BLINDNESS: A novel (1926)
I intend to real-time review some novels of Henry Green in the tradition of my other marathon reviews of 20th Century authors, and this is the second one.
LOVING was reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/28/loving-henry-green/
All my reviews of Henry Green to be linked HERE
My previous reviews of literary authors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/23/some-of-my-serial-reviews-indexed/
My review will appear in the comment stream below…
PART ONE – CATERPILLAR
LAUGH
“It has rained all the past week.”
“What is bad is that this school tends to turn the really clever into people who pretend for all they are worth to be the mediocrities which are the personification of the splendid manhood phrase. And in the end these poor people succeed and lose all the brains they ever had, which is distressing, particularly for me who could do with a few more.”
This seems to be a likely lad engagingly keeping his diary at a boy’s school called NOAT – a scenario that may have pre-empted a later Bullingdon Club Cabinet of Ministers who couldn’t shake off their boyhood misdemeanours. During a period of “soaking weather”, the diarist talks to us about other boys and the masters while often going to the dentist to get a nerve killed. He buys an orange-ribboned straw hat for a horse and threatens to wear it himself for ‘Camp’.
“…the horse’s neck being the length of its body.”
I have so far read up to this passage that somehow obliquely echoes the novel’s title…
“I suppose I have been rather tiresome lately, but all except T. B. and possibly E. N. are so distressingly the athletic type, who sink their whole beings in the school and its affairs, and are blind and almost ignorant of any world outside their own.”
A tooth broken on a fruit stone reminds me of it happening to me in the last few days! Shows how accident-prone this individual is as he writes about his school days and his mother and his era’s various art movements like cubism and the art society and the tactile horrors of Camp and much else in this real-time review that some may call a diary.
I have read up to: “Smith, the master, crosses his cheques with a ruler. One comes across something amazing every day here.”
“I now understand why men were brave in the war; it was because they were afraid of being cowards, that fear overcoming that of death.”
The politics between conservatives and socialists of the age. just as polarised as now, but full of bonhomie. A marionette show for the art society. And, pivotally, a chance angled stone to replace the earlier fruit stone creating the title of this book, a sudden turning of events as the diary part of this books ends. Writing not to die for, but to go dark for. I am shaken. Yet still beguiled.
Empathising, too, with the diary entries depicting attempts to be a writer before that second stone arrived through a fixed-track train’s window ….
“Have written another story all about blood ; not impossibly bad but sadly mediocre. If only I could write ! But I think I improve. Those terrible, involved sentences of mine are my undoing.”
PART TWO — CHRYSALIS
1 NEWS
“So that he was like a blind worm in a fire, squirming, squirming to get out.”
This chapter is a horror story for all horror story readers to read with their eyes how it is to be told gradually you are blind, all duly told to us in a literary experimental way by an 18 year old Henry Green while still at Eton College about someone only a little younger than him; strange it is accessibly Joycean, and Proustian (by imagining his mother’s attentions almost like a sweetheart’s?), and the nurse with his two eyes as keepsakes. None of this is a spoiler, because it’s the way it’s written that counts as its real plot.
2 HER, HIM, THEM
“It was terrible to see the country changing, the big houses being sold, everyone tightening the belt, with the frightful war to pay for. Now that he was blind there was no hope of his ever making any money.”
We see the situation from his widowed mother’s point of view, the coping with ageing servants, et al. And what usefulness can be found for her blind son John.
And, following earlier ‘neutral yellow’ walls and a yellow wardrobe, I have read so far up to…
“Going out she straightened a picture that was a little crooked. As she opened the door the sunlight invaded the passage beyond, and made a square of yellow on the parquet floor.”
“Along one wall was hung a museum of cooking utensils, every size of saucepan known to science, and sinister shapes.”
We see household matters and gossip through the blind one’s mother, but what about this intriguing paragraph, one about ‘the Shame’ that needs noting for later reference? —
“The attendances at church were disgraceful again now, just as bad as when the Shame had had it. That had been the only time the village had been right and she wrong. No one had been able to persuade her till she had seen for herself. It was all part of this modern spirit, she had seen terrible dangers there for him, but now, poor boy, that he was blind she could at least keep him to herself away from those things that led nowhere.”
A passage to remember, but how can you forget it?
“ He felt himself sinking into a pit of darkness. At the top of the pit were figures, like dolls and like his friends, striking attitudes at a sun they had made for themselves, till sinking he lost sight of them, to find himself in the presence of other dolls in the light of a sun that others had made for them. Then it did not work, and he was back in the darkness, on the lawn again. Nothing seemed real.
He said “tree” out loud and it was a word. He saw branches with vague substance blocked round them, he saw lawn, all green, and he built up a picture of lawn and tree, but there were gaps, and his brain reeled from the effort of filling them.
He felt desperately at the deck-chair in which he was sitting. He felt the rough edges of the wood, which would be a buff colour, and he ran a splinter, into his finger. He put his hand on the canvas, he knew that it was canvas, dirty white with two red stripes at each side. It felt rough and warm where his body had touched it. He felt for the red, it should have blared like a bugle. It did not; that would come later, perhaps.
He felt the grass, but it was not the same as the grass he had seen.
He lay back, his head hurting him. How much longer would he be there? The letter crinkled in his hands reminding him of its presence. He ran his fingers over the pages, but he could feel no trace of ink. He came upon the embossed address. It might have been anything. A fly buzzed suddenly. Even a fly could see.”
More remarkable passages as the blind one recalls his vision in the memories of fly fishing,
Then read up to a third reference to flies: “A bee droned by to the accompaniment of flies.”
“So all he could do to keep his brain a little his own was to write short stories.”
After agonising over the process of smoking cigarette when blind, he broaches a new area regarding short story writing. It seems inspirationally appropriate that his latter thoughts coincide with my own story-writing’s watershed of agonising earlier today here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/10/29/high-suspicion/!
“He sat on a chair while the nurse got the bed ready. His head hurt him, the stairs must have done that. Poor Ruffles, it was too bad that he was finished. His head was throbbing; how he hated pain, and in the head it was unbearable. And this atmosphere of women. 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. A long way away there might be a country of rest, made of ice, green in the depths, and ice that was not cold, a country to rest in. ‘He would lie in the grotto where it was cool and where his head would be clear and light, and where there was nothing in the future, and nothing in the past. He would lie on the grass that was soft, and that had no ants and no bugs, and there would be no flies in the air and no sun above his head, but only a grey clearness in the sky, that stretched to mountains blue against the distance, through the door of his ice-house. There would be pine trees in clumps or suddenly alone, and strange little mounds, one after the other, that grew and grew in height till they met the mountains that cut off the sky. A country of opera-bouffe. And little men in scarlet and orange would come to fight up and down the little hills, some carrying flags, others water pistols. There would be no wounded and no dead, but they would be very serious.“
Amazing things going on in his blind and bandaged head.
And from fly-paper, and the blasted women who care for him, to his poor moribund dog Ruffles.
3 PICTURE POSTCARDISM
Some amazing writing about the countryside, matchless prose, I would say, and a change of gear as we concentrate on Joan and is it her father with cancer? So off the wall, so on the wall, too, it is staggering narrative material that I am glad I have managed to encounter before cancer finally gets me!
Read up to: “Don’t throw up quotations like that at me just to annoy me.”
“But that was as it should be, he ought to take a a pride in the hatred of the world. It was ever so with the great. But sardines, he paid for them. There had been a time when he had thanked God for sardines, because he had always hated them so that he saw in them his cross. But what was the good? He paid for them, and ate them because it was better than eating dry bread.”
The Father having just complained to Joan about sardines again! Is there not a sardines game in Henry Green elsewhere? Or did I imagine it?
Read up to: “’It’s the cancer, Joan, that what I am so terrified about. I can feel it glowing hot. We can’t afford an operation or morphia. I shall die.’
It would be nice to die; but no, it wouldn’t be, and that was very unreasonable. But no, it wasn’t, there was his book.”
“Oranges and lemons he suggested was more likely, but no, said Edwards, sardines was all the rage now not blind bloody man’s buff,…” – from PARTY-GOING
Note the ‘blind’ there.
And someone making flowers out of sardine tins in CAUGHT.
“….the great book that was to link everything into a circle…”
[…]
“How dreadful a disease, cancer.”
[…]
“Father, where did you put the tin-opener for these sardines?”
“There is an order in my disorder.”
Several pages read today, a classic tour de force that should be far more well known, a sort of Joycean Molly’s Monologue by or about Joan via Green (a Mrs Green is mentioned) describing much more about sardines, including blood in the sardine oil, bluebottles and sardines, the blood being from cutting the hand when opening the tin, sardines and cancer, Joan’s past, searching for eggs, the anthropomorphism of the sun, church going, her relationships with men as well as with her father and late mother, and her connection with Barwood, a house that is connected to our blind hero earlier in this novel.
PART THREE — BUTTERFLY
1 WAITING
“…perhaps he would never see again, even in his dreams?”
Some more amazing material, this being our blind hero’s monologue via Green, although he is explicitly as good a writer as Green, so I sense I hear both their authorial voices at once. A blurred tension between these voices ( eg June/Joan?) Here, whether confused or not by his own blind state, he talks about his Mamma not being his real mother, about his Nanny, too, and, above all, about the woman June with whom he has relations, whether she is socially beneath him or not by means of her ‘drunk father’ and the catalyst of meeting our hero from her cut hand (the hand that we saw earlier cut on a sardine tin, I wonder, as well as his blindness here causing our hero paradoxically to hear sounds slightly wrong and June is merely a morphing of Joan??)… tracing fingers by touch… but I am not yet sure of what the butterfly title above implies.
“…your fingers strayed into hair suddenly, though shut eyelids were incredibly alive.”
2 WALKING OUT
A glimpse of our blind hero with June/Joan followed by his Nanny’s turn of a solitary monologue as cast by Green’s matchless prose, about the backstory with her once baby charge who is now blindly walking out in this way, and her misgivings about this walking out and about other family matters… a long monologue tellingly kettled or bracketed between these two memorable passages, the latter one also featuring a fly and where I have read up to so far…
“Nanny sat by the fire. Shadows ran up and down the walls of her room, and it was very quiet in there except for her breathing and the murmuring kettle. Kettles were so companionable. On the table by her side was a cup of tea which steamed up at the ceiling, broadly at first, and then the steam narrowed down till at last it was lost in a pinprick. It could not get so high. On the table was a patchwork cover, the heir-loom of her family. By the cup stood a tea-caddy and by that a spoon. The kettle spurted steam at the fender in sudden, angry bursts.”
“She sipped. The kettle threw out sprays of steam and bubbles bubbled angrily about the lid. Sometimes the lid would rise as if to let something out, and there would be a hissing in the fire and then it would fall back again. The room was full of movement with sudden still glowing colours here and there on the furniture where the fire caught it. A late fly dozed just within the half-circle of light thrown out by the fire on the ceiling and where the shadows crept up from the corners trying to choke the light. The room was so warm. And the figure in the chair sat straight and quiet with hands crossed on her lap, and the whalebone in her collar kept the chin from drooping.”
“Thanks. 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, June, 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.”
“Yes.”
“But I will be. What else is there to live for? Writing means so much to me, and it is the only thing in which the blind are not hampered. There was Milton.”
“Ah yes, Milton.”
“I must justify myself somehow.”
[…]
She paused. “John, you’ll make me the person your hero’s in love with, won’t you? and your hero’ll be you, I suppose?”
“Perhaps.”
***
A touching dialogue, while walking in the countryside, between a blind man and a woman he can’t see, with few brief vivid descriptions, a dialogue between June/Joan and our assonant hero John, and such a dialogue prefiguring, in this earliest novel, what I so far believe to be Green’s signature style in his later planned novels, but was he ever blind enough for such empathy, I wonder?
“Perhaps.”
3 FINISHING
These chapters’ titling prefiguring forthcoming novel titling by Green?
‘“What is Minnie?”
“Our cat.”
“Why do you give him a female name?”
“I don’t know. Father always calls him she. Father hates cats.”
She had told him this before.’
More conversation between the two of them (blind and sighted) in the countryside, and their TALKING of LEAVING together.
Read up to: “We ought all to go away for a time. The country is poisoning us, June. Under all the smiles that one hears and the soft kindness that one sees at first, there is so much cruelty. We will go.”
“Besides, there was the Shame, who was a fool by all accounts, almost an idiot.”
Alongside the sounds of a distant football crowd, the two of them agonise to and fro, about staying together, or not, with considerations as to her father and the new handsome milk man she’d seen, and the book her father is writing, and our hero’s ‘Mamma’…
The ING titling extending to ‘her’?…
Read up to: “They might as well have some of that tinned herring. They had eaten it once to often, but still it was good.”
“Why were there always idiots in a village?”
“Electricity was so hard and bright that it was bad for the eyes.”
Effectively another monologue via Green, this time thought by our blind hero’s selfless ‘Mamma’ who is leaving her roots and social doings in the countryside village where she lived at Barwood, all for the sake of the blind writer who she called son. Going to the ‘temple of machinery’ that was London, with various trunks and boxes, some to be forgotten. In a train that moved like a worm. One farewell for our blind hero elicited from him…
“‘Then I shall see you at tea, Mrs Palmer.’ The door shut.”
4 BEGINNING AGAIN
“Could you pull the blind down and shut the window, the noise is so frightful?”
The most striking of ‘elbow’ moments ….
“But he was on his feet and groping about when he met her hand again, calm and a trifle moist, which took his and guided it. His other hand meeting her shoulder slid down the dress (through which her arm glowed) till his fingers caught on her elbow. How small it was, but it wriggled, and seized with a sudden despair he loosed it. Then, as he was groping forward again, the lily poked gently into his face, trying to tickle him, and shuddering, he pushed the thing away.”
…in our blind hero’s grappling with a new ‘love’ in London, and a lily and other flowers, while suffering guilt about his Mamma with regret at leaving Barwood, and the resonance of bells — “In the country you had been able to forget you were blind.” — and the life-saving by perhaps a different lily as link to one of his old school friends we were told about in his diary at outset, being reclaimed from blindness?
There are something about mustard in cakes, and something ‘straining behind his eyeballs to get out’. Is it happiness? Sudden and illuminating, as this early novel becomes, and one wonders why some of the incredible richness of passages in this final ‘monologue’ is not studied again and again.
“What was the use of his going blind if he did not write? People must hear of what he felt, of how he knew things differently. The sun throbbed in his head. Yes, all that, he would write all that.”
END
Previously:
I shall soon review another HG novel. Soon to be linked below.