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In 1950, Henry Green gave a little talk on BBC radio about dialogue in fiction. 1 Green was obsessively concerned with the elimination of those vulgar spoors of presence whereby authors communicate themselves to readers: he never internalizes his characters’ thoughts, hardly ever explains a character’s motive, and avoids the authorial adverb, which so often helpfully flags a character’s emotion to readers (“she said, grandiloquently”). Green argued that dialogue is the best way to communicate with one’s readers, and that nothing kills “life” so much as “explanation.” He imagined a husband and wife, long married, sitting at home one evening. At 9:30, the husband says that he is going across the road to the pub. Green noted that the wife’s first response, “Will you be long?,” could be rendered in scores of different ways (“Back soon?” “When will you be back?” “Off for long?” “How long will it be before you are back?”), each one capa ble of a distinct resonance of meaning. The crucial thing, maintained Green, was not to hedge the dialogue with explanation, as in:
“How soon d’you suppose they’ll chuck you out?”
Olga, as she asked her husband this question, wore the look of a wounded animal, her lips were curled back from the teeth in a grimace and the tone of voice she used betrayed all those years a woman can give by proxy to the sawdust, the mirrors and the stale smell of beer of public bars.
Green felt strongly that such kind of authorial “assistance” was overbearing, because in life we don’t really know what people are like. “We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?”
Green, counseling against being overbearing, is laying down a fair amount of prescription himself, and we do not need to take his doctrine scripturally. Notice that when Green does his parody of explanation, he also falls into a deliberately breathy, second-rate style (“wore the look of a wounded animal”), whereas we can imagine something more continent, less offensive: “Olga knew what time he would come home, and in what state, stinking of beer and tobacco. Ten years of this, ten years.” Fulsome explainers like George Eliot, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, and many others would all have to retire themselves in Green’s universe.
However, his larger argument, that dialogue should be carrying multiple meanings, and that it should mean different things to different readers at the same time, is surely right. (It can carry several indeterminate meanings for the reader and still be “explained” by an author, I think, but this takes great tact.) Green offered an example of how he might proceed:
He: I think I’ll go across the way now for a drink.
She: Will you be long?
He: Why don’t you come too?
She: I don’t think I will. Not tonight, I’m not sure, I may.
He: Well, which is it to be?
She: I needn’t say now, need I? If I feel like it I’ll come over later.
In this passage, notice that Green tries to answer one question with another, and that, very characteristically of Green’s writing, the woman slides in hesitation—“Not tonight, I’m not sure, I may.” She may be in several moods at once. As a result, the man’s response, “Well, which is it to be?” becomes harder to read, too. Is he irritated, or just mildly resigned? Does he in fact want her to come to the pub at all, or was he just saying it in the hope that she would decline? The reader tends to plump for one reading, while being aware that multiple readings are also possible; we sew ourselves into the text, becoming highly invested in our version of events.
There is a very good example of Green’s doctrine in action in V. S. Naipaul’s great novel A House for Mr Biswas . Mr. Biswas has decided to build a house, but he only has a hundred dollars. He visits a black builder, Mr. Maclean (one of the few portraits in the novel of a black Trinidadian), and gingerly poses the question. What is beautifully done is that both men are dancing a little pas de deux of pride and shame; each is maintaining a fiction. Mr. Biswas wants Maclean to think he has enough money for a grand house; Maclean wants Biswas to think he is very busy, with lots of orders for work. And each sees through the other’s fiction, of course.
Mr. Biswas begins by suggesting that they take the thing very slowly (that way, he can pay some money each month rather than place a huge sum down immediately). Ideally, Biswas would have Maclean take about a year to build the place:
“We not bound and ’bliged to build the whole thing right away,” Mr Biswas said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.”
“So they say. But Rome get build. Anyway, as soon as I get some time I going to come and we could look at the site. You have a site?”
“Yes, yes, man. Have a site.”
“Well, in about two-three days then.”
He came early that afternoon, in hat, shoes and an ironed shirt, and they went to look at the site.
At the site, Mr. Biswas announces that he wants concrete pillars, plastered and smooth. Maclean wants his cash:
“You think you could give me about a hundred and fifty dollars just to start off with?”
Mr Biswas hesitated.
“You musn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs. I just wanting to know how much you want to spend right away.”
Mr Biswas walked away from Mr Maclean, among the bushes on the damp site, the weeds and the nettles. “About a hundred,” he said. “But at the end of the month I could give you a little bit more.”
“A hundred.”
“All right?”
“Yes, is all right. For a start.”
They went through the weeds and over the leaf-choked gutter to the narrow gravelly road.
“Every month we build a little,” Mr Biswas said. “Little by little.”
“Yes, little by little.”
The dance of pride is so delicately done. Biswas first couches his shame in a classical allusion, hoping to give it a bit of grandeur (“Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know”), to which Maclean replies with a practical grunt: “So they say. But Rome get build,” Naipaul subtly using Trinidadian patois—“But Rome get build”—to separate the two men and their social status. Mr. Biswas is aware of this social difference, too, because, when Maclean then asks if he has a site, he tries to close the gap by also using “black” patois: “Yes, yes, man. Have a site.” (Whenever Biswas wants a bit of borrowed bravado, he employs the pally Caribbean word “man.”) Maclean affects to be so busy that he cannot come for several days, and then arrives “early that afternoon.”
And then it all begins again, over the question of money. Maclean is perfectly aware that Mr. Biswas is trying to save face, and flatters him with the absurd “You mustn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs.” And relentlessly, Naipaul reminds the reader that the site itself is leaf-choked and weed-infested, that the whole thing is doomed from the start. (In this, he is a good deal more of an explainer and pointer than the very reticent Henry Green.)
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And the same novel reminds us that Green is not necessarily right to assume that “dialogue is the best way for the novelist to communicate with his readers.” As much can be communicated with no speech at all. It is Christmas, and Mr. Biswas, on a whim, decides to buy a hideously expensive doll’s house for his daughter. He can’t possibly afford it. He blows a month’s wages on the gift. It is an episode of madness and bravado, of aspiration and longing and humiliation.
He got off his bicycle and leaned it against the kerb. Before he had taken off his bicycle clips he was accosted by a heavy-lidded shopman who repeatedly sucked his teeth. The shopman offered Mr Biswas a cigarette and lit it for him. Words were exchanged. Then, with the shopman’s arm around his shoulders, Mr Biswas disappeared into the shop. Not many minutes later Mr Biswas and the shopman reappeared. They were both smoking and excited. A boy came out of the shop partly hidden by the large doll’s house he was carrying. The doll’s house was placed on the handlebar of Mr Biswas’s cycle and, with Mr Biswas on one side and the boy on the other, wheeled down the High Street.
Not a word of dialogue—indeed the opposite, the report of a dialogue we do not witness: “Words were exchanged.” Again, this is both funny and terribly painful, because of the way Naipaul writes it up. He resolutely refuses to describe the purchase itself. Instead, he describes the scene as if the author had set up a camera outside the shop. We watch the men smoke, we watch them go in, and a minute later we watch them come out, “smoking and excited.” The scene is thus like something out of the silent movies, and almost begs to be run at double speed, as farce. Passive verbs are used, precisely because Biswas is a weak, comically gentle man who thinks he is asserting himself while he is in fact generally being acted upon: “was accosted by … the doll’s house was placed on the handlebar … [was] wheeled down the High Street.” Naipaul deliberately describes this event as if Mr. Biswas had nothing much to do with it, which is probably how Biswas self-forgivingly thinks of this moment. Most subtle is the decision not to represent the scene of purchase itself, the moment where money changes hands. This is the epicenter of shame for Mr. Biswas, and it is as if the narrative, knowing this, is too embarrassed to represent this shame . Naipaul is superbly aware of this, superbly in control. He knows that the sentence “Words were exchanged” is the pivot of the paragraph—because, of course, it is not words that are im portantly exchanged but money that is crucially exchanged. And this is what cannot, must not, be described.
Several days later, the doll’s house will be smashed to bits by Mr. Biswas’s wife, because she thinks it unfair that their daughter got such a present while none of the other children that constitute Mr. Biswas’s horribly extended family received anything.