492
PARTISAN REVIEW
early book do not seem to me to be very difficult to discover. He had
felt an aversion to the
looseness
of modem English prose, and to avoid
this weakness, he has tried to write in what is virtually a kind of
shorthand. His sentences are short and staccato. Many of his inver–
sions do save the use of a word or two. He omits articles, and some–
times the connecting particles. To my mind, and to the later mind of
Henry Green, this was a wholly mistaken method of confronting the
contemporary linguistic problem. Telegraphese is simply one of the
diseases of our time, and homeopathic remedies are patently inap–
plicable to literature. Certainly it is true that a great fault of current
speech lies in the proliferation of superfluous and meaningless sounds.
Phrases like "as a matter of fact" and "taking everything into con–
sideration" have lowered the currency of speech, and some severity is
needed. But "the" is both an innocent and a useful word, and to
concentrate so heavy a gun against it seems a curious misdirection of
this writer's fire-power.
Green's two earliest books,
Blindness
and
Living,
revealed a
young writer of obvious originality but confronted by obvious dangers.
Would he surrender to his idiosyncrasies and dissipate his talents in
a mere striving at any price for the outward appearance of novelty?
His next two books were not encouraging.
Party Going
is a whimsical
description of a group of rich young people leaving from Victoria
Station for the continent. One has the gloomy feeling when reading
it that what was aimed at was quite unashamedly a
tour-de-force;
and nothing in the world is more discouraging than a
tour-de-force
manque.
The language of this book is not so much distorted as archly
contrived,
and although there are moments of superb and individual
humor the whole book leaves a rather sickly taste in the mouth.
When
Party Going
was followed by a slapdash and totally immemor–
able autobiography, any critic would have been justified in suggesting
that Henry Green's name might be regretfully added to the long list
which is headed
Hopes Dashed or Promise Unfulfilled.
Fortunately
this judgment would have proved grotesquely premature.
Almost all the admirers of Green would agree that his three best
novels, the
oeuvre
by which he may be allowed to stand or fall, are
the three which followed in fairly quick succession on his unfortunate
autobiography. To these three,
Caught, Lo ving,
and
Back,
some
of his more extreme devotees would add his 1948 novel,
Concluding.
