Blindness Read online

  HENRY GREEN (1905–1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family’s engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was written while he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels—Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting—and a memoir, Pack My Bag.

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN was born in 1960 and studied Classics at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. His essays and reviews appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. His books include The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace; and two collections of critical essays, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, published by New York Review Books. He teaches literature at Bard College.

  BY HENRY GREEN

  (published by NYRB unless otherwise noted)

  Back

  Introduction by Deborah Eisenberg

  Caught

  Introduction by James Wood

  Concluding (forthcoming from New Directions)

  Doting (forthcoming)

  Introduction by Michael Gorra

  Living

  Introduction by Adam Thirlwell

  Loving

  Introduction by Roxana Robinson

  Nothing (forthcoming)

  Introduction by Francine Prose

  Pack My Bag (published by New Directions)

  Party Going

  Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri

  Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green (forthcoming)

  Introduction by John Updike

  BLINDNESS

  HENRY GREEN

  Introduction by

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © Henry Green 1926

  Introduction copyright © Daniel Mendelsohn 2017

  Blindness first published in Great Britain by the Hogarth Press in 1926

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Richard Tuttle, 2017

  Cover design by Richard Tuttle and Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Green, Henry, 1905–1973, author. | Mendelsohn, Daniel, author of introduction.

  Title: Blindness / by Henry Green ; introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2017] | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016046070| ISBN 9781681370668 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681370675 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Young men—Fiction. | Blind—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Medical. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PR6013.R416 B57 2017 | DDC 823/.912—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046070

  ISBN 978-1-68137-067-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  PART ONE: CATERPILLAR

  Laugh

  PART TWO: CHRYSALIS

  1 News

  2 Her, Him, Them

  3 Picture postcardism

  PART THREE: BUTTERFLY

  1 Waiting

  2 Walking Out

  3 Finishing

  4 Beginning again

  INTRODUCTION

  IT MAY be with a sinking feeling that readers of Henry Green’s astonishingly assured first novel meet his precocious young hero, John Haye. Haye is a privileged “public school” student with an aesthetic bent and literary ambitions; as such, he bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator. Green, born Henry Yorke in 1905 to a socially prominent Birmingham industrialist and his upper-class wife, published Blindness when he was still at Oxford; by then he was already friends with Anthony Powell, whom he’d met at Eton, and Evelyn Waugh. The first part of the novel, set at an Eton-esque school called Noat, takes the form of Haye’s diary (“Diary of John Haye, Secretary to the Noat Art Society”), and we’re not very far into this journal before its author confesses that he “fell in love with a transparent tortoiseshell cigarette case” on one day and on another “in a moment of rash exuberance . . . bought a cigarette-holder about eight inches long.” The languorous aesthete schoolboy is a type we have met before in the novels of Green’s contemporaries—most famously in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; this by-now cliché milieu, to say nothing of the first-person format (that crutch of first-time novelists), is likely to put off those who have had enough of the Anthony Blanches and Sebastian Flytes of this world.

  So, too, might sophisticated lovers of Green’s mature novels be averse to reading a work that he himself later repudiated, after rejecting certain of its themes and most of its techniques. Long a cult figure among readers and a figure of a rare veneration among writers and intellectuals as disparate as John Updike (“Henry Green taught me how to write”), the Oxford classicist Maurice Bowra (“piercing insight, stripping men and ideas of their disguises and going straight to some central point”), and the American writer Terry Southern, who interviewed Green for The Paris Review (“the most elusive and enigmatic [writer] in contemporary literature”), Green would develop, in the years after the relatively conventional Blindness, a set of idiosyncratic techniques designed to achieve his great goal: to bring the experience of reading fiction as close to the experience of living as possible. Small wonder that nearly all of his titles are gerunds, the grammatical form that turns verbs into nouns: Living, Loving, Party Going, Doting, Concluding.

  Some of the tics Green developed in his desire to refresh the genre, such as his dislike for the definite article, are likely to irritate: Sentences like “Some had stayed in iron foundry shop in this factory for dinner. They sat round brazier in a circle” are bound to remind some readers of the mortifying dialogue in certain movie Westerns. But others are tonic. Foremost among these is Green’s jettisoning of the omniscient narrator. The voice that tells his stories, almost all of which are about upper- and lower-class people caught in the meshes of desire, obligation, ego, and economic necessity, seems to know no more than the reader does; it reports only what can be seen, surmised, heard, and overheard. (This effect is achieved primarily by means of a strict avoidance of free indirect discourse, a remarkable gesture for an author who came of age in the era of Virginia Woolf; and also by an accumulation of doubtful interjections on the narrator’s part: “it seems,” “probably.”) All this contributes to the characteristic feel—a combination of concreteness and confusion—of Green’s mature novels: their world is simultaneously as reassuringly familiar and excitingly murky as our own.

  The author’s technique serves, too, a strikingly egalitarian perspective. With a combination of detachment and sympathy, his fiction observes (but never enters into the thoughts of) his characters, from the Birmingham factory workers of Living (1929), to the flighty swells and aristocrats trapped in a railway hotel en route to a grand house party in Party Going (1939), to the servants and masters (but mostly the servants) who ramble about a grand Irish country house in Loving (1945). “Everyone has their feelings,” one of Green’s character
s says; a distinctive feature of the novels is the way in which the narrative gives “everyone” due consideration. (As if to emphasize this egalitarian perspective, the author often segues between scenes and conversations with an unnerving smoothness that can give you the narrative equivalent of whiplash.) But how do we know what everyone’s feelings are? Hard to say. That difficulty is central to the slightly shadowed atmosphere of Green’s fiction. As Raunce, the butler in Loving, observes with an enigmatic opacity that is typical in this author’s work, “It’s the uncertainty.”

  That all this bears such scant resemblance to the themes and techniques of Blindness might be a kind of recommendation of the book to some fans of Green’s fiction: It’s always gratifying to be able to evaluate a writer’s evolution, and there is little doubt that Blindness establishes a baseline for that evaluation. But the fact is that Green’s first novel is stronger and more affecting than many a novelist’s mature work. Preternaturally accomplished in its technique and impressive in its humanity and wisdom, it suffers only in comparison to the achievement that would follow.

  How we proceed from youth to maturity is, as it happens, the theme of this unabashed bildungsroman, as it is of so much youthful writing; as if simultaneously to acknowledge and dispense with his own susceptibility to this inevitable literary cliché, the young author called his three major sections “Caterpillar,” “Chrysalis,” “Butterfly.” The flighty and self-conscious aestheticism of the seventeen-year-old hero in the opening pages, his pretensions and affectations, are, it turns out, a kind of narrative bait. The book, it soon becomes clear, will be about how John Haye sheds a shallow aestheticism and becomes sufficiently acquainted with life’s profundities to become an artist—in his case, a writer. This, of course, is by now another literary cliché, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t grant Green access to the same narrative toolbox that James Joyce or Marcel Proust rummaged through.

  The vehicle of young John’s metamorphosis is the affliction to which Green’s title alludes. One afternoon, while he sits in a railway carriage on his way home from school, a stone casually tossed by a small boy who’s watching the train go by shatters the window of his compartment, and John is blinded and disfigured for life. “Isn’t it dreadful,” one of his schoolmates writes breathlessly—and with just the right touch of literary self-consciousness—to another on hearing the news. “It is a tragedy. Blindness, the most . . . etc.” “Poor dear, amusing John,” his correspondent later writes back. “I must write to him, though what there is to say I don’t know. Really, these letters of condolences are very difficult.” An early diary entry by John contains a strikingly vain admission—“I seldom meet anyone who interests me more than myself”—and Green’s narrative strongly suggests that, deprived of his sight, his hero will attain an inner vision that will allow him to transcend his youthful self-absorption (and, we imagine, the self-absorbed friends of his youth) to find a deeper meaning.

  Immediately after the accident, at least, it seems that John can’t help reverting to the posturing of his schoolboy diary. “So he was blind, how funny,” is the thought that Green gives him—remember, the author has not yet abandoned free indirect discourse—as he awakens at the beginning of part two, “Chrysalis,” to another day of dealing with his shallow stepmother and with the odd young nurse who tends his wounds (and who, we learn, keeps his eyeballs, removed in an operation, on her mantelpiece at home: a typically odd and arresting detail). But this invalid existence gives Green’s hero a great deal of time to think seriously about life for the first time, and it is with remarkable frankness that he confronts the self that, only a few months earlier, he’d so glibly evaluated as being more interesting than anyone else:

  There was no male friend who would come to stay, he had always been too unpleasant, or had always tried to be clever, or in the movement. And now there was no escape, none. . . .

  Why couldn’t there be something really romantic and laughable in life? With sentimentality and tuppenny realism.

  The seemingly jarring combination of tragic earnestness, romantic sentiment, and “tuppenny realism” for which John yearns is precisely what would characterize the tone of Green’s own novels, and it’s fascinating to see the young author, through the persona of his hero, groping toward the aesthetic that he would later make his own.

  Indeed, hints begin to accumulate that young John, deprived of his sight and perforce learning a new sensuality—“the mahogany table in the front hall almost purred when you stroked it”—is slowly acquiring the insight he will need as a writer, discarding his earlier literary fancies for a more honest, straightforward manner. (“But no, it would have to be in England, the tourist effect in stories was dreadful.”) Part of this maturation derives from his first exposure to that “tuppenny realism.” In the latter part of “Chrysalis,” John meets and falls in love with a poor young woman from the village: Joan, the vivacious daughter of a disgraced and alcoholic local vicar, with whom she lives in vividly evoked squalor, glumly eating sardines as her father laces his milk with gin. It is a testament to the unusual maturity of the twenty-year-old Green that the romance with Joan doesn’t curdle into cliché about the redemptive powers of young love, or of a rich boy’s encounter with poverty and disgrace. For the first but hardly the last time, this author has some narrative surprises in store.

  The biggest of these involves Mamma, the stepmother who understands very little about the young man she finds herself having to raise. (John’s father, we learn, died when he was small, leaving him to be raised by a young second wife; she thinks a lot about certain beloved horses, some of whose hooves now serve as inkwells.) The portrait of this character, who appears so irritatingly banal at first (“And here he was on to his books again, as if books mattered in life. But one must always show interest. . . . One had read all those Russian things in one’s teens”) but turns out to be more complex than we might have imagined, is so marvelously evoked by means of finely wrought interior monologues that you find yourself wishing that Green hadn’t gone on to abandon this technique. Here is Mamma when we meet her early on at John’s bedside, her thoughts—none of them very profound—veering between the trivial and the tragic:

  This coffee was undrinkable. The cook had probably been gigglin’ again with Herbert. That affair! You could not drink it, absolutely undrinkable. She would make a row. But was it worth while? She felt so tired today. But the house must go on just as usual, there must be no giving way. She rang the bell. They must find some occupation for the boy, he could not be left there rankling. Making fancy baskets, or pen-wipers, all those things blinded soldiers did, something to do. . . .

  It was so terrible, he would never marry now, she would have no grandchildren. . . . A girl would not want to marry a blind man. All her dreams were gone, of his marrying, of her going up to live in the Dower House. . . . Why was it taken away quite suddenly like this? But then they might still find some girl who had had a story, or who was unhappy at home, who would be glad. . . .

  And yet, as “Chrysalis” inevitably segues into “Butterfly,” it will turn out that Mamma has more character than we—or John—had imagined possible, suggesting that suffering can be “rather fine,” as he tells her at one point, for people other than the sufferer.

  There are fascinating glimmers here of Green’s mature technique. Not the least of these is the almost cinematic way in which his narrators, as smooth as a Steadicams, track characters who hover at the periphery of the action, and whose quotidian activities provide the humming basso continuo of “living” that runs beneath the dramas of the principals, as in this remarkably assured scene that gives us a glimpse of life belowstairs at the Howe demesne:

  Herbert, leaning on the sill of the kitchen window, was making noises at Mrs. Lane while she toyed with a chopper, just out of his reach. Weston was lost in wonder, love and praise before the artichokes, he had a camera in his pocket and had taken a record of their splendor. Twenty years on and he would be showing it to his g
randchildren, to prove how things did grow in the old days. Twenty years ago Pinch had seen better. Harry was hissing over a sporting paper; Doris in an attic was letting down her hair, she was about to plait the two soft pigtails. Jenny, the laundry cat, was very near the sparrow now, by the bramble in the left-hand corner of the drying ground.

  Another passage shows us life in the little farmyard outside Joan’s hovel as experienced by the resident rooster.

  It’s hardly a sin in a young author to end up focusing, as Green ends up doing here, on the character who most resembles himself. Certainly suffering does turn out to be “rather fine” for John, to whom a climactic gift, provided by Mamma, grants the possibility of entering into the greater world; the world, potentially, of letters. If Blindness ends with a tinge of the kind of sentimentality that its author would eventually reject, as a revivified John readies himself for a new life, eager to reconnect at last with his letter-writing school chums, that’s a venial sin in so young a writer. (Anyway, even here a taste for the ironies and tuppenny confusedness of life makes itself felt: it’s not quite clear that they’ll be so eager to reconnect with him.) As for the confidence John feels about the adulthood that awaits him—

  But now, do you know what I am going to do now? After all, one must have something to put against one’s name. For I am going to write, yes, to write. Such books . . . such amazing tales, rich with intricate plot. Life will be clotted and I will dissect it, choosing little bits to analyse. I shall be a great writer. I am sure of it.

  —who could blame him? After all, he was right.

  —DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  BLINDNESS