Still wincing and grunting whenever I move, I think ‘back’ is my personal word of the month. But also being a reluctant believer in the God of the Three Occurrences, should such a deity exist, I remember listing among the authors I planned to reread this year Henry Green, whose nine brilliant and often baffling novels include one called Back. Published in 1946, it’s about the return to England in the summer of 1945 of a young man who was three years a prisoner of war after sustaining a wound which resulted in his losing a leg. Rose, the woman he loved, was married to another man and has since died. Charley Summers then meets a woman, Nancy, Rose’s half-sister, who exactly and disturbingly resembles Rose and whom he comes to believe is her.
In the graveyard at the opening of the novel, Charley ‘ran his eye with caution over cypresses and between gravestones. He might have been watching for a trap, who had lost his leg in France for not noticing the gun beneath a rose.’ Green continues: ‘For, climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose after rose’. That may stir memories of Gertrude Stein—‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’—and John Ruskin weaving the name of his beloved and—after 1875—dead Rose La Touche into the pages of Fors Clavigera.
I recently reread the two marvellous late novels by Shirley Hazzard, the second of which, The Great Fire (published more than twenty years after The Transit of Venus) concerns itself with a world soon after the Second World War in which the ‘victors’ also are hugely damaged. Quite late in the book, the protagonist Aldred Leith, returned to England in 1948 from work in China and Japan, is given a present by Aurora, a former lover of both his own and his father’s, which he doesn’t open at the time. ‘In the hotel room, he unwrapped Aurora’s package. The book, a fresh work by a writer he enjoyed, was called Back. He finished it that night, and fell asleep near dawn.’
All three present and correct then: reading list; wincing and grunting; Shirley Hazzard. I know how to take a hint.
Reconstructionary Tales 