‘We are all animals, and therefore, we are continually being attracted. That this attraction should extend to what is called love is a human misfortune cultivated by novelists. It is the horror we feel of ourselves, that is of being alone with ourselves, which draws us to love, but this love should happen only once, and never be repeated, if we have, as we should, learnt our lesson, which is that we are, all and each one of us, always and always alone.‘ — Henry Green
‘Start reading any of Henry Green’s books and some long dormant faculty in the brain becomes alert. The words are simple enough but the phrases never seem to slide into their usual slots, to be skimmed and forgotten – you have to read slowly, but it feels like an engrossing conversation rather than work. Why is “as he was doing” tucked into the middle of that sentence, comma free? And what in the world does he mean by “felt thoughts”? (I’m still not sure about the latter.) In this heightened state of attention, awake but slightly disoriented, strange bits of poetry come floating to us down the sentences – “would give the cool moon to stand in his shoes.” Not showy lyricism, but ordinary speech at its most expressive.
‘Over the years, Green has accumulated an odd coterie of admirers and, as far as I can tell, very few readers. Each admirer also tends to connect with a different set of Green’s books because they are extraordinarily dissimilar. Despite some obvious stylistic similarities – the preponderance of dialogue, the occasional dropping of articles, strange word orders – each novel takes on a different method of storytelling and an entirely new set of narrative problems. And unlike, say, D.H. Lawrence, Green doesn’t have a stable set of moral concerns, and occasionally appears to have no concerns at all: his books don’t seem to be making points or pushing any view of the world on the reader. At first, it’s hard to see what drove Green to write them, and indeed Green wasn’t too sure himself. He had plenty of money and a job available to him running his family’s factory, and he apparently wrote novels because he couldn’t help it. He once said that he was no more proud of producing his books than growing fingernails.
‘Green’s books are the work of a genuine savant. He never seems to have struggled through a derivative phrase, and his earlier books (the first was published when he was 19) are just as singular, in different ways, as his later ones. All of his novels, plus one extraordinary memoir, seem to casually shrug off the entire history of the art form – every familiar narrative device, every piece of emotional shorthand that we’ve come to expect as readers – and cut closer to the truth of lived experience than any writer I’ve come across.
‘I’m not sure why Green stopped writing. He died in the early 70s, without publishing a word after 1952. Apparently he spent much of that time drunk. I don’t want to pretend that I have any explanation for this, but I wonder if part of his dryness came from the loss of the vernacular culture from which he drew so much of his inspiration. In Pack My Bag, Green has wonderful samples of working class British talk: “When they describe,” he writes, “as everyone knows, they are literally unsurpassed in the spoken word.” And one can imagine him listening to maids and workers and the office typing pool, all of their words mixing with his imagination and becoming art. Much of that world was already going after the war, and maybe Green was himself withdrawing from what was left of it. In any case, it survives in the books – nine novels and a memoir – and it is among the great fictional universes left by any writer this century, a happy age of literature all by itself.’ — The Occasional Review
Henry Green’s house
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Context
Birmingham, UK in the 1920s
Birmingham, UK in 1935
Birmingham, UK in 1964
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Further
‘Molten Treasure: The Books of Henry Green’ (1949) @ Time Magazine
‘Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green’
‘Caught in the Web: Henry Green’ @The Guardian
‘PUSHING THE DAGGER OF PERCEPTION THROUGH THE DRAPES OF NARRATIVE: TIM PARKS ON HENRY GREEN’ @ 3:AM Magazine
Henry Green page @ Facebook
Henry Green @ goodreads
‘Silent Treatment: Benjamin Anastas on Henry Green’ @ Bookforum
‘Henry Green, the last English Modernist’ @ TLS
Henry Green @ Dalkey Archive
Buy Henry Green’s books
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Manuscript
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Interview
by Terry Southern
from The Paris Review
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?
HENRY 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?
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?
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 molder 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.
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.
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?
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”?
GREEN: I don’t follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide—now forbidden—of a Hindu wife on her husband’s flaming pyre. 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.
GREEN: Oh, subtle. How dull!
INTERVIEWER: … yes, well now I believe that two of your books, Blindness and Pack My Bag, are said to be “autobiographical,” isn’t that so?
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?
GREEN: I was in the same house with him at Eton. He was younger than me, so he saw through me perhaps.
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Book
Henry Green Party Going
Penguin
‘Party Going opens with a small group of hastily assembled characters converging in, or making their way to, the railway station, on their way to a holiday in Europe. The sense of holidaymaking suspends the hotel somewhere in a semi-realistic state: between home and holiday, and between station and city. When intense fog envelops the city they are halted on their journey and take refuge in the station hotel. This creates a sense of anticipation which is never fulfilled and which leaves the characters vulnerable –- unsure of how to act and behave in the static environment. The hotel as a refuge, however, soon takes a sinister turn as those unable to enter it become trapped in the station where they are swept up in a frenzy of panic and claustrophobia. Green continuously plays with point of view giving different descriptions of entrances and exits in order to juxtapose various characters’ reactions to the same space, highlighting the distinctions between interior and exterior space. Initially, a fragile sense of community is formed through those characters that are able to occupy the hotel, to take refuge in it. It is an odd sense of refuge, however, for they do, of course, all remain in the city where they live; yet at the same time removed from their everyday life and trapped by external circumstances (that is by the obscuring fog and crowds shut in on the station concourse). And it is precisely this ‘known’ London being rendered ‘unknown’ and their powerlessness in the face of this transformation, which brings about a growing sense of panic as they begin to lose control of the situation.’ — Joanna Pready, Literary London
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Excerpts
Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon.
*
Seen by Julia from the hotel windows directly above, the crowd seemed to be swaying like branches rock in a light wind, and she had forgotten what it was to be outside, what it smelled and felt like, and she had not realized what this crowd was, just seeing it through glass. It went on chanting WE WANT TRAINS, WE WANT TRAINS from that one section which surged to and fro and again that same woman shrieked, two or three men were shouting against the chant but she would not distinguish words. She thought how strange it was when hundreds of people turned their heads all in one direction, their faces so much lighter than their dark heads, lozenges, lozenges, lozenges.
It’s terrifying, said Julia, I did not realize there were so many people in the world.
*
Standing prepared, empty, curtained, shuttered, tall mirrors facing across laid tables crowned by napkins, with space rocketing transparence from one glass silvered surface to the other, supporting walls covered in olive-coloured silk, chandeliers repeated to a thousand thousand profiles to be lost in olive-grey depths as quiet as this room’s untenanted attention, but a scene made warm with mass upon mass of daffodils banked up against mirrors, or mounded once on each of the round white tables and laid in a flat frieze about their edges — here then time stood still for Jane, even in wine bottles over to one side holding the single movement, and that unseen, of bubbles rising just as the air, similarly trapped even if conditioned, watched unseen across itself in a superb but not indifferent pause of mirrors.
Into this waiting shivered one small seen movement that seemed to snap the room apart, a door handle turning.
*
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 brances 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.
*
p.s. Hey. ** Jeff J, Thanks. Yeah, OH is seriously rivalling CA for the haunted house mecca crown. I’ll need to be across town at 6 pm on Saturday for an interview, so maybe 4 pm would work, probably not much later. Or anytime Sunday. What’s best? Thanks about my tooth or my new lack thereof. It’s been strangely and pleasantly quiet. ** Sypha, Thanks. Yeah, I was happy and relieved that my dentist didn’t even suggest checking for cavities, of which I suspect I am beset. There’s a company called Muzak? I wonder if that’s where the term muzak came from, ala kleenex from Kleenex, xerox from Xerox, etc., although it would be a pretty long established company. Huh. ** Alex, Ah, Mr. Rose, heartiest greetings! Ack, this blog’s wily and mysterious and undiagnosable mechanistic ways/mishaps are a big drag. No, I took novocaine. I wasn’t given a choice. Suddenly there was a hand in my mouth and a sharp pain in my gums, and it was happening. My extraction sounded kind of more like Einsturzende Neubauten at a very low volume. I was not un-entertained. No, ‘Mandy’ isn’t here yet, but, yes, it’s a given. It doesn’t have anything to do with that Barry Manilow song, does it? Your news is bigger than mine: ‘Dennis Cooper has one less tooth!’ Love from here/me. ** Steve Erickson, Yeah, I was totally shocked by the cost. I chose extraction because he’d told me the other option, reconstruction of the tooth, would take three sessions and would be expensive. So after the extraction and cost reveal, I asked what he’d meant by ‘expensive’. He’d meant $75. So, yeah. Well, my LA apt. is only about 45 minutes drive from the San Diego McKamey Manor, and, no, I have never had even the most remote interest in going there. I think I can guess what your answer would be to that question. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. ‘Extreme’ haunted houses are definitely an increasingly popular thing. I saw a snatch of May’s ABBA entrance. Ha ha. ** JM, Hi. Well, based on my experiences, mostly with the ones in LA, the HHs charge quite a bit, generally about $25 to $40 for what amounts to a maybe 2 minute experience if you’re lucky, so I think they do earn a nice profit, although most of the people and small companies who do them do so because they’re pretty fanatically into the whole haunted house form and industry. ** H, Hi. Thanks. It’s been a relatively mild aftermath luckily. Just a little fuzz around the corners of my mind. Talk soon! ** Right. It’s been years, I think, since I turned the blog’s spotlight on the great Henry Green, so I thought I’d shine a little more light his way. See you tomorrow.
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