The Butler (Green)

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The Butler (Original title: Loving ) is a novel first published in 1945 by the British writer Henry Green . The first edition appeared in the Hogarth Press , directed by Leonard Woolf and John Lehmann .

The novel depicts life on an Irish country estate during the Second World War. Almost all residents of the country estate are British and must fear both a possible assassination attempt by the IRA and an invasion of Ireland by the Third Reich. The most important figures are the servants of the country estate. After the death of the old butler , the household slips into an increasingly anarchic mismanagement, in which each of them tries to gain advantages in the power vacuum that has developed. Green tells this in the form of an ironic fairy tale - the novel begins and ends with the traditional fairy tale formulas “ Once upon a day ” and “They married and lived happily ever after ” ( ... they were married and lived happily ever after ).

The novel is considered a 20th century classic. The British newspaper The Guardian included him in the list of the 1000 must-read novels in 2009, while the Time news magazine named him one of the top 100 English-language novels between 1923 and 2005 and 2015, and 82 international literary critics and scholars voted him one of them 100 Greatest British Novels .

In German-speaking countries, the novel was published in 1964 by Suhrkamp Verlag under the title Lieben in a translation by Friedrich Burschell . In 1988 a new translation by Walter Schürenberg appeared under the title Der Butler .

action

Widowed Briton Mrs. Tennant manages Kinalty Castle, an 18th century building in Ireland, during the war-related absence of her son Jack. Compared to England , which is threatened by bombs, life on the country estate in neutral Ireland is quiet and without any serious restrictions. However, an invasion of Ireland by the Third Reich is one of the possible threats. At the same time, Mrs. Tennant describes Ireland itself as an enemy country: the IRA has carried out arson attacks on numerous British-inhabited mansions and the increasing tax burden on mansions like Kinalty Castle could soon force the family to give up the manor and return to England. Green indicates this complex situation subtly in the choice of the family name: "Tennant" means lessee.

The novel begins with the dying of the old butler Eldon, dragging on for days, who is only looked after in his room by the chief maid Agatha Burch. She seems to be the only one really weighing the situation up. Otherwise, the death of the butler for life at Kinalty Castle just means less supervision: a maid steals eggs, servants and kitchen boy help themselves to the whiskey in the pantry, to which only the butler has the key. The butler died two days later. While the body is still in his room, Charley Raunce, the first servant, indicates to Mrs. Tennant that he is considering quitting because he does not want to hire a new butler. Mrs. Tennant then promotes him to the vacancy. In his new role, Raunce is now the superior of all servants - how fragile his position is is indicated by the name with which his employers call him. Like all servants at Kinalty Castle, he was previously called Arthur by his employers; as a butler, he would be entitled to be called Raunce. Mrs. Tennant uses this name only a few times, however, then she will call him Arthur again by the end of the novel.

The promotion of Raunce leads to increasing tension among the other servants - including an old nanny, a cook, a kitchen boy, three maids, the head gardener Michael and the "man for everything" Paddy O'Conor. Paddy, whose Irish dialect is barely understandable for the others, and the gardener Michael are the only Irish among the servants and therefore suspiciously eyed outsiders. The cook describes them as semi-wild animals, who cannot tell a plucked chicken from a peacock. The employers are also condescending to their Irish servants: "Do you really still believe that the boys are kidnapped by fairies?" Asks Mrs. Tennant's daughter-in-law Violet her mother-in-law.

Violet has an affair with Captain Davenport, the owner of the neighboring country estate, which Mrs. Tennant does not know. On the other hand, some of the servants know about the affair. The maid Edith noticed that Violet Tennant had returned from a visit to Captain Davenport's excavation with incomplete underwear. A little later one morning she finds Davenport in Violet's bed. The late butler's carefully kept list of tips, which Charley Raunce secretly took, shows large amounts that the butler received from the captain, which suggests that butler Eldon also knew about the affair and with this knowledge he wore money from the captain . The elderly nanny is ill, so the rest of the servants have more work to do: They not only have to look after Violet and Jack Tenannt's two little daughters, Miss Evelyn and Miss Moira, but also Albert, a nine-year-old boy from a working-class London neighborhood . Albert's origins remain ambiguous - he is either the cook's nephew or her illegitimate son. As a favor, the Tennants allowed the cook to take the boy from bomb-threatened London to the safety of Kinalty for a few weeks.

Without the authority of Jack Tennant and the old butler, life at Kinalty Castle is slowly sliding into increasingly anarchic mismanagement. Between lavish meals and trying to cheat his employers out of money through false bookkeeping, the 40-year-old Raunce flirts with the half-age maid Edith. Kate, the other maid, is flirting with Paddy, and Violet Tennant is secretly investigating her affair with Captain Davenport. Mrs. Tennant loses a precious sapphire ring. As soon as he arrives, young Albert turns the neck of one of the numerous peacocks and teaches the young Tennant daughters vulgar swearwords.

Jack Tennant receives leave from the front, but he will not spend it at Kinalty Castle. His wife and mother travel from Ireland to England to be close to him. Captain Davenport will follow them. Left to their own, the servants go first relatively harmless pleasures by: The cook gets drunk, the maids dancing in the ballroom, and play with the kitchen boy blind fold . Raunce and Edith make themselves comfortable in front of the fireplace in the library. Raunce's talk of a possible attack by the IRA worries those who stayed on Kinalty with increasing concern. Edith finds the lost sapphire ring and then hides it again because she fears that she might otherwise be suspected of stealing it from her employer. However, in a moment of weakness, she reveals where the ring is to one of the children. This is lost again and in the subsequent panic and the attempts to cover everything up, the representative of the insurance company arrives at Kinalty, where the ring is insured. The whole thing escalates to a farce when the reports of the various servants about the loss of the ring contradict one another.

Raunce and Edith decide to get married and the kitchen boy announces, whether in a fit of jealousy or out of anger because he is suspected of stealing the ring, that he will leave the country estate and volunteer for military service. When Mrs. Tennant and her daughter-in-law return, Mrs. Tennant receives her ring back, but is upset because she cannot find out why it has disappeared. For them it symbolizes the loss of their control over the country estate. Her daughter-in-law Violet feels increasingly guilty about their affair, but ultimately cannot choose between her husband and Captain Davenport. The elderly nanny is dying, the drunken cook has a tantrum and Raunce is increasingly plagued by self-doubt. He is concerned that his fraudulent bookkeeping will be discovered, and he is no less concerned that the pretty, impulsive Edith is only half his age. At the end of the novel, however, the two run away to England together and get married there.

Background and literary significance

Henry Green worked on this novel after the publication of Caught in 1943, a previously untranslated novel in which Green processed his experience as a member of a fire service fighting fires in London after bombing raids. In December 1943 he had already completed a draft of 25,000 words. Green revised the novel in the summer of 1944 and handed the manuscript to his publisher, Hogarth Press, in October. John Lehmann , who ran the publishing house together with Leonard Woolf , was convinced from the start that Green had written a masterpiece.

Green later said he liked the idea of ​​the novel while he was talking to a member of his fire team who had previously worked as a second servant on a country estate. He reported that one day the butler of this country estate confessed the following to him:

"I enjoy nothing more [...] than lying in bed on Sunday mornings with the windows open, listening to the church bells and eating buttered toast with fingers that smell of cunt."

From the point of view of Green's biographer Jeremy Treglown, this anecdote expresses the attitude of negligence, opportunism and irresponsibility that also characterizes the protagonists of the novel.

Henry Green is considered a master of subtle allusion and casual storytelling. The novel shows him at the height of this ability and is also characterized by his special language style and unusual punctuation. The relative security of Ireland compared to England, which was suffering from the German air raids , is indicated by the note that there is no blackout in Ireland (“For this was in Eire where there is no blackout”) . The threat posed by the IRA is made clear to the reader by the brief sentence that the blue living room with its furnishings from the 18th century is the most famous in Ireland that has yet to be set on fire (“... the most celebrated eighteenth-century folly in Eire that had still to be burned down ”) . For Sebastian Faulks , this mastery can already be seen in the first sentence of the novel.

"Once upon a day an old butler called Eldon lay dying in his room attended by the head housemaid, Miss Agatha Burch."

"Once upon a time there was an old butler named Eldon who lay dying in his room, looked after by the head maid, Miss Agatha Burch."

Faulks sees a specific cadence here, which clearly distinguishes Henry Green from his literarily equally important contemporary and national comrades Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh . The sentence is solemn and lyrical, banal and funny at the same time. The introductory “ Once upon a day” stands for a certain longing, but also for the traditional beginning of a fairytale story that recounts events of which the reader cannot know whether they actually happened . The next part of the sentence “an old butler” is a direct narrative information, which however has a slightly cheerful undertone - in the English narrative tradition, old butlers are more likely to be protagonists of farces in the style of P. G. Wodehouse . However, the man is dying and he is looked after by a housemaid, of whom Green, unlike the butler, not only gives his first name, but also the marital status with the word "Miss", while the first name of the butler is kept secret. According to Faulks, withholding narrative information that is given later is another characteristic of Green's narrative style that captivates the reader. The dying butler keeps asking for a Ellen, but the maid, who later grieves for him, is called Agatha.

Trivia

Birr Castle is considered a model for the fictional Kinalty Castle in Green's tale
  • Green came from a well-to-do family that employed numerous servants. He spent parts of his childhood on the large country estate of Petworth House , the seat of the maternal family. Even after the First World War, male guests were expected there to appear for dinner in tails and white bow ties. Green himself employed between four and five servants in the 1930s.
  • In one of his first narrative vignettes, which Green probably wrote during the school holidays spent at Petworth House, he fantasizes what would happen if a giant suddenly appeared on the property. In this fantasy, his uncle Charles, 3rd Baron of Leconfield, sends the butler Wickham to meet the giant first. The giant throws the butler into the lake, which Charles comments with the brief praise “Wickham was a good servant”. It soon turns out, however, that Wickham had the cellar key with him and that one of the family's last escape routes is blocked from the giant. Thereupon Charles' piety turns into the annoyed remark that despite all instructions it is impossible to teach servants to keep keys on accessible hooks.
  • In the same year that The Butler was published in the UK, it also came out Brideshead Revisited , the author of which Evelyn Waugh Green had known well from their time in Oxford. Brideshead Revisited also has a large mansion as one of the main locations.
  • In Ireland it is often pointed out that Birr Castle was the model for Kinalty Castle. Even if Green took over some of the architectural elements from Birr Castle, the fictional Kinalty Castle is also inspired by other mansions, according to Treglown.

expenditure

literature

  • Jeremy Treglown: Romancing - The Life and Work of Henry Green . Random House, New York 2000, ISBN 0-679-43303-1
  • John Sutherland: How to be well read: A Guide to 500 great novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities. Entry to Loving . Random House Books, London 2014, ISBN 9780099552963

Single receipts

  1. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed June 9, 2016.
  2. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed June 9, 2016
  3. ↑ Treglown: Romancing - The Life and Work of Henry Green . P. 151
  4. ↑ Treglown: Romancing - The Life and Work of Henry Green . S. 154. The original quote is: What I enjoy most, Favell, is to lie in bed on a Sunday morning with the windows open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.
  5. ↑ Treglown: Romancing - The Life and Work of Henry Green . P. 154.
  6. ↑ Sutherland: How to be well read: A Guide to 500 great novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities. Entry to Loving .
  7. ^ Lehmann: Henry Vincent Yorke in John Sutherland (Ed.): Literary Lives - Intimate Biographies of the Famous by the Famous . P. 367.
  8. ↑ Sebastian Faulks: Foreword to the ebook edition of the Vintage publishing house, ISBN 9781409087847 .
  9. ↑ Treglown: Romancing. The Life and Work of Henry Green . P. 103.
  10. ↑ Treglown: Romancing. The Life and Work of Henry Green . P. 8.
  11. ↑ Treglown: Romancing. The Life and Work of Henry Green . P. 157.