Romancing: the Life and Work of Henry Green
Jeremy Treglown
Faber £25, pp300
Buy it at BOL
Life is lived forwards but understood, if at all, sideways. While other modernists took the incoherence of the world as an affront, or a tragic fact to be stared down, Henry Green (the pen name of Henry Yorke) seems to have accepted it in his fiction simply as a given. His prose isn't difficult as difficulty is normally understood, but it is demanding. Grammar is loosened disconcertingly, punctuation light, so that the reading brain must constantly reassess the relationships between parts of a sentence.
Mannerism is pressed into the service of realism. Precisely notated dialogue gives way to lyrical passages whose texture can become scumbled or even blobby. Changes of tone are more often stark than modulated.
If Green didn't win a huge readership in his lifetime (1905-73), he also had a tendency to exaggerate setbacks, or even to invent them. Early stories of his were sent by his mother for assessment to John Buchan, a family friend, and even Green's son, Sebastian, believed the verdict was unfavourable ('strongly advised him to give it all up as a bad job'); in fact, the letter survives in a family scrapbook and is quoted here. Buchan was enthusiastic about the writing, but wary of literary careers in general.
Perhaps it was because he could be said to have followed this advice that Green had a distorted memory of it. He had a full career in the family business, Pontifex (manufacturers, among other things, of high-pressure filling machines for beer-bottling), starting on the shop floor, and he did a lot of his later writing at head office or else at lunchtimes or after work. The early experience of labour was filtered into Living (1929), his first mature novel, but Green can be exonerated equally of taking a job simply to generate copy or of seeking to overturn the existing power structures. His professional life was one long attempt, long and doomed, to win the approval of a flinty father.
Jeremy Treglown's excellent critical biography was authorised by Green's family, if only for a short time (they had earlier given their blessing to Paul Bailey, by whose preliminary work Treglown has profited). Until a late stage, his subtitle was 'The Life and Work of Henry Yorke and Henry Green', but he seems to have realised that the division between the two was anything but stable. If Henry Yorke could privately be snobbish and insensitive, on one occasion rhapsodising in a letter to a needy girlfriend about the diamonds he was buying for his wife, Dig, then Henry Green could also (in his 1940 memoir Pack My Bag) vacillate, as Treglown puts it, between 'class guilt and flagrant snobbery'.
Perhaps it's not surprising that he should have been a better observer when a subordinate, whether at the firm's works in Birmingham or in the Auxiliary Fire Service, which he joined in 1949. Caught (1943), the novel based on his AFS experiences, departed so far from the propagandistic pieties that Green himself had doubts about whether it should be translated into German, though several references to firemen stealing had already been suppressed from the published version.
Treglown shows an admirable unwillingness to damp down the contradictions in Green's attitudes and behaviour, and extends the same courtesy to many of his sources. Green was friendly with Evelyn Waugh, who was slightly older, and also Anthony Powell, an exact contemporary. Waugh's attitude went from sustained and generous early praise to seething postwar rancour, a characteristic trajectory, though any rancour might be expected to flow in the other direction.
In 1945, both Green and Waugh published novels set in country houses, but it was Brideshead Revisited rather than the exquisite Loving which caught or created a national mood.
Powell's testimony shows a more veiled hostility to his old friend. He once left a cheque after spending a few days as a guest in the Yorkes' house, and was astounded when Green accepted it (with a letter saying the sum was 'far too much', but 'very good of you in these hard times'). By a number of codes, not all of them patrician, nothing could be ruder than offering to pay for hospitality. Clearly, Green had a sharpened awareness of money, an awareness more paranoid than practical. But perhaps he was simply calling Powell's bluff.
That Powell was capable of using politeness as an aid to rudeness is shown by an anecdote of Eudora Welty's. On a 1950 visit to promote a book of her own (during which she and Green were to make an enormous mutual impression), she gathered that Powell had published a book. She asked for its title, and was told: 'That question is not asked.' With an obliqueness that might appeal to the book's subject, Treglown delegates criticism of one of his sources to another.
Romancing takes its title from Green's hobby as listed in Who's Who: 'Romancing over the bottle, to a good band.' Evidently, 'romancing' has two meanings, but the bottle, alas, has only one. How far Green's wife was aware of his affairs (including one with her younger sister) isn't clear; perhaps that question, too, was not asked. Green's drinking and the collapses it provoked were talked about essentially as a series of bad colds.
After two unusually controlled novels - Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952) - he entered a long silence. His relationship with his writing had always been precarious - the art shoring up the life and vice versa. From outside, the mutual collapse seems wilful, but his earlier comments have an edge of panic - he refers to 'a frightful surge of power and ideas' while writing Back (1946).
In a 1958 interview, he announced that once it's printed you can't kill a book the way you can a child, 'by putting your hands round its wet little neck'. In a writer, it's not the mock-murderousness towards children that is alarming, but the hostility towards books. Green's unstrangulated novels are as fresh as when they were written, as radiant and unconsoling.
