by Henry Green
HENRY GREEN (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was written while he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels—Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting—and a memoir, Pack My Bag.
MATTHEW YORKE was born in London in 1958, the son of Sebastian Yorke and the novelist Emma Tennant, and the grandson of Henry Green. He is the author of three novels, including one book for young adults.
JOHN UPDIKE (1932–2009) was a prolific novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and critic. His major work was the set of four novels chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, two of which, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
SEBASTIAN YORKE was born in 1938. He is the only child of Henry Green.
BY HENRY GREEN
(published by NYRB unless otherwise noted)
Back
Introduction by Deborah Eisenberg
Blindness
Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn
Caught
Introduction by James Wood
Concluding (published by New Directions)
Doting
Introduction by Michael Gorra
Living
Introduction by Adam Thirlwell
Loving
Introduction by Roxana Robinson
Nothing
Introduction by Francine Prose
Pack My Bag (published by New Directions)
Party Going
Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri
SURVIVING
Stories, Essays, Interviews
HENRY GREEN
Edited by
MATTHEW YORKE
Introduction by
JOHN UPDIKE
Followed by “A Memoir” by
SEBASTIAN YORKE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
The writings of Henry Green copyright © 1992 by Sebastian Yorke
Foreword and notes copyright © 1992 by Matthew Yorke
Introduction copyright © 1992 by John Updike
“A Memoir” copyright © 1992 by Sebastian Yorke
All rights reserved.
“Arcady” is reproduced by kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College
Cover art: Jon Beacham, 2020
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Green, Henry, 1905–1973, author. | Updike, John, writer of introduction. | Yorke, Matthew, 1958– editor.
Title: Surviving: stories, essays, interviews / by Henry Green; introduction by John Updike; edited by Matthew Yorke.
Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2019025142 (print) | LCCN 2019025143 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374123 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374130 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR6013.R416 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PR6013.R416 (ebook) | DDC 828/.91209—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025142
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025143
ISBN 978-1-68137-413-0
v 1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Foreword by Matthew Yorke
Introduction by John Updike
TWENTIES AND THIRTIES
Bees
Adventure in a Room
The Wyndham Family
Monsta Monstrous
Arcady or A Night Out
Mood
Test Trial at Lords
Saturday
Fight
Evening in Autumn
Excursion
FORTIES
A Rescue
Mr Jonas
Apologia
The Lull
The Old Lady
The Waters of Nanterre
The Great I Eye
FIFTIES AND SIXTIES
Henry Green
Edward Garnett
A Novelist to his Readers: 1
A Novelist to his Readers: 2
A Fire, a Flood, and the Price of Meat
Invocation to Venice
For John Lehmann’s Programme
Matthew Smith – A Personal Tribute
The Spoken Word As Written
The Jealous Man
A Writer’s Diary
The Complete Plain Words
Impenetrability
Falling in Love
Journey out of Spain
A Centaur
The Art of Fiction
An Unfinished Novel
Before the Great Fire
Unloving
For Jenny with Affection from Henry Green
A Memoir by Sebastian Yorke
FOREWORD
BY MATTHEW YORKE
This book has been long in the offing. It was John Lehmann who first proposed a volume of Henry Green’s Uncollected Writings. ‘Dig about and see what you can come up with,’ he urged Green in 1971, enthusiastically listing the wartime stories and articles from the fifties. It is not known whether Green even replied to the letter – in all probability he did not. Two further attempts were to founder, one soon after Green’s death in 1973, the other at the end of the following decade.
That nothing came of these three ventures can now only be seen as fortuitous in view of the fact that a considerable amount of previously unknown material has come to light, the bulk of which was discovered in the late 1980s when the Yorkes’ house in Knightsbridge was being cleared. It is therefore from a much fuller archive that I have been able to select the pieces which comprise this book.
It has been my aim to arrange the material in strict chronological order. Not only does this reveal a strong sense of the development of Green’s style, it shows the extent to which he veered away from fiction after the publication of his last novel Doting in 1952. Where the pieces have been previously published there have, of course, been no problems with dates. However the unpublished stories and sketches, many of which were found and taken from undated notebooks, have been much harder to place. Letters to and from Nevili Coghill, his close friend of Oxford days, and Edward Garnett, reader for Dent and Jonathan Cape, should have provided the clues – unfortunately in some instances they have failed to do so. Where dates cannot be accurately attributed to pieces I have set out the facts of the matter as I know them.
Disregarding a large amount of juvenilia (carefully preserved by his older brother, Gerald Yorke, the words ‘saved from the wastepaper basket’ touchingly written in pencil on one of the manuscripts) this volume represents about three quarters of the material in the Henry Green archive. All that remains now are a number of abandoned projects, two plays, and two articles on the craft of writing, published in the fifties, their points covered in more depth in pieces printed here.
In the course of compiling this book I have been given generous assistance, and I should like to thank the following people: Jonathan Burnham and Carmen Callil; Lady Dorothy Heber-Percy; Joan Henry; Alice Keene; Margaret Scrutton; John Updike; and the Yorke family.
INTRODUCTION
BY JOHN UPDIKE
Henry Green was a novelist
of such rarity, such marvellous originality, intuition, sensuality, and finish, that every fragment of his work is precious, as casting a reflected light upon his achievement, the nine novels and the memoir that he published in his lifetime. There is not much uncollected Green, really; he was not a worker on Grub Street, piling up copy every week. Through the 1930s he was a man fully engaged in his business at the London office of H. Pontifex & Sons, able to produce only one novel, Party Going, in the decade. The forties saw him become an auxiliary fireman in the blitz and its aftermath, with one day in three devoted to his business – in spite of all, his most productive period. In the fifties, growing famous, he ventured out into the world of journals and the BBC, and even managed a few such extracurricular chores as a translation from the French and a paeon to Venice, an obituary tribute to Edward Garnett and a friendly note for an exhibition of Matthew Smith. But, though these peripheral compositions are interesting, and in some cases revelatory, his art and his claim to fame are all but entirely concentrated in his novels. We read these previously uncollected pieces, lovingly marshalled by his grandson, for an answer to the question the editor Edward Garnett posed to the twenty-year-old Henry Yorke after reading his first novel, Blindness: ‘How did you ever come to write any thing so good?’
In England the literary vocation is usually the prerogative of the middle class, even when, like Evelyn Waugh, the successful writer puts on upper-class airs. The Yorkes enjoyed not only a venerable aristocratic background but owned a Birmingham factory. By Green’s own account, in Pack My Bag and the autobiographical tidbits he released in later life, he was an unprepossessing, overweight, rather sad and solitary youngster, fond of fishing and reading. At Eton, he did not do as well as his two older brothers, Philip and Gerald, and his beginning a novel while there was, according to his schoolmate Anthony Powell, ‘an undertaking not regarded over-seriously by relations and friends’. At Oxford, he was on the billiards team, drank and went to the movies a great deal, and eventually failed to graduate, allegedly because he could not learn Anglo-Saxon and ‘for the rest discovered that literature is not a subject to write essays about’. But he did manage, while still at Oxford, to complete his novel, to show it to Edward Garnett, and to get it published by Dent in 1926. He was then twenty-one. We search his juvenile writings for clues as to his possession so young of a defined and venturesome style and an imagination that, in Blindness, ranges impressively beyond the mind of his schoolboy hero into the thoughts and feelings of a middle-aged woman, a defrocked and decrepit clergyman, and a young girl wasting away in unnatural isolation.
A tendency toward authorial invisibility and a universal empathy manifested itself early; Green’s juvenile effort is to create, as he when mature would consummately do in Living, Loving, and Concluding, a field of characters, mingled with their environment like small creatures coming and going in a meadow. In ‘Bees’, the earliest published piece here, from an Eton magazine when the author was seventeen, a sunk clergyman – kin perhaps to the miserably eccentric Parson Entwistle of Blindness – retreats from the world of men into that of bees, a vision of adult despair carried out naïvely but with a brave completeness, right to the final ironical amorous twist which the school authorities deleted and, Green added in his handwriting, ‘so removed all point to the story’. The adult writer’s voice, in its compression and obliquity, can be already heard in an admirably pawky sentence like ‘He detected an insult in the butcher boy’s whistling as he delivered the meat.’ And in ‘Arcady’ from 1925, the style is full at work, its cunningly limp convolutions searching for a simultaneous precision of emotion and sensation: ‘the air inside drooped with folded wings at the shut windows & the scent she used, sweeping through the streets that swirled in eddies of changing light, talking nervously she & I of what was coming.’ It is an exercise, directed to Coghill, and leaves a rather mannered and priggish impression, yet in its deflationary account of the deadness of a date of which both parties had unreal expectations – a barren night at the theatre (‘Hysterical laughter when the curtain came down to cover the emptiness that was left. . . . Then a scene with a bed upon the stage with the tumult of my fears storming within me’) – there is, remarkable in a nineteen-year-old, that terrible tender honesty with which Green was ever to gaze at human romance. ‘Adventure in a Room’ contains the embryo of Blindness; one would love to know what incident gave Green, a painterly writer of great visual intensity, his fantasy of blindness, and what frustration ‘exasperated’ him, an advantaged youth of seemingly callow character, ‘into a desperate striving after the beautiful’.
The two stories about giants are quaint surprises, childish and familial; yet they lead us to reflect that part of Green’s unique effect, as we read his fiction, is the largeness that his diction gives his characters, a statuesque magnification achieved by the studied piling-on of some words and the withholding of others. For the first time, in ‘Monsta Monstrous’, we see the withholding of articles, with incantatory, epic effect:
Mountains are in Wales but he strode over these and often knocked over the tops of them, till he came to where they fell before plains and sat down on the last mountain and let his feet rest in the plain, resting the toes in a river to cool them (and they were hot with knocking) and sat there looking at the smallness before him. Toes made floods immediately.
‘Saturday’ extends articlelessness into the sensations of a young working-class woman and the territory of his great second novel, Living.
No blind was over window. Sun came by it. And she turned head over from sun towards them sleeping and did not see them. She smiled. Head on bolster was in sunshine.
Life was in her belly. Life beat there.
The growing writer’s next venture is again into the mind of a young woman, one of his own age and class, and it failed to become a novel. He discussed Mood, with liberal quotation, thirty years later, in the essay ‘An Unfinished Novel’. He tells us that he was in love with the model for Constance Ightham, his heroine, and the images with which he furnishes her stream of consciousness have an assurance lacking in the almost comically primitive giant’s world of Maggie Cripps, who was transformed into Lily Gates in Living. He may have loved Constance but didn’t admire her, as he admired the rougher-hewn Maggie, and perhaps admiration for a character is more sustaining than love. At any rate, Mood was abandoned and Living became his second novel, though eventually and with visible artistic difficulty Green did incorporate in his third novel, Party Going, his own social set, which included (his son’s memoir tells us) Aly Khan. ‘Excursion’, with its railroad terminal and crowd confusion, seems a dry run at Party Going, on the plebeian level; without any of the gaudy colour and giddy comedy of the upper-class interactions within the terminal hotel, the panorama stays inertly, wanly grey, though Green by this time (1932) has his style and sympathies in place.
These early pieces show, in sum, a self-effacing, broadly empathetic author assembling a style which with a seemingly casual sensitivity can register a wide range of visual, vocal, and emotional nuances. Green is unusual, for his class and nation, in his strong democratic tastes – for football and pub talk, and those experiences of factory and fire fighting that broke down class barriers – and his avant-garde propensities. He was sent to France in 1923, before going to Oxford at the age of eighteen, and along with the language he imbibed there, it seems, a certain continental approach to art: Proust and Céline were high among his artistic heroes, and his novels never give the impression of being merely social news. A certain abstract shimmer, a veil as it were of transcendent intention, adds lustre to all his pictures, and piquancy to his prose. Each paragraph has something of a poem’s interest and strangeness. The uncollected pieces of the forties show him functioning at full tilt, bringing to the inferno of blitzed London a descriptive power of almost lurid virtuosity. Fire meets an ice of visual exactitude:
Already it would have been possible to read in the reddish light spread by a tall building sixty yards away, the t
op floors of which, with abandon, in recklessness, with fierce acceptance had exchanged their rectangles for tiger-striped hoops, great wind-blown orange pennants, huge yellow cobra tongues of flame. . . . There must have been a gas main alight beneath the debris for whitish yellow flames were coming out, as I could now see five yards away round a great corner, in darker blue, of sculptured coping stone, curved in an arc up which this yard-high maple leaf of fla me came flaring, veined in violet, then died, then flared again.
The prose is not easy; it must be read and read again, until the picture comes clear. From this decade comes also Green’s most considered and passionate piece of criticism, his ‘Apologia’ for the idiosyncratic prose of C. M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. Green exalts qualities we do not think of him as aspiring to: monumentality, purity, magnificence. Doughty’s prose represents ‘the magnificent in written English’; Doughty is ‘harsh, simple to a point of majesty, and not clear, that is his sentences meander’. Green considers the point that the rhythms of this prose derive from Arabic and says that others who also knew the language – T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Wilfrid Blunt – have ‘an elegance that is too easy’. Doughty is not easy: ‘when he passes on a tale, he treats it as a man will granite that he has to fashion.’ ‘He is often obscure. He is always magnificent.’ As if to cinch this professed admiration for a meandering, majestic, difficult prose, Green ends his essay with one of the most defiantly tangled and impenetrable sentences ever committed by a careful writer to print. This yearning for the majestic surprises us but explains an enduringness, a resistant hardness, a something graven that distinguishes Green’s prose from the lucid, efficient, common-reader prose of many of his contemporaries; one such, Anthony Powell, recalled of his old friend Yorke that ‘he had a passion for Carlyle (an author tolerable to myself only in small doses), and (a taste I have never acquired) Doughty’s Arabia Deserta; both indicated a congenial leaning towards obscure diction’. This leaning would seem to be at the opposite pole from his celebrated fondness for demotic speech; but colloquial diction too, as we can see in an orgy of it like ‘The Lull’, can be obscure, and needs to be reread for the meaning to soak in. Green might be writing of himself when he says of Doughty that in a miraculous way he ‘puts words together which, entering by our ears if they are read out loud, or slipping by our eyes if they are scanned in print, express their meaning in our bones’. In his striving for a prose that, coming at us at an unexpected slant, penetrates to bone-deep meaning, Green was in the company of, among others, Ronald Firbank, Rosemary Macaulay, and Virginia Woolf. But it is Henry James he cites on ‘the effort really to see and really to represent, [which] is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement’. Though he elsewhere deplores the late James style, it seems truer of James and himself than of Doughty that ‘His style is mannered but he is too great a man to be hidden beneath it.’
