SOURCE: "Limbo States: The Short Stories of Henry Green," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1983, pp. 447-54.

In the essay below, Russell assesses the short stories "A Rescue," "Mr. Jonas," and "The Lull" in terms of their evocation of a "limbo-like" state.

The first two stories of the Blitz that Henry Green published, early in 1941, are about a rescue job he had to undertake and a more confusing rescue—lacking the other's ordonnance, queerly observed as though lighted up from the side—of which he was a witness. Because the storyteller in "A Rescue" is directly imperiled, its narrative has focus, "grip" as it were, of a lyric kind; whereas the equally short "Mr. Jonas" affects the reader differently. The focus here is on the "we," first on firefighters who have been ordered out and watch from their drawn-up pumps the night's holocaust augment—men "seated hands...