Henry Green - the unstopping, tissueless sentences traveling without delay of punctuation – those sentences which seem to drop a stitch and unravel just as you thought you were sewing up their meaning.

Henry Green, Loving; Living; Party Going,  Penguin Classics; Revised edition, 1993.

“Green's remains the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time.”— Eudora Welty  

"His novels made more of a stylistic impact upon me than those of any writer living or dead." -John Updike

"Green's novels reproduce as few do the actual sensation of living." -Elizabeth Bowen

Henry Green is a writer who always seems to need "introducing", like a stranger at a party: dark, louche, awkward. It is odd, this need, because in his life he had friends enough, while his novels were viewed by people of dependable judgment as being among the best - perhaps the very best - of their time. Is it just that to later generations he is a little too "difficult"? Is it merely that Green requires a fraction more concentration than Greene? Perhaps so; but it is puzzling, this chronic shyness, when what his admirers are chiefly claiming for him is that he brings pleasure - a pleasure more intense, more original, more rewarding than that offered by any of his contemporaries.
Your first Green novel is in some ways your most memorable. I can still remember the incredulous pleasure with which I read Living in a battered library edition about 30 years ago. Here was a novelist who was doing something I had never experienced in fiction before. He seemed to have redrawn the familiar triangle between reader, writer and character, so that you somehow had the impression that you knew his characters better than he himself did. So real were they, so grand yet so fragile, that one felt protective of them - protective even against the plotting of the author.
Living (1929) is a story about people in a Birmingham iron foundry, most of them poor manual workers without much life beyond factory, family or a small terraced house. The absence of certain common words from the prose brings us face to face with the concrete nature of their world: harsh, hard to mould, monotonous. Yet alongside this machine-age view of the "masses", something underhand is going on. To begin with, it is in a kind of tenderness that Green allows to colour his descriptions; though when this feeling threatens to swell, he usually deflates it: sometimes our love for the people in the book seems unrequited - by them or by their author - and this can be painful. You vow not to fall so easily next time; yet soon the beguiling rhythms of the prose begin to seduce you once again, so that you long for emotional release, either within the fictional lives of the characters or in your unstable relationship with them. The inner shape of the novel in this way imitates our experience of living: it promises pattern, then withholds it, insisting on a formless banality; it describes intensity, but as part of a grudgingly accepted monotony; it glimpses poetry, but only from the corner of its eye.
Green came from a wealthy family, was educated at Eton and Oxford and knew many of the people whose names are familiar from literary biographies of the period. His "research" for Living was undertaken while he worked for his father's company, which made plumbing supplies and beer-bottling equipment in a factory similar to the one described in the book. His attentive, unpatronising attitude to the working-class characters was cause for comment when the novel came out, in 1929, as was his largely satirical treatment of their employers. Green, however, had grander interests than those of "class". Most of the workers are idle or conniving, and while the toffs are epitomised by a young man who can do tricks with a glass of water without spilling it on his dinner jacket, they also have their complications, their light and shade. Young Dupret, the factory owner's son, may be a secret nose-picker, but he does see beauty in the work the men do.
Green hardly ever gives psychological accounts of his characters, their motives, childhoods or formative experiences. In this respect Green seems to belong to the Modernist movement, which preferred its depiction of reality broken up into its constituent planes, like Picasso's, or fragmented, like Eliot's. What makes Green distinctive, however, is that despite following the manner of his time, he is able to convey, in Living for instance, such a warm sense of what old Mr Craigan, or the talented but shifty Tarver, or Lily Gates, bursting to be a mother, is really like. One of the book's greatest passages is the attempted elopement of Lily and Bert Jones to Canada, which takes them no further than Liverpool. In a scene that is comic and moving at the same time, one sees these human fragments move from one urban mass to another, then falter under the weight of their own insignificance. Even the story seems unable to bear it. "What is a town then, how do I know? What did they do?" asks the narrative. Even at this self-consciously literary moment, one never loses sight of Lily in her childish desire to escape, so easily deflated, or Bert forced by his wounded bravado to abandon his lover when he cannot even track down his own parents.
Green wrote his first novel, Blindness (1926), when he was 18. It is a book of astonishing maturity for one so young, yet it is Living that is the triumph of his precocity: a near-masterpiece written at the age of 24. Of the three novels in this volume, Party Going (1939), though it has proved a most fertile ground for critics and theorists of narrative, is the one that is most likely to be problematic to the non-academic reader. Nothing much happens, and the characters are all more or less appalling. Frank Kermode has written that the way most contemporary readers see this novel is as "an expression of disgust at the conduct of the immature, ostentatious rich ... and of admiration, even tenderness for the poor".
This is not at all the way I read Party-Going. Green was a naughty man in some ways, and occasionally his naughtiness gets into the books; usually it appears as a playful teasing of the reader (he likes characters to be known by different names: Mrs Henderson is for no clear reason both Evelyn and Evelyna; Angela Crevy is known by both her names); and generally one feels that his is an attitude like that of Shakespeare in his comedies: the world is an absurd mess, you cannot blame me if in our enchanted wood there are two men called Jacques. Green talked in interviews about getting a "dig" in at various real people and at the aristocracy in general, and doubtless he took some small pleasure from exactly that (his stern father is guyed in the figure of old Dupret in Living). But the artist in him was above the drab politics of 20th-century class warfare. For Green is a plotter - not in the sense of someone full of narrative surprises - but in the manner of a spider with a web in which these flies are caught and then inspected.
Party Going is at pains to point out the shallowness of its characters ("Robin ... wondered angrily how Angela could go with these revolting people"), but its artistic purpose is surely more ambitious than that of social criticism. Green, in his youth, was an addicted cinemagoer, and much has reasonably been made of his cinematic technique: the short, flickering scenes, the jump-cuts and so on. However, a more helpful, if necessarily approximate, analogy is with music. Living must, I suppose, be a symphony by an "avant-garde" Russian, though with more melody than that comparison perhaps suggests; Loving could be a collaboration between Britten and Vaughan Williams; but Party Going is pure chamber music. This is amoral virtuosity, unashamed, self-regarding in places, dizzy with its own patterns of invention.
Can you tell the difference between Angela and Claire and Julia and Evelyn? Does it matter? Isn't part of the point that such people are, ironically, just like the "masses": indistinguishable one from another? Does Max prefer Angela to Amabel[sp?] or Julia to both? In fact, how can he be sure, when they are almost interchangeable? Who is this man with the mysteriously shifting accent who shuttles to and forth between the hotel barred against possible "revolution" and the foggy underworld outside? What is the function of the dead pigeon and why does Miss Fellowes feel she has to wash it?
At times it seems that the people in Party Going are like characters from a Robbe Grillet novel, from whom individuality has been withheld as a matter of literary dogma; and yet they do have individual characters, even if what distinguishes them (different amounts of money, different degrees of familiarity and affection for one another) is not profound.
The climactic interchange of the book, it seems to me, is between the lovers Max and Amabel, who have been deceiving and avoiding one another throughout and continue to do so when face to face. She pulls at her handkerchief, threatening tears; but he "hated tears, he never found them genuine". Never! A few moments later, she "made her eyes cloud over", and we do not know if she is truly sad or not - and neither, perhaps, does she. As real feeling eddies beneath the surface of brilliantly simulated emotion, Green begins to see what dialogue, unmediated by a narrator, can achieve; his interest in this technique was to take him in one of his final novels, Nothing, into a rather austere place, where fewer readers wanted to follow. Here, however, between Max and Amabel, the effects are sublimely minimal; it as though a scene from Private Lives has been revised by Samuel Beckett.
Party-Going is not as easy to love as Living is, but it is impossible not to admire its artistry. Of these three novels, Loving (1945) is perhaps the most immediately sympathetic to a contemporary reader. We are in the aristocratic setting of Party Going, but it is the servant class of Living who are the main characters in a largely below-stairs comedy of life in an Irish country house during the second world war. The erotic manoeuvrings and duplicity of the servants are given to us with some of the stylistic quirks of Living - the ellipsis, the omissions of articles and so on - though here this quirky grammar serves to depict not a factory but a mansion of closed rooms and quiet corridors where people are often surprised by the unheard approach of others; stables where an idiot lampman lies asleep; and gardens where the air is rent by the screech of peacocks.
Another important difference about Loving is that, in a quiet way, a great deal happens. In Romancing, his admirably concise, no-nonsense biography of Green, Jeremy Treglown's summary of the action runs over three pages. I also feel that the main characters in Loving are more fully developed psychologically than Bert, Lily, Craigan, or young Dupret in Living, or than any of the party-goers. Green still offers little in the way of "back-story" and retains a distrust of "motivation", but somehow we do become familiar with the nature of Charley Raunce, the venal, nervous head footman, surprisingly promoted to butler, and of Edith, the ravishing, gentle but conniving underhousemaid.
Green clearly loves this girl, and we can forgive him for doing so. The delicacy of her nature is beautifully given, in her consolation of the old head housemaid Miss Burch, in the modesty of her blushes, in the sensitivity that causes her to shriek then faint at the sight of a trapped mouse (though her faintness is perhaps also caused by the hysteria of her suppressed desire for Raunce) and in the natural and loving way that she plays with her employer's granddaughters, Miss Moira and Miss Evelyn. Indeed, the game of blind-man's buff between Edith and the children in an abandoned room of the old castle is one of the great lyrical scenes of the novel.
This writer is unique. No fiction has ever thrilled me in the same way as the great moments in Living and Loving; I have been moved by Tolstoy, Lawrence, Proust and others, perhaps more so, but not in the same way. Interviewing him once, the American Terry Southern, while ostensibly writing about a number of internal inconsistencies in Green's plots, described this singular quality quite well, I think:
"The reader does not simply forget that there is an author behind the words, but because of some annoyance over a seeming 'discrepancy' in the story must, in fact, remind himself that there is one. This reminding is accompanied by an irritation with the author for these apparent oversights on his part, and his 'failings' to see the particular significance of certain happenings. The irritation gives way then to a feeling of pleasure and superiority in that he, the reader, sees more in the situation than the author does - so that all of this now belongs to him. And the author is dismissed, even perhaps with a slight contempt - and only the work remains, alone now with this reader who has to take over. Thus, in the spell of his own imagination the characters and story come alive in an almost incredible way, quite beyond anything achieved by conventional methods of writing."
Henry Green's writing life was sadly short. He drank too much, worried about money and found the effort of producing these complex, touching works of art too much to contemplate after middle age. He wrote an early memoir called Pack My Bag, published in 1940, when he was only 35. In a passage that begins as no more than a reflection on the memoirist's difficulty in using the real names of people he has known, he goes on to talk about what writing is, or should be. His definition is one that I - and, I expect, many other admirers - have long had pinned above the desk:
"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 ... Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone ..." - Sebastian Faulks


Henry Green, Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green. Ed. by Matthew Yorke. Viking Adult, 1993.

A collection of work by Henry Green is introduced by John Updike and includes never-before-published short stories, pieces on London during the Blitz, journalism, book reviews, a play, and more. 10,000 first printing. $10,000 ad/promo.

Under the pseudonym Henry Green, businessman Henry V. Yorke (1905-1973) wrote 10 distinguished Symbolist novels in the period from 1926 to 1952. (In February Penguin will reissue six of them, including his major work, Loving , in its Twentieth-Century Classics series.) Green's strength was to cluster seeming trivia in image patterns redolent with meaning; and in Doting and Concluding , he treated sex in uncommonly modern and matter-of-fact terms. For the current volume, Green's grandson has assembled published, unpublished and rejected pieces; synopses and drafts of embryonic work; reviews, and polished jottings. Green's unfinished Mood recalls the world of Virginia Woolf, and there is a review of Woolf's Writer's Diary . In "Excursion" he creates a microcosmic knot of people at a train station, anticipating his novel Party Going. Pieces on the art of fiction include a two-part BBC talk, "A Novelist to His Readers," which reveals the importance Green placed on dialogue. Essays about the fire squad on which Green served in the WW II blitz ("A Rescue," "Before the Great Fire") parallel the topic of his novel Caught. His work for American magazines include "Falling in Love," written for Esquire (he was aggrieved not to be paid for it) and "Invocation to Venice" for Vogue . Among the rejects are a TV drama "Journey Out of Spain" (too long, they said), and "The Jealous Man," turned down by New Yorker editors who promised to keep in mind Green's interest in "books by dead authors." The collection sheds light on the publishing scene in Green's day and adeptly serves the cause of English letters. A memoir by his son closes the volume. - Publisghers Weekly

Green, whose real name was Henry Yorke, was a successful businessman and reasonably successful novelist from the 1920s to the 1950s--an author of the type called a "writer's writer." Admired by the likes of Burgess, Welty, and Updike (whose introduction is one of the assets here), Green was sometimes experimental (e.g., he suppressed articles for immediacy of sensation), sometimes lucidly straightforward. Included here are some fables, some rejected short stories, a rather tepid play, a fascinating collaborative interview with Terry Southern (for Paris Review in 1958), and sundry short pieces. Green's novels, of which Loving (1949) is probably the most famous, are about to be reissued by Penguin, but even so mass demand for this title is not likely. Surviving is for true Green enthusiasts or very writerly writers and is therefore appropriate only for very large public and academic libraries. - Robert E. Brown

Henry Green is one of the literary enigmas of the twentieth century. Twenty years after his death, posterity seems still to be groping for an evaluation of his slim oeuvre—nine novels and a memoir,[1] all produced between 1926 and 1952, when he stopped writing at the age of forty-seven. “I find it so exhausting now I simply can’t do it any more,” he told an interviewer, though he lived on for over twenty years, increasingly eccentric and reclusive. He refused even to leave his London house for the last seven years of his life, nor would he consent to being photographed except from the rear. In 1973 he died, a very old sixty-eight.

He achieved neither commercial success nor wholehearted enthusiasm from the literary pundits, though he commanded, then and now, excitement amounting to passion from certain readers, an oddly assorted group including W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Terry Southern, Eudora Welty, and John Updike. About his readership he exposed the ambivalence that characterized every attitude he ever held. “I write for about six people (including myself) whom I respect and for no one else,” he claimed, though he never gave up the vain, one might even say deluded, hope that his work would one day bring in a comfortable income. So oblique and subtle is Green’s style that, as Terry Southern points out, he has been called not merely a writer’s writer but a writer’s writer’s writer; yet he himself criticized Joyce and the later Henry James for allowing the excesses of their styles to hinder communication between author and reader.

If Green’s working aesthetic was delicate, allusive, and cryptic, it was in mysterious contrast to the anti-intellectualism he otherwise affected. He despised literary conversation, preferring flirtation and gossip. Though he read about eight books a week, according to his son, Sebastian Yorke,
the standard of the novels never seemed to matter… . He rarely praised a book; there were some American authors he would admit to liking, but he seemed to admire no contemporary English writers. He never re-read a book or selected one from his small library of ‘classics’ collected in his Oxford days. Nor can I recall him reading anything by his professed idols: Gogol, Turgenev, [C. M.] Doughty [the author of Travels in Arabia Deserta], Céline or Faulkner. He only liked novels—he would not read poetry or biography. He loved thrillers and magazines, particularly Time magazine.

This most artful and self-conscious of writers was very clearly uncomfortable in the role of artist. The discomfort was perhaps inevitable when one takes into consideration the fact that Green never rejected his decidedly philistine background.
It seems fitting to follow Green’s own careful differentiation between his literary and non-literary selves and to call him by his pseudonym when speaking of his work and by his real name, Henry Yorke, when speaking of his life. Henry Vincent Yorke was born in 1905. His father was the owner of a large Gloucestershire estate, and the chairman of the Birmingham engineering works of which Henry was to become managing director, H. Pontifex & Sons. (With his usual love of the grotesque, Henry liked to claim that the firm manufactured toilets, though its principal products were in fact beer-bottling machines.) His mother was a daughter of the second Baron Leconfield. Henry Yorke was thus not only an aristocrat but an industrialist as well. Anthony Powell, a lifelong friend, remarked that “if one side of Yorke found the silver spoon a handicap to respiration, another accepted it as understandably welcome; and coming to terms with opposed inner feelings about his family circumstances, his writing, his business, his social life, was something he never quite managed to achieve to his own satisfaction.”

Apart from his writing, Yorke led a fairly conventional life. He was not academically brilliant like his father and older brothers; though he was a published novelist while still an undergraduate, he left Oxford without a degree. He then began working for Pontifex, spending his first year on the shop floor with the men before joining the management in London. He passed the rest of his working life with the firm, living in a comfortable house with his wife, Dig (Adelaide), and their son. Though Yorke was not a successful industrialist, he was a dedicated one, and he never let his writing take precedence over his business responsibilities. His books were written in his spare time and his habits were those of any upper-middle-class businessman; he abhorred all things bohemian. It has become customary to refer to him, in his youth, as a Bright Young Thing, but the cliché is misleading: Diana Mosley, writing that “The Bright Young People [was] an expression that always made us laugh,” says that she and her circle used it “of our particularly serious friends, Bright Young Roy Harrod or Bright Young Henry Yorke.”

Green’s unwillingness to pontificate about aesthetics has resulted in a general critical uncertainty about his actual importance as a writer. His books are rarely in print[2] and, though he receives a few passing glances from the academy, an enthusiasm for Green is now seen as evidence of specialized, even arcane, tastes. When speaking of his work, people hesitate to commit themselves, usually saying that he is an interesting writer, but … For if it is difficult completely to swallow Green’s demanding, often precious prose style, it it also impossible to write him off. And the extraordinary range of his gifts is indicated in the fact that, among the nine novels, there is virtually no repeat material; each novel attempts something wholly different from the last. Green was not one to develop a style or theme over the years, building onto it with every new book. Rather, with reckless confidence, he attacked each novel as though it were his first.

Nor did Green ever attempt to take the easy route in his writing. He always reached for extremes, sometimes becoming labored in his wish to avoid the elegant and the Augustan. His own literary tastes were for the strenuous, the magnificent, the muscular: Carlyle and Doughty were lifelong passions, and his admiration for James and Woolf is unsurprising. In Blindness, his first novel, begun and mostly written while he was still at Eton, Green had already begun seeking the limits of the possibilities of English syntax, and in his second novel, Living, he found those limits and began to stretch them.

A certain degree of failure, of course, was inevitable, and the diversity of Green’s achievements is matched by a corresponding variety in quality. In one paragraph he will hit the bull’s eye with a magnificent felicity of phrasing, in the next he will overreach himself and produce a piece of prose that is very bad indeed. He could produce a vivid image with a minimum of words, and Green was always strongest when handling the concrete, either in descriptive prose or in dialogue. In Nothing, for example, a young couple enters a French restaurant without having reserved a table: “They were standing before Pascal, close together in an attitude of humility while Gaspard sneered in their faces. It was plain they were not known.” By the same token, Green’s stylistic exertions can be disastrous. His omission of the definite article in many of his early stories and in Living is a case in point. “I wanted to make [my prose] as taut and spare as possible,” he later said, “to fit the proletarian life I was then leading.” Intermittently, the trick is effective, producing scenes of great beauty, as in this passage from Living:
Mr Craigan smoked pipe, already room was blurred by smoke from it and by steam from hot water in the sink. She swilled water over the plates and electric light caught in shining waves of water which rushed off plates as she held them, and then light caught on wet plates in moons. She dried these. One by one then she put them up into the rack on wall above her, and as she stretched up so her movements pulled all ways at his heart, so beautiful she seemed to him.

In 1958 Green said that he would not employ this technique again, giving as his reason that “it may now seem, I’m afraid, affected.” And so it does, especially when he insisted upon the principle too dogmatically:
Sang birds. They lay, arms round each other. Waved ferns in the wind and they were among them, lying silently. Above trees hung a cloud against blue sky and leaves clustering from branch above and tall ferns hid these two deep in the wood from anyone and the sky. Soft the air.

The conceit is audacious, and in order for it to succeed each sentence must be perfect; even a slight bungling is enough to make an entire passage ridiculous. Green’s style thus often descends into pure mannerism, and it is certain that he has antagonized many readers who ought otherwise to be favorably disposed to his work. Both Southern and Updike describe Green’s “tendency toward authorial invisibility,” but in fact precisely the opposite is true, for there is never a moment, even during Green’s smoothest displays of ventriloquism, when the reader could possibly mistake his work for that of any other author. Concluding, a case in point, establishes atmosphere with such obsessive detail that it becomes a book about atmosphere to the exclusion of everything else. Caught is another novel in which style takes center stage; Green focuses so single-mindedly upon re-creating nuances of voice and dialect that the central psychological situation is finally consumed within the showy display of fine characterization. Orville Prescott complained of Green’s “excessive concentration on method rather than matter,” and Philip Toynbee called him a “terrorist of language”; “‘the,’” he wrote, “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.”

These censures are too often merited. But in a masterpiece like Loving, where Green was able so exquisitely to modulate his idiom to suit his glorious and trivial subject, the reader forgets all of Green’s sins in pure admiration of his virtuosity.
‘Oh Edie,’ he gasped moving forward. The room had grown immeasurably dark from the storm massed outside. Their two bodies flowed into one as he put his arms about her. The shape they made was crowned with his head, on top of a white sharp curved neck, dominating and cruel over the blur that was her mass of hair through which her lips sucked at him warm and heady.
‘Edie,’ he muttered breaking away only to drive his face down into hers once more. But he was pressing her back into a bow shape. ‘Edie,’ he called again.

This novel about the goings-on among a group of servants in a great country house in Ireland during the owners’ absence is, perhaps, the best-known and best-loved of Green’s novels. It is characteristic, too, of one of the features that has made Green such an anomaly among English writers of this century: his apparent classlessness. Though Green can describe his own milieu, and brilliantly (Blindness, Party Going, Nothing, Doting), he seems equally at home among the petty bourgeoisie (Back, Caught) and the working classes (Loving, Living). In fact he is perceived by many readers to be a writer specifically proletarian in sympathy and focus. But the fact that these same readers all tend themselves to come from the upper and upper-middle classes should alert us to be wary of this conclusion. Though Living has been called the “best proletarian novel ever written,” Green himself was quick to point out that “the workers in my factory thought it rotten. It was my very good friend Christopher Isherwood used that phrase … and I don’t know that he ever worked in a factory.” Green’s year on the works floor in Birmingham gave him a lifelong respect for the proletariat, and it is possible that Living celebrated that world with just a touch of romanticism. Though Green himself believed the proletarian inspiration to be central to his aesthetic, he led (except for the Birmingham period and his time in the Auxiliary Fire Service during the war) an unexceptionably upper-middle-class life.

And while Green was a member of the so-called Auden generation, he was entirely out of step with that group’s philosophy of political commitment and activism. Throughout the Thirties (the decade in which Auden, Day Lewis, Orwell, and Upward, all Green’s contemporaries and social co-equals, were producing literature of passionately left-wing inspiration), Green was engaged in the painstaking composition of Party Going, a novel which dwells almost exclusively upon the fatuous doings of a group of rich and aimless young people.

In reality Green was concerned less with any one social group than with the entire spectrum of human grace and folly. Rather than being divided by socio-economic factors, his characters, finally, are united by the vanity, greed, and generosity common to the species as a whole. It is not that Green was uninterested in the minutiae of social distinction; indeed, he liked to point out that there exist not three, or five, but hundreds of clearly demarcated social classes in England, and he spoke scornfully of “the English novelist’s worst restriction—ignorance of life in all social classes but his own.” Social distinction, however, manifested itself for him not as a monolithic or necessarily desirable aspect of culture but as yet another facet of the human race’s ever-imperfectible nature. Inverse snobbery has caused critics of the last novels, Nothing and Doting, to belittle their “significance” because of the impenetrable frivolity of their upper-class characters. But these characters are not so very different in essence from the lower-class ones in Loving and Living, and the books’ libidinous middle-aged men and scheming women are every bit as deserving of their happy endings as are Loving’s scoundrelly butler and less-than-honest maid. It is difficult to see where Nothing and Doting are more “trivial” (an insult often aimed at them) than any of the other novels. The pursuit of self-interest is to Green both natural and acceptable; Green, wrote V. S. Pritchett, is “inside the human zoo, preoccupied with it, and occasionally giving a sad startled look at the bars he had momentarily forgotten.”

Hence the apparent moral vacuum that mystifies or repels those readers who demand from literature the affirmation of a system of values. Green’s refusal to judge his unregenerate characters is absolute, as is his refusal to endow them with any of the redeeming features most authors allow. All of his creatures are commonplace in the truest sense of the word: they are without intellectual or spiritual interests, without philosophy, wholly lacking in curiosity about the rest of the world and even in self-knowledge. But they are comic rather than tragic, and their very humanity is ultimately a force for redemption.

Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, which appeared in England last year, is now being put out in this country by the Viking Press.[3] It is a valuable volume, adding substantially to the little we possess of Green’s output. As well as stories, articles, and reviews by Green himself, it contains an introduction by John Updike, an interview from the Paris Review: Writers at Work series, and a superb memoir by Sebastian Yorke, who clearly inherited his father’s love of the macabre and the absurd. The contents of this collection, according to the editor, Green’s grandson Matthew Yorke, represent three quarters of the material in the slender Green archive. Arranged chronologically, the pieces begin with a schoolboy story dated 1923, and wind up with a short, eccentric self-portrait published in The Spectator in 1963. Fiction predominates in the Twenties and Thirties, essays and reviews from the Forties on.

The collection is interestingly named. Surviving suggests that the quality of the work continues to stand on its own merits—but how well does it, in fact, “survive”? The question is a difficult one to answer, for in the last analysis these pieces will probably be of interest only to the confirmed Green enthusiast. Green’s reputation still must rest on his nine novels, and not on the material in this volume, which varies wildly in quality.

The short stories are of interest mostly for the light they throw upon the developing sophistication of Green’s touch. Unlike so many novelists, Green did not produce his best work early in his career, for his particular vision, dark, morbid, and with a powerful sense of the ridiculous, is one which comes naturally with middle age rather than youth. In 1958 he stated, as though it were a generally-accepted fact, that “the whole of life is now of course absurd,” and said that “most of us walk crabwise to meals and everything else. The oblique approach in middle age is the safest thing.” It is this instinct for absurdity and obliquity—which he did not begin to develop fully until his thirties while writing Party Going—that is fatally lacking in the early stories of Surviving. Most of these are experiments in the use of language. They proliferate in the kind of syntactical excess that Green largely succeeded in purging from his novels, but they nevertheless contain strokes of brilliant originality.

The most considerable story from this early period is “Mood” (1926), the beginning of what was to have been Green’s second novel, abandoned after twenty pages. It is a subjective narrative from the point of view of a young girl, Constance Igtham, upper-class, unmarried, somewhere in the no-man’s land between childhood and adulthood. As she wanders through London the reader is made party to her mixed impressions and memories. One hesitates to call this narrative “stream-of-consciousness,” for there are occasional, sometimes ironic, comments from the narrator (“… she went everywhere and was everyone’s bridesmaid. Constance was utterly charming. This book is about Constance. When you have read it you too will say how charming Constance is”). “Mood” is, in fact, remarkably close in technique and even subject-matter to Mrs. Dalloway, which had been published only a year before, and it confirms one’s instinctive feeling that Green, in his visual power, his irony, and his insistence upon the caught impression, was a close artistic ally of Virginia Woolf’s. (Green admired Woolf, calling her “one of the great women of our time,” but he suspected that she was less enthusiastic about his own books and had taken him on as a Hogarth Press author purely as a favor to John Lehmann.)

“Mood,” for all its beauties, is not wholly successful. Later in life Green was embarrassed by his youthful self’s innocent use, in the fragment, of the most obvious Freudian symbolism, and he wrote that “to establish a girl … in a static situation where nothing is happening to her except her thoughts and feelings, is an impossible project for the novelist and one which only a young man, as I was then, would try for.” Of course, other novelists have tried and succeeded in this venture; what Green really meant was that it was an impossible project for the kind of artist he was. For Green’s most successful technique is the vivid presentation of significant surfaces: in his best work he never presumes to trespass upon his characters’ thoughts or pasts. “Do we know, in life, what other people are really like?” he wrote. “I very much doubt it… . How then can the novelist be so sure?” Green’s characters, as his work develops, communicate only by accident, as it were; they expose their real motives and passions not through straightforward thoughts and deeds but through chance actions and vacuous asides.

The quantity of the fiction thins out as Green ages, but its quality improves immeasurably. While the rhapsodic nature of the early work wanes, the cool, restrained tones that suited Green so well now make their appearance, and one very short story, “The Great I Eye” (1947), is as good a piece of fiction as Green ever wrote, a combination of macabre fantasy and bland realism. A hungover husband wakes on the morning after a party, trying to remember what exactly went on the evening before: it is a masterly, surrealistic story that grazes the mysterious and obscure origins of marital guilt, a subject to which the later Green returned again and again.
We go about our daily lives, in great cities, thinking entirely about our personal affairs; perhaps every now and again sparing a thought for our partners, that is, the person we live with, and of course with even greater guilt, of our children. After a time, in married life, it becomes the other partner’s fault that they have married one, but the only child, or, as chance may have it, the many children, have had no choice, they are ours, and this is what fixes the guilt on us.

This, from a 1954 essay called “Impenetrability,” represents for Green not a passing mood but a deeply felt conviction. Another excellent and disturbing exploration of this theme is “Journey Out of Spain,” a short, never-produced play that Green wrote for television. Ostensibly a variation on the hackneyed subject of the travel nightmare, in this case the apparent inability of an English couple to escape from the vile Spanish backwater they are visiting as unsuspecting tourists, the play is also a disturbing and sinister vision of the guilt, demands, and devouring selfishness behind the façade of a very conventional marriage. The sincere and almost religious conviction of the primacy of guilt in human relations is one of Green’s most fruitful sources of inspiration, and he forcefully develops it in Doting and Nothing, his last, great, and dismally underrated novels.
Surviving shows the line of development in Green’s fiction to be straight and strong, but his non-fiction—particularly his criticism—tends to be weak throughout his career. For while certain advantages accrue to an artist who remains purely an artist as opposed to a critic, he will tend to be shown up rather badly when he does turn to criticism. And Green’s anti-intellectualism, worn like a badge of honor, finally turned into a terrible handicap. His thought processes were finely adjusted to every nuance of observed behavior, but when he tackled the abstract they became convoluted and clumsy, his usually delicate prose fumbling. In his only attempt at art criticism, for example, a 1953 essay on the painter Matthew Smith, he is tentative in every statement, as though fearful of sounding either foolish or pedantic. He obviously recognized the problem, for he said at the time: “I have never written about painting before and never shall again. It has given me hell.” Some of his attempts at expository writing show just how bad things could get when he lost control:
Now that we are at war, is not the advantage for writers, and for those who read them, that they will be forced, by the need they have to fight, to go out into territories, it may well be at home, which they would never otherwise have visited, and that they will be forced, by way of their own selves, towards a style which, by the impact of a life strange to them and by their honest acceptance of this, will be as pure as Doughty’s was, so that they will reach each one his own style that shall be his monument?

What a tangle! One can only fear that Green’s style, too, will be his monument. As H. G. Wells said of the later Henry James, “his great sentences sweat and strain,” and the more desperately he reaches for precision the further it retreats from his grasp. Green’s essays on fictional technique also suffer from want of a frame of reference. In the Fifties he wrote several remarkably naïve pieces on narrative theory. Here, for example, is his case against the omniscient narrator:
Writing in this sort of way the novelist speaks directly to his readers. The kind of action which dialogue is, is held up while the writer, who has no business with the story he is writing, intrudes like a Greek chorus to underline his meaning. It is as if husband and wife were alone in the living room, and a voice came out of a corner of the ceiling to tell them what both were like, or what the other felt… . What he tries to do is to set himself up as a demi-god, a know-all. That life has been so created in novels, in the past, is not for me to argue for or against.

It might be 1870 and Green inveighing against the despotism of Dickens and Thackeray, rather than 1950, with Proust, Joyce, and Woolf (to name only a few) already dead and buried; one would think the author didn’t control what his creatures say as well as what they think, and that the novel had a life of its own independent from that of the author. The violence of his reaction to what he seemed to perceive as unquestioned literary convention is bizarre in view of the preceding century’s achievements.

But fortunately Green the novelist never completely followed the dicta of Green the theorist. His art was both too delicate and too ambitious to yield to formulae, and indeed the reader who still turns to Green does so as much for his mysteries and illogic as for the frequent beauty of his style.
A man falls in love because there is something wrong with him. It is not so much a matter of his health as it is of his mental climate; as, in winter one longs for the spring. He gets so that he can’t stand being alone. He may imagine he wants children, but he doesn’t, at least not as women do. Because once married and with children of his own, he longs to be alone again.
A man who falls in love is a sick man, he has a kind of what used to be called green sickness. Before he’s in love he’s in a weak condition, for which the only prognosis, and he is only too aware of this, is that he will go on living. And, in his invalidism he doesn’t feel he can go on living alone. It is not until after his marriage that he really knows how wrong or sick he has been… .
The love one feels is not made for one but made by one. It comes from a lack in oneself. It is a deficiency, and therefore, a certifiable disease.
We are all animals, and therefore, we are continually being attracted. That this attraction should extend to what is called love is a human misfortune cultivated by novelists. It is the horror we feel of ourselves, that is of being alone with ourselves, which draws us to love, but this love should happen only once, and never be repeated, if we have, as we should, learnt our lesson, which is that we are, all and each one of us, always and always alone.

That this magnificent and uncompromising declaration is sincere there can be no doubt. But neither can we doubt that Green was sincere in agreeing, at about the same time, that all of his books are love stories, “inspired by the belief that love is the most absorbing human experience of all and therefore the most hopeful.” Green himself ardently mixes darkness and light, and his work must always appeal to those readers who, like him, do not fear life’s inevitable contradictions.- Brooke Allen



Paris Review Interview





ROMANCING The Life and Work of Henry Green. By Jeremy Treglown. Illustrated. Random House.2001.

 First Chapter: 'Romancing'


Henry who? Fifty years ago, anyone who cared about fiction knew the work of Henry Green -- the aristocratic, publicity-shy English novelist whose books (most of them with titles ending in ''-ing'') were seductive and pleasing because of their very oddness and elusiveness. They were a little like Anthony Powell, a little like Evelyn Waugh, maybe even a little like Muriel Spark, but altogether stranger and harder to pin down. Green enjoyed a fair amount of popular success and, even more, the esteem of his peers. (He made a lifelong fan of Eudora Welty, and influenced younger novelists as varied as Terry Southern and John Updike.) There are writers and then there are writer's writers, Southern once explained: Green was a writer's writer's writer. But the fragility of literary reputation is such that nowadays, in this country especially, Green is seldom heard of, let alone read, and his books slip in and out of print almost unnoticed.
None of this would have surprised Green in the least. He loved the idea of anonymity, and although not without his share of authorial vanity, he could be ironic and diffident about his own work. (He called one of his novels ''Nothing,'' and would give that as an answer when people at parties asked him what he had written lately.) Even at the height of his career, he held onto his day job, and he worried that the knack for writing was something that could at any minute be taken away from him -- which is more or less what happened. Read more: review By CHARLES McGRATH

Henry Green put in an incongruous cameo appearance in Jeremy Treglown’s 1994 biography of Roald Dahl. When an interviewer from the Houston Post asked the bestselling author of the low-life and hilarious ‘adult’ short-story collection Someone like You who his favourite British writer was, he answered loftily: ‘Henry Green.’ Treglown thought the reason might have been that Dahl (who anyway loved a put-down) shared a friend with Green, the painter Matthew Smith, whose work he did know and like. For surely Dahl could have had little time for an avant-garde writer like Green? Besides, Green was just the kind of Eton-and-Oxford Englishman who had made him feel so alien and unappreciated in the London literary world when he first tried to set up as a writer after the war.
The truth, as it turns out, is that by the 1950s Green was in his way as much of an outsider as Dahl. His literary friends and fans, too, were un-English – the Americans Eudora Welty and Terry Southern (author of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty book Candy); or the French New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute, who singled out Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett as (after the demise of Woolf) the most original and distinctive voices in British writing. Southern managed to coax out of Green, who was notoriously inarticulate (and not just from the booze), a 1958 Paris Review interview in which he confessed to admiring Céline, Joyce and Kafka: but they were ‘like cats which have licked the plate clean. You’ve got to dream up another dish if you’re to be a writer.’

By now Green was pretty hopelessly blocked. Sarraute, who thought this a perfectly natural and logical state for any real writer to find himself in in the later 20th century, praised him for making the deadly conventionality of British life into a kind of brilliant metafiction. Writer’s block was a starting point, a theme, an inspiration for writing about writing. Her description of the contemporary character fiction should be focusing on – ‘a being devoid of outline, indefinable, intangible and invisible’, an avatar of the author – fits Green’s writing very exactly. Except that for Sarraute this was contemporary fiction’s game, whereas for Green, it seems, it had become an authentic, personal mess. By the time he was being regularly praised as an original he truly hadn’t two ideas to rub together.
It’s this double alienation – being without definition, being so much the outsider to your own vocation that you can’t work any longer – that Treglown’s book explores in Green. It’s partly the story of the relations between his family identity as Henry Yorke, upper-class inheritor of the family firm, and his character as Green the writer; but it’s also an exploration of the fatal attraction of anonymity, the love affair with society’s nobodies that’s at the centre of Green’s best writing. The title, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, sounds thoroughly traditional, but signals a provocative intent. The puzzles of Green’s texts are, Treglown wants to argue, intimately connected with his singularly centreless personality: ‘his fiction is an oblique form of self-portrait,’ and readers ‘who have not swallowed the critical dogma that tries to exclude authors from their works’ should find the life-story illuminating. Which it is. Green’s Modernist textual density and his authorial absenteeism are here inextricably entangled with the way he set about the business of living and working.
So we’re not going to reread Green and understand how he ended up imaginatively bankrupt unless we have a Life. This sounds like an echo of Treglown’s protracted negotiations with the Yorke family – first this biography was authorised, then authorisation was withdrawn, though there’s no blow by blow account of the process. Nor, in the book itself, of any seriously scandalous revelations people might have wanted to suppress. But then that’s not necessarily why survivors and family feel so equivocal about biographers. Another reason, and a good one, is the fear that the subject will join the wax museum of ‘characters’ on display in accounts of ‘Bloomsbury’, or of the Waughs and Spenders and Actons and Nicolsons and . . . Lives too often deny their subjects’ particularity, the banal but precious fact of everyone’s uniqueness, which is just what they’re cracked up to celebrate. Indeed, it’s often the juiciest biographical subjects, Vita Sackville-West, say, or Kingsley Amis, who anticipate the process, and turn themselves into caricatures and stereotypes in life. There’s a touch of this about Green’s long years of decline, when he drank himself silly, and retreated into an especially British style of polite, slurred anecdotage. But earlier on he was one of the few real anti-novelists whose books explored the dissolution of the old social and sexual plots that kept – still keep – the heritage show on the road.
Green’s masterpieces, like Party Going (1939) and Loving (1945), are devoted to demonstrating the hollowness of traditional loyalties and roles, for all the world as if he were a fictional anthropologist looking at the last days of an alien culture, except that, uniquely uncomfortably, he’s doing it from the inside, almost as trapped and confused as his characters. Treglown quotes V.S. Pritchett finely describing Green’s special subject as ‘the injury done to certain English minds by the main, conventional emphases of English life’. Hence his New-Novelish expertise in ‘the blurred, the lethargic, inarticulate part of human beings’.
One of the things Romancing brings out with great vividness is the tragicomic character of Green’s disaffection – less traumatic than bathetic. His parents belonged to the previous century, and lived on a larger, altogether more picturesque and energetic scale: Vincent Yorke was a classically rounded character, a scholar, a huntsman, a shrewd and autocratic businessman; his mother, Maud, lived for dogs and horses, and seems to have exhausted her interest in her sons with her monumental grief over the death of the eldest, Philip, while still a schoolboy at Eton. She turned his bedroom into a shrine, where nothing could be changed or moved, and then – this is the really revealing bit of the story – moved her maid Mabel in there for convenience’s sake, so that Mabel had to sleep among the relics. But then Mabel could sleep among the relics without dispelling the magic of mourning, because she didn’t occupy space in the same way at all.
And nor did Henry. He sided with the help. Loving, for instance, reverses the Maud/ Mabel set-up, with Anglo-Irish nobs Mrs Tennant and her careless, adulterous daughter-in-law Mrs Jack playing bit parts in the lives of their servants. The plot stages an ingenious double-take: Mrs Jack is caught in flagrante by the maid bringing in her breakfast, because what the servants see doesn’t count much, for her. But in fact what Mrs Jack gets up to doesn’t matter that much to Edith, because Edith has a perfectly absorbing life of her own, with quite enough excitement and confusion and loose ends to be going on with. Evelyn Waugh, revealingly, found this book infuriating; prewar he’d praised Green, but while he confined himself to complaining fussily to his face about some of the social detail in Loving – surely if these were really gentry they wouldn’t be renting the house, and so forth – to others he declared it ‘obscene’. Perhaps he was thinking of scenes like this one between Edith and her friend Kate, in the afternoon, in their bedroom:
‘Kate I’m getting too hot.’
‘Take off some of your clothes then silly. Come on with you I’ll help.’
‘Quiet. There’s Mrs Jack’s stockings I’ve got to go over.’
‘If you lie on your buttons I can’t undo ‘em at the back can I?’ Kate said. Then she tickled Edith to make her shift.
‘Mercy stop it,’ Edith screamed . . . But she made it easier for Kate by moving her body here and there as was required.
‘It’s only your old uniform,’ Kate said and soon Edith was lying almost naked.
‘I’ll stroke you if you like,’ Kate said. ‘Shut your eyes now.’
‘I ought to be going over those silk stockings.’
‘If you don’t take good care I’ll run over you like you was an old pair Edie and darn you in all sorts of places you wouldn’t think.’
They giggled in shrieks again at this and then quietened down.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the writing here is that it’s not voyeuristic, but one of those moments of (textual) bliss when Green seems to lose himself – his gender, his class, his authorial voice – in his characters. ‘It’s only your old uniform . . .’ He longs to be ‘demobbed’, liberated into a state of indeterminacy and ambiguity. Not that it’s possible to sustain it for long. Edie and Kate will go their separate, conventional ways; the children of the house, allowed to run wild and play with the cook’s nephew, will be safely accounted for as they grow up, the world will restabilise itself, more’s the pity.
You can hardly imagine a scene more at odds with the sensibility of the author of Brideshead Revisited. And to add insult to injury, the whole thing has no camp allusion to metaphysics, either. Emma Tennant, who was briefly Green’s daughter-in-law, thinks that his scepticism is one of the keys to his elusive character as a writer and as a man:
He was too clear-sighted to have any religion. He wasn’t going to have any Communism or Fascism or any God or anything at all. That was a cruel fate for him. But if he hadn’t had that complete lack of belief in things he wouldn’t have been able to write those books with their extraordinary poetic distance, because something sentimental would have got into the writing. It’s because he didn’t that the writing lives.
Thus his 1929 novel, Living, the book that established his reputation at the age of 24, dealt with the lives of factory-workers, based on those he’d met when he dropped out of Oxford and went to work on the shop-floor of the family foundry in Birmingham, entirely without benefit of ‘collective’ political language or conviction. And this is of a piece with his particular vision, if you can call it that.
One sign that he knew what he was up to is the fact that in Living Mr Craigan, who belongs to the older generation, reads Dickens and asks his granddaughter Lily when she runs off with Bert to Liverpool whether they spent the night together. He expects a full-blooded Victorian plot. But that’s not at all what has happened: Lily and Bert simply run out of steam in Liverpool, en route to Canada – they cannot, when it comes to it, plunge into the unknown, they’re defeated by the amorphousness of their personalities, being products of the present time. Landlocked, they panic at the smell of the sea: Lily has the horrors as the searchlight from a lighthouse sweeps the sky: ‘She would not look up again . . . She was blank, blank. Again it came along the sky.’ She returns home, to settle for the old prospects.

Green himself, in his life as Henry Yorke, did something rather similar. During his two-year stint in the Farringdon Works he never lost touch with his family or friends, he kept one foot on their ground always, and if he was – as everyone who knew him thought – happy for once, it seems to have been because he was liberated as an observer, able to store up for himself other people’s voices, hobbies (racing pigeons, football), awful Sundays (‘worst day in the world’), and look at his own class from the outside, too. The year Living was published he married Dig Biddulph, the daughter of his parents’ neighbours at Ledbury Park, though he was rather in love with her sister Mary, too, and they both seem to have been very fond of him – the kind of eminently suitable, vaguely incestuous marriage that typified his world. The line of least resistance for all concerned. They had a son, Sebastian, and entertained and partied, and he went to work at head office in London, and fell in love from time to time with other women, some of them – like Rosamond Lehmann – formidably wilful and attractive, though there was never any question of leaving his wife. His girlfriends usually stayed friends once the affairs were over; and Dig usually stayed friends with them too, and no one ever knew whether she ‘knew’ or not – certainly no one ever spoke about it.
There were no domestic scenes, no ‘words’. And never a question either of affairs with women outside his class (or at least outside London’s bohemia): he wanted to be those girls, write them, not make love to them. Indeed the Yorkes seem to have been rather inept with their ‘help’, always losing cooks and having to eat out. And though he wrote children so well, he wasn’t by the sound of things a better than conventional father, a bit distant. The only other real digression was the war, when he joined the London Auxiliary Fire Service, and once again was working alongside strangers, and this period seems to have acted – as did the foundry – as a source of energy and inspiration. Otherwise he more and more listened to other people’s voices in the pub, or in the bus on his way to the office, where he also drank, and gradually lost heart. He seems to have wanted quite badly to think of his writing as honest toil, ‘work’: but the main result of that was interfering unhelpfully in his publisher’s sales of foreign rights, or wisely deciding that paperbacks were a bad idea.
His last book was Doting in 1952. Its characters, as Treglown points out, come close to home: ‘Arthur’s mid-life crisis, Diana’s reiterations of the doctor’s warnings against his drinking . . . her unhappiness, yet her unflagging dedication to her in every sense hopeless husband’. The novel’s last sentence is: ‘The next day they all went on very much the same.’ And so they did, for twenty more years, except that he wrote nothing more, though he went through the motions. He was only in his forties, but redundant, out of work, unemployed. The last chapters recounting Green’s achingly slow disintegration are the best and most original. Treglown has taken a leaf out of his subject’s books in describing the surreally inarticulate life Henry and Dig lived – she saying to dismayed visitors that poor Henry has a chill, when he’s insensible, or even, sometimes, in hospital.
Michael Holroyd, working on his book on Lytton Strachey, went to interview Green about Ottoline Morrell, whom he’d known well, of course, like most of those more flamboyant contemporaries who were figuring in new Lives: ‘Dig received him politely, picking her way gracefully over a dishevelled, sleeping figure on the stairs whom Holroyd took to be a tramp. It was Henry. Dig mildly instructed him to tidy himself up and he soon reappeared neatly shaved and well dressed, and sat down to talk helpfully to the interviewer.’ Almost to the end Henry could on occasion get back into uniform, though apparently he usually wore his bedroom slippers with his suit. Asked for his opinions on the world, he’d tell people one should sit as still as possible, try not to go out. He didn’t actually talk helpfully to interviewers, almost ever, he simply adopted a parody of the correct language. His very emptiness – that weird domestic space he shared with Dig, his true other half in this, a genius of ‘denial’ – becomes memorably real. Treglown, who has had a thing about anonymity ever since editing the TLS (and is currently plotting to ‘out’ all those past generations of anonymous reviewers), clearly takes a perverse pleasure in Green’s end. Now you see him, and now you don’t. Romancing is a hidden polemic on behalf of the much maligned craft of literary biography. Like his subject, though, Treglown can’t quite bring himself to come out and say so. - Lorna Sage

John Russell: HENRY GREEN : Nine novels and an unpacked bag or pdf
Nicholas S. Shepley: Henry Green: An oblique approach to the everyday (pdf)