Surviving

by Henry Green

  ‘I still don’t see why not. But tell me about Pam,’ Harry demanded.

  ‘And so I was giving Angela and her mother drinks on the Tuesday. They’d just dropped in. As a matter of fact, I’d asked Angela to go to the party with me on Wednesday instead of Pam after our row. Then Pam rang up. Can you imagine what she wanted to know, and in that loud voice of hers which rang out of the ’phone? Only what time I was going to call for her – Pam, mind you – for this party that I’d invited Angela to in her place.’

  ‘Awkward, eh?’ Harry seemed to sympathise.

  ‘Now our lady’s looking round on us again,’ Peter announced. ‘Look out! And with a particularly ingratiating beastly sort of smile this time.’

  ‘Well I wish we could get on. I’m going to be late,’ his companion grumbled. ‘Can you see what’s holding us, Peter?’

  ‘Lights have stuck, I suppose. But the other one up in the old hospital’s still waving. Angela heard every word Pam said over the ’phone, of course, and waved to me to say don’t bother with me, take her out! So I told Pam the time I’d call. Hullo, we’re off!’ And their line of traffic surged forward. ‘We’re really off at last. And now they’re both at it, waving like mad at each other. She’ll lose her handkerchief out of the window if she isn’t careful! Now ours, the one in with us, has stopped, we’re past and it’s all over. So what d’you make of that, Harry?’

  ‘That I’m going to be late,’ this young man replied and then he added, ‘Oh, she was only telling the other in here with us that she could go now.’

  Harry was blind.

  A FIRE, A FLOOD, AND THE PRICE OF MEAT

  (Broadcast by the BBC. Published in The Listener, August 1951)

  Since the last war no more than three things of note have occurred in the pub I use at lunchtime near my office and these were: the chimney fire; the time our butcher got upset, dashed out to fetch his daybook which he read aloud, in a terrible voice, to give the prices he had been paying back in 1938; and last, most significant of all, the time the cistern in the Gent’s overflowed, flooding out the floor.

  I am entirely serious when I say I hope to show how these happenings, especially the last mentioned, had, on those present, an effect similar to that which occurs between a writer and his reader in a book. I hope also to show what lessons the prudent writer should draw from such occurrences, and at the same time I aim to explain my own attitude, because things are getting more complicated these days and I, for one, feel that it is for the writer to explain himself, now, a little.

  I was a fireman in the war so you can judge of my incredulous delight to hear the old roar in the chimney, and to realise, as I entered the bar at midday, that I was to enjoy the most enviable moment of all to any ex-fireman, a nice little job in someone else’s chimney, with the unimaginable pleasure thrown in of watching a crew one isn’t on, go through the absurd motions of putting a chimney out. I should, perhaps, explain that chimney fires are seldom dangerous if seen to by professionals, always provided that they are not abandoned before they are well and truly out. And when is a fire out? Only what we used to call a bull’s-eye, that is to say, the last glowing ember, knows.

  Well, the guv’nor of this pub, as I entered, was rather white about the gills, his hired help watched with wooden faces, but I knew, and they knew – we didn’t have to say anything – that in three minutes he would have to dial the old 999, and the beauty of it all was, I realised, that what we used to call the attendance, which means the particular station to be ordered on, would inevitably be from my own fire station. As, indeed, it turned out; I knew everyone on the crew, had gone along with them on many a moonlit night in London in 1940. Well, they put this small job out. They made no mess, the customers, after a first small excitement, even seemed to grow a bit bored. We, the customers, had not been sent outside, things were not serious enough for that, and my old mates, under the eye of an officer, just recognised me by little nods and winks. It was, the whole show, still intensely enjoyable for me, of course. But the other customers, the beer, the traditional port-and-lemon drinkers, obviously saw nothing more.

  A part in every chimney fire is played by a fireman on the roof. He may drop a loose brick down the chimney, or more likely he will play water down it, but anyway one of them always gets up there. It was this man, whom I knew well, who came below and said to the officer in my hearing, ‘Would you like to come up and have a look at it, guv, the roof’s quite easy.’

  Catching this remark fairly made my morning for me, the use of the word ‘guv’, and the reference, in almost reverential tones, to the roof being safe when I suppose there is no fireman who went through the blitz, as I and all these men had, who could not call to mind at least one occasion on which he had almost been blown off a high one by high explosive. And ‘guv’ used to be one of our happier jokes. How often in those days did I hear the injunction given by an officer, an old London Fire Brigade man – ‘lad, don’t never call nobody “guv”, not below the rank of–’, I forget the rank which rated this title, but it was more than nice to hear the phrase again.

  ‘Guv,’ the customer in a pub may say with a world of feeling in his voice, if the server looks to be that kind of man, ‘Guv, a pint of wallop, quick,’ and if the server should be that sort of a man, he’ll put one up as though he had reason to know you needed it, sympathetically. Not so with the writer when he serves the dish to his reader. Things, for him, are decidedly more complicated. As with the audience in that pub, who did not know you should never call an officer ‘guv’ unless he was above a certain rank, so, with his reader, the writer cannot use too much material that has to be explained. If he does, I suspect he will bore his audience, just as these people in our pub got bored with our fire once they saw nothing in the officer being reassured about an easy roof.

  And now to my second example, our butcher on present-day meat prices. I must here say a word on his audience, that is, about the people who use the pub at midday. They do not seem so well known to each other as do those regulars who forgather in the other house I patronise at night. Possibly this is accounted for, in the daytime in a business district, by there being so many casual customers at noon. And even the morning regulars have to work, so that their jobs may keep them from attending always at the same hour each day. Anyway when I first noticed our butcher that morning, dressed, as he always is, with the apron of his trade and the old straw hat, he was in a dispute, with a man I did not recognise, about today’s meat prices. It is a subject I know nothing about and I did not pay much attention, nor, so far as I could then judge, did anyone else. Yet all of a sudden, with a great cry of ‘I’ll show you, wait till I get my books,’ our butcher fairly ran out of the place to his shop next door, and I could tell from the discreet smiles all around that most of us had in fact been listening, and that this someone had been having the butcher on. In other words, if these two had collaborated in a book, they had their readers’ interest. The thing was suddenly alive that morning in the saloon bar; there was tension, attention, and amusement. What author could hope, or plan, for more?

  The butcher was back in a moment with a ledger open in his hand. It dated back to 1938, he said, and contained a record of his purchases, with the prices he had paid. He began to read these out in a loud voice. Then, at once, the whole atmosphere in the pub changed. Everyone listened openly, and, so I thought, with disbelief. You might say it had suddenly become a semi-political meeting. In a great voice, one hand above his head, as though taking the oath, our butcher read out, ‘a side of beef’, which he told us weighed so many stone, then he explained how many pounds weight go to a stone, and then with great ease and rapidity he told the company how much a pound that made, and said, ‘There you are, then.’ A man cried out, ‘Go on!’ ‘It’s right,’ the butcher yelled, ‘all here in my book,’ and so brought his hand down from over his head to lick a thumb, to turn another page.

  He gave one example after another, he took us straight through the dismembered carcas
s of an ox. His remarks on how cheap everything had been in those days did not seem to be disbelieved. Rather his audience appeared as though about to give up listening; what some call the good, and others the bad, old days, sounded remote that morning. Perhaps our butcher sensed this. Suddenly he turned to poultry and then, because it was near Christmas, to turkeys. A blind man, if he had been present, would, I swear, have sensed the immediate rise in interest again. Even I knew how cheap the price in 1938 sounded. Encouraged by this perhaps, the butcher, stretching his free hand above his head, no longer extended the fingers into a sort of salute; no, whilst he dealt with turkeys, he closed the four fingers on his thumb while his recitation rose, then opened them again when he allowed his great voice to fall. It was a performance. But at once I was again conscious of a drop in interest, although the guv’nor of this pub began to insert comment now and then, to encourage his very good customer, our butcher. And it was now that the butcher’s assistant, a man, he tells us, of seventy-five, but who looks, I swear, a good twenty years younger, came to the glass door, and beckoned to his guv’nor, the butcher, who left at once. This assistant is always calling him away all morning. None of us, officially, knows why. The butcher is always back in no more than the time one would think it would take to serve one customer. He was away on this occasion just that short while. Yet, when he did come in again, what spell there was had gone. And he did not try to start afresh, but fell back on a dignified silence.

  The third occurrence in our pub, the truly remarkable one, also concerned the butcher, but not so directly. It was remarkable because it held the interest of all present for as long as I could spend on that particular morning in the saloon bar. It also had the quality of every good book ever written, it challenged the attention at once, held this and drew all the modest drinkers present into a communion of people, each, in his own way, equally interested in what would happen next.

  After describing what did happen, I propose to end with a suggestion why it was significant, and why it appeared to me to have a lesson for writers. Because, as I crossed the busy street, which constitutes a peril every time I leave this public house, I had no idea what lay in wait behind those two swing doors through which we, the customers, one and all have to leave and enter. Because, when I pushed through the last one of these, I came on a meandering stream of water all over the floor, the drinkers keeping their feet out, although it was not more than an eighth-of-an-inch deep. There had been a leak somewhere, and in a stream the water was wandering in rivulets not more than six inches across all over the place; you could see them flowing from the specks of dust advancing with them, that only occasionally joined, at a bulge, into the body of the water before.

  There was only one dry patch of any size, and this was occupied, at full stretch, by the Alsatian dog. As was only natural, I halted. I came up short on being faced with this extension of the English winter, within doors. To get across to the bar seemed, for a moment, almost to involve paddling. It was at that instant I caught sight of the butcher. In his traditional get up he was watching me intently, a thing, so far as I know, he had never done before. And so was the rest of the audience. When someone eventually came in, after me, I realised this was not personal. We were all waiting to hear what the latest arrival would do, or say, about the flood.

  What my own first exclamation was I no longer remember. And it may, or may not, be significant, that I can recollect hardly anyone’s spoken reaction to this floor. Instead, I do call to mind, on every face, as its bearer entered, a look of ludicrous dismay. Meantime, the audience in the pub stayed attentive and silent, studying each new arrival’s reactions. But when, on my own entry, I had pulled myself together, I did remark to the butcher, who was watching me so intently and whom I had never in my life addressed before, I did say something to the effect that ‘I thought at first all this was to do with you,’ I said. A flicker of genuine annoyance seemed to cross his face at this. ‘No,’ he replied with dignity. ‘There’s a leak they can’t manage to stop out there in the cistern, so it’s overflowed.’

  When I had got my pint, and picked my way over to where I always sit, I watched the Alsatian which lay with pricked ears, head sideways, on the largest patch of dry floor, a dog which was obviously, from its twitching nose, anxiously regarding the flow of water, at eye level. Then the animal got up and sniffed the small flow before lying down again. At that, the butcher’s elderly assistant entered, obviously, this time, for a drink, because he did not beckon to his master. He made no remark on the state of the flood. He looked in a grave way at his feet. And the butcher said, almost sternly, in what was a put-on educated tone of voice; he said, ‘Have you had your meal?’ ‘An’ very nice, too,’ the assistant answered. There was a pause. Then he demanded of the floor, ‘What’s this?’ Upon which we all, as though at a signal, burst out discreetly laughing. ‘I thought for a minute it was something to do with you,’ the butcher challenged him, borrowing from me, and then someone fresh came in, and got the floor. So it went on, with not a dull moment, until I left to go back to work.

  To examine those round us in an experience, is to learn the little we know about human nature. I do not refer to ‘crowd psychology’, and do not mean to stick my neck out in attempting a definition of what may constitute a crowd. But, the thing about the flood in our pub was, everyone became so enthralled that no one even discussed it, each one was too busy waiting for the next customer to come in. Some would talk it over afterwards, no doubt, as I am doing now; as readers will, after they have read a good book. Yet they had discussed the fire in the first stages of its being put out, while, when the butcher was on the price of turkeys, people had grown quite heated in their comment, but only for a while. Then, when their attention was really engaged, they stayed silent, and the reason behind it is, I think – I do not know – that they became, by the flood, interested in the people round them, and, more important still, were interested in themselves as well.

  How much do you, as readers, think about yourselves as you get through a novel? When I was very young, I did. When six or seven years old I of course knew nothing, had done nothing, and identified myself with all the characters. Up to a point I still do. And how many of you come to read novels out of your curiosity in other people’s experience, either in the author’s experience or in that of his characters? What makes you read? I submit that the act of reading consists very much of what went to make up the flood water scene in my saloon bar. As we, each in our turn, went up to order drinks, we were not comparing this unexpected occurrence with another. It seemed to me that everyone was shocked into an acute awareness of himself or herself, and of his or her audience. And a reader’s audience, in a novel, is, of course, the characters that make up the book, that go to make it live, if it does live.

  I said earlier there had seemed to exist, on this last occasion, a sort of communion between the people in our bar. And the reason for the existence of this must be, I think – I do not know – just amusement. There can be few readers entirely without a sense of humour, so, let’s have more humour. In any case, everyone, as in the pub, has an acute sense of the ridiculous where he or she is concerned, and a sense of the ridiculous does very well for me in novels; in fact, I often find there is not enough of it.

  And so what I have tried to show here is, not how to put the mechanics of written communication over on a reader, but rather I have tried to show the sort of experience I, as a writer, have been allowed to witness, in life, by which people would seem to be drawn together, as into a book. All I hope, in life, is that such people may turn out to be readers!

  INVOCATION TO VENICE

  (Published in British/American Vogue, 1952)

  Venice, where no ice is, and green has never been, at dawn the fishless stinking sea milk white, a pink palace domed into a sky of milk and towards which one black gondola is being poled; Venice where the only horses must be statues and they have yet to put up motor cars in stone, oh Venice with no bicycle bells but with a Bridge of
Sighs and Casanova always on a roof – the sun in rising must bring azure to your roads of sea, tideless with a steadily rising stench, Venice where Proust thought to travel and never did, Venice they somehow missed when bombing, Venice which is still here but for how long, and will it be too late soon, the pigeons, St Mark’s, a populace standing under colonnades angrily arguing prices, the sun at noon too sharp striking light off marble, the brazen horses hot and dry to touch – up in that dormer window on the lead roof a maid stretched in black, snoring on the bed with skirts up about her mouth, the natives poling spaghetti down, Venice which is too hot because she never freezes – where do they get their drinking water or do they strike this like oil, are there derricks to gush it from the ocean into those old palaces past which the motor boats must not speed in case they bring the places down.

  Venice, for the honeymoon, cushions at the rear in a little moving room, the gondolier who does not look back, but no he would be pushing from the stern – we would be stretched out before him – so what, do they have shades on that little backward-looking window through which his envenomed eyes at the corners of which two bluebottles sip brighter than jewels, the gondolier appraising our love-making, can you then draw a blind to exclude him or can he go to the bows to pole and not look over a shoulder, to stare into sun with his wounds of eyes while I wound you, my love, on cushions white like rice to the lap lap of water. . . .

  Venice, the lions of St Mark’s in stone – did one such lion on a great afternoon swim in from blinding yellow sands every yard from the South, its home – an orange head athwart the azure sea, with salt-encrusted nostrils, eyes red, a white fish impaled on the claws of one forepaw all the sad way from Africa towards which Venice ever leans – did they then who live there catch its sobbing breath, the dark despair of effort a sounding band about the heart oh Venice of marble, my love unvisited, my honeymoon unspent. . . .