`Odd and Oddly Familiar'

A reader reports she has discovered the joys of Henry Green, by way of Eudora Welty’s essay “Henry Green: Novelist of the Imagination,” collected in The Eye of the Story. She’s reading his masterpiece, Loving, and says, “I'm not quite far enough yet to say for certain, but I strongly suspect that Loving will turn out to be a watershed moment in my reading history.” I know what she means. Green, without trying, writes as though he belonged to another species. He is helplessly sui generis, and I suspect he puts off many readers with his oddness. How absurd that some critics have tried to domesticate him by calling Green’s novels “proletarian.” He works from within the world he creates, which looks something like ours but is not identical. You could never deduce the existence of such a world before reading Green’s renderings of it. Tonight, if you have a dream that is not cartoonish and that you’re tempted to describe as “realistic,” whatever that means, it might resemble a Henry Green novel. As Welty puts it:

“Different as they are from one another, all Henry Green’s novels are likely on first impact to seem at once odd and oddly familiar. One reason must be that they touch, as they always do, uncommonly close to the quick of experience. Another reason may be that when after moving you as they do they come to an end, they do not (I think) release you, like the more orthodox novels and like the greatest novels.”

This is shrewd and honest evaluation. Welty dispels any suggestion of hyperbole the reader thinks he detects. No, Green is not James or Proust, but once he casts his spell you no longer inhabit the same world. Your expectations – of books, of the world – are left benignly and lastingly off-kilter. That’s why some of us feel so jealously protective of Green. We want to proselytize but we also want to hoard him, protect him from the unworthy, though I suspect the unworthy are indifferent. Walter Benjamin, an incisive reader when not in one of his political moods, wrote in his essay “The Storyteller”:

“A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares his companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader….In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace.”

This is not the case for most novels or novelists, and in the final sentence Benjamin goes too far and ruins the metaphor. As readers, we destroy nothing, though our jealousy and hunger can be fierce. In Green’s company, even our solitude is no longer truly solitary.