Living
by Henry Green
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LIVING, as an early novel, marks the beginning of Henry Green's career as a writer who made his name by exploring class distinctions through the medium of love. Set in an iron foundry in Birmingham, LIVING grittily and entertainingly contrasts the lives of the workers and the ownersTags
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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 show more 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:
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:
I love that passage. Ultimately this novel may not be perfect but it is a great and interesting contribution to literature. show less
Personally, I’m usually up for some interesting linguistic terrorism. Living was Green’s second novel, and it is a resident of the show more 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. show less
Right at he start you're thrown into a conversation on the factory floor between people you've never met, whose names you're coming across for the first time. After a chapter or so, people start to emerge from the crowd: Lily Gates, who keeps house for her father Joe; her father's friend Mr Craigan who is in charge; the boarder, Jim Dale, who wants to marry Lily; Bert Jones, a foundry worker whom Lily hopes will take her away from Birmingham and her dreary future. The factory workers and their political machinations emerge: Mr Bridges, who runs the foundry and listens to no one; Tarver, who wants Bridges' job; Tupe, the snivelling boss's man who runs to Bridges with tales about his fellow-workers. Then there's young Dupret, son of the show more factory owner, who's ordered around by his father, ignored by Bridges, and patronised by his father's assistant. If his father, who is old and ill, is to die, Dupret will be in charge and able to exert his authority over all the old men who he believes are holding him back.
It took a while to get into the book because I was very confused, but after a while everything started to make sense. It's about the working and home lives of the foundry workers, their bleak, poverty stricken futures, their lack of choice and control, their dependence on the good will of their managers and the foundry owner.
I've started Living a few times, and am pleased to have read it. It was well worth the effort. show less
It took a while to get into the book because I was very confused, but after a while everything started to make sense. It's about the working and home lives of the foundry workers, their bleak, poverty stricken futures, their lack of choice and control, their dependence on the good will of their managers and the foundry owner.
I've started Living a few times, and am pleased to have read it. It was well worth the effort. show less
Living at first seemed a novel of contrasts and opposites. In reality, it is a carefully worked story of parallels between two disparate groups: factory workers, and the factory ownership and management. Most of the book is in dialogue form rather than narrative. The reader hears the story directly from the characters involved.
Like most conversations at home and at work, the characters speak mainly of the everyday often completely mundane details of their lives. In Birmingham, site of the iron foundry, a worker sat down to dinner:
Mrs Eames put cold new potato into her mouth.
"Ain't they good?" said she.
"They are" he said.
"Better'n what you could get up the road or if you took a tram up into town."
"There's none like your own."
So for a show more time they ate supper.
Meanwhile, in London, the owner's wife was having dinner with her son:
They went in to dinner. Mrs Dupret and her son. Butler and footman brought soup to them.
"James" said Mrs Dupret after searching "I left my handkerchief upstairs" and footman went to get this.
It is not all back and forth however, [Living] was written in 1929, a time of crisis for many, workers and owners alike. The two worlds necessarily overlap. Here are the workers caught up in attempts by management to modernize production methods and shop floor procedures. Here are the workers concerned about jobs, injury and old age. Dupret, the owner, is ill and elderly, and the workers, while grumbling about the familiar present, fear for the future when Dupret's son takes over. Craigan, the best moulder, actually has a small house where he lets out rooms to other workers. Lily Gates, the daughter of one of them, runs the household in the absence of any other female. It was a time of upheaval for women too. Lily would have like to go out to work in a factory or shop, but the men were adamant that she should stay at home. They felt they were perfectly capable of providing for her.
Green skilfully blends the two worlds. Making a living can be living itself, but living itself is a job.
As I read this, I thought it seemed an unusual novel for the times. Admittedly, it's not a period I've read much, but it occurred to me that most of what I had read was by female writers favoured by publishers like Virago and Persephone. These writers offer a completely different, though equally valid take on the time, albeit more skewed to the middle and upper classes. Workers are few and far between in their novels. Perhaps it was time to read more men from this time and place. Who were they?
Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood and Graham Greene were contemporaries. Henry Green was not the man of the people his writing suggested. He was actually Henry Vincent Yorke, onetime Chair of the British Chemical Plant Manufacturers' Association, and managing director of the family owned H Pontifex and Sons Ltd. He had attended Oxford where his tutor was[C S Lewis, but dropped out to work in his father's factory after two years, living with workingmen.
Green had published Blindness, his first novel in 1926. It, and the 1929 Living, were well received by the critics, among them Evelyn Waugh. However, he didn't publish another novel until 1939, by which time Waugh himself had eclipsed Green in the public eye. He was a "writer's writer", not a bestselling author, possibly because his writing was difficult to pigeonhole, and he himself was aloof. Today, however, his works are enjoying a resurgence, with eight of them currently published or forthcoming from NYRB, and another two from New Directions. show less
Like most conversations at home and at work, the characters speak mainly of the everyday often completely mundane details of their lives. In Birmingham, site of the iron foundry, a worker sat down to dinner:
Mrs Eames put cold new potato into her mouth.
"Ain't they good?" said she.
"They are" he said.
"Better'n what you could get up the road or if you took a tram up into town."
"There's none like your own."
So for a show more time they ate supper.
Meanwhile, in London, the owner's wife was having dinner with her son:
They went in to dinner. Mrs Dupret and her son. Butler and footman brought soup to them.
"James" said Mrs Dupret after searching "I left my handkerchief upstairs" and footman went to get this.
It is not all back and forth however, [Living] was written in 1929, a time of crisis for many, workers and owners alike. The two worlds necessarily overlap. Here are the workers caught up in attempts by management to modernize production methods and shop floor procedures. Here are the workers concerned about jobs, injury and old age. Dupret, the owner, is ill and elderly, and the workers, while grumbling about the familiar present, fear for the future when Dupret's son takes over. Craigan, the best moulder, actually has a small house where he lets out rooms to other workers. Lily Gates, the daughter of one of them, runs the household in the absence of any other female. It was a time of upheaval for women too. Lily would have like to go out to work in a factory or shop, but the men were adamant that she should stay at home. They felt they were perfectly capable of providing for her.
Green skilfully blends the two worlds. Making a living can be living itself, but living itself is a job.
As I read this, I thought it seemed an unusual novel for the times. Admittedly, it's not a period I've read much, but it occurred to me that most of what I had read was by female writers favoured by publishers like Virago and Persephone. These writers offer a completely different, though equally valid take on the time, albeit more skewed to the middle and upper classes. Workers are few and far between in their novels. Perhaps it was time to read more men from this time and place. Who were they?
Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood and Graham Greene were contemporaries. Henry Green was not the man of the people his writing suggested. He was actually Henry Vincent Yorke, onetime Chair of the British Chemical Plant Manufacturers' Association, and managing director of the family owned H Pontifex and Sons Ltd. He had attended Oxford where his tutor was[C S Lewis, but dropped out to work in his father's factory after two years, living with workingmen.
Green had published Blindness, his first novel in 1926. It, and the 1929 Living, were well received by the critics, among them Evelyn Waugh. However, he didn't publish another novel until 1939, by which time Waugh himself had eclipsed Green in the public eye. He was a "writer's writer", not a bestselling author, possibly because his writing was difficult to pigeonhole, and he himself was aloof. Today, however, his works are enjoying a resurgence, with eight of them currently published or forthcoming from NYRB, and another two from New Directions. show less
Living by Henry Green is a 1929 novel that explores factory life in 1920s Birmingham. The author was only 24 when this novel was published. He had dropped out of Oxford University and worked in an iron foundry in order to experience a working class life. His resulting novel is one of social observation that brings the lives of workers, their families and their managers into sharp focus.
The author’s writing style makes this a reading experience as right from the first page you are set down amidst a group of Birmingham factory workers and their lives, jobs and conversations carry on as though you have been with them for some time. As you become immersed in their lives, you quickly figure out who everyone is and you start to focus on show more the story line. All through the book, there are characters that just come along, say their piece and then leave again, but you are able to build a picture of this world, one of mind-numbing labour, poor pay, and few expectations of betterment. These people are simply staying alive not enjoying much variety or pleasure.
Some of the characters made quite an impression on me. Lily Gates who wants to wed Bert Jones, a factory worker. Lily would like to get a job as well but her guardian is against women working. She and Bert dream of emigrating and starting a new life somewhere else. There are some characters from the upper class as well, in particular, the Dupret family who own the factory, and we learn of the constraints upon them and their way of life as well.
I started off confused and not really liking this book, but after 50 pages or so, I was totally drawn into this world of class boundaries and under-appreciated workers. Living is a rather short novel, but it is broad in scope, and as the reader becomes adjusted to author’s unusual writing style they can then appreciate the narrative. show less
The author’s writing style makes this a reading experience as right from the first page you are set down amidst a group of Birmingham factory workers and their lives, jobs and conversations carry on as though you have been with them for some time. As you become immersed in their lives, you quickly figure out who everyone is and you start to focus on show more the story line. All through the book, there are characters that just come along, say their piece and then leave again, but you are able to build a picture of this world, one of mind-numbing labour, poor pay, and few expectations of betterment. These people are simply staying alive not enjoying much variety or pleasure.
Some of the characters made quite an impression on me. Lily Gates who wants to wed Bert Jones, a factory worker. Lily would like to get a job as well but her guardian is against women working. She and Bert dream of emigrating and starting a new life somewhere else. There are some characters from the upper class as well, in particular, the Dupret family who own the factory, and we learn of the constraints upon them and their way of life as well.
I started off confused and not really liking this book, but after 50 pages or so, I was totally drawn into this world of class boundaries and under-appreciated workers. Living is a rather short novel, but it is broad in scope, and as the reader becomes adjusted to author’s unusual writing style they can then appreciate the narrative. show less
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 show more good they were also very different from each other. show less
This book was hard to get into. While I started to enjoy the plot halfway, or maybe a little more, through the book- the journey was essentially over by then. Overall, a mired and distracted sort of book that meanders and (I feel) loses itself in the process of being read.
Not recommended- barely 2 stars.
Not recommended- barely 2 stars.
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 show more 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! show less
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 show more 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! show less
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Author Information
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Writing under the pseudonym Henry Green, Henry Vincent Yorke kept his life as a wealthy industrialist separate from his literary persona. Although he had friends who were authors, he did not travel in literary circles and refused to be photographed, to protect his anonymity. Yorke was born in 1905 in Gloucestershire, England, and worked as a show more laborer before becoming managing director of a food engineering firm. From the publication of his first book Blindness (1926), which was begun when he was 17 years old and a student at Eton, he was admired for his unfailing sense of dialogue and characterization for all classes of British life. Green's last novel, Nothing, was published in 1950. Although he is still relatively unknown in the United States, he is recognized by authors such as John Updike and W. H. Auden as a masterful storyteller and one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century. He died in 1973 (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Living
- Original title
- Living
- Original publication date
- 1929
- Dedication
- for Dig
"As these birds would go where so where would this child go?" - First words
- There is really no appropriate way to introduce a novel by Henry Green. (Introduction)
Bridesley, Birmingham. Two o'clock. Thousands came back from dinner along streets. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And of course, according to the terms of Green's argument, Sarraute is still right, even though he is dead. (Introduction)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"You're too young, that's too old for you" she said. - Blurbers
- Lehmann, Rosamond; Treglown, Jeremy; Allen, Walter; Updike, John
- Original language
- English
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 265
- Popularity
- 121,524
- Reviews
- 7
- Rating
- (3.45)
- Languages
- English, German, Italian, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 12
- ASINs
- 8
