Molten Treasure

LOVING (248 pp.)--Henry Green--Viking ($3).

In 1929 a young nobody of 24 named Henry Green wrote Living, a proletarian novel about the lives of Birmingham factory workers. In the same year another 24-year-old unknown named Henry Vincent Vorke, nephew of a peer named Lord Leconfield, became engaged to the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph.

Little attention was paid to Mr. Green --so little, in fact, that Evelyn Waugh (who had just made a hit with his second novel, Vile Bodies) angrily described Living as "a neglected masterpiece." Henry Green abetted this neglect himself. He made little attempt to mingle with other literary lights, declined to be photographed. (As a special concession, last month he allowed himself to be photographed for TIME, but only in hands-to-face masquerade--see cut.) But the gossip columnists of that year had been idly poking around in search of something to say about the wedding bells of Mr. Yorke.

The truth came out with a minor bang: PEER'S NEPHEW AS FACTORY HAND. Proletarian Mr. Green, it seemed, was simply the pseudonym of socialite Mr. Yorke. After writing most of his first "Henry Green" novel, Blindness, while a schoolboy at Eton, Mr. Yorke had gone up to Oxford, where he soon grew plain "bored." So he had roamed up to Birmingham, where a big engineering firm hired him at -L-1 a week. "First I was a sort of storekeeper. Then I passed on to be a pattern maker, later I became a molder, and finally I was in the copper shops."

Acid Test. The Birmingham owners treated their Old Etonian employee just like any Tom, Dick or Harry. In return, Henry Yorke was profoundly impressed and fascinated by his working mates ("I loved them"). Like them he was usually covered with acid stains and engineering grime, but he still did not look the part enough to deceive anyone. "I'll bet he is a public-school boy," he once heard a Birmingham woman say sadly. "I wonder what has brought him to this."

The answer to this question about Henry Yorke will be found in the novels of Henry Green, which now number seven and embrace an astonishingly wide reach of British life and customs. There are as many distinctive social classes in Britain as there are regions in the U.S., and most British novelists, no matter how imaginative and observant, are as incapable of portraying life in any strata other than their own as, say, a Brooklyn-bred novelist would be of showing how a tree grows in Independence, Mo. But the novels of Henry Green, which are still little known in Britain and almost unheard of in the U.S., bubble like a social melting pot that can boil down everything from cutaways to galluses. Nor is any one of them much like its fellows, because both Henry Yorke and pseudonymous Henry Green love to court new experiences and make fresh experiments. Since his proletarian years, Henry Yorke has graduated into big business: he is now managing director, in London, of his old Birmingham firm, H. Pontifex & Sons. In World War II, he worked full time as a fire-fighting "ranker," i.e., enlisted man in the hazardous National Fire Service.

In each of his works Henry Green has tried to investigate a new condition of life. His special "experiment" (apart from tricks of punctuation that are usually more irritating than useful) is to catch his variegated Britons in a situation (blindness, old age, a dense fog) from which they cannot escape--"imprisoned in a rudimentary part of life," says Critic Henry Reed. Thus, Green's characteristically terse titles--Blindness, Living, Caught, Back, Party Going, Concluding--are like simple signposts indicating the general direction in which he intends to explore.

Last Gasp. In Loving, the first Henry Green novel to be published in the U.S. and perhaps the best of his seven, readers will see for themselves just what the "rudimentary" trap of blended yearning, lust, selfishness and self-sacrifice, i.e., love, looks like in the hands of an experienced man with a musical ear, an impressionist painter's eye, and a poet's obsession with life's hidden undercurrents and emotional mysteries.

In a vast Irish castle, where scores of beady-eyed peacocks strut and scream about the lawns and terraces and a moldering stone wall shuts off the outside world, an aged English butler is dying. From time to time he groans out the name of an unknown loved one--"Ellen, Ellen!" But

Ellen never comes to his call, and the rest of the castle staff, all of whom are English except Paddy, the silent peacock-keeper, are mostly too preoccupied to comfort the dying man. For World War II has started and these English men & women are nervous exiles in a neutral but silently hostile land, half relieved, half ashamed when they think of what they are escaping.

In the drawing room of the lonely castle, the English owner, Mrs. Tennant, whose son is away on active service, sits with her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Jack, and tries to talk about the only two things that interest her--her son and the reliability of the servants. But Mrs. Jack hardly answers; unknown to her mother-in-law, she is a mass of nerves trying to conceal her love for another man.

Gold Veins. Belowstairs, Albert, the 'prentice footman, is sick with love for-Housemaid Edie, who is herself pining for First Footman Charley Raunce. "I love 'im, I love 'im," she cries to Housemaid Kate (who is obsessed by the mere idea of being in love). "I could open the veins of my right arm for that man." But Footman Charley is momentarily too busy to take Edie seriously. He is hovering outside the dying butler's bedroom, waiting for the brief coma between life and death when he can safely order young Albert to pop in and swipe the old man's private notebooks, priceless treasures of information about how to work the castle pork barrel--which guests can be touched for tips, what pennies can be pocketed undetected, what overcharges can be got away with.

With a last cry of "Ellen!" the old man dies, and with him, unknown to the castle servants and Mrs. Tennant, dies the groaning old world of aristocratic England. Stuffing the precious notebooks into his striped-pants pocket, Charley Raunce boldly seats himself in the dead man's high chair at the head of the servants' table, determined to carry on a way of life that actually has ceased to exist. He is now "Mr. Raunce," butler-king of the castle; as he surveys the long table--the older servants mourning the dear departed, the housemaids coy and giggly--life takes on a new shape. "And the wicked shall flourish even as a green bay tree," cries the old housekeeper as Mr. Raunce, the notebooks snug in his pocket, rises to carve the fragrant joint.

"The Hair of 'is 'ead." The notebooks show that the old butler's best tipper was a certain Captain Davenport. Housemaid Edie learns why the Captain was sometimes so generous. Going into Mrs. Jack's bedroom as usual one morning, when old Mrs. Tennant is absent from the castle, Edie draws back the curtains and the sun streams in. "She saw a quick stir beside the curls under which Mrs. Jack's head lay asleep, she caught sight of someone else's hair as well . . . retreating beneath the silk sheets." Dumfounded, Edie scuttles off to Housemaid Kate. "I seen the hair of 'is 'ead," she screams; "the Captain." "In your young lady's bed?" cries Kate. "Large as life," says Edie. Both housemaids collapsed onto their beds, rocking, crowing and shrieking until they are drenched with tears of hilarity.

But, under her jester's mask of giggles, Edie is a changed girl. In that instant of discovery she drops her girlhood like an old pinafore and turns like a flash into a Shavian woman in love--absorbed, intense, sole-heartedly set on the capture of her own beloved, Charley Raunce.

Butler Charley is an ambitious rogue with a bad conscience, a double man who is torn between his desire to make hay while the sun shines in neutral Eire and his realization that his manly pride depends on his returning to embattled Britain. Similarly, he is the sort of a man who loves to hide his capacity for love and loyalty under a leering, winking mask of sexy chatter and innuendo ("Let me tell you," he assured young Albert, referring to the departed French governess, "there was many an occasion I went up to Mam-selle's boudoir to give her a long bong jour . . ."). Charley alone is enough to show why Novelist Elizabeth Bowen considers Henry Green "one of the living novelists whom I admire most." But Housemaid Edie, who builds their furtive little affair into a full-blown storm of love and wedding bells (in Britain), is an even more subtle and profound creation, warm as toast towards her Charley but cold and calculating as a stockbroker in getting him under the lock & key of matrimony. Cobwebs over Eire. Two such masterly characters deserve a masterly stage-set, and Author Green supplies it. Hollywood could make of Loving a movie almost as stunning as the novel, simply by faithfully following Green's sharp, quick series of glittering scenic plays and his natural, jumping dialogue. And a good director could even capture the lush moments when Green suddenly forgets the human comedy and begins to dream poetic fairy tales--as in his pen-picture of peacock-keeper Paddy O'Conor, surprised napping in the saddle room by Edie and Kate:

"It was a place from which light was almost excluded now by cobwebs across its two windows and into which, with the door ajar, the shafted sun lay in a lengthened arch of blazing sovereigns. Over a corn bin on which he had packed last autumn's ferns lay Paddy snoring ... a web strung from one lock of hair back onto the sill above . . . Caught in the reflection of spring sunlight this cobweb looked to be made of gold as did those others which by working long minutes spiders had drawn from spar to spar of the fern bedding on which his head rested. It might have been almost that O'Conor's dreams were held by hairs of gold binding his head beneath a vaulted roof on which the floor of cobbles reflected an old king's molten treasure from the bog."

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