Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green
Jeremy Treglown
Faber, £25
Buy it at BOL
"A very very complicated and tricky person", was Anthony Powell's considered view of Henry Yorke, his friend since prep-school days. "The most curious imagination in the English novel" in mid-century, wrote VS Pritchett of Yorke's writing alter ego, Henry Green, whose Who's Who entry referred simply to a managing director, with publications - "Recreation: Romancing over a bottle, to a good band".
Curious as the novels surely are, the harder of the two personae to read, on the evidence of Jeremy Treglown's perceptive and sympathetic life-and-works biography, is the aristocratically connected Birmingham businessman who became chairman of the British Chemical Plant Manufacturers' Association before withdrawing early with the gin bottle.
At least we have all the novels (in the excellent Harvill edition) of the writer who was kept in funds and perhaps sanity by Yorke's job. But for all Treglown's diligent hunting-down of letters and survivors, the romancing manager fades with the years in a puzzle of conflicting memories (though a sharp, sad sketch of him late on - mordant, dirty and drink-stained - is to be found in Emma Tennant's Girlitude ). The best of the novels, on the other hand, still gleam with the same strange radiance, still writing consciousness anew.
It's partly this that separates out the life and work, partly the deeply conflicted nature of what remains of Yorke/Green's life and personality. A late love, Kitty Freud, was not alone in being fascinated by "a distinct difference between Henry Yorke, who could be very grand and rather sharp, surprising people by putting them in their place, and the sympathetic, unthreatening Henry Green".
His family was grand, especially on his mother's side; a Wyndham and close friend of the Queen Mother, Maud Yorke was so posh, said Maurice Bowra, she dropped "g"s from words that didn't have them. His father Vincent was also a landowner and wealthy businessman. Henry grew up on the family estate near Tewkesbury, but his attitude to the world he was born into was always ambivalent; in his twenties he told his mother she must face up to the fact that "by nature I am not what is generally known as a gentleman". He mocked his parents' world, felt insecure and often out of place in it, but he married into it and never really cut himself adrift. His marriage survived a lengthy list of lovers, not all from his own class, for it wasn't only the novels, "electric with sex" as Treglown observes, that were so interested in women.
"I was born a mouth-breather with a silver spoon": the unnerving opening sentence of Pack My Bag , written in his mid-thirties on the eve of the war. The most open-hearted pages of these veiled and complicated memoirs describe Green's encounter with working-class life after leaving Oxford, when he worked on the shop floor of the family's foundry in Birmingham. "An introduction to indisputable facts at last," he wrote, "to a life bare of almost everything except essentials and so less confusing", among people living "one of the best ways to live provided that one has never been spoiled by moneyed leisure".
He was fascinated by the fascination with human behaviour, by the gaiety and anarchic laughter that erupted in the heat and smoke of the works; and above all by the language, the boldness of metaphor and imagery of people whose speech had not been squeezed into a banal homogeneity by the mass-media octopus. These pages breathe a kind of relief, an absorbed interest and an unsentimental affection that is neither patronising nor much to do with politics.
The same is abundantly true of Living, the novel he began there, which reads at first like directions for an expressionist film script, but then shows very clearly how well he listened with that extraordinary ear for dialogue and idiom. The dropping and eliding of articles and demonstrative pronouns, for example, which he turned to such tender poetic effect, reflects how many working-class people of the north and Midlands actually spoke. The novel also juxtaposes without comment the febrility and wasted leisure of the rich world with the work-filled, directly experienced lives of factory folk. And yet within months of leaving "Bridesley", there is Henry Yorke a world away, leading his bride, Lord Biddulph's daughter, out of St Margaret's, Westminster on an uncomfortably hot July day, with top hat, furled umbrella and all the other obligatory accoutrements of a society wedding.
In his first autobiographical novel, Blindness, begun in Green's last year at Eton, the central character starts a diary that will act as "a sort of pipe to draw off the swamp water" - writing's role in his psychic economy. Years later, in an interview, Green repeated the figure. Now it was some kind of distillation process, drawing off "the things that are in ferment" "to get myself straight". So perhaps the books do in a way pull this complicated person together, uniting his divisions in their absorption in people and in art, for in his rare pronouncements on such matters Green always put life first. Here his American readers seem to understand him best, both John Ashbery and Eudora Welty focusing on his unique way of combining poetry and fidelity to life - of being, says Welty, at once in the highest realm of art and "in the world with us".
In this Green reminds me sometimes of Stanley Spencer's transfigurations of the ordinary, especially in Loving, the second in that central group of novels (all rare, all different) that began in 1939 with Party Going 's menacing art deco, continued with spectacular paintings of the London Blitz in Caught and the obsessive Back that evokes so well the shell-shocked insecurities of postwar Britain, and ended with his tragicomic, moonlit pastoral, Concluding, in 1948.
In Loving , the war is an off-stage rumour in a castle in neutral Ireland where, their masters away, the English servants play, dancing in the locked ballroom and catching the married daughter of the house sitting up naked in bed with her lover, "her fronts bobblin' at him like a pair of geese". Party Going intently watches a group of foolish young socialites trapped, with thousands of others, by dense fog in Charing Cross station, claustrophobia and suppressed hysteria casting war's shadow before them. These two are his achieved beauties, so assured that they provoke fewer complaints about vaguenesses and irresolution than some of the other novels. Often Green seems to be not so much plotting as tapping into the flow and sway of life, sharing Henry James's belief that "the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of realities" and playing with deep, intuitive skill what Frank Kermode calls "the blind man's bluff of the spirit".
That is Henry Green's game; "a vulnerable kind of art", as Jeremy Treglown says, and "one that calls on the reader's understanding in more than obvious ways and which has no ready answer to pedantry or plain dislike". To call for humility, patience and gratitude as primary responses to a work of art is brave in a professor of literature. One wonders what the heavy-duty theorists and New Puritan skinheads will make of it, or indeed of Green, who Auden thought "the best English novelist alive" and whom one of our own best critics, James Wood, believes to be the greatest of the English modernists after Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The last word comes from another American admirer. There are writers, said Terry Southern, and writers' writers - perhaps most likely to be read in a spirit of humility and love. Green, Southern decided, was "a writers' writer's writer".
