Living

I just recently finished reading Living (1929), Henry Green's second published novel, and one of his most original and successful. It's not an easy book to read, especially for an American reader, since it's written in language and syntax that reflect the Birmingham accents of its working class characters. Set in the interwar years, when the British economy was strong and manufacturing jobs were still fairly plentiful, Living recounts the complicated story of an interconnected group of foundry workers and their families. Green's prose style in this book, which mimics the dialect of his characters even in descriptive passages, can be both realistic and also poetic:

Here factories were and more there, in clumps. She saw in her feeling, she saw men working there, all the men, and girls and the two were divided, men from women. Racketing noise burst on her. They worked there with speed. And then over all town sound of hooter broke out. Men and women thickly came from, now together mixed, and they went like tongues along licking the streets.

The setting is the Dupret factory, an aging foundry that is part of a larger family business. Green details the many conflicts among owners, managers, and workers, introducing us to Mr. Dupret and his son, Robert, who has been given an opportunity to travel from London to Birmingham to try out his somewhat limited business talents; Mr. Bridges, the volatile manager of the foundry; and a large cast of administrators and foundry workers, all of whom are engaged in various levels of intrigue. Green masterfully recounts the petty warfare carried on by all of these characters, while he describes the doubts, fears, and insecurities that each harbors. Bosses mistrust workers; workers resent their bosses; cliques form and spread gossip and rumor against one another. Jobs are mishandled, delayed, rejected by buyers. Blame is passed around, denied, and deflected. Each sees himself as competent and everyone else as a potential liability to the success of the business.

The novel eventually concentrates attention on a single household of four: Mr. Craigan, the householder, an aging moulder at the foundry; his friend Joe Gates and Gates' daughter Lily, who live with him; and Jim Dale, another foundry worker and boarder who is much infatuated with Lily. Craigan, Gates, and Dale would all prefer Lily to accept Dale's awkward overtures, marry him and settle down, but she has eyes only for Bert Jones, an ambitious but undependable young man who works at the same foundry. Also attached to this family circle are their neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Eames, and a loose network of friends and co-workers.

My first reaction to  Living was frustration. It was not easy in the early going to distinguish among the many characters or to establish their relationships to one another or their significance to the story Green was unfolding. And the novel's style was not at first inviting. But with perseverance, I began to catch the rhythms of the language and to distinguish among the various actors and discern their connections to one another. Green's great talent is his generosity of spirit. He enters into the thoughts and souls of his characters, creating very believable, if not always appealing, individuals. As I found with Loving (1945), which I read earlier, I could not really sympathize or identify with any of these people, neither the middle class businessmen nor the working class laborers and their families, and yet I was fascinated by them and, as I read, began to know them as individuals with distinct motives, dreams, fears, and desires. Somehow Green makes his people come alive, and in doing so, captures a moment in time and brings it back to life. The novel is almost visual or cinematic in the way it recovers images from a past time.

To a great extent, that has been the appeal of Henry Green's books. He has that ability to report accurately what it was like to live in his own time, to observe a variety of different individuals from a fairly wide range of social classes and then describe them interacting with one another. From his autobiography we know he was very sensitive to English class distinctions. His novels detail some of those distinctions, and help one to understand how powerful they were, even as they were beginning to fray and yield to some extent. The other penetrating aspect of Green's novels is his insight into the interestingly dysfunctional quality of English interpersonal relationships, especially between men and women.

I have one more of Green's novels here waiting to be read. First I will read another of my book club books, but then I will return to Party Going, which he published in 1939, after Living and before Pack My Bag (1940) and Loving. Then perhaps I will be able to say more both about Green and his treatment of class in his writing.