THE NOVELS OF HENRY GREEN
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obvious fault in the writing, and by our usual standards there is
nothing particularly wrong with any of them. They seem to do their
different jobs well enough; they carry the reader along without either
offending or surprising or boring him. Yet, distinguishable though
they may be, how intimately they share a lack of
all
distinction in
the secondary and nobler sense of the word. They are the work of
journeymen, smooth, yarning voices, telling a good story over the
port.
There is no cause to write any further here about the two small
categories of the Dandies and the Archaists. They have played a
negligible role in the modern English and American novel. The real
linguistic war is being fought between novelists of the kind I have
quoted- whom we might not unfairly call the .Men in the Street–
and the smaller but formidable band of Terrorists. The Terrorists
are, by their nature, a diverse and unwieldy category. All they have
in common is that they have made a conscious assault on their lin–
guistic medium. Some have been defeated by it, and their bloody
corpses lie strewn by the roadside, derided and desecrated by anti–
terrorist critics and novelists. Undoubtedly an appalling risk is taken,
for the defeat of a Terrorist is a gross and humiliating defeat. He can
be justly accused of affectation, of pretentiousness and of exhibition–
ism, and several modern novelists have shied so desperately away from
the pedestrianism of their contemporaries that they have tumbled
headlong into all these vices. But the Arch-terrorist stands now like
a monolith in the waste of contemporary prose, and we can clearly
make out the uncoordinated but by no means disreputable platoon
which
is
scattered in his wake. Such diverse writers as Thomas Wolfe
and Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller and Henry Green, may
be
grouped
in this context under the banner of J ames Joyce.
The intention of this preamble is to prepare American readers
of Henry Green for the shock which they are almost bound to feel
at their first approach to him. He is the most
self-conscious
of modern
English novelists, the most mannered, the least digestible. I believe
that he is also--and I shall try to dissolve any paradox which may
seem to be involved here-among the most natural of our novelists
and conceivably the most important of them.
The linguistic oddities of Henry Green are not by any means
his most important contribution to the novel, but to many readers
