Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  At the time, Henry may not have been aware of Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies,” but he certainly practiced it in his writing. He was keenly interested in playing with different stylistic techniques, and in applying Chekhov’s notion of significant irrelevance, in which details were teased out through indirect means. “Irrelevancy means so much,” he wrote to Coghill, “it shows you what a person is & how he thinks, & conveys atmosphere in a way that is inconceivable if you have not seen Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard.” He finished his novel on May 30, 1925, a few months before his twentieth birthday, noting the precise time and date of completion on the last page of the manuscript. He promptly (and rather boldly) sent it to Chatto & Windus, the distinguished London publishing house of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Samuel Beckett, and the first English translation of Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu. (Henry was a great admirer of Proust.) The editor who received Henry’s novel was not impressed. “I do not make much of this MS., which depressed me at the start (by the boringness of the schoolboy mind) and went on depressing me (by the boringness of everything) to the end,” he wrote in a memo. “Nevertheless,” he added, “the author should not be lightly condemned, because he evidently is very fluent, and his talent may develop.”

  He mailed the manuscript back to the author with a standard letter of rejection. Henry was furious and told Coghill that Chatto was a “despicable firm.” His friend suggested that he send his work to the publisher J. M. Dent, who accepted it after requesting some revisions. An editor there asked Henry, “How did you ever come to write anything so good?”

  Dent was known for creating the Everyman’s Library—handsome limited editions of classic literature, offered at an affordable price (one shilling). Because Henry was still legally a minor when his book was accepted, his father had to sign his publishing contract. Gerald Yorke later described their parents’ response to the novel as “not quite horror but complete misunderstanding and great doubt.” They did nothing to assuage Henry’s anxiety about disappointing or upsetting them. One of Henry’s aunts interpreted Blindness as a cry “for sympathy which he doesn’t find at home.”

  At Oxford in the fall of 1926, Henry was very lonely. Many of his friends had graduated and moved on, and he fell into a depression. He wanted out. “Everyone is rich and vapid or poor and vapid & one & all talk about Oxford day & night,” he complained in a letter to his mother. He wanted to go to work “in a factory with my wet podgy hands” for the Birmingham branch of H. Pontifex and Sons, his family’s coppersmithing company. Vincent Yorke had several enterprises, including positions in banking, insurance, and railways—all secured for him by his father, John Reginald Yorke, who had purchased Pontifex for him as well. The company, which was then failing, had once made plate engravings for William Blake. Vincent proved a savvy businessman, making Pontifex profitable again by moving the factory to a cheaper site (Birmingham instead of London) and by expanding the manufacturing business into bathroom plumbing and brewery equipment.

  Henry decided that he was finished with Oxford’s academic pressures. He resented being forced to spend his time studying, he said, “when I have my own work always running in my mind.” In December, shortly after the publication of Blindness, he dropped out of Oxford without earning a degree. His friend Evelyn Waugh, at work on his own first novel at the time, was enthusiastic about Henry’s literary debut: “It is extraordinary to me that anyone of our generation could have written so fine a book.”

  Henry was eager to trade his stuffy university environment for the factory floor, partly because he sensed that the rhythms and sounds of proletarian idioms could provide material for his next novel, and partly because he longed to experience what he called “the deep, the real satisfaction” of manual labor. (His interest in the working class was not unlike that of his contemporary, and fellow pseudonymous writer, George Orwell.)

  In January 1927, Henry reported at the Midlands iron foundry, where he would quickly build up his muscles moving heavy machinery for eight hours a day, earning twenty shillings a week. Although coworkers assumed that he’d been assigned the job as some kind of shameful punishment, it was at Henry’s insistence that he started as an apprentice, working his way up from the bottom and living in a Victorian boardinghouse.

  The setting was as unrefined as he’d hoped for, and he toiled away at Pontifex quite happily for the next two years. “I had been an idler who had at last found something to occupy his mind and hands,” he later wrote. A hundred and fifty people worked at the factory that he would one day control. There was no lack of colorful characters to keep him entertained. Henry proudly reported to his mother that he had met a man who “bites the heads off mice to kill them when the trap hasn’t.” Despite working harder physically than he ever had, he still found time to indulge in one of his favorite hobbies—his addiction to the cinema—and to write a few hours each day. “Going home it would be dark again and I would be tired,” he later recalled. “But after no more than thirty minutes in a chair I was ready for hard work again.” His moviegoing and his writing were not unrelated; Henry aptly described the draft of what would become his second novel, Living, as “a kind of very disconnected film.” The novel, tentatively titled “Works,” was set in a Birmingham iron foundry and captured the monotony of the workers’ lives. Written with extraordinary sensitivity and empathy, without a trace of condescension or sentimentality, it was a reflection of the author’s lifelong affection for the working class, and of his ambivalence about his own pedigree. He once told his mother bluntly that she should accept the fact that “by nature I am not the sort of person who dresses for dinner every night, in fact I am not what is generally known as a gentleman.”

  He led two lives. By day, he was Henry Yorke, laborer and aspiring businessman; in his private writing time, he was Henry Green. He preferred that the two personae would never meet. For one thing, as he later explained, “I write books but I am not proud of this any more than anyone is of their nails growing.” And for another, as he explained in a 1958 Paris Review interview with a close friend, the American novelist Terry Southern, “I didn’t want my business associates to know I wrote novels.” The role of artist seemed pretentious and ill fitting. While contemporaries such as George Orwell (Eric Blair) were engaged in polemical writings and political activism, Green was quietly crafting his strange fiction. He shied away from publicity, avoided being photographed in public, and had deliberately chosen a pseudonym that was unremarkable and did not call attention to itself. He explained that “if you are trying to write something which has a life of its own, which is alive, of course the author must keep completely out of the picture.” As Sebastian Yorke (Henry’s son) later noted, Henry’s own father regarded his son’s books “with silent contempt because they did not make money,” which only reinforced the notion that Henry Yorke ought to remain as invisible as he could.

  In 1949, upon the U.S. publication of Green’s fifth novel, an American critic asked:

  Who is Henry Green? Well, there’s an elaborately built-up mystery about that, though you could probably soon find out in England. Particularly if you could inspect British income-tax records. He is [according to his publisher] a fellow with a passion for anonymity, a Birmingham manufacturer, an Etonian, an Oxonian, possibly a Bolognian, too, no less. . . . It may be that he is really Graham Greene. It may be that he is Ivy Compton-Burnett’s great-grandfather.

  By 1958, most of his colleagues at Pontifex, at least, were well aware that Henry Yorke had an alter ego called Henry Green, and he admitted in his interview with Southern that the revelation had affected his relationships with them. “Yes, yes, oh yes—why, some years ago a group at our Birmingham works put in a penny each and bought a copy of a book of mine, Living,” he said. “And as I was going round the iron foundry one day, a loam molder said to me, ‘I read your book, Henry.’ ‘And did you like it?” I asked, rightly a
pprehensive. He replied, ‘I didn’t think much of it, Henry.’”

  It was no wonder: aside from the brilliant music of common speech, which Green captured beautifully (“I got you fixed in me mind’s eye tucking away lamb with mint sauce”), his prose style was scrambled and demanding. There were sentences with loose grammar, absent nouns, cryptic references, and articles dropped at will: “Hundreds went along road outside, men and girls.” “Range made kitchen hotter.” “Baby howled till mother lifted him from bed to breast and sighed most parts asleep in darkness.”

  Although Green’s admirers placed him alongside authors such as Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, and Sterne, he claimed no influences himself. “As far as I’m consciously aware,” he said, “I forget everything I read at once, including my own stuff.” He explained, too, that “Joyce and Kafka have said the last word on each of the two forms they developed. There’s no one to follow them. They’re like cats which have licked the plate clean. You’ve got to dream up another dish if you’re to be a writer.”

  By the time Green was twenty-four, he’d already written two boldly experimental novels. Yet in the memoir—if you can call it that—that he published in 1940, Pack My Bag, he hardly mentions the publication of either book, or his third novel, Party Going, which came out the year before; or any sense of pride in his accomplishments. He names almost none of the people in his life, not even his wife and young son; he does not reveal that the main schools he attended were Eton and Oxford; and in no way does he describe the effect that Philip’s death had on him. He entirely skips the decade of his life prior to 1938 (his story stops when he is twenty-four). And he does not even bother to explain why Henry Yorke had become Henry Green. The book’s subtitle, “A Self-Portrait,” seems a kind of joke. It is a work of great originality, but one in which the author, as usual, omits the most basic details and presents the rest mostly through a blurry viewfinder. (Kingsley Amis said of the book that it seemed “the author was drunk whilst writing it.”) There is a willful perversity in the way Green hoards and obfuscates information. Evelyn Waugh wrote to him at the time that “it was a book no-one else could have written and it makes me feel I know [you] far less well than I did before which, in a way, I take to be its purpose.”

  Despite its baffling omissions, Pack My Bag was deeply important to the author. Written when Green was thirty-three, his “interim autobiography” was the result of his terror that he would die in the impending war. He published his book hastily because “we who may not have time to write anything else must do what we now can.”

  The memoir finished as enigmatically as it began, and abruptly, too—though on a somewhat tender note, alluding at the very end to his epistolary courtship of the woman he would marry: “It was not hunting when it was no fun, not having to go shooting, it was not having to be polite to masters who were fools, it was to lose convictions, at a blow it was life itself at last in loneliness certainly at first, but, in that long exchange of letters then beginning and for the ten years now we have not had to write because we are man and wife, there was love.”

  Green delivered his tersely titled novels in efficient succession: Party Going (1939), Caught (1943), Loving (1945), Back (1946), Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952). Then came silence, a literary purgatory that lasted until Green’s death in 1973.

  In 1929, the year that Henry Green published Living, Henry Yorke married an upper-class Englishwoman, Mary Adelaide Biddulph, known as Dig. Waugh affectionately called the couple “Mr H. Yorke the lavatory king and his pretty wife.” Henry, along with his parents, had decided that once he’d completed his latest novel, he would move to London and assume a new role at the family firm: managing director. He knew that the structure of an office job would keep him stable, yet he was also “violently depressed” at the time. “My fucking novel is so absolutely mediocre,” he told Anthony Powell. His editor, too, had commented that Green’s elliptical prose style was “difficult, & a trifle affected.” When it was released, the book was neglected critically, perhaps owing to the crowded, exceedingly impressive publishing field that year: Ernest Hemingway, Italo Svevo, Rebecca West, V. S. Pritchett, and Robert Graves all brought out new works. But Green’s prominent literary friends helped boost his spirits, providing a welcome antidote to reviews such as one from the Times Literary Supplement, which asserted that the author “does not seem to care in the least whether the reader is thrilled, bored, delighted, or irritated.” Waugh considered Living a masterpiece and compared Green’s dazzling technical feats to those of T. S. Eliot. He also emphasized that the author’s radically ambitious aims made it “necessary to take language one step further than its grammatical limitations allow. The more I read it the more I appreciate the structural necessity of all the features which at first disconcerted me.” Regardless of its originality, the novel failed to sell many copies.

  The decade-long interval between the publication of Green’s second and third novels was the result of frustrations and distractions, bouts of depression and paranoia; the demands of business, of upper-class society, of fatherhood (his son was born in 1934); and the onset of the war. As one critic later wrote of Green, the neglect of his literary legacy came about partly because he “lived several lives not sequentially but in parallel.” He never fully inhabited one identity or the other. The ambivalence evident in his work was also reflected in his personal attitudes. As Anthony Powell noted of his friend, “[I]f 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.”

  During the London Blitz, Green volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service, an experience that would provide material for Caught. His preceding novel, Party Going, comically followed a group of aimless young rich people stranded in London’s Victoria Station during a heavy fog. Not much happens, and the characters aren’t particularly likable. (Seinfeld again comes to mind.) The novel’s startling, bizarre opening line set the tone for the disorientation that lay ahead: “Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.”

  After the war, Henry assumed his position as managing director at Pontifex, and the novels he continued to write were greatly admired by W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Roald Dahl, and other prominent literary figures. He also kept busy as a serial philanderer who was as cruel as he was charming. “Hurting—that should be the title of your next novel,” one of his girlfriends suggested bitterly.

  That Henry Green published nothing after 1952 is explained by the sad decline of Henry Yorke. His lifelong despair started to overtake him and never loosened its grip, eventually leaving him adrift even from himself. Although he was mostly deaf (a condition that worsened during the war), he refused to wear a hearing aid, which isolated him still further from others. He drank and drank. Half his days were spent in pubs, and sometimes he’d return to a pub after dinner and stay until closing time. “To the regulars he was simply Henry who always sat at the same table wearing his raincoat and hat with a glass of gin and water beside him,” Sebastian recalled of his father.

  Henry had not lost sight of the mission of writing fiction, but he could no longer fulfill it. “Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night,” he believed, “and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. 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 stone.”

  He once claimed that he could “only get myself right by writing.” He insisted that writing alone had given him happiness, and that he relied upon it to stay sane. Yet, for some reason, he could no longer gain access to t
he part of himself that yielded such pleasure.

  Henry continued to oversee Pontifex, which had experienced a brief postwar boom, but the company too began to decline. With his stubborn inattention to detail, his pessimism and pathological indecisiveness, and his increasingly erratic behavior, he proved a poor chairman, and the company suffered. In 1958, it was discovered during a board meeting that Henry’s water glass contained neat gin. He was forced to retire a year later.

  After 1960, the man whom Terry Southern had called a “writer’s writer’s writer” rarely left his house. He dictated the beginning of an intended sequel of sorts to his memoir, called “Pack My Bag Repacked,” a project that, like many others, he soon abandoned. In one draft, he refers to himself in the third person: “Green lives with his wife in Belgravia. He has now become a hermit. . . . Green can write novels, but his present difficulty is to know quite how to do it.” He spent much of his time watching TV, especially sports. He often wandered around the house in a shabby state, littered with cigarette ash and wearing mittens because he said that his hands were always cold. Sebastian recalled that his father’s hearing grew steadily worse. He once phoned home and asked to speak to “Mummy,” to which Henry replied, “So sorry, I have absolutely no money.”

  In 1962, a BBC interviewer asked Green, “Are you going to write any more books?” He replied wearily: “No—never—never. . . . It’s too exhausting, I can’t do it.” He’d lost his drive and was convinced that no one wanted him to find it again. “I’m absolutely finished as far as the public’s concerned,” he said. “I mean, I’m out, I don’t sell books any more, and the critics despair of me. No, I don’t exist any more.”