A novel (1945)
I intend to real-time review some novels of Henry Green in the tradition of my other marathon reviews of 20th Century authors, starting with this one.
My previous reviews of literary authors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/23/some-of-my-serial-reviews-indexed/
My review will appear in the comment stream below…
My earlier review of Henry Green’s THE LULL:
“He went so soft he might have been a ghost without a head.”
Above and below stairs in an Irish country mansion still complete with its roof, when Eire significantly did not need wartime blackout curtains. A head butler lies dying, as the footman dead-heads a daffodil, and speaks of the butler’s red and black notebooks (Memo or Nemo books?); and we meantime learning of the motley servants, and what they think of each other, with innuendo or not, and why the lady of the house always calls each footman she employs by the name Arthur. I am already entranced by this obliquely parallel Bowenesque or pre-William Trevor.
This is pure joy of clipped richness of style. But with dark undercurrents following the death of the butler as well as who should now get tea in bed and delivered by whom, plus sexual innuendo, sapphic sights and thoughts of boys in skirts as taken off by fairies. The characters are manifold but I think I already have a handle on most of them, even those who are due to visit the mansion as I like to think of this house in wartime Eire, whose lack of enemy would not have necessarily been mine. (Strangely the text I happen to be reading on paper has many of the dots missing from the top of the lower case i’s.)
Not forgetting the pink blotting paper!
The famous Rhys Hughes inspired me to start this marathon with Henry Green, who just posted these words in response to my previous entry but one above:
”The barrage of characters definitely seems confusing at first, to the conscious mind, but we sort of learn who they are by some subconscious osmosis and then we find ourselves differentiating them without even trying. It’s an unusual effect and Green is a master of it.”
I have so far read up to this elbow-triggery = “Kate began to stroke up and down the inside of Edith’s arm from the hollow of her elbow to the wrist. Edith lay still with closed eyes. The room was dark as long weed in the lake.”
What is shown by the monetary tips recorded in the dead butler’s notebooks? Why do peacocks scream? And can a mansion also be a castle?
There are so many fine details observed here, they teem into the brain to be sorted along with the many characters.
Read up to: “…and two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass.”
The rooms of this mansion / castle is at least half-closed up we learn and we follow our noses as well as the ghostly music in this text, plus more on the peacocks and doves supposedly kissing beak within beak, a broken weathervane, and a mischievous boy called Albert who has a confusing namesake, I think, that doesn’t help me or the peacocks! What other secrets are found in the butler’s notebooks and what has been unleashed by his death? Charley Raunce the footman now being a character to reach through this novel’s piques and veils towards notorious stardom in literature?
Read up to: “…and steadied herself round a turn of the Grand Staircase by holding the black hand of a life-sized negro boy of cast iron in a great red turban and in gold-painted clothes.”
The segueing of scenes, more peacocks, IRA men and Jerries vis à vis this ‘nootral’ country, a missing sapphire cluster, bed-hoppings, hair-grooming, comings and goings to London, and much else. I don’t think I have yet divulged here the dead butler’s name as ELdon, with Raunce filling his boots in more ways than one in this maze of a mansion, that is in fact a half-shut Castle.
SKULL-PIER GALLERY
”Miss Evelyn announced they’d decided that they’d go play in the Skull-pier Gallery.
‘All right if you want,’ Edith replied, ‘but not through the old premises or we’ll dirty ’em wet as we are,’ for this Gallery was built on to the far portion of the Castle beyond the part that was shut up. So they ran along a path round by the back past the dovecote and any number of doors set in the Castle’s long high walls pierced with tall Gothic windows. Running they flashed along like in the reflection of a river on a grey day, and smashed through white puddles which spurted.
Squat under this great Gothic pile lay the complete copy of a Greek temple roofed, windowed and with two green bronze doors for entrance. The children dashed through an iron turnstile, which clicked into another darker daylight, into a vast hall lit by rain and dark skylights and which was filled with marble bronze and plaster statuary in rows.
‘What shall we play?’ the Misses Evelyn and Moira cried. Their sharp voices echoed, echoed. The place was damp. Albert kept his mackintosh on. Edith took off her scarf. She was brilliant, she glowed as she rang her curls like bells without a note.
‘Blind man’s buff,’ she said. ‘Oh let’s,’ the girls cried. It was plain this was what they had expected.
‘You won’t have no difficulty telling it’s me,’ Albert brought out as if he held a grievance, ‘it’s me,’ the walls repeated.”
Read up to Agatha’s words: “Not like me with no more than a door opening into the sink and a bit of a cupboard in all this mansion.”
So, yes, a mansion as well as a castle and a house! And with the lady of the mansion away in England and Raunce writing to his mother also in England and hoping she has her Anderson shelter to protect her from bombs, while, here in the air of ‘nootral’ Eire, I am still mystified by the red and black notebooks the dead butler, Eldon, left behind and into which his replacement as butler, Raunce, sees more than I can see in their pages, while Raunce also playing the main chance with the women servants and with the children as they play blind man’s buff – and why does he hang up a dead peacock full of maggots, as I see he does in the very next page of this novel? The mind boggles while being entranced, too!
Read up to: “‘He’s kept his neck wrapped up the last two weeks,’ Miss Burch announced, ‘he makes out the glands are enlarged. But it’s his whole head has swelled.’”
More about Raunce’s neck, making me think the missing dots on some of the i’s in this text are complicit, plus more shenanigans with the emerald ring that was ‘lost’ and a supposed insurance man with supposed ‘lipth’, a sort of marriage proposal, talk of eloping to London and its bombs and further talk of a nude woman who “sat up in bed with her fronts bobblin’ at him like a pair of geese…”, and much more.
Read up to: “There was a sort of lull.”
Read up to “The evenings were fast lengthening.”
My mind goes half-crazy with the mischievous shenanigans going on here, the plot’s humanly conniving and constructively confusing events that give a whole flavour of fallibilities as to the times this novel manages to depict historically, politically and literarily, along with absurdist surprises that are too numerous to mention. Bit by bit my brain suffers a kleptomania to steal from it. Even the acronym of an insurance company with the IRA!
“I’ll make everything you want of me now so much more than you ever dreamed that you’ll be quit imaginin’ for the rest of your life.”
The ‘love’ scene between Raunce and Edith to the haunting sounds of “peacockth” is a landmark of literature, I shouldn’t wonder. And the ongoing repercussions of emerald ringgate, Edith’s “greenish” body (from peacock eggs?), her ‘love’ with Kate as well as with Raunce, the former the genuine sort, I guess, and which of the two Alberts is “running naked on the steeply sloping roofs high up”? There is so much here that tells you so much, even about this ‘priest-ridden’ land and the interface of mistress and servants, and why have we not heard again about the bandaged neck and swelling head? – it’s just the headless i’s, I guess, and Raunce saying: “This would occur just when I’m not quite up to the mark.” Not forgetting the servants’ orgy of lisps.
END of ‘Loving’
This review will be continuing in due course with ‘Blindness’.