Nothing 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.

  FRANCINE PROSE is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College. She is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction; her most recent novel is Mister Monkey.

  BY HENRY GREEN

  (published by NYRB unless otherwise noted)

  Back

  Introduction by Deborah Eisenberg

  Blindness

  Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Caught

  Introduction by James Wood

  Concluding (published by New Directions)

  Doting

  Introduction by Michael Gorra

  Living

  Introduction by Adam Thirlwell

  Loving

  Introduction by Roxana Robinson

  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

  NOTHING

  HENRY GREEN

  Introduction by

  FRANCINE PROSE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1950 by Henry Green

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Francine Prose

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press in 1950.

  Cover art by Amy Sillman, 2017

  Cover design by Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Green, Henry, 1905–1973, author.

  Title: Nothing / by Henry Green ; introduction by Francine Prose. Description:s New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059875| ISBN 9781681371436 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681371443 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Conflict of generations—Fiction. | Parent and child—Fiction. | Satire. | Humorous stories.

  Classification: LCC PR6013.R416 N6 2017 | DDC 823/.912—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059875

  ISBN 978-1-68137-144-3

  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

  NOTHING

  INTRODUCTION

  IN 1950, Eudora Welty attended a literary party in London, where she had come to promote her story collection The Golden Apples. Unaware that the writer to whom she was speaking was Henry Green, the author of Loving, which she had read and greatly admired, Welty asked the rather proper Englishman what he had written.

  “Nothing,” he replied. Only later did Welty discover that the stranger was Green, and that Nothing was the title of his new novel.

  It’s not hard to imagine the tone in which Green delivered his reply: funny, sly, knowing, intentionally unsettling—adjectives that could just as well be applied to his novel. In fact, the significance of Green’s reply was deeper than Welty could have known. In Nothing, Green was moving toward his stated goal for his final novels, the last of which, Doting, appeared in 1952. His plan was to erase his presence from his narrative and to become, as it were, nothing; to disappear into his fiction and let his characters (without the controlling intelligence of a narrator) do all the talking. As Henry Green (the pseudonym adopted by Henry Yorke, a prosperous businessman) told Terry Southern in an interview published in The Paris Review, “If you are trying to write something which has a life of its own, which is alive, of course the author must keep completely out of the picture. I hate the portraits of donors in medieval triptychs.” Meanwhile Green’s little joke about his penultimate work of fiction has outlived him; we repeat a version of it whenever we must explain that we mean Nothing the novel, and not nothing, the absence of something.

  In the Paris Review interview, Green also said that “you have to get everything into . . . the first twenty pages.” And so, at the start of Nothing, he wastes no time in giving us a preview of what is to come: the scheming of two widowed, middle-aged former adulterous lovers, John Pomfret and Jane Weatherby, whose affair took place even though John’s wife was Jane’s best friend at the time. Much like the conspiracy at the center of Les Liaisons dangereuses, their collusion can be seen as an extended form of foreplay. The objects of their machinations are their grown children, Philip Weatherby and Mary Pomfret, an earnest young couple, decent but rather dull and conventional compared to their sexy, conniving parents.

  All Green needs is a few pages to make us understand exactly whom we are dealing with: two Bright Young Things, their luster considerably tarnished by time and by historical events, in particular by the war that ended only a few years earlier. What motivates the couple at the center of Nothing is their long-lived romantic attraction spiked by their new fear that their children will marry and together be downwardly mobile—and by their shared awareness that they are growing older, more frail, and less able to count on the privilege and security that they have formerly taken for granted. In addition, the suspicion that Philip and Mary might be siblings is raised, but (in an era long before the advent of DNA testing) never resolved.

  Green, who insisted that he endeavored to write without judgment, had a rare talent for knowing (and letting the reader know) more than his characters understand about themselves, for managing this without making us feel superior to them—and for using this technique to increase (rather than diminish) our compassion for these benighted men and women. Part of Green’s success at this may come from his unwillingness to tell us directly who a character is, or what he or she is thinking or experiencing, a hesitation expressed in his preference for the verbs seem and appear instead of is. (“Do we know, in life,” he wrote, “what other people are really like? I very much doubt it. We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?”)

  Yet despite his refusal to explain what his characters are “really like,” he makes us see them whole. So, in Nothing, he reminds us that John Pomfret and Jane Weatherby are neither as young, as attractive, nor as wealthy as they used to be, and that they—perhaps like us—suffer bouts of anxiety and dread. Our sense that Jane and John are self-serving and manipulative is constantly being mitigated by the frequency with which they express their financial worries (“Oh my dear isn’t it too frightful about one’s money. . . even little Penelope’s overdrawn now”) and later in the novel, by the fact that John is “chock full of diabetes.” In The Novels of Henry Green, Edward Stokes notes incisively that “the strength of his characterization rests on his ability simultaneously to see his characters as others see them, as they see themselves, and as they really are.”

  Green’s handling of point of view at the start of Nothing is remarkable. Nothing is, in many ways, so unusual that, as far as I know, no literary term exists for the point of view in which it is written. Is it omniscient? Sort of b
ut not for long. The opening sentences suggest what Green called the “know-all narrator” who not only can tell us which London hotels are fashionable but can read the guests’ moods.

  On a Sunday afternoon in nineteen forty eight John Pomfret a widower of forty five, sat over lunch with Miss Liz Jennings at one of the round tables set by a great window that opened on the Park, a view which had made this hotel loved by the favoured of Europe when they visited London.

  He did not look at the girl and seemed nervous as he described his tea the previous Sunday when Liz had to visit her mother ill with flu so that he had been free to call on Jane Weatherby, a widow only too well known to Miss Jennings.

  Among Green’s great gifts is his talent for conveying considerable quantities of information in just a few words, and here it’s the phrase “only too well known” that tells us more or less all we need to know about John’s relationship with Jane, with Liz, and about Liz’s (as it will turn out) reasonable and well-grounded fears about John’s attraction to Jane. (Consider how different the sentence would be had Green written “well known” and omitted the “only too.”) This narrative voice will return on occasion and when strictly necessary, for example at a party at which Philip and Mary surprise the guests by announcing their engagement. At this point Green treats us to a gently mocking view of the responses of the couple’s shocked parents.

  At the same time this whole setup is itself a bit of a setup. By the end of the first page, the know-all narrator has vanished, and we are plunged into the musings of John Pomfret, reflections in a language so much more lyrical and so unlike the way Pomfret mostly speaks that we can only conclude that either he is not thinking this or else his interior and exterior selves might as well be two different people. Another explanation is that we are in a Henry Green novel, flipping between the poetic and the banal, the likely and the improbable, eavesdropping on characters who are many things at once, who talk all the time yet are unwilling to, or incapable of, saying what they mean—or, for that matter, of hearing what they are saying.

  John Pomfret has a story to tell Liz, an anecdote about his visit to the “only too well known” Jane Weatherby. John’s besottedness with Jane is so profound that the novel’s language goes all gooey: “it had been dark with sad tears on the panes and streets of blue canals as he sat by her fire for Jane liked dusk. . . .” Soon enough we realize that we are watching the former (adulterous) lovers, whose feelings for each other remain intense, playing a humiliating, creepy, and unconscious trick on Jane’s daughter, Penelope, a bit of play-acting that goes badly wrong. The child appears in a pretend wedding veil, as little girls do, and her mother decides to take the game further, announcing that Penelope is to be married to John. Of course, as we will soon discover, it’s Jane who wants to be married to John. The ceremony has involved the placing of a cigar-band ring on the child’s finger. John can’t recall all the details. . . .“But the harm was there.”

  Laughing, Liz tells her lover that he should never be allowed to play with little girls, and asks when the tears started, a question he misinterprets.

  He objected that Jane had not cried then and went on to explain that so soon as this mock ceremony ended and Penelope had flown to her mother’s arms he’d taken it all a fatal step forward and asked the child to sit on her husband’s knee.

  “You see they made an absolute picture,” he explained. “You know what Janie’s eyes are with that wonderful blessing out of the huge things.”

  “Well?” Miss Jennings demanded when he paused.

  After describing “a great wail” of “Mummy I don’t want” that came from Penelope, John says,

  “I nearly sobbed myself. Oh the blame I had to take! No but seriously you can’t think it wrong of me Liz?”

  “Are you seeing a lot of Jane these days?” Miss Jennings wanted to be told.

  Poor Penelope! Poor Miss Jennings! The frightened and embarrassed child (who, we will learn, further on in the novel, refuses to let go of her own elbow because she is afraid that her arm will fall off) is only a minor character in a story that John tells mostly for a chance to talk about Jane, and in the hopes that Liz will absolve him of some (mild) residual guilt: an anecdote by which Liz is initially amused until she begins to hear it as a warning about her lover’s passion for another woman.

  On rereading the passage, we understand that this conversation touches on a theme that will keep burbling up through the novel: parents treating children like puppets, or like minor actors in a play in which they themselves are starring. John and Jane (plain John and Jane) are monsters of egotism and they treat their children pretty monstrously too. Nothing is, among other things, a portrait of two rather awful parents, adults whose inability to see their offspring as anything but extensions of themselves allows them to meddle destructively in their children’s lives.

  Nothing can be read as a novel about how long it can take people to admit—and to tell—the truth. Not only are Green’s people perpetually misreading one another (“My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life”) but they are frequently misleading whomever they happen to be speaking to, for reasons that are clear to the reader if not to the characters being misled. As Green wrote in an essay entitled “The English Novel of the Future,” “You learn more from the lies of someone who is speaking to you, if you can find these out, than you will from direct statements which generally only represent a portion of what the person you are speaking to believes. A direct lie can be infinitely revealing.”

  Yet such is Green’s delicacy and skill that we are made to feel that his characters are not intentionally lying so much as saying something that they wish were true—but which just happens not to be. Thus Liz Jennings, complaining to Dick Abbot, misrepresents what she suspects about John and Jane: “You know what they were once supposed to mean to one another and never will again those two, well as if that wasn’t enough he’s always going back. He won’t admit if you ask him but he’s got an idea that once he’s had anything in his life he’s only to lift his voice to get that back once more and dear Jane’s too sweet to let him see.”

  Perhaps what’s most unexpected about a book so filled with original touches and surprising turns is not just how it ends but how we feel about the ending. It’s hard to think of another novel in which we are so glad when the “right thing” has not been done, when the “wrong people” have triumphed, when a happy marriage has been brokered between two lovers who, we might think, are undeserving of romantic bliss. When, in the last lines of the book, Jane asks John if there is anything he wants, he replies, “Nothing . . . nothing.” And we couldn’t be more delighted for the middle-aged couple who have found happiness and peace, nor more persuaded that order has been restored—as it generally is at the conclusion of comedies ending in marriage. This novel about apparently shallow people has obliged its readers to think and feel more deeply, to transcend our prejudices, to recalibrate our own first (and second and third) impressions, all of which is—to echo Green’s little joke one more time—certainly not nothing.

  —FRANCINE PROSE

  NOTHING

  ON A SUNDAY afternoon in nineteen forty eight John Pomfret a widower of forty five, sat over lunch with Miss Liz Jennings at one of the round tables set by a great window that opened on the Park, a view which had made this hotel loved by the favoured of Europe when they visited London.

  He did not look at the girl and seemed nervous as he described his tea the previous Sunday when Liz had to visit her mother ill with flu so that he had been free to call on Jane Weatherby, a widow only too well known to Miss Jennings. It was wet then, did she remember he was saying, so unlike this he said, and turned his face to the dazzle of window, it had been dark with sad tears on the panes and streets of blue canals as he sat by her fire for Jane liked dusk, would not turn on the lights until she couldn’t see to move, while outside a single street lamp was yellow, reflected over a thousand raindrops on the glass, the fire was rose, and Penelope cam
e in. Jane cried out with loving admiration and there the child had been, no taller than the dark armchair, all eyes, her head one long curl coppered next the fire and on the far side as pale as that street lamp or as small flames within the grate, and she was dressed in pink which the glow blushed to rose then paled then glowed once more to a wild wind in the chimney before their two faces dark across Sunday afternoon.

  “Then you’re to be married,” Jane had cried and so it was he realized, as he now told Miss Jennings, that the veil of window muslin twisted in a mist on top of the child’s head to fall to dark snow at her heels, with the book pressed between two white palms in supplication, in adorable humility, that all this spelled marriage, heralded a bride without music by firelight, a black mouth trembling mischief and eyes, huge in one so young, which the fire’s glow sowed with sparkling points of rose.

  “Oh aren’t you lucky,” Jane said, “you sweet you?” but the infant said no word.

  It was then he fell, he told Miss Jennings. He had gone on his knees. Not direct onto the floor, he explained. No, he used one of those small needlework cushions women put about a room and the fact was Penelope made no objection when he suggested the ceremony should take place at once. There was a cigar band handy in the ashtray for a ring and he had, he swore it, looked first at Jane who’d only said “why not then darling?” Thus it is he explained to Miss Jennings that the great mistakes in life are made. And it was Jane, he went on, had called “wilt thou take this man?” while the little girl stayed agreeably silent, had continued “for richer or poorer, for better or for worse” right through her own remembered version of the service. Or perhaps Jane had altered the words to make it unreal to herself, Mr. Pomfret did not know he said. But the harm was there.