Books: Molten Treasure

LOVING (248 pp.)—Henry Green—Viking ($3).

In 1929 a young nobody of 24 named Henry Green wrote Living, a proletarian novel about the lives of Birmingham factory workers. In the same year another 24-year-old unknown named Henry Vincent Vorke, nephew of a peer named Lord Leconfield, became engaged to the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph.

Little attention was paid to Mr. Green —so little, in fact, that Evelyn Waugh (who had just made a hit with his second novel, Vile Bodies) angrily described Living as "a neglected masterpiece." Henry Green abetted this neglect himself. He made little attempt to mingle with other literary lights, declined to be photographed. (As a special concession, last month he allowed himself to be photographed for TIME, but only in hands-to-face masquerade—see cut.) But the gossip columnists of that year had been idly poking around in search of something to say about the wedding bells of Mr. Yorke.

The truth came out with a minor bang: PEER'S NEPHEW AS FACTORY HAND. Proletarian Mr. Green, it seemed, was simply the pseudonym of socialite Mr. Yorke. After writing most of his first "Henry Green" novel, Blindness, while a schoolboy at Eton, Mr. Yorke had gone up to Oxford, where he soon grew plain "bored." So he had roamed up to Birmingham, where a big engineering firm hired him at £1 a week. "First I was a sort of storekeeper. Then I passed on to be a pattern maker, later I became a molder, and finally I was in the copper shops."

Acid Test. The Birmingham owners treated their Old Etonian employee just like any Tom, Dick or Harry. In return, Henry Yorke was profoundly impressed and fascinated by his working mates ("I loved them"). Like them he was usually covered with acid stains and engineering grime, but he still did not look the part enough to deceive anyone. "I'll bet he is a public-school boy," he once heard a Birmingham woman say sadly. "I wonder what has brought him to this."

The answer to this question about Henry Yorke will be found in the novels of Henry Green, which now number seven and embrace an astonishingly wide reach of British life and customs. There are as many distinctive social classes in Britain as there are regions in the U.S., and most British novelists, no matter how imaginative and observant, are as incapable of portraying life in any strata other than their own as, say, a Brooklyn-bred novelist would be of showing how a tree grows in Independence, Mo. But the novels of Henry Green, which are still little known in Britain and almost unheard of in the U.S., bubble like a social melting pot that can boil down everything from cutaways to galluses. Nor is any one of them much like its fellows, because both Henry Yorke and pseudonymous Henry Green love to court new experiences and make fresh experiments. Since his proletarian years, Henry Yorke has graduated into big business: he is now managing director, in London, of his old Birmingham firm, H. Pontifex & Sons. In World War II, he worked full time as a fire-fighting "ranker," i.e., enlisted man in the hazardous National Fire Service.