Caught
by Henry Green.
NYRB Classics, 2016,
$14.00 paper.
Loving
by Henry Green.
NYRB Classics, 2016,
$14.00 paper.
Back
by Henry Green.
NYRB Classics, 2016,
$14.00 paper.
At the beginning of Henry Green’s fourth novel, Caught—which was published in 1943 and takes place in England at the start of the war—Richard Roe, an enlistee in London’s Auxiliary Fire Service, is granted a brief leave and takes a train to visit his wife and five-year-old son, Christopher, who have fled to the country. An eight-year-old cousin who came along to the train station to meet him “was old enough to say some of the conventional things when they shook hands,” but what Christopher says and does, at five, is unmediated by convention. He is sometimes difficult, sometimes shy or simply inexplicable. The father is shy too, or anxious to please, or regretful about the distance between them, or baffled, or upset. When he takes his son for a walk, he thinks that such a walk may never happen again: he expects to die in the war. Some moments are companionable and good. “They found a dead mouse,” we read. Like many passages in the three novels Green wrote during the war—Loving was published in 1945 and Back in 1946—the scenes about Christopher and his father are painful to read but thrillingly recognizable. There are so many ways in which human beings may fail to understand each other, or act at cross-purposes, or make a connection so brief it ends before they quite realize it has happened.
Like the five-year-old, Green the writer does not look away from dead mice. It’s not that he prefers what’s dangerous, ugly, or evil for subject matter. Without judgment, without putting events into categories (bad or good, pleasant or disgusting), Green notes what happens and what people say and do. The reader’s pain and pleasure arise not from the author’s unflinching honesty about horrific events, but from his honesty about what events are actually like, no matter what they’re supposed to be like; sometimes they’re nothing much. These are books without explicit messages, without subordination and emphasis, and without the familiar hints and foreshadowings that tell us, in most novels, which apparently insignificant mo-ments to keep in mind as we read. All three books have forward momentum and surprise, but there’s no fuss about any of that. There is plot, but it’s as if the author hasn’t noticed it.
Situations—what the characters must deal with in their lives—matter more than what they desire or how they develop. The firefighter in Caught spends almost no time putting out fires. Richard and his colleagues and superiors in the Auxiliary Fire Service spend their time devising, following, or breaking rules, trying to endure one another’s company, and attempting to get along with the real firefighters. He is separated from his family and is free to take women he meets to bed. He may die in a bombing, but that’s mostly theoretical. Green’s decision to call him Richard Roe may imply that he’s everyman—anyone—though he has more distinctiveness than that.
Green, whose real name was Henry Yorke and who lived from 1905 to 1973, came from an old wealthy family, but his refusal to put things into categories in his books extends to social distinctions. They are everywhere in the novels, but they reveal themselves in details. Loving is about English servants in a large country house in Ireland. In one scene the owner is irritated by a servant. The calm light of the author’s attention is turned evenly on everyone, but the class distinctions come through:
She could not see Violet because he was in the way. So she glared at the last button but one of his waistcoat, on a level with her daughter-in-law’s head behind him. He had been standing with arms loose at his sides and now a hand came uncertainly to find if he was done up and having found dropped back.
Most of Green’s characters are working class or lower middle class. The servants in Loving are British, living during the war in a neutral country whose inhabitants they consider uncivilized. They consider going back to England and their families, to be drafted or killed. The owners of the house are called the Tennants, and indeed, to all intents and purposes the servants own the place. When Mrs. Tennant and her daughter-in-law go to England for an extended visit, the servants find it difficult to have her gone—they fear she won’t return—but when Mrs. Tennant does return, she finds the door locked and can’t get in. Her granddaughters have been left behind and by now are honorary members of the servant community, an arrangement that may give us a clue as to how Green came to know so much about what servants do, how they talk, and what they talk about.
These three novels, the fourth through sixth of Green’s nine, are quite different, but they have much in common. All are set during the war, and none is about fighting, though the bombing raids are a reality in all three books. In Caught, the newly recruited firefighters prepare for them but only experience them in a brief, frightening flashforward. In Loving, the characters worry about their English relatives, but their immediate concerns are relationships inside the castle they live in. In Back—which is about a soldier who returns to England near the end of the war after losing a leg and being imprisoned in Germany—the bombing raids, diminished by now, are inconveniences: the characters remind themselves to close curtains; on a walk they may come upon destroyed buildings. Neither the war nor the missing leg are central to the story, though past suffering, rarely mentioned, makes ordinary life in Back even more excruciating than it is for the young father and son at the start of Caught and the start of the war.
All three of these wartime novels are about work—about jobs—and if the prose refuses to look away from dead mice, the characters are people whose jobs provide numerous opportunities for not quite noticing what’s going on, not quite saying, disapproving for subtle reasons, or inflicting pain without anything so direct as a visible attack, verbal or physical. Bombs and fires may kill people elsewhere, but what we see killing these characters is pretense, elaborate protocol, or subtle betrayal, mostly made possible by conditions on the job. In Caught, major drama occurs when the firefighters’ addled cook misunderstands her superior and travels to see her son-in-law. The equally addled supervisor, who is in charge of Richard Roe as well, is completely flummoxed. If she’d let him know, he could have covered for her—but since he doesn’t know exactly what she’s done, he can’t or won’t conceal her unauthorized departure. He is the one who will suffer, becoming more and more tangled in the elaborate rules he sets for himself and others, and misunderstanding what he is told about his own big problem: a sister in a psychiatric hospital (who got there by briefly kidnapping Richard Roe’s Christopher—for which her brother blames Richard).
The servants in Loving must conceal—or contrive to reveal accidentally—the fact that the cook’s nephew has killed one of the peacocks prized by the owner. A ring belonging to Mrs. Tennant is found and lost many times, and many lies are told about it. In Back, the newly returned soldier, who works in an office, takes revenge on his secretary because she slept with their host when he brought her along on a weekend trip. He hints to his boss that she’s not quite as competent as she might be, and she is promptly fired.
Green is one of those writers who is rediscovered every few decades, while knowing people take pride in having already read him. New York Review of Books Classics has now brought out his novels; he also wrote a memoir, Pack My Bag, just before the war, when he was convinced he would die. (The title is a command to a servant: in other words, I’m leaving.) I believe I first read Green in the Nineties, the last time his books were reprinted. A few months ago I was reading the memoir on a plane when a stranger sitting next to me asked, “Is that the novelist Henry Green?” We gazed into each other’s eyes as if we’d discovered that we had the same favorite high school English teacher—a figure who, if Green were the model, would have been by turns encouraging and somewhat brutal. Maybe now Green will at last become a household name. Maybe not. He is a sharp observer, fascinated by his characters, whom he pays the respect of describing minutely: their concerns become his concerns. But though people fall in love in these books, and decide to marry, and do marry, almost all the exchanges among all the characters are failed attempts to communicate, if not outright deceptions. You can read book after book by Green, delighting again and again in his keen eye, his fair mind—but suddenly you may want to read about characters who make connections to one another, who learn and change.
Solace in Green’s books does come. It comes by way of sex. There is jolly, tawdry sex, a source of fun and gossip, as when the servants in Loving find Mrs. Tennant’s daughter-in-law (whose husband, the son of the household, is off fighting) in bed with a neighbor. And there is sweet, loving sex, which comes like mercy when it’s been despaired of, a blessing the characters had hardly dared to hope for.
It’s not that they suddenly understand each other. They don’t. They continue mute, or speaking at cross-purposes, or to no purpose. Loving begins with the death of the old butler, and the head footman more or less promotes himself to the butler’s job, moving into the old one’s room. Mrs. Tennant reluctantly agrees to call him by his name, Charley Raunce, though she has generally called all male footmen Arthur, after the first one. Raunce, now Mr. Raunce, courts a young housemaid who loves him frankly and simply—she just does. They don’t have heart-to-heart talks that we overhear, or not very revealing ones, but living in this chilly castle, they find reasons to sit side by side in grand armchairs before a fire that has been lit in a room generally closed because of wartime shortages. The fire is to keep the paintings on the walls from deteriorating. They become a couple. The woman is also loved by a young servant, and that isn’t a source of boring jealousy: it’s just another sweet fact, a little sad for the boy.
Love in Back saves the main character, Charley Summers. In the first chapter we meet him seeking out the grave of his married lover, Rose, who died of an illness while he was imprisoned. He remains friends with her husband. He was the dead woman’s first boyfriend, and he visits her parents. Her father gives him the name and address of a woman, Nancy, urging him to visit her, and when Charley does, he collapses in a faint because he thinks Nancy is Rose, who has somehow been alive all along. As is typical in Green’s books, we aren’t guided immediately to an understanding of what’s going on, which is that Nancy is Rose’s half sister, the illegitimate daughter of the father who provided her name and address. Charley remains sure Nancy is Rose, and at first, for all we know (though that kind of plot would be atypical for Green) it might be so. When others see her, some don’t even notice a resemblance, and we gradually realize that Charley’s experiences have made him lose touch with reality. It is because of Green’s deliberate, cautious record of just what happened next, and next, and next—Nancy and Rose’s father has a stroke, Nancy goes to live with her father’s wife and care for her—that we believe in what slowly happens, as Charley’s delusion gradually falls away while he remains who he was. The penultimate sentence of the book, as he and Nancy finally embrace, is “And she knew what she had taken on.” Which is probably the case for all who pick up their second, or third, or ninth Green novel. By then, you know what you’ve taken on, and you’ve discovered that it’s more than worth it.
Alice Mattison’s seventh novel, Conscience, will be published in August. Her book about writing, The Kite and the String, is now available in paperback.
