SOURCE: "Paradoxes of Pleasure-and-Pain: Henry Green," in The Tragic Comedians: Seven Modern British Novelists, Indiana University Press, 1963, pp. 66-81.

In the following essay, Hall explores the role of what he calls "play-and-pain" in Green's novels, focusing especially on Loving and Concluding.

Henry Green published his first novel, Blindness, two years before Waugh's Decline and Fall. But, while Waugh was succeeding quickly, Green was working slowly toward the most important innovations in the comic novel since Joyce.

Most readers of Green like him for extraordinarily funny scenes like Edie's telling Kate she has found the Captain in Mrs. Jack's bed or old Rock angrily waiting for his breakfast handout in the girls' school kitchen. But many readers finish Loving or Concluding, as I did, unsure of what else happened. There is something to be said for leaving the situation at that. Scenes are obviously Green's natural units and it...