the Green agenda

Leafing idly - if one can "leaf" on the internet - through the incorporeal pages of Jacket magazine, I came across this quote, from the novelist Henry Green's interview in the Paris Review in 1958:

"People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. After all, we don't write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore."

Now, I love this! It's funny, and prescient, and it's a little scary to have the long-dead Green engaged in the dialogue we're having today, all about technology that didn't exist when he was alive - and in any case, he'd have said machinery. It troubles me.

Henry Green has always been a hero of mine, ever since I read his books Nothing and Doting way back in the eighties. I still think it's marvellous to have a book called Nothing, and most of his titles are similarly terse: Loving, Blindness, Back...

The books are terse, too: Green had an incredibly spare, open style. The two novels I mention are written in dialogue, with (let's say) two people talking about a third, and then the third, plus one of the original two talking about the other, and then someone else walking in and saying, "But I just saw her and she told me..." It's just like life, just as aggravating as life (this is discussed in the interview) and very funny. Although nothing ever seems to happen the story is moved inexorably on.

Henry Green is impossible to categorise, either as a person or as a writer. His class identities are all mixed up (relevant: it was the first half of the century), and he had a very strange way of looking at the world. His books are all surface - all from the outside: there are no hidden thoughts, no stream-of-consciousness, no Modernist under-the-surface maneouvering - he wrote about what showed, actions and words. But somehow this technique produced these living characters, and his books feel like personal discoveries. They are intense, private things, like prisms, to read, hold up to the sunlight and watch the air change around them.

Asked if he thought television and movies would alter the form of the novel, Green replied:

"It is simply that the novelist is a communicator and must therefore be interested in any form of communication. You don’t dictate to a girl now, you use a recording apparatus; no one faints anymore, they have blackouts; in Geneva you don’t kill someone by cutting his throat, you blow a poisoned dart through a tube and zing, you’ve got him. Media change. We don’t have to paint chapels like Cocteau, but at the same time we must all be ever on the lookout for the new ways. "

nb: I'm not going to write whole critique of Henry Green. I've found excellent and fascinating articles online which there is no point in trying to duplicate here:

interview in the Paris Review, 1958

Brooke Allen in the New Criterion, 1993

James Wood in the TLS, 2006 (I think)