LITERARY HISTORY is full of the rediscovered. Some authors, indeed, don’t ever “make it” so much as they move from one period of rediscovery—or attempted rediscovery—to the next. But British readers will soon have a chance to read an extraordinary piece of autobiographical fiction by the undeniably long-forgotten author G. F. (George Frederick) Green. In the Making had such a negligible impact on its first publication in 1952, moreover, that in any true sense, its republication sixty years later allows us to discover, rather than rediscover, a major writing talent.
Even in his lifetime (1911–1977), Green was overlooked. Elizabeth Bowen called him “the most neglected writer of his generation.” My own involvement with In the Making began when I was commissioned to edit a U.S. book that would be published as 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (2009). Many early contributors came up with familiar, even overly familiar works. So I encouraged others to be more daring. I had a hunch that, of all the figures I approached, Peter Parker—author of a scintillating life of J. R. Ackerley, a wonderful writer who had similarly fallen by the wayside until Parker’s book—was one that I thought might surprise me.
When he mentioned G. F. Green, however, I was initially suspicious. The author’s life story seemed implausibly suggestive or symbolic, for one thing. And In the Making sounded far too good to be true: the sort of novel you might invent, wanting so much for such a book to have existed. As an unapologetic account of a solitary English boy’s adolescent (and pre-adolescent) passions in the 1920’s, the book was, oddly enough, dedicated to Green’s own parents. I state “oddly” because—at a time when homosexual acts were proscribed by British law and the articulation of same-sex desires was consequently quite infrequent—In the Making dared to suggest the possibility—indeed the inevitability—of intense longing on the part of one young adolescent boy for another.
The novel’s language is sensual, passionate, and utterly idiosyncratic—as is its hero, Randal Thane, who was loosely based on Green himself. Nothing more than a single, stolen (that is, unreciprocated) kiss marks Randal’s erotic initiation. Yet every cadence, incident, and sensory impression contributes to the atmosphere created by Green, with extreme economy, as he fleshes out the endless trials and occasional promise experienced by a prepubescent boy in England’s buttoned-up culture of the interwar period (memorably revisited in Alan Hollinghurst’s recent novel The Stranger’s Child). Green himself was either blind to the book’s achievements or, more likely, stoical in response to critical and public indifference. Of course, a particular discretion usually attended the publication of books with gay themes of any kind at this time—including that of novels as chaste as In the Making fundamentally is. (Many books on gay themes were published pseudonymously, too, such as Patricia Highsmith’s novel Carol, published the same year as The Price of Salt by “Claire Morgan.”) On Green’s death at age 66 in 1977, his sister-in-law Chloë Green and the publisher A. D. Maclean put together a memorial anthology, A Skilled Hand, gathering writings from across Green’s literary career. It included some previously unpublished late tales concerning homosexual relationships in the Near and Far East, alongside reminiscences of Green from acquaintances such as writers Alan Sillitoe and John Lehmann and the actor Michael Redgrave. A Skilled Hand also contained excerpts from each of Green’s three books. Land without Heroes (1948) had collected early stories depicting Green’s upbringing in Derbyshire and the working-class society and values of the industrial North more generally. In the Making (1952) saw Green fictionalizing his own childhood and early adolescence, recasting them in the southwest of England, where Green had lately settled. A twenty-year hiatus preceded The Power of Sergeant Streater (1972), an extraordinarily bewildering novel (or trio of novellas, in fact) centering on an intergenerational gay relationship. Broadly speaking, this latter theme characterized much, if not most, of what Green wrote after In the Making. In a sense, then, his second book of fiction might be interpreted as having liberated its author by uncovering his “true” subject. In the Making—subtitled “The Story of a Childhood”—recounted his experiences at Wells House preparatory school in the Mal-verns. Green relocated these, however, to a school in the Quantock Hills. The novel recounts the life of his sensitive, imaginative, idolatrous protagonist Randal between age six and fourteen. The story is told in vivid, remorseless, sometimes hilarious, more often excruciating detail—especially his passion for the beguiling (and apparently manipulative) upperclassman Felton. Green’s frankness was all the more extraordinary, given what he had undergone in the Second World War. Posted to Ceylon in 1940, he had made strong friendships—sometimes also erotic in nature—with native men. In 1944, he was caught having sex with a rickshaw-puller. The two-year sentence that followed his court-martial was served partly in an old colonial jail on the island and partly back in England, in Wakefield Prison. Green suffered a nervous breakdown on his release, only returning to writing by way of psychiatric therapy. Under the pseudonym “Lieut. Z” he published an article on his incarceration, “Military Detention,” which appeared in Penguin New Writing in 1947. Relocating to Batcombe, a village in Somerset, Green now oversaw the publication of Land Without Heroes and edited a collection of stories about childhood, First View (1950). He dedicated the latter to Denton Welch, a writer he loved, and perhaps—with In Youth Is Pleasure, Welch’s 1945 autobiographical novel concerning a fifteen-year-old boy—the nearest figure stylistically to the Green of In the Making (which followed two years after First View). I started to spread the word about In the Making as soon as I’d bought and devoured my own copy of the original edition (published by Peter Davies). Friends on several continents snapped up the few other copies for sale listed on the Internet. When commissioned to edit Ronald Firbank’s 1915 novel Vainglory for Penguin Classics, I immediately mentioned G. F. Green to my editor. She was keen to have a look—only to find that not a single copy of In the Making was to be had, across the planet. Peter Parker, meanwhile, had been investigating Green’s life on and off for many years, and had made contact with Chloë Green, who remains her brother-in-law’s literary executor. I loaned my own copy of In the Making to Penguin, and then heard occasionally and by stealth how it was proceeding from one commissioning editor to the next. Nonetheless, I think Parker and I were both astonished at the ease with which the title was ushered onto the Classics list, given Green’s obscurity. In the Making can lay claim to negotiating “with astonishing empathy the pleasures, pains and perplexities of first love,” in Parker’s words. But many books can make the same claim. Stylistically, however—and I know I’ve mentioned two writers that Green at times evokes—the novel is utterly sui generis. Its third-person prose proves by turns both immediate and direct and—again, Parker’s words—full of “elision, compression, and exhilarating syntactical complexity.” Green’s narrative approach readily absorbs and naturalizes Randal’s sensory impressionism, apprehension, and intuitiveness as a child. At the same time, as a boy he is unable to recount his own story as he experiences it. Mood and atmosphere suffuse the novel to a degree that brings to mind Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, the Southern gothic novel, which first appeared in 1948. Yet Green, unlike the Capote of that book, is also a principled and methodical structurer of plot. Perhaps In the Making’s greatest moment relates to one of the occasions on which Randal and Felton seem closest: their participation in the school’s Halloween celebrations, for whose fancy-dress party Randal goes as Pierrot and Felton as Harlequin: Felton took and quickly put on the mask. He was amused and pleased at Randal’s interest in his appearance. He adjusted the mask consciously like binoculars to his eyes, aware with curious pleasure that Randal wanted it, that he wanted it because it was his and that he wanted him to keep it in order to see him wear it. He dropped his hands at his sides, lowering the ribboned stick to his feet as if he offered himself at an inspection for approval, which he believed he himself had caused, rather than the needs of Randal’s mind. He looked on Randal with friendly conceit and a little concern as for something belonging to him which stood alone and empty-handed, even robbed against the autumnal creeper. He laughed and gave him, as if Randal had demanded the gift and it were the least he could do, a promise. This last sentence, with its precarious, undulating syntax, brilliantly restages the torment of anticipation experienced by the younger boy. Equally, it conveys clearly the older boy’s sudden recognition of his new power. Later in the same scene, nonetheless, Felton will cede that power to Randal, on a whim, when the boy offers him a bite of his semi-eaten apple, ordering his superior to attack the fruit again and again. Randal next resumes eating what is left, “biting deep into the faint green teeth marks” which Felton has left in the fruit. The sense of their having shared the apple gains a secretive and symbolic edge for Randal—a sort of Joycean epiphany as his own teeth track Felton’s imprint: “He ate as if it were a banquet, gay under the shining arc of his cap before Harlequin who stood, patient and spare, against the dark walls. Never could he be nearer anyone than for that measureless instant.” Clothing constitutes a special fetish in Green’s writing, as Parker points out. The diverse sensations imparted by fabric brushing against bare skin in particular are repeatedly invoked. Sometimes the prose records Randal’s experience of his own clothing. At other times, he observes Felton’s look, and imagines himself in the older boy’s clothes: “Felton stood so close that Randal saw the ribs of the material from the corded circle round his throat, beneath the colors and down his firm legs. He could almost himself feel the hard shining belt pressed into the Harlequin’s stomach.” When the two boys go tobogganing during a school holiday, Green describes Randal’s impression of “the warm firm sweater covering Felton’s body.” After their sledge comes to a halt, he impulsively buries his face into the sweater, and again time seems to stand still. Shirts and trousers conceal (but also, paradoxically, display and even accentuate) the body of Randal’s beloved. Likewise, too, Felton’s black mask, over which he obsesses, assumes an awesome power for the beauty it conceals: it holds Randal “blindfold like the communicant of a secret mass.” When Felton takes it off, insisting that Randal wear it, the boy immediately looks away from the “bright and open face” that has assumed such power in his imagination. Putting on the mask affords Randal a sense of safety, however, since his response to Felton’s beauty cannot now be read: “It seemed easy to be strong and careless with the safe mask across his eyes.” At the same time Randal experiences the sense of owning his beloved: “The stiff canvas was warm from Felton’s eyes and it was as if he held there a part of Felton.” As a further marker of Randal’s nascent capacity for a fetishizing identification of the inanimate mask with the Apollo who has lately worn it, when he looks again at Felton, Randal experiences him “as if from a distance, like a puppet. … Felton’s mask was more real to him than Felton.” This is reassuring, indeed necessary, since by now the real figure of the boy triggers that boundless level of idealization and adoration that we rightly associate with first love. Soon, we are told: “Randal gazed on him, absorbed as a child is by a single fact which is for him the whole story. Felton was too complete and actual even to be touched.” These lines wonderfully connect what I am calling fetishization with the literary quality of metonymy, whereby a part of something or someone may stand for the whole. Implicitly, Randal’s reification of certain clothes of Felton’s, of his teeth-marks in the apple, or of his mask, leads effortlessly into the narrator of In the Making’s efficacious deployment of metonymic expression. It is, I suppose, not giving too much away to reveal that Randal will not come to own that which he covets. Yet there is a payoff: the feelings he experiences will inform and enable “his” future achievements (or rather, Green’s own), as a writer capable of capturing such feelings so skillfully. An even more peculiar instance of fetishized perception follows, when the boys take a car journey into the countryside—an idea proposed by the always obliging master, Little Willie (whose generous conduct towards the boys might well be subject to a very different interpretation today). An exhausted Felton falls asleep, lying across Randal’s shoulders. The boy’s bliss knows no bounds, as a succession of stored images of Felton plays out in his imagination, prompted by this sensory moment of intimacy: “Felton’s close presence released even more powerfully the images of him in his mind. He could not think of him as he was during Hallowe’en, that dancer whose arms had encircled him, the Harlequin in whose hand he had seemed to sleep.” Macrophilia—an obsession with or sexual interest in a giantized “other”—is a rare but identified fetish nowadays, and one that is doubtless even rarer in fiction. Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film Hable con Ella (Talk to Her) is the only invented narrative I can think of in which a male (in this case, adult) fantasizes about self-miniaturization, and the capacity it might give him to explore the body of the beloved (in this case, a woman in a coma). It may be argued, of course, that miniaturization per se is not intrinsically erotic, appearing in children’s literature such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. In Randal’s case, the image of himself asleep in Felton’s hand is, of course, fantastical. What Randal dreams of is not properly, or at least voluntarily and expressly, erotic. Yet it only makes sense at all as, at the very least, an embodiment of ideas of possession, ownership, and belonging, which seduce him from this point in the story onwards, propelling him toward the novel’s fateful conclusion. For Felton, needless to say, the moments that strike Randal most acutely are either scarcely heeded or readily discarded. The pair’s magical, obscure world is fully Randal’s construction—and bears ever less palpable relation to the actual person of Felton as things develop. A fellow schoolboy of Green’s, John Marshall, in A Skilled Hand, recalled the boy on whom Felton was based as popular, characterized by two traits that were familiar in the period as indicators of success and esteem: “athleticism and bravura.” Alec Waugh, the brother of Evelyn, had much to say about these virtues in his 1917 novelized memoir The Loom of Youth, which, while not exactly a precursor of Green’s book, was a work so shocking in its account of how schoolboy idealization might tip over into passion and even sexual consummation that Waugh was kicked out of Sherborne School’s old boys’ society. Marshall also noted, tellingly, that Green’s intimacy with this commanding elder struck him either as entirely imaginary or at least very exaggerated. This intimacy is enshrined in In the Making, however, even if it existed nowhere else than in Randal/Green’s imagination. The novel closes on an abrupt transition. Randal is poised to move on to his secondary school career. This leave-taking has been prompted by a small, simple act that he has committed—one so gravely transgressive, however, that there can be no question but that Randal must be cast out of this educational Eden. As Randal begins a poem in Felton’s honor, however, he gestures forth to Green’s own literary future, just as surely as the American gay novelist Edmund White’s protagonists in A Boy’s Own Story (1982) and The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) likewise contained embellished versions of their author’s future authorial self. The last lines of In the Making record with extreme understatement Randal’s transposition into a writer (however incipient) as he scribbles, alone and unremarked, in the railway carriage that takes him from his beloved: “His words moved in triumph across the page while he thought of Felton against the flickering leaves. The poem and Felton possessed his mind. The two patterns of his life were achieved.” If falling in love is to allow oneself to pose the ultimate “what if” question (“what if he or she feels the same toward me?”), then it may very well be the nearest that most of us will come to the urge that propels novelists to create their imaginary universes. As Parker succinctly summarizes G. F. Green’s achievement in In the Making: “imagination may mislead the heart, but can also be creative and transformative, as love can be.” Richard Canning’s most recent publication is an edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory
