introduction

After all, no one knows what he is like, he just tries to give some sort of picture of his time.

—Henry Green, about himself

Putting Henry Green in His Place

Henry Green is among a small number of English novelists who portray the working class without condescension, without stereotyping, without insincerity. He is also among a small number of English novelists who have the ability to present the upper class without being defensive, without obsequiousness and without any trace of snobbery.[2] What is most distinctive, and what is central to Green’s literary project, is that he chooses to explore both the upper and lower class social strata throughout his body of work. In doing so, however, Green’s novels are not only dedicated to exploring society, and the conditions of both upper and lower class life that define this society, but they are also dedicated to doing so in a way that “attempt[s] to break up the old-fashioned type of novel” (Green qtd. in Stokes 8). In its efforts to investigate the social world, Green’s work is committed to artistic experimentation and stylistic exploration using language that is highly mannered, at times striking, and imbues a poetic significance into Green’s subject matter:

She folded the shutters back into the wall. And Edith looked out on the morning, the soft bright morning that struck her dazzled dazzling eyes. (Loving 37)

We may have revolted against fear but it is more likely we thought for once the world was ours who were so young we did not have to mourn the dead, who did not guess the price we in turn might have to pay for other boys to celebrate the victory by, that which our lives must buy today sooner than tomorrow, no doubt to turn the worms again. (Pack My Bag 66)

Consequently, Green's body of work is difficult to classify in the context of his literary generation, a generation dedicated to straightforward political involvement through literature.

Writing experimental and aesthetically charged novels at a time when the dominant literary mode was more overtly politically motivated than it had been in the previous modernist decade, Green has been left out of much critical discussion of mid-twentieth century literature. Henry Green was a lifelong friend to Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, best man to Evelyn Waugh, roommate to Anthony Powell, schoolmate to George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, and literary associate to Stephen Spender, but while these authors engaged in explicit political debate, Green chose to write fiction that expressed no political aim, and instead, explored political subject matter with no explicit partisan program. Subsequently, he has been relegated to literary obscurity; he is read solely as a rara avis of his literary generation and his stylistic project has been regarded as an imitation of the earlier modernist's experimentations and not as a vital and purposeful examination of his own time. In this study, I attempt to account for Green’s experimental stylistic project by re-entering it into the context of his historical age, and by realigning it with his subject matter, with his social exploration. I hope to reconcile the discrepancy in Greenian scholarship, and in scholarship on Green’s “second-generation” modernist age, by gaining an understanding of how Green’s language, in its novelty, is used in a manner particularly appropriate to his subject matter, which itself is most relevant to his literary and political age.

Green has never been short of devoted—and often, in their own right, famous—admirers. In one collection of blurbs on the Picador omnibus reissue of Green’s three novels Loving, Living and Party Going, W.H. Auden’s words refer to Green as “the finest living English novelist;” Angus Wilson's, as “one of the few really considerable English novelists of our time;” Elizabeth Bowen's, as “nearer than almost any other to the spirit and what might be called the central nerve of our time;” and V.S. Pritchett's, as “the most gifted prose writer of his generation.” Yet, even though the greatest novelists and literary voices of “his generation” felt Green belonged among them, when he is remembered, it is mostly for the ways in which he does not fit into this group. Green occupies an awkward position because of the difference between his work and that of his more famous literary peers.

In 1948, Walter Allen began a critical trend that suggested the removal of Green's work from the its historical age. For Allen, reading Green’s work alongside writers like Auden, Bowen and Pritchett was a mistake. Allen proposed that “one thought of Green in terms of Auden and Spender and Isherwood because he is of their generation; but in point of fact, his practice has run directly counter to the tendencies of his age” (Allen 158). Allen insisted that the tendency of "their generation" to deal with politics did not apply to Green's work, and Green's experimental tendencies did not accord with the language of the rest of his generation. Instead, Allen classified Green with the group that preceded Green’s peers, the “first-generation” modernists like Forster and Lawrence, whose "preoccupation was with style...[and for whom] subject is of secondary importance" (Allen 149). Likewise, Mark Shorer, in 1949, listed Green after Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf—all first-generation modernists—as next in the line of important twentieth century novelists writing prose “that risks” (Holmesland 1). That same year, Green’s sixth novel, Loving, was published in America, and Green was lauded in The New York Times, Time and “the leading literary and intellectual journal in New York,” Partisan Review as a “new discovery…in the tradition of high modernism” (Treglown 194). In the four-thousand-word Partisan Review profile, Philip Toynbee sought “to prepare American readers of Henry Green for the shock which they are almost bound to feel at their first approach to him” (qtd. in Treglown 194). Toynbee made a point to separate Green from his literary peers by calling him “the most self-conscious of modern English novelists, the most mannered, the least digestible” but also, he insisted, “arguably the most important of them” (Treglown 194). Green’s oeuvre, in this way, lost its place among the writing of his contemporaries and lost its association with the socio-historical moment to which, I argue in this paper, it is completely dedicated. In consequence, Green's work has been severed from its historical epoch and has been consistently misread.

Green's work has been praised and criticized as “poetry rather than prose” and as “oblique and…elusive” (Stokes 8), but few have tried to mine this "poetic" elusiveness as a comment on the social scenarios Green's novels present. Of Green’s nine novels, three deal directly with the Second World War and its social repercussions while six concern themselves with issues of class-identity and class relations. Likewise, all of his novels recreate a specific part of the British social world and all of his novels are dedicated to exploring this reality. I argue that what John Ashbery saw as an oeuvre combining “prose-poetry with fidelity to everyday life” (Treglown 4) cannot be read without an understanding of the "everyday life" it depicts. Trying to read Green’s novels not as examinations of the social world, but as stylistic throwbacks to an earlier modernist age, obscures the impact and intention of his work. Reading Green solely as a rara avis of his literary generation disregards what he does share with his literary peers in terms of the topic he chooses to explore, just as it ignores the distinctive relationship his style has to this politically relevant subject matter. Reading Green in such a way disregards the importance of his comment on the subject he returns to time and time again, the subject which his stylized language discusses, the subject, that by engaging, Green puts forth a project that is also both implicitly and explicitly political: the subject of social class.

In his 1988 work British Writers of the Thirties, Valentine Cunningham argues that literature cannot be isolated from its context, that “history masticates texts, whether authors (or readers) like to notice the chewing or not” and he points to Henry Green as an author most interested, and influenced by, this history (Cunningham 11). For Cunningham, Green’s work needs to be re-read in the context of his time, and his literary generation, because Green’s work is conscious of, and involved in, knowing “how the figures on the page, the written results of the gestural act of writing, were touched by as well as touching, intussuscepted by as well as intussuscepting, the surrounding historical and social real” (Cunningham 10). It is inside this “reality” that we must re-read Green’s body of work, and Green's stylized treatment of social class. In this thesis, I explore Green’s writing as a bridge between first- and second-generation modernists. His is a body of work that confronts the “historical and social real” also explored by Auden, Isherwood and Greene (to name a few) through its extension and re-invention of the “risk-taking” experimentalism championed by Woolf, Henry James and Ford Madox Ford (among others). Green’s treatment of both social classes must be discussed in this context in order to be understood as a stylistic project specifically aligned to his political age. Green's novels fuse impressionistic effects learned from the first-generation modernists with techniques taken from the travel writing of C.M. Doughty to confront the same social issues predominant in the literature of his second-generation modernist peers. He is not writing esoteric “prose-poetry” while lost in a generation of politically driven authors. Rather, Green re-invents the techniques of his literary forbears in order to forge a new language to speak about the social issues most pressing to his generation. It is with this language that Green enters into the political dialogue of his time, not with overt polemic or explicit commentary. Likewise, it is toward this aim that Green experiments with language in novels that resemble projects executed by the first-generation modernists. Only by realizing this, and by carrying out a study that takes this into account, can a re-reading of Henry Green, as Cunningham suggests, give Green’s project the treatment it deserves. Only in this way can Green's relevance both to his generation and to the twentieth century in general be realized.

Putting Green in Context

In May 1940, Virginia Woolf characterized the difference between first- and second-generation modernist writers in her now-famous essay “The Leaning Tower.” According to Woolf's characterization, first-generation modernist writers “did not seek to change” the political world, while second-generation modernist writers became interested in the political effect of their writing to the exclusion of all other aspects (Woolf, 133). For Woolf, this shift was absolute, and explained the difference between writers educated before World War One, such as D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot, and those educated after it, like Auden, Spender and Isherwood. The First World War, for Woolf, caused such turbulence in the social world that younger writers could not ignore the effects of this instability, so much so that they felt compelled to engage politically with these issues in their work. The aspect of the social world that the First World War destabilized, particularly, was social class.

The First World War made young writers conscious, Woolf explained, of their position in the “ivory tower,” of the privileges offered to them by the wealth and leisure of their class. In a post-WWI world, the young writer became overly conscious of the unfairness and arbitrariness of their class standing. Looking out from the same tower as the previous generations, the young writer saw “communism in one country; in another fascism” and felt that his tower was “no longer steady” (Woolf 139-40), but leaning. Unlike the writers educated before World War One, these young writers—second-generation modernist writers—could not look any “class straight in the face” (Woolf 140) and responded to this self-consciousness by using their literature to engage in political debate. No longer living in a settled social world, the second-generation modernist felt compelled to document this world in their writing. According to Woolf, their literature, consequently, became interesting as social document, but was left “feeble as poetry ” (Woolf 142). However, this absolute characterization leaves no place for a “poetic” writer like Henry Green.

When Samuel Hynes famously defined the central trend in the writing of the second-generation modernists, the same group Woolf had found exemplified by Day Lewis, Auden, Spender, Isherwood and Louis MacNeice (Woolf 139), he called the young writers the “Auden Generation” because of the strong political concerns and stylistic disinterest they shared with W.H. Auden. According to Hynes, the central unifying factor for these artists was their interest in engaging the political in their work in an active and dynamic way. They believed, Hynes explains, “or at least hoped, that [literature] might alter action in…a fundamental way” (Hynes 24). These writer's sought to effect action and felt that in order to achieve this aim, aesthetic artistic concerns had to be disregarded. As Hynes explains, in Auden’s work, and in the work of the Auden Generation, art was “moral and not aesthetic in its central intention” (Hynes 13). For the Auden Generation writers, “art remains art, but it performs a social role” (Hynes 15). In an effort to respond to the political climate of the time, these young writers asserted “a direct relation between literature and action in the public world” and for them “writing [became] a mode of action” (Hynes 13) that made stylistic concerns insignificant. Again, Hynes offers no way of accounting for the kind of writing put forth—in this generation—by Henry Green.

Hynes's second-generation modernist's developed a tendency to use the colloquial style of "realism" in an effort to transmit their political message. Ian Watt, in The Rise of The Novel, defines realism as a stylistic mode in literature in which a specific prose style avoiding "eloquent and figurative" language is used in order to give an "air of complete authority" to each statement. By keeping the fiction free from obvious stylistic artifice, realism hopes to divert attention from the fictionality of the novel believed to be perpetuated by stylization (Watt 157). The writings of the second-generation modernists, exemplified by Isherwood in his novel Goodbye to Berlin, were intended to function, in this way, something like documentary photography: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking…Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed” (Isherwood 1). By capturing the "real" essence of social experience and not "affecting it" with the artistic process of development or processing, a metaphor for stylization and embellishment, Isherwood hoped his work could expose the world as he truly experienced it and then, released into the world in its honest form, would influence the world, effecting positive political change.

George Orwell, dedicated to the idea that literature was inescapably political, and therefore should be explicitly so, used in much of his writing the documentary-styled genre of memoir to record his own real-life experiences among the poor in Down and Out in Paris and London and with the working-class in The Road To Wigan Pier. Orwell, like Isherwood, found the "facts" he was recording to be so compelling as art, he left his prose conventional and unstylized in a manner reminiscent of Watt's "realism". Even his reactions to the poor and lower-class were explicitly stated in his work in order to minimize the chance of his political message—the reason for his art—being lost or misunderstood. Writers like Isherwood and Orwell felt compelled by political pressure to prioritize the thematic message of their art over any aesthetic exploration. Orwell even stated, in 1946, that "it seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of [political work]" (Orwell 315).

The world which these writers inhabited, did, after all, seem to be threatened; fascism and totalitarianism, as close as Spain and Italy, had become real concerns—if not threats—and the fear of threatened democracy was a real cause of unease (Hynes 242). The group referred to by Hynes as the Auden Generation, already class conscious, only became more so with the economic and political climate of the 1930s. In Britain, the potentially devastating effects of the Depression were a real threat to the British economy, and though the working class was uniting around the progressive Labour Party, the upper and middle-class clung to the Conservative Party which promised to keep the upper class in power and to keep society relatively unchanged (Stevenson 346). While most aristocrats and those with considerable wealth were little affected by the economic volatility, instability and insecurity about potential turmoil ran rampant in all sectors of society (Stevenson 331-2). Among the wealthy, only the landed gentry, suffering from a dip in agricultural rents, were significantly hurt by the turbulent economy, but the residual concerns of a changing class structure was still on the minds of many (Stevenson 334). A feeling that the class structure was crumbling, or at least becoming more fluid, became an accepted and obsessive fear (Stevenson 345). As social prestige continued to shift away from upper-class landed elite to those with more professional qualities, like business men, there was a feeling endemic in British society that the social world was in danger of disintegrating (Thorpe 96).

Historians today point out that there actually was little change in how class was structured at the time, but that there was an urge toward defensive class identification in reaction to this perceived change (Thorpe 96). The general feeling among all sectors of society was that change, at least, could be on the horizon. In response to this perceived fluidity, the interwar years saw the development of a much more pervasive sense of class in all corners of society (Stevenson 345). Society grew more aware of its class divisions, and clung to them, just as those very divisions seemingly began to break down. As Woolf and Hynes found, this obsession entered the literature that this society produced. After WWI, the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression that hit England and much of the world, literature by the second-generation modernists—the generation of writers raised during the turbulence of WWI—became distinctly more conscious of exerting direct political influence on the world. Writers, like Orwell, either sought to insist upon the firm boundaries of class, and thus sought to reconcile the differences between rich and poor; or, like Day-Lewis, sought to show the entire social infrastructure as on the verge of collapse, as it had been in pre-revolutionary Russia, and thus sought to inspire a socialist revolution at home in Britain. In a time when the turbulence of the political stage shook even the ivory tower, Henry Green too was affected by the political and social climate. Henry Green's understanding of social class, however, diverted from both of the accepted models.

Green did not feel inspired to effect tangible change on society through his literature because he did not find the social world to function like his literary peers envisioned. When trying to understand Green as a product of his historic epoch, and as a product of the society he depicted, it is important to remember that his distinctive depictions of English social class must have been influenced by the fact that he—unlike many of his contemporaries—was himself born an upper-class aristocrat, and spent his life working as an industrialist. That his writing never had to earn him a living, and that his living was entirely dependant upon a functioning class system must have had a distinct influence on his perspective. His subsequent interest in exploring class and his decision to explore class through the intricate details of style and not toward an aim of political influence could not have been unmotivated by his social standing and the perspective on society offered to him by his class position. Removing his work from its historical context, however, only further obscures the intention of his project. Green still engaged the political discussions of his contemporaries in his work, though he did not aim to effect political change through his writing. Green’s experiences during WWI, and his unique interest in traveling among social classes not his own, helped him forge a conception of social class and a method of presenting this class world in his literature that was subsequently unlike that of his peers.

Traveling With Class

Like much of his generation, Henry Green became interested in class because of the social mood that was born of World War One. This mood, characterized by anxiety about perceived class fluidity inspired by the revolutions abroad and social fluctuations at home, began to influence Henry Green during his experiences as a child during WWI. In 1939, at the age of 33, Henry Green published a memoir, Pack My Bag. In his opening paragraph, he blatantly divulges his class standing, his generational membership and his fears: "I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both. But not too late for the one which seems to be coming upon us now [i.e. WWII]" (Pack My Bag 1). Green’s choice here to associate himself with his class and with the wartime experience that defined his generation so blatantly, and so openly, as the starting point of his memoir is crucial to understanding his project. The common name “Green” itself had been chosen fifteen years earlier in order to invest an “everyman” character into the literary work of the extremely wealthy young Henry Vincent Yorke (Treglown 81). Declaring his class standing and his fears about the implications of wartime so immediately, as the introduction to his only autobiographical work, aligns Green with his literary generation by disclosing Green’s greatest literary preoccupations and most recurring thematic concerns. It also blatantly exposes one of the principal lenses through which Green viewed himself and his relation to the world.

Henry Vincent Yorke, after all, was the son of a successful industrialist and a highborn landed aristocrat. He was upper-class both in terms of his birthright and his wealth and, as he was often the first to point out, these class characteristics not only informed, but defined, his relationship to society and the way in which he organized the world around him. Appropriate to his class standing and to his family’s wealth, Green spent most of his young life being looked after by a nanny and other servants and spent little time with members of his own class growing up. Yet it was the events of the First World War—like for so many of his peers—that served to ferment the interest in social class with which Green's fictional work would later be so absorbed.

World War One allowed Green immediate access to a world of class difference in a manner that influenced him, and his fictional work, in a profound and vital way. During the war, like many upper-class families, Green’s family turned their country estate into a wartime hospital, hosting soldiers of all classes and backgrounds who were wounded on the battlefields and in the trenches. Having officers and soldiers in his family's home offered young Henry Yorke significant contact with the reality of class distinctions, or what he calls “the half-tones of class” (Pack My Bag 42). Depicted in Pack My Bag, Green’s early social education, his first realization that there existed real differences “between people differently placed by the accident of birth and cash” (Pack My Bag 44) came when his family's country house was converted into a hospital during WWI. According to Green, “the effect of this on a child of my class was to open before his feet those narrow, deep echoing gulfs which must be bridged” (Pack My Bag 42). Green became, in his own life, uniquely interested in bridging these “gulfs”, and the experiences of this figurative and literal “bridging” gave him much fodder for his fiction. Green felt that “everyone’s view of people is colored by their circumstances” (Pack My Bag 113) and the mixing of classes he experienced during the First World War was a circumstance that gave him specific awareness of how class functioned in the social world. In his work, Green depicts class as an unstable entity, like it was in his home-turned-hospital during World War One. For Green, society during the Depression and through World War Two continued to be a terrain of class-crossing and the consequent interactions between individuals of different classes that this fluidity encouraged created the very apex at which class identity was formed. Green's style, even, reflects this "bridging" in the way it uses language to present and comment upon the way individuals perform and present class in society. Based on the insight Green gained about society through observing the classes interact during WWI, he used travel among different class groups as the greatest inspiration for, and as a guide to, writing his novels.

After finishing at Eton and studying for two years at Magdalen College, Oxford, Green was given his first opportunity cross the “narrow, deep echoing” class divide he had been awakened to during World War One. Green asked his father if he could leave university to work "from the bottom up" (Green qtd. in Treglown 63) among the workers at the family’s Pontifex factory in Birmingham. He left Oxford without taking any exams, and while he told his father that work at the Birmingham foundry would be "broadening," he quietly hoped the experience would help him devote himself more fully to literature: "'Of course I already have another book in my mind's eye,' he admitted. 'I have already done sketches for it which run into 20,000 words...I want badly to write a novel about working men.'" (qtd in Treglown, 63). This became the first instance in which "travel" across class boundaries gave Green access to a unique perspective on class and its function in society. This experience among the working class inspired the writing of Green's second novel, Living, about the lives of those associated with a factory in Birmingham.

After this, crossing class "gulfs" became Green’s primary method of exploring the social world. Green also spent time "traveling" with a group of upper-class socialites made famous in the early 1920s in a series of satirical novels by Evelyn Waugh and referred to by Waugh as the “Bright Young Things." While Waugh depicted this social set in youthful exuberance and with the self-possession of confident wealth, Green's next novel, Party Going, was based on a very different type of experience for this group. Stuck in a train station and isolated among a crowd of lively working class commuters, the Bright Young Things in Green's novel are forced to reaffirm their own class identity in the context of the unfamiliar workers around them. As if the entire social set had "traveled" into an unfamiliar class context, Green challenges the essence of class identity in a manner only inter-class contact could achieve. Later, during World War Two, Green once again took advantage of his upper-class privilege in order to witness the social flux of wartime first hand through class "travel." Volunteering as an auxiliary fireman in London, Green was able to "travel" among lower-, middle- and upper-class fireman in the context of the unhinged society the war brought. Green dramatized this "travel" experience in his next novel Caught and in this way, was able to explore society groping to understand class identity while it was most blatantly being challenged.

The experience of traveling across class lines was not only a method for Green to observe the social world. It was not only an opportunity, in his personal life, to gain familiarity of different social classes and situations in order to inform his fictional project. Class travel, and the interactions between different social classes it precipitates, serves as a basic metaphor for how Green sees class identity being formed, and how Green sees class functioning in society. In 1941, Green wrote an essay for Folios Of New Writing that presented the obscure Victorian travel writer C.M. Doughty as one of his greatest literary role models. In the essay, entitled "Apologia", Green praised Doughty for the way his project, as a documentary traveler, sent him into new social terrain. Green suggests that writers of his generation had—like Doughty and himself—need to "go out into new territories, [that] may well be at home, which they never otherwise have visited," implying that class boundaries as well as other boundaries of comfort need to be crossed in order to write "towards a style which, by the impact of a life strange to them" would lead writers to write literature that more accurately represented the social world (Surviving 95). Green was aware that Doughty was not writing fiction, but rather was documenting non-fiction experiences and it is the way in which Doughy translates this project into English prose that Green found compelling. Doughty, in Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), sought to emulate, not actual English speech, but the speech of the Arabs spoken in Arabic and then “translated” by him into English while he observed their culture.

Since Green too saw himself as a traveler, but among individuals of different classes, he felt inspired by the manner in which Doughty translated the Arabic language, and hence Arab life, into his English prose. Green tried to infuse his work with Doughty's style, not by producing “faithful reproduction of ‘native’ speech patterns” in his characters, but by reproducing description and “dialect [that] is consciously used poetically” ("The Novel of the Future" 12). In other words, Green tried, like Doughty, to infuse his prose with a translated “reality” as he observed it in society. In "Apologia", Green praises Doughty for resisting commonplace English in his attempt to depict the world as he actually saw it. Where the Arabic had no connectives, no deictics,[3] so Doughty would leave out the English deictics in his prose as if to document the "real" social experience of his Arab subjects. To this effect, Green’s grammar is immediately arresting, his language is markedly “poetic.” Green leaves out words and splices clauses, leaving his sentences sometimes fragmented and other times swooping across many lines. Green, however, tunes this language to the experiences of the working and upper class among which he was traveling. In this way, Green seeks to create a language that documents the experience of class formation and class identity in lower and upper class life.

Consequently, with Doughty’s style, Green sought not to avoid the social concerns of his contemporaries, but to integrate the techniques of the first-generation modernists in a manner that he felt better transmitted the reality of how he actually saw social class being experienced in his contemporary society. In "The Leaning Tower", Woolf argued that first-generation modernists had not felt guilty about their privileges and, atop the ivory tower, “did not seek to change those [class] divisions;…[but] accepted them so completely that [they] became unconscious of them” (Woolf 133). Consequently, these earlier writers were able to ignore social and political topics in their literature in order to focus more fully on—as Desmond MacCarthy put it—“abstract speculation” (Woolf 134). They were able to write, not about “public causes,” but rather, “those ‘goods’ which were ends in themselves…the search for truth [and] [a]esthetic emotions” (Woolf 135).

Dedicated mainly to artistic concerns, these writers began to develop literature that explored literature itself, just as much as it explored the external world. Hence, for the first-generation modernists, in the very artificiality of literature and the way in which literature then interacted with fictional subject matter, “reality” for the first time, seemed “not a material given” (Bradbury 50). Instead, a new type of literary reality could be created, with a reality suggested by the form and language of each individual literary work. As stylistic expression and formal experimentation became the primary concerns of art, “each work [was] a once-and-for-all creation, subsisting less for its referential than its autotelic constituents, the order and rhythm made for itself and submerged by itself” (Bradbury, 29). Literature became able to explore a reality specific to each instance of human consciousness as it could be embodied in art through style, causing art to depart from concerns with universals, or political truths. In this way, dealing with the problematics of language became a main concern of the early modernist writer and an essentially aesthetic project became dominant among their novels. Toward this aim many writers set forth fictional projects that sought to present different "realities" through the style and form of their writing.

Green did not need to ignore social concerns in order to understand this capacity of literature to present the relativity of reality. Class travel had shown Green that the realities of class could best be transmitted through literature with a style that presented the experience of this reality, not its “inherent” political truth. The way in which Green interacted with the aesthetic concerns of language in the work of C.M. Doughty was mitigated by the techniques he garnered from a group of early first-generation modernists who referred to their work as “impressionistic.” When Green proclaimed his desire to exert “the effort really to see and really to represent” in his work (Surviving 139), he was echoing Henry James’s similar decree in “The Art of Fiction.” James explained in this essay that he sought, through his highly mannered prose, better to capture an impression of lived experience and transmit it through his literature. In this way, Green's work, unlike that of his peers, was particularly interested in the techniques the first-generation modernists, like James, used in order “really to represent” the social world that Green, like his peers, found so pressing. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, like Henry James, set forth a program for writing fiction that best achieves what they felt was the sole aim of any art, “to produce an illusion of reality” (Ford 43), and in doing developed a method of writing that intended to show life “as it was experienced.”

For Conrad, this could only be achieved through, what he called, a "complete blending of form and substance" (Conrad 162), or a complete blending of style and subject. This technique, that Ford termed "impressionism", intended to embody the impression of lived experience in the language of literature. Ford elucidates this aim by situating impressionist language as that which “would attain the sort of odd vibrations that scenes in real life really have;...[and] would give your reader the impression that he was witnessing something real, that he was passing through an experience” (Ford 42) like that the characters in the fiction are experiencing. Green treats language in a similar manner. He purports to create, in his novels, “ 'life' which does not eat, procreate or drink, but which can live in people who are alive" (Surviving 43), and he inflects his language with a style that mimics the experiential reality of his characters. As Green based many of his novels on the experience of "traveling" among other classes, it is in capturing this experience that he fashions the language of his novels to reflect the stylistic innovations of C.M. Doughty. Doughty’s writing impressed Green not because it diverted attention from Doughty’s literary artifice (as with realism’s “non-style”), but because “[h]is style…is found to vary with his subject” and because “the style seems to cling to the subject” in a manner that best mirrors and channels the experience appropriate to the subject (Surviving 96, 91): “It is miraculous the way Doughty puts words together which, entering our ears if they are read aloud, or slipping by our eyes if they are scanned in print, express their meaning in our bones” (Surviving 93). In Green’s celebration of Doughty’s style, he praises the way in which Doughty's language presents life not "as it actually is," but as it presents life “as it is lived.” In tandem with first-generation modernist influence, this impressionistic style allowed Green to depict the experiential reality of social class in his novels and thus to forge a unique method of depicting, and an original way of understanding, class in his contemporary social world.

For Green, this experimental reality is specifically tuned toward the experience of being an individual within a society looking to define its interactions through a class infrastructure. The reality that he chose to confront was the class reality he had experienced as a traveler among other classes. Green uses this language most effectively when he is documenting the experiences of class characters as they form ideas about their own class identity. For Green, this experience, at a time when society often seemed to be in social flux, during the Depression and before and during WWII, was particularly pertinent to how class functioned in society, to what class “was.” As an upper-class traveler into the “foreign lands” of class, Green did not feel class boundaries were the impenetrable borders many of his contemporaries felt they were. Likewise, living among the working-class during the Depression, Green was not inspired by the Marxist romanticization of working-class identity as that of a unified body of homogenous workers. For Green, class was an “accident of birth and cash” (Pack My Bag 44) to the degree that the wealth and privilege class delineates created the very identity class purported to indicate. In other words, class existed only when individuals clung to the rituals and practices that defined their idea of class to themselves. In his three novels that span the Depression, the anxiety leading up to the Second World War and the wartime world, Green most clearly presents class as an infrastructure that could be toppled at any moment, but isn't, because of society’s interest in preserving the identities, and faculties of communication, class provides.

Class, for Green, is inherently tied up in the way people communicate, and in the way they speak. Hence, in order to preserve their class identity, and in order to preserve the language with which people create social bonds, in a world where this identity is constantly being challenged and this language is constantly being broken down, social characters cling to the notions of class with which they had been raised and educated. In Green’s reality, “there are not two or three social classes but hundreds well defined throughout Britain” (Pack My Bag 125) because at each moment, individuals are creating notions of class identity in order to explain and facilitate social interactions. Consequently, these "hundreds" of social classes do not divide strictly along a proletarian/bourgeoisie fault line. Instead, they divide society along many lines, lines that divide people from each other, but that also group people into families, communities and social networks. Green's interest was in documenting the life of this class infrastructure, not advocating its change, or championing the experience of individuals with certain class affiliations.

Through the three major novels that I look at, Green challenges the notion that class in society is based on real social difference by exploring class during times when it, as an institution, was being persistently challenged. In these novels, Living, Caught and Party Going, social class is an institution based merely on circumstance, arbitrarily dividing those who work for their money from those who do not, and perpetuated by the habits and desires of a society that needs difference in order to understand identity. Green uses various stylistic affects to present the impression that society itself has trouble using language to articulate identity when class structure, that is inherently circumstantial, is challenged. Through Living, Party Going and Caught, Green presents society as beginning to understand that class is not concrete, but reluctant to make the leap away from it. As society departs from its assumption that class is a social given or absolute, however, so it loses its linguistic abilities to describe concrete identity; as social difference breaks down, so does language. Language, which for Green is where class identity is (per)formed, cannot function properly when class boundaries are questioned. In the end, language fails to describe a world without class and thus, society clings to what helps it understand itself and chooses to perpetuate the inevitably tenuous class differences that it has language enough to describe.

Mapping Green's Travels

In my first chapter, I present a reading of Green’s pre-Depression-era novel, Living. In Living, Green presents upper and lower class social worlds that are unconnected in terms of their work and cultural practices, but meet in the factory and desire the same things out of life (love and independence.) This complex relationship is embodied in the language of the novel, where narrative without deictics serves to link both social groups in a socially fragmented experience while ornate epic language severs this like social community along class lines. In the end, the ability of Living's characters to find an opportunity, inside their isolated social groups, to achieve the autonomy and love they all desire situates the benefits of class divisions specifically in a pervasively divided society.

Next, in Chapter 2, I explore Green’s most upper-class centered work, Party Going. In Party Going, Green presents the wealthy and elite young social group set in relief against the working class in a way that forces the Bright Young Things to question their own identity in relation to the workers and among themselves. Party Going reveals class difference in the central situation of the novel; characters spatially perform class in reaction to a fog. Linguistically, Green uses hypotactic description to mirror this fog, and shows that the partygoers are unable to understand or articulate class difference even though they perform it instinctually when they perceive its boundaries might be threatened. Thus, the anxiety about the permanence of class incited by the possibility of social instability shows class to be habitual, as opposed to innate. Language continually fails the partygoers as they attempt to situate their class identities in concrete terms and ultimately prevents them from forging a supportive class community like in Living. In the end, dangerous social division displays the need for class to be reaffirmed by ritual and community affiliation in order to remain a vital social institution.

In my final analysis, in Chapter 3, I explore Green’s first wartime novel, Caught. In Caught, the collapse of social boundaries as a result of the war, challenges the clear class distinction between those who work and those who do not, and reveals that class is a social institution created as much by culture than by vocation and wealth. However, though the Blitz reveals the potential for members of disparate classes to form a classless community, language inevitably is unable to express this alternate social world and after the Blitz, society returns to a class-based structure that is familiar. The universalizing experiences of the Blitz, in which Englishmen of all classes become heroes, reveals the possibility of a social world that does not rely upon class distinctions; the fact that language cannot convince the central character’s sister (who did not experience the class-blurring effects of the war) of this unifying social experience proves that class is an infrastructure the society relies on, finds comfort in, and chooses to perpetuate regardless of its nebulousness and ultimate artificiality.

It is only by reading Green's novels in the context of Green's historical moment that his impressionistic language makes sense. Though often beautiful as poetry, the questions Green poses in his literature apply to how people interact, love, and live inside society and during a specific historical moment. Not only are his characters creating their identities in relation to this experience, but Green's style portrays this creative process "in the bones" of his language. By reading Green's style as a guide to his statement on social class, and as a comment on the social world this class infrastructure holds in place, Green's position, not as an enigmatic oblique writer among a generation of realists, but as an essential writer of his age, is clear. Green is unique among second-generation modernists in his ability to use the literary techniques of the early modernists in a project that seeks to present what Elizabeth Bowen has called “the actual sensation of living”[4] in England in the years leading up to and during World War Two, and not just a picture of the time. Only in this context is it possible to discover what Green's language, in all its obscurity and distinctiveness, says about what it is like to experience social life, and social class, during this time.

chapter one

Birth, and copulation, and death.

That's all, that's all, that's all, that's all...

—T.S. Eliot, "Sweeney Agonistes"

Living: Language Block

It is with Living, his second novel, that Green began to set himself apart from his literary generation. What Virginia Woolf found to be the central characterization of all literature of the generation succeeding her own—that it is politically obsessed—applies to Living. Inspired by and written during two years working on the floor of his father's factory in Birmingham, Living, published in 1929, is about the working class. It engages social themes and explores the difference between those who work for their money and those who do not. Yet, what Woolf saw as the corollary characteristic of “second-generation” modernist literature—that it is unconcerned with formal stylistic concerns—clearly does not apply to Living. Green's second novel does not champion any political cause and instead, uses formal experimentation and stylized language to explore the social world.[5]

With Living, Green chose to explore a subject matter that later occupied what Rob Mengham has called a "whole school" of 1930s literature, literature that also explores the role of class in society (Menhgam 14). Specifically, Michael North adds, after Living explored the working class in depth, proletarian-themed literature became a distinctive and popular subgenre in the 1930s (North 51). In other words, with Living, Green not only to tread on new ground but tapped into politically-charged and socially relevant subject matter. Thus, it is in light of this political and social relevance that we must seek to understand why Green—unlike his contemporaries—chose to confront this material with a highly mannered language reminiscent of a "first-generation" modernist project. While most proletarian-themed writers of Green's generation rely on realism to offer politically charged, politically influential and often Marxism-inspired work, Green does not engage in such a project. Green uses the modernist's stylistic innovations to explore the same subject matter many of his peers found to be the most pressing to his political age, but in order to suggest a different understanding of how class functions in society. Green’s project cannot be cast aside as circumstantially political. His choice of language makes a political claim and the goal of this chapter is to understand this language in the context of the political matters about which Green has chosen to write.

Living is about those involved in and affected by factory work, and its style reflects this subject. Living tells a story about the particularities of life as a worker as compared to the particularities of life as a leisure classman and it does so in a highly stylized manner. While the world of Living is a world characterized by division—gender division and generational division, as well as class division—Green uses language that undermines this division in order to stress the underlying similarity of all social experiences. Like the impressionism upon which modernist stylistic experimentation was based, Green constructs sentences that give the impression that life as lived by the working class and the leisure class is fundamentally the same, regardless of the cultural differences inherent in a society divided along class lines. Green's unifying language, however, brings to light what ultimately is not a united social world.

In the end, Green's exotic phrasings depict a society in which characters of different classes exist in similar, but essentially separate, social worlds. Though, for Green, class division is circumstantial—based on inherited cultural traits—and not a politically potent identity that needs to be subverted, it still has the power to divide like people spatially and culturally, and permanently. In this way, Green subverts a strict Marxist view of class and situates his fictional project as diametrically opposed to other political literature of the 1930s. With language that tests the limits of class difference, however, Green is unable to envision a world in which social class does not have a real effect on people's lives. Still, he challenges the strictness of a dichotomous definition of class and chooses, instead, to explore how class gives communities the power to forge common identities that can counteract the divisions that otherwise define the social landscape.

What Kind of Life: A Summary

Living is the story of two classes separated by wealth, divided by living conditions and situated in different physical and social spheres. The novel is comprised of numerous minor events narrated in frequently short, shifting scenes in a way that is reminiscent of the cinematic technique of montage. This technique allows Living to present many mundane and trivial moments in the everyday lives of two groups, one working- and the other upper-class, both in the place where they live and the place where they work, with equal focus and specificity. A quick summary will help situate the subject matter that Green puts forth as the terrain of Living’s stylistic experimentation.

The Duprets own the factory, live off the labor of those who work inside it, and run the Birmingham works from far away in London, where they enjoy the trappings of the leisure class. Mr. Craigan and his factory-employed compatriots, on the other hand, live off the wages they earn for their manual efforts, are tied to Birmingham, and to the Bridesley village in particular, where they live among a large working class community. These two sets are on opposite ends of the social spectrum, and present, not extreme cases, but representatives of their respective social classes. The makeshift family that lives with Mr. Craigan (including his assistant Joe Gates, Joe's daughter Lily, and Joe's mate Jim Dale) is working-class, but not poor. They live in a clean and secure part of town and make enough money to pay Lily to stay at home and do domestic chores. The Dupret family, however, is quite wealthy. Richard has just come up from Oxford and his father is the owner of the Birmingham works. They have great wealth but are not free from the dull or the demanding. The Duprets are still affected by common disappointments and difficulties: Richard is unable to win the admiration of the girl he desires and his father falls ill after he "slips on dog's mess" (56).

Consequently, when the novel begins, Mr. Dupret prolongs his recovery from this illness in order to give his son an opportunity to run the family's factory. (He can stay in bed because he does not depend on his labor for income.) Richard has trouble dealing with the workers; he misunderstands the works' manager, Mr. Bridges, and finds himself preferring the younger, overly ambitious designer, Tarver. When the older Mr. Dupret returns to the factory, he reverses many of the changes Richard has made, embarrassing Richard and undercutting the son's authority.

Among the factory workers, Mr. Craigan has a different kind of authority: He holds an important position in the Foundry hierarchy as the "best moulder in Birmingham," (4)^[6] and in this position performs an essential role in the line of production. He has also created a makeshift family that allows him to enjoy a similar authority at home. He practices a firm patriarchal rule over this family, even though they are not bound to him through blood. However, when Mr. Craigan falls ill, his authority begins to break down. Without work, Craigan is no longer the "bread winner" and those for whom he provided begin to challenge his leadership. Lily, feeling trapped by the domestic position that keeps her at home all day, decides to court the rougher and less ambitious worker Bert Jones, instead of her family's favored suitor, Jim Dale. Consequently, Jim Dale, spurned by Lily, and Joe Gates, threatened by Craigan's challenge to his patriarchal authority, both move out of the Craigan house.

Richard also struggles to break away from the confines of his family position. Attempting to find independence from his father through love, he attends upper-class social soirées—but they are so frivolous and empty that they leave him even more miserable and lonely. The object of his affection, the socialite Hannah Glossop, is more interested in parlor games and intrigue than she is in him, and consequently, she fails to offer the escape he desires. When Mr. Dupret suddenly dies, Richard assumes his father's role as the manager of the factory. His first action is to disregard his father's wishes and to lay-off all the older workers of the Foundry, including Mr. Craigan.

Acting in conjunction with Mr. Craigan’s illness and subsequent loss of familial respect, Lily, in her search for companionship and independence through love, follows Bert to Liverpool, where Bert's parents live. She hopes to elope with Bert and then to break from the oppressive Craigan household by emigrating to Canada as Bert's wife. Bert's parents, however, who are necessary to facilitate the marriage, have moved house and left no trace. Bert and Lily traverse the depressed landscape of Liverpool in search of them, entering the poorest and most pitiable slums of the working-class world. Frightened by this experience, Lily returns home to the sick Mr. Craigan in shame. Both Richard and Lily end the novel back in the social world from which they each came: Lily, in working-class Bridesley alongside Mr. Craigan; Richard, in upper-class London with his late father’s job.

Dividing Society: Two Separate Spheres

In Living, the upper and the lower class are divided. They live in two spatially and socially separate worlds. The Duprets have a house in the country and a house in London, and in both houses they employ numerous servants, including maids, butlers and cooking staff. The working-class neighborhood where the Craigan-family resides is a crowded urban area. In the Craigan household, Lily is paid to do all the housework, including the cooking and cleaning. The narrative reflects this difference in how it introduces the two opposing class groups.

When we meet the working class in the opening of the novel, the language accentuates this social division by isolating the workers into one distinct social group: "Thousands came back from dinner along streets...Thousands came back to factories they worked in from their dinners…Hundreds went along road outside, men and girls" (1). The action of every worker is the same. They are all returning from dinner, commuting together to the factory to begin working their afternoon shift. At first, the individual workers are unnamed, they only exist as an indistinct mass, as "thousands,” “hundreds,” “some.” Even the character that speaks in the opening is not given a personal name, and just referred to as “works manager” (1), as if vocation subsumes even personal identification. Later, however, even when we are given personal names, most are linked with foundry occupations, as if to insist explicitly that each character is a worker:

Joe Brown that was foreman in this shop (2)

Mr. Tarver…this man was chief designer in Birmingham factory (7)

As each individual character evolves, class standing is reiterated along with personal names. The narrative constantly reminds us which characters are working-class. Many characters are linked with their occupations far into the novel and sometimes repeatedly:

foreman’s name was Andrew Philpots (73)

Andrew (that was foreman in iron foundry shop in this factory) (111)

This insistence on the work that the workers do accents their difference from the upper class. Where they, the members of the working class, are defined by their jobs, the members of the upper class are not. Richard Dupret, touring the factory at the beginning of the book, is constantly given the epithet “son of Mr. Dupret” (1), as if his lineage, and not his occupation, better describes him. His name, "Dupret," signifies his class standing, not his vocation.[7] His class is defined by birth, by heredity, and not by the kind of work he does (for in actuality, he does not need to do any kind of work at all in order to be upper-class.) Unlike the workers, whose identities are hidden behind or inexorably tied to their work, Richard is instead tied to his father, and hence, to his class membership through his family name.

Naming is not the only way the class separation is described in Living. Physical differences are also described in a manner that accentuates the fact that the workers and the leisure class exist in separate social spheres. Each social set lives where they work and there is little fluidity between the two groups. While the working-class “works manager” (Mr. Bridges, as we later learn) runs the factory from the floor in Birmingham, “son of Mr. Dupret” and the rest of the upper-class managers of the Dupret’s firm work in an office in London. The upper class only visits Birmingham when they need to[8], and the working class characters only leave Birmingham when they venture into the equally working-class Liverpool. The narrative uses different language to describe the difference between the atmosphere of the upper- and lower-class social spaces. While the managers work in offices, live in fine estates and travel in cars, the working class work on the dirty, loud foundry floor, live in cramped and crowded flats and walk or use the third-class trains. When Lily describes the workers coming out of the factory at the end of the day, they are lumped together, uncomfortable, and dragging themselves like tongues:

Here factories were and more there, in clumps…Racketing noise burst in on her. They worked in there with speed. And then over town sound of hooters broke out. Men and women thickly came from, now together mixed, and they went like tongues along licking the streets. (108)

The sentences describing the working commuters are short, and follow a simple subject/predicate construction. The workers are depicted as acting mechanically in reaction to the sound of the “hooter,” and the image of the tongue adds physicality to the atmosphere of the working world. The workers, probably thick with sweat and hungry ("like tongues") after exerting such energy, head straight home at the sound of the bell. Green suggests that factory work has made them these “men and women” into mindless beings; as tongues, they are subsumed by physical desire for nourishment, for sensual contact. In contrast, when Richard describes his upper-class peers at a party, the narrative is quite different, and the images invoke a markedly dissimilar class group:

Chandelier hung from ceiling on a level with half way upstairs. It was like bell-shaped, and crystal, cut in all manners, formed it. As they went up he looked at Chandelier. Chatter of people going up and down past him and he thought this great brilliant thing…all these people ascending, descending, and then, as first tones of dance music came down through chatter about, chandelier thrilled all through and light tumbled down along it, like it was a bell and notes trembling from the clapper.

So…they went upstairs (123)

The upper-class partiers are described alongside the ornate, crystal chandelier that, bell-shaped, makes noise akin to the beautiful bell-tolls of a chapel. This noise, and the thrilling light that tumbles form the chandelier, are the backdrop for the light-hearted chattering and playful back-and-forth jockeying of the partiers. This noise, and this object, decorate the upper-class world, and its beauty is analogous to the wealthy who inhabits it, or so the narrative suggests.

Miscommunication: When The Classes Collide

The upper class has money, and live with the trappings of wealth, the lower class does not; this difference is reflected in every detail of their lives. They do meet in the factory, however. In this mixed-class setting, the differences between the two classes is accentuated: lower and upper class are not equals and their communication is hindered by their class difference. The motivation for entering the factory is different for each class. It is only after Richard’s father dies and he is spurned by Hannah Glossop that he chooses to enter the “works” and to take an active role in the running of the iron foundry. The working-class characters like Craigan, Joe Gates and Bert Jones, however, have no choice but to work in the factory. When, in the end, Mr. Craigan and Mr. Gates are laid off, they lose their capacity to earn a living and consequently lose their livelihoods and their respectability. Richard’s factory work, however, is a method of self-distraction, something like a hobby:

What a new year, he thought in mind, what a new year, father dead and now Miss Glossop was over, that was done with!…One should go away he thought…

One might go to foreign countries but what was in these but nausea of traveling, hotels, trains…Work, that was it, he would work. (170-1)

Consequently, when Richard does enter the foundry, his difference from the workers is exaggerated.

Here, in the foundry, where the two classes do come face-to-face, their division is most apparent. There is no middle class in the world of Living, and the factory space is the only place where members of opposite social classes coexist or converse. On the factory floor, the workers are unused to the presence of the upper class. When Richard makes a special visit to the factory, the workers get nervous and hover around him awkwardly, unsure whether they should be currying favor with him, or spurning his intrusion into their social sphere. Even Mr. Tarver, a "very clever man at his work," has no idea how to interact with the upper-class Dupret: "as they [i.e. Bridges and Richard] went round he followed, like a poacher, for he had no business following them" (7). Tarver and Tupe both clumsily interfere in this way:

Dupret and works manager came to outside assembling shop. Old man stopped them there, it was Tupe, and told Mr. Bridges how he fell...Mr. Dupret began to notice man signaling from behind a big cylinder...it was Tarver. (8)

The two social classes are unused to coexisting in one place. Lack of tact on the part of the workers is a product of their inexperience with the upper class—and displays their difference. The two classes do not easily mesh when they are forced to interact.

Miscommunication between Living's characters is the product of their class difference and dramatizes the deep gulf that divides the two social groups. The different dialects used by each character perform the division between upper and lower class on the linguistic level. The dropped "h" and the excessive conjunctions of Brummagem dialect clash with the conventional prose of Richard's speech. When Gates speaks, it sounds much like "works manager's" Brummagem dialect earlier in the novel, elided, contracted, repetitive: "Ah, he'll kill himself one o' these days. It'll be a judgment on 'im. Everything that goes on 'Tis 'im hears of it through him" (4). Richard Dupret speaks in a different way, marked by complete and often grammatically complex sentences which are evidence of his education: "It's all right, but of course I can't do anything. You can't shift Father, he's set in his ways and the others are like him, you've no idea of it, they've had no fresh blood in the show for years" (36).

Both struggle, when speaking across class boundaries, to understand the language of the other, but this communication consistently fails. When Bridges first meets Dupret, he tells him "What we want is go, push...What I say to them is—let's get on with it, let's get the stuff out" (1). Later, Richard uses this same language while complaining to his mother that the older workers in the factory have no energy and no drive: "What we want in the place is some go and push...but it's what none of them seem to realize" (36). Just as Richard does not realize he is wrong—for the "older worker" Bridges has put this idea in his head—he also does not notice that his language is literally taken from the working class. Consequently, not only does Bridges fail to communicate his idea to Richard as his own, but Richard fails to understand that communication has occurred at all. The gist of the idea is transferred from Bridges to Richard, but the class divide is only reaffirmed because Richard takes on a gutted form of the idea as his own. As if in performance of this failure, Richard 'gentrifies' Bridges's language with an added conjunction "and" while insisting, ironically, that "none of them realize" exactly what Bridges has made him realize. In this way, the upper class is not only divided from the lower class in terms of lifestyle and class culture, but when they do come together spatially, the true disparity between the two classes becomes clear. The society of Living is a characterized by this class division which seems pervasive and consistent. However, the narrative style with which Green depicts this dichotomous class world challenges even this most enduring division.

Uniting Society: Impressions of Fragmentation

Even while the narrative presents two divided classes, the language Living uses to describe the divided class world undermines the totality of the discord between the class groups. For Edward Stokes, as for most readers of Living, the most striking stylistic affectation is Green's "almost total warfare declared on the definite article" (Stokes 196). By usually (but not entirely and not consistently) avoiding the use of definite articles in the narrative description of Living, as with the statement, “Thousands came back from dinner along [the] streets” (1), Green problematizes the meaning of his prose. Robert S. Ryf, in his book Henry Green, finds the gesture of this disjointed narrative to “mirror the lack of wholeness and completeness” (Ryf 10) in the lives of the factory workers by relating it, stylistically, to the character of the factory:

In the foundry was now sharp smell of burnt sand. Steam rose from the boxes round about. On these, in the running gates and risers, metal shone out red where it set. On Mr. Craigan’s huge box in which was his casting Mr. Craigan and Jim Dale stood. They raised and lowered long rods into metal in the risers so as to keep the metal molten. Steam rose up around them so their legs were wet and heat from the molten metal under them made balls of sweat roll down them. Arc lamps above threw their shadows out sprawling along over the floor and as they worked rhythmically their rods up and down so their shadows worked. (34)

According to Walter Allen, in his essay “An Artist of the Thirties,” passages such as this use narrative style to carry the impression of factory life into the language. For Walter Allen, the style of Living is "bare, repetitive, harsh, angular, sometimes deliberately clumsy," in order to create a verbal equivalent of "the blackness and din of the foundry" (Allen 154). If we apply Allen's decree to the above excerpt, we can trace a relationship between Green's language and the experiential reality of the factory. In the first sentence, the absence of the connective "there," in the second sentence the absence of the deictic and verb "that were" between "boxes" and "round," in the third sentence the absence of the verb "was" before the last word "set," along with the other grammatical elisions, all convolute the meaning of the passage. Without these useful words, the passage is less specific and the sense is complicated. Without these clarifying words, we still understand that this is a factory scene, but the conventional connective tissue we rely on in prose to clearly explain the scene is missing.

Likewise, in a manner that mimics the anonymity of the opening description of the workers, the repeated use of the pronoun "their," instead of a restatement of the proper names "Mr. Craigan" and "Jim Dale," creates a feeling of vagueness in the passage. In the sentence "Arc lamps above threw their shadows out sprawling along over the floor and as they worked rhythmically their rods up and down so their shadows worked," it is unclear who or what the "their"s and "they" refer to. Is it the arc lamps? Or is it the workers, Craigan and Dale? It seems Craigan and Dale are subsumed by the image of the arc lamps; it is unclear who is actually described as doing the work. The feeling that the factory is confusing, busy and unclear is suggested by the language which is itself confusing, busy and unclear. According to Allen, where Green’s diction is odd, so Green intends to show the factory world as discordant, where Green is verbally confusing, so he intends for the factory world to seem convoluted. But this style, with all its implied discordance and lack of clarity, is not only used to describe the inside of the factory.

The Craigan residence and the Duprets' social world are also described using this narrative style. When Richard spends time alone in contemplation in the garden of his country estate, it is doubtful that Green intends for the narrative to echo the rising steam and rolling sweat of the factory scene:

Sunshine was pale. So drifted into sleep…He shook afternoon off him and went back into house. Still flowed River Thames and still the leaves were disturbed, then were loosened, and came down on to water and went by London…, by there and out into sea. (114-5)

The style Green uses in this passage indicates the same convolution and confusion as the factory description. Here, sentences alternate between the short and the complex and articles are often left out. In the second sentence quoted above, the sentence lacks a subject; in the third sentence two possible definite articles (before “afternoon” and “house”) are conspicuously absent causing the meaning of the sentence to be less absolute. The second sentence depends on a causal relationship between the sunshine being pale and the subject drifting into sleep, but the identity of the subject is unclear. Likewise, in the fourth sentence, narrative logic is convoluted by the plac ement of the adverb “still” in the place where the subject of a sentence usually resides (in the primary position). In this position, “still” clashes with “flowed”: its adjectival meaning, “motionless and undisturbed,” is incongruous with its adverbial meaning, “indicating that a situation that used to exist has continued, and exists now” (Microsoft Word Dictionary). Consequently, this narrative suggests that Richard, in his contemplation, is also experiencing fragmentation and convolution and having difficulty understanding the world around him. In this way, the narrative style of Living challenges the very dichotomy between the two classes that it represents.

Through this style, Green connects the upper class to the working class. Though the two classes are spatially separate, culturally divided and unable to truly communicate, the narrative suggests they all experience, in life, the same lack of wholeness and completeness. Valentine Cunningham, in British Writers of the Thirties, proposes an understanding of Green's style that suggests more than just a passive experience of incompleteness. Cunningham points out that an overuse of deictics is common in the literature of Green’s peers and predecessors, including W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. This deicticism, he explains, indicates an effort on the part of these writers to “assert authority, knowledge, command of experience” (Cunningham 10). Consequently, Cunningham implies that Green's choice to withhold deictics from his narrative could suggest an inability, on the part of the characters in Living, to assert “authority over” or “knowledge of” the world. In the context of Living, this lack, along with a lack of "wholeness and completeness," is exactly what working-class Lily and upper-class Richard both experience and try to reverse.

The Creative Impulse: Across the Class Divide

When Richard and Lily cross paths on the street outside the Dupret factory, in Lily's working class neighborhood, the alignment of their fates mimics the parallel experience of disconnectedness that the style of the narrative suggests both classes have. When Richard sees the lower class crowd of young mothers and children, he initially responds to the working class around him with an unsympathetic bitterness. He refers to the working-class lifestyle as “a kind of terrible respectability on too little money” and wonders what the point of the working-class cycle of life really is:

you were born, you went to school, you worked, you married, you worked harder, you had children, you went on working, with a good deal of trouble your children grew up, then they married. What had you before you died?…The satisfaction of breeding…? (187)

At first, his bitterness seems to be incited by his association of the working-class toil with the "din" of the factory. Previously, Richard had exhibited mixed feelings about factory work. After his first visit to the Birmingham foundry during his father’s illness, he encapsulated his duplicitous feeling about the factory in a statement to his mother:

It was all grimy and tiring. It was so dirty there that I had to have a bath as soon as I was back before going to tea somewhere. Where did I go to tea? But, no matter, yes, the works, yes you know there’s a kind of romance about it or perhaps it’s only romantic. In the iron foundry the castings, they call them, were very moving. (36)

His desire to see the castings as "very moving" speaks both to his complete separation from the actual labor involved in factory work and his romanticization of the creative process of laboring. Factory work is dangerous, and the castings, which Richard finds so romantic, at one point almost kill Craigan. As Jim Gates explains:

I don't know if you knows your way about a foundry but we 'as to dry some moulds before the metal can be poured into 'em. They're put on a trolley, see, and the crane pulls it into the stove with a wire rope. Well the wire rope give. Ah, it parted right at the top, right by the eye and whipped out not a foot away from our old man. (44)

To Richard, however, the potential for sweat and danger in the factory is peripheral to his desire that the foundry fulfill what he feels his life is missing. He wants to escape his father's tyranny; he hopes to manage the factory differently from his father in order to take on a creative, and thus fulfilling, role in the world. He is not interested in empathizing with the plight of the working man. In this scene, crossing paths with Lily, the sight of children and mothers socializing outside their homes causes Richard to recall the fate he feels he might be heading toward, the fate of a fragmented life without love, without fulfillment, without Hannah Glossop:

"The other day I met a girl called Glossop" [Richard] said...how had he not seen her? But sometimes in reading, he thought, you will find word you do not know and when you learn the meaning then for a few days you come again and again upon that word. He thought you make a little circle and yours reflects other circles. Death, death, sackcloth and ashes. (76)

This passage, as convoluted as the scenes describing the busy foundry floor, describes the fate Richard hoped to escape with Hannah's love and companionship. At the time he walks near Lily, however, he has been spurned by Hannah and hence recalls his earlier fears that there could be a vast sense of emptiness "in any walk of life" (187) and that this emptiness could afflict him as well ("you make a little circle and yours reflects other circles. Death, death, sackcloth and ashes"). Without the love he sought to acquire from Hannah Glossop, he worries that there is potential for his own life to trap him: "He thought…all [this] because of Miss Glossop" (187). The irony of Richard's bitter reaction to the working-class mothers near Lily is that the fears his own life may have the empty fate he projects onto them.

When Lily's thoughts are narrated, it becomes evident that she is also aware of the potential to become trapped in a lonely version of this cycle of life. But for Lily, gaining authority over her desolate world is only possible by playing a creative role in this procreative cycle:

But Lily coming through the gate saw children running and those mothers and she stood and watched them, feeling out of it. "I must have babies," she said then…She was not excited when she said it. Just now she was being very practical. (188)

Throughout the novel, Lily spends much time with Mrs. Eames, the Craigan household's next-door neighbor. Mrs. Eames is working-class, but she does not suffer from the feelings of confinement that Lily feels in Craigan's home. Mrs. Eames celebrates the possibilities inherent in entering the cycle of procreation. She has a baby and hopes that her child might follow in her husbands footsteps, become a worker, and comfort her in old age. Mrs. Eames is able to find consolation and beauty in the cycle of social renewal. She even refers to her child by the name "Beauty":

'What will we do with him? Beauty, when you grow to be a man, eh, what will we do with you?'

Waking, Mrs. Eames turned over...

'Maybe like your dad you'll be a turner when you're a man. Beauty!'...She felt cold, and he was warm.

'When you're grown...We shan't be up to much work not when you've been a man for long so you'll look to our comfort when we'll have worked to see you come to strength.' (24)

The comfort offered by the cyclical nature of life is clear to Mrs. Eames, in part because she actively takes part in this cycle; she has a husband to love her and consequently has been able to create a baby. Lily's realization that she must enter this cycle, that it is "practical" for her to "have babies," reflects her awareness that there is an alternative to the confinement she feels in Craigan's home. She is able to understand the difference between the kind of domesticity Mrs. Eames represents and the kind she is experiencing at the Craigan household. She, like Richard, realizes this difference is in the nature of the role she plays in this community.

As a woman, Mrs. Eames is relatively independent. She has her own house, her own family; Mrs. Eames has autonomy and companionship. Neither Richard nor Lily has yet found companionship or taken part in the world creatively. Mrs. Eames can look at the world optimistically, "it always did rain in this town though garden would benefit" (24). She can answer the question that haunts Richard and Lily, "sons and daughters why do we bring them into the world?...Because, because" (25). Mrs. Eames takes an active part in this regeneration and so she is anything but trapped.

Richard and Lily, however, are trapped—at least so far—and they fear this confinement may be permanent. When Richard wonders

[w]hat will they [i.e. the working-class children] grow up to he thought in mind,—they’ll work, they’ll marry, they’ll work harder, have children and go on working, they’ll die. He shuddered. Then he forgot all about them and thought about himself. (188)

His shudder and subsequent change of thought are fueled less by sympathy on his part for the future working-class toilers than by his realization that their fate may also be his own. His subsequently expressed sense of superiority is empty, because the reader knows the justification is false: “But these people, how much worse it was, he at least, had money…they really only had marriage and growing old” (188). As we have seen, money only really offers Richard the facade of a different life: he really seeks the same thing as Lily, to break free from the confines of his home life, or at least to become empowered in it. Richard has already shown he lacks anything other than a desire for love, and in lieu of that, a desire to work in the factory to distract himself from wanting—and not finding—love. Wealth fails to offer him any access to happiness that the working-class Lily does not also have. With Hannah, Richard could not find love. Thus, he worries he will be cursed to a monotonous and uncreative life much like he projects onto the working class mothers. He fears a life experience riddled with the misunderstanding and fragmentation that he has experienced thus far (like we saw when he sat on he shore of the Thames at his country estate).

Lily, in her desire to enter this procreative cycle, hopes to avoid this same fate. Lily refuses to enter the anonymity of her class. She struggles, instead, to "better herself" with Bert Jones, to join herself to his masculine creative faculties by forcing him to work harder for her, to love her more, to help her access her own creative abilities through pregnancy. Lily does not want to experience the world as the "thousands" and "hundreds" of "men and girls" heading to and from the factory. Neither does she want to lose herself in its fragmented disconnectedness. At one point Lily dreams of “factories...in clumps...in every house was woman with her child. In all streets, in clumps, were children” (108). She wakes from this dream crying:

I, I am I. I am I, why do I do work of this house, unloved work...Why may I not have children, feed them with my milk. Why may I not kiss their eyes, like their skin, softness to softness, why not I? I have no man. (109)

Lily both fears the anonymity of social existence and desires to enter into it as a creator. She insists upon her individuality and her autonomy as a potential mother. By asserting her individuality, by empowering her "I," she does not suggest she wants to break free of the working-class lifecycle. Rather, she complains that her present exclusion, that she does "not have children," stands in the way of fulfilling her claim that "I am I." Unlike Richard, a man, Lily realizes that work alone will not empower her, at least not "unloved work" like she does in the Craigan house. Instead, she must do "loved" work, work that involves feeding her own children. In order to access this work, she must enter the procreative cycle like the woman around her. Hence, she desires to enter into the very aspects of the cycle that causes Richard trepidation. Her desire for self-realization depends on the nature of her role in this working-class community; and the procreative role demands she find a man, has babies, and raises them by her labor.

Like Green's narrative style suggests, Lily and Richard experience similar dislocation from society and fear the same alienation and disconnectedness as a result. Regardless of their class standing, they both fear the same fate and long to enter creatively into the world. However, because of their different class positions, they are unable to empathize across class lines. Class division accentuates their disunity. Though they walk on the same street and gaze across the crowd at each other, they never actually see each other. Preoccupied with imagining herself as separate from the other working class women, Lily does not notice Richard in the crowd, and Richard, ironically, "did not notice her, she was so like the others" (188). In this way, class ultimately acts as a divisive factor in Richard and Lily's lives. For all they share, for all their like desires, they are separated by the tangible division class causes in society.

Narrative Flourish: Another Class Trap

Even when Green celebrates his characters with language that departs from the fragmentation of his usual narrative description, his language, though almost epic, still shows his characters as trapped inside their class position. For example, Mr. Bridges's thought process is elevated to "theater," but limited because it can only be elevated with language that compares it to the process of moulding:

Mr. Bridges in his thinking and most of his living was all theater. Words were exciting to him, they made more words in him and wilder thinking.

Sometimes liquid metal foundrymen are pouring into moulding box will find hole in this, at the joint perhaps, and pour out. Sometimes stream of metal pouring out will fall on patch of wet sand or on cold iron, then it will shower out off in flying drops of liquid metal. To see this once or twice perhaps is exciting. But after twice, or once even, you just go to stop hole up where metal from box is pouring.

So with Mr. Bridges. (112-3)

In the end, Bridges's creativity only extends to his relationship to the foundry, as the language that describes him ties him to his work and thus to his class. Though he may be creative, he only is so in the context of the working class. Later, when he is fired from his job, he loses more than just his self-respect. He loses all his creative ability as well—he even stops speaking (words were formerly "so exciting to him"). Likewise, Craigan, at almost seventy, exudes beauty only when he's working. At home, he is ill, aged, and decrepit: "whenever he spoke it was about the needs of his body" (91). Yet, in the factory, in the context of his work, he rises above this looming mortality: "Mr. Dupret looked at the foundry. He walked over to where Craigan worked. This man scooped gently at great shape cut down in black sand in great iron box" (4). In this moment, Craigan is "gentle" and taking part in "great" work, though he is still "grimed with the black sand" of his class.

Description of Lily also sometimes transcends Green's fragmented descriptive prose. But again, it only does so when she is acting according to the confines of her class role. As Jim Dale watches Lily wash dishes, she becomes a beautiful creature in his loving eyes: "She swilled water over the plates and electric light caught in the shining waves of water which rushed off plates as she held them, and then light caught wet plates in moons" (160). However, only domestic work can lift Lily into the very image of loveliness for Dale. She cannot escape her domestic position on her own, and hence, neither can she transcend her class. Once Lily has completed all her domestic chores, she is described "as when gulls come and settle on the water so her spirit folded wings" (131). This bird-like freedom merely recalls the novel's epigraph, a line taken from the novel itself which links Lily's fate to those of the homing pigeons her neighbor cultivates: "As these birds would go where so where would this child go?" (246). Though Lily seeks to escape the monotony of her fate, even in flight, she is still defined by her class position. Likewise, though she escapes with Bert to Liverpool, she returns to Bridesley, and in the end, grasps once again for the only type of creativity that her class position allows. As the novel closes, Lily sees Mrs. Eames’s baby in its pram. With glee, she runs at it "with loud raucous cry...to kiss it" (269), at once locking herself in her class fate and exhibiting, ironically, her awareness that motherhood is her only chance for any amount of autonomy or freedom. As she lunges, homing pigeons lift off and flutter in the air. But they will, of course, return home.

A Difference of Class: Class as Community

In this way Green sets forth both classes as trapped within the confines of their separate spheres. Though the upper and lower class characters seek happiness through the same urges for autonomy and companionship, class division limits the ability of any social actor to transcend these limits, or to forge across class lines a more unified society. Thus, the inability of Living's characters to see past social affiliation, even though it fragments an otherwise cohesive society, shows class distinction as something that further complicates—and thus weakens—a society in which people (even of similar classes) already have difficulty connecting with and understanding each other. For even inside each social class the old are separate from the young, the female from the male, the specialized workers from the other workers, and family members from each other. The examples of division are many: Mr. Craigan and Old Dupret are alienated from those they take care of, and as they get sick and nearer to death, they must deal with the mounting hostility of the younger generation towards them. Likewise, the younger generation are struggling to escape the control of their elders: Lily chooses an unapproved man to marry and Richard makes decisions in how he runs the factory that are solely motivated by his desire to oppose his father's business model, a model he feels punishes the young. Tupe and Craigan, the oldest workers on the floor, are often mocked by the young workers, and Richard eventually fires them on a whim. While the men go to the factory or to the office to work, the women, of both social classes, are forced to stay in the domestic realm; this is what initially drives Lily to seek escape in Bert Jones, and what has left Richard with a feeling that Mr. Dupret "had made mother's life misery to her" (110). Inside the factory, even the workers are divided: Craigan, a skilled artisan, feels Joe Gates experiences a "loss of caste" when he begins frequenting the pub alongside the less-skilled worker John Tarver (155). In the social hierarchy of the factory, Craigan asserts, this is a step below Gates's station and reflects poorly on the entire Craigan household.

But class subsumes all of these other divisions and acts to organize this torn society. In this way, Green subverts the Marxist tradition that sees class as a social division indicative of an impending social change. After Living depicted the working class in 1929, a social realist movement, dealing with a similar subject matter, became the dominant literary mode of the 1930s. Harold Heslop, at the Second International Conference of Revolutionary and Proletarian Workers, praised Green as a new writer of "proletarian stock" interested in writing realism that challenged capitalism (Hitchcock 6). Yet, Living chose to explore the working class as part of a complex social order, a capitalist order that didn't seem to be changing. The social realists chose to explore class as the nascent next stage of a new social order, squarely in accordance with Marxist tradition. Class, for Green, was defined by the everyday minutiae of lived experience, but in the 1930s, Marxist-inspired writers wrote social realism that dwelt on the quotidian aspects of working experience in an effort to subvert the class hierarchy and inspire the working man to rise to the top of the social ladder. Authors like Edward Upward in his 1938 novel Journey to the Border, depicted the working class identity as inspirational force for challenging the organization of society and changing the capitalist social cycle that class keeps in place (North 52). As we have seen in Living, differing domestic culture and household circumstance define class experiences; just as level of dependence upon work and type of vocation contribute to class identity. Yet, for Green, these experiences are not meant to inspire the working man to transgress his social station. Lily is punished for her attempt to "better herself" and Mr. Craigan explicitly states that he "wouldn't educate [his] son above the station 'e was born into" (160). Though Mr. Craigan has no son, Mr. and Mrs. Eames do, and they share this same view. Likewise, it seems to be a feeling that is shared by most of the other workers. In Living, it is only by accepting class position that Mrs. Eames is able to be comfortable in life, and Lily's only hope for autonomy is in mimicking Mrs. Eames method toward the autonomy of working-class motherhood. For Green, class is an identity that facilitates Lily's ability to realize her creative potential. Without her working-class identification, and the community it provides, Lily would have no system in which to contextualize her desires. She longs to "better herself" by escaping to Canada until she realizes what Mrs. Eames represents. At the end of the novel, her excited lunge toward the Eames child is an eager return to the working class, but now, at the very end of the novel, it is a community she knows can offer her fulfillment.

When Richard stands facing Lily, though he fails to see her, he finally begins to understand his own desires in contrast to the anonymous working-class community he does see. He does not see Lily, and hence is unable to realize their similarities, but he is able to recognize his own creative desires in opposition to what he perceives as the working class plight. He is able to understand his own identity as an upperclassman, and his place in his own community. In the end, Richard and Lily stare at each other and only see themselves. What they see is their differences; what they understand is their empowerment inside their different classes, inside the class infrastructure. Class is, in this way, a real divisive force—but in a society overrun by division, it is also an organizational force and a source of constructive identity that allows Richard and Lily to contextualize their creative drives and to eventually begin to find access to their respective creative callings.

Green's characters in Living have an identity that transcends class position—their shared desire for companionship and autonomy spans class lines—yet their methods for obtaining this happiness is defined by their class position. In this way, class, for Green, can empower any member of society. Even though class lines are arbitrary (they divide Foundry workers from other workers as well), potentially unjust (wealth is not equally distributed), and contribute to social division, they also serve to connect individual members of society. If the class system were overturned, it might leave society's deeper fissures exposed, and the social body might be much worse off. In Green's next novel, which I explore in the following chapter, we will see what becomes of class when it fails, in this way, to facilitate the formation of constructive communities on one side of the divide.

chapter two

If people vary at all then it can only be in the impressions they leave on others’ minds.

-Party Going (145)

Party Going: Language Fog

The 1930s was the decade in which the second modernist generation of writers came into prominence in the literary world. Between 1929, when the stock market crashed and the Depression began, through 1939 and the start of World War Two, Green’s literary peers came of age and their voice as a literary generation was solidified. During the 30s, Day Lewis, Greene, Waugh, Isherwood, Orwell and Bowen all published major work, and it is this work upon which Woolf based her “The Leaning Tower” characterization of the "second-generation" modernists. Henry Green, however, wrote and published only one novel during this era: Party Going. Unlike Living, which was published months before 1930 and written about working conditions as they existed in the late 1920s, but whose critical reception placed it as a “30s novel,” Party Going was written between 1931 and 1938 and is about the social conditions of the 1930s, the politically turbulent years leading up to the Second World War. Since it is Green’s only novel published during the 30s, and the 1930s are often seen as the decade that defined his literary generation, Party Going is often read as the focal point of Green’s literary reputation. Though Green's gesture in Party Going cannot be seen as anything but directly confronting politics, and especially class politics, Party Going also presents language itself as part and parcel of this confrontation and in this way, the novel assumes special import in the context of Woolf’s characterization of “1930s writing” as politically obsessed but stylistically bare. Party Going is not stylistically bare; it stands apart from other “30s novels” just as Green oeuvre stands apart from his literary generation.

Yet, regardless of Party Going’s unique—and impressionistic—confrontation of the social world of 1930s Britain, many critics, like Valentine Cunningham, have read Party Going as “a representative 30s novel” (Cunningham 4). In this chapter, I explore Party Going in the context of the 1930s, as a parable for British social life and class structure in the 30s, but I look beyond this characterization. In creating a type of parable about 1930s life, Party Going seems to situate the two social classes in an antagonistic opposition. However, this judgment, which is much more critical of the upper class, is complicated by the conclusion of the novel and the struggle with language the wealthy characters experience. Not only does Green use stylized language to explore notions of social class vital to 1930s political life in Party Going, but Green presents a linguistic breakdown as the very heart of 1930s England's class problems. How Green uses impressionistic language not only to embellish and obscure the political focus of Party Going but also situates this flawed language at the heart of this social misunderstanding and political problem—thus setting himself off from the rest of his literary generation—is the ultimate topic of this chapter.

Who Is Going: A Summary

Unlike Living, Party Going takes as its focus the upper-class rung of the British social ladder, yet it does not do so to the exclusion of the lower class. Just as Living explored the factory as a place where the working and leisure class met, and thus where they were forced to understand themselves in opposition to the other, so Party Going is set in a train station, at midday. Here, the working-class commuters are trying to head home after a day at work while the upper-class partygoers are gathering to depart on a pleasure-trip to France. A quick summary of the events of the novel will give a better picture of what slice of society Party Going is about.

Party Going begins with a fog. Within it, a pigeon has died and fallen dead at the feet of Mrs. Fellowes, an older upper-class lady just entering the "Departures" gate of a train station in order to see off her niece who, along with a group of five friends, is planning to leave on a social excursion to the south of France. We meet Mrs. Fellowes’s niece, Claire Hignam, her husband Robert, and each of their cohorts as they struggle, with the aid of their servants, to prepare for the trip and to get to the station in the dense fog. Once at the station, however, we learn that none of the day's trains are running and a considerable group of daily commuters, possibly thousands, are amassing in a crowd at the station. Meanwhile, the group's elusive and wealthy playboy host, Max Adey, engages two hotel rooms for the party in the station hotel, in which the partygoers can rest—away from the working-class crowd—while they wait for the trains to be running once again. Simultaneously, Mrs. Fellowes has cleaned and packaged the dead pigeon and subsequently fallen ill. She too is taken into the hotel, where Max acquires her a room of her own. Little fazed by Mrs. Fellowes's illness, the partygoers (now including the childish Julia Wray, the innocuous Alex Alexander, Angela Crevy, “coveted for her looks” (27) and Evelyn Henderson, the newest—and poorest—in the group, as well as Max and Claire) relax in one room and begin to gossip, revealing the overwhelming frivolity of their concerns. The rest of the novel takes place inside this hotel which, eventually, steel shutters are raised to protect. Repeatedly, the characters mention that no one is allowed in or out of the hotel and the partygoers note this fact with intermittent apprehension as they gossip, flirt and wait.

Meanwhile, an ambiguously classed man who has followed Mrs. Fellowes into the hotel (the partygoers, confused by his accent and his interest in Mrs. Fellowes, postulate that he might be the "hotel detective") is paid by the partygoers to go outside to check on their luggage. Outside in the crowd, through which the mystery man somehow finds his way, their servants are watching their luggage loyally. Offering us our only narrative access to the goings-on of the lower-class crowd outside, the servants are relatively comfortable and relaxed among the growing crowd. To the partygoers above, however, who see the crowd swaying together and hear them chanting in unison, "WE WANT TRAINS," the workers seem to be getting somewhat threatening. Upstairs, many small events then happen concurrently: Max takes Julia privately to the other room to test the romantic chemistry between them. Max's past lover, the society "It-girl" Amabel, arrives at the hotel and decides to take a bath before confronting Max. Next door, Mrs. Fellowes grows increasingly ill, has a number of disturbing dreams, and a doctor is called. All the while, the social politics of the partygoers continues to be embellished: they obsesses over the fate of a mutual friend not present, Embassy Richard, who has recently been published in the papers. The crowd below, now thousands strong, continues to sway together, now more violently, and is now heard to be singing what the partygoers think are drinking songs. Eventually, Mrs. Fellowes begins to feel better and just as the trains start running and the crowd disperses, Embassy Richard arrives to join the partygoers and their trip can finally begin, now with eight in the party.

A Parable of Class Division

When accounting for Party Going's confrontation of the class divide, critics have read the novel as an apt and rigorous parable of English society in the 1930s. Between 1929 and 1938, the mounting threat of continental political instability, the mounting aggression of Germany toward its European neighbors and the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Italy and Spain, contributed to British fears about great social change. At home, the Depression led many Britons to fear that the instability abroad was contagious, and soon, such turmoil would afflict the British social world as well. As my introduction describes, classes began to unite into explicit groups in order to counteract fears that society, under economic and political pressure, might become more fluid and that class lines might collapse.[9] This fear often caused social groups to divide along strict class lines, with individuals organizing based on economic similarities in order to protect shared interests during difficult times (Thorpe 96). Those who worked for their money were often split from those who did not. The upper class feared the workers would attempt to encroach on their property and the workers suspected that they would be forced by the upper class to unfairly bear the burden of the economic slump (Cunningham 352). Consequently, there was much animosity and distrust across class lines. All of Europe was, to W.H. Auden, “troubled” and “crooked” and in an “hour of crisis and dismay” (qtd. in Cunningham 40) and hence, many, among both class groups in Britain felt the social world was in a divided state and feared immanent conflict. In Party Going, Green seems to establish such a divide, and in his depiction of the confused and isolated upper class, he seems to present a critique of the upper-class reaction to this social tension.

There is no doubt that Green was aware of the political turmoil of the 30s or the anxiety it caused in society. Green's intention for political relevance is clear on the last page of Party Going, where a signature, "London 1931-1938," is appended. The events of the novel, Green insists, correspond to a real place and a real span of time. As Michael Gorra suggests, Green's novel seems to present a microcosm of the greater British social world of the 1930s (Gorra 38). The partygoers, Gorra implies, represent all of the upper class and the commuters represent all of the lower class. It is to this effect that the novel stages, at its center, a confrontation between two distinctly separate class groups and it is for this reason that Green presents a class-obscuring fog as precipitating the events that take place at the train station.

When Party Going begins, the narrative immediately separates two ambiguous bodies of characters into two distinct groups defined by nothing but their class. As the novel opens, the narrator declares that “people were gathering everywhere…and making their way to the train station” (8) and describes this growing anonymous crowd and the characters that begin to come clear inside it in a crowd-like and crowded fashion, providing names and new characters in quick and convoluted succession:

Meantime Claire and Evelyn had met and were greeting each other…Robert was taking off his hat and saying “Why hullo Evelyna” and she asking them where everyone was and telling them she had seen Thomson with Julia’s luggage…Where on earth was Angela, or Max and Alex? Did anyone know if Max meant to come? Claire had said she had telephoned and that she thought he would. “Anyway,” said Evelyn, “I’ve got their tickets here. Now Robert, you and Thomas had better go and try and find them all…Thomas go with Mr. Hingam and see if you can bring Miss Crevy and others back here will you? You haven’t seen anything of Edwards I suppose? (8)

It is easy, in a narrative of this kind, to lose track of exactly who is being presented, and it cannot be incidental that just as the train station fills up with such a crowd, so the novel begins to fill up with such indistinguishable people. However, unlike in Living, we are immediately given a sense of which characters are set apart from the crowd and why. Also, unlike in Living, these characters are the named characters arriving in a flurry of nannies, porters maids, servants and drivers; in this way, the named characters are distinguished immediately as individuals, and as upper-class.

As the narrative introduces the named characters, their class position is made clear by the manner in which they arrive at the train station. We first meet Miss Angela Crevy as she and her fiancé negotiate with their porter; we meet Mrs. Fellowes as she, in progress toward washing the dead pigeon, avoids two old nannies because they are employees of her family. Likewise, Max is introduced to us as he interacts with “Edwards, his manservant” who is nearly done packing his bags for him and Mr. and Mrs. Hignam, are first shown stuck in traffic, being chauffeured to the station by “their driver” (390, 391). These named characters, at first almost indistinguishable from each other, are clearly distinguished from the crowd and even from their (also named) servants by detailed, and often poetically embellished descriptions:

Like two lilies in a pond, romantically part of it but infinitely remote, supported, floating in it if you will, but projected by being different on to another plane, though there was so much water you could not see these flowers or were liable to miss them, stood Miss Crevy and her young man apparently serene, envied for their obviously easy circumstances and Angela coveted for her looks by all those water beetles if you like, by those people standing around. (95)

Angela and Miss Crevy are distinctive, they are described as “romantic lilies,” while the rest of the crowd is one mass, merely “those people,” an anonymous, practically inhuman group, “water beetles.” Yet it is with Miss Julia Wray that the true meaning of this separation is made clear:

As she stepped out into this darkness of fog above and left warm rooms with bells and servants and her uncle who was one of Mr. Robert’s directors—a rich important man—she lost her name and was all at once anonymous; if it had not been for her rich coat she might have been any typist making her way home. (388, emphasis added)

The presentation of Miss Julia Wray is an introduction to the overriding concern of Party Going, that of class identity. Julia is a girl so connected to her class identity that without it, she has no identity at all. The fog, for Julia, establishes a mood of anxiety and misunderstanding because it threatens to obscure her class characteristics and thus, threatens to challenge the very way in which she understands herself in relation to the world. The narrative, however, in all its foggy convolution, does not fail to distinguish Julia a named individual among this upper-class group; she is not anonymous to us. The fog, in this way, does not actually obscure the class identity of the upper-class partygoers or the lower-class commuters, but only threatens to do so.

Political Cause: An Upper-Class Critique?

Gorra and others have seen the separation caused by the fog as a staged reflection of the actual reaction to the political turmoil as it occurred in 1930s society and the anxiety the fog perpetuates as a presentation of the actual upper-class reaction to this turmoil. The image and the effect of the fog, placed so early and so prominently in the narrative, triggers instincts toward social isolation among the rich and blurs the working class into what looks like one unified nameless mass. Fog, in Party Going, acts much like the political turmoil that was causing anxiety in English society at this time. Like the political turmoil of the 1930s, fog threatens to undo the social order that defines classes as distinct and separate entities and consequently, the upper-class characters become fearful and reenact these social divisions with spatial boundaries. Likewise, Samuel Hynes describes politically oriented 1930s author as often using an iconography of "borders [and] bombs" in order to establish the anxious emotional experience of the 30s in his work (Hynes 239). The “borders” speaks to both the 30s individual's awareness of social division and to an increased consciousness of national borders;[10] the “bombs,” to the increased likelihood of war, and the constant threat of a workers' revolution.

Green's use of borders in Party Going echoes these iconographic techniques. For Green's partygoers, crossing the national border is the goal of their excursion. Their party is, after all, waiting to take the international train to France. Likewise, the hotel walls, inside which they are sequestered during the wait, have become a social border separating the working from the upper class. Green also compares the sounds of the workers outside the hotel to the sounds of airplanes and bombs in such a way as to establish a feeling of anxiety among the young socialites inside:

[like] an aeroplane high up drones alternately loud then soft and low it is so high, what were shouted protests or cheering or just hubbub of that crowd away below...[the partygoers] wondered and dreaded a little. (149)

In this way, the mood of the novel that the narrative creates corresponds to the mood of much literature about the social and political 1930s.

Valentine Cunningham also points out that trains, in much 30s literature, serve as a symbol of progress, social motion and escape that facilitate a solution to the social problems of the decade (Cunningham 356). In Green’s work, like Cunningham finds in so much 30s literature, the train station is a place in which all levels of society meet and interact. However, train travel does not offer the progress or true possibility for social change or mobility that it initially promises. In Party Going, where the trains are not even running, trains never truly offer the possibility of social change and the train station, where the class division is performed, and the train travel the station promises, ultimately subverts notions of social freedom or escape.

Setting Party Going in a train station allows Green to subvert common 1930s iconography. In this way, Green situates Party Going as a metaphor for English society in order to critique the English social order. The train station, in Party Going, where individuals of all classes are forced to crowd together, merely becomes a setting for a reenactment of social difference. The partygoers, with their intended trip to France, hope to escape English society but instead, because of the fog, are forced to account for the class divide and the anxiety it causes them.

Green seems to issue a strong critique of the class system when he depicts the partygoers looking out at the workers and unable to articulate the class difference that they have performed instinctually. For upper-class characters whose identities, as we have seen, rely so much on notions of class, this inability is striking. We cannot help but see the rich character's lack of understanding and subsequent fear of the working class as a serious concern. These characters, so completely absorbed with notions of class difference, are so dissociated from the actual concerns of the workers outside that they have little idea how to react to the burgeoning masses. This is clearly the case when Julia, for example, opens the window to see the workers:

As he [Max] came over to join her she [Julia] said well anyway, those police over there would protect their luggage, as they were drawn up in front of the Registration Hall. And as she watched she saw this crowd was in some way different. It could not be larger as there was no more room...and she heard them chanting "WE WANT TRAINS, WE WANT TRAINS." Also that raw air came in, harsh with fog...it was all on a vast scale...she had forgotten what it was to be outside, what it smelled and felt like, and she had not realized what this crowd was, just seeing it through the glass....two or three men were shouting against the chant but she could not distinguish words. (99)

Julia's inability to "distinguish words" from the crowd encapsulates her more significant inability to assign words to define what makes this crowd "different". Whereas before, looking outside at the crowd, "she had not realized what this crowd was," she realizes now it is "in some way different." However, as if her own understanding of class were fogged, she has no context with which to understand what this difference could be and no words to articulate this ignorance. Only Amabel’s maid is able to use the word "revolution," and none of the other partygoers seem able to articulate the significance of the crowd outside or their seemingly ominous behavior. Most, like Max, spend the novel either ignoring the crowd or gazing at it without any display of comprehension (484-88).

The partygoers may be frightened, as Julia obviously is: “'Its terrifying' Julia said, 'I didn't know there were so many people in the world'” (100). The upper-class socialites often refer to the crowd of commuters with ominous overtones, as if they were potentially violent criminals. Julia refers to them, when she can find the words, as "those frantic drinking hordes of awful people" (240). Yet, the narration that describes the working class often uses colorful and elaborate language:

The crowd was woven as tight as any office carpet or, more elegantly made, the holy Kaaba soon to set out for Mecca, with some kind of design made out of bookstalls and kiosks seen from above and through one part of that crowd having turned towards those who were singing, thus lightening the dark mass with their pale lozenge faces; observing how this design moved and was alive where in a few lanes or areas people swayed forward or back like a pattern writhing; coughing as fog caught their throats... (205)

The "franticness" that Julia had perceived seems, in this light, that it could be a positive characteristic: indicating more vibrancy than desperation. Yet, while the partygoers rest inside the hotel, un-crowded, warm and comfortable, and the workers outside thrive as a vibrant and lively group, the socialite girls still fear the workers will come rushing in for food, or worse yet, assume "they'll [i.e. the workers will] probably try and kiss us or something" (244). The partygoers do not seem capable of understanding what frightens them about the workers or willing to inquire into whether or not fear is an appropriate reaction to their predicament. All they know is that they must stay separate, or else their class liberties will be revoked. The drama of this ignorance and misunderstanding, and its division along the class lines, has led Party Going to be read as a "picture of irresponsible privilege, and flirtation set against an apocalyptic background" (Mengham 43), or as "an allegory about the spiritual paralysis of an English upper class, kept by its possessions from the vitality of ordinary men and women" (Gorra 37). The partygoers fear the workers outside because they are convinced they are going to rush inside the hotel and further challenge social distinctions. Yet, Green presents the upper class as hardly deserving the privilege these distinctions supply, and that they take for granted. It is in this way that the novel has been read as parable of 1930s English society—and as parable, as an unambiguous critique of 1930s England and its political and social hierarchy that divides the social body along class lines.

Problem Not Resolved: Richard Arrives

We must hesitate before concluding firmly that Party Going can be read only as a social allegory. The highly stylized language and the ending of the novel challenge the notion that the novel is meant to take part in a political debate, to commit itself to a political cause and to enact tangible political influence.[11] Merely hours after the fog falls and the partygoers enter the hotel, the fog lifts and all of the tension of the novel suddenly, and unremarkably, resolves. In the span of five pages all of the anxiety and mounting tension of the novel is deflated. It seems, in the end, the partygoers’ assurances—that, when stated, they even seemed to disbelieve—that "an English crowd is the best behaved in the word" (517) and that we should not think "these people are violent or anything, because they aren't" (517) turn out to be correct. When the fog lifts, and the trains begin running, so the crowd disperses: "Separated there they became people again and were no longer menaces as they had been in one mass when singing or all of their faces turning one way to a laugh or a scream. She could even smile at them, they were so like sheep herded" (524). It seems the events of Party Going were as incidental as a bad dream, with no more potential for turbulent social effect. However, it is also in the abrupt ending of the novel that we are given insight into a deeper cause of the anxiety of the fog-bound partygoers and that we are offered a key to reading, not only the plot and the action of the text, but the style of the language, and the highly deliberate nuance this style affects in the prose.

In Embassy Richard, the party crasher so prominent in the dialogue of the partygoers, we have an embodiment of the upper-class vapid, self-absorbed, party-seeking lifestyle. His appearance at the train station underscores and emphasizes the young socialites’ inability to understand neither the events of the day, nor each other. Smalltalk about Embassy Richard has dominated the conversation throughout the entire novel and this chatter, characterized by disagreement and misunderstanding among the highbrow group, takes up most of the partygoers' energy. Embassy Richard is famous because a correspondence had been printed in the paper about his status in relation to a party to which he may or may not have been invited, and to which he definitely did not “go.” As the partygoers relate (in fragments and half-descriptions), a letter was published in “the papers” apologizing, on Richard’s behalf, for Richard’s declination of an invitation by “the Ambassador” to a party the Ambassador was holding in the honor of “the Prince Royal.” A response was then printed from the Ambassador implying that it mattered not that Richard declined because he had never been invited to the party anyway (417-20). In revealing thematic irony, the debate about who really wrote the initial letter (was it Richard? was it another friend named Charlie Troupe?), is, essentially, an argument the partygoers have about another failed partygoer. Richard’s saga is constantly on the minds and tongues of these stationary society darlings as they wait, unable to attend their own party in France. Yet, just as Richard is another failed partygoer, so is he a failed communicator. Essential to "the Embassy Richard debate" is the fact that Richard himself is a failed writer. We learn at the end, that he himself wrote the letter: “You all heard about my little trouble...you know I put that little thing in the papers about my not being able to come to something or other, well, they all made such a fuss you'd never believe” (527). However, we do believe, because Richard's failed communication, and his subsequent inability to "party-go," has been much like the experiences of the rich young characters so absorbed with Richard's saga.

In Richard's failed articulation, we have an analogue to the greater issue at the heart Green's critique of the partygoers: miscommunication. Richard could not find the words to communicate his predicament and the words of his letter failed to accurately communicate to the reading public or to the other hopeful partygoers. It was Richard's own muddlement that has made it, as he says, "time for little Richard to say goodbye for now" (527) and thus brought him here to the train station with this party of near party-goers and fellow failed communicators. We have seen the young set trying to communicate throughout Party Going: recall Julia's futile attempt to find words to describe the crowd's threat, Alex and Angela’s labyrinthine and constant bickering about the details of the Embassy Richard "mystery." The entrance of Embassy Richard as the herald of the novel's "resolution" highlights what really has not been resolved: the partygoers inability to use language.

In the end, the upper-class socialites still do not have any comprehension of the significance of the crowd outside and they certainly are in no way more connected to each other. While the working-class commuters are able to access a communal language and chant as a unified group, “WE WANT TRAINS,” the socialites never use language to forge a connection. Unlike the workers in Living, their upper-class community is fragmented and their conversation is trivial and empty. When they speak, it is more a performance of social grace, of empty ritual, than a creator of interpersonal connection: "Both exclaimed aloud at the beauty and appropriateness of the other’s choice, but it was as though two old men were swapping jokes, they did not listen to each other they were so anxious to explain. Already both had been made to regret they had left such and such dress behind" (29). Their conversations are characterized by constant white lies (like the one above), competition, attention grabbing, and complaint. For the partygoers, and especially for the female bon ton, language is a performance, a moment to hog the center of attention, but not a means of offering empathy, or entering into a community with the rest of the upper-class group. As a group that instinctually performs division along class lines when faced with the fog, it is quickly evident that they have little understanding of this identity, other than as it sets them apart from those below.

Looking down, after Max’s sexual advances have been rebuked, Julia and Max see "thousands of Smiths, thousands of Alberts, hundreds of Marys, woven tight as any office carpet…Julia and Max could not but feel infinitely remote, although at the same time Julia could not fail to be remotely excited at themselves" (150). While Julia cannot imagine what the significance of the workers below might be, she feels exhilarated because of her position, above them, separate from them. This difference is all she understands of her identity. In this way, the materialization of Richard on the last page of the novel underscores the partygoers’ inability to linguistically communicate. Richard joins their party just as its actually going somewhere and in this way emphasizes the lack of linguistic connection defining the upper-class social experience. Likewise, Richard’s appearance, and the “resolution” he heralds, undercuts the clear political critique Party Going seems to offer. In the end, the party will be attended and no confrontation between the upper and lower classes has occurred; has a potentially social problem been avoided or perpetuated? Richard’s arrival indicates the latter.

Narrative Style: Performing the Social Fog

Looking at the word-choice and style of Party Going, we can explore the interaction between language and the political meaning suggested by the "parable of 1930s society" and the clear allegorical reading this relationship complicates. We have seen that Green's opening narrative uses lists, with unembellished proper names, in order to depict, and linguistically emulate, the crowding at the station. Green performs this manipulation of language often in order to engage the symbolic fog in much of Party Going's language and hence, in order to comment on the failures of the partygoers' own interaction with language. In this way, Green uses impressionistic techniques in order to characterize the social dilemma at the heart of the young socialite’s experience during the fog as a deeper social problem, one not resolved when the fog lifts and they are able to depart for France.

Edward Stokes offers a general overview of the stylistic terrain of Party Going in his book-length study The Novels of Henry Green. He finds Party Going to be a novel “which preserves unity of time and place, and which concentrates attention on a homogenous group of people of the same age, social class and attitudes” (Stokes 203). Consequently, Stokes explains, the language Green uses is “fairly uniform in length and structure” in order to achieve this effect (Stokes 203). Yet, what Stokes refers to as “uniform” effects are used to create the impression of obscured meaning in Party Going. Green uses impressionistic language to produce the impression of fogginess, and this fog is not only literal and social, but linguistic. For Green, no character escapes the fog just from moving inside, because the external fog is merely symbolic of a more serious internal problem. The language of the upper-class characters does not perform clear communication. In their conversations, Mengham points out, they constantly "lose track," "change ground," and "lose their thread" and they seem incapable of conversing about anything but the most trivial things (Mengham 46). The narration that embeds this dialogue and the characters' interactions while speaking is also disconnected. Communication in general, in Party Going, is a foggy process; linguistic fog is an essential aspect of the social dilemma Party Going presents.

Stokes is convinced that it is in order to slow down the narrative that Green replaces full stops with “ands” throughout the text: “She turned and she went back to where it had fallen and again looked up to where it must have died for it was still warm and, everything unexplained, she turned once more into the tunnel back into the station” (397 emphasis added). Stokes argues that this, as a stylistic effect, achieves “monotony, lassitude and boredom” (Stokes 203) and it does, sometimes. Passages intending to contrast the “boredom” of the partygoers with the strange actions of the burgeoning crowd they are separate from often use hypotactic phrasings in order to accentuate the difference between those inside and those outside. Green often uses multipart comparisons and embellished language to describe the actions of the crowd outside:

Where ruins lie, masses of stone grown with ivy unidentifiable with the mortar fallen away so that the stone lies on stone loose and propped up or crumbling down in mass then as wind starts up at dusk and stirs the ivy leaves and rain follows slanting down, so deserted no living thing seeks what little shelter there may be, it is brought so low, then movements of impatience began to flow across all these people and as ivy leaves turn one way in the wind they themselves surged a little here and there in their blind search behind bowler hats and hats for trains. (202)

Inside the hotel, the upper-class group is rarely described in such a drawn-out manner. Instead, narrative hypotaxis creates the impression of boredom through list-like explanation of the events of the partygoers. Green uses hypotaxis to flatten their actions into one continuous, lifeless stream of insignificant events:

Claire asked who said her Aunt May [Mrs. Fellowes] was very bad, and Alex could only say his little man had. Angela [spoke], and Julia took that up and said she thought Alex had been perfectly right. Angela, trying to be malicious and yet not rude, said she was horrified…and…how it did not seem right. Alex wanted to talk to Miss Crevy…but he did not dare, and Claire said yes. (428 emphasis added)

However, when Stokes tries to extend this characterization to the entire work, the passages he uses as examples show the narrative is also working to depict the ever-growing crowd, and Mrs. Fellowes’ actions with the dead pigeon inside this crowd, as unmistakably confusing and muddled. Green’s looping, run-on sentences, instead, seem to accentuate the fogginess of the setting, and not in the sense that fog is “monotonous.” In this way, the language creates the impression that the fog is obscuring and convoluted and hence, potentially a cause for great anxiety. This anxiety is presented as explicitly part of the character’s reactions to the fog and the language adds to this confusion. Upon the closing of the hotel gates, we learn that

it did make Julia feel very nervous and she moved to Alex where he happened to be teasing Angela because he might be nervous too which would comfort her. People who weren’t nervous were useless because they did not know what it meant (62)

The ideas that this passage presents are convoluted not because of the uniformity of the narrative, but because of how Green crowds his sentences with ambiguous meaning. It is difficult to parse this excerpt: Alex is not teasing Angela “because he might be nervous too;” rather, Julia is seeking Alex because she thinks that “he might be nervous too.” In Green’s narrative, as with actual fog, sentences are blurred and meaning is hard to decipher. Clauses connect to other clauses before any meaning has become particularly obvious and dependant clauses are separated sometimes by long parentheticals (though parentheses are rarely used), sometimes embedded in statements about seemingly unrelated topics. Green’s language seeks to create the effect of “fogged” meaning because it is confusing and verges on disorder. The reader, like the partygoers, is left to grope for connective tissue, for clarity, for sense; like in Conrad’s work, here, “form and substance” have been blended for an impressionistic effect (Conrad 162).

Just as the fog serves Green’s desire to explore two classes in performed opposition, his use of impressionistic language allows him to explore the partygoers’ deeper relationship to the society they are lost in. Take for example, the description of Julia’s early attempted walk to the train station:

Where hundreds of thousands she could not see were now going home, their day done, she was only starting out and there was this difference that where she had been nervous of her journey and of starting, so that she had said she would rather go on foot to the station to walk it off, she was frightened now. (389)

In a descriptive passage about Julia’s walk, Green has included two self-contradictory ideas in one long sentence. The sentence hinges on the word “difference,” a word that is thematically important in Party Going. Fog, as we have seen, in the course of the novel, frames a performance of “social difference,” and allows Green to question the true “difference” between the upper and the lower classes. The word is nudged here in between a description of the working class returning home after a day at work and a description of Julia’s anxieties about “party going.” Clearly, there is a difference between Julia and the working class. Whereas they leave for home in the evening, after work, this is when her day begins, when she begins to go to her parties. The fragment “where hundreds of thousands…were now going home…she was only starting out and there was this difference” could stand alone; it would fulfill the notions of class difference that Gorra’s reading of Party Going, as a social parable, clearly suggest. Yet, it doesn’t stand alone. It is merely the first part of a convoluted and grammatically complex sentence. In actuality, the “difference” the sentence refers to is a difference between the anxiety Julia felt before she left for the train station and the anxiety she currently feels because of her fear of walking through the fog. In a particularly perfomative gesture, Green causes us to misread and then re-read his sentence, thus getting an extra meaning from an already complex line. Green intends for his readers to get lost, and to find ways toward tentative meanings along the way to understanding the final meaning of the line. Like Julia, we experience the convolution of the fog. Like Julia, our assumptions are based on social difference, but our confusion is linguistic. Green’s alternative meaning is intentional, and we must get lost in order to find it. The impression of fogginess is part and parcel of Green’s project. Green uses this technique in order to perform an impression of the social experience his characters are experiencing. Hence, the very style of Green’s language contributes to his comment on the social and political world and makes Party Going more than just a critical microcosm of the class world of the British 30s.

A Deeper Fog: Class Identity and Misunderstanding

Green's intention is to understand, and present, how the partygoers themselves interact with language and thus experience class. Green's style in Party Going is impressionistic, poetic and affected. His language assumes a more complicated relationship to meaning because his characters have a complicated relationship to it. This complication is at the heart of their social dilemma and hence it is at the heart of Green’s stylistic project. Take, for instance, the mysterious character Frank Kermode calls the "Hermes" character of the text (after the Greek god Hermes, patron of thieves and interpreters), the enigmatic stranger that follows Mrs. Fellowes into the hotel from the bar. Besides Amabel, who arrives with her maid and six bags of luggage exactly half way through the novel, the stranger is the only character in Party Going able to leave the hotel and infiltrate the masses after the hotel had been shut with "steel shutters." This man, significantly, is classless and confuses the partygoers because they are unable to situate him in their social frame:

'Aye, but the corridor's public,' this man returned, and without any warning he had used Yorkshire accent where previously he had been speaking in Brummagem. This sudden change did his trick as it had so often done before and Alex, losing his nerve, asked him to have a drink. He thought he might be the hotel detective. (426)

If we, like Kermode, take this character as Hermes, it becomes significant that the partygoers can make no sense of him and yet he is the only one "going" anywhere, outside the hotel, or across class boundaries. The partygoers’ fail to interpret the identity of this (supposed) professional interpreter because his language transcends the firm class borders they rely on in order to understand themselves. This failure accentuates the characters’ reliance on language and the failure of this linguistic reliance to produce any concrete "reality" for them. Ironically, in their sincere struggle to define the stranger they can only produce one possibility, that he is the hotel detective, the hotel's hired interpreter. This irony serves to emphasize the linguistic disconnect, the linguistic impotence, that characterizes the partygoers. Yet the stranger, in all his ambiguity, is assigned a similarly Hermes-like identity by the workers outside. Even when he goes across the class divide, his flexible language keeps his identity obscure.

The stranger, for all his ability to transcend class boundaries, has no place among any class. His ambiguity, after all, is not in his dress or stature (which is never described) but in his language alone. Inside, he switches between a Yorkshire and a Brummagem accent when speaking to Alex; outside, with Julia's servant Edwards, he speaks “in educated tones” before “relapsing into some dialect of his own” (204, 205). His use of both (various) lower-class dialects and "educated tones" is unique, and socially enigmatic, but it is also gives Edwards a reason to distrust him. Uncomfortable with the ambiguous stranger, but certain he is not a member of his own class group, Edwards decides he might be “Arsene Lupin easy” (204), the famous “gentleman thief” from the popular French novels by Maurice Leblanc. The stranger is not clearly part of the partygoers’ social set just as he is not a servant, and so, Edwards cannot “understand how he could go on talking with this man who might be anybody” (204). As “anybody,” to Edwards, he might as well be nobody. Without a clear language, the stranger cannot be affiliated with any class, and thus, he cannot be understood—or trusted. As we have seen, Julia fears she will lose her class, and consequently her identity: in the fog; the stranger has lost class and identity, he has no name, no context and no place in the social infrastructure. Kermode can assign him the mythic title "Hermes" because of his class transcendence and the inability of the characters to identify him as anything other than an (upper-class) thief or a (working-class) detective; yet, in his classlessness, he never steals or detects anything.

Without a class identity, Hermes's powers are ineffective. His trans-class vocabulary lifts him out of the class world altogether; there, he is unable to take part in society at all. Without class identity, Hermes follows Mrs. Fellowes into the locked hotel and then, mysteriously, finds a way out. Classless, he navigates the crowd of thousands until there, miraculously, he finds Edwards. Yet, he is excluded from both social groups to which he has unadulterated access. Class markers, like language, that serve to advertise a class identity are necessary in a society—like this one—in which class is not otherwise concrete. In this way, the stranger contradicts any notion that a classless individual may be the anecdote for the arbitrarily (and unfairly) divided social world Party Going presents. In the social flux that the fog has brought, class divisions are not toppling because the partygoers continue to perform their class-roles based on instinct. Yet, their inability to use language as a marker of their own class identity, along with their inability to use language to describe the different identity of the lower class indicates the tenuousness of their class identification. Consequently, their anxiety may stem from a social problem more pervasive than the social fog they are in, a deeper inability of their class affiliation to function as a constructive community.

When we come upon Amabel's bath scene, when she is "engaged in writing herself" (Cunningham 7) in the fog, we cannot help but relate this meta-textual moment to the underlying inability of the partygoers to express identity or understand society through language:

The walls were made of looking-glass, and were clouded over with steam; from them her body was reflected in a faint pink mass. She leaned over and traced her name Amabel in that steam and that pink mass loomed up to meet her in the flesh and looked through bright at her through the letters of name. She bent down to look at her eyes in the A her name began with, and as she gazed at them steam or her breath dulled her reflection and the blue her eyes were went out or faded. (479)

In this scene, Amabel writes on the fog of the mirror, and through this fog, sees herself in her name as she rubs the fog away. Inside this hotel, inside the bathroom that has mirrors on all its walls, Amabel is secluded at the heart of the partygoers’ seclusion. She is separate from them as they are separate from the workers outside, and as John Updike has pointed out, we, like Actaeon, are allowed to see this Diana-like, goddess-like bather, though we are not torn to bits.[12] Just as Actaeon had stumbled upon a chaste Diana and transgressed a strict cultural boundary (to see the Virgin huntress without her bow and arrow), we are offered a view into the profound solipsism of Party Going's most powerful female (and possibly the most powerful character in general). We become granted access to the frivolous self-love of the most self-loving of a self-centered set. Here, there is no feigned (or attempted) camaraderie, just a single person trying to use language to access selfhood through a dense fog. At the heart of this scene, so sexually potent, so transgressive, Amabel does exactly what all the others in Party Going try so hard to do: she tries to declare her identity with words. Even Amabel's personal declaration, however, is a failure.

Amabel writes on fog and like so many others dealing with fog in Party Going, the more she writes, the more the fog creeps back, eventually erasing her written name and subsuming her visage completely:

She rubbed with the palm of her hand, and now she could see all her face. She always thought it more beautiful than anything she had ever seen, and when she looked at herself it was as though the two of them would never meet again, it was to bid farewell; and at the last she always smiled, and she did so this time as it was clouding over, tenderly smiled as you might say goodbye, my darling darling. (479)

This passage, narrated in such a rarely succinct and clear prose (it even uses semi-colons, a punctuation mark so rarely used in Green's descriptions), struggles to retain clarity in the face of Amabel's inevitable linguistic failure. Amabel's language is fogged over, just as Green's language is throughout most of the novel, but Green's narrative here struggles to retain clarity in this literally foggy scene. The seven repetitions of "she" and the four repetitions of "it," as seen even just in the excerpt above echo the "effort to assert authority" through a use of deictics that Cunningham saw as characteristic of other 1930s writing (but not Green’s) (Cunningham 10).[13] In the language of a writer who we have seen to be reluctant to use deictics at all, this is quite surprising. By contrasting a narrative certainty with Amabel's linguistic impotence it becomes obvious that Amabel's failure is not caused by the external fog so often performed in the narrative. The clear narrative insists that Amabel’s linguistic failure is a product of her own inability. Just as the other partygoers' inability to communicate does not end when the fog lifts and is only reiterated by the arrival of Embassy Richard, the narrative suggests that this linguistic disconnect runs deeper than the events of this day. Amabel is at the heart of the upper-class seclusion and her writing is for an audience of only herself; her failure is symbolic of a deep inability of the partygoers to use language to understand their own identities, on the most basic, egotistic level. Though we may learn about the frivolous character of the upper-class in contrast to the communal potential of the lower-class, the linguistic disconnect which is causing an emptiness at the heart of leisurely society is more serious. Shared language helps facilitate the community that class can offer as an anecdote to social division. Without this language, the partygoers are unable to access this unity, or to realize their own social identities and this illness does not resolve with the rising of the day's fog, or with the return of running trains.

Mrs. Fellowes and the Failures of Class

It is evident that reading Party Going merely as an attempted political commentary would neglect to incorporate the significant way Green uses language, and involves language, in his critique of 1930s society. Yet Green's statement is politically charged and in Party Going, class conflict is not only a physical event causing anxiety and fear, and threatening to erupt in violence. Rather, the ills of society, that express themselves in class conflict, run deeper than the division and anxiety caused by the social and linguistic fog. Green's partygoers fail to understand their relationship to the social world just as they fail to understand their own identities except in opposition to the class "others." Hence, they have lost touch with what it means to live properly in a society that has a functional class system. This is Green's political statement: He doesn't wish to promote revolution, or drastic social change, rather, he hopes to pinpoint the problems with the class system as it functioned in the 1930s. As we have seen in Living, class can function to soothe the divisions inherent in social life by facilitating meaningful communities. In Party Going, we have seen that these communities beak down: The partygoers are unable to truly connect, are unable to communicate honestly, are unable to articulate their role in the social world. However, the older Mrs. Fellowes offers a compelling alternative to the problems experienced by the community of young upper-classmen.

Mrs. Fellowes is set apart from the youthful socialites, she is a marginalized member of their community not only because she is ill, but because she is old. Her actions, however, frame the entire novel. On the first page, she picks up the dead pigeon and starts to clean it, throughout the entire novel she is ill, at the end, she feels better and rises out of bed. The partygoers' community, however, never feels compassion for her. She is a burden, another factor, like the fog, that is holding them back from their desired excursion, their desired escape from the English social problems they misunderstand and fear. When Edwards declares "if she [Mrs. Fellowes] was really bad, they'd never go [to France]," Thompson, Max's servant, points out that "Mr. [Max] Adey would" (207). Likewise, Claire tries to justify leaving Mrs. Fellowes behind, just in case the trains did start running before the old lady's health improved: "Those nannies could look after her, they've got nothing else to do you know" (209).

Throughout, as the partygoers flirt, gossip and complain, Mrs. Fellowes lies ill in bed. While the partygoers' anxiety about the commuters outside grows, Mrs. Fellowes has horrible dreams about being sucked out, violently, into the sea:

As this tumulus advanced below the sea above would rise, most menacing and capped with foam, and as it came nearer she could hear the shrieking wind in throbbing through her ears. She would try not to turn her eyes down to where rising waves broke over rocks as the nearer black mass advanced so fast the sea rose and ate up what little was left between her and those wild waters. Each time this scene was repeated she felt so frightened, and then it was menacing and she throbbed unbearably, as it was all forced into her head. (76)

Yet, this "black mass" that seems to recall the mass of unruly workers outside (who Green also compares to “waves”), like her illness, "was all forced insider her head" by the events of the day. The dreams she fights against symbolize an imposition that she is trying to cast off.

As if in response to this ambiguous imposition, when Mrs. Fellowes has an "argument with death" in another dream, she recalls childhood rituals in order to justify the actions that got her into her current state: “she argued why shouldn't she order whisky if they died they had always had it when they were children” (126). It is also this justification, for rituals that made sense in her youth, that she uses to explain her cleaning of the dead pigeon. She responds that, "as for the pigeon it was saving the street-cleaner trouble, when they were never left out to rot in the streets nowadays” (126). Mrs. Fellowes, unlike any other character in the novel, shows that she acted out of an interest in helping someone else, and someone of a different class.

Mrs. Fellowes embodies exactly what her name implies: fellow-feeling. Fellow feeling is what the lower classes seem to have, and what the partygoers lack in entirety (as they don't even have fellow-feeling for the bed-ridden Mrs. Fellowes). Alex even points this out:

This is what it is to be rich, he thought, if you are held up, if you have to wait then you can do it after a bath in your dressing-gown and if you have to die then not as any bird tumbling dead from its branch down for the foxes, light and stiff, but here in bed, here inside, with doctors to tell you it is all right and with relations to ask if it hurts. Again no standing, no being pressed together...no fellow feeling, true (195)

The inability of the partygoers to express fellow-feeling is embodied in Alex's inability to understand Mrs. Fellowes's relationship to the dead pigeon she picked up at the start of the novel. To Alex, the pigeon symbolizes a working-class death, one that happens outside, alone, without the comforts provided by wealth. Mrs. Fellowes, however, does not see the pigeon as part of a separate social system. Mrs. Fellow's pigeon cleaning, for all its absurdity, is her effort to show fellow-feeling toward something abject, something that has been forgotten and despised. Whether this pigeon represents the lower classes (left outside in the fog, dirty and feared) or a more ambiguous marginalized body, she shows it compassion, something the partygoers do not even have for each other. Throughout the book, the young socialites present no understanding of even the concept of fellow-feeling, let alone fellow-feeling for the workers outside.

The young and wealthy inside the hotel never imagine sacrificing their privileges in order to improve the lives of the working-class masses and are too busy obsessing over the subtle differences in their own class positions in order to support each other as friends. The young beau monde gape and stare at the workers below, but they never imagine helping to make their hours in the cold and the fog more comfortable; the idea never even crosses their minds. While the young socialites wonder if the workers will violently rush inside the hotel, Mrs. Fellowes dreams that she is being called out into the black mass, into a position from which she could help the workers. Mrs. Fellowes's desire to help the workers is coupled with her remembrance of an older time, of an older society. She enacts the odd ritual of cleansing the pigeon as a desperate act, in the context of the rituals of her youth, that recall a lost society. In youth, she drank whisky; in youth society functioned differently. Now she drinks whisky and grows ill, and dreams of the past. In her actions, Mrs. Fellowes is grasping for the compassionate society she remembers from her youth. This is why she desperately (and almost pathetically) enacts the social customs and rituals that accompanied this bygone world. Unlike Julia, who has no linguistic ability with which to articulate the identity, or even the perceived threat, of the working class, Mrs. Fellowes understands her own status in relation to the "street-cleaner," and she chooses to reach across class lines to become part of his world. In Party Going’s fog, even personal servants are separate from their upper-class superiors (spatially and in terms of fellow-feeling); Mrs. Fellowes symbolizes a convincing alternative.

As Mengham has pointed out, Mrs. Fellowes, unlike the partygoers, is the only character in Party Going who actually manages to travel within the space of the text, though all of the traveling she does "happens inside her own body" (Mengham 37). When Julia comes upon Mrs. Fellowes when she has just woken up from a dream, she realizes that "[Mrs. Fellowes] looked as if she had been traveling" (244). Yet, Mrs. Fellowes only travels back in time to her youth, to remember the society of which she was once an integral part. The fact that she is ignored by the partygoers while being set in relief to their inability to understand the society around them accentuates the disjunction of upper-class society in Party Going's social world. When Julia goes upstairs hoping that Max seduces her, she takes note of the hotel decorations, but fails to understand any of the historical context:

One of these [wall paintings] was of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, on a marble terrace. He stood to his violin and eight fat women reclined on mattresses in front while behind was what was evidently a great conflagration.

"Nero and his wives," she said and passed on.

Another was...a large bed with covers turned back and half in, held out of it a fat girl with fat legs sticking out of her nightdress and one man menacing and another disappearing behind curtains.

"Here's a to-do," she said. (92)

To Julia, the foreground of each picture is important, but the rest is negligible. Julia sees these pictures as if they were the events of her own social group, her own social "to-do's." In the last painting, of a church in Scotland, she even exclaims: "Oh, do look, Max darling...Isn't that like the church...which you took last winter, do you remember?" (92). However, there is no conflagration at the end of Party Going, nor is there a Neronian orgy. Green does not suggest that society needs to be overturned, or that the working class needs to act out against the upper class, or that the privileges of the socialites are being grossly abused. Rather, he suggests that the upper class partygoers have lost touch with the vitality of class organization. Green suggests the tension in society is caused by this misunderstanding, and that Mrs. Fellowes anguish is a result of her reaction against this loss.

Social class, in Party Going, is a flawed institution, one that has become incongruous with its social function. For Green, the upper-class youth may be to blame, but in their inability to use language to understand society, a greater social problem is articulated. In the end, even Embassy Richard is able to take leave of the unjust English society he helps to complicate and the class system is never overturned. Yet, the Hermes character shows that some class system must survive in order for community of some kind to exist in society. In Party Going, Green offers no absolute solution; he merely describes the disjunction between the divisions class should bridge and those that it, in the 30s, is accentuating instead. Through true fellow-feeling and the community identity these feelings would built, the linguistic fog might finally lift, and those identities that are lost in society—like those of the young partygoers—could be rediscovered. The class system, however, does not need to be toppled; the social infrastructure does not need to be burned. However, in Caught, this fire will alight, and its flames will help us understand further how class difference functions in society, and why.

chapter three

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice

— T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

Caught: Language Trap

Almost every one of Green's novels takes one word as its title and while usually the word is a present participle or gerund, it almost always ends with "ing."[14] These titles, like Living, and Party Going, as we have seen, connote ongoing action and fluidity and yet the novels explore the opposite. In Living, Lily and Richard are stuck in the linguistic impotence, and thus the social restrictions, of their classes. Likewise in Party Going, the young society darlings, literally caught inside the train station, are also caught by their inability to communicate, even among their own social group. It is in light of this thematic project—and as a comment on it—that Green chose to title his fourth novel Caught. Caught continues to concern itself with characters that are somehow immobile. However, in Caught, the characters are not alone in their uncomfortable stasis; rather, all of society is stuck. Unlike Green's previous novels, Caught is about characters and a society involved in change, expecting to change, yet unable to. Just as it is one of Green's only novels with a title that is a simple adjective, and one reflecting the rigidity of society, so it is the only title that describes the nature of the social stasis Green depicts. The characters in Caught cannot escape the social situation we find them in, no matter how much they may desire to do so; thus, they are "caught" in it.

Caught is Green's first wartime novel set in London. It begins early in the Second World War when the city had yet to experience any bombings, but expected to do so any day. Treglown explains that "many Londoners assumed that the outbreak of war would immediately bring air raids of overwhelming ferocity, total collapse of civilian morale, and rapid invasions by Nazis" (Treglown 114); but it didn't. Instead, England's entry into the war was followed by almost fourteen months of waiting, until the big Blitz finally began in 1941. The thousands in the Auxiliary Fire Service—originally expected to be the most front-line military force—as well as the rest of English society, had nothing to do but anticipate the cataclysmic change that the war was expected to bring, eventually. Caught, in this way, depicts a society “caught in time,” trapped between the memories of a familiar, settled society and the as-of-yet unknown post-war society. The social world of Caught is an impromptu society created in a fissure, existing in an unstable in-between time. Society can neither move forward, reacting to the changes brought by the war, nor can it fall back into the old habits and patterns of pre-war, peaceful, society. Class boundaries reflect this insecurity, and characters in Caught are for the first time conscious of the limitations of their social class as well as able to express interest in challenging these boundaries.

The narrative Green uses reflects the distance between the present, wartime society that is so turbulent and the distant, peaceful society that seemed to be, in contrast, the very image of social stability. Memories and descriptions of the past are romantic to many anxious citizens expecting a cataclysmic war on the home front. However, Green’s narration of present events is repeatedly curt and blunt. In response to their uneasiness with the social displacement caused by the new, fluid, wartime society, the characters either grasp for what they thought were stable prewar social identities or attempt to revise their class positions into what they hope will offer them a new chance to be happy. This tension is illustrated in Green’s dialogue, in the voices the characters use to discuss the wartime world. Class affiliation is either reaffirmed or manipulated by dialect, though inevitably, language alone cannot change any character's class position. Pye and Roe struggle to capitalize on the fluctuations of wartime society, hoping to find happiness in different class affiliations. However, their notions of class identity fail to accord with social reality, and it is only through the literal fire of the Blitz that they are able to break free of the social classes that they are caught within. Only in this final display of heroism, does Green hint of a humanity underneath the social infrastructure of class. However, the failings of language and the inability of the characters that survive the Blitz to transcend their class speech shows the true limit of this revelation: even in wartime, the social world is caught in the bind of class distinctions.

Getting Caught Up: A Summary

In Green's wartime Caught, social roles are undefined. Wartime is depicted as instigating opportunities for social interaction between members of different classes that would normally be unlikely, if not impossible, in a peaceful England. Hence, the characters of Caught are filled with an anxiety about how to understand the social world and a hesitation as to what role they should play in its coming reformation. Namely, because of the influence of military rank and the status accorded to those fighting in the war, the usually implied rigidity of class boundaries are blurred and complicated. These complications, and their ramifications, are the subject matter of Caught. Here, a summary will help contextualize how this social scenario is played out in the novel.

Set during the period known as The Phony War,[15] Caught explores one group of Londoners living and working in an Auxiliary fire station while awaiting the bomb-destruction they have volunteered to combat. The firemen live near their former homes, sometimes near their former jobs, but are unable to fully take part in them. Instead, they spend their days in preparation for an event that will bring unknown consequences. Caught centers on the wartime experiences of two men, a volunteer auxiliary fireman Richard Roe and his boss, a career fireman, Albert Pye. The war has left each man displaced. Roe is an upper-class office worker who has volunteered to serve as an auxiliary fireman. Consequently, Roe is displaced among the working class. He has sent his young son Christopher to live at his country estate with his deceased wife’s parents and sister, presumably because “war puts men in this position...that they can do little about their own affairs, they have no prospects, their incomes fluctuate wildly, heavier taxation is always threatened” (1). Roe's anxiety about connecting to his son is dramatized in the opening of the novel when, on leave from the station, he visits his son in the country. There, we learn that before the war, his son was kidnapped by the sister of, coincidentally, Roe’s boss Pye, but that the child had been later returned safely. This kidnapping, of Roe's son and heir, serves as a foil to the social anxiety Roe experiences in his new working-class environment. The challenge to his upper-class identity that this wartime social displacement causes is echoed in the threat to his inability to pass this identity on to his son that the kidnapping embodies. Pye's working class sister threatens the legacy of Roe’s upper class bloodline, just as the war threatens to alter Roe's (and Pye’s) class standing. The kidnapping also serves as an aberrant and complex link between the two men. It is complicated and intensified by the fact that Pye is a member of a lower social class than Roe, but is, functionally, Roe’s superior at the fire station.

Significantly, however, it is the war that has caused this class-discrepancy for Pye as well: Pye, as a working-class fireman, has only been promoted to a leadership position because the impending bombings have increased the demand for firemen. Pye is ranked above Roe, but classed below him; they are both fully aware of the ironic obstacle this inevitably causes, and yet are both determined to work beyond this contradiction. Both men struggle to redefine their interactions in lieu of the class incongruity. Because of his position, Pye is also displaced, like Roe, from his own class. Promoted, and in a leadership position, Pye is no longer viewed as a “worker” by the other fireman that were previously his peers. However, neither is he accepted as someone justified to lead by his superior, the superintendent Trant Dodge. Pye constantly tries to reconcile his wartime identity with his identity as a member of the working class, an identity he confidently held before the war; he often reminds the other men of his extensive time spent as a “worker:” “I have scrubbed floors white for twenty years,” (90) and he constantly struggles, and fails, to execute the duties of his new, administrative job.

The novel does not end with scenes of Roe and Pye fighting fires during the Blitz. Instead, it ends with one scene in which Roe describes, in flashback, the fires he fought against. The entire story, except for this final scene, is entirely about the mounting anxiety leading up to the large-scale German bombings on London. The conclusion to the novel comes as a marked anti-climax indicating the eventual lack of social change brought by the war.

Narrative Style: Past Versus Present

The narrative of Caught exaggerates the change wartime has brought to London and amplifies the character's unease in this new society. Narration in a manner reminiscent of Green's most "fog-like" and romantic passages in Party Going recount the past and describe the pre-war world while description of the present is often as "telegraphic" as the most abrupt passages in Living. Stokes has recorded more long sentences in Caught than in any of Green's novels; and yet "the basis of the non-dialogue is the short sentence" (Stokes 209, 207). Whenever Pye thinks about his sister, his most tangible tie to his working-class upbringing, or ponders his youth, the narrative becomes looping and poetic:

In the grass lane, and Pye groaned as he lay in the floor, his head by a telephone, that winding lane between high banks, in moonlight, in color blue, leaning back against the pale wild flowers whose names he had forgotten her face, wildly cool to his touch, turned away from him and the underside of her jaw which went soft into her throat that was a colour of junket, oh my God he said to himself as he remember how she panted through her nose and the feel of her true, roughened hands as they came to repel him and then, at the warmth of his skin, had stayed irresolute at the surface while, all lost, she murmured, "Will it hurt?" (40-1)

Passages like this one characteristically use elision ("the pale wild flowers whose names he had forgotten her face"), and use the conglomeration of many compound clauses to convolute the meaning. This style contributes a sense of otherworldliness to the prose by making the past often seem dreamlike. By bleeding ideas and descriptions into others, the narrative often gives the impression that the past is hazy and unreal. Character’s recall this past with feelings of nostalgia and the dreamlike narrative style underscores the difference of the past from the present reality. Pre-war society and the aspects of society that symbolize this past, outside the fire station, is a world in which class stability seemed to be a reliable given. Consequently, the rhetoric and imagery that conveys the past as different from the present and that shows the inaccessibility of the past social structure in the current wartime world is conveyed with this narrative style. Stokes points out that "most other passages of this kind concern Richard Roe—his memories of boyhood, of his first experiences..., of his wife among the roses at his country home...of Christopher's abduction" (Stokes 210). In other words, the passages in which the narrative is the most romantic and embellished are those that depict the past world. Thus, the remembered past world, not influenced by the displacing force of the war, is set apart through style from the current wartime world.

Hence, these passages stand in stark contrast to the descriptions of present events. In describing wartime society and the events in the fire station, the narrative grows terse, loses its poetry, and explains events as they happen instead of the emotional content contextualizing them:

It seemed like a long time before they drove out through the slush, but they were quite fast. In those early days taxis drew in the pumps. Richard was upset that Chopper, who was in the charge of the appliance, should ride standing on the step and not use the seat made for him next the driver. They careened along. They stopped. Pye's appliance had drawn up in front. Pye and Chopper plugged through a peacefully open door. "It can't be," Richard thought. But it was. He looked up. (78)

Characterized by short, matter-of-fact sentences, passages such as the one above describe the world in a way that suggests unmediated reality. As if struggling itself to make sense of the world of social instability that confronts Roe, Pye and the others, this narrative describes the wartime world and the actions that take place in it in as clear-cut a way as possible. In relying on sharp observation and colloquial realism to confront the present, and opulent rhetoric and poetic imagery to describe the past, Green accentuates the differences between the past settled world and the present turbulent one. However, it is in the dialogue of the characters that Green accounts for this opposition and dramatizes the reaction to this social flux.

Piper and Shiner: Speaking With Class

Characters in Caught, finding themselves in an unstable social world, re-define themselves by exaggerating their own speech, and thus struggle to proclaim wartime class identities similar to those they had before the war through their language. The dialogue in Caught presents characters as being particularly self-conscious about the manner in which they speak. Piper, an older worker at the station who befriends Roe early on, is determined to reaffirm his pre-war position as a member of the lower class through the language he uses. At age fifty-nine, he uses phrases and expressions that even the other working-class firemen find out-dated and silly, but he is determined to use language that reaffirms his subservience to those people with authority and hence declares his working-class standing. In an effort to show respect for Pye, the station boss, and subsequently to show the deference to authority expected of a worker, he “would hush any recruit who shuffled, and then would repeat the last few words of what he had just heard [Pye say]” (49). He echoes Pye to such a degree that Pye becomes unable to stand him. But, in literally copying Pye's own language, in a manner that both reaffirms Pye's authority and displaces his own independence, he loses his own voice in order to associate himself with a lower-class identity challenged by the war. The war has placed him alongside upper-class fireman (like Roe) and he must follow the orders of a working-class peer (Pye). By exaggerating his language he exaggerates his class standing and is able to remain comfortable through the fluctuations of wartime society.

In a similar manner, the former sailor, Shiner, reaffirms his pre-war class position by performing his class in his speech. By restating the language he hears others around him use, and by describing what goes on around him, in a rough, working-class dialect that he better understands and that he more clearly associates with the working-class, he reaffirms his pre-war working-class identity. Like Piper, Shiner constantly defers to Pye, calling him “Skipper” and "Chief" (49, 63). But Shiner also takes an active role in (per)forming class identity: When Shiner is told that Pye had “played it safe,” he impulsively replies with the phrase reworded as “boxed safe” (43) as if to recast Pye’s actions in a more authentically working-class light. Shiner also uses the adjective "conga," and other blatantly working-class colloquialisms, "to cover almost everything" that happens during the war (41) with a thick working-class veneer: "'A conga night,' he said. He called each Rescue man 'cock.' He remarked that their whisky was dodgy" (41). His speech is clearly working-class, but in exaggerated form. Even Richard Roe is conscious of the artificiality of Shiner’s speech. Roe makes light of Shiner's vernacular by attributing it to his having seen the film "King Kong" (41). Shiner's speech, however, is not exaggerated for purely comic effect (though the effect is often funny). His speech is affected because he tries to reassign noticeably working-class associations to the ambiguous social world the war has brought. Shiner’s use of “conga” does recall King Kong’s use of “native speech.” However, for Shiner, "conga," “cock” and other Kong-like phrases align his language with the dominant masculinity and sexuality found in King Kong. For Shiner, working class identity is masculine and therefore his language must correlate to this identity.

Before the war as a sailor, Shiner had little to no interaction with upper-class business men like Roe (64), and so in assigning Roe the epithet "cock" and referring to his whisky as "dodgy" he situates Roe in terms he understands, masculine terms, working-man’s terms. Hence, he places his interactions with Roe in a familiar social context. For example, when Shiner, unable to understand Roe’s motivations for not trying to seduce two women, and for letting Pye try instead, labels Roe “pansy” (64), he displays an effort to translate this confusing situation into his working-class mindset: "He [i.e. Shiner] had once been out in a foreign port with two girls and a pansy, the pansy paying, and it ended in smashing stroke, he'd had both girls in the same bed" (64). Shiner tries to understand Richard Roe's actions in terms of his experiences in the pre-war working-class world. Hence, he labels him with a working-class slang word that justifies and contextualizes Richard's otherwise confusing actions. "Pansy" does not accurately describe Richard. Rather, Richard's actions, his passing-off of the two girl's to Piper, is an expression of Richard’s own class displacement. Richard passes off the sexual opportunity, not because he is a homosexual, but because he hopes to curry favor with working-class Pye (with an action he assumes a working-class man would appreciate), and because he acts out his upper-class self-conception as a decent gentleman, uninterested in sexual engagements with strange girls.[16] It is to this already befuddled action, an action motivated by Richard's own class confusion, that Shiner struggles to assign a version of his stable, pre-war conception of class. In this way, Shiner uses language to translate the unstable class relations caused by wartime into a class paradigm he can understand, to insist, by exaggeration, his membership into a pre-war social infrastructure that makes sense to him. Because class boundaries have been threatened by the events of the war, each character is self-conscious about his class position, and characters like Shiner and Piper activate language with dialect in order to counteract this feeling of displacement.

Roe and Pye: Trying to Travel

In a similar manner, but with a different aim, Roe and Pye use language to assert their wartime identities. Unlike Shiner and Piper, however, Pye and Roe dramatize the social flux caused by the war by manipulating their voices in an attempt to change their social identities. Like no other characters in Green's oeuvre, Roe and Pye try to forge new, more complex and more miscellaneous class identities, and they do so by taking advantage of the unique elasticity of the wartime social world. Pye and Roe are constructed as parallel characters. Their names each represent a Greek letter, Pi and Rho, that when taken together create the word pyro, "the Greek root for terms describing fire" (Russell 149). Though they each come from different class backgrounds, they are both given names that accentuate their social ambiguity: Roe's full name is "Richard Roe," the legal corollary of "John Doe," used for anonymous plaintiffs in common law cases. In Caught, this association accentuates Roe’s ambiguous class position as an upper-class man now working as a fireman with other workers. Pye’s name is also indefinite. His surname sounds a lot like “Piper” and almost blends with the name of Roe’s sister “Dy” and he is given no functional first name.[17] Throughout the novel, Pye and Roe serve as mirrors for each other, and offer an alternative reaction to the class displacement as presented by Shiner and Piper. They both acquire lovers from classes different than their own, they both have trouble performing aspects of their new, ironic, work duties (the business man becomes worker, the worker must administrate) and they both are haunted by women from their pre-war lives (their wife and sister, respectively, that tie them to their pre-war social groups). Both struggle vigorously to fit into the classes that frame the new social roles that they take on. Roe seeks the camaraderie and sexual freedom he sees as an integral part of the working class in his wartime job as a fireman and Pye seeks the respect, sexual power and financial stability he sees as an integral part of upper-class life in his new role as a sub-station head. Yet, in both cases, their attempts to cross over to a new class position fail. Neither language nor action can give them authentic membership in the classes of which they think they want to be a part.

When Richard returns home on leave to visit his son, his sister-in-law is surprised by the harsh tones and working-class phrases that have entered his speech. Yet, while he effects the tones of working-class speech, he never is able to communicate as a member of the working class. In conversing with Shiner, Richard is depicted as nervous (“talking too fast…he wound up rather lamely”) and as struggling to use working-class expressions by borrowing Piper’s phrases (64). He laughs “as loud as he dared and he swore all he knew” in order to talk like Shiner (63-4) and yet, still does not understand half of what Shiner says. The dialogue breaks down. Shiner is equally at a loss in Richard’s company as Richard is in his (65). In a situation unique to wartime, these two men of different classes have become equal in occupation. However, because they originally come from disparate backgrounds (“they had neither of them come across anyone in the least resembling the other [before the war]”), they share a class vocabulary and class inflections but they are unable to forge a true interpersonal connection (66). Richard tries to access the power of language in a manner like Shiner, but for the opposite effect. However, his new social position fails to offer him a new social perspective and his difference from Shiner remains. Shiner remains unconvinced that Roe is an authentic worker, let alone a social peer.

In a similar way, Pye is constantly aware of his social disadvantage because of his working-class identity, repeating over and over that “my father gave only what he could afford, namely a working man’s ordinary education” (19). He still tries to affect "educated tones" when serving in his leadership position, however, sometimes sounding very articulate and grammatically lucid: "When I got to an age when I could use my mental processes, I found I had grown to be a man in the world other men had made to their own advantage" (15). He also slips easily into working-class "tones" when he is nervous or excited, projecting at these times a tone that is much more vibrant and seems more natural: "if ‘e wants us to have our eyes gouged and ‘atpins stuck through us where it would do most bloody damage, I says, why, what Mr. Dodge thinks best is good enough for me only why don’t ‘e tell me ‘isself or pick up ‘is pen" (44). Late in the novel, when Pye's relationship with Prudence, the higher-class girl who lives next door to the station, is coming to an end, "her educated accents cut him" (152) when he is at his most honest and emotionally needy. Just as Roe could not connect with Shiner, though he could imitate his speech, so Pye is unable to connect with Prudence through language when he needs her for more than sexual fulfillment. In the end, Pye is able to affect upper-class speaking patterns but is never able to express himself honestly with this voice. Like Roe, he learns the vocabulary of the class he is traveling with, but never can fully express himself in this “foreign” tongue.

When In Rome: Misunderstanding Class

The problem with Pye and Roe's attempt at infiltrating new social landscapes is that they both attempt to find access to over-romanticized and inaccurate versions of the class they wish to enter. Roe is obsessed with hiding his upper-class identity and Green frequently situates Roe’s actions in the context of this process. Each one of Roe’s actions has the potential to link him with his pre-war, leisure-class self or his new, ambiguous “working man” position. Early in the novel, eager to blend in, Roe hopes to fit in with the working-class men by hiding the fact that he used the services of a taxi to get to the station (33). But later, Roe uses his upper-class privilege to fit in: “Richard bought the Regulars more beer than anyone. He was as bad as the rest, and more successfully, because he had more money” (45). Roe avoids honesty with his fellow workers and instead situates himself as the worker he believes most accurately embodies his working-class idealization. This dishonest method has an unfulfilling result.

When Roe experiences changes as brought on by new working conditions, he begins to look, outwardly, like a member of the working-class. He imagines himself as part of a massive network of noble workers, a member of a romantic brotherhood and a supportive community:

In his dirt, his tiredness, the way light hurt his eyes and he could not look, in all these he thought he recognized that he was now a labourer, he thought he had grasped the fact that, from now on, dressed like this, and that was why roadmen called him mate, he was one of the thousand million that toiled and spun.” (48-9)

However, Roe is never able to fully grasp the true nuance of this working-class identity. He wants working-class identity to offer him escape from the problems in his life, to give him the connection he does not have to his son, to reconnect him with the memory of his deceased wife. The changed physical attributes do not give him access to this lower-class world; the working class he imagines does not actually exist. Roe "flirts" with working-class identity, but he does not attempt to become a true worker. Rather, he tries to emulate an unrealistic romantic notion of "worker-ness", much like the false notions of working-class that Dick Dupret entertains in Living.

This flirtation and failure is even more evident when he goes so far as to become romantically engaged with a working-class WAFS (or Wartime Auxiliary Fire Service) girl. When he begins to date Hilly, he does so because he craves the sexual freedom and fulfillment he has developed as part of his romantic notion of the working-class. After being trained as a fireman, because he realizes that now "girls looked him straight, long in the eyes as never before, complicity in theirs, blue, and blue, and blue" (47), he decides to forgo what he thinks of as “upper-class tact” and decides during the war to experience what “he imagined [working-class] men and girls were sharing” (63): sexually fulfilling romance. When he realizes that Hilly is also blue eyed (70), he decides to seek this with her, a fellow worker. In his new “workers body,” he feels more sexually potent than ever and loses all his former inhabitations. Roe uses his wealth to woo Hilly, and treats her only as the sexual object he imagines socially unrestricted working-class men are entitled to enjoy. In dating Hilly, he identifies with his idea of working-class masculinity and sexual license. However, in the relationship, he exposes the shallow nature of his identification with her class.

For Hilly, the war is “a tremendous release” (98), allowing her to get away from her “uncle’s business” as a “sort of superior filing clerk” (98) and to enter into a more ambiguous class space—one that seems to offer her more opportunity for social mobility. Roe offers her access to his upper-class world and seems to make her socially mobile when he dates her. Roe often takes Hilly to “a small place in Soho,” a fancy restaurant where they share “a bottle of claret” (97). On these expensive dates, Roe and Hilly connect; they begin a love affair that lasts the extent of the war. Just as Roe’s altered physical appearance only allows him to entertain romantic notions of working-class identity, however, his interest in Hilly is not based on actual affection. Roe never considers Hilly an equal, or even a "fellow worker," and remarks that he is “glad to see no one he recognized also having dinner” (97) at the restaurant to which he takes Hilly. Instead, Roe remains upper class in relation to Hilly, through the inequalities between them. She remains dependent upon his wealth for their dates and unable to understand his lack of interest in long-term love. Even though he hopes, by dating her, to more fully experience working-class life, the relationship only further accentuates the certainty of his difference.

When the novel ends, Roe returns to his country estate and spends time recuperating with his sister-in-law Dy and his son. Hilly is mentioned only in passing, and is remembered by Dy only as Roe's sexual object:

"You remember Hilly," he asked awkwardly, "the driver you met when you brought Christopher along that time?"

"Oh her," Dy said, remembering the girl very well. She has obviously been up to something with Richard. (177)

Roe's involvement with Hilly exposes the contradiction in his interest in becoming working class. All Roe can say about Hilly is "Hilly? She's still about". For Roe, Hilly was fantasy-fulfillment, just a lover, not a serious "significant other" and they, in this way, never really became class equals.

Pye entertains similarly romantic notions about upper-class standing and thus is never effectively able to transcend his position as working-class. Placed in a leadership position he would otherwise never have, Pye struggles to reconcile his working-class standing with his new status as an authority during the war. However, his new authority causes him to make assumptions about what it means to be "separate" from his fellow workers and thus to misunderstand those whom he is supposed to lead. He is unused to having men under him, and assumes that when they aren’t happy, it is intentionally in order to “get him down” (82). He finds himself responding bitterly to the workers beneath him while still trying to identify with them as an equal. He resents the fact that the entire station does not come to him “with its troubles” (87) even though he sets himself apart from the other men by constantly trying to delineate his special status. When the cook Mary, also confused by the new structure of wartime society, abandons her post to visit her son-in-law, Pye feels that he should cover for her. Separated from Mary’s low position merely as a WAFS worker, however, Pye misunderstands her needs and fails to empathize effectively with her actions. He acts, instead, in accordance with what he thinks a leader should do, in a way that he thinks will preserve the integrity of his authority and his pension. He fails to support or report Mary and hesitates in his response to her absence. Consequently, his actions provoke the suspicions of his boss, Trant. Once he is in Trant’s bad graces, Pye is never actually able to exist comfortably in his position of power. Trant’s greater authority constantly mitigates Pye’s struggle for authority, and Pye is “never the same” (79). As a working-class man, Pye should be particularly able to understand and respond to the concerns and desires of his employees. However, because he confuses leadership with notions of upper-class privilege and assumes it should automatically bring him admiration, wealth, and respect, he loses the support of Trant. Consequently, he loses his authority and his only concrete chance of rising out of the working-class status he thinks he can disown.

In another instance of his attempt to act in the way he imagines a “promoted,” socially mobile, person should, Pye begins to date Prudence, one of the higher-class girls living next door to the fire station. Prudence, like her roommate Ilse, is “an expensive girl, discreetly enameled” (47). In order to entertain Prudence properly, Pye feels he must frequent the same nightclub in Soho that Roe visits with Hilly. On their dates, he finds the high prices to be an “offence against his upbringing” (118). Pye struggles to financially support his idea of Prudence’s desires because he thinks the expense enters him into the upper class. Pye is unable to separate his designs for class-mobility from his ideas of financial affluence and amorous success that he conflates with this mobility. He persistently struggles to make his romantic notions of what it means to be upper class seem real: “he could not possibly afford [dating Prudence]. Yet he was too foxy to let her see” (118). In the end, Pye shares only sex with Prudence: “bed was all they had…in common” (119). They arrive at no interpersonal connection and create no emotional link. Though Pye is “a warm-hearted man” (45), he cannot access Prudence because, ultimately, he cannot overcome his romantic notions of what it means to be upper-class in order to offer Prudence the support she desires from a man. In the end, Pye fails, much like Roe did, because he is unable to understand what it means to transcend class lines. Both search for an image of class that promises to free them from their discomforts. They seek class that is inherently “other” and romantic in its difference. Hence, in this way, they refuse to let go of those aspects of their class identities that they hoped to preserve even across class lines. In this way, they remain oblivious to those aspects of identity that align a person with a social class.

The consequences of Pye’s attempted social mobility are dire and explicate the dangers of breaking out of the communities that social class provides. Though Pye disassociates himself from his pre-war class, he is not accepted by anyone outside his class and subsequently, without any a class group in which he feels like he belongs, Pye is utterly alone and breaks down. In the end, Pye exists in a classless position and beleaguered by the reproaches of Trant, the explicit rejection by Prudence and the continuing insecurities associated with his deflated leadership position, he begins to travel the streets of London. Awkwardly mirroring his sister’s kidnapping of Roe’s son, Pye brings home a young boy to spend the night in his room. Though Roe insists later to Dy, “I don’t say it was sexual. I’m sure it wasn’t” (197), Pye’s action seems to be the “last straw” in his isolation. Pye’s desperate grasping for the company of the young boy encapsulates his complete isolation from any social community. Ashamed, and in consequence more dislocated from society, Pye kills himself. In a final ironic action, he sticks his head in a gas oven to end his life. Pye cannot function without an identity, without a way of understanding himself, and his dislocation from all of society, from both the social class he strove to enter and the class he tried to escape, leaves him no recourse but self-annihilation. In this way, his interest in crossing the boundaries of class and his inability to grasp the realities of class distinctions precipitate his death.

Like Roe, who conflates working-class identity with his notions of working-class freedom, Pye associates working-class identity with the lack of freedom, and any escape from the working class with immediate privilege. However, because neither man allows for actual understanding of the human element behind class stereotypes that attract them, they fail to enter the community class can offer. Pye’s death speaks to the dangers of having an ambiguous class identity—without an explicit class community, he does not have any class, he is nothing, like the Hermes characters in Party Going. His death was the consequence of his misunderstanding of what class supplied. Assuming higher class status would offer him comfort through wealth, he was unable to actually become a member of any class community, the one in which he was raised or the one into which he thought he was entering. In this way, Pye lost all attachment to the social world. Roe, however, is given a chance to see his romantic folly for what it is when he lives through the socially transforming event that is the Blitz.

Transcendence, And Return

In the end of the novel, Roe is able to see past his misconceptions about class and to understand humanity beyond mere social distinctions. However, he cannot find language to express this revelation and thus fails to forge a new classless community in the social world. In the last section of the novel, Roe has returned to his country estate to convalesce from an injury incurred while combating the Blitz. Once home, he tries to communicate the experiences of the Blitz to his sister-in-law, Dy. The experiences of the Blitz are not described in the main body of the novel and it is only here, in retrospect, that the reader is given any idea of what went on. Even in the most general sense, Roe is unable to describe accurately what he experienced, and the narrative accentuates this incapacity by correcting and embellishing Roe's account. Green uses a narrative technique that is unprecedented in his previous work: After each description that Roe offers in his own voice, the narrative echoes with a parenthetical, often contradictory, and always more poetic, added description of the same scene:

“It was acres of timber storage alight about two hundred yards in front, out in the open, like a huge wood fire on a flat hearth, only a thousand times bigger.”

(It had not been like that at all. What he had seen was a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.) (181)

In competition with the omniscient voice, Roe is never able to evoke the emotive force of the events of the Blitz. Yet, he is adept enough to realize the social effects of the event. It is in defense of their common social identity, their British identity, that the events of the Blitz unites Roe with his fellow fire fighters as "heroes": "'But what makes me laugh,' and he was not even smiling, 'is to think how different the real thing is to what we thought it was going to be. And the way that people have changed, you've no idea. We're absolutely heroes now'" (176). In this statement, Roe essentially contrasts his post-Blitz ideas about social dissolution with those that existed in anticipation of the Blitz, throughout the entire body of Caught. The reality that everyone thought the Blitz was going to bring (a cataclysmic force of social change), is contrasted to the way people really “changed," into a unified social group. The men he fought alongside become more than workers or sexually free working-classmen. Instead, they become British defenders of London, noble men above all, and social beings second: "after twelve months there we were suddenly men again, or for the first time" (192). Likewise, it is only during battle that Shiner and Roe can understand and agree with each other: "So I said 'Well we're staying.' Shiner said 'OK, mate. If you say so that's all right by me." (192). It is in this moment alone that Roe is able to forget the romantic idea he had formed about the working class. Only here, in the actual combat of war, are the last social barriers broken down and members of different classes able to actually connect and communicate, to forge an alternative community. However, as with Party Going, Roe finds himself unable to communicate this revelation to his sister-in-law, a member of his own social class. Only, in this instance, it is because Dy has not experienced the trauma of battle or the socially emancipating effects of such an intensely unifying experience.

In re-analyzing the pre-Blitz wartime world after the Blitz, Roe is able to forgive Pye; but Dy cannot. Looking back on the fires, Roe realizes that "we were suddenly face to face with it, as I had been with Pye two months before when I pulled him out of the gas oven" (184). In other words, in the battle, Roe realizes the essential decency of his fellow firefighters. Consequently, as he can understand his fellow combatants in retrospect, so can he understand Pye. He tries to carry this community identity into the post-Blitz world by explaining his empathy to Dy by recounting the tragedy of Pye's experience with the boy he brought to the station, and how it was Piper's talk alone that led to Pye's humiliation. But Dy is unable to understand Roe's point of view and responds to his explanation with disgust, just as Roe realizes his linguistic impotence:

"Don't be a fool," she said angrily. She thought it was absurd.

He was silent for once. He felt his rage rise.

"So Pye committed suicide?" She asked, although Richard had written to tell her weeks before.

"In the gas oven," he said. "But he had the sense to turn off the automatic burners in the boiler first. Or we should all have been blown up."

He waited, watching his anger. Then he heard the verdict.

"I can't help it," she said, "I shall always hate him, and his beastly sister."

This was too much for the state he was in. He let go. "God damn you," he shouted, releasing everything, "you get on my bloody nerves, all you bloody women, with all your talk."

It was as though he had gone for her with a hatchet. She went off without a word, rigid. (197-8)

Tellingly, Richard includes the detail of Pye's goodwill in his description of his suicide, indicating his ultimate exoneration of the man. However, Dy cannot understand Roe's forgiveness and falls back on her dislike of Pye, based on his relationship to Christopher's kidnapper and on his class standing, which leaves her unable to empathize with his plight. Dy has spent the entire war (with the exception of a few visits to London to see Richard) in the country, far from any social instability that may have challenged her notions of class identity. Consequently, Richard is unable to communicate to her what he has learned in battle. Dy's final inability to accept Richard's feelings about Pye undercut any assumption that she may have understood the reality of the socially leveling force of the Blitz through Richard's description. Presumably, she had no access to the embellished descriptions supplied by the parenthetical narrative, and hence, her entire understanding of the Blitz was supplied by Richard's language; language which ultimately fails to communicate its intended meaning to her. Her failure to accept Richard's pronouncement of Pye's goodness merely displays the failing of his language to express the transformation he and his fellow firefighters went through during the fires. In the end, however, she also walks away “without a word.” The war did not fail to change English society: it has created new rifts, between those who experienced the social emancipation of the battlefields and those who did not. As a result, the community that the Blitz helped the firefighters to form, the community that spanned class lines and that seemed more convincing and more supportive to Roe, cannot survive. Roe, at the end, is caught by his inability to communicate and his inability to express his realization of social unity. Likewise, Dy parallels Pye (their names are even similar, and rhyme) and is silenced by the war. Dy is caught in the same class mindset she was at the beginning of the novel and presumably, at the end of Caught, society, as well, remains caught—left unchanged by the havoc and social instability of the war. Class, in the end, remains the only institution able to offer the community support Green's characters so profoundly need.

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[1] The pun, of course, is unintentional, but the choice to study fiction instead of my “first love”, poetry, was part of my desire to use the thesis to (somewhat forcefully) expand my critical abilities, not just indulge my literary interests.

[2] A similar observation is made by Edward Stokes in The Novels of Henry Green (9). Henry Green was born to wealthy landed gentry in 1905, wrote nine novels, one memoir and a small number of unfinished and shorter works before his death in 1973.

[3] The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines “deictic” as “directly pointing out, demonstrative;” deictics, grammatically, are those words which “directly point out” the referent, such as ‘you,’ ‘this,’ ‘now,’ ‘the,’ ‘a’ and ‘there.’

[4] Quoted by John Updike in his introduction to the omnibus reissue Loving, Living, Party Going: “[Green’s novels] reproduce, as few English novels do, the actual sensations of living’ (7).

[5] Living is Green's first novel to stand in this complex position. The novel that preceded Living, Blindness, was written while Green was studying at Oxford and does not centralize political issues or use stylized language to discuss such issues.

[6] The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines a "moulder" as "A person who makes moulds for casting." It is a skilled position the requires an apprenticeship and a high level of expertise. In this position, Mr. Craigan is not an "average" worker, but a specialist in the context of the iron foundry.

[7]These epithets are almost Homeric in the way they contextualize the characters based on external characteristics that define them socially. It would not be as meaningful to identity Andrew Philpots in the context of the factory as “son of X,” whereas Dick Dupret’s father is the owner of the factory and this relationship alone defines his role in the working hierarchy.

[8] Even when requested by Richard, the longtime manager Walters, who “ran the business” from London, finds it unnecessary to actually visit the foundry even in order to “make thorough study” of it. (Living 172)

[10] According to Rob Mengham:

That the border was a Thirties myth is apparent from a glance at the titles, On the Frontier (Auden and Isherwood), Journey to the Border (Upward), Across the Border (unfinished novel by Graham Greene). (Mengham 46)

[11] In response to the social disposition and the chaotic political state, a great number of Green's literary peers sought to influence the social and political world through their literature. George Orwell, in his 1930s work, depicts the English working class as a beleaguered group ready for massive social change and deserving of much sympathy. In Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933, and in Road to Wigan Pier, 1937, Orwell's work is marked by an exasperated and alarmist tone; he begs his reader to react to the atrocities of the class system he is presenting and to enact political change. Likewise, in 1928, 1930 and 1932, Evelyn Waugh published Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Black Mischief, respectively, a series of novels that satirize and criticize an insipid lifelessness and exaggerated recklessness Waugh perceived in the young and rich upper class. Waugh uses satire and a biting sardonic tone to critique the young people's frivolous actions in a way that intends to inspire a clear negative reaction to the upper class privilege. Green's work seems to work in a similar way. However, Green's novel engages the social themes that Orwell and Waugh document and satirize (respectively) in a more complex, and less politically direct manner, through the style and form of his language. Green does not promote a certain political "cause" or, as I will show, champion one class lifestyle over another.

[12] From Updike's "Introduction" to the Picador omnibus reissue Loving, Living, Party Going (13).

[13] See my discussion of Green’s lack of deicitics in my first chapter, "Living: Language Block" (14).

[14] This includes Living, Loving, Nothing, Doting, Party Going, Concluding; the exceptions, other than Caught, are Back and Blindness.

[15] The Phony War, or “Bore War,” was the period after the British declared war on Germany but before there was any engagement on the British home front. It lasted from October 1939 through April 1940. The major Blitz, on large urban centers like London, did not begin in full until 1941.

[16] We see later, when Roe breaks with this fantasy of chivalry and has an affair with the worker Hilly, that this had more to do with his idea of what signifies “upper-classness” and not with his character.

[17] Pye’s first name, Bert, is only used in one scene in the entire novel. It seems only his sister is familiar with it.