"The Heritage of Symbolism": Henry Green, Maurice Bowra, and English Modernism in the 1920s

Rex Warner and Cecil Day Lewis thoroughly immersed themselves in the political broil of what Bowra's letter to Colby called "the regenerate thirties;" so did Cyril Connolly, who joined the Left and condemned all "Mandarin" writing in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise; John Betjeman married in 1933 (marriage being, in Bowra's view, the ultimate betrayal of artistic independence); Evelyn Waugh also married and converted to his wife's Catholic faith in 1930; Anthony Powell, Green's closest friend at Oxford, adhered longest to Bowra's aestheticist ideals (featuring, as has often been conjectured, a portrait of Bowra in his novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time).51 It testifies to the lasting "heritage" of Bowra's critical doctrines that Henry Green continued to be drawn to the questions which worry his first novel, even though in later years his attention swerved from the high-artistic "Symbolism" envisioned by Bowra to a "symbolism" of wider scope. Green's second book, Living, while it is experimental like all of Green's works, is set in the glum industrial landscape of Birmingham and has been hailed as one of the most memorable novels of proletarian life in English.53 We are in a better position to recognize the hiatuses and continuities in the writings of Henry Green, and by extension of his fellow "Bowristas," if we restore his early work to the lively literary context in which it originated and in relation to which it needs to be understood.