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 show more 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. show less

A party of rich young men and women waits in a London station hotel for the fog to lift. They were leaving for France, but the boat train has been cancelled. Upstairs in the hotel they wait for news. Downstairs in the station thirty thousand people wait, trapped inside by the fog, to catch their trains home from work.

Max Adey has organised the continental trip. He is enormously rich and is paying for everyone. He has tried to escape his lover, Amabel, in order to pursue Julia, and has invited Angela as a backup. Evelyn, Alex, Claire and Claire's husband Robert, have been invited as a smokescreen. At least, that's my interpretation, because the reasons are as many as the characters. Miss Fellowes, Claire's aunt, is ill and being looked show more after by two retired nannies who came to see off their ex-charges. Claire wants to go to France and tries to persuade herself that she has no responsibility for her aunt. Amabel turns up, to Julia's disgust. Everyone is talking about Embassy Richard, who has made an enormous social faux pas. It's all strange, opaque, almost certainly allegorical, and very funny. show less

Take a book that the Guardian rated #63 of the 100 best English novels; add ecstatic praise from John Updike, and you would expect a first rate read. In the case of Party Going by Henry Green, not so much.

A group of bright, young, and spoiled English men and women are on their way to a house party in the South of France by train when a thick fog rolls in from the Channel. All trains are delayed, apparently indefinitely. Their host, Max, arranges for them to wait in a railway-owned hotel immediately across from the station. The station itself begins to get exceedingly crowded as suburban Londoners seek to go home, but no trains depart. One of the girls says, “It’s terrifying. I didn’t know there were so many people in the show more world.” Certainly not in the world of the rich party-goers, who are protected from the growing masses as the hotel locks its doors, leaving the party-goers’ luggage and porters in the station.

The party-goers are a spoiled lot with hardly an attractive character among them. For example the aunt of one of the girls (Claire) had come to the station to wish her off, but she (the aunt) has the indecency to become ill, thus jeopardizing Claire’s prospect of a good time. Claire says:

“It’s rather touching that’s why she came to see us off really it’s her only link. No, but it’s not touching actually because she goes and gets ill. Oh, Evelyn, it’s so unfair, isn’t it?”

Their stay at the hotel is comfortable, but boring, for the reader as well as for the party goers. The book is only 144 pages long, but the first 100 pages seem like 500. The thick London fog mirrors the impenetrability of the writing in the beginning. It is hard to tell one character from another. In addition, the author has the annoying habit of referring to three of the female characters either as by her first name or by “Miss [last name], ” but almost never by both names so that the reader can get a feel for who is who.

The final third of the book gets a bit more interesting as Max has to juggle two different girlfriends (one of whom was not actually invited). Max and the two girlfriends are effectively individuated. Some of the other characters are so similar that the author could have substituted one for another in numerous places and not affected the flow of the action. I had to read this book as part of a Symposium I will be attending. At first, I was ready to toss the book and rely on the Cliff Notes, but the book started to grow on me. I even began to appreciate the writer’s skill, which is considerable. Nonetheless, I hardly think it deserves to be called great, let alone one of the top 100 English novels.

(JAB) show less

As the book starts, there is a fog so dense that it coats and hides everything. A bird drops down dead at the feet of an elderly lady- Miss Fellowes, who picks it up as she enters the station. After picking up this bird, she takes it to a public toilet and washes it before wrapping it in brown paper. Welcome to Henry Green’s world of satire, make yourself comfortable because there’s no service out. Party Going tells the tale of a group of wealthy people, hoping to travel by train to some swanky house party, but the fog being no respecter of wealth has descended and shut down all the train services, they take rooms at the adjacent railway hotel & this is where all the action takes place. Although action, may not be the right word, as show more what we have is a rolling scene of individuals of varying wealth attempting to communicate with each other. Although Communicate may not be the right word, as most of the time is spent in deciphering the meaning from the barbs and sweet talk that passes for small talk. I mentioned on twitter my problems, not with the book which I liked, but with the characters of said book which I didn’t and they were described to me, as “The bright young things” a bit like the top football players of this age. I had a problem with this statement, as footballers may be wealthy now, but most didn’t start out that way, yet these characters have known no other world than the one they inhabit, in which their own position is marked on a scale from who has the most and then in degrees down to where they see themselves, this also marks how they relate to the others about them, with all deferring to Max (Top Dog).

Communication is the activity of conveying information, deriving from the Latin word “Communis” meaning to share, this requires a sender, a message and an intended recipient. Effective communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality, and this process is complete once the receiver has understood the message of the sender. Feedback is critical to effective communication between parties. Now although the characters here share “an area of communicative commonality” they are all of a similar social standing, share the same codes of behaviour etc., yet there is something failing, they have the same coding apparatus, but the wrong keys.

Which takes me to my heading, Empty Vessels, this is the old adage “that empty vessels make the most noise” and by this I mean that although a lot is said, these are characters that abhor a silence, nothing is really said, it’s as though you have three or four people occupying a room and shouting into the void, then waiting for the echo. Whilst researching for this post I found this quote, which I found made sense

“Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries except Samuel Beckett, Green exploits the trivia and minutiae of life. His characters react to life in terms of basic needs, the most basic of which is how to relieve boredom or dispel loneliness. The need for conversation, the need to verbalize, is of course attached to one's desire to avoid tedium; and Green's characters frequently talk not for the sake of communicating particular ideas but rather to occupy themselves…”*

This I felt held the key to understanding this book, that these “bright young things” had no aims beyond a need to stave off anything that could hinder sensation, no matter how vague, that they were running between anything that left them alone, with only their selves for company and now finding themselves trapped by a dense fog, could do no more than bleet their helplessness to an otherwise occupied & indifferent individual.
I read this book because of Stu from Winstonsdad, as part of his Henry Green week, I would not have come across it had he not held this writer up above the crowd of names we see every time a new or new to us writer surfaces. So thanks Stu for introducing me to this writer whose book I enjoyed, if not the bright young things within it.

*Frederick R. Karl, "Normality Defined: The Novels of Henry Green," in his A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/empty-vesselsparty-goinghenry-green... show less

A fantastic novel! As with other modernist masterpieces such as "Ulysses" and "Under the Volcano", "To the Lighthouse" and "Gravity's Rainbow", you have to submit to the style until you are moving in its rhythm - but that is in fact the essence of modernism, which is why so many of the great works in the tradition gather negative reviews at Internet sites (and probably would have a hard time getting published today). Don't let the naysayers dissuade you. Henry Green is a master and this is one of his greatest achievements.

Not an easy read just because of the way it unfolds and how it remains obscure. However unreal the tone can seem it nevertheless exposes us to a remorseless reality. Nevertheless, a classic in its own time.

This was another novel of Green's that I could not get into. I found the setting, characters, themes, writing, and effect to be sorely lacking and generally placid and uninteresting. I was not hooked and reading this felt more like a chore than anything else. Overall, I was not impressed and do not recommend this novel.

Barely 2 stars, yet again.