GREEN, Henry [pseudonym for Henry YORKE]. Blindness. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. 1926.
8vo. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine, publisher’s monogram stamped centrally in blind to front board, single fillet borders in blind front and rear, upper edge blue, in the dustwrapper with wraparound illustration by Thomas Derrick (1885-1954); pp. [viii], [1], 254, [2], 6 (publisher’s catalogue); spine tips a touch rubbed and pushed, gilt muted but sharp, cloth clean and bright, moderate spotting to fore- and lower edges spreading a little to page margins of prelims and final leaves, dustwrapper with three patches of loss to edges (two to front, one to rear panel), a handful of closed tears and nicks, minor loss to spine tips, scattered spotting to verso; a very good copy in an exceptionally bright example of the dustwrapper.
An unusually well-preserved copy of Henry Green’s precocious first novel, in a bright, unrestored example of the haunting Thomas Derrick illustrated wrapper.
Henry Green, born Henry Yorke, published Blindness, his first novel, while still at Oxford, having begun writing it at Eton. It is dedicated to the author’s mother. “Caterpillar", the novel’s first part set in a very Eton-like school named Noat, consists of extracts from the diary of John Haye. A not unfamiliar figure in fiction of the period, Haye is an aesthete, liable to “f[all] in love with a transparent tortoiseshell cigarette case" or purchase, "in a moment of rash exuberance […] a cigarette-holder about eight inches long." The later parts of the novel, entitled "Chrysalis" and "Butterfly" make it clear that we are reading some kind of Bildungsroman. The spur to development for Haye, however, is the loss of vision signalled by the novel’s title. While sitting on the train home from school, a stone is thrown at the window which shatters and blinds him. This inevitably shifts the emphasis of the prose, “loss of sight correspond[ing] to a very specific kind of openness to noise, [to] an oversensitiveness to the sounds of nature which are characteristically whispered and indistinct, only partially given” (Mengham). Haye falls in love with the daughter of an alcoholic vicar and has a difficult relationship with his stepmother. The book, however, ends with a heartfelt statement of intent which we cannot help but read as obliquely autobiographical: “For I am going to write, yes, to write. Such books... such amazing tales, rich with intricate plot. Life will be clotted and I will dissect it, choosing little bits to analyse. I shall be a great writer. I am sure of it.”
In his introduction to the NYRB edition of Blindness (2017), Daniel Mendelsohn refers to “fascinating glimmers of Green's mature technique [, of] the almost cinematic way in which his narrators […] track characters who hover at the periphery of the action, and whose quotidian activities provide the humming basso continuo of “living” that runs beneath the dramas of the principals” (Living would be the title of Green’s next novel (1929), set in the very different milieu of a Birmingham iron foundry).
The extraordinary, and rarely seen, original jacket depicts a blazing sun rising (or setting) over a rural landscape, against a black sky, and is the work of the English artist, Thomas Derrick (1885–1954).
See Rod Mengham, The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).
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