| Title | : | Living |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0781200377 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780781200370 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1929 |
Living Reviews
-
Because, Just Because
Things are changing in 1928 England. Or so the old and the young in Living think. The old men are engaged in the crises of declining vitality; the old women are primarily coping with these masculine crises. The young men are ambitious and feel themselves under-appreciated; the young women feel the same and attach themselves to the optimistic young men. It is the same for the folks who ride the trams as it is for them who ride the Bentley motor cars. Everyone is dissatisfied with his lot. But class boundaries, particularly language, prevent the possibility of mutual sympathy.
What is clear to the reader, however, is that precisely the same life-patterns are being established by the young as the old have come to regret. The young men inevitably will be disappointed that they 'escaped' into the trap of marriage and the slavish role of bread-winner. The women will eventually grieve over their lost lives and a futile reliance on masculine effort. The things that tempt them to the trap are universal and timeless although they appear unique and urgent: sex, companionship, independence, reputation.
Those who are no longer young but not yet old, namely those who actually run the show, all worry about maintaining whatever it is they've achieved. Their positions are vulnerable. The young are militating for change because the past is rotten and the world has been mis-managed. The old, the mentors and promoters of the middle-aged, are incapacitated and unable to protect their former protégés. They scheme and intrigue among themselves to hold off their inevitable decline.
Meanwhile the business, a steel foundry on which they all depend, is slipping slowly down the plug-hole. The Belgians (not the Chinese yet of course) outbid them routinely. Waste is immense because of bad workmanship. Customers are returning obviously defective products. Machinery is not maintained properly and has become lethally dangerous. Union organisers are making inroads. These are mere annoyances, however, compared with the issue of the toilet monitor installed by the factory manager and removed by the son of the owner. Such is the rule of the trivially dominant.
This is a remarkably insightful novel for a young man of 22. It is at least partially autobiographical since Henry Green (Yorke) was the son of a Birmingham industrialist and took over the family business. Despite admiration by Auden, Waugh, and Anthony Powell, Green was not a reader's writer and never sold more than 10,000 volumes of any of his eleven titles, perhaps because he pursued the family's business interests over his literary career. The family firm, H Pontifex & Sons, continued in operation until its bankruptcy in 2011 so he apparently did not degrade that legacy.
Nevertheless, Green died a somewhat lonely, alcoholic death in 1973. One is tempted to the conclusion that even acute literary insight doesn't prevent ultimate disappointment with one's lot. The only response to the question about the real point of life that is posed to one of Green's characters is "Because, just because." Perhaps no other is possible. -
Living - what's that all about?
Living is about how you make your living.
In an iron foundry in Birmingham in the 1920s, hierarchies, animosities, competition and intrigues are as much part of working life as anywhere else. Frustrations, worries, wages. There is no end to the discussions about jobs when you sit in the pub in the evening, trying to drink the money you earned to forget the hardship of LIVING. You know you live for your job if you mourn when you lose it because you have grown too old to be considered productive anymore.
Living is about the place you live in.
Whom you share your life with tells the story of your way of living. Whom you leave and break free from as well. If you are running away from the place you are living at, it shows you long for something better. If you come back, it tells your family there is nothing better out there. If you don't know anymore where your parents are living, it shows you have cut out a huge chunk of your former life. That is heavy luggage to carry into the future.
Living is about the meaning of life.
Why do we do what we do? Does it make any sense? If not, how can we cope anyway? You know you are alive when your emotions run high, when you change between anger, resentment, humiliation, hope, love and longing within the short hours of a day. When your thoughts and actions are coloured by your dreams and nightmares, and your movements show your secret wishes. Is there more meaning in a life spent in luxury than in poverty? Do the owners of an iron foundry find more reason to be happy than the families depending on its wages? Sometimes. But by no means always.
Living is about spending time.
By repeating patterns we live our lives. We work, eat, love, go to the pub, to the movies or to a football game. We engage. Then we disengage again, sleep and repeat the pattern, until we are old.
Living is puzzling.
This is the second novel I read by Green, and after
Loving, I was curious how his unique voice would work in another context. LIVING is, if possible, even more fascinating than LOVING, mainly because it is such an impossible task to describe what is happening between birth and death. In Sweden we often talk about Livspussel, Life puzzle, and how to get the different bits and pieces to fit together. This novel literally creates such a puzzle.
In the beginning you have all those tiny bits spread out in front of you, and they are realistic and accurately drawn, but don't make any sense, as they are not given any context. You start constructing the puzzle, and step by step, the panorama of Birmingham life gets a shape. You fill in gaps, see the background colours which unite the picture to one whole painting of LIVING, you make connections, sometimes fragile, just one tiny piece of the puzzle to link two sections, sometimes you create a whole perfectly rendered situation. Some pieces are missing, and you have to imagine what would have been there.
Like the closing lines, the powerful description of workers going to an Aston Villa -Cardiff game. We don't get the scores, the results, just the moving masses making noise, singing and cheering. Villa is their life. Their way of living. A never ending game.
"What is a town then, how do I know? What did they do? They went by lamps, lamps, lamps, each one with light and dark strung up on it each with streets these were in. Houses made the streets, people made the houses. People lived in them, thousands millions of lives. Each life dully lived, and the life next it, pitched together, walls between built, dully these lives went out onto streets promenaded dullness there. Ugly clothes, people, houses. They went along through these, she did not recognize her own form of ugliness in it."
What two characters discover when they run away to Liverpool is the blatant ugliness of ordinary life to which you don't have a special connection. That is the feeling the reader also gets at first, before starting to see the characters, care for them, worry about them when they are frustrated and get into a pub brawl, etc... LIVING makes you see the individuals underneath the millions of dull lives lived everywhere.
Being ugly, but alive! That is what LIVING is about. -
three things
This novel taught me three things. The first is that right there on your To Be Read shelf may be lurking your next five star book and it might be one of the ones that have been there for years, you’ve picked it up and it put down dozens of times, it’s got a dull title, kind of boring cover, you’ve often wondered why it was there at all, and finally, one day, you open it and begin.
That’s when I learned the second thing. I pretty much hated the first thirty or forty pages, what is this tosh I thought, a faux-naif deliberately-slapdash style that omits “the” and “a” randomly and seems to be a strange kind of – what – parody? – of the way working class people talked in the 1920s… but then, I guess like when you hear a piece of music for the 2nd or 3rd time and you didn’t get it at first and then – something started to click into place and by page 50 or 60 it had enveloped me, this thrawn, awkward, slantwise style was – in fact – exactly right, exactly and precisely. So the second thing was – you can start off pretty much hating a book and then it can tune in your brain like tuning in a radio and it can get you on its wavelength. And then you’re gone gone gone.
The third thing was that I was wrong, very wrong, with a previous cherished literary prejudice of mine that said no good novel could be written by anyone under the age of 30. Well, I had been coshed by Mary Shelley and tripped up by Carson McCullers then booted soundly by Evelyn Waugh but I was still thinking I was right. But Henry Green was none other than 23-24 when he wrote this. So I’m here to say I was wrong. People in their twenties can write great novels.
The odd style
“And they went upstairs, so the music came nearer to them from room dancing was in.”
Here is Lily Gates, young, lovely, imprisoned by life, looking down on a part of Birmingham from a hill:
Here factories were more and more there, in clumps. She saw in her feeling, she saw men working there, all the men, and girls and the 2 were divided., men from women. Racketing noise burst on her. They worked there with speed. And then over all town sound of hooters broke out. Men and women thickly came from, now together mixed, and they went like tongues along licking the streets.
The dialogue, though is not like this, it’s quite different, as if a tape recorder was switched on in Birmingham, 1928 :
“I’ll be on my own again, Friday nights. I said to ‘im, Yes, but don’t consider, I said, that I’ll be a stay at ‘ome even if I ‘ave to go out alone, no I can go and take myself out for a walk and get a mouthful of fresh air for myself thank you. Still, who would’ve thought it, meeting you in the road like that, I don’t know I’m sure.”
My own father worked as a colliery engineer and my father-in-law as a miner, then a colliery manager. I hear both of their voices in these pages :
“What about ‘im?”
“What I want to get at is, what happened when that wire rope gave some time back.”
“Nothin’ didn’t ‘appen.”
“Didn’t it come down somewhere by Craigan?”
“I know it daint. It broke sure enough but there weren’t much strain on it at that moment and it wouldn’t’ve bruised ‘is arse if it ‘ad fetched ‘im one. But God strike me ‘andsome if ‘e didn’t raise ‘is ugly old dial an’ start blubberin’ an’ made such a ‘ullabaloo as if ‘e might be dead. That’s ‘im all over.”
Is there a story?
Yes, it takes a while but we are following an upstairs downstairs scheme. Upstairs, the old factory owner is on his way out and his son is straining to take over. He’s also straining to get somewhere with a certain young lady. Downstairs, we follow the household of the said Lily, and her attempts to break free of her invisible bonds. Lily could break your heart. At the very least she’s going to bend it a little.
How did this young man write such a great novel?
Especially since he was a toff himself and was part of the Eton and Oxford University caviar and champagne set lovingly recreated in his pal Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited.
I really don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense. He reached out his hand and caught some magic here. -
he writes like child would write, child describing world they see day in day out; child sees the world, lives in it, doesn't want to live in it, lives in it still. it is purposeful sort of writing - most explicitly in decision to not include many articles, conjunctions - it is primitive sort of writing as well. makes sense. Green is depicting lives at most primitive, "Living" at most basic:
birth, school, work, death. Green has even hand: lives of factory workers, upper class knobs, given same treatment. mournful, frustratingly rote lives full of repetition, barely-formed plans that never go as planned. lives full of spite, smallness, disappointment. sad lives, though only sad to those living outside of it. to those in it: it is what it is. it is what they have, why try to wonder what another life could be like - even lives they dream of are lives that are extensions of circular traps they live in now. alas!
but is easy for me to say, alas, rendered complacent from happy hour drinks with colleagues from workplace, watching reality tv, scoffing, writing review from perspective of gent named mark monday with little to no concerns about money, working at place that gives what he'd like to think is meaning in life. these factory lads, these factory old-timers, these wives, these wives-to-be, these upper class factory owners, their meaningless ways... dreamlike lives, grey rainy dreams. perhaps they find their own sort of meaning in their lives, rich and poor alike. what is this "meaning" anyway? Green doesn't know, maybe me either. maybe meaning is just another word for trying to survive with your head up, like you matter, like your feelings matter. we can all relate, right? even if we don't want to. what does it all amount to, what does living even matter? let's just try to get by, try not to realize that living, living, is what should be our life's work.
review for Loving
here
review for Party Going
here -
It took a while before I got accustomed to the telegraphic style of Henry Green. Reading Living is like reading short messages on the ticker tape.
Later alarm clock sounded next door. They woke. She began to get out of bed and he put on his spectacles. ‘Another day’ he said after he sneezed. She said was one thing to these houses with narrow walls it saved buying alarm clocks…
Sudden jumping from character to character and from event to event creates the illusion that everything happens at once and all is interlocked. And in his apparently modernistic style Henry Green managed to portray the life of the workers and their relationships between themselves and their masters more precisely and vividly than many realists.He thought it was not poverty you saw in this quarter, the artisan class lived here, but a kind of terrible respectability on too little money. And what was in all this, he said as he was feeling now, or in any walk of life – you were born, you went to school, you worked, you married, you worked harder, you had children, you went on working, with a good deal of trouble your children grew up, then they married. What had you before you died? Grandchildren?
Those who have and those who have not – they are worlds apart. And nothing can fill the bottomless chasm between them.What were they to her, they were like sheep and would always be here, was no kind of independence in them she thought in image in her mind, like lettuces in a row they were, yes, separate from one another but in one teeny plot of land.
It is much better not to have any sweet dreams about the future for it is hard enough just to stay alive in the present. -
Now regarded as a modernist classic, this is one of Green's early works. Much has been made of the experimental nature of the novel with its paucity of articles and conjunctives. It is set around the lives of management and workers in an iron foundry in Birmingham. It is dialogue driven and much of it is in dialect. Green being from the area makes a pretty good job of capturing the Brummie accent and I suspect this is the real reason for the lack of articles and conjunctives: it better captures the everyday language of the area.
Two characters in particular stand out. The factory owners son, Dupret, trying to fill his father's shoes and make his mark at the same time as trying to woo an impossibly distant girl; and Lily Gates, keeping house for her father and "grandfather" and their lodger Jim, who all work at the factory. Green captures the everyday tensions of work and leisure, limited money, the risk of being laid off, the pub, the risk of sudden violence (close to the surface) and the aspirations.
The novel contains an excellent description of the way a person withdraws from life in the period before death. Old Mr Dupret takes to his bed for no apparent reason and just stops participating in life. There is nothing obviously wrong with him, but he seems to know his life is over.
Lily's search for love is the most poignant part of the book. The two men who attempt to woo her are typical of the factory workers, clumsy with a very limited view of what women are and should be. Like the older male generation they believe that a woman should keep house and not work. Lily's choice is a grim one. The novel is set just after women got the vote; but Green points out that nothing has changed in reality.
Lily and Dupret make disasterous choices. Dupret decides to run the factory his own way; he lays off most of the older men, those close to pension age and they have nothing left in their lives but the pub and an empty future. Lily leaves with one of the men, who promptly abandons her in a strange city and she returns home ashamed.
A brief novel with a broad scope encompassing class and gender; people behave as you would expect and within thier limitations, each stupid in their own particular way, but splendidly human. There is a touch of Marxian determinism about the structure, but there is a warmth and affection amidst the brutal realism. -
Henry Green, he of the one-word title. So I automatically set my buzz-alert and dutifully marked each time the word Living appeared. And the various meanings buzzed: living, as in breathing, existing; living, as in a standard of behavior; living, as in employment, making a living.
So I found these notes in an intentionally strange language (more on that later), but a buzzer kept going off the way a spouse's alarm clock will go off even when she isn't there, and you have no clue how to turn the damn thing off. It was:
Pigeons.
Pigeons. Pigeons. Pigeons.
If you think about it, what can be more proletarian than a pigeon? And this is a very proletarian tale, about foundry workers in 1929 Birmingham, England. Yet there are also women in this tale, and they too seek a living, and living. So it is Lily Gates who first sees the pigeons.
Here pigeon quickly turned rising in spirals, grey, when clock in the church tower struck the quarter and away, away the pigeon fell from this noise in a diagonal from where church was built and that man who leant on his spade. Like hatchets they came towards Lily, down at her till when they were close to window they stopped, each clapped his wings then flew away slowly all of them to the left.
That's the way to do foreboding.
So Lily dreams of escape from the dreariness, the lack of living, perhaps to India then, eastward to tea plantations, and dolphins and tropical fish. But no; instead it's a train to Liverpool with Bert Jones, who may not be the right man, and we're told this:
When we think--it might be a flock of pigeons flying in the sky so many things go to make our thought, the number of pigeons, and they don't fly straight. Now one pigeon will fly away from the greater number, now another: sometimes half the flock will follow one, half the other till they join again. So she thought about tombstones and how sculptor made it pay showing so many spoiled ones in his window as it might be. . . . So, as pigeon when she had watched out of kitchen window had flown diagonally down in a wedge and then recovered themselves, as each one had clapped his wings and gone slowly away, so she drew back at him, her mind unbound, and said to him: "Why look it's raining."
Who's the pigeon, you no doubt are wondering. Lily's not done:
Sitting at window-sill of her grandad's window she overlooked Birmingham and the sky over it. This was filled with pigeon flocks. Thousands of pigeon wavered there in the sky, and that baby's raucous cry would come to her now and again. So day after day and slowly her feelings began to waver too and make expeditions away from herself, though like on a string. And disturbed her hands at sewing.
That's not Lily's baby, Lily doesn't know if she wants a baby. That's the neighbors' baby, of Mr. and Mrs. Eames. At book's end they all go for a stroll, Lily pushing the baby in a pram. They are beckoned down an alleyway by a pigeon fancier, what they call it. Another occupation, a way of making a living.* He's trying to sell some pigeons.
When he came back he put grain onto the hood of the pram and one by one pigeon fluttered off the roof onto the hood of this pram. As they did so they fluttered round heads of those people in the yard, who kept heads very still. Then the fancier put grain onto the apron of the pram in front of the baby and one pigeon hopped from hood down onto the apron right in front of the baby. This baby made wave with its arm at the pigeon which waddled out of reach. Mrs. Eames looked at its fierce red eye and said would it peck at her daughter but fancier said not on your life. Soon all were laughing at way this one pigeon, which alone dared to come onto apron, dodged the baby which laughed and crowed and grabbed at it. Soon also they were bored and went all of them into his house. . . . Lily did not go, but stood like fascinated. . . . Suddenly with loud raucous she rushed at the baby, and with clatter of wings all the pigeon lifted and flew away, she rushed at baby to kiss it.
And continuing with avian symbolism, here might just be the best paragraph I read all year:
"You don't want me," she said and she went paler. "Don't want me," she said and she began crying. Large tears came down from eyes down her still face. He turned. He saw these and as the sun comes out from behind clouds then birds whistle again for the sun, so love came out in his eyes (at the victory, at making her cry) and he whispered things senseless as whistling birds. Lastly he said, "and what would I do if you weren't coming!" She clung to him--aching tenderness--and she thought how could he be so cruel.
I hinted above that Green employed an odd structure, what he called his "experiments with the definite article." It was off-putting at first, like baby talk, or the way older movies would have Native Americans speak English in caricature. But Green continued, "I wanted to make that book as taut and spare as possible, to fit the proletarian life I was then leading. So I hit on leaving out the articles. I still think it effective, but would not do it again." I thought it worked well, complementing for me the harsh Birmingham dialect.
In an unusually helpful Introduction (by Adam Thirlwell) to this novel, Green is quoted: To create life in the reader, it will be necessary for the dialogue to mean different things to different readers at one and the same time.
That's the beauty of this book I think, that engagement with the reader, something I found lacking in recent reading of Flaubert. Stated otherwise: this is what I like. And it doesn't matter if I'm wrong.
Not everyone sees the pigeons.
____________
*Like you, I will be awaiting the inevitable publication of The Pigeon Fancier's Daughter. -
I love this book. I'm awed by the love in it and the strange description and the dialogue caught so faithfully. It's set in Birmingham among factory workers in the late 1920s. This is a passage from it:
Then, one morning in iron foundry, Arthur Jones began singing. He did not often sing. When he began the men looked up from work and at each other and stayed quiet. In machine shop, which was next iron foundry, they said it was Arthur singing and stayed quiet also. He sang all morning.
He was Welsh and he sang in Welsh. His voice had a great soft yell in it. It rose and fell and then rose again and, when the crane was quiet for a moment, then his voice came out from behind noise of crane in passionate singing. Soon each one in this factory heard that Arthur had begun and, if he had 2 moments, came by iron foundry shop to listen. So all through that morning, as he went on, was a little group of men standing by door in the machine shop, always different men. His singing made them all sad. Everything in iron foundries is black with burnt sand and here was his silver voice yelling like bells. The black grimed men bent over their black boxes....
Everyone looked forward to Arthur's singing, each one was glad when he sang, only, this morning, Jim Dale had bitterness inside him like girders and when Arthur began singing his music was like acid to that man and it was like that girder was being melted and bitterness and anger decrystallised, up rising in him till he was full and would have broken out - when he put on his coat and walked off and went into town and drank....
Still Arthur sang and it might be months before he sang again. And no one else sang that day, but all listened to his singing. That night son had been born to him.
Weird but beautiful I think and I could quote passage after passage that I love. -
This is quite an extraordinary book, where not only the speech and thoughts of the various characters are written in a staccato fashion, but the narration is done in the same way. The word "the" is almost entirely absent. It takes some getting used to, but I found that if I read it with a northern English accent in my head, it worked well. An early example:
"Evening. Was spring. Heavy blue clouds stayed over above. In small back garden of villa small tree was with yellow buds. On table in back room daffodils, faded, were between ferns in a vase."
Woven throughout the book are references to pigeons, both ones owned by someone who feeds and cares for them, and wild birds. The characters likewise have ties to work, family and friends, where living together is a safer proposition in terms of the sharing of costs, but the individuals still yearn for freedom to go elsewhere and do other things.
"We are imprisoned by that person whom we love. In the same way as pigeon have an almost irritating knack of homing so our thoughts are coming back. And as the fancier soon forgets to wonder at their sure return so we forget to notice, as we get used to it, which way our thoughts are turned. And which way our eyes."
The book was set in 1928, the year it was written. Thus it is ten years after the end of the Great War, and preceding the Great Depression. The war is never mentioned, but there are references there all the same. For example:
"... there's only men of 'is age, and young men in that place, so trouble's bound to be between 'em, the younger lot trying to push the older out of the light. There's none that comes between 'em, speakin' of age."
The workers in the factory are almost all either in their fifties or sixties, or young men in their early twenties. Those who would have been in their thirties and forties had mostly been killed or maimed on the battlefields.
An extraordinary book, written by a young man of 24 who came from a privileged background, but nevertheless seemed able to get into the skin of the workers he came across in his father's factory.
3.5 stars. -
An interesting, engaging, clever, well written, character based novel set in Birmingham, describing the lives of a group of people associated with the iron foundry business. The novel starts slowly as we are introduced to a number of characters. I found after about fifty pages I became familiar with the characters. The prose is a bit jerky as the author tries to capture the working class economy of expression and their expectations and desires.
There are at least four story threads. The Dupert’s are well off, based in London, They own the Birmingham iron foundry. Mr Craigan is in his 60s and has been working at the foundry for over fifty years. Miss Lily Gates is housekeeper and cook to Mr Craigan, Miss Gates father, an experienced foundry worker, and Jim Dale, a young foundry worker. Mr Bridges is the manager of the iron foundry and has some disagreements with the way the young Dupert wants to run the business. Mr Bert Jones and Miss Gates are going out together and planning their future.
First published in 1929. -
This is the 2d Henry Green novel I've read. I read Loving a few years ago. I liked it, but I liked Living even more.
It's a kind of novel of the universal. This is suggested by Green's omission of the sentence articles "the" and "a". So the reader comes on a sentence about Lily Gates and Bert Jones visiting his aunt and uncle: "Lily Gates took pleasure in feeding chickens, it was infinitely amusing for her, and she had on new dress." It reads like Gertrude Stein, an observation I believe Adam Thirlwell made in his "Introduction". It's also like Stein in that Green writes the humdrum moments of his characters' lives--work, pub, meals, sleep-- in dialogue and everyday actions one after another in a stream of repetition which gradually collects, layer on layer, to create reality.
Christopher Isherwood called this a proletarian novel. The story is of characters who work day after day for their living in an iron foundry in Birmingham, England "till we're too old. It's no manner of use thinking about it, it's like that, right on till we're too old for them to use us." Mr Craigan in the novel had gone to work when he was 9 years old and every day of his life had worked the daylight hours until the time of the novel--the late 1920s, I think--when he's due his old age pension. Not all the characters are working class, though. Richard Dupret, an owner and manager of the foundry, feels the same inescapable controls of fate and vocation: "He thought how he would sit in office chairs for another forty years, gradually taking to golf at the week-ends or the cultivation of gardenias." For Green the characters are representative of living in the modern world.
The reader thinks there's no underlying meaning, no metaphor. He thinks Green has given us only the monotony of day-to-day surface accumulating to recreate our living. But I believe Green loved these people of Birmingham so much that he even gave some of them the affirmation of attendant angels. It's a lovely novel. -
"Well you've always told me there is no money to make in iron founding but--you know, I'm not trying to be quarrelsome, isn't that rather a defeatist policy?"
"Diabetes?" said Mr. Bridges.
The rare NYRB fail. I like Henry Green, too, but this early "modernist" (whatever!) novel of his was slightly too impenetrable and wayward for my tastes. It's hard for me to pin down what I didn't like here. The style is odd, but not off-putting. If you can read Irvine Welsh's Scottish novels, you can easily read this article-less Brummie prose. It's more that the story itself, disparate and easily-confused characters in and out and around a Birmingham factory, isn't very interesting. There are characters in the office, most especially the flat and uninteresting heir to the factory trying to make good on its flailing profits, and the workers. Then there's Lily, the only really engaging figure, a young girl wanting to elope with her guy and work. It's all about work, hence the title, I guess, there just isn't much more to it than that, save for flashes of Green's genius, which he must've kept in reserve for his later novels. -
I wavered between 3.5 and 4 stars for this book. I had not read anything by Henry Green before and found that it took a while to get used to his writing style which could be described as telegraphic, I suppose. Articles and even some nouns are omitted in the narrative, though when it comes to dialogue, they are present.
The look at life of working men in the late 1920s Birmingham was quite vivid. One aspect that irritated me but was probably accurate was the way the various men didn't seem to communicate with each other well at all. For example, one of the engineers at the iron foundry was unhappy that the draftsman he had been working with was sacked; the manager of the works knew he was unhappy so took the engineer and his wife out to dinner with his wife. He seemed to feel that made everything OK but of course it didn't address the main issue causing the engineer to be unhappy! -
Living by Henry Green
10 out of 10
The under signed has struggled with the style of this masterpiece and has even had to leave it aside for a while, thinking that maybe it would not be the best idea to try and continue reading a book that offers challenges more than pleasure, given the ‘proletarian literature’ to which this opus has been assigned by critics, difficult because it is meant to reflect a Birmingham accent, where the story takes place and hard to grasp for this reader, who congratulates himself though for continuing when it looked rather hopeless, first of all because Living is included on the list of 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read – and then how can we miss it – and then because I have had the fortune to read Loving by Henry Green
http://realini.blogspot.com/2012/09/l... and have been elated by it.
Somehow, the plot of the novel does not agree with the under signed, in that it is about ‘workers’ and having lived under a communist regime prone to an endless propaganda in which the working class, its merits, the role it has as leader in the upcoming revolution that will take over the world, beating the capitalists, conquering the rotten west and taking the world to the peak of civilization, where ‘all animals will be equal’, has had pretty much his full of these notions and quite a number of the words in Living appear to operate as triggers, in that even if the life of Bert Jones, Craigan, Lily Gates are the lives of individuals, the background, the repetition of problems from the factory create sensations of rejection in yours truly.
Lily Gates appears to be the protagonist of the narrative and she lives with her rather objectionable father – who would hit her quite hard at one point and the others appear to approve of this violence, since this is an age, in England in the 1920s, when such attitudes are more the norm than the exception to the rule, the characters are working class, less educated, never mind advanced or emancipated adults, and they feel that they ‘feed’ the young woman and the role of females in that society was to be housewives, clean, cook, keep busy about the house and play the inferior role that some academic stars dispute…Jordan Peterson is the leader of a new trend, which sees women of the past as allies of men and if they have had a hard time, it was not their men, but nature and history that made life difficult…he does not use these words, but I hope this is the significance and furthermore, that there is some truth in what he says.
Both Lily and her parent live in the house of Craigan, and though they are not related, the girl refers to the owner of the house as ‘granddad’, given the affection he shows for her – somehow outré at times, as in the episode where Mr. Gates, a despicable figure, especially towards the end, thinks that he can live on the money of Craigan, if he blackmails him and refers to a period when the old man was alone in the house with a woman that is not related to him…an aspect that would not be tolerated by the public opinion of that day – and there is another man living under the same roof, Jim Dale, the one that both Craigan and Mr. Gates would like to marry the young woman, albeit this situation would change and her father will not favor even living in the same house with Dale, once the pieces of the puzzle would have been rearranged dramatically.
With three men bringing wages and only four mouths to feed, the household is not facing financial challenges, at least until the factory where they work does not start with a short program and consequently lower wages, due to low demand, and then furthermore, once old Mr. Dupret will have be taken ill – though they even try a bizarre sort of remedy, or perhaps just a temporary improvement, an offbeat ‘treatment’, by bringing in a courtesan, or a harlot as they were also called, without effect, even if the old man had used to be more than just unfaithful, this time, the visit does not provoke any interest – and eventually he would change things from his bed at home, as in the case when it had been decided to have a man outside the toilets, to clock the time spent inside by the employees.
This had caused, if not a furor and large protests, at least very much hostility and many comments on the idea that workers are treated like animals, and they have to finish with their necessities in under seven minutes…on the other hand, some of the managers, was it Mr. Bridges too, feel that the workers are too slow and anyway, the factory will soon reach the point where it is not selling, accumulating stock and faced with hard choices – the under signed must state here that he is a junior partner in a small business and he is the one that insists on layoffs, during hard times, such as the current pandemic and cruel and heartless as this seems and probably is, he has repeatedly wondered if the about sixty or more employees are really needed…there have been times when he had visited the business, many seemed to be freelancers, operating to line their pockets and the attitude appeared to be a free for all and then calls for action, firing were also made…
Young Dupret is unhappy in his love, for the woman he falls for does not reciprocate – true, she in turn is cold shouldered by the man she prefers – and then he feels he needs to concentrate on work and thus he becomes more involved in the business, especially once his father dies, after the humiliation of having some of his prior decisions reversed by a moribund parent, and he feels that the management does not keep him informed, even when the measure of introducing a short program he was not informed, and he is also furious to find that there has been an accident, when one man could have been killed – though the version he gets is that it was not quite so serious and besides, that man is an annoyance and they would have been better with him gone for good – and nobody told him about that.
In the meantime, Lily Gates is infatuated with Bert jones – this reader has a problem with admitting love as the diagnostic, ever since reading a short story by Thomas Mann, in which it is argued that even as we hear all the time love and how the word is not able to grasp the deep, fabulous feelings that people have for each other, in that story, the counter argument is that Love means so much that we only find it in art, literature and not in real life – and it will be a challenge for them to manage to stay together and bring their affair to a fruition, given the background the lack of financial means and the hostility of her family and the granddad.
They keep hoping for a solution, such as moving to Canada, or in her plan, to find a plantation in the Far East, which would be dropped with time and they settle for Canada, which they would reach with a loan from his parents…however, there is a challenge there, for he has not had a word from them in a long time and he does not know where they have moved in Liverpool and he has hidden this fact from the woman he is supposed to marry…if that will be possible -
This was my second Henry Green. I started with Blindness, which I found intriguing and moving. This left me cold, however. It is a record of the dull lives of dull people in a grey bleak, industrial north. No one does or says anything which interested me at all. I admit a wry smile at the absurdities of the industrialist Mr Dupret:
"Mr Dupret said the Jews had brought the Continent to ridiculous state with extravagant tipping, which is why he would never go abroad. " I know dear", she said."
But really all this shows is that Mr and Mrs Dupret are as dull as everyone else. Despite money and education, they are still as intellectually incurious as the gritty proletariat. And as for the weird omission of definite articles, this struck me as being an experiment that does not work. Such a disappointment; 2 stars is probably one too many, as far as my enjoyment is concerned. -
I'm currently reading this in a three-novel collection. I've read two of Mr. Green's novels(Loving and Concluding) and have enjoyed the mental/spiritual stimulation and challenge they present. Mr. Green focuses a LOT on having his characters talk like real people. And somewhat notoriously, and especially in this book, an early effort, he deliberately eschews the use of such words as a, an, the etc. In the first two books I read this was not so noticeable, but in this one it's a bit distracting. Not only does his dialogue feature this blue collar naturalism, but the narration does as well. My comfort with this device comes and goes. It seems to create a kind of verbal staccato in my brain. I HOPE I can get used to it. So far the story is very much focused on LOTS of realistic-sounding dialogue and interactions of its working-class characters. Mr. Green(a pseudonym) had a "side" career as a manager in his family's manufacturing concern. When it comes to the lingo of his blue-collar characters, I would say that he knows what he's writing about.
Moving on, and deciding that I won't be able to finish this before I have to return it. Can't renew an inter-library loan. Oh well ... I'll just have to make another attempt down the road. Or I could buy one from Amazon. We'll see.
I need to have my wits and focus about me when I'm reading this. So far so good, but there are still times when I'm not sure who's talking to whom. It helps to read it out loud in my head. As I noticed while reading "Concluding" HG really leans on dialogue to carry the "plot" forward. The word picture he paints is vivid and intense as it digs into the lives of these very real-sounding people. Their lives very much revolve around the engineering works in Birmingham. It's their world. Their "living." It all seems very intense and dramatic from the inside, that is, as it's lived and felt by the participants. There's very little description of extraneous "stuff," just the barebones minimum background settings(if any). If this were Donna Tartt, the whole thing would be buried under piles of descriptive "storytelling" prose - ICK! -
The quirky grammatical approach is initially daunting, but is manageable. In addition to using strong dialect for speech, the novel drops many articles: “these two were in drawing-room of the London house; each had engagement book...”
The novel centers on the workers in a Birmingham iron foundry. While there is some antagonism towards the young son of the owner who interferes in the management of the firm, there is even more bitter rivalry between the workers, based on status and competition for power.
A strange, sour novel with some foreshadowing of Pinter, albeit with intermittent poetic description of the city and its inhabitants.
I preferred “Loving”, but this grew on me significantly during the reading. -
Having just finished this novel I am ambivalently torn if to praise or condemn it.
Set in the late 1920's in England it traces several of the lives of workers, management, and ownership who are involved in a iron factory. The factory figures only very loosely in this book, a means of tying otherwise an uncertain collection of people together. The protagonist, if there truely is one, is the young twenty-ish year old Lilly, the daughter and granduaghter of one of the iron workers, and her struggles with an awkward presumed first love as they contemplate leaving the city of Birmingham where the novel os set. Surrounding and interwoven with this plot are the lives of the grandfather and father, interspersed with vignettes of the factory owner, who takes control of plant operations after his father passes away, and a motley side collection of others.
What made this work a struggle for me was its writing style. Most of the plot and thematic elements are advanced solely through a dialog that was immersed in local dialect, replete with the complete loss of the letter H. This created an entirely new dictionary section of words to include 'e (he), 'ers (hers), 'ad (had), 'ere (here) and the like, that made for somewhat difficult reading. Coupled to this was the authors disdain for standard use of language, particularly the word "the". Whole sentences are devoid of this common word.
Take the paragraph on page 96, "She passed by and black man passed by her. She had in mind to turn back and look at him. But she saw chest of tea in shop window." It goes on from there, but that gives the general framework of the prose. I suppose that the choppy, apparently poor writing style helps to set the tone for the borderline poverty that the main characters face, but it was a tough slog to get through in places.
It took me near half of the novel to overcome these stylistic challenges, but once I did the subtle thematic material started to sing out; budding feminsit topics, the role of family, the frality of older age, and the comparator inexperience of youth all became important.
These were the moments this book shone and made the somewhat arduous read worthwhile. It was like chewing a overcooked piece of meat, yet one that still has the most delicious flavor - once you got past the work of mastication the savory juices were in the end worth it. -
Green's writing is so interesting to me. It seems like he just plops you down in the middle of a story, and you need to figure out where you are and what is going on. Then once you finally get really into it, the story ends! I have a hard time at first getting into his style as well as he seems to not see the need for filler words like "the", "a", etc, and its off-putting at first. His stories are interesting, though, and his style of writing makes his books like none other.
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Henry Green was a terrorist. That’s in the words of the contemporaneous French critic Jean Paulhan, describing those writers of the day who fought what they saw as the looseness, the drabness, the unsuitability of the current language (French as well as English). The critic and writer Philip Toynbee described this person thusly in a 1949 article: “The Terrorists are those writers who confront their language as a wrestler confronts his adversary, knowing that they must twist it and turn it, squeeze it into strange shapes and make it cry aloud, before they can finally bring it to the boards.”
Personally, I’m usually up for some interesting linguistic terrorism. Living was Green’s second novel, and it is a resident of the Modernist foothills around Mount Joyce. Its particular contribution to the insurgency is to blow up the definite article. Thus you get, to begin the novel:Two o’clock. Thousands came back from dinner along streets.
“What we want is go, push,” said works manager to son of Mr Dupret. “What I say to them is - let’s get on with it, let’s get the stuff out.”
Thousands came back to factories they worked in from their dinners.
Noises of lathes working began again in this factory. Hundreds went along road outside, men and girls. Some turned in to Dupret factory.
Green later in life remarked that he did not think this approach quite successful, and thought it sounded too affected. However I think it does draw your attention to the language and words in a more intense way, as your brain notes it is different from regular speech and writing and thus your attention can’t merely glide along as usual. More focus must be paid on the level of the individual sentence. The contrasting viewpoint is expressed succinctly by Toynbee again, who while in league with Green’s motivation, remarked that “the” is “both an innocent and a useful word, and to concentrate so heavy a gun against it seems a curious misdirection of this writer’s fire-power.”
There’s much more to Living than matters of language, however. The plot, as suggested by the opening, concerns working class life in 1920s industrial England, specifically Birmingham. Christopher Isherwood called it the best proletarian novel written, which caused Green to humbly quip in wonder how familiar with proletarian life Isherwood actually was.
I found it to focus more, against my expectations, on interpersonal relations and family life among its subjects, as opposed to the conditions and details of work inside the industrial factories. There is some of that, to be sure, but it’s a more universal novel in reality, dealing with the emotional and imaginative facets and challenges of human nature, which, come to think of it, is indeed appropriate for a novel with the simple title of “Living”.
With a wide cast of characters, Lily Gates is the one most central in my view, a young woman who never sets foot in a factory. Living a constrained life taking care of the men in her household, she escapes in her mind into dreams and fantasies, fed by the movies that she goes to see, ultimately grasping hopefully at the one chance she sees to make her escape a reality through a love affair with Bert Jones, a factory worker with a vague plan to emigrate to Canada. The following passage I think gives a good sense of the universal human emotion the novel deals with, in its peculiar linguistic construction:She came nearer street lamps and then stumbled a little. Looking up she saw them, light sticking out from them, and as she came nearer so night left, excitement effervescent in her she put coat straight, and felt cold. When she stepped into cone of light of this lamp, night was outside and it might not have been night-time.
She met Bert at corner.
They kissed. Her warmth and his, their bodies straining against each other, became one warmth. Walking, his arm round her enclosed her warmth and his. So it came from his veins flowing into hers, so they were joined.
They walked from cone of light into darkness and then again into lamplight, nor, so their feeling lulled them, was light or dark, only their feeling of both of them which was one warmth, infinitely greater.
I love that passage. Ultimately this novel may not be perfect but it is a great and interesting contribution to literature. -
i’ve often remarked that it would be great if all our marxist literature came from people working 12 hour shifts in meat packing facilities, but unfortunately those guys are all a bit busy. this is probably as close as we’re gonna get - aristocratic oxford dropout who opted to work in a factory.
wonderful novel about the social dynamics of these factory towns, however my only gripe is that any novelist affecting a regional dialect will always come off as slightly condescending at best, or explicitly elitist / racist at worst. as far as that goes here i think Green handles it about as well as one can, but there’s an easier option: you don’t have to affect a dialect as a novelist -
Henry Green is incredible. He makes you smell and hear the surfaces, and he makes the surfaces into depths.
He loves birds, too. Here it's the pigeons. -
Green is an original. This is a book where nothing much happens. The setting is England in the early 20th century. Labor conditions are challenging. We get a view of a mid-size engineering firm in town of Birmingham. There are two primary threads in this otherwise unstructured narrative. We have a young girl named Lily being courted by two young men, Bert and Jim Dale. Jim Dale is the more stable of the two. Bert is the more charismatic. The second theme is the transfer of power as the son of the longtime owner and manager of the engineering firm is being to assume more control as his elderly father begins to run down.
We see the issues of politics, ageism and the conflict between labor and management through varying viewpoints. The two most poignant and juxtaposed views are that of the young son Mr Dupret and a longtime worker named Craigan. The young Mr Dupret has no loyalties to the longtime members of his father's staff and views employees are interchangeable cogs. He is ruthlessly focused on the bottom line and busyness rather than quality of work and skill. Craigan is the antithesis of this work style. He is diligent and skilled but somewhat plodding at cranking out work.
The style is curious with Green mostly doing away with articles.
"Mr. Bert Jones with Mr. Herbert Tomson, who smoked cigarette, walked along street."
This provides a childlike, shorthand feel to the narration. Another curiosity is the rapid changes in scenes. In a single short chapter he may change settings 4-6 times. First we are following Bert, then we abruptly cut to the young Mr Dupret at his office, then on to Lily talking with Craigan, and over to the elder Mr Dupret talking with his nurse. This erratic jumble is challenging. It is easy to get lost.
The title is ironic. The workers live a soulless existence. When not working or thinking about work, they are drinking at the local pub and talking about work. There is no room for love, loyalty or frivolity in this harsh ecosystem. This is a curious and artistic work from a highly experimental writer. If you are looking for great story, look elsewhere. If you are interested in original voices in literature, this short book is worth a look. -
REVIEW: At first it is hard to settle into this book which is unique for its structure (lack of conjunctives and articles). I thought, oh no, this is going to take forever to read but after a bit I was used to the rhythm and the story began to take shape. It is a story set in the between war years in Birmingham industrial area of England and features the social structure of labor, middle management and owners of the steel factories. There is also the two characters; Lily and Mr Dupret both unsuccessful in their search for marriage. In addition there is the struggle of the old and young in the factories and a third theme of women's emancipation. This is the second of Green's novels that I read for the buddy read and while both books were very good they were also very different from each other.
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Living is a book written with few conjunctives and articles, making for a kind of minimalist prose style. The characters are generally lower-class workers having a tough time, and I mostly ignored the plot, but there were a few really great descriptive moments - for example, this passage describing Mr. Craigan's obsession with Miss Gates: "For now, wherever Miss Gates went there Mr. Craigen followed with his eyes. As her hand fell so his eyes dropped, when she got up his eyes rose up to her from where he sat in chair. He was not watching, it was like these pigeon, that flying in a circle always keep that house in sight, so we are imprisoned, with that kind of liberty tied down."
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I'm sorry to say that I did not enjoy this book at all. The writing style was very difficult to read and I struggled to finish the book. If it wasn't for the fact that 2 other people were relying on me to finish and write a review for The Wish List Challenge, I would not have finished the book. There wasn't any plot or discussion that could pull me into enjoying this book. I found it very boring. I'm sure there may be some others who would love to read this book and may enjoy it but this book was not for me to enjoy.
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Read it. Genuinely good to great literary novel, a 9/10, hard meat to chew at first until you digest the style, the later literary lushness a bit of a letdown and wish the ending wasn't so sad, but true to form, a perfect master, no absolute tragedy, a mild knockback, the ruination of all yet nothing dramatic and a dull uplift to follow... what can i say? I read Doting first, which is an easier novel to love, start there, but read this.
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Strange, almost experimental kind of writing not to mention dialect which makes the whole thing irritating and off-putting. A lot of people seem to love Henry Green's writing, people who are said to have good taste, but "Living" is more trouble than it's worth, in my estimation (- but then, I'm not known for my good taste, so it doesn't signify). Someone else can read this book. I'm done.
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This is a beautiful book that teaches you how to read it as you are reading; it is difficult at first, but a perfect example of why it is worthwhile to stick with something challenging and afterward you find yourself thinking in the cadence of the writing for a little while and better for it. I love it. I love Henry Green. He should be far better known than he is.
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Extremely difficult dialogue, no articles, prepositions and rarely the word "the". Ended up just finishing it as quickly as possible, unfortunate because the basis for a really interesting story is there.
