Henry Green’s Investments

Ben Harker

doi:10.1353/mod.2023.a925909

Henry Green’s Investments

Ben Harker

English and American Studies

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Placing his oeuvre in a longue durée of capital and class relations, this article develops the recent contextual turn in the study of Henry Green, and hazards a materialist account of his style, focusing especially on his memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), and breakthrough novel, Living (1929). It revises the usual story, that Green’s literary modernism transcended, disrupted, or was irreconcilably at odds with his pin-striped, pro-business conservatism, arguing for homology and equivalence, not rupture or division, between his investments, commercial and aesthetic. Like Green’s unmodernist turn to business, the notoriously idiomatic, knotty, modernist style that defined Green’s most characteristic writing—the seven books published between 1929 and 1948—represents at a formal level a complex act of mediating—of simultaneously registering and resisting—the broadly democratizing economic, political, social and cultural processes transforming interwar Britain. Methodologically, the analysis supports a renewed emphasis on form, literary and linguistic, in materialist criticism of modernism and its moment.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	807-829
Journal	Modernism/Modernity
Volume	30
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2023.a925909
Publication status	Published - 1 Nov 2023

Access to Document

10.1353/mod.2023.a925909

REVISED AND RESUBMITTED HENRY GREEN'S INVESTMENTSAccepted author manuscript, 107 KB

Cite this

@article{57b2e29d2eb24931a821dd124bd183b1,

title = "Henry Green{\textquoteright}s Investments",

abstract = "Placing his oeuvre in a longue dur{\'e}e of capital and class relations, this article develops the recent contextual turn in the study of Henry Green, and hazards a materialist account of his style, focusing especially on his memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), and breakthrough novel, Living (1929). It revises the usual story, that Green{\textquoteright}s literary modernism transcended, disrupted, or was irreconcilably at odds with his pin-striped, pro-business conservatism, arguing for homology and equivalence, not rupture or division, between his investments, commercial and aesthetic. Like Green{\textquoteright}s unmodernist turn to business, the notoriously idiomatic, knotty, modernist style that defined Green{\textquoteright}s most characteristic writing—the seven books published between 1929 and 1948—represents at a formal level a complex act of mediating—of simultaneously registering and resisting—the broadly democratizing economic, political, social and cultural processes transforming interwar Britain. Methodologically, the analysis supports a renewed emphasis on form, literary and linguistic, in materialist criticism of modernism and its moment.",

author = "Ben Harker",

note = "This is a long article --11000 words--in the leading journal in the field. It's the type of article that can get a 4, with the right reader. The readers' reports are pasted here: 18-Jun-2021 Dear Ben Harker, Thank you for your recent submission to Modernism/modernity, and for your patience while your manuscript “Henry Green's Investments{"} has undergone mutually anonymous peer review. I have appended the reports of the reviewers to the bottom of this email. Both readers, as you'll see, find a lot to admire about the piece and are enthusiastic about the prospect of a Green article in Mod/mod. However, both also feel that revision is warranted before this manuscript is ready for publication in M/m--and Reader 1 insists that you clarify your use of Perry Anderson and your periodization of modernism generally. Reader 2 affirms that the issues at the heart of the piece are of great potential interest to M/m readers and offers additional suggestions for improving the piece. Then, in the process of seeking reviewers for this piece, one reader who ultimately declined writing a full report, asked me to pass on this advice: As an aside, it might be worth your contributor contemplating how Green's last two novels, Nothing and Doting, offer a barbed problematic commentary on the consolidation of social democracy. I would therefore ask you to revise and resubmit, with particular attention to these reports, especially the crucial recommendation of reader #1. I do look forward to reading this piece in its final form--and I thank you for submitting it to Modernism/modernity. All best wishes, Anne Fernald Anne E. Fernald (she/her) Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Co-Editor, Modernism/modernity [email protected] Reader #1 This splendid article attributes Henry Green{\textquoteright}s unique forms of modernist engagement to his conservative investment in his family business. Whereas critics typically say that the former disrupted the latter—that Green{\textquoteright}s experimental realism transcended his conservatism—this article{\textquoteright}s brilliant argument equates the two investments, explaining how and why Green{\textquoteright}s quirky conservative politics generated acutely inventive styles of literary recognition. This explanation is ingenious in the manner of the best new materialist interpretations of modernist literary forms. Its insight into the complex dynamics that actually unite Green{\textquoteright}s class outlook and his writing style combines a fresh take on the politics of modernism with an inspired approach to the parallel literary aesthetic. A fascinating new Henry Green emerges, as does an important new way of thinking about what modernist fiction could do to embody changing socioeconomic possibilities. Green{\textquoteright}s unlikely business commitments involved restabilizing hierarchies, reasserting old-fashioned commercial and class values in the face of emergent modernization. But this investment also involved new ways of representing sociocultural difference. In order to champion traditional class identities and relationships, Green had to inhabit current class dynamics, and doing so meant modernist engagement—a phenomenological alertness to individual subjectivities, a crystalline realist precision, and other tactics and techniques that might otherwise seem incompatible with social conservatism. This reversal in turn also enhanced a social awareness more extensive than anything modernism typically involved. But precisely because he mixed motives more typically divided between 1920s aesthetic innovation and 1930s social realism, Green{\textquoteright}s investments have been misunderstood; his subtle, closely perceptive political aesthetic has been disaggregated, and seeing it whole demands a new sense both of his business model and his aesthetic objectives. Which is provided with rare insight and finesse in this article{\textquoteright}s excellent readings, interpretations, and conclusions. Among the article{\textquoteright}s strengths are its fresh and nuanced political assessments, its way of building upon the latest historicist accounts of modernist culture (including awareness of the “conjunctural simultaneity” of modernism{\textquoteright}s competing socioeconomic temporalities), its narratological acuity (so important to its specific detailing of the narrative tactics parallel to Green{\textquoteright}s commercial investments), its lively biographical accounts, its many apt observations, and in general its way of moving past old presumptions about the relationship between art and commerce. But the article needs significant revision. The biggest problem—the one that absolutely must be fixed—is the use of Perry Anderson{\textquoteright}s periodization of modernism. Anderson{\textquoteright}s argument is never fully explained, and its relevance here is never fully clear, especially since the article departs in at least two or three ways from Anderson{\textquoteright}s model. Anderson comes up only telegraphically on pages one, eleven, and fifteen, and then oddly gets brusquely dismissed at other and later moments. To be a viable critical context here his work would need a solid paragraph of explanation, and its role here should be justified more thoroughly as well. Better yet, and more simply, why not just bring up Anderson when he{\textquoteright}s specifically relevant and not accord him the status of main theoretical framework? “Intersections” begins by calling its subject (interwar gender trouble) “another significant context mediated in Living.” This non-transition seems to prevent the necessary explanation of what gender has to do with the larger argument, and then the density of plot summary that follows delays the necessary explanation until the last paragraph of this section concludes that the cancellation of social-justice opportunities is something similar to but different from the novel{\textquoteright}s way of handling class politics. That claim should be introduced earlier and its relationship to the larger argument should be clearer. At times the article{\textquoteright}s argument risks devolving into the too-inclusive kind of claim that begins “Henry, Ford”: that political discourses are “variously registered, contained and countered” in Green{\textquoteright}s fiction. It might make more sense to stay focused on the stronger argument about the homology between Green{\textquoteright}s conservatism and his modernism. Similarly, the article might be stronger if it persisted more fully in the excellent larger revisionist view of modernism that ends “Receiving.” The article returns to a narrower focus on Green in its last paragraphs, but it might instead put that material before the broader view and then give that broader view more time. The article{\textquoteright}s claim to larger significance—and its appeal to a broader readership—could become more substantial that way, with a fuller account of what this revisionist view of Green means for our idea of the politics and aesthetics of modernism and modernity more generally. Finally, some sentences and paragraphs are too long. This article{\textquoteright}s vigorous, expansive, often playful prose is mainly a total pleasure to read, but there are excesses that should be curtailed. I greatly enjoyed reading this compelling, refreshing, eye-opening reconsideration of Henry Green. Its materialist approach to modernist style is a great and inspiring success. The implications for modernism are exciting, and I look forward to the further conversations it is sure to spark. Reader #2 “Henry Green{\textquoteright}s Investments{\textquoteright} provides a materialist reading of the formal and linguistic innovations of two major works by British novelist Henry Green, Pack My Bag (1939) and Living (1929). The essay couches Green{\textquoteright}s work in a longer history of British class relations and capitalist modes of production, with a sharp take on the interrelationship between these two factors. By drawing attention to the underlying equivalence between Green{\textquoteright}s capitalist investment in industry and his aesthetic practices, the essay provides a fresh reading of Green{\textquoteright}s challenging work. The essay succeeds on many levels. It is sharply written and tightly argued, drawing out a fresh reading of Green{\textquoteright}s work and its many ambivalences between high capitalism and modernist art. There is a controlled and fresh use of context – social, political, and economic – that is illuminating. It is lucidly written (although there are moments when the syntax becomes overly complicated, especially with the overuse of em-dashes). As a way of showing the utility of materialist readings of modernism, the essay is exemplary. That being said, I think the essay could do with two minor revisions before final publication. The conclusion appears a bit flat, especially given what was promised in the introductory paragraph – rather than extending out the stakes of the essay to modernist studies more generally, the essay goes through a rather potted reading of Green{\textquoteright}s late work. I think the essay would be substantially stronger if the stakes of the argument were extended out in the conclusion. The second revision concerns the need to provide the reader a clearer conceptual introduction to the theoretical/materialist framework. While bits and pieces of Anderson{\textquoteright}s work are presented throughout the essay at the appropriate times, for the sake of clarity readers would be better served by a few paragraphs at the opening of the essay laying out the theory. Doing that would also tie in the revised conclusion in a more structurally coherent manner for the essay. Recommendation: highly recommended for publication, pending minor revisions A few small matters: -pg. 1: Green published six books (not seven) between 1929 and 1946; the author seems to want to group Concluding within the larger analysis, but that was published in 1948 -pg 6: {\textquoteleft}different kinds of attentiveness is{\textquoteright}  verb should be {\textquoteleft}are{\textquoteright} -pg. 8: {\textquoteleft}without holding and political views{\textquoteright}  {\textquoteleft}and{\textquoteright} here should be {\textquoteleft}any{\textquoteright} -pg. 9: {\textquoteleft}glossed be Green{\textquoteright}  {\textquoteleft}by{\textquoteright} instead of {\textquoteleft}be{\textquoteright} ******* To revise your manuscript, log into https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/modernism and enter your Author Center, where you will find your manuscript title listed under {"}Manuscripts with Decisions.{"} Under {"}Actions,{"} click on {"}Create a Revision.{"} Your manuscript number has been appended to denote a revision. You may also click the below link to start the revision process (or continue the process if you have already started your revision) for your manuscript. If you use the below link you will not be required to login to ScholarOne Manuscripts. *** PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-step process. After clicking on the link, you will be directed to a webpage to confirm. *** https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/modernism?URL_MASK=cb10abab5f77413f936da2fee35a242d You will be unable to make your revisions on the originally submitted version of the manuscript. Instead, revise your manuscript using a word processing program and save it on your computer. Please also highlight the changes to your manuscript within the document by using the track changes mode in MS Word or by using bold or colored text. Once the revised manuscript is prepared, you can upload it and submit it through your Author Center. When submitting your revised manuscript, you will be able to respond to the comments made by the reviewer(s) in the space provided. You can use this space to document any changes you make to the original manuscript. In order to expedite the processing of the revised manuscript, please be as specific as possible in your response to the reviewer(s). IMPORTANT: Your original files are available to you when you upload your revised manuscript. Please delete any redundant files before completing the submission. Because we are trying to facilitate timely publication of manuscripts submitted to the Modernism/modernity, your revised manuscript should be submitted by 16-Oct-2021. If it is not possible for you to submit your revision by this date, we may have to consider your paper as a new submission. ",

year = "2023",

month = nov,

day = "1",

doi = "10.1353/mod.2023.a925909",

language = "English",

volume = "30",

pages = " 807--829",

journal = "Modernism/Modernity",

issn = "1080-6601",

publisher = "Johns Hopkins University Press",

number = "4",

}

TY - JOUR

T1 - Henry Green’s Investments

AU - Harker, Ben

N1 - This is a long article --11000 words--in the leading journal in the field. It's the type of article that can get a 4, with the right reader. The readers' reports are pasted here: 18-Jun-2021 Dear Ben Harker, Thank you for your recent submission to Modernism/modernity, and for your patience while your manuscript “Henry Green's Investments" has undergone mutually anonymous peer review. I have appended the reports of the reviewers to the bottom of this email. Both readers, as you'll see, find a lot to admire about the piece and are enthusiastic about the prospect of a Green article in Mod/mod. However, both also feel that revision is warranted before this manuscript is ready for publication in M/m--and Reader 1 insists that you clarify your use of Perry Anderson and your periodization of modernism generally. Reader 2 affirms that the issues at the heart of the piece are of great potential interest to M/m readers and offers additional suggestions for improving the piece. Then, in the process of seeking reviewers for this piece, one reader who ultimately declined writing a full report, asked me to pass on this advice: As an aside, it might be worth your contributor contemplating how Green's last two novels, Nothing and Doting, offer a barbed problematic commentary on the consolidation of social democracy. I would therefore ask you to revise and resubmit, with particular attention to these reports, especially the crucial recommendation of reader #1. I do look forward to reading this piece in its final form--and I thank you for submitting it to Modernism/modernity. All best wishes, Anne Fernald Anne E. Fernald (she/her) Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Co-Editor, Modernism/modernity [email protected] Reader #1 This splendid article attributes Henry Green’s unique forms of modernist engagement to his conservative investment in his family business. Whereas critics typically say that the former disrupted the latter—that Green’s experimental realism transcended his conservatism—this article’s brilliant argument equates the two investments, explaining how and why Green’s quirky conservative politics generated acutely inventive styles of literary recognition. This explanation is ingenious in the manner of the best new materialist interpretations of modernist literary forms. Its insight into the complex dynamics that actually unite Green’s class outlook and his writing style combines a fresh take on the politics of modernism with an inspired approach to the parallel literary aesthetic. A fascinating new Henry Green emerges, as does an important new way of thinking about what modernist fiction could do to embody changing socioeconomic possibilities. Green’s unlikely business commitments involved restabilizing hierarchies, reasserting old-fashioned commercial and class values in the face of emergent modernization. But this investment also involved new ways of representing sociocultural difference. In order to champion traditional class identities and relationships, Green had to inhabit current class dynamics, and doing so meant modernist engagement—a phenomenological alertness to individual subjectivities, a crystalline realist precision, and other tactics and techniques that might otherwise seem incompatible with social conservatism. This reversal in turn also enhanced a social awareness more extensive than anything modernism typically involved. But precisely because he mixed motives more typically divided between 1920s aesthetic innovation and 1930s social realism, Green’s investments have been misunderstood; his subtle, closely perceptive political aesthetic has been disaggregated, and seeing it whole demands a new sense both of his business model and his aesthetic objectives. Which is provided with rare insight and finesse in this article’s excellent readings, interpretations, and conclusions. Among the article’s strengths are its fresh and nuanced political assessments, its way of building upon the latest historicist accounts of modernist culture (including awareness of the “conjunctural simultaneity” of modernism’s competing socioeconomic temporalities), its narratological acuity (so important to its specific detailing of the narrative tactics parallel to Green’s commercial investments), its lively biographical accounts, its many apt observations, and in general its way of moving past old presumptions about the relationship between art and commerce. But the article needs significant revision. The biggest problem—the one that absolutely must be fixed—is the use of Perry Anderson’s periodization of modernism. Anderson’s argument is never fully explained, and its relevance here is never fully clear, especially since the article departs in at least two or three ways from Anderson’s model. Anderson comes up only telegraphically on pages one, eleven, and fifteen, and then oddly gets brusquely dismissed at other and later moments. To be a viable critical context here his work would need a solid paragraph of explanation, and its role here should be justified more thoroughly as well. Better yet, and more simply, why not just bring up Anderson when he’s specifically relevant and not accord him the status of main theoretical framework? “Intersections” begins by calling its subject (interwar gender trouble) “another significant context mediated in Living.” This non-transition seems to prevent the necessary explanation of what gender has to do with the larger argument, and then the density of plot summary that follows delays the necessary explanation until the last paragraph of this section concludes that the cancellation of social-justice opportunities is something similar to but different from the novel’s way of handling class politics. That claim should be introduced earlier and its relationship to the larger argument should be clearer. At times the article’s argument risks devolving into the too-inclusive kind of claim that begins “Henry, Ford”: that political discourses are “variously registered, contained and countered” in Green’s fiction. It might make more sense to stay focused on the stronger argument about the homology between Green’s conservatism and his modernism. Similarly, the article might be stronger if it persisted more fully in the excellent larger revisionist view of modernism that ends “Receiving.” The article returns to a narrower focus on Green in its last paragraphs, but it might instead put that material before the broader view and then give that broader view more time. The article’s claim to larger significance—and its appeal to a broader readership—could become more substantial that way, with a fuller account of what this revisionist view of Green means for our idea of the politics and aesthetics of modernism and modernity more generally. Finally, some sentences and paragraphs are too long. This article’s vigorous, expansive, often playful prose is mainly a total pleasure to read, but there are excesses that should be curtailed. I greatly enjoyed reading this compelling, refreshing, eye-opening reconsideration of Henry Green. Its materialist approach to modernist style is a great and inspiring success. The implications for modernism are exciting, and I look forward to the further conversations it is sure to spark. Reader #2 “Henry Green’s Investments’ provides a materialist reading of the formal and linguistic innovations of two major works by British novelist Henry Green, Pack My Bag (1939) and Living (1929). The essay couches Green’s work in a longer history of British class relations and capitalist modes of production, with a sharp take on the interrelationship between these two factors. By drawing attention to the underlying equivalence between Green’s capitalist investment in industry and his aesthetic practices, the essay provides a fresh reading of Green’s challenging work. The essay succeeds on many levels. It is sharply written and tightly argued, drawing out a fresh reading of Green’s work and its many ambivalences between high capitalism and modernist art. There is a controlled and fresh use of context – social, political, and economic – that is illuminating. It is lucidly written (although there are moments when the syntax becomes overly complicated, especially with the overuse of em-dashes). As a way of showing the utility of materialist readings of modernism, the essay is exemplary. That being said, I think the essay could do with two minor revisions before final publication. The conclusion appears a bit flat, especially given what was promised in the introductory paragraph – rather than extending out the stakes of the essay to modernist studies more generally, the essay goes through a rather potted reading of Green’s late work. I think the essay would be substantially stronger if the stakes of the argument were extended out in the conclusion. The second revision concerns the need to provide the reader a clearer conceptual introduction to the theoretical/materialist framework. While bits and pieces of Anderson’s work are presented throughout the essay at the appropriate times, for the sake of clarity readers would be better served by a few paragraphs at the opening of the essay laying out the theory. Doing that would also tie in the revised conclusion in a more structurally coherent manner for the essay. Recommendation: highly recommended for publication, pending minor revisions A few small matters: -pg. 1: Green published six books (not seven) between 1929 and 1946; the author seems to want to group Concluding within the larger analysis, but that was published in 1948 -pg 6: ‘different kinds of attentiveness is’  verb should be ‘are’ -pg. 8: ‘without holding and political views’  ‘and’ here should be ‘any’ -pg. 9: ‘glossed be Green’  ‘by’ instead of ‘be’ ******* To revise your manuscript, log into https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/modernism and enter your Author Center, where you will find your manuscript title listed under "Manuscripts with Decisions." Under "Actions," click on "Create a Revision." Your manuscript number has been appended to denote a revision. You may also click the below link to start the revision process (or continue the process if you have already started your revision) for your manuscript. If you use the below link you will not be required to login to ScholarOne Manuscripts. *** PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-step process. After clicking on the link, you will be directed to a webpage to confirm. *** https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/modernism?URL_MASK=cb10abab5f77413f936da2fee35a242d You will be unable to make your revisions on the originally submitted version of the manuscript. Instead, revise your manuscript using a word processing program and save it on your computer. Please also highlight the changes to your manuscript within the document by using the track changes mode in MS Word or by using bold or colored text. Once the revised manuscript is prepared, you can upload it and submit it through your Author Center. When submitting your revised manuscript, you will be able to respond to the comments made by the reviewer(s) in the space provided. You can use this space to document any changes you make to the original manuscript. In order to expedite the processing of the revised manuscript, please be as specific as possible in your response to the reviewer(s). IMPORTANT: Your original files are available to you when you upload your revised manuscript. Please delete any redundant files before completing the submission. Because we are trying to facilitate timely publication of manuscripts submitted to the Modernism/modernity, your revised manuscript should be submitted by 16-Oct-2021. If it is not possible for you to submit your revision by this date, we may have to consider your paper as a new submission.

PY - 2023/11/1

Y1 - 2023/11/1

N2 - Placing his oeuvre in a longue durée of capital and class relations, this article develops the recent contextual turn in the study of Henry Green, and hazards a materialist account of his style, focusing especially on his memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), and breakthrough novel, Living (1929). It revises the usual story, that Green’s literary modernism transcended, disrupted, or was irreconcilably at odds with his pin-striped, pro-business conservatism, arguing for homology and equivalence, not rupture or division, between his investments, commercial and aesthetic. Like Green’s unmodernist turn to business, the notoriously idiomatic, knotty, modernist style that defined Green’s most characteristic writing—the seven books published between 1929 and 1948—represents at a formal level a complex act of mediating—of simultaneously registering and resisting—the broadly democratizing economic, political, social and cultural processes transforming interwar Britain. Methodologically, the analysis supports a renewed emphasis on form, literary and linguistic, in materialist criticism of modernism and its moment.

AB - Placing his oeuvre in a longue durée of capital and class relations, this article develops the recent contextual turn in the study of Henry Green, and hazards a materialist account of his style, focusing especially on his memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), and breakthrough novel, Living (1929). It revises the usual story, that Green’s literary modernism transcended, disrupted, or was irreconcilably at odds with his pin-striped, pro-business conservatism, arguing for homology and equivalence, not rupture or division, between his investments, commercial and aesthetic. Like Green’s unmodernist turn to business, the notoriously idiomatic, knotty, modernist style that defined Green’s most characteristic writing—the seven books published between 1929 and 1948—represents at a formal level a complex act of mediating—of simultaneously registering and resisting—the broadly democratizing economic, political, social and cultural processes transforming interwar Britain. Methodologically, the analysis supports a renewed emphasis on form, literary and linguistic, in materialist criticism of modernism and its moment.

U2 - 10.1353/mod.2023.a925909

DO - 10.1353/mod.2023.a925909

M3 - Article

SN - 1080-6601

VL - 30

SP - 807

EP - 829

JO - Modernism/Modernity

JF - Modernism/Modernity

IS - 4

ER -

Henry Green’s Investments

Abstract

Access to Document

Fingerprint

Cite this