Concluding by Henry Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Master of Similes

Henry Green’s versatility as a stylist is astounding. His first book, Living, is a 1920’s experiment in Midlands dialect. Caught, written during WWII, on the other hand, is a stream of consciousness, neologistic piece to rival Joyce. Concluding is something else altogether: a post-war tale of bureaucratic Britain told through a sequence of similes that are sprinkled like poppies in the herbaceous borders of an English country house that has been turned into a state-owned St. Trinian’s.

This English garden simile is, I hope, apt. Azaleas “sway their sweetness forwards, back, in silent church bells to the morning.” The branches of a fallen beech tree “that hung before him bent to the tide, like seaweed in the ocean.” A young girl lies half hidden under a tree which has toppled over “in the fallen world of birds, buried there like a piece of tusk burnished by shifting sands.” And rhododendrons have “flowers the colour of blood, and the colour of the flesh of bathers in open air in sunless country.”

Concerned about gardening, Green has an understandable obsession with the weather: The summer sun appears through the clouds “like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it.” And then almost immediately the flowers are hidden as the fog, “redescending, blanketed these off again; as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window...” In the mansion kitchen of the now state-run country pile, the sun pours in “like soda-water through transparent milk.” Not yet done with its influence, that same sun has a certain invasive fluidity, “like a depth of warm water that turned the man’s brown city outfit to a drowned man’s clothes.” The sunlight moves “across his pig’s flanks like pink and cream snails.”

And similes are not just the literary currency of the natural world; they allow Nature to intrude upon Civilisation. Two old men “moved like slow, suiciding moles in the half light.” One of them feels the rising curiosity of an old woman “like the smell of a fox that has just slunk by, back of some bushes.” A middle aged woman kisses her lover “fastening her mouth on his as though she were an octopus that had lost its arms to the propellers of a tug.” The girl under the beech tree has “heavy hair a colour of rust over a tide-washed stovepipe on a shore.” The teaching staff of the institution consider “our main function, [is] that of spinning like tops on our own axis.”

Continuing the nature in mankind theme, birdsong is a favourite of Green. A girl’s young school mates titter about her “like birds at long awaited dusk in trees down by the beach.” Later “their talking was a twitter of a thousand starlings.” When in assembly they have an “outburst of talk as of starlings moving between clumps of reeds to roost.”

The found girl doesn’t merely bathe after her ordeal but stretches out in her tub “like the roots of a gross water lily which had flowered to her floating head and hands.” She herself feels “as though she were bathing by floodlight in the night steaming lake, beech shadowed, mystically warmed.” And so on, and so on.

Green also makes an interesting similetic innovation: a ‘sounds-like’ simile. Mr. Rock, the aged pensioner, is hard of hearing. So he, in a manner my wife says I mimic on a daily basis, mis-hears and repeats phrases. “Spoiled the peace and quiet...” becomes in Rock-speak “Pooled the diet?” The question “You mean the weather?” Is transformed into “Did you say ‘end of her tether?’” “You and your sort” becomes “Lose the fort.” Which then gets echoed back from another curmudgeon as ‘Booze the port.” I can personally attest to the inaccuracy of consonants in the hearing of the aged. Everything sounds like something else, often comically so.

There is one other aspect of Concluding that also suggests Green’s intentions. The story is permeated by sexual frustration and a consequent social morass of sexual innuendo and suspicion. The disappearance of two girls is linked by rumour to every male character. The senior girls are portrayed as Lolitas out to exploit all the available men. There are intimations of rampant lesbianism - among the girls as well as between the two women who run the school, one of whom attempts to seduce the 76 year old Rock. Rock’s grand-daughter has sex with her boyfriend in the place where one of the girls is found.

Building on this sexual theme, one of the more enigmatic phrases that pops up is “Who is there furnicates besides his goose?” This is but one of the offences against what the state-bureaucrats call “The odious deviations from what is usual.” Is it too much to infer that this sex is the binding simile of the entire narrative? Something like ‘The State we are creating is like a state of suppressed sexual rage and fear.’ Speculative at best; but perhaps that’s what good novels are meant to do - provoke speculation.

I don’t think, therefore, that this density of similetic prose in Concluding is incidental or an idle stylistic affectation. It is meant to do work. Green is using it to make a point, to create an effect. The story of Concluding is a comedic attack on bureaucratic Britain, or at least Green’s idea of where the welfare state was headed: a proceduralised set of institutional rules which are used by skilful state employees to avoid responsibility and keep themselves in power, a somewhat more benign 1984. The literary problem of how to make believable a world that is not yet entirely arrived but that only threatens is significant. The reader must feel it to be possible. One of his characters states the problem directly, “You know, sometimes I feel as if I’d something in my head and I simply can’t get out the words.”

I have no external proof but I believe that Green addressed this literary problem using the linguistic theory of ‘expressives’ developed by the American pragmatist philosopher C. I. Lewis. The academic explanation of this theory is complicated. But the common-sense version isn’t. Put simply the theory is that all language is self-referential; words only refer to and are defined by other words; the connection between words and things is not just tenuous but impossible to establish reliably.*

Philosophical readers will recognise this as an issue of epistemology, that discipline which inquires about how we can know what we think we know: who to trust; what to believe; what constitutes something ‘real’. The ability to distinguish rumour, fables, lies, and suppositions from facts is one which we can all appreciate in the age of Trump and his fake news.

Green establishes the epistemological theme in the search for the whereabouts of a missing girl and in the uncertainty about the decision that Mr. Rock must make about his future. But he also employs Lewis’s insight that the self-referentiality of words isn’t a circular trap but in fact offers the possibility of a helical advance in understanding the world.

Words are the only thing we can connect to other words but we can make many, perhaps an infinite number of, connections among words. And every time we add a connection we move ‘upward’ not just round and round, getting more accurately expressive as we go. T.S. Eliot makes just this point in his poem Ash Wednesday when he uses the trope of the spiral staircase.

Lewis specifically cites simile as the figure of speech most effective for addressing the epistemological issue of writing, especially the writing of fiction. If I am correct in my guess, Green has used Lewis’s theory of expressives as his primary literary device in Concluding in order to accomplish his objective of making the book a credibly imminent, or at least impending, picture of British society. For him, despite the unremitting sunshine diffused throughout the book “Everyone was frozen in the high summer of the State.” To melt his audience Green had to orient them with as many similetic cues as he could. And he does.

*A good introduction to this theory is provided in ‘C. I. Lewis: Similetic Certitude and Epistemic Assimilation’ by SANDRA B. ROSENTHAL, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 3 (FALL, 1976), pp. 55-63

Postscript: the following piece on Karl Jaspers appeared in my feed today. Jaspers’s theory of ‘ciphers’ is remarkably similar to Lewis’s ‘expressives’ in its attempt to deal with the Kantian problem of the disjunction of language and reality.

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