Rarely can a contemporary view of a literary situation have been so different from a retrospective one as in the year of Lawrence’s death, 1930. Looking back from half a century or so on, it seems to mark the end of a great period of English fiction, but at the time matters must have seemed otherwise. Conrad and Hardy, men of an older generation, had died in the previous decade, but there was no reason to believe that Forster would never write another novel nor to foresee that Virginia Woolf’s best work was already done; Bennett was still alive and Joyce still writing and surely a younger generation would follow. Hardly a five-year period had passed between the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 1891 and To the Lighthouse in 1927 without the appearance of a masterpiece: What Maisie Knew, Nostromo, The Old Wives’ Tale, The Rainbow, Ulysses, A Passage to India were merely some of the more striking and different ones. Most of them are books which make demands on the reader both in terms of the techniques employed and the sympathies demanded; many of them deal with large political, social, and moral issues and they all oblige us to come to terms with newly explored experiences. Ambition and confidence are the marks of the giants of early modern fiction. Was it not to be expected that such a tradition should continue?
Yet in retrospect the literary scene of the 1930s and for long thereafter displayed nothing in fiction of comparable scope to what had gone before. Joyce Cary, who was to establish his reputation later, published five novels in the 1930s and George Orwell began his literary career, though his talents were clearly not those of a novelist so much as a journalist and polemicist. But those novelists who established themselves in the late 1920s and 1930s and whose works are still read seem mostly to have chosen deliberately smaller subjects and to have turned their backs on technical innovation.
Ivy Compton-Burnett had one thing which she did marvellously well and clearly had no intention of moving away from it; Richard Hughes produced a short but memorable minor classic in A High Wind in Jamaica, Elizabeth Bowen published a number of delicate small-scale post-Jamesian studies, mostly of children and adolescent girls; Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell set themselves to produce works of wit within a very limited social and emotional range. Akin to these in many ways, but puzzlingly different in others, was Henry Green who, gifted as it seems with everything required for a serious and major novelist, resolutely refused to write anything but studiously small masterpieces.
This, like all such generalizations, is based upon judgements about a multitude of novels and must bear the marks of the critic who makes it. Admirers of J. C. Powys and Wyndham Lewis would make very different generalizations. The former - and perhaps his brother T. F. Powys—would be seen as strikingly original fabulists in a regional mode which owes something to Hardy, and the latter would certainly be seen as continuing the line of Modernism. Nobody can doubt that they make large demands for their importance and I refer my readers to the Bibliography for different views. Both are obviously gifted with many of the qualities which fiction demands and Lewis was undoubtedly a polemicist of great force and intermittent insight, but neither seems to me able so to organize his talents as to construct a major novel.
A great deal has been written about the social, philosophical, and political reasons for—or accompaniments to—the movement which we loosely call Modernism. Its surprisingly sudden end in England has attracted less attention. Perhaps it is felt that it is more normal not to have major novelists and that normality asks for no explanation. It has been suggested (by C. P. Snow, somewhat self-servingly, among others) that Modernism was a cosmopolitan intrusion into an English fictional tradition which runs from George Eliot through Hardy to certain post-Second World War social novelists, in this paralleling a similar case made for the development of English poetry which bypasses Yeats to reach Betjeman. This would perhaps be a more convincing argument if one could feel that the 1930s was a thin patch and that since then an English tradition has flowed strongly. Alas, I cannot believe this. Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence are indubitably great writers who deal with great central issues; they are not aberrant intrusions except so far as genius is always an intrusion into run-of-the-mill normality. Moreover, as I have said, what is most significant about so many of those writers of the 1930s and 1940s whom we can still read with pleasure is not so much that they are minor novelists as that they appear to have turned their backs on the large issues and the ambitious structures of their predecessors. Instead they tend to deal wittily, allusively, quirkily, from rather unusual points of view, with the kind of material presented to them by a very limited social scene. In this they may be said to be provincial in a sense very different from Bennett or Hardy.
A partial explanation may lie in the experience which they had just missed but which must have shadowed their childhood—the Great War. The experience of the trenches produced a good deal of poetry and a number of novels, but for those born in the early years of the century it may be that the shock of the war, impinging on them in their adolescence, and the disillusion of the post-war years turned them against large claims and confident certainties and left them happier with the familiarities of domestic life and other in-groups. For it is of in-groups that many of them tend to write and Waugh and Powell in particular take up the tradition of the dandy which was so enthusiastically adopted by Ronald Firbank and continued by ‘Sakl’ (H. H. Munro), who died on the Western Front.
If one begins to think about their self-imposed restrictions one cannot avoid speculating about the relative uniformity of social origins, background, and education of these writers; one also realizes that it was shared by such rising poets of the time as Auden, Spender, and MacNeice and by a large number of the editors and middlemen of literature. In this they differ from the major writers of the earlier part of the century, who had been marked by a great variety of backgrounds: Hardy was a countryman of lower-middle-class origins, Conrad a naturalized Pole of the minor gentry, Bennett came from a provincial family which was rising in the world from humble beginnings, Lawrence’s father was a miner, Virginia Woolf was educated in the library of her father, the great Sir Leslie Stephen, Forster progressed from an orthodox public school to King’s College, Cambridge.
It is striking that Forster is the only one of these who speaks much of his education and, so far as the school part of it is concerned, totally unfavourably. The public school, he asserts, produces trained bodies, half-trained minds and untrained hearts; the Empire, so he says in A Passage to India, is run on public school lines; Sawston, based on his own school, Tonbridge, sums up all that is opposed to life and truth. By contrast Hardy does not seem to have been much preoccupied in his adult life by the British School in Dorchester nor Bennett by his school at Newcastle-under-Lyme nor Lawrence by Nottingham High School. Is it merely an idiosyncratic aberration that Forster suggests that his school and others like it were the determining factor in so much of English life? One might well take that view were it not that an astonishing number of writers of the period which I am discussing appear to agree with him, though they often rejoice in, rather than regret, their schools.
It is not surprising that they should have been educated at public boarding schools and, frequently, at Oxford or Cambridge, for most of them came from the professional or upper middle classes and such an education would have been taken for granted in their families. What may seem surprising is that the schools, and to a lesser extent the universities, should have continued to have such an importance for them. This can be explained, I think, by a consideration of the function which, over and above the teaching of academic subjects, was the characteristic of the public schools. The number of such schools grew so immensely during the nineteenth century because they were needed to produce an elite which could run a large Empire; some were overt in their aim - Kipling’s school was one such - but those which did not proclaim the aim were equally devoted to producing disciplined and self-confident men who would form a ruling caste. In the process, and doubtless often against their will, the schools also helped to produce such self-confident literary castes as the members of the Bloomsbury Group and the dominant literary editors and reviewers of the inter-war years.
It is this sense of membership of a caste which is so striking in this period. The characters of Anthony Powell’s early novels (and of his later ones, too) register their positions in relation to other people in terms of what schools they attended, what regiments they were in, to which houses they are invited. The subject of Waugh’s first novel is the progress of his hero from Oxford, via a stint as schoolmaster in a parody school, back to Oxford. The fashionable young people of Green’s Party Going are of the class that gets into the papers as they tread the round of parties at which everybody knows everybody else. Nor is this fixation confined to those who seem to have enjoyed membership of the dominant caste. The schoolboy adventure element in such temporarily Communist writers as Auden has often been noticed and it must seem astonishing to any Continental political thinker that Orwell’s time at St Cyprian’s and Eton has played such a part in discussion of his outlook.
The significant characteristic of a caste is that its members recognize one another as fellow-members, whether they like one another or not, and that they find it hard to conceive that those outside the caste can have much in common with them. In some cases this manifests itself in a cultivated snobbery, as in Waugh; in others, of whom Orwell is the most striking example, we see a writer trying rather unavailingly to put himself on a level with the outsiders and usually finding this easier to do when confronted by foreign proletarians or by the destitute rather than the majority of miscellaneous fellow citizens who had peopled the novels of Hardy and Bennett.1 Nowhere is this sense of a special caste of both writers and readers so neatly shown as in the comment of Waugh’s biographer, Christopher Sykes, on the reception of his first novel, Decline and Fall:
Waugh, so his biographer tells us, was always irritated by people who said that Decline and Fall was his best novel. It is always annoying for writers to have their later works compared unfavourably with their first, but there is surely a more specific reason here, for, without ever showing signs of wishing to leave the charmed circle of high life which is his chosen sphere, he endeavours in later novels to suggest significances of feeling and depths of belief within it. But his is really an anarchic talent, flourishing in a created world of brilliant lampoons, the willing sacrifice of plausibility for bravura effects, the breaking of taboos and the elegant cultivation of bad taste. These abilities sit uneasily with devotion either to the maintenance of old families with traditional tastes or with the Roman Catholic Church.
The tone which is set at the opening of Decline and Fall is one of heartless farce. Paul Pennyfeather, a shy and reclusive young man who is reading for the Church, is debagged by a gang of rampaging undergraduates. The dons, whose main aim is to fine offenders enough to be able to drink Founder’s port on the proceeds, realize that he has no money and therefore send him down for indecent behaviour; his guardian takes the opportunity to discontinue his allowance. The college porter has already suggested the course of action which he is expected to follow: ‘I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir, that’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.’ He visits the scholastic agents, Church and Gargoyle, and proceeds into a world of joyfully hailed stereotypes in a plot which is anecdotal, but where Waugh appears to have given the definitive form to what we feel must surely have been pre-existing anecdotes. We follow Paul’s progress via Llanabba Castle, the epitome of the appalling prep school, in which he learns how not to teach, to his involvement with the mother of one of his pupils, Margot Best-Chetwynd, which leads to his innocent participation in the white slave traffic and his being hauled off to prison, an experience which, as he reflects, for somebody who has been at an English public school does not seem unduly arduous. He is bought out of prison by Margot’s willingness to marry a politician who can arrange for Paul to begin life again under another name. We leave him at the end of the book back at college under his false name, preparing once again to go into the Church.
Virtually all the characters are either venal or deluded and Waugh delights in conspiring with in the breaking of taboos, especially those public taboos which are the province of the well meaning. There was, at the time of the book’s publication, a good deal of discussion of prison reform and also of efforts to put down the white slave traffic by agencies of the League of Nations. Predictably in Waugh’s world the humane Prison Governor attempts to reform the inmates by finding out what they are interested in and giving them an opportunity to follow up that interest, with the result that one prisoner murders another. But we are not called upon to feel for the victim since he is the comic clergyman with Doubts whom we have previously met as a colleague of Paul at Llanabba Castle. Similarly the dull, pedestrian official of the League of Nations arrests the innocent Paul and we cannot weep for the girls since they are shown as having an enterprising ambition to succeed in their profession.
Decline and Fall may not be the best of Waugh’s novels, but it is certainly typical of everything that he wrote before the outbreak of war. Claims have been made for serious moral intentions; Samuel Hynes in The Auden Generation (1976), for example, draws parallels between Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies (1930) and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), instancing the emphasis upon the antics of the Bright Young Things under the shadow of war and the prevailing sense of futility. But the energy of the book goes into the concept of Father Rothschild, who ‘had a happy knack to remember everything that could possibly be learned, about everyone who could possibly be of any importance’ and of Mrs Melrose-Ape, the Evangelist with her singing, dancing, and preaching girls, called Faith, Charity, Fortitude, Chastity (who travels via Buenos Aires to Salisbury Plain to cheer up the soldiers), and Creative Endeavour. In Black Mischief (1932), Waugh alternates between farce and the presentation of real fear and pain in his account of civil war in a land approximating to Ethiopia, which he had recently visited. But we feel, in the grimmest section, that what Waugh is really leading up to is the fulfilment of the promise of Prudence to her lover, the worthless but charming Basil Seal. ‘You’re a grand girl, Prudence, and I’d like to eat you,’ he says and she replies: ‘So you shall, my sweet, anything you want.’ Unwittingly at a ceremonial feast he does precisely what he has wanted and she has promised.
What is potentially serious in these early novels cannot for long engage our attention in competition with the disruptive, the anarchic, and the flippantly cruel. In his later novels, where his intentions are certainly serious, the limitations of his social interests are especially damaging. In so far as affection is ever expressed in his books it seems to be for the high spirits, the frivolity, and frequently the drinking of the Bright Young Things whom, it is sometimes claimed, he was satirizing. He does not seem to me to be satirizing them at all. He loves what he sometimes mocks. Snobbery, the sense that only a few people matter and that the others who are striving for acceptance inevitably bear the marks which exclude them and will have those marks pointed out to them, is central to the society of which he is writing, but it is surely central to Waugh himself. Many of his characters are worthless but they provide the only society in which he can envisage living. When, in Briaeshead Revisited (1945) the enjoyment of that comforting warmth which comes from the elaboration of rituals and the linguistic usages which are designed to define the exclusion of outsiders is felt in complicity with the Roman Catholic Church (represented by more than Father Rothschild), it appears shoddy.
But the early novels, taken as entertainments and not as satires, will always find readers, not least because of the crisp efficiency of the prose style. Detached, secure, totally unaffected by any of the great stylistic explorations of the early part of the century, the narrative prose makes its point in the traditional manner of farce by keeping a cool head in the midst of chaos.
Anthony Powell, who is chiefly known for his post-war sequence of twelve works, A Dance to the Music of Time, prefaced his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), with an epigraph from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which might well characterize all his five pre-war novels and, indeed, those of his friend Evelyn Waugh:
The subject-matter and the choice of clear, elegant, and essentially traditional prose style for the narration are akin to Waugh, but the effect of the books is less savage, though sadder. The world with which Powell deals is one of parties for the young and eccentric hobbies, stamp-collecting, spiritualism, transvestism for the elderly, of seemingly shallow attachments and elaborate cross-purpose conversations. The conclusion of Afternoon Men is characteristically incon-elusive and muddled.
Powell’s characters seem to go through life in a dream, clutching at a few fixed ideas, or sometimes, particularly if they are fashionable young women, making a successful social effect by seeming to do so. He is a master at presenting both the comedy, even farce, and also the occasional sense of sad futility of a society in which some questions are never answered or even asked while elsewhere laborious discussion grows pedantic over trifles. It is typical that Atwater’s question, in the passage which I have just quoted, is about a girl whom he loves and who has left for America with another man, and it receives no answer. Elsewhere in the same novel, by contrast, four pages are consumed in discussion of what is the right amount to tip a fisherman who has saved one of the characters from drowning after he has repented of an attempt at suicide.
Of all the writers of this period the one who is most specialized and who seems deliberately to have chosen to write perfectly—or as near perfectly as anyone can—in one limited form is Ivy Compton-Burnett. After one false start, Dolores (1911), a novel which she later wished ignored, she began with Pastors and Masters in 1925 to produce one novel about every two years, all of which have considerable resemblances to one another, all concerned with small groups of people in a closed environment. She is particularly fond of such limited worlds as that of the boarding school and two of her novels deal with such an institution, but she has the ability to make almost any world seem closed, not least the family.
Her view of the family is an exceedingly pessimistic one, logically enough since it is the chief sphere of operation of human behaviour and she is on record as saying on a number of occasions that she takes a very low view of human nature and believes that in family life many horrors are suppressed. In her novels they are not suppressed; jealousy, greed, malice, and deception are given free rein except so far as they are kept in check by hypocrisy.
She makes very few concessions to the normal expectations of fictional form, crowding in a lot of often melodramatic plot with no particular attempt to make it seem convincing and introducing characters with perfunctory factual description. At times she seems to take positive pleasure in emphasizing the wantonness of invention. At the end of A Family and a Fortune two brothers remind one another of what has happened in the course of the novel:
Her most striking effects are achieved through stylized dialogue which seems intended to be taken in part as what the characters are saying to one another, though with greater coherence, brevity, and wit than most people can command, but in part also as an epigrammatic voicing of what people feel but could never say, though others may deduce their meanings. This surely is the effect achieved in such a passage as that in Chapter 8 of A House and its Head (1935), when Alison, Duncan Edgeworth’s second wife, first comes down to dinner with him, his nephew and his two daughters:
Alison is not a monster, as she would surely be if she actually said these things, for that would imply an intention to shock and hurt by speaking the unspeakable. If we interpret it as being, in part, what she thinks and what the others know she is thinking we are presented with people thinking the unspeakable, and this we can all recognize as not unusual. But there are plenty of monsters in the novels and it seems to be central to Ivy Compton-Burnett’s way of looking at the world to believe that there are a goodly number of people in any society who will never show mercy to those weaker than themselves. She shows their ruthlessness through various subtle social cruelties and also through theft and murder but she has a liking for the really tough and uncompromising and it is notable that her most effective epigrams are those which exemplify an unflinching recognition of the worst in people. Nance at the end of A House and its Head reflects:
In More Women Than Men (1933), Felix is talking to Josephine, the headmistress of a school:
The characteristics which I have suggested are to be found in novelists writing after the great period of the earlier part of the century are, with one exception, very strikingly found in Ivy Compton-Burnett. She treats of a very limited range of society, she avoids any public or social issues and sets almost all her novels in the period before the Great War, she restricts the feelings with which she deals and she is so far from wishing to go on breaking new ground that she runs the risk of being repetitious. I do not think that in her work we ever find an exact repetition, but it is surely significant that many admirers discuss her works in terms of categories, speaking, for example, of her ‘tyrants’, her ‘fools’, and so forth.3
The exception to this generalization is, of course, that she is not unwilling to make demands upon her readers. Her books need to be read with care, the more perceptive epigrams frequently lurk in the middle of apparently quiet dialogue and she normally makes her points by hints which are given once only. One effect of this is that the reader who takes the trouble to engage with her claustrophobic, harsh, and witty view of the world is likely to find it compelling, even if at times partaking of the nature of a cult.
Ambition was not lacking in Henry Green’s choice of theme for his first novel, Blindness (1926), which he started while still at Eton and which was published when he was twenty-one. Dealing as it does with a schoolboy who is blinded as the result of an accident it must tackle extreme feelings of loss and despair in the central character and complex readjustments in his family and friends. It has the flaws which one might expect in a youthful work. The schoolboy rivalries, the sense of being dashing and outspoken and shocking, the juvenile dandyish aestheticism give the impression of being rather close to Green’s own experience, so that our relationship to them and the judgements which we are invited to make are not very secure. He has, also, a certain lack of social awareness; the eccentric daughter of an alcoholic, dotty, unfrocked parson, with whom the boy falls in love but whom he never understands, is strikingly well created in her individuality but not very firmly located in any actual social world. But these are minor flaws in what is a good deal more than an astonishing tour de force.
Nothing is more effective than Green’s avoidance of anything like a major, set-piece confrontation either between people or issues. Much appears understated, almost desultory, as we realize that what would once have been important is now peripheral to the boy’s need to find some way of coming to terms with the loss of the world that he has known. Green is extraordinarily successful in presenting the mental world of someone who is having to relearn in different terms the physicality of life. On the basis of this novel alone Henry Green stands out as potentially a very fine novelist and one hopes that, had one read it at the time, one would have waited expectantly for his next book.
One would not have had to wait long. Nor would one have been disappointed. His next novel, Living, was published in 1929, the first of a series of books with present participle titles which imply the capturing of a continuing process. The opening with its strikingly abbreviated form, marked particularly by the omission of articles, suggests an unformed element in the life shown, its immediacy, what might almost be called its gawkiness.
The social milieu of Living is very different from that of Blindness; though the owner of the factory and his family are ultimately responsible for the fate of many of their employees, it is the workmen and their families who take up most of our time and concern. Green certainly provokes reflections about the power of ownership and the powerlessness of labour, but we are more aware of the accidental and the random. Old Mr Dupret is dying and his son takes charge of the family engineering factory, provoked by the sense that the family does not take him seriously as an industrialist and by lack of success in his pursuit of a young woman. His interference sets fears and jealousies going among people who are already worried about the slump. The fragmented structure of the novel, composed of short sections, often of seemingly unedited dialogue, serves well to show the resulting incomprehension, rumour, resentment, and backbiting. Dupret has no conception of the lives of the people whom he employs nor of the managers who intrigue to win favour; the workers are busy with their own concerns and usually misunderstand the causes of what happen to them.
The group upon whom our attention is most fixed consists of Mr Craigan, an old widower who has worked in the factory all his life, and three people who lodge in his house: Lily Gates, to whom he is devoted, her father who sponges on him, and Jim Dale, who wants to marry Lily. She finds Jim dull, falls in love with Bert Jones, who also works at the factory, and plans to run away with him to Canada, where life will be less drab and prospects brighter. The progress of this elopement, which is in fact a slow winding-down, is as close as the book gets to a central, sustained happening. They go first to Liverpool to seek Bert’s family; but he has not been in touch with them for a long time and his vague hope of finding them evaporates as it proves that they have moved. The two are left with their plans falling apart, alienated by the strangeness of the city and the people in it (for Liverpool is for them as alien from Birmingham as China would be for the Duprets). Bert is not a villain, no seducer, but he is weak and not very intelligent and he suddenly runs away in the street, feeling that everything has collapsed and he can do no good and that he had better leave Lily to go back home. We realize that this grotesque anticlimax probably is all for the best, Lily does return and the book ends with her keeping house again for Craigan, her spirits lifting.
The elopement section is typical of the whole novel in an apparent arbitrariness which persuades us that people cannot predict what their feelings will be. Each moment is new. We have much less of a sense in Green’s novels than elsewhere of a writer constructing a series of happenings which are directed towards some end. There is a great sense of accident, of openness to surprise of mood, with a consequent effect of precariousness. It is for this reason, I think, that we are able to believe in Lily’s opening out to happiness at the end of the book, her feeling that life is flowing in her again after the intense shame and depression of her return. We believe in her mood, but we also know that it is the feeling of that moment and it is set against Craigan’s realization that he is trapped with Lily’s sponging father because he is besotted with paternal love for her and that, sacked because of his age, he will never work again.
None of the characters in this book is in any way out of the ordinary. This is, indeed, true of all Green’s novels. Most of them are in fact ordinary to the point of banality. In Party Going, at least, his aim almost seems to demonstrate the interesting opaqueness of people by setting up an experiment with the simplest possible organisms, moved almost entirely by socially conditioned reflexes. They do not normally reflect upon their lives (Craigan’s reflections on old age are unusual), Green does not draw conclusions or generalize, the books are not constructed so as to lead to any obvious moment of revelation. What we are left with is a sense of a number of sharply realized moments which are none the less significant for being arbitrary. Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse reflects on getting hold of a memory ‘that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything’.4 Green seems to me to succeed remarkably in giving us this sense of direct uninterpreted experience.
Paradoxically his most artful device - his use of elaborate and repeated images and apparently symbolic objects - which might seem to offer an interpretation and connect disparate experiences, in reality only reinforces the specific and the arbitrary.
We naturally seek to connect episodes in a novel composed of a large number of short sections and if we cannot connect them in terms of sequential plot we seek a thematic or symbolic relevance. Green often tempts us to do this. Craigan’s neighbour is Mrs Eames who has one baby and is pregnant with another; she is frequently playing with her baby, enjoying the sight of flowers, and looking out of the window at birds. Early in the novel she frees a bird trapped in a window that men are unable to rescue. At the very end of the book Lily and Mrs Eames are seen making a fuss of the new baby while pigeons fly round. The temptation here is to transform Mrs Eames into a dove-accompanied mother figure, comforter of Lily. But Green, though he raises this possibility, makes its achievement impossible. The specific refuses to be generalized; Mrs Eames remains a woman who loves her children, likes flowers, likes watching pigeons, gets to know Lily; if this is to be a mother figure, we feel like saying, then so be it, but it is not worth saying. The book dismantles the symbol which it may seem to create.
The pigeons which figure so largely in the book illustrate this unusual trait most thoroughly. Green seems to be fascinated by pigeons and he makes metaphorical use of them on a number of occasions. At the end of Chapter 20 Craigan’s love of Lily is related to the bird:
A little later, as Lily is recovering from the abortive elopement, her feelings, too, are expressed thus:
But the local metaphorical usage does not transform the pigeons into general emblems of human feelings or relationships; if we try to think of them as such the effect would quickly become ludicrous because we have too marked a sense of them as specific birds. The effect is far more to assert that the Birmingham sky of the novel (and doubtless the Birmingham sky of reality) is full of pigeons proclaiming by their circlings and gatherings that whatever the circumstances men and women will have hobbies, including keeping pigeons, that these will from time to time appear beautiful and that sometimes people will look at them and attach feelings to them. Presented as potentially symbolic creatures, they remain real birds, tributes to the tangential.
As, indeed, does the pigeon which appears at the beginning of Green’s next novel, Party Going (1939). This short novel is an account of how three young men and eight young women, all very rich, very spoilt, and very unaware, are caught by fog on their way to the Continent and take refuge in the station hotel. They have to pass the time and they do it as best as they can. In Living Green is fascinated by the minute shifts of position and tactical manœuvres in the conversation of rather simple and inarticulate people; few writers can so well convey the concealed agendas of the banal. In Party Going such manoeuvring for position plays an even larger part, but whereas the issues of Living are often important the characters in Party Going are moved entirely by the trivial. They gossip, they flirt, they pretend to know the man who is paying for the trip better than they really do, they recognize this and snub the one who is trying. One of the women in the party sums up her own reflections when confronted by a richer and more dazzling social beauty, and this also sums up, I think, much of what Green wants us to notice:
Meanwhile, Miss Fellows, the elderly aunt of one of them, who has come to see them off, is startled by the fall of a pigeon, which has collided in the fog with the building. She takes the dead pigeon to the underground cloakroom, washes it, procures brown paper and string, and makes it into a parcel. Then, feeling ill, she drinks a glass of whisky and soon collapses. She is carried to the hotel and lies in one of the rooms, wrongly thought by some to be drunk and by others, perhaps correctly, to be dying. When the message comes that the boring wait is over and the party can go down in the hotel lift and be ushered to their train she has regained consciousness and her niece can, without too much trouble, be persuaded that she need not stay behind to look after her.
As usual in Green’s work we can if we wish extract a pattern, construct a symbolic scheme around the pigeon; why else is it there? It is, like Miss Fellows, an embarrassing encumbrance. She has not put away the idea of death as the others strive to. With total lack of consideration they send their servants around the station to do little jobs for them; she washes her own dead pigeon. But here, as in Living, the actual effect is to turn any metaphorical system on its head. The pigeon remains irreducibly a dead and washed pigeon in a brown paper parcel, inconvenient and a bit of a puzzle, like Miss Fellows herself.
The novel has a number of hints which provoke wider speculations beyond the claustrophobic world of the little group, but they remain hints. As the crowd on the platforms grows thicker an anonymous voice says ‘what targets for a bomb’. It is hard to shrug this off in a novel published in 1939. A somewhat similar menace is created as the party looks down from its privileged rooms high up in the hotel at the packed crowd and one of the girls thinks that they are breaking in. There is plenty of scope for social and political implications but we are more aware, I think, of the girl as only playing at being frightened. That in itself is perhaps a political point but we are not invited to dwell on it. Green gives the impression of great neutrality; his way of relating his characters to their society is to set them apart in their shelter, absorbed in an intensely conscious, if superficial, series of social games, and to set cutting across this arbitrary objects and happenings which they must ignore or evade.6
This puzzling effect of extraordinary vividness of presentation combined with an elusiveness which comes from presenting the reader with the possibility of interpretation in terms of symbols and structural metaphors while making him feel that such an interpretation would be crude remained with Green for the rest of his writing. He has been discussed as a fine portrayer of proletarian life in Living, of life below stairs in Loving (1945), of life in a fire-station in Caught (1943), and an equally assured observer of the rich in Party Going and his last two novels, Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952). But, vivid though they are, his books cannot simply be thought of as realistic portrayals of a wide range of milieux. He has been considered as a symbolist and I have suggested why this, though tempting, seems to me almost the opposite of the truth. He has been claimed as a forerunner of such nouveaux romanciers as Alain Robbe-Grillet. There have also been attempts to turn him into an auto-destructive fabulator. None of these labels quite fits and it seems arguable that this elusiveness is related to what is perhaps the most important puzzle about his work. Why, though he has written in successive novels about a wide range of social environments and types of personality, has he always chosen in each novel to restrict his range and to produce consciously minor masterpieces. His last two novels, in particular, show most clearly this deliberate restriction. He seems to me to have been the best placed in experience and the most gifted of all the novelists of his generation to produce a major novel to stand beside those of the great fiction writers of the first three decades of this century, but he chose never to attempt to write such a book. It is not to underrate his nine novels to feel that there is more there than ever came out.