Surviving

by Henry Green

  This is indeed, therefore, a moment for heartfelt applause and gratitude to Matthew Smith for this torrent of beauty with which he has endowed mankind.

  THE SPOKEN WORD AS WRITTEN

  (Review published in The Spectator, 1953)

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  Green wrote to Professor Sutherland: ‘As you know, I am not a reviewer and have great difficulty with The Oxford Book of English Talk, and am afraid I did not bring out how much I really admired it. And of course I was the worst person to review it as I had a bee in my bonnet on this subject of dialogue.’

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  The Oxford Book of English Talk, edited by James Sutherland is an anthology of conversations, that is to say of oral communications in print between people and extracted from plays, novels, proceedings at judicial trials, and so forth. Mr Sutherland, in his preface, believes ‘that this is the first book to record at length how Englishmen and Englishwomen actually spoke from late medieval times down to the present day’. This may be true. At the same time it does raise the question of how people speak to different purposes and on different occasions. Does a man on trial for his life speak frankly and easily? At a recent murder trial Christie used sentences of an extraordinary intricacy in his defence which were not, one would assume, characteristic of his everyday speech. Similarly, playwrights and novelists, in dialogue, are always writing, that is to say, introducing ‘business’. This must interfere with their rendering of their idea of how contemporary conversation goes. In other words no anthology can be as successful as a gramophone record made off a concealed microphone and possibly nothing would be more untypical or boring than such a record. Art must intrude. And the question is, how far art has distorted this recorded talk, recorded in print of course, from 1417 in this book to 1949.

  I saw, with great pleasure, that a piece of mine had been included. On rereading this, an extract from one of my novels, I found that it came from a moment, for me, of great difficulty in the writing of the book. Of course talk must be about something, but here a landlady is telling her lodger three things he must know and which are vital to him and to the story. To do this she verbally ducks, improvises and sometimes has to wince away from him in her telling. So what, you say? Everyone has to in real life. Very well, but the question with us here is whether such a conscious effort to other things by any novelist is a valid attempt on his part to convey contemporary talk. In other words can he clothe his purpose, which is the story he is writing, with an accurate rendering of contemporary speech?

  Another of Mr Sutherland’s choices is a broadcast by John Hilton entitled, ominously enough, ‘Calculated Spontaneity’. In this the man, well known in his day, and after four years on the air, gives us his idea of the technique of broadcasting. He tries to show how to be natural in written speech. He does not draw attention to the fact that he repeats everything at least three times. Is this repetition endurable in ordinary conversation? It is prevalent of course. But we are on a high plane here, this is an Oxford Book, and on this occasion one doubts the value of Mr Hilton’s inclusion. Nevertheless it does raise the whole difficulty, which anyone who writes dialogue knows only too well – that written dialogue is not like the real thing, and can never be.

  Yet there are moments, dramatic of course, when the words ring out and we cannot help but say ‘this then is how he spoke’. In ‘Charles I Faces His Accusers’ we have this recorded as having been said three hundred years ago: ‘Remember I am your King, your lawful King, and what sins you bring upon your heads, and the judgement of God upon this land – think well upon it – I say think well upon it, before you go further from one sin to a greater.’ Even then a doubt creeps in. At that time this text made politics and must have surely been edited by those in power. Are they then the King’s own words?

  At another trial, and again the man is ‘on his life’, poor Colonel Turner is interrupted by his wife while he gives his vital evidence. (He was hanged within the week with Pepys watching.) Turner: ‘My wife came to me publicly, I did not whisper with her –’

  Mrs Turner: ‘Nay, look you husband –‘

  Turner: ‘Prythee, Mall, sit down: you see my Lord, my wife will interrupt me with nonsense. Prythee sit thee down quickly, and do not put me out: I cannot hold women’s tongues, nor your Lordship neither.’

  Lord Chief Justice Bridgman: ‘This is not a May game.’

  Poignant enough, this, in all truth, with a real ring of speech, but how true we shall never know.

  Another gem is Pope’s description of Jonathan Swift: ‘Dr Swift has an odd blunt way that is mistaken by strangers for ill-nature.’ With a friend he calls on the Dr who rather begrudgingly offers them food and then drink. When both decline Pope describes the following.

  Swift: ‘But if you had supped with me as in all reason you ought to have done, you must have drank with me. A bottle of wine – two shillings. Two and two is four, and one is five: just two and sixpence a piece.’ (He is referring to the cost of two lobsters and two sixpenny tarts.) ‘There Pope, there’s half a crown for you, and there’s another for you, sir: for I won’t save anything by you, I am determined.’

  Here one wonders whether the artist in Pope has not improved on Swift, so taut and sharp are the sentences.

  Perhaps the best way with this difficulty, as to whether The Oxford Book of Talk really represents talk, is to turn to the few selections included which span our own lives. There is an enchanting and beautifully written broadcast, ‘Holiday at the Seaside’, by a Mrs Lilian Balch. It is conversational, certainly, although done with extreme skill, describing exactly what the title implies, but it is a monologue. Now monologue is also always with us of course, but surely only as a small part of talk, its poor relation so to speak.

  We have also a speech by Mr John Betjeman in defence of the threatened village of Letcombe Bassett. It is a fine thing but it is not, to those who have the privilege of knowing him, at all the way he talks ordinarily. It is the public occasion we are given, when he is speaking to a cause. Possibly the nearest to what Mr Sutherland calls ‘linguistic truth’ is the piece with the frightful title of ‘Wizard Prang’, another broadcast for which, no doubt, the pilot did not choose the name. But this is in just one of the Service lingos evolved by one more war and which by now is already dated. Mr Sutherland then includes a piece of Hansard, of the time after Munich. The several speeches given are all in that unique and horrible jargon of the House of Commons for which it is impossible to find reason or excuse, or its like outside that institution.

  Next we have an extract from Al Coppard’s Abel Staple Disapproved, 1933. This is accurate dialogue which rings true, but is it like talk, is it the way people actually spoke? You must read it and judge for yourselves.

  Talk, I suppose, is an exchange between two or more people watching the expression on each other’s faces, hearing the tone of voice. Perhaps there is, as Mr Hilton practised, endless repetition. Certainly there are pauses, hesitations, and changes of direction which will never do in print. And this of course we cannot expect Mr Sutherland to give us. Nor could he very well call his work The Oxford Book of Recorded Conversation or Printed Talk or what have you. What he has done, and that it is learned as well as scholarly goes without saying, is to raise a monument to that great source of our language as we know it, the spoken word, out of which as the language changes from generation to generation the written word springs; new turns of phrase as they come up in speech, being the tools of the poet and the novelist. And if this book will inspire, as it deserves, at least one young man to write out of his birthright, this most miraculous of all languages open to writers, then Mr Sutherland’s labours will not have been in vain.

  THE JEALOUS MAN

  (Unpublished, 1954)

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  Both ‘The Jealous Man’ and ‘Impenetrability’ (see page 188) were rejected by the New Yorker. ‘We’ll keep in mind your interest in doing reviews of books by dead authors,’ the letter finishes.

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  Eng
land once had a sculptor who, at the time I want you to meet him, was old and very famous. It had not always been so. When his wife was alive he did not earn much, and stayed poor for many years after she died. The commissions that came his way then were few, he could not afford many models, so whilst his wife was still living he did many nudes of her and of his incalculably beautiful child Corinne and these, now that he is world known, are in every gallery all over Europe and elsewhere.

  He lived in London and was a jealous man.

  No one was allowed to look twice at his wife or, later, at most of his models. But, unique in some respects, he did not, when the time came, mind about young men for Corinne, his daughter, who, grown up now, was even more beautiful than she had been as a little girl. At the time I am telling you of, long after his wife’s death, it was only occasionally, and perhaps more out of habit than anything else, that in Battersea Park, of a summer evening, he would exclaim on seeing a man sit himself down on the grass up to sixty yards off (just as he had said, but in a voice of thunder, to the mother so often in the past) ‘Angel, there’s another lout peeping up your skirts.’

  Both women, one dead and the other living, had by this time been seen naked in bronze marble or clay in galleries all over Europe. But he had no sense of humour. He was a jealous man.

  Like most great men, all his life he had been wonderfully looked after. His wife never spared herself whilst she was alive to leave him free to work, as he went on working throughout his life, right through the hours of daylight every day.

  When her mother died Corinne was old enough to do as much for him. Even when things turned better for them she worked, she sewed, she cooked and made the beds, she scrubbed to keep him comfortable. Then he began to be able to afford models. If what I have heard is right, he would enjoy himself with these girls every day as soon as the light failed. He was very jealous. But he was a loving father. And when his daughter came to tell him one morning that she was with child, he did not seem to be disturbed, begged her not to marry because he did not hold with marriage, said to bring her young man to live with them, as, he explained, he could not do without her. And that was that! So it was the fellow came to live with them. But what Corinnne did not tell the father was that her lover, who had begun the third love of her heart, the third love that to her heart’s delight was already turning over in her belly even then, – what the two of them did not dare tell the old man was that this lover of hers was also a sculptor.

  So she scrubbed for three and cooked for four. She ate as much as the two men together and stayed slim, as, being herself, she would for quite a while. And all the time riotously shared the bed she was glad to make each day for the father of her child.

  About now the old man was commissioned to do a bust of the King. When he used to take his clay along to the Palace in an old dirty bucket and the royal servants wrapped it up in serviettes, he made one of his few jokes. Jealous men are very often humourless. ‘I tell you Corinne they must have thought I’d got fizz in it.’

  ‘But Daddy did the King ask you that?’ ‘No, I can’t say he did.’ ‘Then what did you talk about, Daddy?’ ‘Râteliers,’ the old man replied and looked sad.

  Jealousy breeds jealousy perhaps, anyway Corinne’s man began to grow moody. He had found a gallery to let him have a one-man show. Which, of course, would mean telling the old sculptor what he was. And Corinne could not have this. ‘Not until after Baby!’ she wheedled her lover in the darkness of night. ‘For Daddy will want to do Baby, he does always.’ ‘Well he hasn’t asked my permission yet, has he?’ the young man demanded. ‘He will, my darling darling,’ she murmured and hugged her lover.

  Then the father made a great Pregnant Woman in bronze of Corinne.

  After which the child, in due course, was born as all children ought to be, at home.

  Nothing could exceed Corinne’s delight in Baby, and her father and lover were both very proud. And so soon as the little girl was weaned the old man at once wanted to do her in clay, as also did the lover, who naturally claimed first choice. Yet Corinne persuaded her young man he must have patience, and, as usual, without apparent effort, her father had his way.

  The marble recumbent figure by the old man which came out of this was, with one lone exception, considered the best thing of a baby he ever did.

  Afterwards the lover pressed harder. An apartment was falling vacant above the garage he used in secret for a studio. And Corinne, who truly longed to move in, for it seemed more than flesh and blood could stand to love three people all at one time, was afraid for the old man, but agreed to move once she found someone to look after him.

  So she bearded her father. He did not say much, only that he could never, on any account, have one of his models to see to him. ‘She’d only get under my feet,’ he said.

  So the search began and it was not easy. For, as Corinne explained to us all, whoever the girl was she would have to be lovely and beautiful and kind. Which is when I interfered and was sorry after.

  I am a specialist on West African religions and knew of an Ashanti girl who had come over as nurse to a British family since sent home. Once here that child had died, and, as I knew her language of which her employers knew little, they brought me in to comfort the distracted, heartbroken coloured girl, who had adored her charge. I found her handsome, clean and young with a skin of a beautiful impenetrable ebony. And she knew how to cook English dishes. So it was I introduced this girl to the old man.

  As soon as Corinne met her she was delighted, all the more because she was sure her father would want to do a bust of the maid. But this, in the event, he never did.

  Then, after a period when both young women waited on him and the old sculptor worked as usual right through the hours of daylight, while Aba, as she was called, cooked entirely to his taste, then Corinne and her lover took Baby off to the apartment over the garage studio. Her father, although he stayed just as affectionate, did not seem to mind. And Corinne came back from time to time. But she found nothing to remark. Aba kept his place clean and the old man seemed content. His work was going well. His fame grew steadily. So Corinne, more and more taken up with Baby, hardly looked in much any more. Particularly as the three of them always dined together in a small restaurant twice a week, once Corinne had found a neighbour on whom to park Baby, on Aba’s nights out.

  It was then, as Corinne told me later, that things must have begun to happen.

  For about now, it became obvious that Aba was soon to have a child.

  You must understand the old man did not so much disapprove of marriage, he just ignored it. He had not resented the arrival of his daughter’s child, nor saw any reason to blame the maid.

  I did make some enquiries, and found Aba’s young man was a law student in London, an Ashanti too. So it was arranged that, when the time came, the baby was to be born in the house where Aba lived, as all children should be. And Corinne engaged to come in more often to do what was needful for the two of them who, so shortly, were to be three.

  It was thus, then, they peaceably waited for the birth; the old man, as ever, working through the hours of daylight and, maybe, still enjoying one or more of his models when the light failed, with Corinne coming in every now and again to see that he and his maid were all right. It was now, because she disliked subterfuge, that she told her father the young man of hers was also a sculptor.

  ‘Fine to have one more in the family’ was his only comment, but it was notable that he did not ask to see the lover’s work.

  All this time Aba grew bigger. Corinne told me the girl was entirely sweet, serene, kind and tranquil. There was just one thing. She did not understand plumbing. When the waste pipe of a sink in their basement got blocked up, rather than cope with the trap Aba crept into the studio, stole some clay, baked it in the oven, and therewith laid a conduit or trough from that overflowing sink to the main drain in the yard. As Corinne remarked, no doubt the girl had learned how to make bricks without straw at home in her native village.


  And when the little girl it turned out to be was weaned the old man wanted to make something of the infant. Aba did not object, she was too happy. So for three whole weeks Corinne’s father put away his other work and recreated Aba’s baby in wet clay which he covered with a damp cloth every night when the light failed. We were all agreed it was the best thing of a baby he had ever done in all his life. Then one evening he went to a party. When he got back early in the morning the light in his studio was still on. He went to investigate. And he found Aba pushing the wet clay about with her fingers to alter the shape of her baby’s nose.

  The old sculptor fired Aba there and then and could not be persuaded to reconsider this. He very much blamed me over the whole business. He was a jealous man.

  The maid with the child and her lover went back to Ashantiland, Corinne having to sell the bust of her own child to pay for the fares.

  Aba’s child was eventually cast in bronze, but has never been exhibited. And what has always fascinated me, the old man never altered the nose from the way Aba left it.

  And that is all.

  A WRITER’S DIARY

  (Review published in The London Magazine, 1954)

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  Green’s accompanying letter to his piece finishes with these words: ‘Quite frankly, the book is almost impossible. It is one long agonised cry from someone who was breaking herself with overwork and it should, as she meant it to be, be the basis on which a memoir was written on her.’

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  A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf [Hogarth Press], being extracts from the journal she kept for twenty-seven years, that is to say from 1915 to 1941 when she died, is a selection by her husband. This volume is of as many pages as there are days in the year. In a wary preface Mr Woolf is careful to inform us that what he has chosen, out of twenty-six volumes of manuscript, includes ‘practically everything which referred to her own writing’. However much we admire her as a writer, and we do, this strikes a chill. Most of us, as she was, are incurably curious. And when we are concerned with one of the great women of our time, it is hard to be denied. This Mr Woolf seems to acknowledge. For he has added ‘a certain number of passages’ on what she thinks of what she is reading, which incidentally is only in the classics, for until towards the end of her life she avoided the books of her contemporaries. This appears to be from a genuine lack of interest (although James Joyce’s work she admits bothered her). Then Mr Woolf also includes passages of which, as she herself writes ‘It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects’, and he finally offers us certain pieces which ‘give the reader an idea of the direct impact on her mind of scenes and persons’.