Defrosting the Freezer

Peace, an intoxicating insanity, after the sobering realities of war. Also, there is a past here, lost to the conflict’s carnage, which can never be resurrected however strong one’s faith. This man sacrificing himself on the altar of his own delusion. The mind losing its compass as it goes in search of old galleons, wrecks now littering the sea’s bed. Henry Green, Back. When a mind sinks down into an imagined history.

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He is a master of describing a woman’s body.

She was lying stark naked on the bed, a lamp with a pink shade at her side. She had not drawn the blackout, and the electric light made the dark outside a marvellous deep blue. In an attempt to seem natural, he said something about showing a light.

“Come here, silly,” was what she replied.

Then he knelt by the bed, having under his eyes the great, the overwhelming sight of the woman he loved, for the first time without her clothes. And because the lamp was lit, the pink shade seemed to spill a light of rose over her in all their summer colours, her hands that lay along her legs were red, her stomach gold, her breasts the colour of cream roses, and her neck white roses for the bride. She had shut her eyes to let him have his fill, but it was too much, for he burst into tears again, he buried his face in her side just below the ribs, and bawled like a child. “Rose,” he called out, now knowing he did, so, “Rose.”

“There,” Nancy said, “there,” pressed his head with her hands. His tears wetted her. The salt water ran down between her legs. And she knew what she had taken on. It was no more or less, really, than she had expected.

Rose is both a symbol and something real, albeit what is real is little more than a reference point, a sign to a pre-war love affair; to Rose Phillips, who died when he was a prisoner-of-war. Throughout his time on these pages, the real and the metaphorical are mixed-up for Charley Summers, producing both an allegory and a terrifyingly accurate depiction of mental breakdown: this man, not coping with a civilian life denuded of its former happiness, his lost love, goes insane. So powerful is the symbol that it invades the naturalistic descriptions and at times takes them over; just like the mad, when the ideas inside their head become the only reality. Back less a study of mental collapse than the thing itself; peering inside this book we come face to face with lunacy. To read between these two hardcovers to enter an asylum.1

Charley and Nancy have their first kiss.

Autumn was the season, most roses were dead. Petals that had dropped some months back and rotted, traces of a summer now gone, were covered by the brown leaves which even in this still air rocked down to lie deep on the ground as they walked, so that their feet rustled.  Where a flying bomb had dropped recently, the drift of leaves was still green underfoot, the trees bare as deep winter. Then, just as they were passing this spot, the syrens set up a broken wailing.

“Come on”, he said, turning off the road into the garden of a house in ruins.

“Why, surely you never took her here?” she asked, for the place could only have been blitzed a few days.

He laughed.

“Or are you nervous?” she wanted to know.

“Not of them,” he answered.

“Why not?” she demanded, as they skirted what was still standing, against the untouched chimney a lone staircase which descended from nothing to the leaf-covered drive, the steps blotched with a dust of plaster, and all of it turned a great red by the setting sun, her face as red as his own. “Why not?” she repeated.

“Don’t know,” he answered, hurrying her along.

‘Where are we going?” she asked, and seemed content. He knew no more than she. But when they got round the red garage, which was intact, and a privet hedge, which, in this light, and because it was shaded, burned a dark glowing violet, they found what had been the rose garden, enclosed with a low brick wall, and then they had before them, the outlines edged in red, stunted, seemingly withered, rose trees which had survived the blast as though it had never happened, and, for a screen at the back, a single line of dwarf cypresses, five feet high with brown trailing leafless briars looped from one to the other, from one black green foliage to its twin as green and black, briars that had borne gay rose, after rose, after wild rose, to sway under summer rain, to spatter the held drops, to touch a forehead, perhaps to wet the brown eyes of someone idly searching these cypresses for an abandoned nest whence fledglings, for they go before the becoming of a rose, and long been gone, long ago now and flown.

Both instinctively looked back to find whether they were being followed, but all they saw was the red mound of light rubble, with the staircase and chimney lit a rosier red, and, as they turned again to themselves in the garden, the briars wreathed from one black cypress to another were aflame, as live as live filaments in an electric light bulb, against night’s quick agony of the sun.

Then, before he knew what she was about, she had put her arms round his neck, and kissed him.

“There,” she said into an ear. “That’s for coming down.”

But he put his hands behind her head, pressed her kissing mouth harder on his own. The night, on its way fast, was chill, and now he had again that undreamed of sharp warmth moving and living on his own, her breath an attar of roses on his deep sun-red cheek, her hair an animal over his eyes and alive, for he could see each rose glowing separate strand, then her dark body thrusting heavy at him, and her blood dark eel fingers that fumbled at his neck.

She cruelly spoiled it. She took her sweet lips off his.

“Was it like that?” she asked, as though nothing had happened.

He made to grab her up to him once more. But she twisted away.

“Was it? she repeated. He did not realize that she was aiming at Rose.

Then, in the position she held, half in, half out of his arms, and so close that the one eye in his line of vision was in the outer corner of its socket to watch him, he saw it catch the dying sunset light around, and glow, as if she had opened the eye hole to a furnace.

He made another clutch at her, but she broke away completely. He was left, so that his arms hung at his sides, and he could not speak, paralysed, for an instant, as Mr. Grant.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, annoyed with herself. He did not move, or speak.

“It’s too cold to sit. We’d best go back,” she said.

So they walked home in silence. In the dark she took his arm once more, pressed close. But he said and did nothing at all. He couldn’t even feel.

Ruins. Withered roses. The briars on the vigorous cypress trees. A garden bathed in the red of the setting sun…the memory of Rose, that sunset on the old affair, diffuses through these moments. Those feelings of loss; a mad remembrance; a belief of the past’s return, of Rose’s resurrection, a ghost become living flesh-and-blood, paints this scene with warm colours. An embrace, the first since Charley’s return to England, suffused with the atmosphere of his last. This kiss, bringing Rose back to life, is also her coffin call; this embrace a road out of the cemetery; for now her influence will fade, as memories of a dead love give way to the living body of Nancy Whitmore. 

Such is the artistry of Green, that we know the exact second Rose vanishes from the scene; it is when rose-tinted Nancy spreads herself out for Charley’s delectation. That red light - the Rose of memory - bathing her body in profoundly contradictory ways, as the emotions and the erotic dance around that lighted flesh; a combat of past love and current desire resolving itself in tears. At last he speaks her name. The light goes out. Rose is no more…. In the garden the old love was too strong, Nancy almost subsumed in it; thus that pull away, her assertion of independence. In the bedroom Charley admits defeat; weeps for his lost self, which runs like a river over the undulating bed of Nancy’s nakedness. At last Charley can see this woman as she really is. And the irony of course - Green is so talented - it is through rose-tinted spectacles - that pink lamp shade - that he sees the beautiful truth. This is Nancy. Sane at last.

The scene is slightly unreal. We wonder at Nancy’s psychology - the lamp an accident? Or did she intend this red bath; to sacrifice herself in Rose…. Such is the density of this description that such questions are endless; there’s also the fact that madness is infectious;2 these characters not in control of their consciousness. It is this madness that concerns the author; like a scientist he wants to describe it as accurately as possible; this book less a novel than a microscope. I know, I know. I speak in metaphors. Only symbols will do when it comes to capturing the invisible workings of the mind.

Such strange realities are played out in the plot; both a commentary and a description of Charley’s collapsing sanity.

Nancy is a secret half-sister to Rose, and has a resemblance to the dead woman. Thus Charley’s shock when they first meet: thinking her Rose he faints. Then his mind cracks. That Nancy is Rose becomes an idée fixe, bringing him close to a total breakdown. He won’t listen to reason. Instead he tries to prove he is right; he introduces Nancy to Rose’s husband, sends Nancy’s handwriting to a graphologist…. This fixed idea occludes all common sense until the evidence is shown to be incontrovertible. Mr and Mrs Grant confirm that Rose and Nancy are half-sisters, Nancy his daughter from a brief love affair. As this truth slowly filters through the crazy maze of his mind, the relationship with Nancy grows. We are back to that garden; and the rose-tinted body, his obsession trickling away between Nancy’s legs.

Why in peacetime? Because time was deep-frozen during the war; those years in camp keeping the past alive, as Charley lived off memories and hope, which are easily conflated: to return to a war-free Blighty imagined as a step back in time; a place erased of blemish and pain. Back in Britain this dream is confronted by reality; and at first the dream wins, the image of Rose imprinted on Nancy’s body.3 A crisis occurs because Nancy will not submit to such delusion. Already in the camp our hero was on the border of insanity, as thoughts of the past became a substitute for the boredom and slop of prison life. But there was no conflict between them. He was free to create an artificial paradise. Back in Blighty the ever-changing contingencies of daily life overwhelm these dream images, destroying a past that could exist only in that time-frozen place, the camp. His mind too weighted to fantasy it no longer has the resources to adapt to the realities around him. He feels a total loss of control. Memory versus actuality, the past against the present, all are striving for ascendency; as Rose’s death both deepens the delusion and puts it under severe stress. To believe that Rose is still alive…. A useful psychological camouflage to hide the horrors of his own war experience: he witnessed something horrible, which he won’t reveal to anyone; the ultimate source, we must assume, of his breakdown. His idealisation of the past a mental fortress designed to keep out this devastating memory.4 Of course, to be sane he has to let it out…those tears on Nancy’s naked body.5

Back home. It is a fragile existence, smashed when he meets Nancy, and mistakes her for his old love. The insanity truly starts, by which I mean a fixed idea dominates the mind, colouring all the grey facts around it. Gradually the outside world seeps in, until he finds himself by a blitzed staircase and a ruined chimney stack, and discovers a woman pulling out of an embrace. It is the moment Nancy starts to replace Rose, whose influence is the setting sun that illuminates this marvellous scene.

War prepares the insanity, peacetime brings it to fruition.6 It is that moment when the fixed images in the mind dissolve under the contingencies of daily living, which we then attempt to control by creating idées fixes of our own. We become the tyrants of our own existence. Our mind a totalitarian Hell.

Not all returning soldiers mentally collapse. Yet peacetime is hard for many of these men. Surrounded by civilians, for the first time in years, you are now engulfed in a tsunami of ignorance and unintelligent sympathy. The realities of war turned into the comic-book caricatures of film and anecdote. No-one understands you. You are alone. It is as if part of you has died…. Yes, my friend, you are see where I am going with this…in trying to recover Rose he is trying to find himself, now lost on these uncomprehending streets. Cut off, lonely, severely alienated, one feels the power of society, its threat to overwhelm, to snuff out, one’s identity. This creates fear and doubt. Patterns are created that do not exist. Paranoia creeps in through the cracks of our rational self. Looking to help both his wife (who also is suffering from a temporary insanity) and his daughter (who lost her husband in the war) Mr Grant invites Charley to meet them. The first encounter is disturbing - Mrs Grant does not recognise him - the second devastating: Nancy. This uncanny meeting with Rose’s “double” finds echoes in other scenes, and Charley begins to believe there is a conspiracy to fool him. His landlady, Mrs Frazier; Arthur Middlewitch, an acquaintance he met in the artificial limb clinic; Nancy and Mr Grant; all seem know each other, and Charley comes to believe they are involved in a plot against his welfare. This paranoia increases until…the pattern is explained, and the banal truth seeps down the channels of that mazy mind. There are connections, but they are far looser than Charley believes; and it is only Mr Grant who has actively tried to intervene in his life - he wants him to have a relationship with Nancy.

Charley Summers needs love. Alas, his natural shyness, accentuated by his wartime imprisonment, makes him diffident before women. Knowing that Dorothy Pitter likes him he yet cannot believe it, and delays making a pass at her; so losing her to another man. He almost loses Nancy, but she has a stronger and more empathic character; there is also their mutual links to the Grants, which provides an opportunity for them to meet, allowing a relationship to slowly grow until it is Nancy who takes the initiative; laying out her body so beautifully under that rose-tinted light.  

Unlike Miss Pitter, thoroughly conventional, she expects the man to lead, Nancy is a strong woman. Like many novels set during and after the Second World War, but in a quiet and utterly realistic way - if it wasn’t for their regular meetings at the Grants it is unlikely that Nancy would have seduced Charley - Back suggests a psychic change in the attitudes of a particular class of women: war gave them independence.

Peacetime is another battlefront, existing wholly in the mind. The soldiers to survive only if they are given understanding and sympathy (Mr Corker, Charley’s boss; Phillips, Rose’s husband).7 These tough men are actually frail creatures, war destroying their heroism. Women are the generals now. These men to be led by the hand to the place they want to go: Nancy making a present of herself to the man with whom she wants to create a future: she wants children. The crisis is over. Charley has returned to the banalities of life.

Review: Back

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1.  One way of reading William Golding’s novels of the Fifties is to see them as a reaction to the madness of peace after the sanities of war.

2.  An extraordinary example is Martha Quest in The Four-Gated City.

3.  The resemblances to Vertigo are extremely strong. We wonder if the writers were influenced by this novel.

4.  We think of the marauding army in J.G. Ballard’s extraordinary short story: The Garden of Time.

5.  Not analysis but emotional release is what cures him. Henry Green a better psychologist than Sigmund Freud.

6.  Compare with Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel.

7.  Who lends Charley a story about an eighteenth century French aristocrat who is not allowed to marry the man she loves, and when he dies falls in love with a young man who is his spitting image. It is a curious interlude which both comments on Charley’s predicament, but is at the same time at variance with it - Madame d’Egmont is not insane, just madly in love. It suggests the limits of understanding of those who can comprehend a little of the madman’s consciousness, but cannot truly grasp it. The mental texture of insanity is what eludes a conventional man like Phillips.