Experimental or Mannered?

            Henry Green challenges me as a reader. I want to say that his style—the dropping of definite articles, for example—is mannerist. But Green wrote to his friend Neville Coghill that he was “still busy experimenting with the definite article” and didn’t know how it would turn out (Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green, ed. Matthew Yorke. Viking Penguin, 1993, p. 51). So is he not a mannerist, but an experimental writer? I think he defies labels. Green is like Woolf in the way he moves from one conversation to another without a transition. But there is often what seems to me a willful blunting or delaying of sense in his writing. Reading Green can sometimes be eerily like reading George Meredith. And one can grow to like it in an odd masochistic way. Did he mean…? And we guess, and wait, sometimes futilely, for confirmation.

I’ve only read a couple of his ten novels, and my favorite is his third, Party Going published in 1939.  Max Adey, a rich young man who these days would be diagnosed with AADD, tortured by the beautiful and also rich Amabel and torturing Julia Wray and possibly Angela Crevy in his turn, arranges and pays for tickets for his friends for a three-week house party in the south of France. But fog closes down on London and none of the trains run. The party assembles at the station, and after the station fills with thousands of would-be travelers, the party moves into the station hotel, which soon afterwards closes its metal gates to keep out the huge crowd.

            The accompaniment to the cruel and mindless doings of the young things in the party is the story of Miss Fellowes, aunt of one of them (Claire Hignam), who has some kind of neurotic attack in the bar of the station and is carried into one of the rooms Max has taken at the hotel to accommodate his party. She is followed by a mysterious man who speaks in varied class accents (like our author, in his various books; is he the prole Henry Green or the toff Henry Yorke—his real name? Frank Kermode thinks he’s Hermes, “boundary-crosser” and guardian of travelers), and also by two aged nannies of party members—the two women just happen to be in the station when Miss Fellowes is taken ill—and they follow into the hotel. The threatened death of Miss Fellowes and the presence of the three old ladies, like Fates, are things the young people can’t avoid.

            It is difficult to avoid comparing the novel to Sartre’s play No Exit, which it predates, though at the end of the novel the trains begin running again.  Clear influences of Woolf show up, as I’ve mentioned, in the way Green jumps from the middle of one conversation to one in another room.

            The other Green novel I’ve read is probably his best-known, and was chosen by TIME  for its “100 Best English-language novels from 1923-2005.” Loving was published in 1945, and is an upstairs-downstairs story. In the Irish country house Kinalty Castle of Mrs. Tennant—like her servants, English—she and her daughter-in-law Violet Tennant, sometimes called Mrs. Jack because her husband, a young officer in London, is Jack Tennant, live at some distance from the war, since Ireland is neutral. Violet is having an affair with a neighbor, Captain Dermot Davenport, whose estate is Clancarty. As the book opens, Charley Raunce, the footman, is in the process of superseding the dying butler Eldon, stealing his black and red books, which are the keys not only to the management of the house and cellar but to the blackmailing of Davenport. The other visitors Eldon has listed don’t matter much, and at any rate Kinalty Castle has few visitors now in wartime.

            Raunce flirts with the housemaids Kate and Edith and outrages the head housemaid Agatha Burch. Then, while Mrs. Tennant is in London, Edith and then Burch walk in on Violet while she is in bed with Davenport. Violet abruptly leaves that night on the night boat.

            The servants are left alone in the house during much of the book. Agatha Burch forms a natural alliance with the drunken cook, Mrs. Welch, while the younger servants tend to hang together. Raunce, at about 40, is in the middle. Edith confides to Kate that she loves Raunce, who eventually proposes to her. Kate is jealous, and sleeps with the lamp man, Paddy O’Conor, who is the only Irishman among the servants. The house has no electric light, and most of it is shut up. Eventually Raunce proposes to Edith, and they discuss taking a house in the neighborhood and bringing over Raunce’s mother. But mum is not having that, and we discover in the last line of the book that Raunce and Edith eloped and married in England “and lived happily ever after.”

            Green tells the story mostly in dialogue, and he may be aiming at the diction of servants who are aping their “betters” in language: at least once he uses rhyming slang (“A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce’s heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer”) and often uses the demonstrative for something or someone he’s just referred to (“She found Kate stretched out already…”I’m dead beat I am,” that girl said….”). The effect is oblique, as if we were listening in as one of the servants tells a story, but we had come in in the middle. If you can grow to like this, Henry Green is your cup of you-and-me.