Accident

By Paul Gray

BLINDNESS by Henry Green Viking; 207 pages; $8.95

Blindness looks like the best first novel of the year, except that the year is 1926. That was when the book appeared briefly in England and the U.S. before sinking from view. Its author was Henry Yorke, a wealthy young Oxford student who went on to write eight more novels under the pseudonym Henry Green. Although he never achieved widespread popularity before his death in 1973, Green did not labor in quite the obscurity that his circle of admirers claim; his novel Loving, published in the U.S. in 1949, flirted briefly with the bestseller list. But even his most dedicated fans have had trouble seeing Blindness, which has remained generally unavailable for 52 years.

Its reissue now proves that publishing has not yet succumbed to agents, packagers and the merchants of subsidiary rights. Viking may not make a dime from the book, but there are accomplishments that outstrip profits: the accessible store of superb novels has been increased by one.

First novels are customarily praised for showing promise. Green's fulfilled it. Blindness opens with the diary of John Haye, 16, a student at a typically repressive English public school. The lad shows himself to be a callow but somehow endearing little twit, alternately gushing over books he likes and playing the world-weary aesthete. Asked to submit a story to a school magazine, Haye notes archly that "there is a sense of degradation attached to appearing in print." The young dandy likes to appear cold and aloof: "It sounds an awful thing to write, but I seldom meet anyone who interests me more than myself: my own fault, I suppose."

Life clearly has a lesson in store for Haye; but when it comes, it is particularly senseless and cruel. A boy idly throws a rock at a train; a window smashes and Haye, sitting behind it, is blinded.

Home is a comfortable estate briskly run by his Scottish stepmother and filled with attentive servants. Caged in darkness, the young master writhes between despair and bitterness, thinking that the best those around him can do involves simply "nursing him back to a state of health sufficient for him to be left to their all-en-folding embrace of fatuity."

With his hero's accident, Green transforms the novel from a typical schoolboy memoir into a remarkably mature meditation on losses and gains. He slips easily into the minds and emotions of characters around Haye: the boy's stepmother, an old nanny, the sad, slightly vulgar daughter of an unfrocked clergyman. All, in varying ways, must struggle to cope with the presence of a person to whom the intolerable has happened. He too must struggle to grow into his tragedy.

Green's language is so plain, his assumed identities so convincing, that splendid effects roll by almost unnoticed. A rabbit comes into view, "trembling at being alive." A girl looks at a sunset: "The sky was enjoying herself after the boredom of being blue all day." Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the images in Haye's mind shift from sight to sound: "Voices had become his great interest, voices that surrounded him, that came and went, that slipped from tone to tone, that hid to give away in hiding."

That Green finished this novel at age 21 is remarkable. His sympathies and understanding already seem to have been ageless. Read now, so many years later, Blindness still appears totally fresh, utterly modern. It could have been written yesterday, provided there were a Henry Green around to write it.

-- Paul Gray

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