Henry Green was the pseudonym for Henry Vincent Yorke, and the author of ten books, most of which are truly remarkable, all short and each one written in its own distinctive dialect. His writing lives in a remarkable place, between the outlandish experiments of Joyce and the everyday exactitude of Graham Greene. He has been categorized as a WWII British voice, but I like to think of him more as a candle in the dark.
Why a candle in the dark?
Henry Green does something that we here at Mutable are very fond of. His books contain experimental elements, but only because he does not see the same limits to language—some would say “does not follow the same rules” as the more mundane realist authors—while at the same time not becoming consumed with experimentation as the high modernists did, but rather focused on character and story and ultimately bound by a stolid traditionalism when it comes to the over-arching form his works take. This is what makes him such an anachronism.
His work cannot be assimilated because it exists in no clear literary moment. As we said earlier, he has recently been lumped into a category of WWII writers, but this distinction is almost arbitrary. It’s a grasping-at-straws. Green’s uncategorizableness holds the key to his identity as a writer. It’s saying something when the establishment spends more than sixty years trying to label you, and the best they can do is, Well, his novels all happen in and around WWII. That’s just because Green spent his youth in and around WWII!
There is a certain kind of writer and a certain kind of artist who crave obscurity—to be unfettered by the eyes of others and allowed to breathe in whatever polyrhythms they find comfortable, and I believe the key to Henry Green can be found in this attribute of his, his amateurism. By this I mean, he was a “Sunday writer”, writing on weekends and working through the week at the Pontifex iron foundry.
Green is often lauded for his ability to capture the particularities of speech of his characters, whether they’re factory workers or aristocrats holed up at a train station, as a “writer’s writer’s writer” as Terry Southern so famously mentioned in his Paris Review interview of 1958, but he is also as often mentioned as being “idiosyncratic” or “unclassifiable” or “neglected”, all of which are classic traits of the professional amateur.
The titles of all but three of Green’s works end in I N G—as in “Loving,” “Living,” and so on—and his play with and disregard for the rules of language are notorious—but what makes Green so alluring—beyond the obvious truth of his portraits and knack for description and dialog—is the the precision with which he uses experimentation, not for its own sake, but as a device, as I mentioned previously. He was not an experimental writer; he was a realist author of the Zola 19th century stamp, but he simply saw no limits to what could be done with language while being this.
Of course, to describe Green as an anachronism is a bit disingenuous. He was very much of his time and in the 1920’s and 30’s he and his wife, Dig, were THE it couple, described as the “Bright Young Yorkes” by Evelyn Waugh, and was adored by T. S. Eliot, John Updike, and the list goes on, but its the uncategorizable nature of his writing as it continues to live its troubled life after him that we see Henry Green as the true amateurist he was. He was unconcerned with how he himself or his novels were framed.
For example, that pseudonym: Henry Green. It was Waugh, again, who said, “From motives inscrutable to his friends, the author of Living chooses to publish his work under a pseudonym of peculiar drabness.” But choices like this were due to more than just any bad choices in the PR department.
Henry Green was fascinated by the unknowableness of his subjects, and it seems he wanted to embrace the paradox of the great author who is also completely unknown.
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I first discovered Green when I was very young, eighteen or twenty, and once I started reading his books, I proceeded to read as many of them as I could get my hands on. But why?
With his books, the reader never has the sense that they’re reading something contrived, but instead getting glimpses into another living universe. As Elizabeth Bowen once said, Green’s novels “reproduce as few English novels do, the actual sensations of living”. What’s more, it was Green’s own presumption that he was creating life of a kind when he wrote.
Which would not have been a shocking statement at the time. (Think of Faulkner’s comment that Sartoris was the first of his books where his “characters cast shadows”.) But this credulous belief in the living-ness of the literary work would be impossible for contemporary writers. Who today speaks of creating life when they speak of writing books?
The problem with categorizing Green is that he’s not “ahead of his time,” but behind it. Unlike William Blake—who was so notoriously neither of the Enlightenment when he lived or yet quite a Romantic—Green’s was a Modernist, and he very much was a Modernist, who thought of his work like a Romantic—as in with an idealized and perhaps mystical (rather than the cynicism of his times) eye.
There could of course be said to be mystical elements in the work of Woolf et al, but what I am referring to here is how the work itself is approached. The work as removed from readership or literary career, the work of the “Sunday writer”, of the amateurist, of the aristocrat. Not only were the books real to Green, they were mystical documents.
Green could even be said to be the prototypical modernist, a great lover of Joyce, and his realism symbolizes the kind of animistic naïveté of the times. Yes. All that is true, but the modernist literary product existed in a cynical universe of “talkies” and advertisements and industrialism off the rails and utopia’s naughty children—and its writers threw their works into that mess and made works to comment upon and be commented upon within that mess—but Green stood aloft in the unknowableness of the amateur, rooted in his background as the gentleman artist who writes for no one but himself, because it would be too gauche to consider writing a commercial exercise.
Of course, some of the most remarkable modernists were moored in the previous century. Both Proust and Faulkner come to mind. And Virginia Woolf could also be characterized as an aristocratic “hobbyist” who raised her hobby to a high art, but all three of these, by one means or another, was able to ground themselves in modernism through the extremity of their works. Proust’s famously long sentences (a style he developed in an effort to emulate the famous 19th century prose stylist, Ruskin) and the epic volumes themselves seem as at home in the universe of Louis Buñuel as Gustave Flaubert. And of course, both Woolf and Faulkner utilized the classic modernist technique of the fragmented narrative. The voice of authors such as these has become as iconic of the times as long hair was to the hippie thirty years later.
Green was different. I suppose another way to think of him is as a neither/nor. He was more what he was not than what he was.
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In the pre-television world of the thirties, storytelling was broadcast upon the weight of the author’s faith in his or her creations. Yes, you could see a movie then, but you could live in the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Green. The wildness of the sixties shattered this staid universe of a shared reality between author and reader.
The norms of realism shattered in the 60’s along with everything else. And television became a lens through which storytelling was increasingly filtered. And generally speaking, there was a shift—from Modernism to Postmodernism, from Freud to Lacan, from Marx to Lyotard, and beyond.
But the most talented author today still does not have the conceit that he or she is creating something that is truly alive when they write. This is why we cannot achieve the same heights as our forebears.
That the works of Henry Green are almost entirely unknown today is a travesty, but that his view of literature is an outmoded dinosaur is a true disaster.
Loving is the most famous perhaps, was listed as one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century by the Times, but Party Going, Living, Nothing, and Doting are all remarkable as well. Each one has a distinct voice. For example, in Living, Green dispenses with “a” or “the” whenever possible, which sounds like the sort of thing would create a trite piece of prose, like a book without the letter e for example, but in Green’s case it’s always done for effect as opposed to some misguided ideological exercise, and it works.
Air she breathed was harsh, and here where there were no lamps or what few there were shone at greater distances, it was like night with fog as a ceiling shutting out the sky, lying below tops of trees.
Where hundreds of thousands she could not see were now going home, their day done, she was only starting out and there was this difference that where she had been nervous of her journey and of starting, so that she had said she would rather go on foot to the station to walk it off, she was frightened now. As a path she was following turned this way and that round bushes and shrubs that hid from her what she would find she felt she would next come upon this fog dropped suddenly down to the ground, when she would be lost.
Then at another turn she was on more open ground. Headlights of cars above turning into a road as they swept round hooting swept their light above where she walked, illuminating lower branches of trees. As she hurried she started at each blaring horn and each time she would look up to make sure that noise heralded a light and then was reassured to see leaves brilliantly green veined like marble with wet dirt and these veins reflecting each light back for a moment then it would be gone out beyond her and then was altogether gone and there was another.
These lights would come like thoughts in darkness, in a stream; a flash and then each was away. Looking round, and she was always glancing back, she would now and then see loving couples dimly two by two; in flashes their faces and anything white in their clothes picked up what light was at moments reflected down on them.
–From “Party Going” (1939)
There’s also something about the character of Green that makes you want to reach out to him. He was a notorious alcoholic, and the sort of man women wanted to find themselves under a table with during the London blitzing. Notoriously shy, Green loved the idea of anonymity, and although not without his share of authorial vanity, he could be ironic and diffident about his own work. (He called one of his novels ”Nothing,” and would give that as an answer when people at parties asked him what he had written lately.) Even at the height of his career, he held onto his day job, and he worried that the knack for writing was something that could at any minute be taken away from him—which is more or less what happened.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. read more about him here
