490
PARTISAN REVIEW
they have proved the most important stumbling block to
Renry
Green. ''''hat is required from a new reader is, at first, no more than
indulgence, and indulgence can perhaps be induced by occasional
reperusal of the passages I have quoted above. Rather than write
like this he has chosen to take risks with his medium. To put it more
fairly, and with more dignity, I would say that
Gree~
has never
doubted that his vision was a new one and that it needed a new kind
of exposition. In his best books I bclieve that he has perfectly ad–
justed his medium to his vision, and that the result has been three
or four of the most satisfactory English novels of our time. In his
less successful books the language is often strained in a way which
seems arbitrary. But Green has never written a book with the sole
and deplorable purpose of exhibiting linguistic oddities. A sympa–
thetic reading even of his worst novel reveals that his motive in writing
it was that he had seen something and that he wished others to see it
too. In this case he has failed to make his vision clear, but the reality
and the freshness of his vision cannot be doubted.
Bridesly. Binningham.
Two o'clock. Thousands came back from dinner along streets.
"What we want is go, push," said works manager to son of Mr.
Dupret. "What I say to them is-let's get on with it, let's get the
stuff out."
Thousands came back to factori es they worked in from their dinners.
This is the opening passage of Green's very early novel,
Living.
It is an intelligent and perceptive study of workingclass life, well
documented (in private life Mr. Green is a Binningham manufac–
turer ), startlingly free of any preconceptions. It is at least arguable
that in this book Mr. Green (an old Etonian as well as a capitalist)
has written about the proletariat with more insight than has any
contemporary writer of proletarian origin. There is no compassion in
his vision, no indignation and certainly nothing patronizing.
As
in
all this writer's novels, the characters appear at first to be moving
in an odd and unfamiliar way; their motives and their conduct seem
to be just out of focus, just to one side of center. They are not pre–
dictable, in the sense that they do not conform in their actions to
the behavior of the fictional characters we know. Nor would it be
true to say that this failure of conformity is due simply to the fact
that the characters
do
conform, but that their conformity is to "life"
