E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #82: Loving by Henry Green
by Ernie on 16/05/08 at 4:57 pm
#82: Loving, Henry Green, 1945. Henry Green (Henry Vincent Yorke) is a dark horse among modern novelists. He never enjoyed placement in the first rank alongside Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, or James Joyce, though his novel Living (not to be confused with Loving) was included in Cyril Connolly’s greatly influential 1965 Modern Movement, which listed 100 works of poetry, fiction, and drama that made up the core of literary modernism in several languages. Praised in certain quarters during his life for his sparse and subtle depictions of working class life, Green has since fallen almost entirely out of favor (though Loving was included in the deeply unimaginative and flawed Time magazine top 100 novels, which inspired this shadow list). Penguin has reprinted several of his novels in a single volume, with an introduction by John Updike, but most readers will return a blank stare when you suggest that his writing has retained its power to move and intrigue us today. His alleged working-class background was, like Wilfrid Gibson’s, a complete fabrication, though this should not detract from his reputation as a sophisticated novelist of working class life. In fact, he worked on the floors of factories his family owned. Aside from his autobiographical book Pack My Bag, his novels tend to have one-word titles: Blindness (1926), Living (1929), Party Going (1939), Caught (1943), Back (1946), Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), Doting (1952). I picked up my own copies of his novels when the Philadelphia Atheneum placed them in the foyer on their deaccession cart. Loving is set on an English estate in Ireland during the Second World War. Ireland, which remained neutral during the war, had some German sympathies (my enemy’s enemy is my friend), and the estate’s inhabitants, set apart from the local population, are alternately drawn to the Irish (as lovers) and repelled by them (as potential mobs). The English working-class servants of the manor are forced to fend for themselves without their “masters” when the English aristocrats are called off either to fight in the officer corp or visit family in England. They are compelled to continue the routines for an empty house, and it soon becomes clear that the very routines, emptied of their meanings, are the only thing that keeps them from falling into a state of complete anarchy. The ending is a terrific, and rather strange, stroke on Green’s part. A highly recommended book, analyzing a teetering English class system from below.
