24 - Henry Green

Summary

“[F]iction, or indeed any book, if good, is not lying, it is a world, a life of its own. Marginal, perhaps, but the marginal, or oblique, has great value.” Henry Green, The Times, 1961 / “'I can't seem able to express myself but there you are.'” Raunce, in Loving, 1945 / 'What is wrong with this picture?' It is a question with which generations of late twentieth-century British children became familiar, as they scanned treated photographs in magazines, trying to place the trim missing from a policeman's uniform, or locate an invisible football; it is also a question pertinent to Henry Green, English modernism's most evasive and idiosyncratic talent. (He was born Henry Vincent Yorke in 1905 and died in 1973.) Reading one of his elliptical yet precisely pitched novels, we might well find ourselves becoming gradually aware that something more, less, or other than straightforward 'representation' is going on. In its most overt form, this displacement of attention involves literally leaving things out - notably the articles which go missing from Green's work in the late 1920s, such as the unpublished 'Saturday' ('Noise came from streets but only murmuring. Sun shone on flowers' (S, 53)) and his second novel, Living: “As Mr Dupret and Bridges walked through the shops Mr Tarver followed them. This man was chief designer in Birmingham factory. He was very clever man at his work.” (LLPG, 211)