Back by Henry Green

You know when Caustic Cover Critic used to those funny posts of appalling cheap reprints of classics? Here’s an example. Among those that are simply confusing were a few that clearly put the title into some sort of search engine and stuck whatever appeared on the front. Three Men in a Boat gets three men in speedboats; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire gets a seductive woman hanging outside the Colosseum; Little Women gets a woman who is admittedly quite short, but is also apparently in the military of an East Asian country.

Well, when I pick up Harvill Press edition of Back (1946) by Henry Green, I can’t help feeling that it is a similar scenario. ‘The River Picnic’ by Victor Pasmore is a lovely painting, and painted only a handful of years before the novel was published – but it does seem to have been chosen primarily for the naked back on it. And the ‘back’ in Back refers to something quite different.

It is very timely, as a 1946 novel – because the title comes from Charley Summers coming back from the Second World War, having been held as a prisoner of war for the majority of it (and also having had a leg amputated). One of the first places he goes to is a graveyard – to visit the resting place of Rose, the woman he had loved.

What should he do? All he had was this suit he stood up in, which he had bought, and which the tailor had not delievered, but had kept safe till he got back. The rest was looted. Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard. Where could she be? Rose that he’d loved, that he’d come so far for? Why did she died? Could anyone understand anything? Perhaps it would have been bestg if they had killed him, he felt, if instead of a sniper’s riflge in that roebush that had pooped off something heavier at him. Rose would never have known, because she had died some time about that identical week. God bless her, he thought, his brown eyes dimmed suddenly with tears, and I hope she’s having a jolly good rest.

Charley cannot return as a grieving widower, or even a grieving partner, because Rose was married to another man – one who is ignorant of their relationship, and ignorant of the fact that their son is (probably) Charley’s. Charley does know the boy is probably biologically is, but seems pretty unmoved by it. He is too occupied with his grief for this woman. Rose remains hard for the reader to grasp: she is the catalyst for this man’s complicated series of responses, but she is something of a cipher herself. I think, and hope, this is deliberate on Green’s part.

Things get complicated when Charley goes to see Rose’s parents, who knew of their friendship. Rose’s mother has some kind of dementia, or possibly a grief-inflicted psychological response, and Rose’s father is caring for her in a chaotic sort of way. The scenes with Mr and Mrs Grant are bittersweet, of course, but also the parts of the novel where Green’s humour is at the forefront. It is undeniably a sad situation, but he finds the comedy of the absurd.

Mr Grant points Charley towards a local young widow, Nancy – and Charley is shaken by how much she looks like Rose. Indeed, he thinks she is Rose. And it’s this relationship that is the core of the rest of novel, as well as Charley’s wavering belief that she is, or is not, the woman he loved. Sometimes he seems to believe both things at once.

It’s an interesting angle on the mental disintegration caused by war, and I particularly appreciated the way Nancy’s personality manages to circumnavigate the curious box that Charley is trying to put her in, so that the reader does get to know her despite it. She resents being a ‘walking memory’, particularly for somebody else’s existence. But she also doesn’t seem able to escape a relationship of sorts with Charley who, after all, is paying attention to her in a world where not many people do.

Stylistically, I found Back rather a mixed bag. I’ve struggled with some Green novels (Living was incomprehensible), enjoyed others (Loving and Blindness), and Back was a curious mix of straightforward prose and very stylised. Well, I assume it was stylised. There were a fair few sections where Green layered on clause after clause, with a rhythm of commas which seemed purposeful. Here’s one example…

Another morning, in London, in which he worked, Charley ran across a man by the name of Middlewitch, whom he had met, in July, at the Centre where he had been to have his new leg fitted.

On a couple of occasions, these long, clause-heavy sentences take up most of a page. There are far more of a shorter, but still distinctive, variety. But not enough for it to feel like a storytelling technique? And, indeed, fewer and fewer as the book continues – so that it feels a bit like something Green tried and then wearied of. For most of Back, the writing is – dare I say it – quite ordinary. If you read this novel in isolation, you certainly wouldn’t consider him a leading light of Modernism. Perhaps, by the 1940s, he had tired of some of the formal and linguistic trickery that had earlier been his calling card.

So, I enjoyed Back and thought it was a very compelling psychological portrait. I suppose I just hoped for a bit more, and for something a bit more distinctive. It was good, but it could have been rather better.