THE NOVELS OF HENRY GREEN
491
rather than to fiction. Or at least this
is
only true in a highly com–
plicated sense. At some point in this book a reader may find that the
characters and the actions are suddenly in focus; that they have found
their center. And in the same moment he will understand that it
is
not the characters and the actions which have shifted, but the focus
and the center. In other words what has happened
is
that Green has
succeeded in imposing his peculiar vision on his reader. We are
seeing people from a position which we have never adopted before,
and, by doing so, our stereoscopic vision has been startlingly clarified.
So long as we are able to preserve Green's vision, superimposed on
whatever our own one may have been, however simple or however
complex it was, then our total apprehension of life has been imeasur–
ably enriched.
Yet it remains none the less true that the beginning of the book
is
not inviting. We feel at once that an effect is being striven for, and,
by the inevitable action of readers' resistance, we determine that the
effect shall not be achieved. The assault has been too sudden. Even
the great Terrorist himself began
Ulysses
in a prose which was familiar
to
his readers, and exercised considerable discretion in escorting them
by devious paths to the guillotine. And in this case the eccentricities
seem somehow trivial. This omission of the definite article irritates us
by its self-consciousness, and seems to contribute nothing to the per–
fectly ordinary statements which are being made. Nor are we likely
to be reassured as we read further. "Mr. Bridges went down through
works in Birmingham till Tupe he found." "Again was first day out–
side, another fine evening." Many such sentences as this confront
us on every page of the book, and it would be difficult to excuse them.
In the first of them I can think of only one conceivable reason for
such an inversion. Had the reader been led to t:.'<:pect that Mr. Bridges
was likely to find not Tupe, but someone else, then this bringing for–
ward of, and consequent emphasis on, the proper name might con–
ceivably have been justified. But in the text no such reason exists.
One can only feel that the writer was alarmed by the flatness of the
sentence he so carefully avoided, and that this inadequate motive was
the only one which moved him to make
his
distortion.
As
for the
second sentence, I find it frankly incomprehensible.
If
it was first
day outside, how could it also be the evening?
Yet the
general
motive for Green's oddities of diction in this
