Surviving

by Henry Green

  As Green was precocious so was his decline into silence premature. His last novel, the impeccable but attenuated Doting, was published in 1952, when he was only forty-seven. It is difficult, given the oblique invitation of its title, not to take ‘The Great I Eye’ as autobiographical, and to consider its profoundly hung-over hero as a pilgrim on the path of Green’s own decline. The muddle of Jim’s spotty memories of last night’s flirtations, nudity, and drunkenness doesn’t quite clear to make a story that stands free; the prose loops out to include what seem stray images:

  When drunk the trouble one caused spread ripples, several dry walnuts thrown at the same time into a water tank hung with green ferns; and where the ripples met, leering faces of his green friends mirrored in the base over and over again in the repeated Olympic bracelets; linked arms for false amity, a symbol of old games.

  Old games, perhaps, are wearing the player down, ‘one’s body that did not forgive. Always the same. The feeling it couldn’t go on like it, misery, anxiety, death death death.’ A dismaying despair flecks Green’s multiplying personal statements during the fifties: he told the New York Herald Tribune in 1950, ‘I write at night and at weekends. I relax with drink and conversation. In the war I was a PFC fireman in London, the relaxation in fire stations was more drink and conversation. And so I hope to go on till I die, rather sooner than later. There is no more to say.’ Rather sooner than later! John Pomfret, the hero of Nothing, written in 1950, ends the novel by wanting, ‘Nothing . . . nothing.’

  Yet Green’s descriptions of the processes and strategies of writing for The Listener show a loving pride in his craft, and the handful of book reviews he consented to do reveal a love of the written word that was broad and voracious; he boasted of reading a novel a day. He undertook literary chores, offering Vogue some pages of thrillingly purple prose on Venice, and sharing with Esquire some alarmingly tough male thoughts on love. Having come increasingly to believe that dialogue was the best way to carry a story, he was attracted to play writing. After Doting, he spent a great deal of time and energy on a political farce, All on His Ownsome, which though it passed through several drafts was never produced; nor has it been included in this collection. Based upon the not unfamiliar conceit of one potent man left in a world of women, it seems at once hectic and static. Even Green’s dialogue, without the embedding descriptions of scenes and poses, refuses to kindle into mental pictures and psychological resonance. The two unpublished short stories, ‘The Jealous Man’ and ‘Impenetrability’, have a new, slack tone; the teller, so delicately and elusively felt a presence in his best fiction, moves to the foreground. The first story feels like a fable spun in an Oriental bazaar, and the second like a BBC chat. The BBC, which broadcast a number of talks by Green, might have done even more; surely the play Journey out of Spain, with a little trimming, could have been broadcast on radio. It is a play of voices purely, with no need of scenery, and charmingly renders one of those near-disastrous yet in the end harmless and even rejuvenating scrapes that foreign travel involves. The device of the monologues is excellent, and the unexpected emergence of the Fixer into the limelight shows a touch of Green’s impish social reach: ‘English people are OK but they cannot understand. Maybe they do not wish.’

  Green’s own emergence as a Paris Review interview subject deserves its place here among the works of inventional. His droll turn as a tall deaf man is carried off with an explosive precision like that of highly honed farce:

  After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now.’ Most of us walk crabwise to meals and everything else. The oblique approach in middle age is the safest thing. The unusual at this period is to get anywhere at all – God damn!

  The interviewer, Terry Southern, seems more deeply deaf than the subject; nevertheless, Green manages to enunciate a number of interesting confidences, from why he preferred to keep his writing side hidden from business associates to the way he carried in his head the ‘proportions’ of a novel in progress and reworked the first twenty pages ‘because in my idea you have to get everything into them’. His proclamation of the purpose of art is almost hierophantic: ‘to produce something alive, in my case, in print, but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life on its own.’ This credo returns, later in the discussion, with some specific articles of faith: if the book has a life of its own, ‘the author must keep completely out of the picture’ (‘I hate the portraits of donors in medieval triptychs’) and there will be discrepancies, for ‘life, after all, is one discrepancy after another’. Though Green gave some later interviews in which he appeared depressed and dazed, he was in good form during that session with Southern, and stated with a beautiful crispness why fiction, in its forms, must keep moving on:

  I think 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. . . . It isn’t that everything has been done in fiction – truly nothing has been done as yet, save Fielding, and he only started it all.

  The interview ends with mention of a book under way, a factual account of the blitz to be called London and Fire, 1940. The first section of that uncompleted work, with an opening sentence very like the one Green confided to the interviewer, is this collection’s last substantial item, and restores us to the flourishing Greenian universe, with its ingenuously compacted sentences –‘That innocent could never have even guessed how much of a child one fireman he saw before him was swishing past’ – and its glowing full palette:

  . . . we saw a parrot-coloured group of rich women and one or two men with rods and waders. The little river dark red with peat tumbled through an emerald field to the slate-dark sea ribboned with white-capped waves as far as a break-out in dark clouds, edged with sulphur yellow, turned a streak of waste waters below to brightest aluminium.

  But more than enough has been quoted of the book that lies in your hands. At its highest pitch Green’s writing brings the rectangle of printed page alive like little else in English fiction of this century – a superbly rendered surface above a trembling depth, alive not only with the reflections of reality but with the consolations of art. He thought about art with a French, or modernist, concentration, and in the final pages here comes up with an un-Aristotelian statement of art’s therapeutic powers: ‘Living one’s own life can be a great muddle, but the great writers do not make it plain, they palliate, and put the whole in a sort of proportion. Which helps; and on the whole, year after year, help is what one needs.’ Help is what art gives us, with its ‘sort of proportion’, and what Green gave, and gives, in those ten volumes to which this now adds a glinting, uneven, but in part priceless eleventh.

  SURVIVING

  TWENTIES AND THIRTIES

  Henry Vincent Yorke was born in 1905, educated at Eton (1919–24), and Oxford (1924–6). Blindness was published under the pseudonym Henry Green in 1926. Apprenticed as an engineer, he worked at The Farringdon Works, the Birmingham branch of the family business, H. Pontifex & Sons, between 1927–9. Living was published in 1929, the year he married Adelaide Mary Biddulph, and moved to London, where he was to work as a director for H. Pontifex & Sons in their George Street offices, until his retirement thirty years later. The Yorkes’ only child, Sebastian, was born in 1934. In 1938 Henry Yorke joined the Auxiliary Fire Service, and was stationed at the outbreak of war in Davies Street, London Wi, Party Going was published in 1939.

  BEES

  (Published in College Days, the Eton magazine, under the pseudonym of Henry Michaels, in 1923)

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  ‘Bees’ was one of three of Green’s stories published in College Days.

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  He was fresh from a slum parish in Liverpool. The doctors had ordered rest: and, now that the first flush of his religion had worked itself off, he was content enough to rest. It was his duty now to work for a sleepy, unenthusias
tic village; to visit everyone personally – else they would not come to church; to minister to the non-existent spiritual needs of a righteous little colony of country people – or so it seemed to him after the harsh realities of his slum parish. The pettiness of his duties hedged him round. He could not get away from it all, for he never read a book or a magazine. All the endless little squabbles of village life were brought to him, till he was sick to death of them; till he lost his sense of proportion, and it seemed to him, when, for the first and last time, the schoolmaster under extreme provocation swore before the children, that it was a serious thing indeed.

  Soon he had become devoted to bees. They had grown to be a reigning obsession. They always appeared to have something to do and they were always doing it efficiently; that was the marvellous thing about them, that was what he really admired. Besides, they did not sting him as they did the rest of his family when they approached the hives, and that endeared them to him. As he never read anything, these creatures were the only means of taking him out of himself: and he used to sit entranced, watching them fuss about. The Church and the village retired into the background. He was taken up with his bees – and why should he not spend a few peaceful minutes in his garden, with his bad health and all? So gradually he faded out of village life. The attendance at Church on Sundays dwindled to the few inmates of the almshouses, too near the grave to risk absenting themselves from the weekly service.

  The Squire, who did not understand his soul-weariness, was angry with the parson. The Squire saw the Church emptying; he heard complaints that the parson never went near anyone unless they were on the point of death, when he paid them a farewell visit. The Squire’s wife found all the village work come on her hands, because the parson’s wife was always ill. No one ever saw the parson’s wife, she might not have existed. Her duty was to have children and to cook food in the intervals.

  Neither the Squire nor his wife could see any fascination in bees. They could only repeat, when asked about it, how they had once lent him a book on bees, and in eight months he had not got through one half of it –‘on his pet hobby, mark you!’ So they began to despise him. But then what did he care for dry-as-dust volumes on dead bees? All the summer he watched his bees work and in the winter his bad health and thoughts on bees kept him indoors. So it went on.

  Then there was a tragedy. His eldest daughter, aged sixteen, died. ‘Little’ Grace, who had always been such a help to her mother; who had always been so quiet, and had never disturbed him at his bees. Now she was dead. And in his morbid state of mind he made it all into a terrible blow to himself: forgetting, of course, his poor wife, who really was prostrated with grief. He sank into himself. The funeral was the only time in three months that he left the rectory garden.

  Everyone was very sorry for him then. One used to say: ‘Ah! poor Wheatley. He has just lost his eldest girl, you know.’ One felt sorry for him. But after six months one looked for some sign of life. With the arrival of spring, the Squire (who was in the City) jovially remarked to us that it was high time the man started earning his ‘living’ – a joke! But the bees had come out of their winter sleep, and he was fondly watching them, marvelling at their activity. With the summer merging into autumn the Squire let fall a kindly but not overtactful hint! ‘We haven’t seen you about for some time, Wheatley; really the village has almost forgotten the look of you,’ and so on. Bitterness started, and rankled on secretly within him. His life was so taken up with himself that, when his bees retired for the winter, he sat indoors brooding over his grievances; of the death of his child, who he thought had meant so much to him; of his wife’s ill-health; of the nuisance of his other children, ‘so unlike poor Grace’; of the way everyone misunderstood him, especially the Squire.

  As time went on he became more and more preoccupied with himself. His life he felt was a tragedy, and he had to live up to the tragic in it. All day long he thought of how he was to stand the blow of his daughter’s death, and, although it was eighteen months since she had died, he was still composing answers in his mind to the letters of condolence that never came. In the busy buzz of his bees he detected the sympathy he could not discover in the world outside. His wife, whom he always regarded as a drone, could do nothing with him. He was sure that every man’s hand was against him. He detected an insult in the butcher boy’s whistling as he delivered the meat. So he turned to his bees, who always sympathised, and were so practical, and who were not useless like his family.

  His wife called in the doctor, who prescribed baths in certain chemicals. The next day he took the bath prepared for him, and, when he had dried and dressed, he hurried out to his beloved bees again. Unfortunately they disliked the smell, which still clung to him, of the chemicals in his bath. There was a vast buzz and they stung him to death. And he, poor fool, thought to the last that it was but an excessive display of sympathy.

  Yes, she married the doctor.*

  * This was censored and so removed all point to the story. [H.G.]

  ADVENTURE IN A ROOM

  (Unpublished, c. 1923)

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  ‘Adventure in a Room’ is clearly a forerunner of Blindness, begun at Eton, completed at Oxford, and published in 1926.

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  He sat in the Windsor chair, gazing about his room. It was his last night at Note. All round were the trifles, the few intimacies of his school life. For six years he had lived with the same old furniture. He had changed his rooms once or twice, but never the wall paper. The small brass figure, talking so severely to his dog, must know him very well by now, he thought. And it was his last night, tomorrow he would be leaving. Those pictures, too, they had looked down on him all the time he had been at Note. The paroquet pictures, the few third-rate prints, his own drawing that Armstrong had said showed such originality, his faithful looking glass – all of them must know him well. His bat he looked on as a pugilist looks on his hands. He had used his bat for so long without its ever having split that he had come to regard it as part of himself. The way it ‘drove’ made him think it was alive. And his books. Dull school books. God! There was a Badminton he had forgotten to return to the school library. Tomorrow. . . .

  He had just said goodnight to the friend he ‘messed’ with. ‘We messed together for years.’ Who had said that? He recognised the point in it now, anyway. Mark and he would never feed together again; he was going to Oxford and Mark to Cambridge. There had been the School Concert that evening.

  Four cricket and rowing ‘bloods’ had sung the Vale. The captain of the eleven had sung it very badly. Such a good fellow and quite on speaking terms with him! Why had he himself never done better at cricket or football? Not for lack of trying. Yet there was that fellow Armstrong keen on art and music and all that. He had got endless colours and was in the Note Society, the acme of human desires as it seemed to him, without any effort at all. He had painted that face to please Armstrong, and it was damned good. He ought to go to bed. He had got his House Colours, anyway, and had got into his house library, a community for the dispensation of justice to younger members of the house. Not many fellows – men – got that far. No. It was time to go to bed. Tomorrow he was leaving and it did not seem possible, somehow. All the unpleasantness of his time at school was wiped away. He looked back on days packed with happy incident. He went regretfully to bed, and fell asleep immediately.

  The next morning he was up at five, notwithstanding the fact that no one was allowed out of the house before seven. He was also smoking a cigarette, to the well-simulated horror of the tip-scenting maids, and to his own intense satisfaction. He was wearing an ON tie; he was a ‘blood’ at last – all old Noteians were bloods, on the last day. Everyone who was staying on envied them so. For three short hours, he enjoyed himself hugely, showing off. But when he was in the train, he fell into the blackest depression.

  Note was left behind now, for ever. His things, all his pictures, knick knacks, and furniture were following him. Physical connection with Note was cut rudely
off, and home life was beginning. An orphan’s life at that. Alone with Nanny, for his parents were dead, and he had no relations to speak of. It was terrible his still calling her ‘Nanny’, now that he was a man – you were always a ‘man’ after you left a Public School – he must not persist in calling her Nanny. There was a little rough shooting though, and he was great friends with the parson’s son, whose sister held open wide the glass doors of Romance. He longed to pull her out of the river just as she had come up for the third and last time, or something.

  At that moment a little boy on the embankment idly threw a stone at the train, rushing so impersonally past him. The stone hit the window, which flew into shivers of razor-sharp glass, which, in their turn, buried themselves with extreme speed in his face.