Surviving

by Henry Green

  INTERVIEWER

  Well, that was written in 1928 – were you influenced toward that style by Ulysses?

  MR GREEN

  No. There’s no ‘stream of consciousness’ in any of my books that I can remember – I did not read Ulysses until Living was finished.

  INTERVIEWER

  That was your second novel, and that novel seems quite apart stylistically from the first and from those that followed – almost all of which, while ‘inimitably your own’, so to speak, are of striking diversity in tone and style. Of them though, I think Back and Pack My Bag have a certain similarity, as have Loving and Concluding. Then again, Nothing and Doting might be said to be similar in that, for one thing at least, they’re both composed of . . . what would you say, ninety-five per cent? . . . ninety-five per cent dialogue.

  MR GREEN

  Nothing and Doting are about the upper classes – and so is Pack My Bag, but it is nostalgia in this one, and too, in Back, which is about the middle class. Nostalgia has to have its own style. Nothing and Doting are hard and sharp; Back and Pack My Bag, soft.

  INTERVIEWER

  You speak of ‘classes’ now, and I recall that Living has been described as the ‘best proletarian novel ever written’. Is there to your mind then a social-awareness responsibility for the writer or artist?

  MR GREEN

  No, no. The writer must be disengaged or else he is writing politics. Look at the Soviet writers.

  I just wrote what I heard and saw, and, as I’ve told you, the workers in my factory thought it rotten. It was my very good friend Christopher Isherwood used that phrase you’ve just quoted and I don’t know that he ever worked in a factory.

  INTERVIEWER

  Concerning the future of the novel, what do you think is the outlook for the Joycean-type introspective style, and, on the other hand, for the Kafka school?

  MR GREEN

  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.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you believe that films and television will radically alter the format of the novel?

  MR GREEN

  It might be better to ask if novels will continue to be written. It’s impossible for a novelist not to look out for other media nowadays. 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. It is simply that the novelist is a communicator and must therefore be interested in any form of communication. You don’t dictate to a girl now, you use a recording apparatus; no one faints any more, they have blackouts; in Geneva you don’t kill someone by cutting his throat, you blow a poisoned dart through a tube and zing you’ve got him. Media change. We don’t have to paint chapels like Cocteau, but at the same time we must all be ever on the lookout for the new ways.

  INTERVIEWER

  What do you say about the use of symbolism?

  MR GREEN

  You can’t escape it can you? What after all is one to do with oneself in print? Does the reader feel a dread of anything? Do they all feel a dread for different things? Do they all love differently? Surely the only way to cover all these readers is to use what is called symbolism.

  INTERVIEWER

  It seems that you’ve used the principle of ‘non-existent author’ in conjunction with another – that since identified with Camus, and called the absurd. For a situation to be, in this literary sense, genuinely absurd, it must be convincingly arrived at, and should not be noticed by readers as being at all out of the ordinary. Thus it would seem normal for a young man, upon the death of his father, to go down and take over the family’s iron-foundry, as in Living; or to join the service in war-time, as in Caught; or to return from the war, as in Back – and yet, in abrupt transitions like these, the situations and relationships which result are almost sure to be, despite any dramatic or beautiful moments, fundamentally absurd. In your work I believe this reached such a high point of refinement in Loving as to be indiscernible – for, with all the critical analyses that book received, no one called attention to the absurdity of one of the basic situations: that of English servants in an Irish household. Now isn’t that fundamental situation, and the absence of any reference to it throughout the book, intended to be purely absurd?

  MR GREEN

  The British servants in Eire while England is at war is Raunce’s conflict and one meant to be satirically funny. It is a crack at the absurd Southern Irish and at the same time a swipe at the British servants, who yet remain human beings. But it is meant to torpedo that woman and her daughter-in-law, the employers.

  As to the rest, the whole of life now is of course absurd – hilarious sometimes, as I told you earlier, but basically absurd.

  INTERVIEWER

  And have you ever heard of an actual case of an Irish household being staffed with English servants?

  MR GREEN

  Not that comes quickly to mind, no.

  INTERVIEWER

  Well, now what is it that you’re writing on at present?

  MR GREEN

  I’ve been asked to do a book about London during the blitz, and I’m into that now.

  INTERVIEWER

  I believe you’re considered an authority on that – and, having read Caught, I can understand that you would be. What’s this book to be called?

  MR GREEN

  London and Fire, 1940.

  INTERVIEWER

  And it is not fiction?

  MR GREEN

  No, it’s an historical account of that period.

  INTERVIEWER

  Then this will be your first full-length work of non-fiction?

  MR GREEN

  Yes, quite.

  INTERVIEWER

  I see. London and Fire, 1940 – a commissioned historical work. Well, well; I dare say you’ll have to give up the crabwise approach for this one. What’s the first sentence?

  MR GREEN

  ‘My “London of 1940” . . . opens in Cork, 1938.’

  INTERVIEWER

  . . . I see.

  – TERRY SOUTHERN

  AN UNFINISHED NOVEL

  (Published in The London Magazine, 1960)

  ⎯

  Coinciding with the publication of Edward Stokes’s critical study, The Novels of Henry Green, this number of The London Magazine was intended as a celebration of Henry Green’s work. In an interview with Alan Ross which follows this piece, Green says of ‘the actual business of composition’: ‘I find it so exhausting now I simply can’t do it anymore. The older you get, the harder it gets.’

  ⎯

  I was in love in the late twenties when I began a novel I am never to finish, called Mood. It was about the particular girl and the name given her was Constance Ightam – ‘the name was correctly pronounced only by those who said Eyetam, not Iggetam or Itham’. She was about twenty years old and had once a great friend, another girl who had got married, Celia was her name. ‘Your dog dies and after a little you buy another, your friend goes and if you are lucky you find a new friend. And all the time you are learning to walk alone. When Celia married she had gone the way of all friends. When you have been two you can’t be three, and now Constance was alone.’ Alone and walking in London down Oxford Street towards Hyde Park when she hears – ‘that high, loud, educated voice, she saw the Blue Train where the voice was so much in evidence, then the boat where was no sound of it throughout the crossing, and the Pullman where again it triumphed, crying: “My dear I went to sleep before the boat started and didn’t wake until my maid told me we were in!” ’ And now here was that same kind of voice – ‘here in Oxford Street, this time proclaiming . . . “the most lovely sponge”. Constance looked and there was that same kind of woman coming out of a shop.’

  This being an impossible novel to be able to finish, Constance proceeds to dream. Sponges lead her to
the Mediterranean. ‘For what is a sponge – and this she felt but did not think. Why it is picked from the sea, it is cleaned and dried, perhaps a lot of things are done to it, perhaps nothing very much. Perhaps a little salt is still left in it. And here she sailed.’ Sailed that is in her mind (and everything in this book was to have been through Constance’s well-loved eyes). She sailed to that tideless sea. ‘As you came down the beach for where you got in the sea it was like you had a halo round you; where the sun had been and now the warm sea lapped you you felt you could roll like dolphins for that round fat feeling. Oh she had gone plunging out, her wet rubber cap had shone like any god, there were no waves nothing but this blue sea, she rolled on it, the sun played like cymbals on her flanks and on one breast and then from a surfeit of all this she’d lain on her back and floated. She’d closed her eyes. But then was a hum like thousands cheering miles away and she looked, and up above in that tremendous blue there was an aeroplane, aluminium painted, all along its wings winking, blinding light, high, high above, ever so slowly moving quite straight like a queen.’

  For Kings and Queens, my private symbol I suppose for the burning love I felt for the girl in question, Kings and Queens were to mean much to Constance. An only child, her parents had one house in the country and another in London, the one Queen Anne the other by Robert Adam and all the servants to wait on her as was still feasible nearly thirty years ago.

  Her parents are introduced. The mother first. ‘Having such a deal of stones suddenly glittering here and there about her, and being so dark, so with her it was like that glittering armoured sheath above a beetle’s wings: she might, when you saw her in the middle of her flowers, suddenly burst out flying, that sheath might suddenly burst open on her sharp and iridescent skin – she constantly wore black, she might at moments ride a broomstick.’

  And then there is poor Mr Ightam, the father, the city man who comes down to his Queen Anne house at weekends. He has a symbol, as Constance is to have one too. His room ‘looked to be what he was’ ‘The walls were done in a brown paper, and on them hung pictures of horses which might be by Alken or Sartorius. There was a big desk on which were many papers and that one yellow china vase of flowers.’ Some play is made of this vase, I regret to say because – ‘he could remember where it stood when he was small and his nurse was washing him, and tickling him’.

  This so-called symbolism, the love for a significant object, is much more strongly brought out in dearest Constance. On the mantelpiece of her room, amongst the invitation cards, the two Delft candlesticks and the old Dutch clock lay or lurked what was really Constance ‘two small bright painted aeroplanes in wood’.

  Lord, when you came in that room and looked round and cried out, as you couldn’t help doing, Lord what a fine room, then, when you saw those aeroplanes you might sing those are her pets, that’s what is most hers in here. When you came in and saw them it might be like you came into a King’s rooms and saw a local paper there. Or, more like, the other way about. You came into a common sort of room and then you saw two Kings seated by the fire.

  Nobody would ever know, she sang as she looked about her in Oxford Street, no one, not one of these not even mother, nobody would know about those aeroplanes. And when mother had had the walls done that gorgeous blue then suddenly she’d see she could bring her Queens down from where she’d put them, in a drawer in her bedroom. But when she’d brought them down and put them on the mantelpiece (she’d put them on the same side one with the other because they looked nicer like that – one just pushing in front of the other) when she’d stepped back to look, then she saw they weren’t Queens any more, but where they were now they were Kings.

  This was written when Professor Freud was still alive in Vienna, and it would be in my bedroom now if my wife had not dug it out of a drawer for a series on discarded work dreamed up by someone in the BBC. Why does one give up something on which one has been working? Obviously because one feels it simply will not do. It is the reason why it will not do, that may be of interest to readers of The London Magazine.

  It is of course perfectly true and feasible that people walking up Oxford Street into Hyde Park can be reminded of much by the faces or the tones of voice, if they can still hear these, of those they encounter. It is also true that any such reminder is almost incapable of being rendered in print. A writer is after all at quite a remote distance from his reader, what he has to say to his reader has no tone of voice, his face is unseen, expressionless, as he confers so to speak at second hand through the black and white of print, as he confers with whoever it may be is good enough to use eyes to read him. It is quite hard enough to establish contact or even sympathy with a reader even by the use of the first person singular – I went to such and such a place, I did so and so – but to establish a girl, in this case Constance, in a static situation where nothing is happening to her except her thoughts and feelings, is an impossible project for the novelist and one which only a very young man, as I was then, would try for. Take the following: she is seated in the Park and a tired ticket collector comes to collect his fee, in those days one penny.

  He had looked into her eyes. She had looked into his. She had seen a light of mockery there. As she had seen that monkey go careering down along the path just now in front of her, so Constance, being like she was this day, had invested that Collector with another life, a new agility. Being so lovely she had brought him out of himself like the night would do which he longed for so: that light in his eye was almost as she had been with Celia on the Mediterranean sea. But he was a man. She felt he had been half mocking at her for being a woman. She had a small creepy feeling at that, like her senses were coiled up inside.

  The effect of a sentence like this, even if it is an obviously incompetent echo of D. H. Lawrence, must be quite fatal to a book. Any work of art if it is alive, carries the germs of its death, like any other live thing, around with it. But in a passage like the above there is already a death sentence, the black cap on the whole projected work inexorably pronounced for a total lack of sympathy or communication with the reader.

  A more experienced writer would have introduced some sort of action, for instance Constance might have been sitting in the Park with one of her young men who could have resented a familiarity on the part of the Collector. A trick of this kind is only too familiar in many a novel and rarely hides the barrenness of situation it seeks to conceal.

  Equally disastrous in my abandoned book is a worked-up climax which fails to come off. Constance while she is making her way to the Park is reminded by something or other of when, as a child, she went with Celia and her French Governess to watch haymaking outside the Queen Anne country house.

  Celia found a stick and first they walked on the new grass between the golden dykes of hay and then they ran along these long concentric rings. Each round they made, one following the other, brought them nearer to the middle of this piece which had been mowed in a round.

  The horses harnessed to the full waggon followed them with their wide eyes from where they had been left not far away. The children ran shrieking round and then, as they neared the centre, they grew more quiet. The horses shifted, they would turn their heads away and yet always come back to the children. The men, sitting low in shade, lazily watched them, only the Governess paid no attention. And as they came nearer and nearer in to the centre, in ever shortening circles, those two horses, hidden from the men by their waggon, grew more uneasy. They snorted through their wide nostrils, distended and red. The children came nearer and nearer in: each horse struck at the ground, their quarters trembled, they were thrown into a sweat. And when at last the centre was reached and the children fell down there, both of them, with what came to the men as a faint cry, then those two horses, with a scream, bolted. They careered away, the waggon pitching, crashing behind them.

  Thus the worked-up climax which fails however well written, and thus the old trick by which the novelist, to be dramatic, casts his reader, or rather drags his reader back
into that imaginary golden sunny adolescence spiked with simple fears. When my adolescence, for one, was a time of deep depression shadowed by terror of so much that was unknown, and deep terror at that. And when, at the time I was trying to write this novel I was so much nearer my own adolescence than I am now, in fact I had then only just escaped!

  How pitiably bad this writing is you must be thinking. And yet at the time I wrote it I had the inestimable advantage of the ear of no less a person than Mr Edward Garnett, the friend of Conrad, of T. E. Lawrence, and the most celebrated publisher’s reader of his day. I had submitted my first novel Blindness to Messrs Dent whose reader he was, and they accepted it. Now, in the goodness of his heart, Mr Garnett, from disinterested kindliness, was trying to help me over the hurdle of the second novel. And a real hurdle it is, indeed it is more than that to every writer, it is a sort of Aintree fence for horse and rider, which is not a bad analogy for the relationship between the author and his casual reader. I had this vast new fence to jump and this book Mood was to carry me over it, and then, you see, the flow, the impetus, began to weaken, to peter out. That this happened was due I now feed sure to the basic weakness of the construction, a succession of moods indeed, just reflections with no action. And so, as the surge of ideas slowed down, I lost heart and several times went to see Mr Garnett for advice and comfort.

  Edward Garnett the first few times a young man met him, cut a formidable figure. Tall, gaunt, greyfaced, with large eyes very much magnified behind his glasses, after opening the door in Pond Place, and leading you up the stairs to his room, he sat down in his armchair and put a rug on his knees. I think it was the grey white hair cut low on the forehead in a fringe which particularly intimidated me. But, at any rate at first, he was a shy man, and I can’t forget the rising sense of despair in which, all haltingly, I read aloud from the manuscript of Mood.