Salad Days, Green and Cold:

...Later Dorothea, the Count's beautiful and desirable daughter, remarks on the same archetypal pattern, and we realize that Keller has simply rewritten the Phaeacian episode of The Odyssey: Henry is Odysseus come naked and filthy to the palace of King Alcinous, and Dorothea is Nausicaa, fated not to be his because he must yet return home...

...Henry is the resurrection of his father, he springs renewed from Anna's death, he courts Dorothea in the false spring of mid-winter and loses her when snow begins to fall again...

...A 15-page account of Henry's dreams, imaging sex as food and money, is a triumph of careful observation and what amounts to prescience...

...Even in this world of trumpery wish-fulfillment, there are moments of Keller's characteristic sanity: a scathing comic portrait of the appearance of an apostle of atheism at the Count's castle, and a brilliant scene where Henry assuages his lovesickness for Dorothea by beating up a peasant who had laughed at him ("I got up, went up to him, tearful and full of my suffering, and punched him behind the ear...

...years later he visits the morgue, sees the corpse of another young girl ("The little breast, scarcely budding, cast two pale shadows on the shroud"), and is thrown back into his feelings about Anna...

...Judith eventually returns to her "green lad" and he finishes his book "in order once again to walk the old green path of remembrance...

...thought I, the common folk have regular Venusbergs among themselves, where the most magnificent knight has no notion of them...

...Grove, 706 pp., $6.50...

...There is an unhealthy quality to some of the erotic teasing in Henry's relations with these girls...

...he informs us: "I had grown up like a blade of grass...

...Some of its intellectual conversations will remind readers of Thomas Mann, and some of its ironic touches of the short stories of Isaac Babel...

...His one clear memory of his father is in a green coat, showing the child a green plant...

...There is a long dull stretch involving a festival, culminating in an absurd duel...

...In its constant tension between passionate young women and a repressed and motherfixated young man, Keller's novel is curiously reminiscent of modern Irish fiction...

...How fitting that he should spring at us like a green pea pod on the jacket of this nourishing and delicious volume...

...he dreams of her "snow-white corpse lyingprone" (the translator probably means "supine...

...Judith tells him that his cruel innocence is a "green soul...

...The most impressive quality of the book is its relentless honesty about childhood, its absolute fidelity to the child's lustful and amoral nature...

...It covers his childhood in Zurich with his widowed mother, and his young manhood trying to become a painter, which takes him as far as Nuremberg...

...What makes Green Henry great, ultimately, is its powerful affirmation of life...

...The narrator writes, when a working girl has asked him, in a frank and dignified fashion, to be her lover: "Devil take it...

...Sometimes Keller interrupts his action to comment on society in a voice like that of Marx ("Thus he fully comprehended the nature of present-day industry, whose productions seem to be the more valuable and desirable to the buyers, the more child-life has been cunningly stolen and consumed by them") or Henry Thoreau ("He who wishes to help improve the world had better sweep his own doorstep first...

...Most of all, in its blending of absurdity and the deepest insight, it very much resembles Melville's Pierre...

...Keller is more visibly ambivalent about the latter two than Marx was...

...The promising social elements for Keller, as for his contemporary Karl Marx, are the selfeducated journeymen like his father...

...In the convention of his time, Keller uses the novel like a great scrapbook...

...In one case, his grand passion for the pure virgin Anna, dying of consumption like a proper Romantic heroine, it approaches necrophilia...

...I could not at all comprehend why the ill-treated youngsters complained so nor how they could be so incensed against me...

...He is attracted to five girls in the course of the novel, and manages by miracles of contrivance to evade physical contact with any of them except the mother-surrogate, his widowed older cousin Judith, whose arms enfold him after his mother's death...

...He is fascinated by the increasing delicacy of her body and the transparency of her complexion...

...the intellectual aristocrats like the Count, enlightened by reading Feuerbach...

...Green Henry is the first-person story of Henry Lee, which follows the details of Keller's own life so far as we know them...

...The sociological penetration of the novel is equally impressive...

...Some of the digressions are marvelous interpolated narratives, such as the harrowing stories of Little Meret and Albertus...

...We can welcome the long-delayed publication of Keller's autobiographical novel in its attractive format and readable British translation by A. M. Holt, thank Grove Press, and immediately begin to lobby for an accompanying volume of Keller's short stories...

...he recognizes that he has been "a young greenhorn...

...The first two of the book's four parts are distinguished by this transparent honesty, but as Henry grows up, the book increasingly becomes a fairy tale, and its third and fourth parts are markedly inferior to the beginning...

...Feuerbach's intellectual revolution is as much mocked (the atheist school teacher with his "German gymnastic suit," the atheist banker "who still goes to church on Sundays") as it is affirmed...

...he writes a book (the first part of this book) and has it bound in green cloth...

...We see the boy Henry telling a wanton and elaborate lie that gets four of his schoolfellows punished severely, then commenting: "So far as I can dimly remember, the mischief I had caused was to me not only a matter of indifference, but I even felt within myself a sense of gratification that poetic justice had rounded off my invention so beautifully that something striking had occurred, been dealt with, and endured, and this in consequence of my creative word...

...It is as a life symbol that Henry is "Green" Henry...

...Henry, like Keller himself, is a child of the new class, the son of a journeyman mason who by self-education and industry had become an architect and contractor...

...The conservatism and greed of the Swiss landowners, the old owning class, are relentlessly satirized in the book, while the peasants are typified by the lout Henry beats up...

...It opens in a graveyard, shifts to the death of Henry's father and the impoverishment of his mother, then slowly develops a birth and life out of the decay and death...

...There is a terrifying story of the child accumulating a pathetic little menagerie—a rabbit, a mouse, a kite, sparrows, snakes and lizards—and when he is unable to feed them properly and can no longer stand their suffering, brutally killing as many as he can bear to, then burying the whole lot, "dead, half-dead and living...

...when she finally does die, he cannot take his eyes off "the delicate little white face of the corpse...

...It is Der grüne Heinrich, the masterpiece of Swiss fiction, published in 1855 and now first translated into English (Green Henry, By Gottfried Keller...

...it looks as if one has to become poor oneself to discover the great splendour...

...The psychological acuity of this book, published the year before Freud was born, is staggering...

...Green Henry often seems surprisingly modern...

...The book's final chapters tell of Henry as a failed and destitute painter, stumbling by accident into the castle of an enlightened Count who coincidentally turns out to have accumulated all of Henry's pictures, and showers wealth on him lavishly...

...When the theft is discovered, for days mother and son sit glumly at table, and the narrator comments: "I felt the need of this sadness and even took pleasure in it, while my mother sat in deep thought, and now and then suppressed a sigh...

...later Henry wears only green clothes, cut down from his father's (thus the nickname...

...and the proletariat...

...Earlier, Henry's painting teacher had explained to him the universality of the Odysseus fantasy, "when he appears, naked and covered with mud, before Nausicaa and her playmates...

...At other times the digressions are pointless and boring, like some meditations on Free Will copied out of an old notebook...

...The life of the urban working class is at once seen as a pastoral idyll and patronized...

...Henry himself is a curiously modern case history of mother-fixation and repression...

...Henry steals from the tiny store of coins his mother has put away for him, "without feeling anything more than the compelling need, and a kind of vague resolution that this should be the last time...