Thinking about the novelist Henry Green

In his introduction to Penguin's 1978 reprint of Henry Green's three short novels, Living (1929), Loving (1945), and Party Going (1939), John Updike wrote,

If I say that Henry Green taught me how to write it implies that I learned, and it is not a business one learns--unlearns, rather, the premature certainties and used ecstasies unravelling as one goes. . . . Green, to me, is so good a writer, such a revealer of what English prose fiction can do in this century, that I can launch myself upon this piece of homage and introduction only by falling into some sort of imitation of that liberatingly ingenious voice, that voice so full of other voices, its own interpolations amid the matchless dialogue twisted and tremulous with a precision that kept the softness of groping, of sensation, of living.

It interests me that Updike so adored Green's work, for Updike's own prose style bears almost no resemblance to Green's. Yet neither does mine, and I also adore it. Green is, like Elizabeth Bowen, like Virginia Woolf, a poet of prose; yet the artifice of his language does not obscure the humanity and sensitivity of his observations. My favorite novel is Loving, set in wartime Ireland, among English servants who are relieved to be in a neutral country yet also ashamed and worried about it. The book is both a comedy and a tragedy; the characters are both unscrupulous and delicate. Altogether it is a remarkable tale, strung together by means of Green's rhythmic, oblique, mannered, and beautiful sentences.

Here's how the novel opens:

Once upon a day an old butler called Eldon lay dying in his room attended by the head housemaid, Miss Agatha Burch. From time to time the other servants separately or in chorus gave expression to proper sentiments and then went on with what they had been doing.

         One name he uttered over and over, "Ellen."

          The pointed windows of Mr. Eldon's room were naked glass with no blinds or curtains. For this was in Eire where there is no blackout.

But such intense descriptions are always brief, for Green advances his tale primarily by way of trivial conversations among his characters. And he's so good as rendering these interactions. I love, for instance, how, merely by choosing not to use commas in his dialogue tags, he constructs a remarkable imitation of quick and casual intimacy:

At last [Edith] said quite calm,

          "Would the dinner bell have gone yet?"

          "My dinner," [Charley] cried obviously putting on an act, "holy smoke is it as late as that, and this lad of mine not taken up the nursery tray yet. Get going," he said to Bert, "look sharp." The boy rushed out. "God forgive me," he remarked, "but there's times I want to liquidate 'im. Come to father beautiful," he said.

          "Not me," she replied amused.

          "Well if you don't want I'm not one to insist. But did nobody never tell you about yourself?"

          "Aren't you just awful," she said apparently delighted.

Every time I reread Loving, I'm in love with it again.