Classic Set in the Industrial North of England. In this 1929 novel, Green does that modernist thing Faulkner did: dialogue-driven writing in dialect. So the dialogue is best read aloud. This video on Brummie is a useful primer though the presenter doesn’t seem to know all dialects of English link sounds together (it’s called liaison). To show how odd people are – everywhere! - Brummie is despised in the UK and thought charming everywhere else.
Living - Henry Green
Green spent a year or two working on the floor of his family’s Birmingham foundry. The guys assumed he was being punished by this father. But Green always knew he was going to write a novel. In the late 1920s, though only in his early twenties, Green was the last modernist in the manner of those stiff-necked hardnoses Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. The 22-year-old probably told himself, “I’m gonna blast the old-fashioned novel.”
How?
Start in medias res. Strip narrative down. Write taut and spare. Dump adjectives and conjunctions. Dump articles even. Give readers characters but give Mr Craigan no first name and pin on other characters unmemorable and easily-confusable names like Jones, Gates, Bridges, Dale, Tupe, Tarver. Give no help understanding who’s who. Provide no authorial interpretation. Let’s go ultra-meta, with prose giving disconnected movie scenes of a date to the movies.
Lily Gates and Jim Dale, who was Mr Craigan’s young man in iron foundry, stood in queue outside cinema on Friday night. They said nothing to each other. Later they got in and found seats. Light rain had been falling, so when these two acting on screen walked by summer night down leafy lane, hair over ears left wet on his cheek as she leant head, when they on screen stopped and looked at each other. [ . . . ] Later her head was leaning on his shoulder again, like hanging clouds against hills every head in this theatre tumbled without hats against another, leaning everywhere.
It is impossible to put down. And I have no idea how Green stokes the compulsion to keep reading, since he doesn’t help us readers. He doesn’t “make you see” like Conrad intended or have an overarching orientation to the world like D.H. Lawrence.
Moral concerns? Please. People want simple things, most of the time. Lily wants escape and a babby. Her female neighbors want respectability and don’t want ill things said of them or theirs. The rough tough manly guardians of the patriarchy want to be obeyed by women and be fed by women and be taken care of by women because they know as night follows day without women they would live like pigs. And even their stunted sense of propriety rebels at the notion of living like pigs.
But ties of some sort that bind people together? Nah. Women are tough on each other; married looking down on the unmarried, mothers looking down on not a mother yet; double-standard, ready to believe the worst about young and single women. Real men don’t really connect. Being a manly man means being divorced from one’s own feelings and oblivious to those of others. Tongue-tied about any shit that’s really important. At least, if the reader grew up in a working-class neighborhood, the strutting bantering masculinity will be familiar and relatable, nostalgic or toxic or both.
Living is mainly habit for Green’s people. Proximity. Monotony means you don’t have to think so hard about what comes next. Custom of the country. Recall the peacocks in Loving, Green has a thing about birds, in this one oft mentioning dingy sparrows and dusty pigeons and the instinct to return to home. Miss Gates [Lily] ends up not going to Canada with her heel of a BF Mr. Jones and so:
As . . . the housewives on a Sunday will go out, in their aprons, carrying a pigeon and throw this one up and it will climb in spirals up in the air, then, when it has reached a sufficient height it will drop down plumb into the apron she holds out for it, so Miss Gates, in her thoughts . . . was always coming bump back again to Mr Craigan.
After a while, the book feels like living the working life. People go to work and come home, eat, fight and make up, fight and feud on, attempt to escape but come home. But we’re looking at it from above, detached, but not wanting to look away.
Mission accomplished: nineteenth-century novel blasted.
Click on the title to go to the review.
Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner
Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams
Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara
Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope
Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell
Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout
Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil
Classic Abandoned: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon
Classic English Mystery: Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie
Classic Set in Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande: Road to Rhuine - Simon Troy
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