As a young man, Green had dropped out of Oxford to work in Birmingham, on the factory floor of the engineering firm his family owned. His fellow workers, well aware of who he was, assumed he had been punished, perhaps for failing at university. In fact, Green had already published a novel and was working there because he was looking for literary material, eager to record working-class speech. His friend Evelyn Waugh, ever on the conservative qui vive, would later detect class guilt in Green’s great hospitality towards common speech. There is indeed a gently radical and humane politics in Green’s work, but he didn’t share the more programmatic politics of his Etonian peer, George Orwell. Green doesn’t seem to have wanted to change English society; unlike the somewhat masochistic Orwell, Green spent most of his life in uncomplaining upper-class comfort, supported by servants. He merely wanted to observe it, from the bottom up. To a novelist so influenced by his youthful reading of Chekhov, this open, unemphatic sympathy with ordinariness doubtless seemed quite sufficient—which is to say, everything.

Besides, when a writer’s ear for the music of speech is as sensitive as Green’s, “ordinary” speech is anything but. Perhaps instead of talking about Green’s ear for dialogue, we should call it his mind for dialogue. Orwell was an acute reporter and recorder, a stenographer; Green is that too, but he is also an inventor, a magician. (And tellingly, in Orwell’s novelistic work, the made-up dialogue is relatively flat, lacking in vitality.) Green’s novelistic conversation is a dance, not a mime. In Pack My Bag, he claims, simply, that working-class speech is more poetic—more metaphorical, with stranger powers of inventive figuration—than conventional middle-class conversation. (“His eyes started out of his head like a little dog’s testicles,” is one of his overheard examples.) Those powers blossom in the novel he wrote based on his factory experiences, Living (1929). “Worry,” says Mr. Bridges, the works foreman, “I’ve ’ad enough of that washing about in my head to drown a dolphin.” One of the factory workers, taken to the hospital, talks about a fellow patient thus:

“There was a feller opposite my bed that had lengths cut out of his belly and when they brought ’im in again, an’ he come to after the operation, they told him ’e could eat anything that took ’is fancy. So he said a poached egg on toast would suit ’im for a start but when they took it to ’im he brought it up. Black it was. And everything they took him after he brought it up just the same till they were givin’ ’im port, then brandy and champagne at the end.”