Blindness by Henry Green

He got up and groping towards the window opened it. As he did so there was a sudden lull in all the noise, he could only hear the clop-clop of a horse receding into the distance, and then mysteriously from below there floated up a chuckle; it was a woman and someone must have been making love to her, so low, so deep it was. He was on fire at once. Love in the street, he would write of it, love shouting over the traffic, unsettling the policemen, sweeping over the park, wave upon wave of it, inciting the baboons to mutiny in the Zoo, clearing the streets. What was the use of his going blind if he did not write? People must hear of what he felt, of how he knew things differently. The sun throbbed in his head. Yes, all that, he would write all that.

John Haye is a senior at an English public school. He's a little lazy--as we learn from the first thirty pages of the novel, which are in the form of John's diary--but of a literary bent, and prone to childish pranks as well as bookish sentimentalism. But his life changes forever when, on his way home, a stone thrown by a child shatters his window on the train, and he's permanently blinded. John returns home to his stepmother, a sort of local busybody who struggles with the idea that her stepson might become a burden to her, and who is appalled when he strikes up an attachment to Joan, the daughter of a local drunk and defrocked priest. The match is no good, though; Joan cannot give John the kind of new beginning he desires, and in the end, he and "Mamma" sell their country estate so that John can find his way as a blind man in the sound and fervor of London.

Entirely by accident, I seem to be reading a lot of first works lately. There was Gallant, then Didion, now Henry Green, who wrote Blindness while he was still at Oxford. Like those other books, it seems awfully weak in comparison to more "mature" books, but the incipient forms of a great author's style are fascinating to see. One of the strange feelings Green's novels generate is the sense of Is that all?, the feeling that you've read something in which nothing happens and whose shape is untraceable, because it was in the accumulation of details you missed while you were waiting for grand gestures. In Blindness that means the little details of country life that John may or may not have access to any longer, and which "Mamma" must feel are distinctly at risk. 

The novel's three sections are called "Caterpillar," "Chrysalis," and "Butterfly," as if to signal that Blindness is a novel not about loss, but of becoming and transformation. Joan, the undereducated, slovenly priest's daughter, is a kind of false start in that transformation. John indulges in fantasies that she will give him a new life, one that consists of walking with him to his old favorite viewpoints and describing the view--something which, as it turns out, disinterests and bewilders her. John has Joan all wrong, preferring the version he makes of her in his head; he even mishears her name at first as "June" and refuses to call her anything else. Their interactions give the novel some particularly Green-like moments of humor, the kind that can be difficult to catch. "They seem to me so lasting," John says to Joan, regarding trees, "so grave in their fat green cloaks, or in winter like naked lace." To which she replies: "There, an' I've forgotten to feed the chickens."

Only at the very end, with the arrival of John and his mother at London, does Green's modernism start to show. He seems actually quite resistant to describing the experience of being blind, preferring Mrs .Haye's viewpoint, or Joan's, to John's, until John is listening to the street noise below. This noise both frightens and excites him; for the first time he feels as if his subjectivity as a blind person has given him a way of knowing or understanding that might not be available to other people. He ends the novel in what you might call a "vision," if it weren't such an inappropriate word: a mysterious moment of ascent and elation that he calls, in the letter that ends the novel, "a fit." Green is cagey about what it is that John is seeing at last, and perhaps at the novel's end John is only beginning to see it himself, but he describes the feeling as one of true "joy."