims, but is able to become himself a scalp. This is due to his astonishing gift of dispassionate sympathy, in the most literal sense of the word. When Charlie, the returned soldier, observes the world through the colored spectacles of his obsession, his creator is also behind those spectacles, sharing and encouraging that peculiar but illuminating vision. Green's ultimate limitation (every novelist has one) is that his activity, both as spectator and as participant, is fundamentally lacking in human passion. His books are exquisite, subtle and entrancing, but they remain a brilliant exercise. At times he simulates tenderness with an astonishing and deceptive skill, but the final effect is almost frigid. We have been fascinated and convinced by Pye, by Charlie, by Raunce the butler; these figures have revealed to us a new dimension of human experience, but they have not moved us as we are moved, for example, by the far more conventional creatures of Forster. Indeed it might be helpful to regard Henry Green as the perfect complement to Forster. He is a subtler, a more sophisticated, a more magical writer, but, owing to his lack of either passion or compassion, he does not enter into the substance of our lives as Forster does. He has instructed us in new uses of the pure imagination, clarified and enriched our sensual understanding of the world, but he has neither tried to achieve nor accidentally achieved a moral effect.

This becomes clearer in his last novel than in any of the three I have been considering. In some ways Concluding is the most réussi of all his books. Approximately, it is concerned with an English girls' school in the country, and the events would appear to be taking place some time in the nineteen-seventies or eighties. An old retired professor lives on the grounds of the school, and the main theme of the book is his growing fear of eviction at the hands of the hostile headmistresses. Two of the girls disappear; there is a love affair between the old man's daughter and one of the masters; the book ends with a dance for the pupils. The book's title is misleading, for it is the most deliberately inconclusive novel which can ever have been written. Nothing is settled. We do not learn what has happened to the vanished girls, or what will happen either to the professor or to his daughter. On the first page we enter a sort of timeless dream, and on the last page the dream breaks off. It breaks off but it does not end. The world of Concluding is a world of pure hallucination, timeless, unhampered by the accepted sequence of cause and effect, yet strangely unified, strangely possessed of its own private logic. It is an exceedingly uncomfortable world to inhabit, a beautiful but pitiless nightmare in which the only warmth comes from the treacherous adolescent bodies of the girls.

Quite soon, girls began to cut in. While Inglefield kept the instrument hard at it, the original partners began to break up, to step back over the wax mirror floor out of one another's arms, moving sideways by such as would not be parted yet, each to tap a second favorite on a bare, quiet shoulder. Then the girl so chosen would give a little start, open those great shut eyes, much greater than jewels as she circled, and, circling yet, would dip into these fresh limbs which moved already in the dance, disengaging thus to leave her first choice to slip sideways in turn past established, whirling partners until she found another who was loved and yet alone.

This passage is typical of the last stage of Green's curious manner, typical in its deliberate clumsiness, its complexity and its curious effectiveness. It is also typical of Green's emotional stance. He is erotically enchanted by the dancing girls, and we are enabled to share his enchantment. But the final reaction to that dance is a shiver down the spine, as if the girls had really been ghosts and were to fall into dust at the last note of the gramophone. And this, indeed, may well be a reader's final reaction to the whole book, a sense that he has been enchanted by an uneasy suspicion that the magic was black. There is not only no compassion in this book; there is, for the first time, a subtle assault on compassion. Not that the book is cruel in any obvious way, but that by the curious purity of its negation it inspires a sort of chilly despair.

Whatever Henry Green does next—and he has already proved the unwisdom of making prophecies about his future—he has already written three of the most original and stimulating English novels of our time. His curious manner has been a wonderfully apt vehicle for his curious vision. Since they are inseparable it may be well to finish this article with a quotation.

A country bus drew up below the church and a young man got out. This he had to do carefully, because he had a peg leg.

The roadway was asphalted blue.

It was a summer day in England. Rain clouds were amassed back of a church tower which stood on rising ground. As he looked up he noted well those slits, built for defense, in the blood-colored brick. Then he ran his eye with caution over cypresses and between grave stones. He might have been watching for a trap, who had lost his leg in France for not noticing the gun beneath a rose.

For, climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose after rose, while, here and there, the spray overburdened by the mass of flower, a live wreath lay fallen on a wreath of stone, or on a box in marble colder than this day, or onto frosted paper blooms which, under glass, marked each bed of earth wherein the dear departed encouraged life above in the green grass, the cypresses and in those roses gay and bright which, as still as this dark afternoon, started at whosoever looked, or hung their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.

This, the opening passage of Back, is the later Green at his most exuberant. Nobody could deny that it is mannered writing, at least in the sense that it is not what one has become accustomed to. But it is the only kind of writing which is natural to the natural vision of this unusual man. For my own part I find this passage both beautiful and effective. I am persuaded by it. I am seduced into the mood which the writer urges on me, and at the end of the book I feel that I have been well rewarded for my willing seduction.

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Henry Green: A Novelist of Imagination

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