| Title | : | Party Going |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 176 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1939 |
Party Going Reviews
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"Not Too Much Ado About Nothing", or "Waiting For Fog-Gone", or "Life is what happens while you are talking about something else"?
As for "Party Going", the title is slightly optimistic - mainly because the party is stuck at the train station, waiting for the dense fog to disappear, and also because the party fails to establish anything resembling a party - despite checking in to a hotel and having drinks while waiting. If Pirandello put his poor characters through the ordeal of looking for an author, the protagonists of this story seem to be left without a plot, - not worrying too much about it. All they can do is create an energy field, trying their best to establish some sort of time-space continuum for themselves.
If this were a play, it wouldn't have to worry about the Aristotelian units of time and place at all. It all unfolds in the train station, over the course of a day of waiting for a train which will carry the English upper class party to Southern France.
As for the action, you will need a looking-glass to find it.
It partly consists in an undefined illness. Aunt May is honoured with various diagnoses, reaching from "being tight" to terminal illness. In the end, she is just a bit too weak to join the party when the fog dissolves on the last pages.
As for further action, it consists in a rich young man's choice of women, leading to various bedroom scenes without inappropriate behaviour - if you do not count tiring dialogue. It remains ambiguous, and without any hope for closure in the near future:
"As he sat there he realized he did not know if she was going to come or not. And if she did come out he did not know if she would stay or when she would get it into her head to start home which she might at any time. He realized without putting it into words he did not even know if he was glad she was going to come, or sorry she was going to stay at home..."
And this only accounts for Max' feelings towards one of his three ladies, and those feelings change on the next page, adding the confused thought of "being sorry she was going to come". Let's not try to put into words what his women think. They wouldn't be able to themselves.
As for minor, incidental action, it also consists of gossip and getting your luggage ready and taking a bath and defining your role in the non-party, mixing a drink and reflecting on who put a notice into a newspaper.
That's it. Nothing much happens until the fog clears, leaving the reader to wonder what on earth the characters will do if they ever reach their destination. It also makes one curious to read Henry Green's novel
Nothing as it seems rather impossible to fill two hundred pages with anything more appropriately called "NOTHING" than what (not-)occurs in "PARTY GOING".
It is absolutely charming non-action, though, and the characters are masters of nothing-doing, so the party-going (or not-going, as the case may be) is really secondary, as far as their
Living and
Loving is concerned.
Recommended! I'm off reading NOTHING! -
and off they go, the pretty young things, the butterflies, brainless and heartless and full of their excruciatingly minuscule plans and ambitions. lacking any true purpose in their movements, any depth in their thoughts. even butterfly lives have more meaning! and to see them off: an old wounded pigeon, barely conscious, immobilized by her spinsterish neuroses and an unwise helping of whiskey. the butterflies fly about her, scarcely seeing her and certainly not understanding her ways. how could they? they are of a different species! the butterflies flutter to and fro, up and down and across, thinking that their little hothouse is the whole wide world.
a novel crammed with dialogue, true to life but only to a certain kind of life: one filled to the brim with willful passivity and micro-aggression; artifice and constant passive-aggressiveness. a book about minutia. Henry Green tracks every small movement, each feint and barb, every blinding bit of quickly shut-down anger, every muffled explosion when some sad person tries to stake a claim then dies just a wee bit on the inside as their barely conceived plots and shallow facades crumble away. but can something without life even die? this novel about various English socialites' attempt at a lark across the channel but stuck waiting for a fogbound train took many years to write, perhaps to get each and every little, little thing just right. the result should have been a chore to read, but it was a tart delight, the participants in this farce too harmless to warrant much more than sneers and snide laughter at the thought of their various trials, tribulations, and heartbreaks. off with their pretty little heads!
but no, that would simply be too cruel, despite what Green may want. his empty vessels are appalling but also amusing, sometimes even fascinating - their minds so full of vague recollections, odd repetitions, and puerile musings misunderstood as meaningful. Party Going is a carefully designed piece of work: a display of tinted glass beads disguised as jewels and colorful vapors pretending to be shapes; a perfect encapsulation of Sartre's "Hell is other people". it is, most of all, a poison pen letter - by turns giddy and melancholy, but always sharply pointed - written to the upper classes of England's yesteryear. let them eat cake, and only cake, for the rest of their so-called lives.
review for Living
here
review for Loving
here -
Party Going is a piece of human comedy but it isn’t without its tragic overtones and a fine dose of absurdity. The departure of a train was delayed due to the soupy fog so the story is a scrupulous description, full of subtle psychological observations, of the process of waiting.
The tale is told in the cinematographic way and the camera constantly tosses from character to character. There is not a personage without some whimsy or peculiarity and Henry Green is always more profound than it may seem.Max therefore was reckoned to be of importance, he was well known, he moved in circles made up of people older than himself, and there was no girl of his own age like Julia, Claire Hignam or Miss Crevy – even Evelyna Henderson although she was hardly in it — who did not feel something when they were on his arm, particularly when he was so good-looking. Again one of his attractions was that they all thought they could stop him drinking, not that he ever got drunk because he had not yet lost his head for drink, but they were all sure that if they married him they could make him into something quite wonderful, and that they could get him away from all those other women, or so many of them as were not rather friends of their own.
This is a portrait of the rich host of a party as seen with one of his admirers’ eyes.It was all the fault of these girls. It had been such fun in old days when they had just gone and no one had minded what happened. They had been there to enjoy themselves and they had been friends but if you were girls and went on a party then it seemed to him you thought only of how you were doing, of how much it looked to others you were enjoying yourself and worse than that of how much whoever might be with you could give you reasons for enjoying it. Or, in other words, you competed with each other in how well you were doing well and doing well was getting off with the rich man in the party. Whoever he might be such treatment was bad for him. Max was not what he had been. No one could have people fighting over him and stay himself. It was not Amabel’s fault, she was all right even if she did use him, it was these desperate inexperienced bitches, he thought, who never banded together but fought everyone and themselves and were like camels, they could go on for days without one sup of encouragement. Under their humps they had tanks of self-confidence so that they could cross any desert area of arid prickly pear without one compliment, or dewdrop as they called it in his family, to uphold them.
And those are thoughts of the host about his admirers.
Much time of our lives is spent in waiting and many crucial events may happen while we wait… -
Stylistically this is similar to the two other Green novels I've just read (Living and Loving). It is breathless dialogue with very little interior monologue, certainly in the modernist tradition. On the surface it is a simple story, but it took Green from 1931 to 1938 to write it.
It is set over 4 hours at a train station. A group of young wealthy socialites meet at a train station to go on holiday to the South of France (this is towards the end of the era of the Bright Young Things). A thick London fog has descended and all trains are stopped. The station begins to fill with people and close contact with the lower and middle classes isn't that attractive, so they take some rooms in the station hotel. They spend most of the novel bickering and flirting. There is also an aunt in tow and she is taken ill and put to bed.
The characters are all pretty vacuous and empty-headed and on the surface it can be seen as a satire on idle rich youth because pretty much nothing happens in the novel. At one level that is true; the characters are in their hotel rooms bickering and looking out of the Windows down on the heaving masses below.
However there is much more going on. At one point there is a description of a picture on the wall of Nero fiddling whilst Rome burns juxtaposed with Max (the main character around whom much revolves) looking out at the crowds below. All the girls seem to be interchangeable, whilst most of the men are just irritants. The girls names are even fluid (Evelyn changes to Evelyna and back). There is also an amorality about it and it does seem as though these rich young people are as amorphous and anonymous as the masses.
Then there is the strange figure who seems to move between the crowds and the group in the hotel, switching accents as he does so and appears to belong in both worlds. There is also the dead pigeon which the aunt picks up and washes before she is taken ill; she carries it wrapped in brown paper.
Green plays with space; familiar space becoming unfamiliar and threatening, members of the group losing and finding each other in the station and occupying the same space at different times before they all move above the familiar space to unfamiliar rooms.The sense of oddness is heightened by the fog with the faces of the crowd having "pale lozenged faces" (as one critic points out, very like Munch's The Scream). Movement and tension revolve around a hollow centre as the crowd become more threatening and the girls worry about being murdered in their beds by the faceless masses.
Of course you could go along with Frank Kermode and see the whole piece as being laced with the imagery of Greek mythology revolving round a Hermes figure.
Green is a very clever writer who teases the reader by hding all sorts of little messages and images. I enjoyed this; it pulls the mind in different directions; but the characters are much less sympathetic than in the other two of Green's novels I have read. It was worth the effort though. -
There's a fog upon L.A.
And my friends have lost their way
We'll be over soon they said
Now they've lost themselves instead.
Please don't be long please don't you be very long . . .
This, maybe the worst Beatles' song, kept droning in my head as I read this novel: because of the fog, because of the droning, because of a trip delayed, and because it's possibly the worst effort of an artist I like. Although it starts well:
Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
The bird was a pigeon and the feet belonged to Miss Fellowes, who fared only a little better than the pigeon. I missed the significance, even though the author kept bringing it up. That's on me, as professional athletes, who don't mean it, say. I'll try to keep it simpler.
This is a book about insufferable people acting insufferably. They are well-to-do Brits in the 1930s. No one has a job, as far as I could tell. They drink instead, and consider mating. Max, the richest by far, decides they will all go to France for three weeks. They meet at the train station, but the fog that betrayed the pigeon halts all other transport as well.
Thousands of citizens wait, body to body. To push through this crowd was like trying to get through bamboo or artichokes grown closely together or thousands of tailors' dummies stored warm on a warehouse floor. But the insufferables repair to three hotel rooms, drinks are served, and mating is considered. Everyone is put out.
There are gender issues: It was all the fault of these girls . . . it was these desperate inexperienced bitches. And, looking down at humanity from their rooms, class issues:
"My dears," she said panting, "they've broken in below, isn't it too awful?" . . . "Why, all those people outside of course," said Julia, "and they're all drunk, naturally. But what are we to do?" . . . "They won't come and kill us in our beds because we aren't in bed." . . . "Oh, but then they'll come up here and be dirty and violent" . . . "They'll probably try and kiss us or something."
As I said, insufferable. But not a very subtle portrayal. -
A novel about some Bright Young Things getting stuck at the train station, waiting for the London fog to lift, so they can get their party going. Reminded me a bit of Vile Bodies in the way it mocks and prods at the pettiness and soullessness of these dreadful spoilt rich people, in contrast to the masses huddled together on the platforms below. I actually find Henry Green quite tricky to read, i'd forgotten this, i mean it's almost as if he writes sentences in a deliberately ass-backwards way just to put you all out of whack, the modernist sod.
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This book was one of the most powerful influences on my early writing. In terms of style it is quite unique. Simply there is no other reading experience like it. Just a few pages in you know you're in an entirely new world of feeling and perception.
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These people are terrible, unredeemably terrible, like
Bret Easton Ellis terrible. Nobody likes each other or even themselves. They make up lies because they can't be bothered to remember what the truth is, and the other person isn't listening anyway. The omniscient narrator is constantly breaking in: "This wasn't true," it casually states. This is the worst group of people in a room since
And Then There Were None.
You won't be able to keep any of them straight, which is fine because they can't keep each other straight either, no one cares; like the matching dummy books they each have on their matching shelves, they're mostly empty covers. But here they are anyway:
- May Fellowes, the drunk aunt with a dead pigeon that will never be explained;
- Her bored niece Claire Hignan;
- Her drunk husband Robert Hignan;
- Her friend Evelyn(a) Henderson, who is so boring even the narrator can't be bothered to remember whether her name is Evelyn or Evelyna;
- Hapless Alex who wants to get along with everyone;
- Childlike Julia who is concerned only with her "charms," which are toys, and getting into Max's pants;
- Max, the rich and ambivalent organizer of the whole thing;
- His girlfriend Amabel, who shows up uninvited;
- Angela Crevy the new girl, badly out of her depth;
- Her young man Robin, who pops up occasionally;
- Embassy Richard, who looms unseen over most of the book like an irrelevant
Percival.
They're all stuck in this room above a train station because the trains are canceled for fog, which makes this one of the
Top Three Books About Fog
3.
Hound of the Baskervilles
2. Party Going
1.
Bleak House
It all gets a little metaphorical here, with these smug bastards looking down from their private rooms at the huddled throngs below on the train platform, everyone waiting equally helplessly for the fog to lift so they can leave, but some waiting far more comfortably than others. Not that you need the metaphor, Green isn't bashing you over the head with it like some arch
Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's perfectly all right to just have a great time hate-reading it.
Hate-reading the characters, not the book. The book is perfect. It's modernist, with an especial debt to
Gertrude Stein's repetitive character descriptions, but not particularly difficult. It's extremely funny - Julia exclaims, faced with possible contact with the lower classes, "They'll probably try and kiss us or something." There are bursts of outrageously beautiful writing. It moves easily, as though it's all a lark, but every step is perfectly calibrated. "If it wasn't so ludicrous it would be quite comic," says Alex about their situation, and the book, and life itself. -
a re-reading.
Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
reading Henry Green is like a dream, even what should be tedious, the game playing, teasing and mocking among the vapid rich: the wonderful few, Max with his three suitors at his back, beauty rising from the bath, always the crowd outside emphasising their special-ness. Green shows they don't deserve it, they are frivolous and uninvolved in society-wide issues, although they have the power to make trains wait, but on the other hand they're just humans subject to whims and embarrassments like those in the crowd on the station forecourt. When this mass is individualised the 'working class' come across cheekily, one on top of another's shoulder to reach the maids in an upstairs window, stoic, not bitter, or only individually so, as petty as those locked in too. Death is seeping everywhere like the fog, the ill aunty who people try to ignore or intermittently attend, with her wrapped up dead pigeon, the luggage like tombstones attended by mourners, the dark and the fog obscuring. And every few pages a passage that leaves you floating, touched; like Amabel, Green flirts and teases with you, wooing all the time. So it's a dream but one that makes you feel alert and receptive. His awkward phrasing, (sometimes) blunt images make you back up a bit. The writing sticks in you. It's what you want novels - fiction - to do. Well, me anyway. -
Lots of awful people trapped in a couple of hotel rooms at Victoria Station.
Bits:
"Anyone who found herself alone with Julia could not help feeling they had been left in charge."
"'I won't have you watching yourself in the mirror when you're kissing me. It proves you don't love me and anyway no nice person does that.'"
"Already the acetone she had filled this room with its smell of peardrops like a terrible desert blossom."
-
When a thick fog stops the trains in London, a group of upper class Brits, funded by their richest member, can't leave for their planned holiday in the south of France. They take refuge in the train station's adjacent hotel and continue the ongoing drawing room comedy of their lives, flirting with and and gossiping about one another, fretting about who is most likely to win rich Max's affections, and looking in on a subplot in which a not-so-elderly aunt collapses after a single drink at the bar. For upstairs/downstairs relief, Green's thwarted traveling party occasionally looks out the window at the masses of frustrated commuters pouring onto the platform below and wonders if their personal attendants are managing to keep their luggage safe from the throng's grasping hands.
Party Going is a short novel, whimsically and artfully written, that reads more like a short story. The main characters, not compelled by economic necessity to be other than they are, do not develop. They are like a group of seals tossing balls of plot from nose to nose, barking with pleasure and generally being impervious to what any outside observer might make of them.
This is an antic book full of Green's peculiarly effective dramatizations of wooing and wounding. The scenes in which Amabel decides to have a bath while waiting for the fog to lift and everyone else remains clothed and perturbed about her naked in the tub beyond the door and in which she masterfully manipulates Max (who ultimately figures out how to crawl out of her clutches) are priceless.
Putting his stylistic quirkiness to effective use, Green elides distinct interactions without any transition to highlight the sameness of this social class's features -- it's often unclear who is talking and who that who is, i.e., what's the difference between Evelyn and Miss Crevy, and which of them, if either, is married to Robert?
This is a novel that has echoes of Chekhov in it while ploughing again the English furrows first gouged by Samuel Richardson and William Makepeace Thackeray. And for whimsy let's keep the most original English stylist in mind, Laurence Sterne.
I have one question I need to answer out of personal curiosity. Why did it take Henry Green seven years to write this book? Not that it isn't worth that much time, but what was the hang up when he so obviously knew exactly what he was doing? -
For eons, I have heard the name 'Henry Green' as a mysterious figure out of London who wrote marvelous books. The titles are intriguing because they are mostly one-worded titles such as "Loving," "Living," "Concluding," and the intriguing title of them all, "Nothing." I started my Henry Green by reading "Party Going." It's a very strange book. The narration is a group of wealthy people who are waiting for a train to take them to a party. They can't go, due to dense fog, and therefore they have to wait at the station and later at a hotel near the train station. What we have is a portrait of a class of people who are separated from others, as they notice the comings and goings of people who may be considered lower than them. The book has a sense of humor, but it is also a bleakness that rings through the novel. Written in the 1930s, it may be based on the Cecil Beaton crowd at the time. Or not.
While reading the novel, I got the impression perhaps these people are dead, and they are just waiting at the hotel/station till they decide to either go to hell or heaven. On my part, I think that is a wrong reading of the text on my part. One gets a picture in the mind of being stranded in a location due to the thick and iconic fog of London. I imagine these people are well-dressed and ready to party - but alas, the party doesn't happen, in fact, as the title states, it's 'Party Going.' Not Part Arriving or The Party - it's a party that's moving, but in truth, they are not moving. They're going nowhere.
There are surreal touches such as a dead pigeon, and I thought of Luis Bunuel's later film works while reading "Party Going." But this is a book from a different time (I think...) and aesthetic. It's like a serious version of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. It's a unique novel because I feel that there is nothing else like Henry Green out there. -
Every few years I give Henry Green a try, since he was one of my mentor, W. M. Spackman's, favorites. With this book, too, I found that the prose style did not pay back its difficulty, as Spack’s does. It’s rarely delightful, and often opaque. Also important is the fact that I didn’t care if I didn’t understand. I kept moving on, not caring about anything.
This is okay if I’m simply watching a master at work; that is more than entertaining enough for me. But either I’m too dim to get what he’s doing, or he’s not a master. I feel more like words master him, and he’s not up to the task. This can be interesting in itself, but it’s not what I’m interested in. -
Party Going by Henry Green reads like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel written by James Joyce. A group of Bright Young Things, along with an elderly aunt, two nannies, two valets, a fiancée, a mysterious hanger on and a crowd of Londoners are caught in a heavy fog that has cancelled all trains. The wealthy young people are headed for a party together via the boat train to the South of France. When the trains are delayed they are able to get sitting and bedrooms in the railroad hotel, because they are rich and influential. Meanwhile the ordinary crowd packs into the station suspended between alternating poles of action representing either the decent English masses or a rioting mob.
The party group is led by Max who is so rich he will pay for everything. He is pursued by two women and hopelessly admired by his gay friend who acts as host and buffer. Max is a cipher, partly by choice, because he refuses to commit to anything. The other characters are very sharply drawn through descriptions of their actions. Green does not use interior dialogue as Joyce and Virginia Woolf did, but he writes around the characters in layers of interaction that clarifies who they might be. The reader remembers them clearly even though little is directly proven.
Green’s language is unconventional. On one hand this short book is deceptively easy to read; on the other the sentences are subtle. The transitions are smooth, but not necessarily logical as his “listening eye” moves from person to person. Don’t expect explanations or resolutions, although the fog does lift.
Reprinted by NYRB press Green’s modernist work is quite entrancing and deserves attention. I plan to read several more. -
memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone.
memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness.
oh!! the bright young things - such glittering people, exemplars of the finest (in their generation) of youth and its manifold stupidities. a characteristic i share with them, being rather young myself. but so often, i ask myself (as i burp, light a cigarette, and finish another damn evelyn waugh novel) where the pathos, the lethargy, and the deep unspoken sorrow are.
party going, then, is evidently the book for me. some young wealthy fools heading to france are corraled into a hotel because their train has been delayed due to heavy fog, ‘so thick a man cannot see his hand before his face’. as they drink and carouse away the three hours in their happy little purgatory, only vaguely aware of the unrest the unhappy working class are brewing over their delayed trains, their lives, topics of conversation, methods of happiness are brutally interrogated and dissected by green. all the while, miss may fellowes (aunt of one of these bright young things, though whose aunt, specifically, is a detail that is continually obfuscated until the very last) wastes away in mysterious sickness in an adjacent hotel room, observed by the two vulture-like nannies of her childhoos; her sickness against this youth acting as the novel’s portable memento mori.
there is passion, stolen embraces; there is gossip, invitations spurned; there is the full-relief minutiae of everyday tragedy as, isolated in a few rooms, the world of our delectably empty-headed protagonists contracts around them and snaps shut. party going is a novel that, for its comic structure, is never delightful and fey and sprightly. one feels the fog, the darkness and the emptiness of the night, one can see the pursing of the lips with the repression of a cruel comment or the stutter of an eyelid as information is withheld, can even taste the gin and cointreau being carelessly drunk, and most importantly, one feels each character growing more and more hateful toward each person that surrounds them - all the while knowing they’re far too well-bred to ever even make it known. -
This is the third Henry Green book I've read this summer (paired with
Loving which I liked and
Living which I didn't), and it is by far my favorite. The book takes place completely within a few hours at a train station and terminus hotel. A mishmash group of upper class frenemies on their way to the south of France are stranded as a fog rolls into London and shuts down trains. With the concentrated setting and dialogue-heavy writing, the short novel reads more like a play. Henry Green's mastery at developing characters is on full show in this novel - looks and their misinterpretations, the way people are addressed or ignored in a conversation, etc. - it works beautifully. There are lots of characters, and it can get confusing in the beginning, however by the end I genuinely felt I had been stranded in the train station right alongside them. Green contrasts the "living" and the "dying" beautifully, as well as the vapidity of some rich people, the difference between classes, etc. Quite a heavy punch for such a small book. -
I'm on a bad streak. I just couldn't get into this one. And I'm getting to the point where by chapter 3, if it's not showing some returns, I'm going back to Mt. To Be Read and grabbing another. Probably not a bad book. Rebecca West Loved Henry Green, after all. But even good writers can bore me out of my skull sometimes. Not for me.
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An entertaining, character based, short novel about a group of rich people stuck at a London railway station for four hours due to fog. Given money it not an issue, the group are able to hire railway hotel rooms for their comfort whilst waiting for their train to depart.
I have read two other Henry Green novels, ‘Living’ and ‘Loving’ and would recommend reading either book in preference to ‘Party Going’. -
Long before Seinfeld came along with the show about nothing there were modernist writers writing novels about nothing. The plotless novel, bereft of much in the way of story, depends instead on a focus on daily life and psychological states, and a demanding experimentalist mode of writing sure to trip up less talented authors. Thankfully Henry Green was not one of these, as evidenced by the application of that trite phrase “a writer’s writer” one can find applied to him in various articles and essays.
Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.
Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.
So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.
The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs.
Good Lord that’s good. -
Originally published on my blog
here in October 2001.
he setup for Party Going resembles that of a classic murder mystery. A group of rich young socialites is heading for the south of France for a party, but fog means that there are no trains from a station which seems to be Charing Cross. They take refuge in the station hotel and are there as isolated as they would be at the kind of remote location beloved of crime writers, despite the huge mass of people barricaded outside.
Of course, Party Going is not a murder mystery. It is a drama about the relationships between the young people (accompanied by their servants and, rather bizarrely to modern readers, in some cases by their nannies). These relationships centre around the host of the party, Max Adey, whose ideas about hospitality are based partly on the Aga Khan, whose son was a friend of Henry Yorke in real life.
Reading Party Going, I was bizarrely reminded of
Zuleika Dobson, though Green's novel lacks the fantasy elements which play so large a part in Beerbohm's. The reason for this is really that both novels portray much the same kind of upper class existence, frivolous and hardly connected to the real world. Though most of the foundations of this lifestyle were swept away by the First World War, it survived until after the second, and the eventual virtual decline of service as a career.
Party Going is given a sense of depth by the unexplained symbols created at intervals and then ignored - they include the death of a station pigeon, falling at the feet of one of the characters at the beginning of the novel, or the paintings in one of the hotel rooms including a depiction of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. The enduring image from the book is the feeling that the privileged few in the hotel are under siege from the vast crowd of ordinary people in the station outside. It is a powerful picture of the end of the old fashioned upper classes. -
I'd never read Henry Green before this, which is weird, because this is just exactly the sort of book I go nuts for. My cursory googling revealed that he was good friends with Evelyn Waugh and was published by Virginia Woolf's publishing house, which makes sense, because his style feels like it owes a lot to both of them, plus dashes of Firbank and Compton-Burnett and Isherwood and Joyce. But that makes it sound like this book is derivative, and that's not fair, because of course he was more or less contemporaneous with all of the above, so who knows who was drawing inspiration from whom?
Shit, you guys: this book was so good. I don't want to be one of those people on the internet who's like "why is nobody talking about [this thing I only just discovered]?" but for real: why is nobody talking about Henry Green? I'm scrolling through his Wikipedia page and the list of great authors who admire(d) him is long - Waugh and Woolf and Isherwood are indeed among them, plus Anthony Burgess and Rebecca West and W. H. Auden and John Updike - but apparently none of his books ever sold more than10,000 copies. Ouch. I guess I can see, from this book, how his work might feel kind of inaccessible or esoteric. Is esoteric the right word? I don't know. (Apparently an earlier, more experimental novel is written entirely without articles. How does that even work?) But Party Going is fun and camp and sexy and bitchy in the best tradition of this very specific genre of literature, and I highly recommend you check it out. -
Most importantly, Green mercifully dropped the "no articles/conjunctions" thing from Living, so points for that.
Structurally, this is a magnificent work. Compressed to just a few hours, he moves seamlessly from one character to another, seemingly always aware of where each character is at each time (reminding me somewhat of Joyce's The Dead) and how each action that each character engages in affects every other character. His eye for detail in this regard is superlative. I also admired just how brave his presentation was; as though he were trying to strip away everything the average reader would expect from a novel: Chapters? Descriptions? Plot? Explicit narration? Fuck you. He's basically the uber-Chekhov, presenting events (such as they are) with absolutely no commentary whatsoever.
As a result, I spent most of my time with this novel alternating between marveling at the complexity of Green's art and being bored by its execution. It was as though he dedicated all of his thought to the presentation and none to the prose, dialogue, characters, and events. I could see what he was going for, but the delivery either left me somewhat cold or (towards the end) bored me senseless. -
Expectations were big for this book so I can't tell if I'm to blame for the disappointment. Couldn't tell if I really got a feel for Green's writing throughout the book or i had a feel for it and just wasn't vibing- regarldess, I wish I liked this book more.
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no
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The embodiment of all kinds of alienation. Recommend. -
a game of who's who
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I kept wanting to read it allegorically - the eve of World War II, the fog rolling in and trapping citizens - but Green wrote this between the wars (1931-38). So maybe World War I and a group of Brits heading to a big party? - but no, that wasn't a party it was a dance. It never seemed to pay off. I liked the sense of pressure or impending doom (life) and the oddness of the language, and was somewhat entertained by the frivolity and frippery, but was also frustrated by the dialogue and I yearned for the prose passages.
Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in. Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women's long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers' glances. A hundred cold suns switched on above found out these coils where, before the night joined in, they had been smudges and looking up at two of them above was like she was looking down at you from under long strands hanging down from her forehead only that light was cold and these curls tore at your lungs. (page 127 NYRB Classics edition)
Not till I retyped this did I truly realize how strange that last sentence is. And then I read the Amit Chaudhuri intro and Tim Parks's 2000 NYRoB essay both of whom said don't try to read allegorically but notice how strange and wonderful this is. And Parks helped a lot to see what Green may have been trying to do. -
Just when it feels like he takes a solid symbolist path, Green turns the story into a comedy of manners only to bring up the dead pigeon or fill in the next two page with a graveyard simile of a crowded station (not to mention an argument with Death and all those people essentially waiting for their departure). At first I thought that Green is just using well-known symbols and twisting them to fit the purpose of narrative, creating dream-like sequences. But it’s the way he keeps going back to them, which gives the story an uneasy feeling of all-pervading mortality, mundane and poetic at once.
I’ve just looked up a few more things on Green and Pack My Bag came right after this, an autobiography he started working on thinking that he wouldn’t survive the coming war. I suppose Party Going can be seen as a metaphorical prologue to it.
Wonderful writing and social inequality matters aside, Purgatory feels like the ultimate metaphor for travelling: having left point A, the characters are stuck not being able to reach the divine point B (read South of France) -
My full review of Party Going is up now on
Keeping Up With The Penguins.
I think we all know that if you take a handful of rich people and put them in a confined space, you’re going to get some good drama. It’s a formula that’s worked for reality TV for years, and before that, Henry Green used it as the premise for his 1939 novel Party Going. If you didn’t enjoy Mrs Dalloway, then this is not the book for you. It’s more readable, yes, and less intensely modernist, but at the end of the day, it’s still a short book that takes a long time to read, about a bunch of privileged white people lolling about and preparing for a party.
