by Henry Green
In spite of all, he realised, the present must be for him. So he hastened to his bedroom, hid it away well at the back of some used ties writhed into a knot like adders in the dark midden of discarded clothes. Then went cold himself. The exertion on top of his stomach. He lay down again, was careful how he placed his head. Cold sweat. He wondered if he could bring it all up. And slept.
FIFTIES AND SIXTIES
With Nothing published in 1950 and Doting published in 1952, Green turned his attentions to drama, reviewing, and broadcasting for the BBC. He continued to manage Pontifex, which had enjoyed a post-war boom but which was now in decline, making twice-monthly visits to the Birmingham and Leeds factories, until his retirement in 1958. After 1960 he seldom left the house.
HENRY GREEN
(Published in New York Herald Tribune, Book Review, 8 October 1950)
I was born in 1905 in a large house by the banks of the river Severn, in England, and within the sound of the bells from the Abbey Church at Tewkesbury. We lived at ease and because in those days there were plenty of fish in the river I spent much of my time with a rod and line. Children in my circumstances are sent away to boarding school. I went at six and three quarters and did not stop till I was twenty-two, by which time I was at Oxford, but the holidays were all fishing. And then there was billiards. My father played this game to win, and until I got good enough to beat him I minded losing.
I was sent at twelve and a half to Eton and almost at once became what was then called an ‘aesthete’, that is a boy who consciously dressed to shock. I stayed that way at Oxford, where the athletes reacted violently against my clothes. By that time I was playing billiards for the University so that when the howling mobs came round to throw me in the river I was able to warn them not to hurt my hands or we might lose the next match, and this invariably saved me.
From Oxford I went into the family business, a medium-sized engineering works in the Midlands, with its own iron and brass foundries and machine shops. After working through from the bottom I eventually came to the top where for the time being I remain, married, living in London, with one son who is almost seventeen. I no longer play billiards because I haven’t time and my fishing is just my fourteen days holiday a year when I help my son catch fish, already much better at it than his father ever had been.
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 now than later. There is no more to say.
EDWARD GARNETT
(Published in New Statesman, 30 December 1950)
Edward Garnett, about whom Mr H. E. Bates has written a short memoir, was a publisher’s reader, that is to say, he read several novels in typescript every day for, I suppose, something over forty years. I only knew him towards the end of his life but always imagined this prodigiously boring task must have left its mark on his character and person.
He was not unlike his contemporary M.R. James, the finest writer of ghost stories ever, who became Provost of Eton and the first hagiologist of his time, and who also seemed to read all day and half the night. James smoked a pipe, he had seven in a rack, one for Monday, another for Tuesday and so on; Garnett always a herb cigarette which poisoned the room. When James came to stay he had, he was so fond of them, to be provided with a cat; Garnett, so far as I can remember, never gave a second glance at any animal, yet James looked like a huge blue Persian, and Garnett was really rather a bedraggled St Bernard but with a cat-like wit. James had such a contempt for day-to-day affairs that he tossed all incoming mail unopened into a large trunk; Garnett was the reverse, he wrote endless letters encouraging young men to write – young men, not girls – but he also had complete contempt for every publisher, reviewer, or member of the public who bought or borrowed novels, in the world.
Here we must leave James, who was a magnificent man, and concentrate on Garnett, who was a wizard. You met Garnett like this. You submitted a first novel, out of the blue, to the publisher of your choice after, in my case, my parents, knowing John Buchan, had sent it to this writer who replied, probably rightly, that Henry would never make an author; then you waited in some agony for weeks, until at last you got a letter inviting you to call on his reader, a Mr Edward Garnett in Pond Place, Chelsea, London.
You went at the time appointed and rang the bell. There were, I think, three steps up to his door. In those days he did not take his own stairs quickly, so that he kept you waiting. When he did open, he had that accursed Bloomsbury disability of not being able to greet you, nor, when you left, to say goodbye. You were just confronted by a huge old man, his buttons undone all over the place, who stared you down with pale eyes behind deep spectacles and whose white hair was combed over his forehead in a fringe – a pale-faced, menacing, wordless object, immeasurably tall.
You had arrived with an idea that ‘they’ were determined to make you rewrite your book (indeed ‘they’ still sometimes do), and you had made up your mind that you were incorruptible because you were twenty and you believed. It was with a sinking feeling you told him who you were. In my case all he said was just ‘Come in.’ And when he toiled over the stairs to his first floor, I began to dread.
There was worse to follow. When we got to a landing he paused by a photograph framed on a dingy wall. He paused by it and asked with great malice ‘What do you think of this?’ The subject was, I think, a bas-relief of Leda and the Swan, treated with what I remember as great indecency. It was the second time only that he had spoken. Completely broken down now and ready to run, I answered with the phrase then current, ‘Oh, very amusing!’ At which he snorted disapproval and I all but fled.
Once seated in his chair, however, and having put the rug over his knees, it was all different. He began with the most delicious praise. He had not only read your work, the stuttering work, but he had seen in it more, far more, than in your dreams you had dared to claim. Better still he had an intense curiosity about you, which is perhaps of even greater importance to young writers. His line was ‘How did you come to write anything so good?’ That your first book, which was all he had seen, was inferior and poor, proved his particular genius. Like a St Bernard he could smell out the half-frozen body which, if encouraged, might yet be able to wrestle with words. The bottle of brandy hung round his neck was flattery, and at the next meeting with him it was blame. Afterwards he bullied you with a mixture of blame–flattery, nearly always to your good.
He had, I think, the defect of his generation, that with writers young enough to be his grandchildren, he made mistakes about the characters of their own age of whom they wrote. He would insist that this or that girl in the typescript was wrong. There must be several men of my generation who regret the revisions in character drawing which he imposed on us. But what he did know how to do, and yet – why is this? – could not do himself, was to write dialogue and narrative. In that field he was supreme.
He would take out a blue pencil and he would never go through more than one page. The words he struck out were magically unexpected; the result, when one had time to ponder it, was alchemy. He had a unique genius to show what could be done, and that, with his exquisite taste, became an inspiration which still, I am sure, remains with many of us now. He used to say the finest realisation of moonlight in prose that could be found was in Chekhov, the reflection in broken glass bottles cemented to the top of a park wall.
For about forty years he had a hand, and a very powerful hand, in most of the best that was written in England. A most retiring man, he spread his influence far and wide. And he was able to do this, as far as I could see, not only because he was almost always right and the publishers recognised it, but above all because, after his distinguished wife and son, the great love of his life was the craft.
A NOVELIST TO HIS READERS: I
(Broadcast by the BBC. Published in The Listener, November 1950)
Anyone who reads out aloud
an essay at home in front of the fire or here, as I am, in a sort of tomb, cannot fail to underline certain words by an emphasis in his voice or by a pause or even a laugh. This I believe to be wrong, especially all reading aloud from a novel, that is to say from narrative. But I mean to deal here with the unspoken communication between novelist and reader in narrative and not about that which may exist between a speaker and his audience, or even between husband and wife, in life.
When infants we learn to speak by listening. Later on we learn to read by looking and listening. We then have to make a conscious act of imagination, whereby we associate the collection of symbols, that is, the collections of letters which go to make up the various words, with the spoken words we have already heard; and by the time we have learned to read we have forgotten the now unconscious act of imagination that is still required. Although this is now in the background, in the sense that we do not have to whip up our imagination any longer to be able to read, it must be the purpose of the novelist to excite this imagination anew in his readers without the crippling aid of speech.
What is the further aim of the novelist? What is the painter going for? What is the sculptor trying to do? I say they are all meaning to create a life which is not. That is to say, a life which does not eat, procreate, or drink, but which can live in people who are alive.
Art is not representational in the sense that the painter, even if he thinks he is painting from nature, does not paint life-size and in any case he is doing his best on a flat surface. But the sculptor does work in three dimensions; his figures have a back and side to them as well as a front, yet they are still; they do not move. While some sculptors have done abstract designs that move to every draught in a room, called ‘mobiles’, except for the moving elephant to carry children on the front at Margate, I cannot now think of any other animal or human figure to which a sculptor has yet given motorised movement. Art therefore remains non-representational. But, if it exists to create life, of a kind, in the reader – as far as words are concerned, what is the best way in which this can be done? Of course, by dialogue. And why? Because we do not write letters any more, we ring up on the telephone instead. The communication between human beings has now come to be almost entirely conducted by conversation. Must plays be the medium, therefore, by which creative artists in words should communicate with their audience, if any? I say not. Because the artist then, unlike the painter or sculptor, is subject to the interpretation of an actor, who in turn is under orders from a producer. There are thus at least two men or women between the playwright and his audience. Not so with the novelist who, when he is printed, has the typesetter to put down his symbols exactly for him, so to communicate direct with the imagination of his readers.
If, then, you and I are agreed that dialogue is the best way for the novelist to communicate with his readers, this will be non-representational, that is to say it will not be an exact record of the way people talk. Conversation in life is at so many different levels, ranging from the intimate to the unfriendly. To give an example of what I mean, supposing a husband and wife live opposite a pub: at nine-thirty any evening when both are at home, he may say, ‘I think I’ll go over now.’ She will probably answer, ‘Oh,’ and there may or may not be a wealth of meaning in that exclamation. And his reply to her will probably be, ‘Yes.’ After twenty years of married life any couple will talk in a kind of telegraphese of their own which is useless to the novelist. It would take too long for the novelist to explain. For if you want to create life the one way not to set about it is by explanation. No, it is in the various ways the same thing can be put that lies the power and wonder of dialogue, the glory of the language, your language and mine.
To get back to my illustration of the situation between husband and wife discussing going across to the pub, there are more than 138 ways she can say, ‘Will you be long?’ Here are some of them:
‘Will you be away [or out] long?’
‘Will [or shall] you be long gone?’
‘Will [or shall] you be gone long?’
‘How long will you be?’
‘How long will it be before you are back?’
‘Will you be back soon?’
‘How soon will you be?’
‘Back soon?’
‘Off for long?’
‘Are you going to be back soon?’
‘Are you going to be long [or late]?’
‘Are you going to be away long [or long away]?’
‘Are you going to be gone long?’
‘When will you be back?’
‘What time [or hour] will you be back?’
And so on. There are almost endless variations on this theme.
It is a good thing that this should be so, for here we have one of the beauties of my language. In the examples I have given there are words to cover almost any shade of acquiescence or even bad temper, or both, or again of moods between the two. For there are reasons why we should use combinations of words with the widest possible range of meaning in dialogue. That is, dialogue should not be capable of only one meaning, or mood, as I shall now try to determine.
Art, as I hope we are agreed, is not representational. But novelists have taken to explaining what they think is going on in their dialogue. They will put down the wife’s question and then write a paragraph in explanation, perhaps like this:
‘How soon d’you suppose they’ll chuck you out?’
Olga, as she asked her husband this question, wore the look of a wounded animal, her lips were curled back from her teeth in a grimace and the tone of voice she used betrayed all those years a woman can give by proxy to the sawdust, the mirrors and the stale smell of beer of public bars.
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. And do we know, in life, what other people are really like? I very much doubt it. We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?
The moment the novelist does tell his readers, he enters into a pact with his audience. He is telling a story as a casual acquaintance in the pub might. Whether the audience knows it or not it is in himself, the narrator, that he is trying to create interest by his comments. 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. All I say is, the time has now come for a change. For how do we, each one of us, find out anything in the lives we each lead? Very little by reading, still less by what we are told. We get experience, which is as much knowledge as we shall ever have, by watching the way people around us behave, after they have spoken. As to other people telling us about what they have found in life, about what others have told them, or even about what they have said themselves upon occasion, it may be personal prejudice, but whenever I can check up, I find they are only giving their own version of whatever it may be. Thence, I suppose, the old saying, ‘There are two sides to every question.’ Presumably the reason for this is that the moment anything happens which is worth while – you could say memorable – one goes over it verbally after, and because conversation comes into almost any experience, in going over it one adds favourable interpretations, favourable to oneself, which colour and falsify the account one gives. If the experience is particularly damning to oneself one can go to the other extreme, shame can make one exaggerate the unfavourable side. What actually may have happened probably lies somewhere, east or west, of what one is told of an experience.
In other words, we seldom learn directly; except in disaster, life is oblique in its impact on people. And if this is so, then how can the novelist communicate obliquely with his readers and yet retain their interest, let alone do for them w
hat I regard as indispensable, namely to quicken their unconscious imagination into life while reading? Certainly not by reading out their work aloud, or having it spoken for them. That is to interpret a work of art, it is to give the speaker’s interpretation, as if each member of the audience were so immature that he or she could not make his or her own interpretation, or were too lazy to try.
If then we are agreed that novels are for reading to oneself – and please remark by that I by no means imply reading aloud to oneself; no, reading is a kind of unspoken communion with print, a silent communion with the symbols which are printed to make up the words; if that is so, then how is the reader’s imagination to be fired? For a long time I thought this was best lit by very carefully arranged passages of description. But if I have come to hold, as I do now, that we learn almost everything in life from what is done after a great deal of talk, then it follows that I am beginning to have my doubts about the uses of description. No; communication between the novelist and his reader will tend to be more and more by dialogue, until in a few years’ time someone will think up something better.
But, then, it seems almost impossible to write entirely by unspoken dialogue – and that, naturally, is one of its fascinations – but what I should like to read and what I am trying to write now, is a novel with an absolute minimum of descriptive passages in it, or even of directions to the reader (that may be such as, ‘She said angrily’, etc.) and yet narrative consisting almost entirely of dialogue sufficiently alive to create life in the reader.
To create life in the reader, it will be necessary for the dialogue to mean different things to different readers at one and the same time. In discussing with a friend something which we both may have witnessed the other night, how often have we all of us said, ‘Was she angry when she said “Oh” as he went over to the pub?’ And our friend may say categorically, ‘No, not at all, she was glad to be rid of him for a bit.’ At which we may disagree and say we think she was furious. In life only she knows how she felt, and we may be sure she will never really tell; people never do. It is only by an aggregate of words over a period followed by an action, that we obtain, in life, a glimmering of what is going on in someone, or even in ourselves.