The Hard-of-Hearing and the Hardly Heard in Henry Green's Novels of the 1940s

Henry Green was the pen name of a hard-of-hearing Englishman, Henry Vincent Yorke (1905-1973), a business man by day and, in his off hours, a novelist "[f]ascinated by the misheard, the unspoken, the oblique."¹ In the novels written before the 1940s and the onset of his deafness, however, this fascination with the misheard is scarcely in evidence. His first novel, Blindness, written when he was still at school and published in 1926 when he was twenty-one, is semi-autobiographical, providing the hero, John Haye, with Henry Yorke's real-life family estate, horsey mother, and aesthetic sensibilities—and perhaps his attitudes toward deafness. Haye, who is blinded in a freak accident, comes to appreciate his newly developed senses of hearing and touch—and to pity the deaf:

So that you were not really lonely; there were only the deaf who were really cut off. How dreadful to be deaf, not to hear this wind choosing out the leaves and carrying them down gently that they might rustle on the ground.

(p. 439)²

The deaf might dream of a soundless world, and how cold that would be. There was the story of the deaf old man who had forgotten that the breaking waves of the sea on the beach made sound. He must not go deaf; one clung so to what senses were left. But sight was not really necessary.

(p. 442)

According to his son, Sebastian Yorke, Henry Yorke's hearing was poor in one ear due to mastoiditis in his boyhood, but the author himself attributed his hearing loss to the bombing during the London Blitz.³ Both these etiologies are plausible, but neither would account for the progressive nature of his deafness, which according to all evidence increased markedly from the late 1930s on, in tandem with what appears to have been quite severe depression and what was obviously very excessive, all-day drinking.⁴ In addition, Henry Yorke suffered from tinnitus, ringing in his ears,⁵ a common and very disturbing consequence of late-onset hearing loss. Those who become deaf after marrying and investing in a career, but while they are still working and raising a family, are the least likely to be able to cope with hearing loss and the most likely to remain for years in denial. Hearing aids in the 1940s were primitive—awkward affairs worn on the chest and ineffective in conversation because they amplified background noises that drowned out speech. Training in lip-reading is laborious, and only young children are at all likely to submit to it or get much benefit from it. Sign language has never been a viable option for any but the rare person who is deafened late in life, largely because family, friends, and co-workers are unlikely to learn it as well. Most people deafened in their early middle age, unless they are famous and sought-after personalities like Beethoven and to some extent Green himself, therefore remain isolated, in denial, paranoid, and miserable. That Green continued to brazen it out by socializing as much as he did suggests a strong personality. That his continued attempts at normalcy were in effect quixotic and the object of ridicule or embarrassment among his friends is tragic.

It would have been the reaction of family and friends to his deafness that shaped Henry Yorke's eccentric social behavior and at least contributed to—if it did not actually cause—his reclusiveness in later life. Sebastian Yorke recalls his father's deafness as alternately hilarious and disturbing (to the family—Sebastian seems never to have speculated on what it was like for his father). In undated anecdotes, Sebastian finds it funny when his father mishears "ostrich" as "octopus" but disturbing when he mishears "Mummy" for "money" in a phone call and claims...