Always Hinting: Henry Green’s Loving

LOVING

By Henry Green

INTERVIEWER
When you begin to write something, do you begin with a certain character in mind, or rather with a certain situation in mind?
GREEN
Situation every time.
INTERVIEWER
Is that necessarily the opening situation—or perhaps you could give me an example; what was the basic situation, as it occurred to you, for Loving?
GREEN
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.

The Paris Review

LOVING, by Henry Green, made a bunch of Top 100 Novels of the 20^th Century lists. And like Dawn Powell, Green has had a champion in John Updike. Many other authors have praised him. I found PARTY GOING to be unbearable, but I loved NOTHING, a book about an impoverished aristocrat man and woman tending to their children’s lives after the war, from a discreet distance. It makes a brittle but true comedy of reticence, and with high artfulness actually conveys the full range of human emotion and concern through ironic dialogue that says, well, pretty much nothing. It is apparent by the end that these two former lovers’ children might be half-brother and sister. What they are conspiring to do then is prevent an incestuous marriage without tipping their children off. Incest, avoiding scandal, indirection, changing status. These are the hunting grounds of the traditional novel, which Green explores with the tools of the twentieth century modernist. Green is an experimental writer. His novels alienate readers, despite their simplicity. Like Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Mann his writing is marked by style, he is pushing at language and all of the formal qualities of the novel. Unlike them his style is minimal. Green is the grand reductionist of the modern period. He does not, like Beckett, go in for grotesque phantasmagoria. Green’s world is ordinary, and the grotesque is suggested, hinted at. The absurd is everywhere concealed by the pitter-pat of conversation, meals, disagreements. His people are ordinary people, closely observed. But his method is highly artificial.

LOVING is his masterpiece, by all accounts. I have come to expect, from Green, a cockeyed use of dialogue and oblique perspective to render in fine detail a slight situation. The pleasure is in reading the unpunctuated but marked pauses and hesitations in the way people talk, their avoidance of saying anything direct, and his ability to convey the intention of what is said as if by magic. I do not think of him as a descriptive or poetic writer in any sense, and almost, as a writer who is not even careful. Yet clearly anyone who writes sentences as strange and free of articles as he does has to intend each syllable. These sentences have been worked over to appear to be the half-heard utterances of people on the tube or at the nearby table. So one of the genuine pleasures of LOVING is the occasional stunning paragraph of description:

“Raunce’s Albert, Edith, Kate, the little girls, and Mrs. Welch’s lad chose for their picnic a place just off the beach. While those children ran screaming down to where great rollers diminished to fans of milk new from the udder upon pressed sand, Albert laid himself under a hedge all over which red fuchsia bells swung without a note in the wind the sure travelling sea brought with its heavy swell. He could watch the light blue heave between their donkey Peter’s legs, and his ears were crowded with the thunder of the ocean.”

 LOVING takes place during World War Two in an English-owned, Irish country estate, a castle. It is told entirely from the point of view of the servants. Charlie Raunce is a Machiavellian butler who, at the novels beginning, succeeds to his position when the old and beloved butler dies. What follows is a love story, with gossip, about the doings of the servants. Charlie is in love with the housekeeper Edith. Edith’s younger housekeeper friend Kate is in love with O’Conor, the sole Irish servant, whom no one but she can understand. The cook pads the food bill to buy gin. Charlie finds the old butler’s secret books itemizing tips and various low level embezzlements. The cook’s nephew is up from England, causing havoc among the 200 peacocks. The owners are Mrs. Tenant, a widow, and her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Jack, whose husband is at war, and who is caught in bed by Edith with a neighbor. The servants are all English and wish to return to England but are afraid of being conscripted, and of the blitz. They also fear for their families left behind. Fear is a constant in the book. They are afraid of the IRA and of Ireland allowing Germany to attack England from its shores. And Mrs. Tenant is afraid of hiring Irish servants, so despite her suspicions of her household feels she can’t afford to lose anyone. And Mrs. Jack, who was discovered naked in bed with a man not her husband, is afraid the servants will tell her mother-in-law, rendering every conversation between them hilarious and awkward as the unstated seems to hover on each of their lips.

There is in all this the strong taste of decline. The castle is mostly shut up. There is only the one visitor, the man whom Mrs. Jack is having an affair with. They are in exile from England and from the past, though all are conscious of the tradition of service, and the importance of maintaining it as security against the chaos and violence of the outside world. In this sense the castle is a prison, and, also, with the beauty of spring, and the wandering peacocks and the flocks of doves in the dovecote, a magic castle in bent pastoral. And the love story, between Raunce and Edith, which develops gently throughout, is genuine. The constant irony that snaps at its heals never overcomes it. The humor of the book is deeply human, and subtly woven into every sentence.

A genuinely eccentric, individual style and purpose in the novel is rare, especially so now. Green did not need to make money from fiction, he owned a factory and came from an aristocratic background. He refused to participate in the literary life of his day, though he understood perfectly well what people were up to. His novels didn’t sell well and were ignored or disparaged by readers and critics, except for a few here an there. The Terry Southern Paris Review interview is marvelous. There is also a review article from the New Criterion (I know, fuck them, but it was a good article!). Writers like Green give me hope as a writer. Not much else does.