upstairs / downstairs
Well, you know how we tell the kids not to rely on wikipedia when they write their papers? Maybe, following our advice, they’re missing out a bit. I was just looking for a summary of the plot of Henry Green’s 1945 novel Loving for this insanely encyclopedic lecture that I’m giving tomorrow and found the following, which is the full entry for the novel on that site:
Loving is a 1945 novel by British writer Henry Green. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Loving tells the story of the servants in Kinalty Castle, an upper-class Irish household during World War II.
In his 1975 memoir Here at The New Yorker, Brendan Gill relates that during a luncheon at the Ritz Hotel, New Yorker editor William Shawn asked Green what had led him to undertake the writing of Loving. Green replied, “I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest time of his life. The butler replied, ‘Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.'”
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it’s quite hard for me to imagine a better answer, or a better moment to recall fondly.
Dave
March 24, 2009 at 1:33 am
This is in Green’s Paris Review interview, and Loving‘s a fine book, worth reading. Party Going, also. You might want to look at Kermode’s exegesis in The Genesis of Secrecy.
Jonathan
March 24, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Ha, Dave! You should have been an Irish butler!
Jonathan,
Yeah I really like the Green I’ve read. I’ll be reading some more in the near future. Thanks for the Kermode rec – I didn’t know he took Green up there.
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March 24, 2009 at 4:46 pm