{"id":116458,"date":"2017-10-12T13:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T17:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116458"},"modified":"2017-10-12T13:11:23","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T17:11:23","slug":"henry-green-good-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/12\/henry-green-good-word\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry Green Is As Good As His Word"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Dean Cornwell, Options<\/em>, 1917, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Evelyn Waugh could push a joke to the outer edge of our ability to bear it, stopping just when laughter turns to tears, and he\u2019s had his imitators for the better part of a century now. So has Graham Greene, who blanched despair into a weary disillusionment; the contemporary thriller is inconceivable without him. Each of them added to the novelist\u2019s grab bag of tricks. Their contemporary Henry Green didn\u2019t quite manage that. In such early novels as Living<\/em> (1929) and Party Going<\/em> (1939) he experimented with dropping out the definite articles in a way that gave his language a tense angularity, the nouns and prepositions grating on each other, uncushioned: \u201cWater dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water.\u201d Nobody followed him and he left no codifiable body of technique. But Green may have had something better\u2014not followers but admirers, and admirers\u00a0among all\u00a0writers. Very little connects such disparate figures as Eudora Welty, John Ashbery, and John Updike, or indeed those who have introduced Green\u2019s other books in this series: little beyond their fondness for this strange elusive figure, not a model but an inspiration. Welty probably put it best. His work was ever changing and yet always the same, his books \u201cto an unusual degree unlike one another \u2026 yet there could be no mistaking the hand \u2026 [with its] power to feel both what can and what never can be said.\u201d Green\u2019s peers recognized his originality; that\u2019s achievement enough.<\/p>\n

For a long time, though, it seemed as if only<\/em> other writers had spotted him. In the early fifties, he was often described as the most innovative novelist in England; by the eighties, he looked always in need of introduction. His American editions went in and out of print, and I had to order his 1940 autobiography, Pack My Bag<\/em>, from abroad; those of us who read him got a lot of practice in explaining who he was, the Green without an e<\/em>. Or maybe not Green at all. He was born Henry Yorke, and rich, the younger son of a Gloucestershire landowner turned industrialist; the family\u2019s Birmingham foundry made both plumbing fixtures and equipment for the brewing industry. The boy\u2019s parents sent him to Eton as a matter of course, and then Oxford. He left without a degree but had already finished his first novel, a K<\/em>\u00fcnstlerroman<\/em> called Blindness <\/em>(1926), and published it under the pen name of Henry Green when he was just twenty-one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The young man then became a laborer on the floor of the Birmingham shop. The workers thought his father was punishing him for some indiscretion, but what really drew him was the chance to step outside his own life. He had always been fascinated by speech, by idiolect and dialect alike, and the factory offered him the chance to listen, to catch at voices unlike his own. That experience gave him Living<\/em>, with its lathe operators and metal casters, and the eighteen months he worked among them set the pattern for the rest of his professional life. Henry Yorke would pass his days in the London offices of the family firm; Henry Green wrote over lunch and at night. The next decade went slowly, but the war seemed to free him. He spent it as a fireman, putting out London\u2019s bomb-lit flames, a job more dangerous than almost any combat position, and wrote about it in Caught <\/em>(1943). <\/em>After that the books came quickly, a novel every two years at least. Eventually there were nine of them, and then silence.<\/p>\n

Green\u2019s critics all stress the degree to which his books are unlike each other, and certainly the social milieux he describes do change from one to the next: a downstairs view of an Irish country house in Loving<\/em> (1945), for example, and then Concluding<\/em>\u2019s (1948) state school and socialist future. Nevertheless, his fiction from Living<\/em> on is all marked by two things. One is his reliance on irresolution, his refusal of narrative neatness. Two girls in Concluding<\/em> disappear one morning; one of them never returns, and her absence remains forever unexplained. But her vanishing seems something more than a loose end\u2014it\u2019s elliptical and numinous, and close to a mystery in the theological sense of the term. The truth cannot be known, and this takes me to the other thing that links his books: his interest in the way people talk, in the texture and deceptions of human speech, its enormous variety even at its most clich\u00e9d. Green almost never enters his characters\u2019 minds. He shows us what they do and say, not what they think, and yet what they say doesn\u2019t always match up to what we\u2019ve seen them do. Are they lying? Do they know it? His school friend Anthony Powell once wrote that in Britain, \u201cunderstatement and irony\u2014in which all classes of this island converse\u2014upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.\u201d Most novelists see that as a problem, Powell among them. For Green, it was a possibility, and one he exploited above all in Doting<\/em> (1952) and its predecessor Nothing <\/em>(1950), the dialogue-novels with which he ended his career.<\/p>\n

His earlier books are marked by a great dazzlement of descriptive prose. So in Loving<\/em> two housemaids dance in an empty ballroom, its chandeliers \u201creflecting in their hundred thousand drops the single sparkle of distant day, again and again red velvet panelled walls, and two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass.\u201d \u201cThese\u201d not those<\/em>\u2014the faint deliberate awkwardness is entirely characteristic. But in his last novels, Green does away with almost all of that. Faces, clothes, furniture, streets\u2014they go unseen, pared back or trimmed out, and so are almost all indications of his characters\u2019 tone of voice. Nearly every page in both Nothing<\/em> and Doting<\/em> seems a run of unadorned talk, one voice pinging off another, and something else gets pared back as well. His earlier books mixed characters of different classes and backgrounds, people brought together by the accidents of work or weather or war. In these, however, his characters all belong to the same class, belong indeed to his own, and these consciously narrow books share a thematic burden as well, a concern with the relation of middle age to the sexual life.<\/p>\n

Doting<\/em> in particular is constructed with the almost mathematical rigor of farce. There are six speaking parts\u2014two men and a woman, a couple of girls and a boy\u2014and almost every scene is a duet staged over a meal or a drink. Here\u2019s a sample, a little moment between husband and wife:<\/p>\n

\u201cNow have you been all right in yourself, lately?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you, Arthur, I\u2019m fairly well, I suppose.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean you aren\u2019t in the middle of your change of life without knowing, are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

She opened her eyes very wide, looked away from him, and drew herself apart.<\/p>\n

\u201cArthur,\u201d she said, in a low voice, \u201care you insane?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI only wondered, my dear.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy do you do this to me?\u201d she whispered.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dear darling, what am I doing?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know I\u2019m not!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, you\u2019ve got to face things, Di. It will happen some day and I thought this may have started, that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut why, Arthur, is all I ask?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause you\u2019re so peculiar about this whole business.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow peculiar, when I\u2019m naturally upset for you if your young mistress who has been trying to ensnare the one friend I still have, starts him off with another girl? What would you feel if you were me?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those last words make me laugh aloud\u2014shouldn\u2019t Diana Middleton be upset on her own behalf, and on more than one score? But they carry the illogical truth of many marital grievances, and Green has no intention of letting one know how Diana feels in herself, let alone how her husband would feel if he were her. The whole point is that Arthur can\u2019t be his wife, he can\u2019t know the inner shape of her experience, but only the way she acts and speaks and moves. Maybe she could tell<\/em> him how she feels\u2014but how, on such a subject, would he know whether or not to trust her?<\/p>\n

Green wrote almost nothing outside of his novels, but he did attempt to explain his reliance on dialogue in a series of BBC broadcasts. \u201cDo we know, in life, what other people are really like?\u201d So he said in 1950, and then answered his own question. \u201cI very much doubt it. We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?\u201d I can imagine any number of skeptical replies to this, but let\u2019s stick with Green\u2019s terms and method. He wants us to encounter these characters as we do the people we meet in life, people about whom \u201cwe seldom learn directly.\u201d Our knowledge comes from what they say, or from what\u2019s said about them; it is at best oblique, and because we can\u2019t be sure what other people think and feel, our understanding remains essentially flawed. Human meaning is ever uncertain, the moral and emotional bearing of any action unclear. The same sentence can mean a dozen different things, and we inevitably misapprehend the intentions that lie behind it. Sometimes we twist another person\u2019s words into some more convenient meaning; sometimes we use the uncertainties of language itself to deny that our speech says what we meant it to say.<\/p>\n

The written word is estranging, and Green liked it that way. He famously wrote that prose should offer \u201ca gathering web of insinuations \u2026 a long intimacy between strangers,\u201d but that intimacy should above all be silent. Green believed one should never read fiction aloud, and on the page his dialogue proves far more enigmatic than it would be if spoken, more elliptical than any actual human contact. He tried to remove all inflection from his characters\u2019 speech, and yet in our actual lives the tone of one\u2019s voice can establish meaning, so does context or physical posture, and we usually know how to read a spouse\u2019s silence. Few people are as mysterious after twenty years as they are on a first meeting\u2014except in the novels of Henry Green. Maybe they should be. His radio broadcasts have a touch of the manifesto about them, as if laying down a path for the novel of the future, a way to capture something we\u2019ve lost, some sense of \u201cwhat never can be said.\u201d But Doting<\/em>\u2019s idiosyncrasies hardly need a theoretical justification, and its pleasures and rewards seem greater each time I read it.<\/p>\n

Six characters, though at seventeen Peter Middleton is merely a catalyst, and two of the others only become important some pages on. When the novel opens in a London nightclub we have just three who count: Arthur and Diana, and Annabel Paynton, the slightly older girl they have invited \u201cfor\u201d Peter. She\u2019s the daughter of old friends, and it\u2019s the family custom to take her along on the first, celebratory evening of the boy\u2019s school holidays. So we start with a triangle. Arthur is \u201crising forty-five\u201d and can\u2019t stop himself from looking down Annabel\u2019s dress. She catches him at it but doesn\u2019t seem to mind\u2014or not enough, anyway, to refuse an invitation to lunch a few days later. Lunch leads to lunch leads to dinner; Diana grows suspicious, and Arthur tries to divert her by asking the roguish widower Charles Addinsell to take her out in turn. Now there are two triangles, and then Arthur makes things worse by trying to pass Annabel along to Charles as well. Suddenly we have four, with each member of the quartet involved with every other. Which might seem stable enough, except that Annabel has a friend of conspicuous \u201croundnesses,\u201d a girl called Claire \u2026<\/p>\n

Doors open upon the erring and unwary, laps are sat upon, and people get kissed in taxicabs. Arthur lies about Charles to Annabel; Diana lies about Annabel to Charles. Meanwhile, the girl herself has her eye on a couple of boys, and everybody proves willing to sacrifice everyone else for the sake of some temporary advantage; willing to say anything to get what they think they want. For that\u2019s what doting is. Doting<\/em> hovers greedily, spiderlike, a web in which you finally catch only yourself. Annabel claims to \u201cdote\u201d on Arthur\u2019s invitations\u2014or maybe she just gloats over them. They give her something to talk about, and so they do Arthur as well, who describes each frustrated lunge to Charles. It makes him feel young, and at the same time terribly old, a man in his gloatage. But Arthur also says that \u201cdoting, to me, is not loving.\u201d That\u2019s what he tells Annabel quite early in the novel, as he feeds her cocktails and tries to decide how far to push it all. \u201cLoving goes deeper,\u201d though it\u2019s typical of the novel\u2019s purposefully flat dialogue that he never manages to say just how.<\/p>\n

Green himself could\u2014only not here, not quite. Claire is \u201cwordlessly contented\u201d after Charles first carries her to bed, and Arthur and Diana make love \u201capologetically\u201d after the extended foreplay of their mutual incomprehension. But doting isn\u2019t loving and Doting<\/em> isn\u2019t Loving<\/em>. Both words, both titles, suggest some action or process and not simply a state of being, but loving for Green involves the loss of self and carries a touch of the sublime. Loving<\/em> ends with the butler Raunce \u201cin pain with his great delight\u201d; Annabel, in contrast, cannot see \u201chow love and terror can run together.\u201d Doting<\/em> recognizes what it doesn\u2019t have; still, it\u2019s more than a pendant to its admittedly greater predecessor, and the older one gets the more one appreciates its resigned and worldly nonchalance. \u201cThere\u2019s very little anyone can do about things,\u201d Charles says to Annabel, while Diana tells her, \u201cAs you go on in life, I fear you\u2019ll find people come more and more only to consult their own convenience.\u201d Accept; relinquish; and try not to look like a fool.<\/p>\n

At the nightclub in which the novel opens, a juggler takes the stage and soon has a dozen billiard balls \u201cfountaining from out his \u2026 lazy seeming hands, each ball so precisely placed that it could be thought to follow grooves in violet air.\u201d Nobody watches, nobody applauds, as he balances yet another ball on his chin, and a beer mug on top of that \u201cat the exact angle needed to cheat gravity.\u201d And so it is with Doting. <\/em>Green tosses his voices around with an extraordinary but unobtrusive skill, keeping them all in the air even as his characters try to juggle their relations with each other. Everything hangs suspended, a spectacle that offers an almost tactile pleasure. Then the balls drop to the performer\u2019s hands and the pint pot to the point of his shoe. The novel closes in another nightclub, with Green\u2019s initial foursome now joined by Claire and Charles; this one promises that \u201cwhilst having dinner, you could watch all-in wrestling, dancing or a floor show.\u201d But the wrestlers never show up, to Peter\u2019s dismay, and at the very end, the first night\u2019s \u201cidentical conjuror\u201d appears once more. The ronde continues, and \u201cthe next day they all went on very much the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doting<\/em> was Green\u2019s last novel. He lived until 1973, but in all those years he didn\u2019t finish anything more than a few short articles, and a central problem of his career is that of the books he did not write. For a long time he had been growing deaf, and complained that he had lost his ear for dialogue, that even in his head he couldn\u2019t quite hear it anymore. He seems to have suffered as well from flashbacks to his war-time experiences, when during the blitz he was in nightly danger of being blown off a rooftop. And he drank, glasses of clear gin he hoped would pass for water. Henry Yorke was eased out of the family business at the end of the fifties, wore slippers whenever he went out, and for a few years didn\u2019t even leave his Knightsbridge house. He did not go on the same; and yet in another sense he did, each faceless day indistinguishable from every other. Anyone who finishes Doting<\/em> will wish that there had been more books. Nevertheless his oeuvre feels complete. It makes an arc, from the expansive modernism of Living<\/em> to the curiously operatic minimalism of his last novels.<\/p>\n

I began by invoking Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, contemporaries whose careers were in every objective sense more successful, and whose books remain far more readable. But are they as rereadable? When I go back to them now they rarely have anything new to say, nothing more than I saw at first; I turn their pages with pleasure and yet the pleasure is that of repetition, the resumption of the familiar. The menu never changes. Henry Green seems in contrast always different, and never what he was. The emphasis alters, and some parts of his work remain forever odd, anomalous and even disturbing. On Doting<\/em>\u2019s first page, he writes that Peter would \u201cseveral weeks later \u2026 carry a white goose under one arm, its dead beak almost trailing the platform, to catch the last train back to yet another term.\u201d That goose isn\u2019t mentioned again. I don\u2019t really want to know what the boy plans to do with it, or even how he got it, but I would like to know why Green put it there. I never will, and among the many reasons for reading this difficult genius is the way he keeps his secrets still.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael Gorra is the author of, among other books,\u00a0<\/em>The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches English at Smith College.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This\u00a0essay is excerpted from the New York Review Books\u2019\u00a0forthcoming reissue of\u00a0<\/em>Doting<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Evelyn Waugh could push a joke to the outer edge of our ability to bear it, stopping just when laughter turns to tears, and he\u2019s had his imitators for the better part of a century now. So has Graham Greene, who blanched despair into a weary disillusionment; the contemporary thriller is inconceivable without him. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1277,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[6047,2300,3550,1687,30947,5764,17533,30670,706,1516,30948,5234,615,30949],"class_list":["post-116458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-anthony-powell","tag-bbc","tag-birmingham","tag-dialogue","tag-doting","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-farce","tag-gloucestershire","tag-graham-greene","tag-henry-green","tag-henry-yorke","tag-john-ashbery","tag-john-updike","tag-party-going"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHenry Green Is As Good As His Word<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Michael Gorra surveys inimitable prose, \u201cfrom the expansive modernism of \u2018Living\u2019 to the curiously operatic minimalism of his last novels.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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