| Title | : | Blindness (British Literature) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1564782654 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781564782656 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 214 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1926 |
Blindness (British Literature) Reviews
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"So? This is your fourth Henry Green novel, and the first he wrote! What do you think?"
"It is all there, all of Green's focus on the magical power of dialogue and life puzzle questions - in the making, yet still quite incoherent, random..."
"You don't think there was a slight overuse of the word "splendid", then?"
"Oh yes! But I work with teenagers. They get stuck on a word, and use it all the time, without nuance or context. I think the adolescent in Green's novel showed that habit of young men quite splendidly. And besides, there is an awful lot of "awesome" in my generation, so "splendid" was a nice variation. Also, I suspect strongly that Green did it on purpose, as his specialty is capturing genuine voices!"
If my two inner voices can be quiet for a while, I will try to sum up my fourth Green experience so far. At first, I thought it had more plot than his later works, and a symbolical message. I wasn't quite sure if I liked that or not, and was relieved to find that the plot petered away, and the message was left ambiguous. Starting out as a reflection on what happens to a young and promising, yet superficial man if he loses his eyesight in a freak accident, the reader expects some kind of inner illumination and change, as do the protagonists themselves. But is that a realistic scenario of a life? Green is not content to write a simplistic, sentimental story of physical loss and spiritual gain, he wants to know what really, truly happens to people. It doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't follow a straight plot, and it is not coherent and logical. Because life is not!
So the young man goes through a phase of sharpening his other senses to make up for the loss of his eyes, and of his position in the academic world, and he arranges himself to become an author. But that was his plan before as well, so there is no life-altering change in plans, just a new angle to it ...
He struggles to find erotic pleasure without his eyes to guide him and support him. But he struggled before that as well, so ...
He struggles to describe the world as he perceives it without being able to imagine it visually anymore, but even before being blind, his vocabulary was "splendid", but limited, so ...
In the end he, honestly assesses his situation:
"The funny thing is that when one goes blind life goes on just the same, only half of it is lopped off."
"Yes?"
"One would think that life would stop, wouldn't you? But it always goes on, goes on, and that is rather irritating."
"My life's always the same."
And that is the other side of the medal: the young privileged man's accident is contrasted with other kinds of blindness. His own previous blindness based on ignorance of the world. The blindness of local people in a village never seeing any change at all. The blindness of busy Londoners, getting lost in the crowd, the noise, the turbulence of urban activity. There is blindness in all lives, and the question is:
"What can I do to live my life as well as possible, considering my particular kind of blindness?"
The protagonist wants to write, to analyse small bits and pieces of life to put together a panorama of the world - as incoherent and accidental as it seems to his partial, limited vision or perception. And in this respect, he resembles his author, who started with "Blindness" - his particular blind spot in the world - , and went on to explore "Living", "Loving", and all the other strange facets of the "Nothing" that our voices create to form our existence in time and space.
I am not sure I would have appreciated this first novel, had I not been immersed in Green's later writing already. I might well have been blind to its significance as a "splendid" starting point to a great authorship. As it is now, my own experience makes me "see" the typical elements of Green's world, and I have "blind faith" in his voice.
Splendid first novel, not to say awesome! -
The night I finished reading Blindness I couldn't sleep. Every time I began to doze off, I would awake with a jolt, fighting for air. This happened once, twice, three times. Probably more. I finally just gave up the fight and went downstairs to watch television. The droning of the voices brought some calmness, and I was eventually able to get some sleep.
I should have known better than to read this.
Blindness has been my Achilles'heelhell all my life. It haunts me in a way I can never express fully.
There is blindness in my family. Two of my brothers suffer(ed) from Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) and all through my childhood, I watched as each lost his vision: a long, slow decline that robbed them each day of some precious little gift. A new indignity would crop up daily, it seemed, until the darkness was all-encompassing.
The loss of freedom was the worst of all: always to rely on someone else's eyes, someone else's timing. There was no "I" anymore, without the "we". We'll go for a walk. We'll go to the store soon. We'll go to the bank. We'll go to the doctor.
The loss of freedom was most unbearable to two young men, both of artistic temperament, and both great sports enthusiasts: loving nothing more than to curl up with a good book and read away all the available hours (when they were not engaged in baseball or hockey), this deprivation shaped their lives in painful ways. Practicing their music became a blur when the notes were no longer readable -- until they found a music teacher with a heart and mind who empathized and found creative solutions. Everything they loved, that they were most passionate about, was no longer within their grasp.
To add to their darkness, it should be understood this was a time long before cellphones and iPads and talking computers and talking watches -- all those little conveniences which today make the world, not necessarily more bearable for the blind, but certainly more navigable by giving an iota of simulated freedom.
All this I understood in the matter of seconds as I read John's plight in the novel. It seems to me Henry Green understood it very well too -- the despair that comes from knowing you have no choice: you either put one step ahead of you every day, even though the path is barely discernible, or you sink and you die. You. Have. No. Choice.
The state of not having a choice results, usually, in some very bad choices ultimately. Henry Green understood that very well too for John makes some rather silly choices, early on, grasping at the straws of existence-without-sight.
I want to feel solid again because I feel I'm disappearing.This is something I learned very early with my brothers' regrettable choices sometimes. Living so completely in the darkness, you start to question at times whether you even exist yourself. And you fight -- and you fight -- and you fight for air. I can't breathe.
You can wrap a blindfold around your eyes and simulate blindness, but it's all a joke. Just knowing that you can take that blindfold off at anytime changes the experience completely. There can never be complete understanding of blindness. That too, Green understood, and telegraphed those thoughts through John's deteriorating mental status.
I can't breathe.
If you don't find equilibrium; if you don't have willpower of steel; if you waiver for just a little bit on the nature of your existence, you succumb, like John. Like my elder brother did because his choices were so much more broken than my younger brother's. It was easier for my younger brother to take direction and accept the guiding hand of one who loved him. It was so much harder for my elder brother because he was so used to being the helper, to being the one in control. It is so much easier to give up control when you haven't had much experience with it; it is almost impossible to do when you've been someone who was the mainstay of the family. (My father died when I was quite young, leaving a whole collection of us to make our way in the world; the elder brother took on the role of helper in the family, so for him, the loss was unbearable, unmanageable, unforgivable.)
All these torments, Green understood.
The novel is as oppressive as the condition: it becomes a metaphor, a simulation of blindness. Read with caution. Read at your own risk. -
Cheerio to All That
Blindness might be a parody of English upper class manners and speech from the 1920’s, except that Henry Green, even in this his first novel, knew how to capture exactly what he saw and heard. Life among the chaps at Eton, all frightfully boring and dull except for Seymour and B.G. with whom one could banter in witty epithets and aphorisms. The only real challenge there was to avoid games, and the housemasters when cutting up in town.
Worst luck going blind don’t you know. Sets a person back a bit. Very important not to let the side down though. So much for the literary after-life (that uncertain period after Eton). It would be fun seeing again but hey ho, as Momma says, we could be poor. Fortunately old Nanny is still around to tend to her charge. No different really from when he was a baby. Easier actually since he’s much less mobile now. This is also fortunate because so is Nanny. So with the nurse, the maids, the cook, William the valet, and various other staff, she can just about cope.
The depressing thing is that the affairs in the house are not all that bright. Taxes you know. Country on the way down. The war had to be paid for after all, one supposes. Momma was alone with all the domestic administration. The motor has to go, and the chauffeur. And one is still expected to respond to these endless charity requests. What with one of the under-butler engaged in a dalliance with cook, there’s hardly time for running with the hounds much less a decent shooting party.
And on and on it goes: a chronicle of class disintegration, national transformation and youthful development. Blindness is probably better sociology than it is literature, a document of the time and place produced by someone who was an eye-witness. It shows where Green might be headed but he certainly hadn’t yet arrived. He just hadn’t seen or heard enough at Eton and Oxford. -
It is impossible, reading this, not to hear the scriptural cadence: I once was blind, but now I see.
The protagonist, John, says as much. And that the musical line derives from John 9:25* should be all the hint we need for the obvious intent.
Early, the author asks this rhetorical question: Was everything nice and like her religion, comfortable? Well, surely no.
Yet I'm not sure our John, dear John, funny John, as a character in a novel, ever can see. At least there was no epiphany. No matter. Our author sees. And hears and smells. And that was the charm of this novel (Henry Green's first, and my fifth Henry Green) for me, more so than any metaphor.
There were the precise details:
- Jenny, the laundry cat, was two inches nearer the sparrow.**
- Going out she straightened a picture that was a little crooked.
- The window was wide open to let out the snores.
- The dew has made a spangled dress for everyone.
And always an eye for color:
- Her hair, black and in disorder, tangled down to her eyebrows. Across one cheek a red scar curved. Her eyes, a dark brown and very large, had a light that burned. There are three stories there, aren't there?
There were the riffs on Blindness:
He always pulled down the blind . . . Young people always went into those things blind . . . They none of them had the gift of sight so they couldn't have foretold this . . . I don't know what you see in views . . . I never see anyone . . .
And then there were sentences that could just be admired for the craft:
- A blackbird thought aloft of bed.
- The air is new.
- He felt the grass, but it was not the same.
No, it is not the same. And it never was.
Blundering about in the dark yet knowing about everything really. . . . You see, no one cares enough, about the war and everything. No one really cared about my going blind.
_______________
*The man answered, "Whether he's a sinner or not I do not know. One thing I do know is: I was blind, and now I see.
** I love this. First, the cat has a name, but also an occupation. And we know from that narrowed two inches what Jenny is up to. -
Remarkable debut novel from a 17 year old Eton student, first published in 1926. (Such prodigiousness to be echoed a couple of generations later by another young Etonian, Douglas Murray, with his biography of Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas – see Wilde).
Incredible insight by such a young author into the effects of sudden blindness and the resulting life changes. That part of the novel is timeless.
Otherwise, dated and something of a period piece – The Manor folk v the unwashed rest. -
Let me preface this by saying that Henry Green published this novel, which incorporates a number of highly advanced modernist techniques, in 1926; that this was one year after Woolf's To The Lighthouse, and one year before her Mrs. Dalloway; and that he managed to do this when he was 21. That's an amazing achievement, and more than enough reason for me to look forward to reading his later work.
Unfortunately, I won't be re-reading this one. His use of dialogue is worth plenty of attention (the scenes in which John and 'June' discuss their malformed expectations are wonderful), and it's fun to train-spot eminent Etonians through the early diaristic bits. But the internal monologues, technically advanced and all, are *torturously* dull: repetitive thinking about boring aspects of life does not make for a worthwhile read. Anyone who continues to spout the idea that one must 'show, not tell,' should be forced to read these monologues, just once, and that should put them on the right track. You can tell people things.
One particularly interesting trick, though, is the way he changes tense in order to indicate a switch from narration to a character's direct thought; it's something I've toyed with myself. But Green puts thought in the past tense and narrates in the present; I went the other way round. I hope to find this in other authors, to see how they used it. -
Remarkable work for a young first-timer and derivative of almost no one. The portrait of the Mother still stands true.
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3* Loving
2* Caught
3* Blindness
TR Living
TR Party Going
TR Back -
A strange little book. British smart-ass kid is blinded in a freak train accident. Section One is his diary from school. All the kids are referred to by initials, few names spelled out. If it hadn't been written during its own era, it would be Central Casting. Part Two picks up the life of a young girl on the estate of John Haye (now-blind boy). Her father is a disgraced clergyman living on gin. They have no money. She retrieves eggs from the unmown grass to augment their diet of iffy bread and canned sardines. She boils the eggs in days-old dishwater. But she also has an extraordinary eye for beauty and dreams, like Cinderella. Etc. Yes, John Haye and Joan (he calls her June) walk out, literally, for a while.
An interesting juxtaposition of internal monologues with and without sight. Because Green is a highly skilled writer, I was held--though barely. However, my edition, hardback from Viking, 1978, had never been stitched. The pages were glued in. As I turned them, they came out in my hands. The book literally turned to dust in my hands. -
I've reviewed other "juvenile" works by authors, prominently Faulkner, that might not live up to the writer's later works, but which is still better than 99% of what is being written by authors of long-standing today. This can easily be included among them.
Green has been hit or miss for me: Caught was excellent, Living more of a slog, but this his first novel, about a young university student blinded by accident and his early weeks and months of adjusting, far surpasses those later works.
Green is known for his vernacular cleverness and sympathetic immersion in his novels of the working classes, of which he was not a part of, and there is a little bit of that here, but this striking novel's beauty lies in its simple exploration of the adjustments necessary. Newly-blind John fumbles with the world, learning to appreciate the keenness of its beauty in new and different ways, tries to fall in love, and begins to learn how to be an artist vicariously through all those things. The loveliness of the story is dark, of course, and muted, but here and there erupts through in weird, winsome moments. -
First novel by Green, who wrote it while in public school and at Oxford. It concerns a young upper-class artsy type who loses his sight and it scarred in an accident. Brilliant descriptive writing of the countryside and English country life, with wonderful set pieces and internal monologues concerning the daughter of a disgraced and defrocked priest and the protagonist's step-mother.
Other authors (most notably John Updike) have started a revival of Green's works. Updike wrote the intro to an omnibus of Green (Living Loving Party Going) which is available in paperback. New York Review Books has also published a number of the books. I read this book from an ex-library (for low demand") hardback I purchased some years ago. Like many 1970s hardbacks, it was only glued and the book fell apart while I was reading it. -
Henry Green’s debut novel, published in 1926 when he was 21 years old and a student at Oxford, is a remarkably mature work. One may not suspect this at first superficial glance of the plot summary - a young man is blinded in an accident and adjusts to life without sight, pretty obvious symbolism opportunity there! - and the titles of the novel’s three parts: Caterpillar, Chrysalis, Butterfly. I’d suspect a pretty simplistic book just knowing those three factors (first novel, plot, reductive outline). But in fact it’s not a simple text at all, and while not exactly Green’s mature style it provides some hints of it.
Primarily I’m thinking here of Green’s avowed intent to take the author out of the picture and just present the reader with what can be seen and heard directly, and to make his or her own meaning from it, which reached an apogee with a couple of nearly all-dialogue novels. Green hasn’t got there yet of course at this point, but dialogue like this, using spoken language between characters instead of authorial narration to suggest something about a character’s state of mind, bears a resemblance:“I was to lead a public life of the greatest possible brilliance. It is different now.”
“How wonderful that would be.”
“You know what I mean? One planned everything out on a broad scale, remembering little scraps of flattery that someone or other had been so good as to throw one and building on that. One was so hungry for flattery. The funny thing is that when one goes blind life goes on just the same, only half of it is lopped off.”
“Yes?”
“One would think that life would stop, wouldn’t you? But it always goes on, goes on, and that is rather irritating.”
This novel’s central character, John, also shares Green’s attitude in respects of the reader forming meaning. The fictional John is, like the real Green, at the very start of his writing career and sees his his role not as dictating meaning directly but allowing the reader to form it:He would write about these things, for life was only beginning again, and there were many things to say. Besides, one couldn’t for ever be sitting in a chair like this, and be for the rest of one’s life someone to be sorry for. And perhaps the way he saw everything was the right way, though there could be no right way but one’s own. Art was what created in the looker-on, and he would have to try and create in others.
What Green would get rid of in later novels was lots of descriptive prose, which approach may have its interest and virtues, but when Green is capable or writing prose like this about a waning day before age 21, one can’t help imagining it as a loss:The air began to get rid of the heaviness, and so became fresher as the dew soaked the grass. A blackbird thought aloud of bed, and was followed by another and then another. The sun was flooding the sky in waves of colour while he grew redder and redder in the west, the trees were a red gold too where he caught them. The sky was enjoying herself after the boredom of being blue all day. She was putting on and rejecting yellow for gold, gold for red, then red for deeper reds, while the blue that lay overhead was green. A cloud of starlings flew by to roost with a quick rush of wings, and sleepy rooks cawed. Far away a man whistled on his way home.
-
The story is of a young man, John Haye. The book is divided into sections called Caterpillar, Chrysalis and Butterfly so we know that there will be change and maturing. The story starts with John at Public School of Noat. John is a boy who loves art, writing and plays. He enjoys beauty such as daffodil blooming amongst the grass in the garden. In his senior year, John loses his eyesight in a freak accident. In Chrysalis, John is at home in the country with his stepmother and nanny. He is getting used to seeing a new way. He spends some time with the daughter of a defrocked parson and then his stepmother rushes John to the London, a new life. In the first part of the book, we are reading John’s diary. In the second part, we are learning the story of Joan (the parson’s daughter). John’s narration switches to his inner dialogue. The author was around 20 or 21 when he wrote this story and used several new techniques of modernism in writing his first novel.
The actual accident is perhaps a little unbelievable but the author did a great job of describing blindness and the way people behave around the handicapped person.
The chapter called Picture Postcardism-- focused a lot on the visual. What John could no longer see but what others (Joan) could see.
Social commentary: John’s mother’s treatment of servants (appalling). the defrocked Vicar feeling like he is entitled. -
great imagery and a good first 1/3, counteracted by being the most boring thing in the universe
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3.5 stars. An interesting, engaging short novel in three parts. It's about John Haye, a young English public schoolboy, who is accidentally blinded whilst on a train journey. The first part is John's diary entries over one year when he was at a tertiary school in London. John's mother lives on a rural property with servants and substantial gardens. The property is six hours train journey from London.
John was 18 years old when he became permanently blind. The second part of the novel is about a young woman, Joan/June, the daughter of the mostly drunk village pastor, and her relationship with John.
This novel is the author's first, written when he was 21 years of age. The book was first published in 1926. -
I read this book.
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Very good writing, especially considering Green’s age when he wrote this, but it doesn’t quite compare to his later novels.
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A schoolboy is blinded in an accident and gradually comes to cope with his disability in Henry Yorke's first novel, written while he was still a schoolboy himself. It is a remarkable book for so young an author, although there is perhaps more style than substance and his later books are better than this one.
The book is divided into three sections named after the stages in the metamorphosis of a butterfly and showing the processes leading to the emergence of a writer. Caterpillar is John's schoolboy diary before the accident, with him devouring books, looking forward to university and wanting to be a writer. Chrysalis is set after the accident, with John at home wrapped in a protective cocoon of stepmother, nanny and nurse, knowing his life has been changed completely, but not knowing what he can do now. The final section shows him embarking on a new life, relishing how his other senses are enhanced by his loss of sight and with his ambition to write more powerful than ever. It is an optimistic story, despite the tragedy, and ends with John in London and out in the world, although the 'fit' he has shows that there may still be problems and difficulties ahead.
Most of the story is told from John's point of view, but we also hear the thoughts of the other characters. The most interesting of these is Joan, daughter of the alcoholic former vicar, with whom John has a mildly romantic relationship. He is not taken to London to get him away from an unsuitable young woman, although Nanny certainly disapproves; it is his desire to go and his stepmother's devoted care for him which makes her give up her country life to take him. Joan is, however, the first person to treat him as a person instead of a patient to be cared for and cossetted after the accident, so her involvement is critical. We are left wondering if they will meet again. -
Because Henry Green wrote so many novels, and because they all have single-word titles that might indicate something off-putting, it's difficult to decide not only where but if to begin. But without looking into the works, I began with his first novel, Blindness, a word full of possibilities for multiple meanings. And although it has flaws of various sorts, I'm happy to know it won't be the last I'll read.
Daniel Mendelsohn's introduction is so professorial and so thorough that it will badly affect the reader's ability to respond directly to the work if it is read first -- my usual complaint: why aren't there Afterwords rather than Introductions? – and focuses most attention on the future works Blindness portends. The novel was written at such a very young age that certain awkwardnesses and somewhat obvious elements can be forgiven, such as the names of the three sections and the studied indirect discourse which doesn't always flow as freely as it might; the ending seems a bit unconvincing too.
But Green's sympathetic involvement with his characters and his skillful manner in presenting them on their own terms overcome such concerns, giving the reader people to care about. That they are removed in time and class and manners doesn't interfere with our involvement with them.
And I look forward to future reading of later novels and what Mendelsohn describes as his abandonment of the classic modernist free indirect discourse – but he's quite good at this affecting and effective technique even in this first work. -
Ostensibly, this is the account of a John Haye, young English public schoolboy who is blinded in a freak accident. Along with the account of his convalescence we are introduced to his stepmother and the domestic servants at John's ancestral home, Barwood.
The perspective abruptly shifts to Joan Entwhistle, the somewhat slatternly daughter of the town drunk, a defrocked vicar. The squalor in which she and her father live is in direct contrast to the stuffy propriety of Barwood.
When John shows a preference for Joan over several eligible young society dames, his stepmother becomes very concerned, eventually to the point of being meddlesome.
John and Joan's distinctly separate impressions of the local countryside are exquisite in their detail and poetically poignant.
It is here, along with his depictions of the inner thoughts of John and Joan, that Green achieves his apotheosis.
At times it is obvious that this novel was written by a very young and inexperienced author, but there are passages of sheer beauty and a rareness of perspicacity. Even the tersely diaristic portion of the novel touches upon genius. -
My sight started to deteriorate suddenly and rapidly soon after I became an avid reader, between the ages of eight and nine. I suspect many of us here on GR experienced something similar. In my case, although a few visits to the Optician restored matters, it has left me with a permanent horror of going blind. I once heard a blind man on the radio describing standing outside his front door on a day of heavy rain, and becoming aware of his surroundings in a new way as the falling rain, altering its tone as it fell on different roofs and gardens, revealed to his inner ear the landscape around him.
This novel also takes away outer sensations to give us a sharpened sense of the life within. Occasionally, it doesn’t quite work, and reveals itself as the first novel of a young man. But overall, it is a fine and effective piece of writing, and has definitely ensured I will read more by the same author. -
John is a student at boarding school and in the middle of his last year, is blinded in a fluke accident. This short novel shows us a bit of his life before blindness, but mostly how he and his family (including servants, because it's that kind of family) adjust.
Green wrote this as an undergrad at Oxford, which explains the accuracy with which he portrays the young man's mindset. He also writes about John and his family's mourning of John's sight in a way that feels very, very real. It's easy to empathize with each character and assume their perspective.
Food: this is reminiscent of my experience eating a home made Ukrainian meal for the first time. I didn't know what I was eating and had very little context for what to expect. I had to trust my host to guide me in what I was eating and how to go about consuming it. -
No, not
that Blindness.
Update:
I know. I abandon too many books...
But I've read too many books about romantic egoists who suffer in some way. I don't have the attention span to read one that isn't even polished. (This was Henry Green's first novel.)
It's not bad though. -
A lesser Green. His first book -- some of it poor, not worth the time unless you must read everything he set down. Bright spots are in the middle with John and 'June' meeting and figuring out what to do with each other and then a few paragraphs at the end with Margaret.
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Rating: 2.5 mainly for the writing and the concept, how the story was told on the other hand was worth one star for me personally
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Blindness tells the story of an ambitious young man who loses his sight in three parts: caterpillar, when John is full of youthful ambition and dreams that stretch beyond the limits of realism; chrysalis, the story of how John deals with his dreadful fate of losing his sight and butterfly, which is the most eventful part of the story where we start to exit the internal stream of John’s confused state of existence and move to how he starts to interact with the world around him. Overall, it was difficult to enjoy the story for almost all the other characters lacked severely in dimension and we were left most of the time with Mr. John Haye’s dreadful mind. Although you can’t help but feel sympathetic towards him, you can instantly feel how this egotistical spoiled child was just desperately waiting for an excuse to act like the victim, he always believed himself to be. The story is mainly conveying the internal monologue of John as he tries to make sense of his new found existence, every dreadful passing thought that goes through his mind is there for us to know and often they come as a tornado of speculation and judgement within very short spans of time, there is no climax or true plot beyond that. Whilst there is some genius in that, as that is what we should expect in a story about the process of losing one’s sight and Henry Green is an excellent writer, Blindness often felt like an exercise in writing rather than a real story. The nature writing in particular is exquisite and when we are presented with some of John’s deeper contemplations for example as he starts to practice gratitude towards the gift of sound or the ability to walk through the trees, you can’t help but be immersed in the beauty of the portrait before you, but these were rare occasions in my view lost and muddled between the tornado of useless passing thoughts that ran through our John’s mind. In a sense, that is an extremely true depiction of reality and how one actually thinks given all the triggers and sources of stimuli that surround us, but I personally wasn’t drawn to that form of writing. Despite all of my criticism, I would highly recommend this story for anyone who would love to strengthen their descriptive writing for there are some literary gems that are truly admirable in this book, here are a few that resonated:
“Why did the trees and the birds conspire so openly”
“Here we are in the woods, do you feel the hollowness of it?”
“The hut, the trees and each leaf suddenly had a spirit of their own. And the wind bore them down to you so that they might whisper in your ear, and be companions as you sat in the dark, so that you were not really lonely”
“There was so much to find out, and in a sense, so much to discover for others, for when one was blind, one understood differently. A whole new set of values had arisen. And being blind did not hurt as long as one did not try to see in terms of sight what one touched or heard”
“Let them talk about things, not people”. -
Poor John is struck blind in a freak accident as a 15yr-old kid, and suddenly his life changes drastically, from active boarding school life to a world of 'nothing all the time'. He is the last in his line of minor aristocrats in the countryside near a small British town, and has no friends or social ties in town, so his life becomes completely defined by the sometimes stifling attentions of his step-mother and her ageing servants. Meanwhile Joan, a girl of about the same age, is starting to think about how her own life ought to go, after a childhood spent taking care of her alcoholic father. Her life is exhausting and difficult, and she has grown up resenting all people like John's family, but especially John's family. On the surface Joan seems like she could be a perfect wife for John, and maybe in another universe they would have made a great match, but John's family is too stuck up and Joan is too deeply ingrained with bitterness and hatred for wealthy people. Instead, Joan may get to spend the rest of her life tending her father and putting up with his abuse of her, while John gets to be just as isolated with his step-mother, now in London, where she can take care of him as if he is even more helpless and invalid than he really is.
There are of course other ways to read this book, and maybe it is just a story of the early hiccoughs in a pair of lives that will be quite nice by the end, but I read it as a story of how families weigh down their children with assumptions and expectations that severely curtail those children's hopes for a better life as adults. -
Blindness is Henry Green's first book and all the more remarkable in that he was so young when he wrote it. I've read where other critics say that's why it is derivative but it shows early signs of his later genius, giving him a sort of back-handed compliment. He's very good with metaphors and symbolism for such a young writer. When John Haye's stepmother drops the Gs off all her gerunds and present participles but still uses them correctly is one small way in which the author quietly displays the difference in the speech of the academic minded John and his ostensibly literal-minded mother. Although when we are given the p.o.v. of young Joan whom he courts we are given no such indications of her place in the country continuum other than a doubtfulness toward everything he says. So, callous but likable young student is blinded in a freak accident, leaves school to become depressed at home, makes an attempt at courtship, and ... well, you'll have to read the book to find out. It's worth your time. All characters are well-drawn, settings beautifully descriptive in the ways said characters can feel or see them, or remember them. I found all very believable and I would not label the book derivative. I highly recommend starting a foray into reading Henry Green with this first of his nine novels.
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A classic read. We all know the language of a classic book. It takes me a little while to get used to the classic language of writing and most of the time I’m used to it by the second day of reading.
It’s not easy for me to connect with the writer when reading a classic book but for Henry Green’s writing, I found myself sort of connecting to his style of writing from day one of reading his novel which is quite unusual for me.
I also found myself more interested in the main character; Joan, his inner dialogue and his struggles with blindness, and I wanted more of that. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded if the whole novel was based on that to be honest.
2 out of 5 as I am personally not a fan of classic novels. -
Often cited by Auden, Waugh, Isherwood and then later by the likes of Updike and Edmund White, Henry Green was new to me. Blindness was written when he was 20 and published in 1926, and whilst certainly of its time, it is the sort of debut novel that makes you want to explore his mature novels. There are some really lovely moments in this slight book, and whilst structure seems to take precedence at times, it is well worth reading.
Looking forward to exploring more.
