World Famous Comics: Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
By: Henry Green Publisher: Penguin Classics Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Penguin Classics Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 528 Publication Date: February 01, 1993
Three modernist classics reminiscent of Woolf and Waugh The three novels included in this collection all share Green's notable stylistic quirks and finely drawn characterizations, but the tableaus in which they are staged vary considerably--from a castle to a factory to a railway station hotel.
The first two novels portray hard-working (if occasionally subversive) members of the underclass and their wealthy bosses--dim-witted, pampered, indolent, and undeserving to a fault. "Loving" is a typically British upstairs-downstairs drawing room comedy in which the aristocrats are largely absent or aloof; the focus is instead on the servants of an Irish manor and their boisterous duplicity and covert liaisons (both sexual and social). Set in an iron factory, the second novel, "Living," depicts in a dichotomous yet sympathetic tone both the workers and their often-silly employers, who haggle over the company's future without much regard for their laborers.
Both these novels thrive off their humorous dialogue and peculiar characters rather than through anything resembling plot. Both, too, share Green's irregular sentence structure and his penchant for randomly dropping definite articles. ("Was danger these people they were dining with would not give champagne, he saw glasses that did not look like champagne.") The language often adds to the comedy of the dialogue or to the immediacy of the scene, but it sometimes (it must be said) stands between reader and writer as little more than an intrusive affectation.
While the atmosphere of "Loving" resembles Waugh and the characters in "Living" are modernist echoes of Dickens, the third novel, "Party Going," is most like Woolf. For my money, it's the best of the three novels. It opens with the dotty Miss Fellowes at a railway station, on her way to see off her niece's vacationing party, when a pigeon falls dead at her feet. She then inexplicably washes the carcass in a public restroom, while two nannies look on aghast. (The scene is surprisingly reminiscent of Clara Dalloway's reading lines on death from a volume of Shakespeare open in a shop window; both women seem to be clinging to a semblance of life in the face of mortality.) When train service is suspended because of the dense London fog, the party of wealthy travelers flees to the safety of the adjoining hotel, unpacking their complicated interpersonal ties and attending to the suddenly ill Miss Fellowes, while the unwashed masses, unable to head home at the end of a workday, are (literally) outside the gates. The novel is as wholly claustrophobic as it is unexpectedly funny--and (again, like "Mrs. Dalloway") it all takes place in a period of a few hours.
The strength of "Party Going," it seems to me, lies in Green's acerbic yet still affectionate descriptions of his own peers, while the other two novels depict primarily the class of servers and workers of which he was an observer--a perceptive and sympathetic observer, true, but a bystander nonetheless. Still, once the reader is attuned to Green's idiosyncrasies, all three novels are memorably humorous and, in spite of their modernist trappings, even romantic and lyrical. These truly are "classics" that deserve to be more widely read.
Hannah got quite hysterical with excitement As far as I can tell the funny thing about the funny syntax in Living is the following. Dang by the way this comment has to appear under the edition introduced by John Updike, an insufferably smug charlatan of long standing I am reliably informed. A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Himself. Or is that Pennsylvania? Who cares? Have you ever read any of this windy old geezer's book reviews? I'm not even going to mention the novels. In the name of Christ dude, unink the well. Quit hugging the shore, sail off on a permanent vacation--take Philip Roth with you why don't you--and forget to pack your pencils. Dear oh dear. Still and all and now that that unpleasantness is well behind us here's the skinny on Living: Green's way of writing here--he was only in his early twenties if you can believe it!--I was first lead to misunderstand by several people who think they know everything set out to approximate the talk of the men and indeed their womenfolk hammering out their time in and around an iron works in Birmingham in or around 1929. What we have here is a place of work, a foundry no less. Vernacular speech, demotic even, Green seems to want to write. And now time is passing. Slowly he turned pages. These are actual lines. And there's the rub. The magic worked here is just this: dress for dinner magnates trailing wives and gilded offspring also pulse into life in these pages. When Green gets to up the ante by taking in the excitations of young Richard Dupret, Hannah Glossop and the rest of the chaps, the original and supposed working-class register doesn't care to skip a dialectical beat. The ruse is curious only for a minute, then knee-slappingly audacious. The lack of definite articles and whatever else is mistakenly assumed to be wanting in these passages treating of hunt balls and weekends in the country starts actually to sound like something else again. Not just the spoken words then but the written ones too, the ones tending toward narration, description, begin to say their own lines. These phrases in their peculiar turn and awkwardness start incomprehensibly to speak more colourfully--to paint now a brand new picture. It's enough to make you go back to page one. I did just that and was glad to do it. The speech may continue to be spoken in a broken sort of English but the sense now is never ever less than straight up or crystal clear. "As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer," as Alex De Large might say. It gets better. A delicious, almost palpable, sense of time and place--akin somehow to nostalgia--is cautiously but openly being evoked right before your eyes. An aside. Does anyone remember Cyprian Lightwood's response to a spoken imperative to pull himself together in Against the Day? His words were these: "Not now Moistleigh, I'm succumbing to nostalgia." Good line that. Made an impression I'll wager. Probably not exactly neither here nor there though. The thing I'm eventually getting to here is Green starts to state his case in a spoken language, a type of talk, idiomatic even. The book is obviously and apparently an effort to write about speaking in authentic regional accents but then the rest of the telling kicks in and soon the book expands into some of the best bent out of shape writing qua writing I've very nearly ever read. A gift indeed I'm getting to be surer and surer. And all simply wrapped in a well will you looky here paperback book you're reading in your La-Z-Boy. And it doesn't even seem like it's the nightblue nostalgia either anymore in Henry Green, it's the farking thing itself. Bells sometimes. Yearning. The actual noise of living. Didn't this wonderful twentieth-century man write a self-portrait called Pack My Bag? Might have a goo at that I think. Let me just finish by inputting out loud a sentiment uttered in my best imitation of George Cole's voice as the incomparable Arfur Daley: Henry Green? That's a gentleman of the very highest proportions that is. A class act.
Realistic At first the wording was difficult to understand, but as I continued to read, the characters developed their own personalities, and Green's writing almost made me feel like I was a bystander in his settings. I learned to appreciate the dialog, especially the realistic colloquialism in the language of the servants. The books are enjoyable and entertaining, and reading this has made me a great fan of Henry Green.
Still Miss "Upstairs Downstairs?" If you are one of the legions of fans of one of the Public Broadcasting System's all-time favorite Masterpiece Theater shows, "Upstairs, Downstairs,"courtesy of the British Broadcasting Company, of course, have I got good news for you. You see, there was this now little-known, early 20th century British writer, Henry Green, who was considered a major competitor of the young Evelyn Waugh's in the British society novel sweepstakes. And Green appears to have taken precisely the worlds of upstairs, downstairs, as his focus. The book, "Loving, Living, Party Going" that's today's topic is a compendium of three short novels by those names, and they are all about life below, and above stairs.
As John Updike explains in his insightful introduction, Green differed from his contemporaries in several important ways. He was the son of a highly successful businessman, and became a successful businessman himself - he had no need to write for money, only for love. He also used the vehicle of his fiction to escape into the working classes, Updike notes, whereas D.H. Lawrence used his fiction to escape from them.
"Loving" is a tale of downstairs life when upstairs is largely away. It's set in a great country house, actually a castle, in neutral Ireland during World War II, when the ladies of the house, the Tennants, are in England. It concerns itself, amid rumors of German invasion and attacks by the Irish Republican Army, largely with the courtship of Charley Raunce, promoted from footman to butler when the previous incumbent dies, and Edith, a housemaid. It's written in what was supposedly the vocabulary and accents of the people it concerns: Green apparently wanted to break away from standard written English to something more expressive. Frankly, this just annoyed me. I've no idea if the author is correct - who would, nowadays--and it just made it harder to read. But within this short novel, Green succeeds in creating a great many rounded, realistic characters, he treats them with great affection as he tells their stories, and actually achieves a powerful conclusion.
The next novel, "Living," is similar. It concerns a Birmingham iron foundry, the men who work there, and the foundry's owners, though once again, the focus is strongly on the workmen. And the tale is told in their speech, Brummagem, supposedly that of Birmingham's working class, that isn't any easier for us than that of the servants. But Green again creates a remarkably rich world within these few pages, giving us a less successful urban courtship,and again achieves surprising power.
The third novel, "Party Going," by contrast, largely concerns itself with upstairs: young people, marooned in a major London train station and its hotel by one of that city's killer fogs, on their way to a swank, all-expenses party thrown by a friend in the French Riviera. The spinster aunt of one of the women, by chance, has ended up with them, and she's been taken quite ill; these society flirts don't quite know what to do about her. A mysterious male character wanders through, trying out all the accents we've wrestled with; is he the writer's stand-in? Anyway, once again, Green ably creates a large cast of individuated characters, in an even shorter piece of writing: and thank goodness, they mostly speak English we can recognize. We are safe in society novel country here.
Green's female characters seem to share a regrettable tendency toward the vapors; guess it went with the landscape. The Birmingham-set novel, surprisingly, mentions the environmental hazards of the factory, and the neighborhood of factories where its workers live. It even mentions the workers' environmentally caused illnesses. The world of "Upstairs Downstairs" was not necessarily the perfect place to live, you know.
Green tackles the big subjects Have you ever sat and thought, man, I wish someone would write a book about living? And possibly loving? Well, Henry Green has gone out and done just that. I had never thought that a book about going to parties might be necessary, but after reading it I think that Mr. Green has indeed performed a valuable service. This wonderful collection of novels is, quite frankly, a comprehensive exploration, and no new books need be written on any of these subjects.
In any case, the writing made my jaw drop in spots, it was so good, and Green way of looking at things is funny and humane while being mercilessly clear-eyed. The only reason I think they've stopped teaching his books in colleges is because they don't have the sort of things one can write papers about: complicated networks of imagery and whatnot that can be dug out of the text and have a title slapped on them. Green's book are too alive to have anything particularly systematic going on in them, while retaining the structure and unity of true works of art. Amazing books, go out and read them.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
