Surviving

by Henry Green

  And yet he had a genius for encouraging the young. He would also give up almost any amount of his time, if he thought one was any good. I only wish I had kept the pages of mine which he blue pencilled to show me what could with advantage be left out. He was almost magically successful with his deletions.

  Anyway he said he approved of what I had read him of Mood and urged me as I got stuck more and more with it, as I increasingly hesitated, he urged me, and this I think may help young writers today, he said vehemently ‘Go on, go on and get it finished and then we can knock the lot into shape afterwards. But you must finish it first.’

  This is what I was quite unable to do, I don’t now know whether to be sorry or glad. All I do know is that if Mr Garnett, in the event of my finishing the book, still liked it then as the greatest book surgeon of his day, he would have shown me how to cut it open, what to remove, what to renew, and how to sew everything up again until it was a Novel.

  Even now I can’t myself see how Mood could be knifed into a book. For instance, take the following – and you will bear in mind that Celia was Constance’s great friend before the former’s marriage:

  And Celia, since marriage, had lost all semblance of what she had been. Constance laughed and thought if they were to go back together now to the Mediterranean again as they had done, before Celia was married, Constance thought how different it would be. Although she had been alone when that aeroplane came overhead yet she had bought two toy aeroplanes, one loneliness for each of them. She had not told Celia about it. They had often swum out together, she had been glad to draw Celia away from the beach, they had lain side by side dazed by the sun and delight out on the sea. So Constance had bought one for herself and one for Celia as a celebration in honour of those occasions. And Constance who had looked on the aeroplanes as one and the same and had held neither in preference to the other, had chosen one of the two for her own when Celia married, a secret one.

  This passage starts a long return by Constance as she sits in Hyde Park, a ‘flash back’ in her mind to her time with Celia by the Mediterranean. It would read better if carried out in dialogue, the ‘do you remember’ sort of thing, with Constance’s young man also present to act as a foil. Then I suppose one would have to find some drama they would have been moving to out there which would have to have some bearing on a drama threatening them presently in the Park. I don’t know what Mr Garnett would have had to say to that if he were alive today, it might have passed. Certainly it might have given body to the following passage which I still quite like. The two girls, by the Mediterranean, but at night, go off out alone, into the night, after dinner.

  ‘They had gone to the outmost edge of the garden, and lights over that porch which led to the hotel were caught in a tiny reflection in their glasses on the marble table which gleamed like skin in the dark. They sat on a bench which had been made to encircle a tree, when they leant back the bark, which was not hot or cold, pressed into their backs in long furry tongues. The marble table kept a hoard of coolness and their glasses of the dark wine looked like huge soft eyes, the pair of them, marvellously soft.’

  Oh dear when I think of the long hours it took to write and wrestle with this unfinished unfinishable novel and then when I think what am I doing making a fool of myself allowing it to be in print at long last, well all I can say to the writer who intends to go on is – ‘throw nothing away, it may come in useful some time. If only to show how things shouldn’t be written,’ and thus perhaps, much later, as now, to turn a slightly dishonest penny.

  But the lack of animation, which is probably the first sign of dissolution, the seeds of death there is in every work of art and which existed, to me, so strongly in this unfinishable novel, even while it was being written, that, in spite of encouragement I couldn’t begin to finish it, occurs most strongly in the final paragraph, that is the last point I got to and beyond which I could not go. Constance is still alone in Hyde Park and it is not long after her meeting with the mocking ticket inspector:

  She watched a couple pass before her. They had on them as they walked a mood so gentle that everything was brother, sister to them. They had that in the way Kings could be proudly apart and yet near to the people. But it was the loneliness in high places which was the great memory you could have, those secret walks with pets where were no men to ape uneasy monkeys, that was what counted.

  Oh being a King was really for when you were alone, for that was the only kind that counted. You could promise, you could swear, but friends nearly always changed as the years went round. They married as one might go to Africa to shoot big game – then stay there drinking, or another was sent to Mexico and there were convents. Everywhere you looked were graves for friendship, love; and tombstones on everyone’s tongue.

  Of everyone you met, was only you you could be with always and she thought that’s how it is, don’t let’s have any monkey business with other people, the issue ultimately is with ourselves. As my two eyes are co-ordinated so let me have myself as my friend, let me have that glory where I draw on no one, lean on nobody. May I learn to be alone.

  The manuscript of Mood ends, for ever here. As I remember it the love I had for the original of Constance died a week or so before those last words were written. And that, perhaps, is the whole explanation.

  BEFORE THE GREAT FIRE

  (Published in Volume 7 The London Magazine, 1960. Also published in The Texas Quarterly, 1960, entitled ‘Firefighting’.)

  ⎯

  A well-structured synopsis of a book, of which he completed only this, a first section, was found among Green’s papers. ‘The book, to a length of between 65 and 75000 words, is to be autobiographical with the least possible use of the first person singular . . . it will be concerned almost entirely with the men and women of the three Fire Stations in which I served throughout the War. These people came from all classes and from many parts of Britain. Waiters, manservants, shop assistants, stock exchange clerks, petty thieves masquerading as building workers and professional London Fire Brigade men living cheek by jowl, sometimes in great danger, more often waiting in acute boredom and nearly all of them more than thirty years of age – all this created a situation which led to every kind of human relationship, unlikely friendships, and obvious jealousies. The title of the book will be London and Fire 1939 – 45 by Henry Green.’

  ⎯

  My London at war in 1939 begins in Eire in 1938. It was Munich, just upon us. My wife and I had a hired car and driver, travelled south west from Dublin almost as far as Connemara to a fisherman’s hotel run for officers and gentlewomen. The building squatted beside the Atlantic where in great sighing loneliness the telephone cable from the US came up into an untenanted wooden, bleak and apparently deserted tar-black hut.

  My wife sea bathed, we sat about, but every night at nine there was the relentless wireless. Always, each day, news worse than the last.

  One by one officers were recalled by telegram, two by two, until at last in a group so to speak of the widows they might soon become, the wives these men had left behind to finish the furlough, if indeed furlough it could now be called, gathered each succeeding evening at nine to listen to more wireless screaming menaces and keep a stiff upper lip to themselves.

  We two often took picnic baskets to get into the wilds with our car and avoid, turn a blind eye, on officers leaving for home and mobilisation. We did not want to witness any part of it, dreading forward as we were to what might all too soon be for the two of us.

  We used to walk out with sandwiches to get away from the lounge where these women were already in wait for each evening and nine o’clock. And almost as soon as we were out of the grounds the coast was deserted, or so we thought. Enormous crescent beaches curved one after the other as wandering forward we shrimped in sea anemone garlanded, limpid emerald pools. Each one of these led to another and so in turn round the next jutted point of sand over which waves broke in shawl after shawl after shawl of whey-coloured lace, advancing, receding, hissing
into a silence where no sea birds were.

  It was at one of these divisions between one creamy beach and another that we saw a seal come out of the pewter sea as far as black shoulders, in its mouth a flapping sole so bright the fish was like a shaft of white light, violently vibrating.

  My wife said, ‘Isn’t he clever – a wet cat,’ and moved on. We had been married for years, were fond, just did not say much to one another, so stayed comfortably quiet.

  Thus we did not have much to do with those who were still left in the hotel. It must have been plain from my appearance I was no Army or Air Force man, and that being the case, these almost bereaved women who remained had really no call to say anything to us. Indeed, as so often at such times, their being the wives of officers made it seem as though they guarded secrets with their virtue and that they might report one if, by ill chance, one asked any sort of a question which might seem to call for a knowledgeable answer. So we kept pretty well on our own.

  In silence therefore, although alone, keeping ourselves to ourselves, we crossed the point, stumbling through soft sand no tide had reached in weeks, to come upon the next new moon of curving strand and sea. But not this time untenanted.

  For, just whiter than the sand and at a certain distance, a couple were lying on their backs over a rug, but naked. Or had they white bathing dresses? We both of us stopped dead on our heels so as not to embarrass what might turn out to be two of the hotel guests trying perhaps to create a last memory, but when he saw us the man got up and turning his half of the rug over, lay down under it so that they both were covered. We went on. When we came up to them we had never seen them yet. Thus we arrived at the next beach which looked as if it had not been visited in ages. Here were some rocks and another, deeper, bluer pool. So, in this priest-ridden Ireland we sat down to rest, but there would be no rest for us that afternoon.

  A milk-like sky hid the sun and because out of all that stillness a fitful wayward wind had begun to spread the freshness and tang of the Atlantic, it came over grey, and because sand dunes were ahead like huge soft dead lions with deep green hills rolling up which it would be necessary to climb, we settled down behind a rock, the pool not twenty yards distant, and were so placed that we could see both hills and sea and yet had our backs to the couple on the point’s far side. This man and woman could thus never say we were snooping, no peeping toms we.

  We had barely settled and had just held hands when we saw, dressed all in black, a minute and aged crone making her way straight at us down over the last swell of land before the sand. My wife said, ‘D’you think she’ll make trouble for that pair?’ We watched. But she came head on for us. My wife took her hand away. It could now be seen the lady was a peasant and very old, nut-cracker nose and chin like a fairy story witch. I said, ‘Will she speak to us, for I can never understand what they say?’

  But the old woman uttered not a word, came on up to the pool, and began to undress in our full view. My wife coughed to no effect. One black petticoat after another was taken off until in a few minutes she was stark nude. She then, still facing our way, stepped into the water which she funnelled over her faint pink-white skin with her old hands. The belly was unwrinkled, well preserved, the bush of hair black and enormous, but above her waist and below just above her knees, she sagged and folded into rolls of thin flesh. She could have been all of seventy and the hair on her head was the white of well-burnt wood ashes.

  We did not say a word.

  After ten minutes she was done, made no attempt to dry, put all the clothes on again and went off to wherever she was from.

  My wife told me she would like her tea now and as we went back a bit inland to avoid the other couple, she said: ‘With all the dreadful news there is I think we might tell the driver to take us east to the nearest port, I suppose Rosslare, so if we must we can get home quickly, darling. Besides, I’m beginning to find Ireland creepy.’

  So next day we were off in the car once more. Meanwhile over in England, unbeknownst to us, committees had already been sitting for years to decide what, in time of war, was to be done with and for civilians such as ourselves.

  Meanwhile, in deeper current ignorance than most others, my wife and I were bowling along behind our driver towards Cork, in Southern Ireland, whilst even in England none except at the top knew that a trial mobilisation had been decided for Civil Defence and that those auxiliary firemen in London who had passed their tests (which will be described) were to have their first experience of London Fire Brigade improvisation.

  It was raining as we drove along the sea road. Suddenly, there was a gaudy station wagon drawn up on the verge and then, soon after, where a bridge spanned a stream, 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. A party after sea trout seen blurred through glass striped by diagonally slithering raindrops. And then for two hours as we went on it was nothing but an occasional dark donkey, tail to the wind, or a flock of geese, wings outspread, hissing defiance at an extremity of their ominous chalk-white necks.

  We were both perfectly miserable on this drive, as also when we got to Cork. It was one of the three worst moments of the war, for war it was one always instinctively knew. Declaration of war was not to come for another twelve months, the rising anguish during the whole year before Mr Chamberlain declared war over the wireless, was far the worst, it got more and more bad as the dreadful days went by. The waiting for the worst is the worst thing about personal disaster.

  And the other really bad time was the chase of our armies through Flanders by those Germans and the collapse of France. Once France fell everyone for no known reason felt ever so much better. ‘Now at last we are on our own,’ the whole of Britain said, speaking as one for once.

  There was a big speech on the wireless advertised from London that same evening and because we felt we must find out whether or no we should push on to try for any boat home from Rosslare, I asked one of the waiters in the bar if there was a wireless. Only in the manager’s private room apparently. Could he then be so kind as to present the manager with our compliments and ask leave to listen? He went off at once but was back in five minutes. The manager was sorry but there was a big fight on the radio at that hour, would we mind? On enquiry it turned out to be Jack Doyle, the Irish heavyweight, who was to fight someone in London. The speech we were after was on the Home Service and the fight on the Light Programme at the same time, and so we were done.

  We then had a miserable dinner, went back to that bar for more drinks. Judge then my surprise when a waiter came up to say the manager was expecting me in his room. He seemed definitely to exclude my wife. So I went alone, supposing there had been second thoughts of a sort.

  Shown to a combined sitting room and office already laced with cigar smoke, a tumbler of neat whisky shoved in my hand, I found five or six powerful citizens of Eire tight round a huge wireless. They had the thing full on, but in their cups they had mismanaged the knobs. It was bellowing out wild deadly cheering and applause which followed as it always did the end of what had obviously been a big speech to some National Socialist rally at the Sports Palace in Berlin. Now we had no German, my wife and I, yet these screaming, shouted, harshly expectorated speeches had drawn us at home to listen in an ever-increasing anguish of terror night after night; in spite of which when we would read the translation in newspapers next morning it was with complete disbelief. It did not seem possible such things could be said. I was therefore familiar with the uproar the Irish were now listening to, therefore it came as no surprise when the German audience broke into its usual chants of ‘Sieg Heil – Sieg Heil’ each louder than the last, a kind of rising invocation each step higher than the next like a grand staircase to slaughter.

  But my drunken hosts were taken in. ‘A
ch, the fight’s ended in a foul,’ they said.

  I tried to explain they were on a wrong wavelength but they were too far gone. Then, as the fight might still be on, I felt it a shame they should miss their programme, so I tried to get at the machine to tune us on London. They pulled me away. ‘Let’s hear how they robbed the boy,’ they said. On which Deutschland über Alles bellowed into the manager’s office. This they did recognise and all broke down into laughter. These men now let me reach the dials and I got on to the Light Programme. Doyle had been counted out in the first round not more than two minutes earlier. They laughed again. Doyle it seems was not unknown at that hotel in Cork. They gave me another tumbler of whisky and let me escape around ten.

  The next day we set off in haste for Rosslare. Our trouble was we had no one we could ask for advice. The British papers were two or more days old and the Irish press, in an attitude accepted as far as we could tell by all the natives, maintained that nothing could ever happen to the great Little Republic. It was a joy therefore when after a long drive we arrived at this port and were getting into the hotel, to find old Mr Hanks dashing out of the revolving door, an Associate of the Royal Academy of Water Colour Artists, aged eighty, slightly known to me, all his paraphernalia on his back, scuttling crabwise out presumably to get some more done in the last light of evening. His work was one watercolour after another, and whatever the beach he had before him, consisted always of a golden foreground of dry sand, somewhere in mid-distance a wet pool with wet brown seaweed and then the sea, blue coloured, fifteen guineas, always the same, each unframed and with a ready sale. He nodded coldly to me, hurried on.

  ‘What, Mr Hanks,’ I called, overjoyed even at an acquaintance, ‘more work?’