Loving / Living / Party Going (1993) - Plot & Excerpts
Loving by Henry Green is about the goings-on between the servants and masters in a castle in Ireland during WWII. It's a pretty simple tale, but there isn't much plot. There's a sort of love triangle between the butler, Charlie, his "man" (aka assistant) Albert, and a chamber maid, Edith, a missing ring, fear of the I.R.A., a drunken cook, an affair between the master's (Mrs. Tennant) daughter-in-law and Capt. Davenport while Mr. Jack (Mrs. Tennant's son) is off doing the army thing... it's more scenes and vignettes of what's happening as opposed to any traditional plot with a climax, denouement, etc.There were some interesting things in Loving that I don't think I've come across yet in any other novels: firstly, there are two characters named Albert - there is Charlie's man Albert, and then the drunken cook's nephew Albert comes to stay to get away from the London bombings. Secondly, there is a character, Paddy, who nobody can understand except the other chamber maid, Kate. So all the servants will be sitting at dinner, and Paddy will say something. But you only know he said something because Charlie will ask, "What did he say?" and then Kate translates. Also, some of the transition from one "scene" to the next is done almost like in a movie. There isn't any real break in the action (I don't mean literally, action - there isn't any of that); instead, it goes something like this: there is a scene of the servants doing their thing in the castle, and in order to transition to Mrs. Tennant and daughter-in-law walking the grounds, Green will say (paraphrasing here): "While this was going on, Mrs. Tennant..." as if the scene in the castle fades out and we see them walking around. Sometimes this caught me off guard (I wasn't paying attention), and I would think - now where did Mrs. Tennant come from? Why does it now seem like they're out in the yard? So I would have to go back, and then I would realize that Green had subtly transitioned from one conversation to another.Charlie is an odd character, and you can't really tell what his motives are... in the beginning, the original butler (Eldon) is dying, and Charlie really couldn't care less (well, neither can any of the other servants, but that's beside the point). Charlie is too busy trying to take over for Eldon. He seems kind of sleazy and none of the other servants like or trust him (except Edith). So, when he first starts making passes at her, you can't really tell if he's serious. Even in the end, you can't really tell...he says things that make you think he doesn't really care about Edith, but maybe he's just playing a game to get her to like him back...or maybe he's just a player (or is that spelled playa?). Edith is equally ambiguous. She seems all right most of the time, but then she wants to keep Mrs. Tennant's ring, (which she finds, then it goes missing again). It seemed out of character. I guess most - ok all - of the characters are pretty ambiguous in that way.An interesting synchronicity is going on with my reading right now...I am currently in the Valley of Bones part of Dance to the Music of Time, in which Nick Jenkins, enrolled in the Army, is sent with his company to Northern Ireland (this is during WWII also). All of the characters in Loving are British nationals (or almost all of the characters - I couldn't figure out if Paddy was Irish) , and there is a big to-do about the IRA, fear of the IRA, fear of the Germans invading, fear for loved ones who may be being bombed, etc. Are they better to stay in Ireland, with all the Irish thugs out to get them and the threat of the Germans invading, or should they go back to England, abandoning the castle? In Dance, as I just mentioned, we're also in Ireland, but from a different perspective...but there's still the fear there. Someone gets attacked while walking to the barracks during a military exercise and has his guns stolen, and it is suggested that it was Irish nationals. It's interesting to see this side of things...I haven't run into stories about the British in Ireland during the war before.It turns out that Henry Green was a comtemporary, friend, and former classmate of Powell and also Evelyn Waugh. It appears that Green had a colorful life - kind of unexpected, as Loving wasn't every colorful IMO. In conversation, he preferred gossip to serious subjects (not unexpectedly), was known as a ladies man, and eventually became an alcoholic. While at Oxford, he shunned intellectual pursuits in favor of going to the movies twice a day and "scorned his tutor, the bluff, hearty C.S. Lewis." Green also apparently had a cruel streak, and a girlfriend once told him, "Hurting - that should be the title of your next novel." He was popular among his contemporaries and later authors. W.D. Auden called him "the best English novelist alive" (though he is no longer, since he is no longer alive); Eudora Welty stated that his work had "an intenstiy greater than that of any other writer of imaginative fiction today." And John Updike: "Henry Green was a novelist of such rarity, such marvellous originality, intuition, sensuality, and finish, that every fragment of his work is precious." Really, John, I don't know about that, but to each his own. My grandma always says it's good we don't all like the same things. Loving is a pretty harmless book - sometimes amusing, short, and easy to get through. Not sure why it made the Modern Library's Top 100, but whatever...oh wait, isn't Updike on the Board? The edition of Loving that I own also contains two other books by Green: Living and Party Going. In the coming years, I will probably read both of them as well. A NY Times reviewer wrote, (of Anthony Powell) "Like Henry Green, an even better novelist, Anthony Powell was too British to catch on [in the U.S.] at first." So, if British comedies are your thing, you'd probably love it. If they annoy the piss out of you, don't bother. I'm somewhere in between. I think the following quote sums up Loving fairly well: "None of [Green's] books illustrates a philosophy, promotes a theme, or delivers a message. With him it is the richness of the felt, heard, and seen moment, often garnished with low comedy, that is the sole point - if, indeed, there is any point at all."
Henry Green is (like Dawn Powell) one of those famously forgotten writers, whose oeuvre is brought back into print every 15 years or so, with dust jacket encomia from writers who have achieved more sustained renown."Loving", from 1945, has a kind of "upstairs/downstairs" structure in which the doings and conversation of the servants and the gentry on an Anglo-Irish estate are contrasted. The former are baudier but ultimately probably more conventionally moral than their masters - not sure if Green even cares about that, since cadences of speech and diction seem to be his predominant interests. The whole thing is in a slightly brittle tone highly reminiscent of Ivy Compton-Burnett, though ultimately less cynical."Living" is one of his earliest, from 1929; it is set entirely among Birmingham steel-workers and the economic and political angle to the story would be hard to ignore, but again linguistic audacity is paramount. The tendency of Northern dialects to make sparing use of definite and indefinite articles is observable in naturalist writers from D.H. Lawrence to Stan Barstow, but Green takes it to an extreme, rendering every utterance a telegraphic series of nouns, verbs and adjectives, piled up like blocks with a minimum of connective tissue. As the longest of the three in this collection, that makes it a bit tough going at times.Finally, "Party Going" has quite a classical unity and an economy of means that would make it an effective play. A dozen upper-class characters are trapped for an evening in a railway hotel by a dense fog which is preventing their scheduled departure. Forced into close quarters, people's social anxieties, insecurity and manipulativeness are magnified. The depiction of them is satirical but not mercilessly so - the characters retain an amusingly sympathetic quality.
What do You think about Loving / Living / Party Going (1993)?
Only read "Loving".A very boring and hard read for me. Why on earth this house has so many servants? what do they do all day long? why does the author let them talk incessantly in their annoying jargon? Dear author, please interrupt them, please do something to convince me I should care. Because I really don't care about all those names: yes names, just names, as they don't come alive as real characters to me.We are promised that the arrival of the kids will bring some change, but seriously, I don't see anything. Okay, they have to do with the ring and all those doves (which remind me of Umberto Eco I just read), but come on. Oh, and a real obsession about peacocks *this* author has.Around 50 pages and few bad days into the reading, I really got sick of this book, so I entered accelerated reading mode and in one evening I got over it. I can tell you that around p. 150 it gets better, probably because the author gets sick of it too at last and hurries up to close it. One character also became alive for me at that point, [Raunce's] Albert.Anyway, you can try this book. You can find something in it if you like this kind of English. If not, don't abandon it but don't let it annoy you too much, read one word out of ten until you find a passage you appreciate and get rid of it in an evening.
—Federico
I understand many of the reviewers who found Henry Green difficult but was irritated by Sebastian Faulks attitude in his introduction that 'Party Going, though it has proved a most fertile ground for critics and theorists of narrative, is the one that is most likely to be problematic to the non-academic reader' as if an 'ordinary' reader hasn't the application or intelligence to get through these three volumes.Yes - they are hard work on one level, but that's only because they break modern conventions of novel writing much as Wilf Self has done in Umbrella. However, once you fall into the rhythm of Green's lyrical dialogue it is no more difficult to read than a play and when he breaks from dialogue to describe a rare piece of location the images - for example, the conversations shouted over the sound of the relentlessly crashing surf in Loving - live on long after you have finished the book.
—L.P. Fergusson
Of the three novels in this volume (which I bought on the strongest recommendation from a friend), I've read so far only the last one, Party-Going and part of the first one, Living. Party-Going is a tremendous short novel, written in "real-time," it seems, the events of the novel unfolding during the two or three hours of a massive train delay caused by London fog. (The time is the 1930s.) I say "real time" because it seems that you could read the book in exactly as much time as elapses in the course of the story. A group of rich young socialites on their way to Paris wait listlessly in a hotel, gossiping, sipping drinks, engaging in half-hearted emotional terrorism, while their porters wait below in the mobbed train-station. The elderly aunt of one of the young socialites has fallen mysteriously ill, and her suffering and delirium are woven through the text, which works by sudden shifts of scene with few breaks and even fewer narratorial interventions. Most of the text is reported speech, it reads almost like a play, but the "dialogue" is too subtle, too hypnotically terse, and too much about nothing to be a proper drama. The not-so-subtle symbolism of a mob of working class passengers trapped in the foggy passages of the station while the rich people recline and drink in a comfortable room severals floors up becomes a source of insistent tension. The fog also is quite palpable as annoyance, as anxiety, as uncertainty in the midst of these people's charming little travel plans. The style is sparse, the action even more so, but one feels a deliberate, if unspoken, sense of disgust, and sometimes of sympathy, underlying the cool, polished surface of the language. I look forward to reading the other novels in the volume!
—Josh
