Caught by Henry Green

First published: 1943

Type of work: Social morality

Time of work: 1939-1940

Locale: London and the English countryside

Principal Characters:

• Richard Roe, a wealthy recent widower, who volunteers for London’s Auxiliary Fire Service in September, 1938
• Dy, his sister-in-law, who looks after his son
• Christopher, his young son
• Albert Pye, the sub-officer of the Fire Service station to which Roe is assigned
• Hilly, Pye’s dispatch driver, who becomes Roe’s mistress
• Prudence, who becomes Pye’s mistress
• Shiner Wright, a fireman who dies heroically
• Arthur Piper, the oldest of the firemen, who toadies to authority
• Mary Howells, the scrubwoman and cook at the station, who unwittingly makes trouble for Pye
• Trant, Pye’s inquisitional superior officer

The Novel

Caught is largely based on Henry Green’s experiences, from 1939 through Christmas, 1940, as a member of London’s Auxiliary Fire Service. One of the novel’s two co-protagonists, Richard Roe, resembles the author in his mid-thirties age, moneyed circumstances, fatherhood of a son who was born in 1934, and exposure, during the first year of World War II, to members of the laboring class serving as fellow amateur firemen.

The novel’s chronology falls into three blocks. The first (chapters 1-4) concentrates on half a dozen days during December, 1939, and January, 1940; the second (chapters 5-14) focuses on a nine-month period from September, 1939, to the evacuation of Dunkirk in May, 1940; the third (chapter 15) reviews, through retrospective narration by Roe, the beginning of the Blitz in August, 1940.

The first four chapters of the novel dramatize Roe’s private life: his sorrow at his wife’s recent death (“his ever present loss”), his self-conscious loneliness, and his muffled pain over his son Christopher’s temporary abduction in 1938 by the sister of the man who is to become his fire instructor at the substation. Christopher lives with Roe’s sister-in-law, Dy, in Roe’s father’s country house, and Richard has difficulty finding time to visit his son, with only one day off between duty days and slow wartime trains. When father and son do meet, their communication is clumsy, stunted, uneasy.

The dominant, middle section of the novel narrates Roe’s gradual emergence from insularity and snobbism, and his acclimatization to a new and different subculture at the substation. Green places Roe in relationships with such proletarians as Arthur Piper and Shiner Wright and immerses him in an affair with a gossipy dispatch driver, Hilly. Hilly’s boss, Albert Pye, becomes the novel’s most vividly drawn character.

Pye, also in his mid-thirties, is a well-intentioned but rather stupid, suspicious, and confused working-class fellow who finds himself unable to manage the responsibility and authority he acquires when, at the start of the war, he is promoted to officer in charge of the fire station. He is resented by his old buddies, whom he now outranks, and despised by his condescending commanders, particularly his immediate superior, district officer Trant, an obsessive martinet. Feeling at sea as a leader, Pye wavers between indulgence and despotism, conviviality and officiousness.

Much of the action centers on Pye’s disintegration. He is mortified to be in charge of Roe, whose son his disturbed sister stole from a London toy shop, resulting in her confinement to an asylum. He resents having to pay for the costs of his sister’s commitment but is even more agonizingly haunted by the possibility that, on a dark night many years ago, he may have sexually forced his sister in a country lane, recalling afterward “her tears still on the back of his hand.” He leads his firefighting crew to the wrong house in his first test of authority. He finds himself rejected, after a brief fling, by a woman who is quickly bored with him. Arthur Piper bears malicious tales about him to Trant. Old Mary Howells takes unauthorized leaves of absence; when Piper finally reports her truancy, his conformity to regulations, in a sardonic plot twist, incenses Trant. Beset by waves of self-doubt, remorse, guilt, and dread, finally charged with misconduct by his commander, Pye takes his own life.

The novel’s last section consists of a single long chapter. Roe, having been dazed in a German raid, is sent for convalescence in October, 1940, to his parental country home. There, he describes to his sister-in-law the dreadful nightly visitations of the Blitz, showing himself matured and enlightened by this experience. Through enforced sharing of hardships and dangers, he has been educated into an appreciation of solidarity with his community of firefighters.

The Characters

Green’s treatment of Roe’s and Pye’s relationship anticipates Robert Penn Warren’s dramatization of the symbolic relationship between Jack Burden and Willie Stark in All the King’s Men (1946). Like Stark, Pye is the more spectacular character who dies violently; like Burden, Roe is the book’s more reflective protagonist, who ponders the meaning of the other’s life and derives vital lessons from it. Pye can be considered Roe’s double, the id to his ego or shadow to his persona: his negative potential.

The men are linked by significant interlacings of their lives: Not only has Pye’s sister abducted Roe’s son, not only is Roe assigned to Pye’s station, but also Roe has once had the suicidal urge to which Pye eventually succumbs. Early in his Fire Service career, Roe encounters two young women who are sexually promiscuous with men in uniform. Instead of seizing this opportunity for himself, he panders it to Pye, “with the idea that, by putting them [the women] Pye’s way he might do himself a bit of good with the Skipper.” Roe thereby sets in motion a train of events that will doom Pye, since he loses his head and neglects his duties over one of the two women, Prudence, thereby forfeiting much of his authority over his men while infuriating his commander with his absences from the station.

One critic of Green’s fiction, A. Kingsley Weatherhead, has pointed out that Pye’s and Roe’s names “put together phonically, produce pyro, the Greek root for terms describing fire.” Pye’s Prudence is associated with a sexuality turned greedy and loveless, exchanging one man’s carnal favors for another’s in the heated excitement of war’s urgency; her simple premise is “War is sex.” Green contrasts Prudence to Roe’s dead wife, whom the widower associates ecstatically with “the hot, lazy luxuriance of a rose. . . open for him to pierce inside.” No wonder Roe rejects Prudence, finding her “knife sharp compared to the opulence his darling had carried about in her skin.” In place of Prudence’s emotionally detached siren, Roe turns to the far more nourishing Hilly, whom he can befriend in the routine world of the station and whom Green describes in garden imagery which parallels that used previously to describe Roe’s deceased wife: “Her lips’ answer, he felt, was of opened figs, wet at dead of night in a hothouse.”

Green uses several minor characters evocatively to demonstrate his view that the tensions of war accelerate either people’s maturation or their deterioration. Thus, Trant, in charge of Fire Station Fifteen, becomes a paranoid and petty autocrat, deceitful, cruel, malevolent. Arthur Piper, a troublemaking, talebearing former soldier, loves to ingratiate himself with superior officers by backbiting and bad-mouthing his peers. The headstrong substitute cook, Mary Howells, takes an unauthorized leave to confront her daughter’s wayward husband in Scotland. Her violation of regulations, when unpunished by a sympathetic superintendent, arouses Trant’s worst suspicions about Pye’s capacity for keeping order: “The fact that she had been let off put Pye in the wrong.” Yet there is Shiner Wright, an earthy former seaman, who excels in bravery during the Blitz and saves Roe’s life by warning him away from a distributor box. For the most part, the author indicates, people are even more selfish, vulgar, sensual, spiteful, and mean in war than in peace, yet occasionally they are capable of splendidly courageous conduct.

Critical Context

Caught is the third of Green’s nine novels, succeeding Living (1929), which narrates conflicts in a Birmingham factory, and Party Going (1939), covering a few hours in the lives of wealthy Londoners waiting to leave for the south of France. Whereas the latter book deals exclusively with gossipy, shallow, selfish, frequently alcoholic idlers, Caught is a far more serious, complex, comprehensive achievement. It intricately interweaves the Jacobean plot of Albert Pye’s disastrous stumbles with Richard Roe’s checkered progress from morose individualism to a measure of integration, from emotional paralysis to a minor liberation from his former emptiness and connection with a panoramic community.

Green’s evocation of mood and tone through sparse dialogue and unerringly precise description is akin to James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). His subtly modulated control of recurrent motifs parallels Marcel Proust’s and Thomas Mann’s work, though in a relatively minor key. His command of montage to dislocate expected chronological order looks back to Joseph Conrad and sideways to John Dos Passos and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Caught is by far the most complex and perhaps the best of Green’s novels, particularly in its insistence that the inner lives of his important characters remain prominent in the reader’s attention despite the perilous setting of World War II. While many Green characters destroy themselves through greed, lust, and fear, he does champion, in Caught, the traditional, homely values of interdependence, social solidarity, and commitment to the family. This is a nontragic, non-Promethean vision, but Green has the talent to convince the reader of its soundness.

Bibliography

Melchiori, Giorgio. The Tightrope Walkers, 1956.

Russell, John. Henry Green: Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag, 1960.

Stokes, Edward. The Novels of Henry Green, 1959.

Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. A Reading of Henry Green, 1961.