To devotees of Henry Green, it seems extraordinary that a writer who gives so much pleasure should remain so essentially neglected: the unstopping, tissueless sentences travelling without delay of punctuation – those sentences which seem to drop a stitch and unravel just as you thought you were sewing up their meaning (“We lived here in the early years, in soft lands and climate influenced by the Severn, until my grandfather died and we moved to the big house a mile nearer the river where it went along below the garden”); the metaphors and similes, which float the strangest, rarest likenesses (a character’s eyes catching the light “like plums dipped in cold water”); the psychological subtlety, with its deep, delicate understanding of tragicomic fantasy; the authorial tact, content to let the reader move without explanatory signals, so that, as Coleridge said of Shakespeare, his characters “like people in real life, are to be inferred by the reader”; and above all the genius for speech, especially working-class, regional, and dialect speech, perhaps the greatest facility for the writing of dialogue in twentieth-century English fiction (less hammy than Kipling, more various than Lawrence, more inventive than Pritchett).
Henry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Yorke, who was born just over a hundred years ago, and died in 1973. He was an aristocrat, with an aristocrat’s rich confidence; he felt no need to explain himself to his readers, either on or off the page. Off the page, he preferred to be photographed from behind – there is a famous Cecil Beaton photograph, with a Magritte-like surrealism, of the dark glossy back of Green’s head – and for many years successfully delayed the publication of his books in America or in paperback. On the page he removed those vulgar spoors of presence whereby authors communicate themselves to readers: he never internalizes his characters’ thoughts, hardly ever explains a character’s motive, and avoids the authorial adverb, which so often helpfully flags a character’s emotion to readers (“She said, grandiloquently”). He can be a difficult writer, is a scrambler of syntax, and in many ways is the last English Modernist novelist: his best-known novel, Loving, was published in 1945, after which English literary Modernism essentially expired.
But paradoxically, despite the apparent mandarinism – he belonged to the generation that included Robert Byron, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh – one of Green’s greatest literary achievements is his ability to write about unliterary people, and to catch the half-thoughts of unlettered minds: factory workers in Living (1929); socialites in Party Going (1939); firemen in Caught (1943); servants in Loving (1945); the upper classes in Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952). In this sense, he has much more in common with V. S. Pritchett, who greatly admired him, than with Waugh, who complained that, in Loving, Green was “debasing the language vilely”.
He was interested, precisely, in the “debasement” that language and meaning undergo when we speak. His father, a distinguished classicist, had listened delightedly to the way his servants spoke at the family home, Forthampton Court, and often consulted a dialect dictionary. Radically, Green dropped out of Oxford University and went to work in Birmingham, on the factory floor of the family firm, Pontifex. (It made plumbing equipment for brewing and for domestic bathrooms.) Many of the workers assumed that the young man had been sent as a punishment by his father; in fact, the precocious writer, who had been writing fiction while at Eton and had already published a novel while he was still at Oxford (Blindness, 1926), was listening hard to the way his co-workers talked. In his memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), Green argues that working-class speech is more poetic than upper-class speech, and offers examples of fragments overheard in the factory: “His eyes started out of his head like little dog’s testicles”. Or this, spoken by a man about his brown dog: “What he likes is I take him out into the fields week-ends and he rolls ’im white in the grass”.
In novel after novel, Green paid his tribute to this poetry. The novel that he wrote about the Birmingham factory, Living, features a histrionic and gabby manager named Mr Bridges, fond of such things as “Worry, I’ve ’ad enough of that washing about in my head to drown a dolphin”, or mysterious images such as “He was sick as if I’d been Mussolini and given him cod liver oil” (talking about an unwell colleague). Caught, the novel Green wrote about his own experiences as an auxiliary in the London Fire Service in the Second World War, is dominated by another histrionic, Dickensian talker, Mr Pye, the unit’s instructor, who enjoys his ability to lecture the men in his charge: “I ’ad to consider what chance a man like you stood with those boys in the Rescue. They’d castrate you, Piper, like a starved bullock. Or they’d wrap those long legs of yours round your neck and stuff the ’eels in your gob. And then where would your new denture be?”. Pye has the habit of calling attractive girls “lovely bits of ’omework”, and his idea of “educated” speech, into which he sometimes falls so as to impress his underlings, is to say something like “Does the staff car want petrol?”. His long arias of advice and bullying are wonderfully funny, though Pye, like the best comic creations, has no sense of humour himself:
“Take a hospital . . . you are called there, you arrive, and this lecture is called practical firefighting ’ints, but all this comes into the job, just as much as putting out the fire. Take an institution, even take what they call a place of public entertainment. Now what do you do? You’ve got always to recollect you must make as little disturbance as possible, use your loaf, don’t let the patients get any idea there’s something up. Go about it quietly. Don’t rush in a ward shouting where’s the fire? There may be people in there through no fault of their own. They’re to be pitied.”
The workers in Living often sound, to my Northern ear, more cockney than Northern, and it may be that Green fell most happily into London speech rhythms. Loving, his greatest novel, is set in an Irish castle during the Second World War, but its servants are all transplanted cockneys, and it is in this book, largely written in dialogue, that Green’s instinct for the poetry of speech reaches Shakespearean heights. Like Living and Caught, Loving is lorded over by a petty tyrant, a speechifying butler named Charley Raunce, who spends much of the book chasing, and finally winning, a pretty housemaid, Edith. Raunce has strong opinions about women, however, and likes to bully his young assistant Bert on the matter: “You know Bert I sometimes marvel women can go sour like that. When you think of them young, soft and tender it doesn’t ’ardly seem possible now the way they turn so that you would never hold a crab apple up to them they’re so acid”.
The English servants feel menaced both by the IRA and the threat of German invasion. Raunce, speaking to Edith, puts it like this: “And what about the panzer grenadiers? . . . When they come through this tight little island like a dose of Epsom salts will they bother with those hovels, with two pennorth of cotton? Not on your life. They’ll make tracks straight for great mansions like we’re in my girl”. (It is characteristic of Green’s great subtlety as a novelist of character that he makes Raunce simultaneously terrified and boastful – he can’t hide his self-satisfaction at the idea that the Germans will avoid those Irish “hovels” and come for “mansions like we’re in”.) Raunce is not alone; Loving is populated by characters who match his verbal flair. Edith, marvellously, complains that she has to take out the lady of the house’s grandchildren for a walk: “Well, I’ve got to take those little draggers out this afternoon”. The cook, Mrs Welch, alleges that, in wartime, children have all become monsters: “Children is all little ’Itlers these days”. Bert, musing on the aged nanny’s rheumatism, mentions his own uncle in London: “Why come to that I got an uncle ’as ’is joints boiled Tuesdays and Thursdays over at St Luke’s down the old Bow Road”. Even a familiar idiomatic phrase will get a slight rhythmic addendum: Edith says at one point: “Why I’m browned off absolutely”.
Green’s late novels, Nothing and Doting, attracted the attention of Nathalie Sarraute, in part for the daring with which they surrender all the conventionalities of fiction – plot, authorial explanation, descriptive detail – to the drift of speech: these novels are a succession of apparently aimless conversations. They have their passionate admirers, but are flatter and less delightful than the earlier books, largely because no working-class characters appear in them; and Green does indeed appear to have believed that upper-class speech lacked poetry. The people in these books, unlike their proletarian counterparts, seem rarely to use images, metaphors, neologisms, or twisted idiomatic coinages. Green, the aristocrat, perhaps lacked the distance from his own speech necessary to hear its poetry; Waugh, the middle-class publisher’s son from Hampstead, could certainly hear it. Still, these late books abound in strange and cunning slippages, moments of surreal comedy when conversationalists are revealed to be not really listening to each other. In Nothing, for instance, Philip and Mary are discussing the possibility of eloping. It is just after the war:
“I know but it’s so rude to the relations when people elope.”
“Yes you’re right,” she gulped.
“And then eloping’s out of date, it went out with horses.” “Oh dear now they’re all eaten poor things.”
“Too many people on this island keep carnivorous pets Mary,” he replied. “The waste is fearful.”
Though one praises a writer for having an “ear” or an “instinct” for speech, it is not realism, as such, that one is praising. Speech, in a writer like Green, is not simply a matter, as creative writing workshops put it, of “getting it right”. Green, like Pritchett, did indeed listen to conversations in pubs and on buses – the realist’s impulse to gather from the world – yet a great deal of his genius lies in how he invented a plausible magic on the page for his speakers. The speech in novels such as Loving and Caught is consistently more savoury and inventive than it would ever have been in ordinary life. When Edith calls her little charges “draggers”, she is creating a brilliantly apt neologism for the way children drag their heels and pull on one’s adult arm. Again, it is Green’s poetry – but it is Edith’s, too, because the word does not stretch credibility; it seems possible that Edith might have come up with it. “Draggers” is a literary word, but it does not belong to high-literary diction.
Speech in Green is both real and magical, observed and invented, a report and a dance. And of course, he had great sponsors in this plausible magic. He had Dickens to study, and Hardy, whose Farmer Crawtree, at the end of The Woodlanders, strikes the Greenian note:
“I knowed a man and wife – faith, I don’t mind owning as there’s no strangers here, that the pair were my own relations – they’d be at it that hot one hour that you’d hear the poker, and the tongs, and the bellows, and the warming-pan, flee across the house with the movements of their vengeance; and the next hour you’d hear ’em singing “The Spotted Cow” together as peaceable as two holy twins . . . .”
He had Kipling, and the Lawrence of the early stories, and he had, above all, Shakespeare – the Shakespeare who created Mistress Quickly, the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Like Shakespeare, Green is unafraid to let his characters ramble on, and unafraid to lend his metaphorical and image-making powers to those characters. In addition to handing Edith a word like “draggers” or handing Pye, in Caught, his word “homework” (to describe a girl), Green will often use, in third-person authorial narration, the kind of simile or metaphor which while successful and literary enough in its own right, is also the kind of figure his characters might use – as when people walking along the streets in Living are seen as “tongues along the streets” or when, in Caught, a girl’s neck is “the colour of junket”.
Chekhov, who habitually does this in his short stories, may have influenced Green. (We know from Jeremy Treglown’s biography that Green read Chekhov with considerable attention.) It is an extension of free indirect style, whereby the third-person narrative is so heavily inflected by the characters it is describing that the very images themselves seem to have been produced by those characters. When Browning describes the sound of a bird that seems to sing its song twice over in order to “recapture / The first fine careless rapture”, he is being a poet, trying to find the “best” poetic image; but when Chekhov, in his story, “Peasants”, writes that a bird’s cry sounded as if a cow had been locked up in a shed all night, he is being a fiction writer: he is thinking like one of his peasants.
Green is sometimes Browning and sometimes Chekhov. In his Chekhovian mode, these kinds of images, handed directly and sometimes indirectly to his characters, constitute a kind of transference of power from creator to creation. This transferred imagery is quite distinct from an obviously literary register – the Browning mode – in which we feel Green laying claim to his characteristically lavish pictures, those figures that seem at times to force metaphor into the peril of hypothesis – roses that stare “like oxen”, or a man’s hands going “like two owls in daylight over the hills, moors, and wooded
valleys, over the fat white winter” of his lover’s body. About both kinds of imagery, however, there hovers a mysteriousness that is one of Green’s most original qualities. In his memoir, he defined prose as “a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known”.
With no direct appeal to what both may have known: what would it mean for prose not to know something? Green’s writing dares to fall into little abysses in which it seems itself not to know what precisely it means. Sometimes this is only a child’s estrangement technique, which briefly bemuses and then refreshes our sense of the world, as when Green writes of Amabel in Party Going that “when she did not smile her eyes were not so blue”, or when in Pack My Bag he says that at school “Sundays smelled, I do not know why”. (Not, you notice, smelled differently, just “smelled”.) But often he loves to leave his effects mysteriously unexplained, sending them back to the reader untasted, as it were. In Caught, we are told about the first time that the Auxiliary Fire Company is called to a fire. The new recruits go up the stairs of the wrong house, the whole thing is a farce, and an embarrassment to the top brass of the service, like Mr Trant. Several pages after the incident, we encounter this paragraph: “Up at Number Fifteen, Trant’s wife, as he left his quarters, promised him pork pie for dinner. This put Trant in mind of his sub officer who had made them a laughing stock the previous day, running about like a chicken that had its head cut off, with his Auxiliaries like a herd of sodding geese”.
