'Ordinary, Helpless, Moody Human Talk'

Long ago I came to accept that certain writers will never be enjoyed by certain readers. I’m no matchmaker and don’t have the soul of a proselytizer. I resent people telling me what I ought to like. On Wednesday two young missionaries came to the front door. One launched his pitch and I indulged him for a polite interval, thirty seconds or so. Both were well-mannered, well-groomed and well-spoken. I interrupted to say – politely – that I wasn’t interested in what they were offering. It can’t be easy going door to door, facing snarling dogs and cranks, while trying to be articulate about the thing in the world most important to you. They smiled, thanked me and moved on. 

I’m fairly certain I’ve never convinced a single reader to enjoy at least one novel by Henry Green (1905-73), not even Living (1929) or Loving (1945). Admittedly, they are eccentric, but not in a way I find annoying or trivial, as is true with most "experimental" fiction. Green’s style requires a certain adjustment of one’s manner of reading. You certainly can’t speed-read his prose. From now on I will refer interested readers to V.S. Pritchett’s “Henry Yorke, Henry Green,” published in the Winter 1983 issue of Twentieth Century Literature. Pritchett’s introduction is a charmer:

 

“There was Henry Yorke and there was Henry Green--two friends in one. The former was a man of business and an engineer who had ‘served his time’: the latter, for the everlastingly mysterious reason of artistic genius, was one of the most delicate of the novelists who became known in the 30’s, a spirit of poetry, fantasy and often wild laughter, an original whose gifts have been admired not only in this country but in Europe and America. This is the Henry whom all who care for English literature, mourn but above all celebrate for what his genius gave to us.”

 

And this on Green’s much-admired (by Welty, by Updike) and much-demeaned prose:

 

“He went for the rare image, the visual mannered style which caught the sensation of being intensely alive from minute to minute. But at heart he was a listener: he doted -- it is his word -- on ordinary, helpless, moody human talk, the vernacular of factory workers whose talk he especially loved—the blokey talk of offices and parties, the rattling brittle chatter of the sophisticated. But he was not a tape-recorder. He saw that the human rigmarole is a mosaic of repetitions and that it is a sort of unconscious poetry or a touching attempt to grope our way towards intimacy and yet also to self-protection.”

 

[You can find another essay about Green, “In the Echo Chamber,” in Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991).]