Verging (Adventure In A Room)

       Today, being Jane’s next –to-last day before she becomes a “high schooler” (finals ended two days ago; her commencement  – called “Moving Up Day” at her school, which was also her mother’s and grandmother’s  -- is tomorrow), made me think of this very early piece by Henry Green, written while he was an 18-year old Oxford undergraduate.   It is clearly an early attempt at writing his first novel, Blindness, which like his later Back, I find almost unbearable to read because they treat painful subjects in such a “real” way.   The main character in Blindness, a young man just leaving his public school (neatly called “Note”, it is Eton, Green’s public school spelled backward; the man really had a touch in everything he did), is blinded while riding the train home after the end of Term when a rock thrown by a boy shatters the train window.   Amazingly, the same thing happened to me on the Long Island Railroad during high school when my train passed through Forest Hills on my way home from a summer job in Manhattan.   I was unharmed, thank heaven.  This occurred in the era before people sued even if they weren’t hurt and the newspapers and television, because of time and space constraints, didn’t  report  every little weird thing that happened, leaving nothing to memory and future imagination.   

       The Green piece, bearing the excellent title Adventure In a Room, is far from the best thing he ever wrote (the same can be said for Blindness, I think), but shows how very talented he was.  For after Blindness (1926) came Living (1929) and then Party Going (1939) and nothing would ever be the same.

Excerpt from Adventure In A Room (Unpublished c. 1923)

He sat in the Windsor chair, gazing about his room.  It was his last night at Note.  All round were the trifles, the few intimacies of his school life.   For six years he lived with the same old furniture.  He had changed his rooms once or twice, but never the wall paper.  The small brass figure, talking so severely to his dog, must know him very well, he thought.  And it was his last night, tomorrow he would be leaving.  Those pictures too, they had looked down on him all the time he had been at Note.  The paroquet pictures, the few third-rate prints, his own drawing that Armstrong had said showed such originality, his faithful looking glass – all of them must know him well.  His bat he looked on as a pugilist looks on his hands.  He had used his bat for so long without its ever having split that he had come to regard it as part of himself.  The way it ‘drove’ made him think it was alive.  And his books.  Dull school books.  God!  There was a Badminton he had forgotten to return to the school library.  Tomorrow .  .  .  .

(For another kind of "Eton Mess", please see Here for a real seasonal treat.)

Foretold -- Three incredible beginnings of novels (In my beginning is my end)

 

FOG was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

     There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty feet above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once.  She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon. 

     -- Henry Green, Party Going, 1939

 

HUDDLED up in a cope of gold wrought silk he peered around.  Society had rallied in force.  A christening -- and not a child's.

     -- Ronald Firbank, Concerning The Eccentricities Of Cardinal Pirelli, 1926

  
Click!... Here it was again!  He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again...Click!...

     Or would the word 'snap' or 'crack' describe it better?

     It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise.  It was the sound a noise makes when it abruptly ceases:  it had a temporary deafening effect.  It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead.  And yet he was not physically deaf:  it was merely that in this physical way alone could he think of what had happened in his head.

     It was though a shutter had fallen.  It had fallen noiselessly, but the thing had been so quick that he could only think of it as a crack or a snap.  It had come over his brain as a sudden film, induced by a foreign body, might come over the eye. He felt that if only he could 'blink' his brain it would at once be dispelled.  A film. Yes, it was like the other sort of 'film' too -- a 'talkie'.  It was as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed.  The figures on the screen continued to move, to behave more or less logically; but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world.   Life, in fact, which had once been for him a moment ago a 'talkie', had all at once become a silent film.  And there was no music.

     He was not frightened, because by now he was used to it.

     -- Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square, 1941