Nothing by Henry Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Less Than Earnest

‘It’s a damnable thing when a chap can only see his mistress on Sunday afternoons, don’t you think my dear? Pressures of work don’t you know? And even then she might decide to visit her mother. Then the chap would have to visit Jane instead. Damned inconvenient isn’t it my dear? Oh look, there’s Jane now. Is that Richard she’s with? I didn’t know Richard’s wife was out of town. She looks well doesn’t she? I do love you so terribly dearest. It’s not too late for you to find someone and have children you know. Oh, waiter! Shall we pay the bill and go to bed my dear?’

A paraphrase but you get the idea: upper middle class English sexual mores are somewhat disconcerting in Nothing. And this is years before the Beatles first LP. Brighton is merely lewd with adultery rather than gay. Servants with pre-war discretion are disappearing but obsequious restaurant staff are still available even if champagne is in short supply.

The children of the professional and ministerial classes are rebelling against their parents, of course. But it is the parental lack of morality and hypocrisy that they find objectionable. Perhaps the children will start a conservative backlash that in turn might provoke free love hippiedom in the subsequent generation. In Nothing nothing seems impossible. The social structure and its customs are Edwardian, or possibly even Regency, but things are fluid in post-war down-at-heel England. All the more reason to whistle in the dark.

Green always has a unique literary ‘thing’ in each novel. In Nothing it seems to be the clipped, disjointed cadence of well-to-do conversation. Talking with each other, however intimately, allows - no, demands - continuous observation of the immediate social environment and the interjection of interesting titbits of gossip, history, or valuations as a sort of seasoning to personal confidences and confessions. Green can bring a whole dining room into a little chat between a man and his mistress without ever describing the place or its inhabitants. The effect is vibratory rather than visual as various frequencies blend to make the harmony of the scene.

The young people talk like their parents but in order to disapprove of them: “‘That’s where the whole difference lies,’ he said ‘between our generations. Their whole lot is absolutely unbridled.’” It’s like the British 90’s comedy Absolutely Fabulous - the children actually parent the adults, who are more or less feckless. “... That generation’s absolutely crazy,” says the son of one philandering woman, in a tone that is used by the school girl, Saffron, in Ab Fab to identical effect. The parents pay absolutely no attention to the conversation of their children except to worry about its incomprehensibility.

Both parents and children seem to be acting according to a script by Freud. Sexual objectives permeate their relationships. Oedipal mothers, Electra-like daughters, married siblings, and several Olympian love triangles form Green’s plot. A particularly English brand of sexual currency is in circulation. There is desire - the men’s adolescently orgasmic, the women’s blatantly economic - but no passion. Calculation not hormones drives the action. The men have more of the latter; the women excel at the former. The children are counters, understandably confused and forced into a sort of prudishness by the adult machinations, “... because they’re like rabbits about sex.”

The naive children put their parents sexual neuroses down to economic rather than psychic trauma: “... one has to be sorry for parents. They had such a lot of money once and we’ve never seen what that was.” Poor things. Green also makes economics the conscious cause of the children’s concerns as well. The only jobs are those with the socialist State. It’s not like the good old days, whenever they were, when private enterprise provided variety and opportunity for the young and aspiring. Tory politics is never far from Green’s narratives.

There is a set-pieceness to Nothing with its coincidences and stage-asides that has charm but for me little substance other than as documentation of a culture in transition. All in all, it’s easier to visualize Green’s characters in Victorian rather than Second Elizabethan dress, high starched collars and crinolines. The situation and structure is that of an Oscar Wilde play, updated to 1948 levels of liberality: The Importance of Being Less Than Earnest, perhaps.

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