Back

INTRODUCTION

“Hallucination may be a new revelation of the real world,” the novelist and critic Philip Toynbee wrote in 1946 in the all-too-real world of post-Second World War Britain.¹ He was reviewing Back, set in the closing phase of the war, when imminent Allied victory was overshadowed for the British by the effects of years of deprivation and by a new hazard in the form of pilotless missiles — to many people, more terrifying than the blitz of 1940–41. Henry Green had already written about the war’s early years in his novels Caught (1943) and Loving (1945), as well as in some short stories which, as John Updike was to say, operate “at full tilt, bringing to the inferno of blitzed London a descriptive power of almost lurid virtuosity”. Beneath the stylistic fireworks, though, these works were developing a sombre exploration of the human capacity for making chaos — in politics by implication, but above all in personal relationships and in the individual psyche. Back, for all its final elements of optimism, is Green’s most painful expression of this theme: so painful that in the escapist literary climate in which it appeared, few reviewers other than Toynbee had much good to say about it.² Kate O’Brien, writing in the Spectator, summed up the general reaction when she warned people off this “small, grey, personal book: very sad, very narrow … greyly and coldly misted in small, mad sorrow”.³ It was “a work of art”, she acknowledged, but it was “not for all readers”.

O’Brien was right at least about the art, and also about how personal it is. In terms of Green’s own experience, the book’s roots lay as far back as the First World War, in the second half of which his parents had turned part of their country house, Forthampton Court, on the Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border, into a convalescent home for officers — a domestic version of Craiglockhart, the Scottish hospital where, around the same time, Wilfred Owen had met Siegfried Sassoon. Henry Yorke (Green was his pen-name) was then in his early teens and his encounters with these gassed, shell-shocked, terrified visitors during school holidays had an impact on him all the more forcible for its contrast with the somewhat daunted confidence which he had previously felt in the apparently invincible world of adult men. (His father was a clever, successful business man and there was a regiment of high-ranking military uncles.) One episode which he later vividly remembered involved a trembling wretch who could not eat or sleep and screamed at the sound of laughter or the banging of doors. One day the man seemed better and set off from the house on a bicycle ride but he quickly turned back, wobbling desperately. Soon after leaving Forthampton, he committed suicide.⁴

Elaine Showalter has written that “The Great War was the first and, so far, the last time in the twentieth century that men and the wrongs of men occupied a central position in the history of madness”⁵ but men’s writing about subsequent wars suggests that in this respect as in some others, the Great War never in fact ended. Certainly its psychological impact was still being felt in 1939–45 — a point made in Back when the grief-bewildered Mrs Grant mistakes Charley Summers on his return from prisoner-of-war camp for her brother, killed in 1917. Henry Yorke’s own elder brother died of leukaemia in the same year and the events of that momentous period may have contributed to a psychological vulnerability which found different kinds of expression in Henry Green’s fiction. One of its manifestations is the intense romantic neediness of characters like the depressed Elizabeth in Concluding (1948), who “helped [her lover’s] heart find hers by fastening her mouth on his as though she were an octopus that had lost its arms to the propellers of a tug, and had only its mouth now with which, in a world of the hunted, to hang onto wrecked spars”.⁶Back is Green’s most extended attempt to plumb the world of the hunted — and haunted — but the theme is present throughout his work, from the (literally) blind dependency of the central character of the first of his nine novels, Blindness (1926), through the longings and inadequacies of the fire-station chief Pye in Caught (1943) and the butler Raunce in Loving (1945), to the amorous idiocy of the middle-aged father, Arthur Middleton, in what proved to be his final book, Doting, published in 1952, when Green was still only in his mid-forties.

After Doting, the novelist was to lapse into morose fictional silence, a heavy drinker and increasingly a recluse. In 1947 he had written a grimly comic autobiographical sketch about a man with a paranoid hangover, but it was some years earlier that friends — close women friends, especially, such as Rosamond Lehmann — had begun to talk about how seriously he was drinking. Whisky plays a part in the nightmare of the otherwise abstemious Charley Summers, the central character of Back, and Green’s own gin habit may have contributed to what Philip Toynbee described as the book’s hallucinatory nature.

It may also have helped to produce some eccentricities in terms of plausibility, organization and stylistic texture, the most obvious of which is also the book’s most ambitious and far-reaching (if somewhat perfunctorily incorporated) device: the insertion, halfway through, of twelve pages of a translation from a semi-fictional eighteenth-century autobiography, the Souvenirs attributed to the Marquise de Créqui. Green’s friend Nancy Mitford had lamented that Caught was not Court — a novel entirely about upper-class people like the Yorkes themselves, rather than largely about firemen.⁷ In an oblique way, the French episode in Back answers her regret. Although Green is best known for his depiction of the lives of working-class and lower-middle-class English people, he had always been a devotee of aristocratic French literature and his work often juxtaposes normally divided social milieux. As a young man he avidly read Proust. Among the books to which he returned in the Second World War was Les Liaisons dangereuses. And he made more than one translation from the Souvenirs, the seven volumes of which are still in the library at Forthampton.⁸ He was attracted by the formal artifice of the genre as much as the kinds of society which it depicts, and used the influence with particular success in the construction of his last comedies, Nothing (1950) and Doting. For now, however, he was mainly intrigued by episodes in the Souvenirs which concern obsession and mistaken identity — themes which are also found in his other novels and which are related to his interest in all forms of duplicity, from pseudonyms to bigamy.

The delusion of Charley Summers, in his obsessive grief for the dead Rose, that her half-sister Nancy is Rose herself, closely parallels that of Septimanie de Richelieu in the episode from the Souvenirs. Septimanie has been in love with the Comte de Gisors, who married someone else and subsequently died. Through outside intervention, she meets an illegitimate half-brother of the Comte, who is his double. What the narrator of the Souvenirs says can also be applied, mutatis mutandis, to Back: “I shall never forget this twin attachment, these two extraordinary passions she somehow found a way to lavish on two men who were entirely different and yet at the same time exactly similar, on the living and the dead …. Nor can I ever forget her last moments when … she seemed … to fuse the memory of these two men into one, into one true lover.”

Henry Yorke himself knew what could be involved in trying to fuse two or more powerful relationships. He was married and was very close to his wife’s sister, while being involved, too, in several shorter affairs, particularly during the war, when his wife and son were in the country. One was with a woman named Rosemary Clifford, whom he met in his wartime role as a volunteer fireman; another was with Mary Keene, a former artist’s model who was married at the time to the film-maker Ralph (“Bunny”) Keene. In 1943, Mary spent some time at Dedham, in Essex, with the painter Matthew Smith. Henry visited them there at least once. Redham, the home village of Rose in Back, is clearly based on Dedham, and the novelist’s divided affections at the time when he was writing the book seem to lie behind its extravagantly complicated emotions. Some time after the affair ended, Mary Keene wrote a number of comments in her copy. Among them was the chilly sentence, “H. Green’s idea of sublimating the two women into one perfect one is interesting.”⁹

Evelyn Waugh, an old friend of Green’s who was one of his severer critics, found the Septimanie passage “irrelevant & inelegant.… Very mad”.¹⁰ It was an over-hasty judgement. In the tradition of neo-classical “imitation”, what Back does is to adapt the romantic implausibilities of his eighteenth-century French source to a contemporary kind of psychosis. The whole book is not only an encoded version of Henry Yorke’s personal life but also a tragi-comic depiction of other aspects of the world around him in 1945: widespread fears about the social consequences of demobilization; the impact of war on individuals both through direct injuries — Summers has lost a leg, Middlewitch an arm — and in its anonymization of their familiar surroundings, a phenomenon comically symbolized by the novel’s game with bureaucratic initials. Summers has himself contributed to the mechanical processes of depersonalization by introducing a new filing system at the office: a system which fails to work.

Charley Summers is also a mid-twentieth-century version of that avatar of European individualism, the questing knight of medieval and later romance: a man injured in combat, searching for a rose which is both a specific young woman and a symbol of lost peace. Much of Green’s work is characterized by an experimental mixture of registers, the most flamboyant of which is deployed in the opening paragraphs of Back when Charley, newly returned from several years as a prisoner of war, goes to Redham to visit the grave of the woman whose name “of all names, was Rose”. It was under a French rose that the sniper who shot him in the leg was hidden and roses fill the churchyard, their inter-twinings mimicked by the repetitions of Green’s voluptuous syntax:

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 hung their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.

Critics have pointed out that the manner is reminiscent of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”:¹¹

… when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose …

To contemporaries it more strongly recalled parts of T.S. Eliot’s recent Four Quartets,¹² the resemblance lying not only in the imagery but in Green’s counterpointing this literally florid style with the most ordinary characters and utterances. When we finally meet Rose herself, through some letters to Charley which he still regards as “sacred”, her voice is banal: “I didn’t half get a moan from dad yesterday in our letter box. You know what I am about letter writing.” No novelist has based more of his art on bathos and if such collisions in Green’s novels are partly there for tragi-comic effect, they also contribute to an argument which runs throughout his work: that it is in ordinariness that the true epiphanies occur. Charley’s quest for his falsely idealized Rose ends in the arms of the unexceptionally genuine Nancy, with her cups of tea and her pregnant cat. After all the narrative’s high rhetoric and Charley’s passionate confusion, Nancy’s invitation on the final page — “Come here, silly” — speaks tenderly for common sense and plain kindness.

The conclusion is far from sentimental, but Green lets it go as far as he can in that direction. The novel is a simultaneously ironic and longing flirtation with sentimentality. An example of the interplay can be seen in its attitude to children, who are more than once described amidst all the confusion as representing the only sure meaning life has. Nancy tells Charley that “Having children’s one of the few things anyone can do for herself in this old world …. It’s all there is that people the same as us can do with their own lives.” She is unconsciously echoing not only Rose’s widower James (“After all having children is what we’re here for …. All there is to life, or that’s how it strikes me”) but also Charley’s boss, Mr Mead. Yet Nancy herself is childless, James is a neglectful father who does little to alleviate the unhappiness of his son Ridley, and the narrative is quick to expose Mead’s home life as less perfect than his myth of it. If having children is all that life offers in Back, it is presented as a mixed gift, not least in Nancy’s own relationship with her bigamous father.

In a similar way, the story ends by refusing the consolations which it has seemed to be about to offer. Charley will have “a happy married life” with Nancy, we are assured, but when at last he gets into bed with her he can do nothing but howl. It is, in the book’s final words, “no more or less, really, than she had expected”. At this miserable moment, “really” is both the kind of expression which would have come easily into Nancy’s mind and an assertion of the narrative’s claims on truthfulness.

Every novel is at some level about interpretation, but Back is almost Dostoevskian in the urgency of its central character’s pursuit of meaning. The process involves mistakes and loose ends in the narrative itself which brought criticism even before it was published. Green’s editor at the Hogarth Press, John Lehmann (who had earlier turned down the Septimanie episode when Green offered it for publication in Penguin New Writing)¹³ asked him to sort out various matters which he and his sister Rosamond found unnecessarily complicated.¹⁴ Green had written the book quickly after finding himself “blessed or cursed by a frightful surge of power & ideas”¹⁵ when he completed Loving in 1944. He was incensed by Lehmann’s doubts and wouldn’t make any changes. Much of his response was expressed in intuitive terms about compositional texture and balance, artistic claims which in turn offended the jealous Lehmann: “I am an artist myself and absolutely decline to be treated like a slot machine which produces a book when an MS. is shoved into it.… [The] whole point of The Hogarth Press while I have been in control, for better or worse, has been that it has been run by a writer with his own ideas and standards.”¹⁶

Green won this quarrel and the book was left with its muddles and inconsistencies intact. Is there really a close physical resemblance between Rose and Nancy? How can Dot possibly not realize which man has got into bed with her? For whom did James subscribe to the literary magazine in which the Septimanie episode was published — Rose (as here) or James’s sister (see here)? If Charley gets “his first good night’s rest for weeks” after reading the story (see here), why does the narrative keep commenting on his having slept “very well for once”, both after he has cut up Rose’s letters (see here) and when Dot goes to bed with James (see here)? Bewilderment and frustration are involved in reading Green at such moments and critics have found various ways of explaining why this seems an essential part of his work’s value. The novelist Terry Southern, for example, suggested that it allows readers a feeling of superior grasp — of seeing “more in the situation than the author does” — which makes the fiction belong uniquely to them.¹⁷ Certainly, as Rod Mengham has argued, the “strong sense of the giddiness of interpretation” in Back is related to Charley’s own predicament. But most readers are bound to speculate about the author’s relationship to it, also, and if they are not impatient and have not swallowed the critical dogma which tries to exclude authors from their works, will allow it a special kind of sympathy. The description of Charley’s “usual state of not knowing, lost as he always was” was marked by Mary Keene in her copy and there is a close resemblance between these words and something Green wrote to Rosamond Lehmann at this time about the state of mind in which he worked: “I really have only the faintest idea of what my books are like, or where I am going.”¹⁸ Here as elsewhere, Green’s fiction is an oblique form of self-portrait: the artist, in all his worried raptness, gazing at himself in a distorting mirror.

Back is the perfect title for this self-reflexive, to-ing and fro-ing novel. The word is loaded with different meanings on which the narrative ruminates almost as naggingly as Charley dwells on the name Rose: “he followed a strange girl … back to what may have been her home”; “‘we all of us came back to what we didn’t expect’”; “he knew it was all right at last, was as it had been six years back”; “‘Life has a funny way of getting back at us, sometimes.’” The most important of these repetitions comes in the call of Rose’s mother, Mrs Grant, as she realizes that her husband has died:

“Gerald.” “Gerald.” And much more urgent, “D’you hear me?”.… After which the most frightful sobbing. “Gerald darling, Father, where are you?”; then, in a sort of torn bellow, “Father,” then, finally, “Come back.…”

Both Charley and Nancy are in the house at this moment and it crystallizes something about each of them: the implications of the fact that Gerald is Nancy’s father, as well as Rose’s; and an easing of Charley’s obsession with the past: “He clapped hands down tight over his ears. He concentrated on not ever remembering …. he won free. He mastered it. And, when he took his streaming hands away, everything was dead quiet.” This passage, more than the book’s closing episode, seems to represent a victory for Charley; but such apparent climaxes are never to be trusted in Green’s work. What saves Charley, as the critic John Russell has pointed out,¹⁹ is not only — as in a conventional romance — the love of a good woman, but his diligence in the routine life of the office and the sympathy of those with whom he works.

Evelyn Waugh was the first to praise the success of Back in delineating this world — which, again, was also Green’s own, in his role as managing director of the family’s engineering firm, Pontifex & Sons.²⁰ The office anchors the story and provides an environment in which Charley’s cure unsensationally progresses. It also supplies one of the many moments of bathos. Immediately after the high romance of Septimanie, the next piece of prose which Charley, like the book’s reader, has to deal with is a business letter, full of bureaucratic jargon: “When last autumn at the instance of the Ministry, Section S.E.C.O., we accepted your esteemed order no. 1526/2/5812 for 60 (sixty) size N.V. Rotary Extraction Pumps and 60 (sixty) size O.U. Centrifugal Feed Pumps, we pointed out both to your goodselves and to Mr Turner of S.E.C.O that we could only undertake this contract on the clear understanding that you would be in a position to urge through sufficient quantities of the pump body.…” Even here, what might seem straightforward to interpret — an easy joke at the expense of modern commercial life — has more complex resonances. Like Pontifex & Sons, Charley Summers’s firm incorporates a metal foundry, but the fictional factory “was burned to a cinder in the blitz”, so this essential part of its business has been “made out” to other companies such as the one from which the complaining letter comes. There is a faint but crucial echo, in all this, of the war’s effects on Charley — of a sexuality which has been temporarily quenched, and then misdirected and thwarted. The symbolic link is made explicit after he and Nancy have climbed through a bombsite to the rose garden where they kiss.

[In] the position she held, half in, half out of his arms, and so close that the one eye in his line of vision was in the outer corner of its socket to watch him, he saw it catch the dying sunset light around, and glow, as if she had opened the eye hole to a furnace [my italics].

Like the book’s other seeming climaxes, this one is both full of ambiguity — is it romantic or apocalyptic? — and unresolved: “He made another clutch at her, but she broke away completely. He was left, so that his arms hung at his sides, and he could not speak, paralysed …. So they walked home in silence.” Green never lets his readers settle and in this pendulum swing between an emotional furnace and a clumsy silence lies the essence of his strange, sad, unforgettable novel.

August 1997

J.T.