Monday, November 13, 2023

Concluding by Henry Green

      • CONCLUDING – A Novel (1948)

        I intend to real-time review all novels of Henry Green in the tradition of my other marathon reviews of 20th Century authors. 
        LOVING was reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/28/loving-henry-green/ and BLINDNESS here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/10/21/blindness-by-henry-green/

        All my ongoing reviews of Henry Green novels 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…

        21 thoughts on “Concluding by Henry Green”

        1. “…the great sickle-shaped sweep of mansion towards which they moved like slow, suiciding moles in the half light.”

          Mr Rock finds his way through hanging mist as I do through the first few Green-prose tantalising pages of this novel, and the people he knows, his granddaughter in a room elsewhere with a man, and I am not sure whether his goose is half blind and half deaf, or Mr Rock is, or both are. I am 76 come January, and Mr Rock…

          ‘Seventy-six come March.’

        2. The plot is described in detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concluding
          Amazing! I have garnered a bit of this already, and it seems, HUMBLING, to be the slow-down (Zeno’s Paradox) start of my own ‘Nemonymous Night’ novel as described here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/authors-statement/, as merged with the SF / alternate world interchange of the girls’ school and the gender themes and the young bodily shriving in my own earliest work AGRA ASKA described here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/my-six-novellas/ together with the ethos of a novel covering only ONE DAY as in James Joyce’s ULYSSES…. I’ll leave you to read it in that light and I shall read it as a previously unknown significant retrocausality CONCLUDING my own life at 76 of writing and reviewing books. (The publication year of CONCLUDING was 1948, the year in which I was born.)
          On to my quoted journey through CONCLUDING — hopefully countervailing rather than concluding — and later Green’s LIVING, a review to which I shall link below shortly….

          • A vintage Green moment here from the mansions of his novels: 

            “ The panelling was remarkable in that it boasted a dado designed to continue the black and white tiled floor in perspective, as though to lower the ceiling. But Miss Edge had found marble tiles too cold to her toes, had had the stone covered in parquet blocks, on which were spread State imitation Chinese Kidderminster rugs. As a result, this receding vista of white and black lozenges set from the rugs to four feet up the walls, in precise and radiating perspective, seemed altogether out of place next British dragons in green and yellow; while the gay panelling above, shallow carved, was genuine, the work of a master, giving Cupid over and over in a thousand poses, a shock, a sad surprise in such a room.”

            Read and relish!

          • “Over one eyebrow, caught in a mesh of hair, was a torn piece of paper with, printed on it, the word ‘FURNICATES’.
            ‘You have something on your head,’ Baker calmly told her.
            Without a word Edge removed it, reread, and let the word drop from her fingers to spiral to destruction on the flames.”

            Much on eggs, scrambled or not. Are sardines next? The black fog outside is certain to subside, and all the girls’ names begin with M. The community of staff reminds me of that in LOVING. Mr Rock, and his granddaughter off with some man called Birt, I recall. The gossip and the sought breakfasts. While the girls’s school, as well as that in ‘Agra Aska’, reminds me of Joan Lindsay’s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (my review HERE): especially when, in CONCLUDING, two girls, Mary and Merope, go missing, too, as they did in the Picnic book (also compare the two missing children in ‘Nemonymous Night’)… cf Mr Rock and Picnic’s Rock! (Cf also some Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Aickman novels.)

            Read up to: “Then, to his vague, wondering surprise, beyond the cone of light in which he [Mr Rock] sat and warmed his cold hollow bones, he gradually felt a tide of female curiosity flow up over him, so strong it was like the smell of a fox that has just slunk by, back of some bushes.”

        3. “He turned to her like a blind man.”

          Much on the aged sage, Rock. Amid breakfast, scrambled egg and porridge mentioned, but no sardines, by the sound of it. Talk of the characters Birt and Edge.

          “And in a moment the old and famous man was left alone at table, altogether blinded by increasing brightness, before an empty plate and a cup that was warm, behind a rumbling stomach, left to dread the journey back with full buckets.”

          Birt with perhaps false falsetto is seen interacting with girls and women at breakfast amid more talk of Edge.

          “Where similar functions are operated in dissimilar environments which may yet have factors common to both . . .” 

          “‘Well I can wash mine, can’t I?’ he demanded, falsetto now. ‘And my lipstick’s lovely. It never comes off.’”

          Read up to…
          “highest falsetto, but which had an edge”

        4. Read up to: ‘And he’s seventy-six now.’
          ‘All the more wonderful then, isn’t he?’

          Theatrical exchanges between Elizabeth Rock and her grandpa, Gapa Rock (cf Picnic!) and we learn more about the precariousness of the latter’s position as ‘great man’ at their living in the school and the imminent ‘election’ re Gapa. How he burns any letters he receives. Mustard bubbles. The character of Sebastian Birt, is it him with a falsetto, or Gapa? At 76, I get confused.
          More about Miss Baker and Miss Edge and two of their girls gone missing.

        5. “So that when Moira entered, and did not shut the door but stood leant against it, half in, half out of the room, dressed in a pink overall (this colour being her badge of responsibility over others), her bare legs a gold colour of ripening apricots from sun with strong eyes that were an alive blue, shapeless to Miss Marchbanks’ dull poached eggs of vision, but a child so alive, at some trick of summer light outside, that the older woman marvelled again how it could ever be that the State should send these girls, who were really women, to be treated like children; she marvelled as Moira stood respectfully flaunting maturity, even her short, curly hair strong about the face with the youth of her body, that the State (which had just raised the age of consent by two whole years) should lay down how this woman was to be treated as unfunctional, like a child that could scarcely blow its own nose.”

          The passage above, at this stage of reading, seems significant. There is talk, too, of Mr Rock’s cat Alice, and fir trees possible for the ball in the hall with scattered salt for snow, and school staff possibly swimming in the lake later….

          Elizabeth Rock and Sebastian Birt – “….fastening her mouth on his as though she were an octopus that had lost its arms to the propellers of a tug, and had only its mouth now with which, in a world of the hunted, to hang onto wrecked spars.”

          A fallen beech trees, amidst much underrated exquisite prose, and Birt finds one of the missing girls in concupiscently scanty ‘Institute Pyjamas’ in the Undergrowth, and she is taken back by Elizabeth and Birt for a bath under tutelage of the deputising Miss Marchbanks and then the school Matron, and spied upon through the bathroom ceiling by another girl called Moira!

          Read up to: “‘Dear, dear, how blind you children sometimes are.’”

        6. “a lull was on the way”

          But Miss Marchbanks fires entrapment questions at Merode as to where she had been or why? Had she been with a boy – or a man like Birt or Rock? And where was the still missing Mary?
          Merode seems to me too long to be a French swear word, ‘a stifling furry rectangle’ in her mouth. While these passages below, as Merode is questioned, made me swear with literary delight! – from Dado to Dada? –

          “But the girl had come to be mesmerised by the black and white receding pavements. No longer blinded in sunlight her eyes had caught on one of the black squares, as that pyjama leg had earlier been hooked on a briar. And while her horror at this interview increased, so the dado began to swell and then recede, only to grow at once even larger, the square in particular to get bigger and bigger till she felt she had it in her mouth, a stifling furry rectangle. Then, when she managed to shake herself free, she cleared it out, but only for a minute. After which this process began all over again. […] Merode could hardly take this in, trapped, as she now was, by one of the more frightening periods of the dado, that immediately before the black square would begin to swell, when the whole stretch was beginning to billow, as if the painted pavement was carried out on canvas which had started to heave under a rhythmically controlled impulse actuated from behind.”

        7. Has Mary been found and now with Matron, or has she drowned in the lake? The Misses Edge and Baker question Miss Marchbanks about the Missing. They fear an investigation, no doubt, and wonder why the policemen has been called and not the Doctor. Mr Rock is questioned by Moira, and things getting ready for the party, and nature’s foliage being sawn as decorations. Much conspiracy and wondering. I wonder, too. 

          Read up to:
          “But we have noticed so many cases, up and down the land, where girls have been stopped by strangers.”

        8. “Miss Winstanley observed, not for the first time, how a person’s lipstick, when it was smudged half way to her nose, wounded the whole face like a bullet.”

          Much whispering and complicity among girls at the start of the planned festivities, leading to a subsuming by rumour. What is under the flowery structure of decoration, or who? Talk of Chinese pheasants and of an earlier ‘black and white farm’ with piebald horse and white and black poultry. And suspicion of older men as paedophiles. A sort of whodunnit. And a girly sort of siesta before the dance…and shadows upon the mansion… (I note of what word ‘mansion’ is an anagram). A gramophone with a waltz on loop. Characters suspected, human fallibility mined.

          Read up to:
          “…where life and pursuit was fierce, as these girls came back to consciousness from the truce of a summer after luncheon before the business of the dance.
          For already shadows were on the creep towards this mansion.”

        9. We watch all characters during LULL times before the dance, in their daily chores and conversations, centred around the still missing Mary. And if someone did something to her who dunnit?
          Elizabeth and Birt look for old sage Rock in his cottage which will shortly be their cottage? Amidst a still centre of a whirling of this girls’ school, a fantastical satire or a genuine prophecy, and its possibly co- resonant alternate world that pre-dates AGRA ASKA but I am reading it only now.

          Read up to: “Back to our private beech,…”

        10. ‘how quaint, how black and white.’

          Pig sties all over the school as an education, as the authorities order by letter, putting Edge on the edge! Pignick, not a picnic? All this on top of the still hanging angst of the missing and what Edge senses is under the hall’s flowers where the dance is due to take place. A hall where some of its wood is “varnished a hot fox red, then, at some later date, treated with lime, until the wood turned to its present colour, the head of a ginger-haired woman who was going white as her worries caught up, in the way these will.”

          Much counterpoint conversation à la Compton-Burnett, now super-typical of Green, with Merode’s visiting aunt, and Edge sees or imagines she sees a swarm of bluebottles in the aforesaid flowers. And what about the pigs? Rock already has a pig, why not put them down there when they come? A pigrockery?

          Read up to: “For it was Mr Rock after all. Much worse he was deliberately exercising his animal. How intolerable, if she had taken her stroll, to have come upon him driving the slobbery pig.”

        11. “Blind sun, three quarters down the sky, was huge to the right […] …when the trees’ shadows crept at last over the mansion, […] a rabbity Rag Doll dressed gaily in miniature Institute pyjamas,…”

          This doll and nightmarish thoughts precede a mix of events that tend to shock if it were not an absurd thing to be shocked by this book at all, such as a couple lying stark naked in the exact place where a lost schoolgirl had been found in her pyjamas, and a man wandering with his goose and pig to find another missing girl, feared dead, and a teacher wondering if the pig had done it, if the girl were dead, based on a memory of a pig in that teacher’s girlhood. A passage below that seems important amidst all the school politics and potential believable pre-dance absurdisms, but I don’t exactly know why…

          “…there had been no other excuse to go down by the water, and someone had to after the poor girl, because those evil ninnies, whose absolute power so absolutely corrupted them, were too muddleheaded, or imperious, to see what must be done in merest human charity. Ted, his goose, covered a deal of ground each day, besides he had no call to look for her, and then pigs, as was well known, possessed a sense of smell which might come in handy amongst thick reeds. Imagine not organising a search as soon as they had learned, the fabulous Neroines, already tuning their fiddles before the rout, the fireman’s ball.”

          Firemen often seem to turn up in one form or another in Green.

          Read up to: “…suddenly full of vile cross currents.”

        12. “‘Furnicates, dear,’ she corrected, in a low voice. ‘F.U.R.N.’ she spelled.”

          Who or what is the centrifugal voodoo force – the awful doll, Rock’s pig or goose, the gramophone, the sleepwalking child, an anonymous letter, Edge, Baker, Marchbanks, Birt, Elizabeth, Winstanley, Merode’s visitor in a car, the decorative flowers themselves rather than what they conceal, the bluebottles, the fallen beech, Rock himself or under the picnic’s Rock, the missing Mary, one of the other girls, an empty bird’s egg…?

          “‘You and I are here to protect our girls, Hermione,’ Miss Edge announced in her strongest manner. ‘We stand on guard over the Essential Goodness of this great Place. And when we sense a threat, our duty is to exercise the initiative the State expects to avert a danger. Now something, we do not yet know what, has occurred, and it is for us to stamp out the evil, or better still, get rid of it quietly, without fuss, as one does with swill.’”

          Read up to: “…they’re only children, the girls I mean, and sex is unconscious at their age. It’s such a temptation for a man.”

        13. “‘And you realise what an Enquiry means, if you appeal against one of these awful Reports. It’s the end. Absolutely. Even if you think you’ve brought it off, it boomerangs back onto you.’ […] ‘Don’t be afraid of life, Liz,’ he said. ‘Everything settles itself in the end. I’ve lived long enough to know that.’ […] Over against the old man and his granddaughter the vast mansion reflected a vast red;”

          Liz pleads with her Gapa not to interfere in the scandal and spoil her future with Birt, as I have just done with this plot? Or have I misunderstood it? The like the earlier vision of bluebottles, a swam of starlings as “a huge sea shell that stood proud to a moon which, flat sovereign red gold, was already poised full faced to a dying world.”

          ***

          Then the big dance — “the first waltz would send each child whirling forward into her future, into what, in a few years, she would, with age, become.”

          Are all the girls’ names M-something because this is a murder mystery with or without a murder? Or because all dream of miniature mansions?

          Much talk by the girls of the onset of pigs to swamp out Rock’s own pig, and talk of swine fever, too… and I have now read up to….

          “At this precise moment, and out of sight of these girls, Miss Inglefield, without warning, started the gramophone just once more to see if it would work. The loud speaker was full on so they could even hear the conductor, dead these many years, tap his stick at a desk some thirty summers back, and the music, with a roll of drums, swayed, swelled into a waltz.”

        14. “…the new powered moon, infinitely more than electric light which, up till then, had seemed, by a soft reflection from whence it cut into the Terrace, pallidly to surprise by stealth these mansion walls. For their moon was still enormous up above on a couch of velvet, blatant, a huge female disc of chalk on deep blue with holes around that, winking, squandered in the void a small light as of latrines.”

          So many important passages here of 20th century fiction at its zenith.
          From the absurdism of The Great Theory v the care of pigs, to the rest of it swirling around. High Suspicion at its most powerful. and such utter greatness here. A dance to remember, a tour de force of literature beyond any other, plus all the overhanging innuendos. Whirling Sapphisms and cerebrally instinctive thoughts. “The music was a torrent, to spread out, to be lost in the great space of this mansion,…”
          Read up to: “the front of their thighs kissed through clothes;”

        15. “Age made a man very dependent, he thought, for this was like the pretty child that led the blind. Indeed his eyes were adequate, even if thick lenses distorted edges of vision, but it was his feet were blind, which fumbled air. […] Moira, in order not to dirty her frock, led the old man as if they had to pass through a tall bed of white and black nettles. She walked sideways, delicately, held his other hand high which seemed to protest in the traditional manner of the sightless.”

          This is a remarkable passage of a … honey trap trip down below for Rock, and he is beset by many other girls later at the dance. References to ‘ambiguous’ – with Elizabeth and Birt, words like ‘animalism’ and ‘orgiastic.’ Mixed with wise saws and homilies in pig farming, domestic politics, and on which rock the school was founded, and to what a ‘blind eye’ should be turned. I am aging and agog with Green, smarmed with its verbal marmalade, its shrimps not prawns.

          Read up to: “After the dancing there had already been, these children were hot despite windows wide open onto sky-staring white Terraces, and, as several tugged at his old hands, Mr Rock could feel their moist fingers’ skin, the tropic, anemone suction of soft palms over rheumatic, chalky knuckles.”

        16. “She was watching a moth dab its own shadow up above. ‘It kisses,’ she said inside her.”

          Telling closure to this novel, whereby we’re taken down below and beyond the ‘green baize door’ into the M-girls’s lair, the Institute Inn! And the missing Mary? Welll, that would spoil it to tell you. Just keep calling out her name to outweigh the inferred voodoo force which turns out, at least for me, to be a blend of the moon and  Rock’s ‘yellow woollen nightshirt’.  It’s all about my co-76 year old at the end, Mr Rock, my own future rock in what has turned out to be a literary masterpiece, and his cat, his pig and his goose. Never a picnic at his hanging rock, but more a maroon party, I guess. 

          “‘That’s that, then,’ he concluded, much relieved.”

          “‘I’m not much longer for this world,’ he said, on his dignity.”

          “He even turned round to view the hated mansion which the moon, plumb on it, made so tremendous…”

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