In the Time of Greenbloom by Gabriel Fielding

First published: 1956

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The late 1930’s

Locale: Predominantly England, sometimes Ireland and Wales

Principal Characters:

• John Blaydon, a boarding-school student
• Victoria Blount, John’s platonic love
• Melanie Blaydon, John’s younger sister
• Edward Blaydon, John’s father, a Church of England minister
• Kitty Blaydon, John’s mother
• Enid Blount, Victoria’s mother
• George Harkness, a country landholder, Enid’s lover
• Marston, classmate of John at the Abbey school
• David Blaydon, John’s eldest brother, an Anglican minister
• Michael Blaydon, John’s next older brother, a university student
• Horab Greenbloom, a student at Balliol College, Oxford, later a private book publisher
• Gilbert Victor, headmaster at Rooker’s Close
• Janus Jane Boscawen-Jones, a poet, Greenbloom’s newest discovery
• Lady Geraldine Bodorgan, the local chatelaine at Porth Newydd, Wales
• Dymphna Uprichard, an Irish schoolgirl, a houseguest of the Bodorgans

The Novel

John Blaydon notices Victoria Blount at a lawn party at the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Bellingham. Victoria is thirteen years old; he is slightly younger. Victoria remarks that they are so much alike that John might have been her brother. John, hopelessly infatuated, suggests that they slip away from the others. They go out by the lake to “see the swans,” but Victoria insists that they go for a swim, even though they both have no bathing suits. When they plunge into the water naked, John realizes that he loves her, that “he would always love her; even when he was old enough to love people he would love her and go on loving her for ever .”

Suddenly, John hears her cry for help. He swims to where she was and desperately searches for her underwater; finally locating her white body, he pulls her to the shore, just as his sister Melanie and Tim, another guest, arrive on the scene, having come to look for him. John and Tim drag Victoria to higher ground, where John, sitting astride Victoria’s unconscious body, proceeds to administer artificial respiration. While he is reviving the unfortunate girl, Mrs. Bellingham appears and immediately assumes that the adolescents have been engaging in sex. Fearing a scandal, however, she wants to keep the matter quiet.

When John and his sister return home, Melanie tells her mother everything. Mrs. Blaydon is outraged and interrogates John. She becomes convinced that intercourse did not take place, but she still finds the situation reprehensible, believing that her son’s looking at Victoria’s nakedness was bad enough. John explains that he saw Victoria without clothes but did not look at her. “If other people want to turn seeing into looking it’s they who are wrong not me, isn’t it?” he asks. Mrs. Blaydon has no answer. She leaves her son with feelings of guilt.

Back at his private boarding school, John cannot get Victoria from his mind. In order to see her again, he has asked his brother David to invite her to his wedding. John is overjoyed when he receives a letter from her, telling him that she accepts. John is also emotionally involved with Marston, another boy at his school, though Marston frequently makes fun of him. One night, however, Marston climbs into John’s bed and begins to caress and kiss him. John struggles to free himself from Marston’s grip and makes a commotion, which attracts the attention of the master, who has the boys put on boxing gloves to resolve their differences. The headmaster defers further punishment, allowing John to go to London to attend his brother’s wedding.

John meets Victoria again but is anxious lest his mother embarrass her by making some sort of scene, as Mrs. Blaydon obviously does not like the mother of David’s bride. Yet Mrs. Blaydon’s antipathies do not prevent her establishing cordial relations with Victoria, and Mrs. Blaydon gives her consent for John to spend part of his holidays with Victoria and Victoria’s mother.

The visit takes place at Danbey Dale, where George Harkness, a friend of Victoria’s mother, has a farm. The two young people are left to themselves, and they arrange a picnic excursion to visit a nearby cave. When they reach one of the caverns, John makes a fire by which they will have their lunch. The sound of whistling, however, alerts them to the fact that they are not alone. A blond man, who had earlier spoken to Victoria, has followed them here. His presence makes the two young people uncomfortable, yet they still accept a ride from him back to the farm. When they arrive, Victoria realizes that she had failed to mail a letter of her mother’s, and she accepts the stranger’s offer to drive her to the post office.

When she fails to return home, the police are called. At first, they suspect that John had something to do with the girl’s disappearance. Their investigation eventually takes them to the cave, where, not far from where John and Victoria built their fire, they discover Victoria’s body.

Two years pass after the murder. John is still traumatized by the incident, especially since people will not allow him to lay it to rest. He is now enrolled in a different boarding school, Beowulf’s, where he is known as the boy of the Danbey Dale Tragedy. The other students treat him as somewhat of an oddity; the headmaster would like John to leave and go to school somewhere else. John’s isolation brings him closer to his brother Michael, who is a student nearby at Oxford. Michael is imposing on the generosity of a rich classmate, Horab Greenbloom, to whom he introduces John.

Greenbloom is Jewish, is immensely wealthy, has an artificial leg, and is impulsive. He seems to have an answer for everything, being particularly fond of quoting the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he is supposedly writing a book. Greenbloom takes an instant liking to young Blaydon and proposes that they drive to London in his Bentley to go to the theater. He makes arrangements through his girlfriend Rachel, who lives there. The ever-restless Greenbloom finds the play boring and predictable, however, and is only too glad to leave before the end to return John to the boarding school to meet his curfew. Yet Greenbloom soon has a better idea: He will fly John and Rachel in his Dehavilland Moth to Paris. Michael is informed only after the boy is deposited in front of his residence at Oxford.

The trip to Paris is a fiasco. Greenbloom has no sense of direction and lands the plane in Ireland. Rachel is tolerant of such unpredictable behavior, but she tells John that he should go back to England by himself. John returns by ferryboat, but the whole escapade gets him dismissed from Beowulf’s.

He is now enrolled at Rooker’s Close, a private school for problem boys, where, to protect him from his past, he is known as Bowden. John, however, is still a loner and likes to spend his free time by himself. One afternoon, on the beach at the nearby resort of Worthing, he encounters the man who killed Victoria, recognizing him by the same whistled notes he heard in the cave. When John accosts him, the man tells him that he is crazy and manages to get away. Later that day at confession, John tells Father Delaura about the meeting, but the priest believes that John is mentally ill and so informs the headmaster of Rooker’s Close. The headmaster takes John more seriously but does not want him to go to the police, because the headmaster fears that disclosure would engender bad publicity. Furthermore, he tells John that Rooker’s Close may not be the most suitable place for him after all.

Two more years pass. John is now eighteen and attending a county school in Wales, where his parents live. He has just taken his final exams but fears that he might have failed. Greenbloom has drifted back into his life, having lived for the past several years in Paris. Greenbloom is vacationing in Angelsey with his protege, an undiscovered poet named Janus Boscawen-Jones. Greenbloom is as opinionated as ever, now having abandoned Wittgenstein in favor of Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he claims to know personally. When Greenbloom discovers that John is depressed to the point of suicide, he offers to help him accomplish it.

Greenbloom, once responsible for providing John with so much reassurance, no longer has the influence over John he once had. John is now attracted to Dymphna Uprichard, whom he meets at the home of a local aristocrat. Dymphna resembles Victoria. John discovers that she intends to study at Trinity College in Dublin, where he himself wants to go. John appears to have worked through his sorrow, and he wants Greenbloom to know, but Greenbloom is ready to depart again from John’s life.

The Characters

John’s attempt to purge himself of guilt for the death of Victoria is constantly frustrated by an unfeeling and indifferent world. Most of the novel’s characters hate children, especially the headmasters of the schools John attends. These educators, the black legend of Mr. Chips, are different from their Dickensian counterparts only in their preference for psychological, rather than physical, birching. Most of the other characters are similarly unsympathetic, being preoccupied with maintaining appearances and consistently indifferent to anything outside themselves.

John’s mother, a source of authority and respect, is distant and threatening, believing that problems find their proper solution through a faith in God, an attitude that has little relevance to her son. John’s only described encounter with the Anglican clergy other than his relations with his minister father ends disastrously. Father Delaura’s lack of understanding and his hostility convinces John that it is impossible to achieve solace through the Anglican faith; “crossing himself for the last time,” he hurries out of the church.

The sole person who seems to be interested in him is Greenbloom, an enticing neurotic with so much money he can pass as eccentric. Greenbloom, though, is as self-centered as everyone else, albeit more amusing and friendly. He convinces John that he is genuinely concerned about him. Consequently, in John’s eyes, Greenbloom can do no wrong. Yet Greenbloom’s irresponsibility driving his Bentley at breakneck speeds, landing in Ireland instead of France, pretentious quoting from philosophers he does not understand could only be genuinely tolerated by the likes of a lonely thirteen-year-old. Others can also overlook Greenbloom’s demerits, but many of these are spongers who are attracted by his money. Even John’s mother is after him to finance the construction of a rood screen in her husband’s church.

For John to come of age, he must become independent of both his family and Greenbloom. When he is eighteen, he finally comes to the realization that he is disgusted with the entire adult value system, “if it were anything at all.” He might apply the realization to himself, for it is difficult to make such an anxiety-ridden teenager appealing, no matter how many precocious things he has to say. John’s rootlessness, his being bounced from one boarding school to another and the Weltschmerz following the death of Victoria, are reasons for pity, but not necessarily for concern. After years of searching and uncertainty, John finally manages to achieve a sense of worth. He bids an ambiguous adieu to adolescence, realizing that henceforth he can only count on himself, but at the same time rejoicing in the prospect of a new love to end his heartache. With such an ambivalent character, it is doubtful whether there can be success.

Critical Context

In the Time of Greenbloom, Fielding’s second novel, is one of several to deal with the affairs of the Blaydon family. Its predecessor, Brotherly Love (1954), centers on the trauma John endures when his older brother David, whom he idolizes, has sex with a girl to whom John has become attached. Understandably, John thinks rather less highly of David than before. Brotherly Love was regarded as a promising first attempt. The critics were more effusive in their reception of In the Time of Greenbloom, some calling it “strikingly original,” “expert at juxtaposing the bizarre and the grotesque,” “surprising and delightful as a four-leaf clover in a bed of green carnations.” Not all the praise was unqualified; the book was also judged confusing, the vision obsessive.

Although some of his later novels have been well received, In the Time of Greenbloom is widely regarded as Fielding’s finest book. Fielding, at the time of its publication a physician practicing in southeast England, was so encouraged by the success of the book that he devoted less time to his medical profession and more to his writing. Eventually, he gave up the practice of medicine altogether, emigrating to the United States, where he combined a writing career with that of a university professor. In this early work, he established the major themes that have marked his later novels: man’s relationship to God, his inherent weakness and fallibility, his moral shortcomings and feelings of guilt. Fielding, whose first published works were poetry, infuses his writing with a great lyrical style, but often there is a fine line between vitality and pomposity.

Bibliography

Borello, Alfred. Gabriel Fielding, 1974.

Cavallo, Evelyn. “Gabriel Fielding: A Portrait,” in The Critic. XIX (December, 1960/January, 1961), p. 19.

Havighurst, Walter. Review in Saturday Review. XL (June 29, 1957), p. 11.

Hogart, Patricia. Review in Manchester Guardian. June 19, 1956, p. 4.

Mallet, Isabelle. Review in The New York Times Book Review. June 23, 1957, p. 21.

The New Yorker. Review. XXXIII (June 29, 1957), p. 85.