Henry Yorke himself knew what could be involved in trying to fuse two or more powerful relationships. He was married and was very close to his wife’s sister, while being involved, too, in several shorter affairs, particularly during the war, when his wife and son were in the country. One was with a woman named Rosemary Clifford, whom he met in his wartime role as a volunteer fireman; another was with Mary Keene, a former artist’s model who was married at the time to the film-maker Ralph (“Bunny”) Keene. In 1943, Mary spent some time at Dedham, in Essex, with the painter Matthew Smith. Henry visited them there at least once. Redham, the home village of Rose in Back, is clearly based on Dedham, and the novelist’s divided affections at the time when he was writing the book seem to lie behind its extravagantly complicated emotions. Some time after the affair ended, Mary Keene wrote a number of comments in her copy. Among them was the chilly sentence, “H. Green’s idea of sublimating the two women into one perfect one is interesting.”9
Evelyn Waugh, an old friend of Green’s who was one of his severer critics, found the Septimanie passage “irrelevant & inelegant.… Very mad”.10 It was an over-hasty judgement. In the tradition of neo-classical “imitation”, what Back does is to adapt the romantic implausibilities of his eighteenth-century French source to a contemporary kind of psychosis. The whole book is not only an encoded version of Henry Yorke’s personal life but also a tragi-comic depiction of other aspects of the world around him in 1945: widespread fears about the social consequences of demobilization; the impact of war on individuals both through direct injuries — Summers has lost a leg, Middlewitch an arm — and in its anonymization of their familiar surroundings, a phenomenon comically symbolized by the novel’s game with bureaucratic initials. Summers has himself contributed to the mechanical processes of depersonalization by introducing a new filing system at the office: a system which fails to work.
Charley Summers is also a mid-twentieth-century version of that avatar of European individualism, the questing knight of medieval and later romance: a man injured in combat, searching for a rose which is both a specific young woman and a symbol of lost peace. Much of Green’s work is characterized by an experimental mixture of registers, the most flamboyant of which is deployed in the opening paragraphs of Back when Charley, newly returned from several years as a prisoner of war, goes to Redham to visit the grave of the woman whose name “of all names, was Rose”. It was under a French rose that the sniper who shot him in the leg was hidden and roses fill the churchyard, their inter-twinings mimicked by the repetitions of Green’s voluptuous syntax:
climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose after rose, while, here and there, the spray overburdened by the mass of flower, a live wreath lay fallen on a wreath of stone, or on a box in marble colder than this day, or onto frosted paper blooms which, under glass, marked each bed of earth wherein the dear departed encouraged life above in the green grass, the cypresses and in those roses gay and bright which, as still as this dark afternoon, stared at whosoever looked, or hung their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.
Critics have pointed out that the manner is reminiscent of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”:11
… when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose …
To contemporaries it more strongly recalled parts of T.S. Eliot’s recent Four Quartets,12 the resemblance lying not only in the imagery but in Green’s counterpointing this literally florid style with the most ordinary characters and utterances. When we finally meet Rose herself, through some letters to Charley which he still regards as “sacred”, her voice is banaclass="underline" “I didn’t half get a moan from dad yesterday in our letter box. You know what I am about letter writing.” No novelist has based more of his art on bathos and if such collisions in Green’s novels are partly there for tragi-comic effect, they also contribute to an argument which runs throughout his work: that it is in ordinariness that the true epiphanies occur. Charley’s quest for his falsely idealized Rose ends in the arms of the unexceptionally genuine Nancy, with her cups of tea and her pregnant cat. After all the narrative’s high rhetoric and Charley’s passionate confusion, Nancy’s invitation on the final page — “Come here, silly” — speaks tenderly for common sense and plain kindness.
The conclusion is far from sentimental, but Green lets it go as far as he can in that direction. The novel is a simultaneously ironic and longing flirtation with sentimentality. An example of the interplay can be seen in its attitude to children, who are more than once described amidst all the confusion as representing the only sure meaning life has. Nancy tells Charley that “Having children’s one of the few things anyone can do for herself in this old world …. It’s all there is that people the same as us can do with their own lives.” She is unconsciously echoing not only Rose’s widower James (“After all having children is what we’re here for …. All there is to life, or that’s how it strikes me”) but also Charley’s boss, Mr Mead. Yet Nancy herself is childless, James is a neglectful father who does little to alleviate the unhappiness of his son Ridley, and the narrative is quick to expose Mead’s home life as less perfect than his myth of it. If having children is all that life offers in Back, it is presented as a mixed gift, not least in Nancy’s own relationship with her bigamous father.
In a similar way, the story ends by refusing the consolations which it has seemed to be about to offer. Charley will have “a happy married life” with Nancy, we are assured, but when at last he gets into bed with her he can do nothing but howl. It is, in the book’s final words, “no more or less, really, than she had expected”. At this miserable moment, “really” is both the kind of expression which would have come easily into Nancy’s mind and an assertion of the narrative’s claims on truthfulness.
Every novel is at some level about interpretation, but Back is almost Dostoevskian in the urgency of its central character’s pursuit of meaning. The process involves mistakes and loose ends in the narrative itself which brought criticism even before it was published. Green’s editor at the Hogarth Press, John Lehmann (who had earlier turned down the Septimanie episode when Green offered it for publication in Penguin New Writing)13 asked him to sort out various matters which he and his sister Rosamond found unnecessarily complicated.14 Green had written the book quickly after finding himself “blessed or cursed by a frightful surge of power & ideas”15 when he completed Loving in 1944. He was incensed by Lehmann’s doubts and wouldn’t make any changes. Much of his response was expressed in intuitive terms about compositional texture and balance, artistic claims which in turn offended the jealous Lehmann: “I am an artist myself and absolutely decline to be treated like a slot machine which produces a book when an MS. is shoved into it.… [The] whole point of The Hogarth Press while I have been in control, for better or worse, has been that it has been run by a writer with his own ideas and standards.”16
Green won this quarrel and the book was left with its muddles and inconsistencies intact. Is there really a close physical resemblance between Rose and Nancy? How can Dot possibly not realize which man has got into bed with her? For whom did James subscribe to the literary magazine in which the Septimanie episode was published — Rose (as here) or James’s sister (see here)? If Charley gets “his first good night’s rest for weeks” after reading the story (see here), why does the narrative keep commenting on his having slept “very well for once”, both after he has cut up Rose’s letters (see here) and when Dot goes to bed with James (see here)? Bewilderment and frustration are involved in reading Green at such moments and critics have found various ways of explaining why this seems an essential part of his work’s value. The novelist Terry Southern, for example, suggested that it allows readers a feeling of superior grasp — of seeing “more in the situation than the author does” — which makes the fiction belong uniquely to them.17 Certainly, as Rod Mengham has argued, the “strong sense of the giddiness of interpretation” in Back is related to Charley’s own predicament. But most readers are bound to speculate about the author’s relationship to it, also, and if they are not impatient and have not swallowed the critical dogma which tries to exclude authors from their works, will allow it a special kind of sympathy. The description of Charley’s “usual state of not knowing, lost as he always was” was marked by Mary Keene in her copy and there is a close resemblance between these words and something Green wrote to Rosamond Lehmann at this time about the state of mind in which he worked: “I really have only the faintest idea of what my books are like, or where I am going.”18 Here as elsewhere, Green’s fiction is an oblique form of self-portrait: the artist, in all his worried raptness, gazing at himself in a distorting mirror.