BOOKS AND WRITERS I N the last few years Mr. Henry
Green has occupied a position similar to that of Mr. William Gerhardi in the 'twenties. In both cases the name was in the literary air, though the books were not much read : both were admired by brother writers ; both had a vision of life which was poetic and oblique, and both gained a kind of esoteric topical interest, insomuch as they spoke for a tiny sector of the cultivated world, part-raffish, part-cultivated, part- prosperous, which was enjoying its last butterfly-day when Mr. Gerhardi began and by Mr. Green's time was already far gone into decay.
This particular sector never grew roots in our literature as deep as those of the steadier professional and burgess England from which most of our creative writers have come ; its artistic standards were purely aesthetic, and aesthetic standards do not live long when a cold wind blows. Compare Mr. Gerhardi's Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925) with Mr. Green's Caught (1943) and Loving (1945). Both writers are genuine artists ; each lacks emotional weight, but responds to life with impudence and pathos ; yet the difference between the two is a grim reminder of how art can decline.
It is not only that Mr. Gerhardi is much the finer writer ; it is also a difference of mental climate. Mr. Gerhardi was writing in complete innocence and confidence ; he never doubted for a second that his aesthetic values were right and that all else was trivial beside them. Mr. Green has no such confidence. An amiable and strong personality speaks from behind his pages, but he is worrying despite himself. His stories, his sentences, even his titles, fritter themselves away ; his text carries all the signs that we have come to associate with artistic diffidence and decay—the false naivete (he is actually .a clever man), the childish patter, the fiddling with commas.
But Mr. Green has now provided us with a more dramatic example of deterioration. Like Mr. Gerhardi, he has just written his literary credo. Mr. Gerhardi's appeared three years ago as a preface to his collected works: it is addressed to his ideal reader, assumes that a work of art is composed entirely for such an ideal reader, and has the serenity of the uncompromising aesthetic view. I find such a view too restricted, and, as I grow older, too inhuman ; but it is a view which we ignore at our loss, and of which Mr. Gerhardi's is the most authoritative statement. Mr. Green's credo is in essence very similar: it appears in an article called The English Novel of the Future (Contact, July-August, 1950). Read these two together, and you will see how, by the side of Mr. Gerhardi, Mr. Green is hopelessly confused. He wants to establish aesthetic standards,.and then gets tied up in arguments about the technological world : he is too intelligent a man not to say some true and penetrating things, but they do not add up ; in the end one is left thinking that the novel Mr. Green predicts certainly will not happen, and that it would be a minor horror if it did.
He begins with a paragraph that reveals most of his weaknesses: " We need not concern ourselves for more than a moment over what the novel in the next few years will be written about. Novelists will continue writing on the theme of people falling in and out of love for the good and sufficient reason that the public who put up the money to buy books, which take a lot of money to produce, are only interested in watching the people round them falling in and out of love."
It would be difficult to cram more diffeient kinds of mistake into a few words. What are the facts ? First, how many of the great novels have been written on the theme of " falling in and out of love " ? Very few, as you will see if you will cast your memory back. War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Fathers and Children, Crime and Punishment, Don Quixote, The Pickwick Papers, Middletnarch, Le Pere Goriot, Barchester Towers in not one of them is " falling in and out of love " more than a minor theme. But then Mr Green, less cunning than Mr. Gerhardi, who addresses his aesthetic only to an ideal reader, talks of " the public who put up money to buy books." How many contemporary best- sellers concentrate on the theme of falling in and out of love ? Mr. Nevil Shute ? Mr. C. S. Forester ? Mi. H. E. Bates ? Mr. Graham Greene ? Not one of them. Or the best-sellers of the 'thirties, Mr. Priestley, Mr. Francis Brett Young ?
No one should begin a critical discussion with a generalisation so lacking in intellectual control. Yet Mr. Green is, as I say, a clever man ; and when clever men talk nonsense without the slightest effort to stretch their minds into a bit of comparative thought, it usually means that they are bewildered about their own case. Mr. Green's real argument, and the only part of his article which is of value, is that novels in the future both will be—owing to the influence of the cinema—and ought to be—for aesthetic reasons— written entirely in moment-by-moment dialogue scenes. This sug- gestion is nothing new, but Mr. Green enriches it with some aesthetic subtleties. Nevertheless, the problem faces novelists today as it has faced them since there was any conscious thought about novel- writing at all. It is this: there are three components of a novel's texture, scene, narrative and commentary. How are they to be blended ?
" Scene " means the description of actual moments of existence as they happened before the eyes—usually, though not always, dono in the form of dialogue. " Narrative " means the link passages by which one proceeds from one such scene to another. " Com- mentary " means any explanation or reflection upon the scene or narrative. A literary aspirant, at the beginning of his career, often makes Mr. Green's assumption, that a novel told in scenes alone will move much faster and seem more natural. Actually it seems far more impoverished, and tends to become totally unreadable. There is only one novel of the first class that is told largely in scenes—Anna Karenina. Novelists have, of course, varied very much in their proportions of the three components ; but all expert story-tellers are skilful in the way they dilute their scenes with narra- tive (Mr. C. S. Forester is a great master of this art), and nearly all specialists in character deepen their artistic and human efforts by the use of commentary.
If a perverse aesthetic led us to a collection of novels told ex- clusively, or even mainly, in dialogue scenes, those novels would become steadily more tedious and more unilluminating ; and, in fact, the novel would be sterilised much as modern poetry has been, and for the same reasons. Mr. Green's own reflection, after an excellent passage upon the artist's oblique approach, is the reverse of en- couraging. " Accordingly, the treatment of dialogue by the novelist will be oblique, that is to say, there should be no direct answers in dialogue. If the fictional characters A and B are talking together in narrative, A should ask a question on which B should ask another, although the natural fatigue of the writer over such inconclusiveness should be carefully watched for." Indeed, it should be watched for ; otherwise " the public who put up the money to buy books " will have shrunk from 37 to 17.
But this is not going to happen. This perverse aesthetic has not caught hold, and, in fact, is weaker now than it was five years ago. Mr. Green is-writing about the novel of the next ten years, and we already know a good deal 'about the people who are going to write those novels. Take, almost at random, five novelists, considerably younger than Mr. Green, whose books have made their mark in the last year—Mr. Alexander Baron, Mr. Neil Paterson, Mr. William Cooper, Mr. J. D. Scott, Mr. Emrys Humphreys. They are all writers of high intelligence and definite artistic purpose, and their books show no sign whatsoever of the tendency which Mr. Green predicts. Mr. Baron and Mr. Paterson, who have already won a large public, both use commentary much more freely than their immediate seniors, and so does Mr. Humphreys. Mr. Cooper and Mr. Scott, two of the best writers of dialogue among younger novelists, use it with a technique and intention quite different from Mr. Green's. In fact, I cannot think of one serious novelist under forty who, in any fashion whatever, exemplifies Mr. Green's prophecy about the immediate future. My own guess about the next ten years would be utterly different, and I shall be content to be' judged by what
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