Henry Green
Loving, Living, Party Going
Introduction
HENRY GREEN IS a writer who always seems to need ‘introducing’, like a stranger at a party: dark, louche, awkward. It is odd, this need for an outrider to go ahead and smooth his way, because in his life he had friends enough, while his novels were viewed by people of dependable judgement as being among the best — perhaps the very best — of their time. Is it just that to later generations he is a little too ‘difficult’? Is it merely that Green requires a fraction more concentration than Greene? Perhaps so; but it is puzzling, this chronic shyness, when what his admirers are chiefly claiming for him is that he brings pleasure — a pleasure more intense, more original and more rewarding than that offered by any of his contemporaries.
Your first Green novel is in some ways your most memorable. I can still remember the incredulous pleasure with which I read Living in a battered library edition about thirty years ago. Here was a novelist who was doing something I had never experienced in fiction before. He seemed to have redrawn the familiar triangle between reader, writer and character, so that you somehow had the impression that you knew his characters better than he himself did. So real were they, so grand yet so fragile, that one felt protective of them — protective even against the plotting of the author whose skill had allowed one to know them in the first place.
Living is a story about people in a Birmingham iron foundry, most of them poor manual workers without much life beyond factory, family or a small terraced house. From the first page, the absence of certain common words from the prose brings us face to face with the concrete nature of their world: harsh, hard to mould, monotonous. Yet alongside this machine-age view of the ‘masses’, something underhand is going on.
To begin with, it is in a kind of tenderness that Green allows to colour his descriptions; though when this feeling threatens to swell, he usually deflates it: sometimes our love for the people in the book seems unrequited — by them or by their author — and this can be painful. You vow not to fall so easily next time; yet soon the beguiling rhythms of the prose begin to seduce you once again, so that you long for emotional release, either within the fictional lives of the characters or in your unstable relationship with them. The inner shape of the novel in this way imitates our experience of living: it promises pattern, then withholds it, insisting on a formless banality; it describes intensity, but as part of a grudgingly accepted monotony; it glimpses poetry, but only from the corner of its eye.
Green came from a wealthy family, was educated at Eton and Oxford and knew many of the the people whose names are familiar from literary biographies of the period. His ‘research’ for Living was undertaken while he worked for his father’s company, which made plumbing supplies and beer-bottling equipment in a factory similar to the one described in the book. His attentive, unpatronising attitude to the working-class characters in the novel was cause for comment at the time it came out, in 1929, as was his largely satirical treatment of their employers. Green, however, had grander interests than those of ‘class’. Most of the workers are idle or conniving, and while the toffs are epitomised by a young man who can do tricks with a glass of water without spilling it on his dinner jacket, they also have their complications, their light and shade. Young Dupret, the factory owner’s son, may be a secret nose-picker, but he does see beauty in the work the men do.
