Will the Real Mr. Green Please Stand Up?

Anyone who has ever distrusted the judgment of book reviewers will be intrigued by the story of one Richard Church, a British poet and novelist who wrote two reviews of the same book, giving opposite verdicts. In one journal, he “strongly recommended” the book and the author’s previous works for their courage, originality and honesty. Two weeks later, reviewing the book for another journal, he berated the author for “infantilism.” Asked to explain himself, Church claimed that both responses had been genuine: “I liked it and I didn’t like it, and I had to say so.”

The book in question was “Pack My Bag,” a kind of premature autobiography by then-35-year-old Henry Green, who at the time (1940) had published only three novels--’Blindness” (1926), “Living” (1929) and “Party Going” (1939)--but who was strongly (and, as it turned out, wrongly) convinced that he would not survive World War II. Green did service as a firefighter during the Blitz and lived another 33 years, producing six more novels: “Caught” (1943), “Loving” (1945), “Back” (1946), “Concluding” (1948), “Nothing” (1950) and “Doting” (1952). His terse titles suggest a writer at once modestly self-effacing yet stylishly distinctive. Green’s work generally received very favorable reviews from the critics, though there were always dissenting voices as well. Most important, perhaps, the readers who seemed most to appreciate his work were other writers.

‘[A] novelist of such rarity, such marvellous originality, intuition, sensuality and finish, that every fragment of his work is precious...” John Updike declared in his introduction to “Surviving,” edited by Green’s grandson, Matthew Yorke. “[T]he most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time,” thought Eudora Welty. “[T]he best writer of his time,” concurred Rebecca West. Other fans included Anthony Burgess, Nathalie Sarraute, Terry Southern and W.H. Auden, certainly a diverse and distinguished crew. Yet of his immediate contemporaries Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene and George Orwell, Green is still the least well known.

A shy, elusive English aristocrat who shunned publicity, Henry Green wrote under a pseudonym; his real name was Henry Yorke. In some respects, he led a double life. He published his first novel, “Blindness,” while a student at Oxford. An imaginative story about a young man who loses his eyesight, it was an impressive debut. After leaving Oxford without a degree, he went to work, first in the factory, eventually as managing director, of his father’s firm, Pontifex, which manufactured equipment for breweries and bathrooms. At the same time, he continued writing, publishing under the pseudonym in deference to his parents’ dislike of publicity. Amusingly, his Oxford contemporary, the aesthete Harold Acton, pointed out one possible reason for his continuing low profile: “There are Greens of so many shades writing novels nowadays that one wishes he had selected another colour.” But self-effacement was not only part of Green’s makeup, it was central to his artistic strategy. If a single thread runs through all nine of his otherwise dissimilar novels, it is the author’s desire to remove or conceal himself, so as not to come between the reader and the novel.

In his early writings, Green often left out articles like “the” and “a,” as in this passage from “Living’: “Two o’clock. Thousands came back from dinner along streets .... Thousands came back to factories they worked in from their dinners .... Hundreds went along road outside, men and girls. Some turned in to Dupret factory.” In his final two novels, “Nothing” and “Doting,” the stories are told almost entirely through dialogue, with almost no interposing narrative voice. “I think nothing of ‘Nothing,”’ sniffed Waugh, who had been an admirer of much of Green’s earlier work. One can’t help suspecting in this case, however, that the author of “Vile Bodies” might have been envious of how deftly, subtly and brilliantly “Nothing” skewers the vanity of aging “Bright Young Things” unwilling to cede the spotlight to their now-grownup children.

Florid descriptions and long, convoluted sentences are also hallmarks of Green’s style. In “Concluding,” a soft-edged novel set at a state-run girls’ school (Green’s attempt here at imagining the future offers no competition to Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”), a teacher discovers a missing schoolgirl beneath a fallen beech tree: “He had parted a screen of leaves that hung before him bent to the tide, like seaweed in the ocean, and his pale face, washed, shaved, hair cut and brushed, in this sun a bandit, he looked down on a girl stretched out, whom he did not know to be Merode, whose red hair was streaked across a white face and matted by salt tears, who was in pyjamas and had one leg torn to the knee.” The effect is sometimes dazzling and hypnotic, often deliberately estranging, and occasionally rather confusing. It’s rather as if some characters from a farce by P.G. Wodehouse had wandered into the lush terrain of William Faulkner. As Updike observes in “Surviving’: “The prose is not easy; it must be read again and again until the picture becomes clear.” This difficulty, he contends, is part of what gives Green’s prose “a resistant hardness, a something graven that distinguishes [it] ... from the lucid, efficient, common-reader prose of many of his contemporaries.”

In his excellent critical biography of Green, Jeremy Treglown tells us that, at one point, Green thought of writing “Concluding” as a ballet. Certainly, its chief charms are lyrical and atmospheric, though even here, his carelessness detracts from the effect, as when he repeatedly refers to the overwhelmingly heady scent of azaleas and rhododendrons, two flowers not exactly famed for their fragrance.

Perhaps the best introduction to Green’s unique sensibility is in his funny, wistful memoir, “Pack My Bag.” In it, Green describes his formative years with the fresh eye of a child, the perspicacity of a mature artist and the rueful humor of a man who feels deeply but tries not to take himself too seriously. “My mother,” Green recalls, “used to say ‘how much do you love me--more than toffee?’ or ‘more than this much’ putting her thumb and forefinger so close together you could hardly see between. Years later a girl said and did the same and I could not tell her what she had made me remember, it spoilt the moment because I laughed. One is always laughing in wrong places or worse, as one gets older one is inclined to belch ...”

Treglown, whose previous books include a life of the writer Roald Dahl, has written the first biography of Green in the hope of stimulating wider interest in him. It is indeed true that, although relatively few people read books of literary history and criticism, many more will eagerly devour a biography. An inveterate drinker and womanizer (in his entry in “Who’s Who,” he listed as his favorite recreation “Romancing over the bottle, to a good band”), Green provides a biographer with plenty of colorful material. But Treglown, much to his credit, pays just as much, perhaps even more, attention to Green’s oeuvre, discussing each of Green’s 10 books. (One would think any biographer of a writer would do that, but many spend more time on their subjects’ personal lives, paying scant heed to the works.)

Some of the most interesting material in Treglown’s book can be found in its footnotes. Given that his publisher has placed the notes at the end of the book and not along the bottom of the relevant page, one wishes Treglown had put more of this anecdotal material in the text, rather than at the back of the book, where some readers may miss it. Only by combing the footnotes does one discover, for instance, that Julian Ross-Maclaren, who wrote a wickedly mocking parody of Green’s prose style in Punch, had also written a glowing tribute to Green’s technical originality in the Times Literary Supplement.

Green’s personality sheds some light on his writing. There was about him a certain lack of definition: a receptivity that kept him open to the world around him, a fluidness that allowed him to experiment with so many different styles. “He didn’t really exist,” Treglown quotes Mary Keene, one of his many lovers, as saying of him. “There was a hole there. He only really existed in other people.” A previous mistress, Rosamund Lehmann, modeled the main character of her novel “The Echoing Grove” on him: “... fading out at will, slipping his identity; intently, idly playing with all possibilities, selecting one substitute-identity, then another, to fill out--or scale down--or put a frame around the amorphous semi-transparent mass of low powered energy that seemed himself .... Any piece of humanity could invade him like a cloud and like a cloud pass through and out of him. Any woman could move him. ‘Anything in skirts.”’ Fortunately for Green, his wife “Dig,” five years his senior, was the kind of upper-class Englishwoman with a knack for shrugging off unpleasant realities. Whether she did not know about his affairs, or merely pretended not to know, she was not the kind of woman to make a fuss. Sadly, she seems to have adopted a similar attitude toward his alcoholism. By the mid-1950s, until his death in 1973, he grew increasingly reclusive and erratic, retreating into the bottle, unable to write because of his drinking and drinking even more because he was unable to write. “He still took pleasure in shocking people, introducing himself to one respectable old lady as ‘Henry Yorke--fifty-five--and I can’t do it!”’ To a large extent, his love affairs had fueled his books. After 1952, his writing dwindled to an occasional article. His alcoholism had left him unable to make love, unable to write, unable to do much of anything but drink.

As Treglown examines Green’s books, attempting to demonstrate why many of his fellow artists esteem him so highly, he seems at times to be conducting a kind of running battle against his own second thoughts. It is almost as if, on reading and rereading the books, Treglown sees why some critics berated Green for infantilism, carelessness and lack of artistic contro but feels obligated to dismiss the criticism by claiming that these very flaws are, in fact, part of what makes Green’s work so special. “To some,” Treglown admits, “‘Concluding’ seems a flawed book, its touches of political satire no less patchy than those in ‘Back,’ ... the whimsicality in general an excuse for weak plotting .... To a large extent, literal objections miss the point.”

But although Treglown, Updike and other aficionados make a compelling case for the deliberately odd quality of Green’s prose, one cannot help feeling that careless grammar, weak jokes, slapdash plotting and thin characterization are still weaknesses rather than strengths. And, although Green received quite a lot of credit for focusing attention on servants and working-class people in his novels, he seems to have had few coherent ideas about society, politics or culture. It is one thing to cite Proust’s ornate, evocative prose as one of the precedents for Green’s but quite another to forget that Proust, unlike Green, also excelled at illuminating the social, political and cultural mores of his time.

It is, perhaps, an unfortunate aspect of our age of hype that in order to call attention to an undervalued artist, it seems necessary to overstate his or her importance. Even taking into consideration the uniqueness of Green’s gifts, surely it is more than a little extravagant to hail him as the best writer of his time. Why not simply focus on his genuine merits, which are amply highlighted in Treglown’s book: Green’s fearless originality, his ability to portray people of all social classes, his willingness to set aside his own personality, ideas and prejudices in order to rely upon his impressions and his imagination. Judiciously balancing the roles of biographer and literary critic, Treglown illuminates the connection between the man and his art. As its apt title suggests, “Romancing” explores a key theme in Green’s life and his fiction: a willingness to proceed by feeling and intuition, to be guided by one’s heart rather than by one’s head.