Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green.(Review)

Jeremy Treglown Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green. Random House, 368 pages, $25

Henry Green was a rarity among the British modernists, for he used his daring experimental style in the service of social comedy. As a result, his books can be off-putting for some. He possessed little of the limpid ease of an Evelyn Waugh, say, while at the same time his subjects can seem trivial (on the surface, at any rate), lacking the weightiness of a Conrad or Joyce. His prose also proves difficult both for the reader seeking underlying themes and for the reader hungry for easy explication. Points of view shift rapidly and abruptly. Green's heroes behave unheroically. And there is an abstract quality in the images and symbols that can defy immediate understanding. But few novelists have as brilliantly made art out of the small daily events of people's lives. The gerundial titles of several of his books --Loving, Party Going, Doting--suggest movement, action, the process of living. Indeed, whether his setting was the grim industrial world of the factory or the dining rooms of posh London hotels, Green's characters are constantly struggling to life, trying to make sense of what a complicated business living really is.

Green altered his style so dramatically from book to book that each novel seems almost to have been composed by a different hand--from Blindness (1926), a youthful caprice of a book, to the self-consciously made Living (1929), with its frequent omissions of definite articles (something Green picked up from C. M. Doughty), to the dense and symbolic Party Going (1939), perhaps the writer's most enduring book, to the late novels Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952), in which dialogue, deceptive and hilarious, dominates, and in which the authorial role has been seemingly reduced to mere scene-setting, lathed right out of the narrative.

The same writer who could produce the gritty descriptions of industrial life that make up Living could also render the most luxuriant of scenes: the shimmering prelude to Jane Weatherby's party in Nothing, for example, or the unforgettable sequence in Party Going in which the exquisite and narcissistic Amabel emerges from her bath, traces her name in the steamed-up looking glass, and gazes at the "faint pink mass" of her body (a body Renoir would have surely adored) until the image dissipates. Even on a single page Green could exhibit great rhetorical variety. Here he is opening his sixth novel, Back (1946), with an almost childlike simplicity:

 
   A country bus drew up below the church and a young man got out. This he had 
   to do carefully because he had a peg leg. 
 
      The roadway was asphalted blue. It was a summer day in England. 

Just a few sentences later, however, we encounter complex syntax, clever wordplay, and prose-poetic quality:

 
   For, climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose 
   after rose, while, here and there, the spray overburdened by the mass of 
   flower, a live wreath lay fallen on a wreath of stone, or on a box in 
   marble colder than this day, or onto frosted paper blooms which, under 
   glass, marked each bed of earth wherein the dear departed encouraged life 
   above in the green grass, the cypresses and in those roses gay and bright 
   which, as still as this dark afternoon, stared at whosoever looked, or 
   having their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.