Back to the Classics #22

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Set in a Place You'd Like to Visit: This 1945 novel is set during World War II in fictitious Kinalty Castle, a big house in southern Ireland, on the Cork coast perhaps. Castle-hopping would be a must on a road trip in Eire (Republic of Ireland). It would be fun to see if any Gothic piles had rooms like the Blue Drawing Room in this novel: “She was surrounded by milking stools, pails, clogs, the cow-byre furniture all in gilded wood which was disposed around to create the most celebrated eighteenth-century folly in Eire that had still to be burned down.”

Loving – Henry Green

The novel begins traditionally enough with a death. Eldon the long-time head butler has died calling out for the love of his life while the other servants carry on. In a surprising move iffy head footman Charley Raunce is promoted to acting butler. Such are staffing shortages, what with the war and all. Out of his depth and not suspecting it, Charlie makes silly observations that perplex listeners that know better.

The author explores love in various forms. A pretty maid named Edith, aged about 20, is attracted to Charlie, aged about 40, because he’s the only eligible man around and she intuits they are the same kind of person: practical, acquisitive and conniving.  But Edith’s friend Kate is jealous of Edith’s deepening relationship with Charlie. Kate begins to fall in love with lampman Paddy O’Conor, the only non-Englishman on the staff. Somehow she understands him though he speaks only Erse, which makes him an outsider in the all-English group, whose members have the usual English prejudices against the Irish and already feel under terrorist threat since they live in the remote country

Both Kate and Edith love Mrs. Tennant’s two little grand-daughters, one of whom has fallen in calf love with Albert, a boy evacuated from London to escape the blitz. Mrs. Smith, the boozy cook but don’t call her Cook, loves and defends the unspeakable Albert so fiercely that one wonders if he’s her illegitimate son. Mrs. Tennant’s daughter-in-law Mrs. Jack is sleeping with one of her husband’s friends so in a delightful comic scene Mrs. Jack has coals of fire heaped on her head when Mrs. Tennant tells her how pleased she is that Mrs. Jack is so good for Jack. So, there’re many different kinds of loving in this novel titled Loving.

And many kinds of deviousness, too. Charlie clumsily tries to manipulate Mrs. Tennant who is concerned that she won’t be able to trust anybody in the house if they don’t get the bottom of the case of her missing sapphire cluster.  And Charley wastes little time figuring out how his predecessor cooked the books. He exploits the chance to peculate here and there to the tune of X number of pounds a week. Slippery Charlie is vague on the amount with his fiancée Edith who tries to pin him down on what their income will be. All the servants have their little scam for food or drink or time.

Given all the guile and shadiness on the part of the characters, the peacocks aren’t parading all over this novel just for the sake of color though Green uses tens and tens of color words that are saturating this novel set in the shamrock emerald kelly of an Irish spring and turning pasty English complexions red, blue and green.  Both Charlie and Edith dislike the peacocks because they feel spied on by the dandies of the avian world. This gets to clanging an Allusion Alert in us hardcore readers into Greek mythology when we were kids.  We recall Hera put in the tails of peacocks the hundred eyes of her giant watchman Argus, after he was murdered by Hermes at the request of Zeus who wanted to cheat on Hera with Io whom Argus was watching. In this novel characters are up so many indiscretions that they had better be nervous about being spied on and found guilty.

As if the fear of war and invasion and the dread of being watched and judged by others are not enough to fill one’s skull with anxiety, people will make themselves more disquieted by over-thinking stuff. The English servants are caught in a double-bind. They fear being drafted into military service if they return to England. And if they don’t return to England they fear being called disloyal slackers who stayed cushy in neutral Ireland while everybody else back home got blitzed. In another comic scene the characters get flustered when a private eye hired by the insurance company drops in to ask questions about the missing sapphire ring. Because the acronym for the insurance company is IRA, Charlie and Company get a case of the jim-jams that the detective is in fact a scout of the Irish Republican Army sent to case the big house.

Green reportedly didn’t like being called a modernist. Indeed, he doesn’t fit into the generation of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford or Virginia Woolf as he was born in 1905, the same year as Anthony Powell, Mary Renault, Rex Warner and C.P. Snow. But Green reminds us of other modernists. His comic situations are as surreal and absurd as in Kafka. The cool unadorned tone of the faceless narrator calls to mind Hemingway. Ordinary people getting by doing what they ought to do reminds me of the slice of life side of Dubliners. Similar to Faulkner having a male Quentin and a female Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, Green has two characters named Albert which mildly confuses not only us the reader but the other characters in the novel.

Also modernist is the willingness on the part of the author to work with the reader who wants to cast off the doldrums, who worries their reading choices are getting stagnant. The writer yanks readers out of their mental ruts with minimal characterization, zero editorial commentary on the action and zero internal monologue.

In Loving, our narrator is mostly omniscient but we readers quickly get the feeling things sometimes escape our narrator so we’d better stay on our toes. For instance, we don’t know whether Charlie’s symptoms are sprinkled hither and tither deliberately or not. But seeing them together in one place - swelling of lymph glands in his neck, shooting pains down his arms, and persistent fatigue – makes us think a biopsy of Charlie’s lymph nodes in his neck may indicate Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Another modernist towline is relating plot and incident through dialogue. The banal dialogues of the servants are written to mimic some kind of working class English dialect – slangy idioms, Americanisms and countrified expressions, grammatical goofs, clichés and mangled proverbs, multiple simultaneous conversations with quick changes of topic, and much implying and inferring between the words going on. Like Faulkner, Green is a wonder-worker at making dialogue express complex interpretations and emotions in the homey vernacular of the character that’s speaking.

Modernist authors eased us readers out of ruts with intentionally disorderly sentence structure, phrases and clauses positioned any old place. Edith and Kate, dressed in purple uniforms, dance in the ballroom, in a beautiful scene that shows Green’s apparently off-again on-again relationship with commas.

They were wheeling wheeling in each other's arms heedless at the far end where they had drawn up one of the white blinds. Above from a rather low ceiling five great chandeliers swept one after the other almost to the waxed parquet floor reflecting in their hundred thousand drops the single sparkle of distant day, again and again red velvet panelled walls, and two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass.

Finally, in keeping with the modernist way, oh the irony. The book ends “… lived happily ever after.” One wonders, since Charlie’s probable cancer of the lymph system will kill him in about five years. Not much post-war promise and disappointment in store for our Charlie.

Anyway, as usual with the work of serious fiction writers of the 20^th century, this novel had better be read twice, first to get a bead on character and story, second to enjoy the wiliness of the writer and the kind of tricks they’re playing. Reading this dialogue-driven novel, the reader that finds Ivy Compton-Burnett freaking dope man will have only mild difficulty inferring the personality and motivations of characters, all the while thankfully certain that though our deductions may well be wrong the acts of thinking, connecting, visualizing, and predicting have jerked us out of a rut.