Nothing by Henry Green

First published: 1950

Type of work: Drawing-room comedy

Time of work: After World War II

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• John Pomfret, a middle-aged widower
• Elizabeth (Liz) Jennings, his current lover
• Jane Weatherby, his former lover
• Richard Abbot, Jane’s companion
• Mary Pomfret, John’s daughter
• Philip Weatherby, Jane’s son
• Penelope Weatherby, Jane’s six-year-old daughter
• Arthur Morris, an old friend, who is suffering from a blood disease

The Novel

Nothing, one of Henry Green’s last novels, is an experimental effort to embody his creative theory that the best way to create a sense of life in narrative is by dialogue. In this drawing-room comedy about the generation gap among the so-called Mayfair social set in London following World War II, there is much idle chatter from the characters but very little explanation or probing of motives by the author. The result is a novel of little action, made up of oblique dialogue, somewhat in the Jamesian manner (but without Henry James’s complexity of thought), that provides the reader with only the brittle surfaces of this upper-class social set. As many critics have noted, the four “mature” characters, John Pomfret, Jane Weatherby, Elizabeth Jennings, and Richard Abbot, seem to be essentially the same people on whom Green focused in his early novel Party Going (1939), now grown older, although not very much wiser.

The plot, such as it is, deals with one of the predominant concerns of the Mayfair social set: sexual pairings. John, a forty-five-year-old widower, becomes involved once again with an old lover, Jane. This reunion, primarily engineered by the schemes of Jane, means John’s breakup with his lover, Liz, and Jane’s breakup with her platonic companion, Richard. At the end of the novel, more out of indifference than desire, Richard and Liz become involved after Jane and John become “reinvolved.” In the meantime, John’s daughter Mary has become engaged to Jane’s son Philip, who celebrates his twenty-first birthday in the novel. Much of the action of the work centers on the efforts of Jane to get John back and to break up the engagement of Mary and Philip. Although no specific information is given, much of the dialogue suggests that the reason Jane is trying to break up the relationship is that Mary and Philip may be half brother and sister as a result of the earlier love affair Jane had with John. It is more likely, however, that Jane simply finds a double wedding of the old and the new couple unseemly in her social set.

The basic irony of the story is that instead of the older couple being conservative and stodgy in their dealings with a somewhat wild younger generation, as is the convention in social comedy, in this case the situation is reversed. John and Jane, who were young during the so-called Roaring Twenties, are the frivolous ones, while Mary and Philip, properly sobered by World War II, are much more serious. While the parents still live within a party world, the children hold drab office jobs in government. Thus, the novel ironically focuses on the hedonism of the older generation and the puritanism of the younger one.

Green makes no firm moral judgment on either of these value systems; each has its own merits and its own shortcomings. The older generation is often selfish but compensates for this with its charm. The younger generation is often quite earnest but spoils this by being more than a little dull. Whereas the older generation lacks responsibility, the younger generation lacks elegance. The dialogue primarily reveals and reflects this dichotomy throughout the novel. It is this reversal of expectation which is responsible for the novel’s comic satire on both the idle rich of the late 1930’s and the earnest drones of the late 1940’s.

The Characters

The nature of the characters in Nothing is determined by two factors: their social situation and Green’s self-conscious decision to delineate the characters primarily through dialogue. Given the facts that the characters are basically shallow or dull and that readers are not allowed into their minds, since all that can be known of them is from what they say, the characters seem to be nothing more than the somewhat brittle and boring surfaces that they project socially. A flat, two-dimensional sense of character is the result. No one is either very good or very bad; no one is torn by emotional or philosophical doubts; no one is heroic or villainous; in short, no one is very interesting. Rather, they are all recognizable types.

For example, Jane, the central character in what is really an ensemble performance of six characters, is beautiful and witty but spoiled and unscrupulous. Her manipulations to get John back and to break up her daughter’s marriage to John’s son constitute the main plot interest. John is a well-bred and well-dressed middle-aged man, but he is a snob. He is also easily manipulated by Jane. Liz, John’s mistress, is an embodiment of sexual indifference, apparently content to be passed from man to man. Dick, the last man to whom she is passed, is an apoplectic and pompous fool. They drift together, after being dropped by Jane and John, for lack of anything better to do.

The younger generation fares no better. Mary and Philip are somewhat too earnest and more than a little dull. They are stuffy and take themselves and the world too seriously. The only other characters of importance are Arthur Morris, an old friend, and Penelope Weatherby, Jane’s six-year-old daughter. Morris serves both as a raconteur, who communicates to the younger couple the carefree life of their parents when they were young, and as a symbolic figure who, by losing limbs of his body one by one until he finally dies of a blood clot, represents the gradual dwindling into “nothing” suggested by the title. Penelope is a neurotic child who is given to sticking pins into herself in imitation of John, who must give himself injections for his diabetes. Yet she is less a real child than a metaphor for the childish absurdity of the various meaningless pairings in the novel. Ostensibly, her strange behavior is related to a play-or mock-marriage she has with John in the first chapter of the novel, during which a cigar band is used for a ring. After this event, Penelope wanders around complaining that she has no husband.

Here, as is true in other Green novels, the minor characters are more interesting than the major ones. Yet Arthur and Penelope are not interesting as people; they are interesting as metaphors: Their complexity is really the complexity of their symbolic relation to the major characters.

Critical Context

Although Nothing depicts what might be called a dying culture, the focus is not on social values as such; rather, Green seems more interested in presenting a novel that is almost pure style. In its nonrepresentational objectivism, particularly in its use of a montage technique, the book has been compared with the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet, for, like Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, it suggests that there is no ulterior reality lying beneath the surface. As a result, a reader may very well finish this novel and find that it is “much ado about nothing.” Although that may be precisely Green’s point, such a point requires something besides empty dialogue to hold the reader’s attention. Even to name one’s novel Nothing runs the risk of the reader’s snide remark that the title is the one “true” thing about the book. Pattern is everything in Nothing, as the three sets of sexual pairs get systematically jostled about until they settle down finally in a quite predictable and artificial way. In fact, artifice and artificiality are probably the key words in this novel, which Green intends to be an aesthetic tour de force.

Critics are divided about the success of the dialogue technique on which the novel depends. Whereas many critics believe that Green’s previous novel, Concluding (1948), is a masterpiece, Nothing is widely regarded as a failed experiment. The affairs of John and Jane, Liz and Richard, and Mary and Philip simply do not seem important enough to generate any human interest, and Green does not give the reader anything more than those affairs. Although one can admire Green’s facility with dialogue in this novel, one does not really care very much what these characters say.

Bibliography

Holmesland, Oddvar. A Critical Introduction to Henry Green’s Novels, 1986.

Odom, Keith C. Henry Green, 1978.

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

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

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