Loving

I finished Loving by Henry Green yesterday and my opinion on it seems to change each time I think about it. I enjoyed the novel but at the same time I got the feeling I was being duped. The abrupt, fairy-tale ending only added to that feeling. At the same time, though, I couldn’t help laughing at the absurdity in the story, which would make the ending a perfect fit.

I’ll mention the links post on Henry Green and Loving since it contains several good descriptions of Green’s style and notes on the novel. Green’s comment about the novel captures some of the satiric flavor:

“The British servants in Eire while England is at war is Raunce's conflict, and one meant to be satirically funny. It is a crack at the absurd southern Irish and at the same time a swipe at the British servants, who yet remain human beings. But it is meant to torpedo that woman and her daughter-in-law, the employers.”

Mrs. Tennant, "that woman" and the owner of the Irish castle, and her daughter-in-law Violet are “torpedoed” often in the novel through their own actions and comments. Mrs. Tennant’s self-absorption is on full display in when she talks about the difficulty keeping up the castle in neutral Ireland during World War II:

“But in a way I regard this as my war work, maintaining the place I mean. Because we’re practically in enemy country here you know and I do consider it so important from the morale point of view to keep up appearances. This country has been ruined by people who did not live on their estates. It might be different if [Éamon] de Valera had a use for places of the kind. Why he doesn’t offer Ireland as a hospital base I can’t imagine. Then one could hand over a house like this with an easy conscience.”

Green still allows Mrs. Tennant to “remain a human being” as she deals with her isolation, not just in widowhood but in the distance she (accurately) perceives in her many relationships. There is plenty of ambiguity in Loving, where Green’s style mirrors his message—despite revealing a lot about his characters we never really get to know them.

The hired help of the castle provide the life and vitality of the novel. Whether they are concerned about family members in London during the bombing or filching peacock eggs for beauty treatments, their worries run the gamut from real to absurd. It turns out many of them have perfected a racket to squeeze extra money out of the household or get ahead in some manner. The resentment and devotion that the help exhibits, often at the same time, toward Mrs. Tennant and her family encapsulates their struggle with their own stations in life. Mrs. Tennant longs for order but the recurring scandals, big and small, demonstrate that such a desire will never come to fruition. Charley Raunce, the head footman who assumes a rise in stature after the death of the butler, provides a sort of stability for the other help yet he undermines it often enough with his enmity toward the head housemaid, his nervousness around his love Edith, and his failing health. My favorite character, Paddy, is not given a direct quote since his thick Irish brogue has to be deciphered and translated. Absurdities such as this continue to pile up as the story progresses (if progressing proves to be the appropriate term).

John Updike’s introduction captures several of the reasons I enjoyed Loving:

“W. H. Auden once called him the finest living English novelist. But no need exists to set up a competition; his writing generation has passed on, and his novels are sufficiently unlike any others, sufficiently assured in their perilous, luminous fullness, to warrant the epithet incomparable. And they have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England. Their substantive content, in human psychology, in social mores, in what can be seen and heard by a man alive in a place and time, is as rich as their formal design in intricate, rounded, and pleasing. … Green’s human qualities—his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of spendour amid loss, of vitality within weakness—make him a precious witness to any age. … With upper-class obliquity he champions the demotic in language and in everything. … They [his novels] live, in short, and like all living feed on air, the invisible; the spaces between the words are warm, and the strangeness is mysteriously exact, the strangeness of the vital.”

The warmth and vitality may seem slight at times but they are there. At the same time, I understand many of the criticisms of, or more often the disappointment in reading, Loving. Only near the end of the novel did I feel things click in place for my enjoyment, a moment where I laughed out loud at the ridiculous world Green created. I don’t think my wife will let me live that one down any time soon.

Henry Green links

In his own words: The Paris Review interview with Terry Southern in 1958.

INTERVIEWER: I'd like to ask you some questions now about the work itself. You've described your novels as “nonrepresentational.” I wonder if you'd mind defining that term?

GREEN: “Nonrepresentational” was meant to represent a picture which was not a photograph, nor a painting on a photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For instance, the very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding things all round them which have not in fact been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a new level of communication is reached. My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life, yet they do so less than I. Thus, when writing, I “represent” very closely what I see (and I'm not seeing so well now) and what I hear (which is little) but I say it is “nonrepresentational” because it is not necessarily what others see and hear. … People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. … I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.

…

INTERVIEWER: In your work I believe this reached such a high point of refinement in Loving as to be indiscernable—for, with all the critical analyses that book received, no one called attention to the absurdity of one of the basic situations: that of English servants in an Irish household. Now, isn't that fundamental situation, and the absence of any reference to it throughout the book, intended to be purely absurd?

GREEN: The British servants in Eire while England is at war is Raunce's conflict, and one meant to be satirically funny. It is a crack at the absurd southern Irish and at the same time a swipe at the British servants, who yet remain human beings. But it is meant to torpedo that woman and her daughter-in-law, the employers. As to the rest, the whole of life now is of course absurd— hilarious sometimes, as I told you earlier, but basically absurd.

James Wood on The Leonard Lopate Show. In the twenty-minute segment Wood highlights many of his points in his essay on Green in The Times Literary Supplement (“The Last English Modernist”), which was included in his book The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (the chapter “Henry Green’s England”). Wood seeks to rescue Green from the “soft obscurity” into which his works have settled.

Jeremy Treglown's biography on Henry Green: Romancing - The Life and Work of Henry Green is a short article on the contrast between a writer and his work. A review of the biography can be found here.

Edward Champion’s entry on Loving in the Modern Library Challenge. Edward makes it clear that the book (or maybe its pace) doesn’t resonate with everyone, as Grant Faulkner makes clear, too.

Update (5 Dec 2011): "The Double Life of Henry Green: The 'Secret' Vice of a Top British Industrialist is Writing Some of Britain's Best Novels" by Nigel Dennis. From the August 4, 1952 edition of Life magazine (check out the ads, too).