Surviving

by Henry Green

  Mr Green writes at night and in many longhand drafts.

  His novels, by date of publication, are: Blindness (1926), Living (1929), Party Going (1939), Pack My Bag (1940), Caught (1943), Loving (1945), Back (1946), Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952).

  In his autobiographical novel, Pack My Bag, he has described prose in this way:

  Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself at night, and it is not quick as poetry, but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.

  An ancient trade-compliment, to an author whose technique is highly developed, has been to call him a ‘writer’s writer’; Henry Green has been referred to as a ‘writer’s-writer’s writer’, though practitioners of the craft have had only to talk with him momentarily on the subject to know that his methods were not likely to be revealed to them, either then or at any other time. It is for this reason – attempting to delve past his steely reticence – that some of the questions in the interview would seem unduly long or presumptuous.

  Mr Green lives in London, in a house in Knightsbridge, with a beautiful and charming wife named Dig. The following conversation was recorded there, one winter night, in the author’s fire-lit study.

  INTERVIEWER

  Now you have a body of work, ten novels, which many critics consider the most elusive and enigmatic in contemporary literature – and yourself, professionally, or as a personality, none the less so. I’m wondering if these two mysteries are merely coincidental?

  MR GREEN

  What’s that? I’m a trifle hard of hearing.

  INTERVIEWER

  Well, I’m referring to such things as your use of a pseudonym, your refusal to be photographed, and so on. May I ask the reason for it?

  MR GREEN

  I didn’t want my business associates to know I wrote novels. Most of them do now though . . . know I mean, not write, thank goodness.

  INTERVIEWER

  And has this affected your relationships with them?

  MR GREEN

  Yes, yes, oh yes – why some years ago a group at our Birmingham works put in a penny each and bought a copy of a book of mine – Living. And as I was going round the iron-foundry one day, a loam-moulder said to me: ‘I read your book, Henry.’ ‘And did you like it?’ I asked, rightly apprehensive. He replied: ‘I didn’t think much of it, Henry.’ Too awful.

  Then you know, with a customer, at the end of a settlement which has deteriorated into a compromise painful to both sides, he may say: ‘I suppose you are going to put this in a novel.’ Very awkward.

  INTERVIEWER

  I see.

  MR GREEN

  Yes, it’s best they shouldn’t know about one. And one should never be known by sight.

  INTERVIEWER

  You have however been photographed from the rear.

  MR GREEN

  And a wag said: ‘I’d know that back anywhere.’

  INTERVIEWER

  I’ve heard it remarked that your work is ‘too sophisticated’ for American readers, in that it offers no scenes of violence – and ‘too subtle’, in that its message is somewhat veiled. What do you say?

  MR GREEN

  Unlike the wilds of Texas, there is very little violence over here. A bit of child-killing of course, but no straight-shootin’. After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now.’ Most of us walk crabwise to meals and everything else. The oblique approach in middle age is the safest thing. The unusual at this period is to get anywhere at all – God damn!

  INTERVIEWER

  And how about ‘subtle’?

  MR GREEN

  I don’t follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide – now forbidden – of a Hindu wife on her husband’s flaming bier. I don’t want my wife to do that when my time comes – and with great respect, as I know her, she won’t. . . .

  INTERVIEWER

  I’m sorry, you misheard me; I said, ‘subtle’ – that the message was too subtle.

  MR GREEN

  Oh, subtle. How dull!

  INTERVIEWER

  . . . yes, well now I believe that two of your novels, Blindness and Pack My Bag, are said to be ‘autobiographical’, isn’t that so?

  MR GREEN

  Yes, those two are mostly autobiographical. But where they are about myself, they are not necessarily accurate as a portrait; they aren’t photographs. After all, no one knows what he is like, he just tries to give some sort of picture of his time. Not like a cat to fight its image in the mirror.

  INTERVIEWER

  The critic Alan Pryce-Jones has compared you to Jouhandeau and called you an ‘odd, haunted, ambiguous writer’. Did you know that?

  MR GREEN

  I was in the same house with him at Eton. He was younger than me, so he saw through me perhaps.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you find critical opinion expressed about your work useful or interesting?

  MR GREEN

  Invariably useless and uninteresting – when it is of daily papers or weeklies which give so little space nowadays. But there is a man called Edward Stokes who has written a book about me and who knows all too much. I believe the Hogarth Press is going to publish it. And then the French translator of Loving, he wrote two articles in some French monthly. Both of these are valuable to me.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’d like to ask you some questions now about the work itself. You’ve described your novels as ‘non-representational’. I wonder if you’d mind defining that term?

  MR GREEN

  ‘Non-representational’ was meant to represent a picture which was not a photograph, nor a painting on a photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape-recording. For instance the very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding things all round them, which have not, in fact, been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a new level of communication is reached. My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life, yet they do so less than I. Thus when writing, I ‘represent’ very closely what I see (and I’m not seeing so well now) and what I hear (which is little) but I say it is ‘non-representational’ because it is not necessarily what others see and hear.

  INTERVIEWER

  And yet, as I understand this theory, its success does not depend upon any actual sensory differences between people talking, but rather upon psychological or emotional differences between them as readers, isn’t that so? I’m referring to the serious use of this theory in communicative writing.

  MR GREEN

  People strike sparks off each other, that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. After all we don’t write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore.

  INTERVIEWER

  And that is your crabwise approach.

  MR GREEN

  To your question, yes. And to stop one’s asking why I don’t write plays, my answer is I’d rather have these sparks in black and white than liable to interpretation by actors and the producer of a piece.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you consider that all your novels have been done as ‘non-representational’?

  MR GREEN

  Yes, they all of course represent a selection of material. The Chinese classical painters used to leave out the middle distance. Until Nothing and Doting I tried to establish the mood of any scene by a few but highly pointed descriptions. Since then I’ve tried to keep everything down to bare dialogue and found it very difficult. You see, to get back to what you asked a moment ago, when you referred to the emotional differences between readers – what one writes has to be all things to all men. If one isn’t enough to enough readers they stop reading an
d the publishers won’t publish any more. To disprove my own rule I’ve done a very funny three-act play and no one will put it on.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’m sorry to hear that, but now what about the role of humour in the novel?

  MR GREEN

  Just the old nursery-rhyme – ‘Something and spice makes all things nice,’ is it? Surely the artist must entertain. And one’s in a very bad way indeed if one can’t laugh. Laughter relaxes the characters in a novel. And if you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading. So you as the writer get a chance to get something into him.

  INTERVIEWER

  I see, and what might that something be?

  MR GREEN

  Here we approach the crux of the matter which, like all hilarious things, is almost indescribable. To me the purpose of art is to produce something alive, in my case, in print, but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life on its own.

  INTERVIEWER

  And the qualities then of a work-of-art . . .

  MR GREEN

  To be alive. To have a real life of its own. The miracle is that it should live in the person who reads it. And if it is real and true it does, for five hundred years, for generation after generation. It’s like having a baby, but in print. If it’s really good, you can’t stop its living. Indeed once the thing is printed, you simply cannot strangle it, as you could a child, by putting your hands round its little wet neck.

  INTERVIEWER

  What would you say goes into creating this life, into making this thing real and true?

  MR GREEN

  Getting oneself straight. To get what one produces to have a real life of its own.

  INTERVIEWER

  Now this page of manuscript you were good enough to show me – what stage of the finished work does this represent?

  MR GREEN

  Probably a very early draft.

  INTERVIEWER

  In this draft I see that the dialogue has been left untouched, whereas every line in the scene otherwise has been completely rewritten.

  MR GREEN

  I think if you checked with other fragments of this draft you would find as many the other way around, the dialogue corrected and the rest left untouched.

  INTERVIEWER

  Here the rewriting has been done in entire sentences, rather than in words or phrases – is that generally the way you work?

  MR GREEN

  Yes, because I copy everything out afresh. I make alterations in the manuscript and then copy them out. And in copying out, I make further alterations.

  INTERVIEWER

  How much do you usually write before you begin rewriting?

  MR GREEN

  The first twenty pages over and over again – because in my idea you have to get everything into them. So as I go along and the book develops, I have to go back to that beginning again and again. Otherwise I rewrite only when I read where I’ve got to in the book and I find something so bad I can’t go on till I’ve put it right.

  INTERVIEWER

  When you begin to write something, do you begin with a certain character in mind, or rather with a certain situation in mind?

  MR GREEN

  Situation every time.

  INTERVIEWER

  Is that necessarily the opening situation – or perhaps you could give me an example; what was the basic situation, as it occurred to you, for Loving?

  MR GREEN

  I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ I saw the book in a flash.

  INTERVIEWER

  Well, now after getting your initial situation in mind, then what thought do you give to plot beyond it?

  MR GREEN

  It’s all a question of length; that is, of proportion. How much you allow to this or that is what makes a book now. It was not so in the days of the old three-decker novel. As to plotting or thinking ahead, I don’t in a novel. I let it come page by page, one a day, and carry it in my head. When I say carry I mean the proportions – that is, the length. This is the exhaustion of creating. Towards the end of the book your head is literally bursting. But try and write out a scheme or plan and you will only depart from it. My way you have a chance to set something living.

  INTERVIEWER

  No one, it seems, has been able to satisfactorily relate your work to any source of influence. I recall that Mr Pritchett has tried to place it in the tradition of Sterne, Carroll, Firbank, and Virginia Woolf – whereas Mr Toynbee wished to relate it to Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, and Henry Miller. Now, are there styles or works that you feel have influenced yours?

  MR GREEN

  I really don’t know. As far as I’m consciously aware I forget everything I read at once including my own stuff. But I have a tremendous admiration for Céline.

  INTERVIEWER

  I feel there are certain aspects of your work, the mechanics of which aren’t easily drawn into question because I don’t find terms to cover them. I would like to try to state one however and see if you feel it is correct or can be clarified. It’s something Mr Pritchett seems to hint at-when he describes you as ‘a psychologist poet making people out of blots’, and it has to do with the degree to which you’ve developed the ‘non-existence-of-author’ principle. The reader does not simply forget that there is an author behind the words, but because of some annoyance over a seeming ‘discrepancy’ in the story must, in fact, remind himself that there is one. This reminding is accompanied by an irritation with the author because of these apparent oversights on his part, and his ‘failings’ to see the particular significance of certain happenings. The irritation gives way then to a feeling of pleasure and superiority in that he, the reader, sees more in the situation than the author does – so that all of this now belongs to him. And the author is dismissed, even perhaps with a slight contempt – and only the work remains, alone now with this reader who has had to take over. Thus, in the spell of his own imagination the characters and story come alive in an almost incredible way, quite beyond anything achieved by conventional methods of writing. Now this is a principle that occurs in Kafka’s work, in an undeveloped way, but is obscured because the situations are so strongly fantasy. It occurs in a very pure form however in Kafka’s Journals – if one assumes that they were, despite all said to the contrary, written to be read, then it is quite apparent, and, of course, very funny and engaging indeed. I’m wondering if that is the source of this principle for you, or if, in fact, you agree with what I say about it?

  MR GREEN

  I don’t agree about Kafka’s Journals, which I have by my bed and still don’t or can’t follow.

  But if you are trying to write something which has a life of its own, which is alive, of course the author must keep completely out of the picture. I hate the portraits of donors in medieval triptychs. And if the novel is alive of course the reader will be irritated by discrepancies – life, after all, is one discrepancy after another.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you believe that a writer should work toward the development of a particular style?

  MR GREEN

  He can’t do anything else. His style is himself, and we are all of us changing every day – developing, we hope! We leave our marks behind us like a snail.

  INTERVIEWER

  So the writer’s style develops with him.

  MR GREEN

  Surely. But he must take care not to let it go too far – like the later Henry James or James Joyce. Because it then becomes a private communication with himself, like a man making cat’s cradles with spider’s webs, a sort of Melanesian gambit.

  INTERVIEWER

  Concerning your own style and the changes it has undergone, I’d like to read a s
ample paragraph – from Living, written in 1928 – and ask you something about it. This paragraph occurs, you may perhaps recall, as the description of a girl’s dream – a working-class girl who wants more than anything else a home, and above all, a child. . . .

  Then clocks in that town all over town struck 3 and bells in churches there ringing started rushing sound of bells like wings tearing under roof of sky, so these bells rang. But women stood, reached up children drooping to sky, sharp boned, these women wailed and their noise rose and ate the noise of bells ringing.

  I’d like to ask about the style here, about the absence of common articles – a, an, and the – there being but one in the whole paragraph, which is fairly representative of the book. Was this omission of articles throughout Living based on any particular theory?

  MR GREEN

  I wanted to make that book as taut and spare as possible, to fit the proletarian life I was then leading. So I hit on leaving out the articles. I still think it effective, but would not do it again. It may now seem, I’m afraid, affected.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you think that an elliptical method like that has a function other than, as you say, suggesting the tautness and spareness of a particular situation?

  MR GREEN

  I don’t know, I suppose the more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in – not true of taking the filling out of a sandwich, of course – but if one kept a diary, one wouldn’t want a minute-to-minute catalogue of one’s dreadful day.