Going Out, Staying In
Henry Green's Party Going
It might be the setup for an Agatha Christie novel, or a sadistic Buñuel film. An assortment of young and fashionable people are meeting at a London train station, looking forward to a trip to France where their dizzyingly rich friend Max will be hosting them in grand style. But a thick and impenetrable fog has descended on London, throwing the city into chaos and stopping all the trains. The station is teeming with people with nowhere to go, and in an attempt to forestall a riot the station masters lock the gates: no one can get in or out. The fashionable group retreats to the station hotel. One of them, a fragile young beauty, has premonitions of doom and thinks she hears someone screaming, while an older woman, there only to see her niece off, suddenly descends into strange hallucinations. From their hotel room windows they can look down at the exhausted, restless crowds below.
This setup to Henry Green’s 1939 novel Party Going is rich with dramatic possibility, and from how I’ve described it above, you might easily be misled into thinking it a biting class satire with an undercurrent of horror. But Amit Chaudhuri’s introduction in the NYRB edition gives us a hint of what is to come. Green is partly remembered today for having been a strong influence and inspiration for John Updike, and Chaudhuri reminds us that what appealed to him was his ear for banality: Updike wrote that Green was a “saint of the mundane.”
This gives us a clue to the book. For a conventional storyteller, a group of people trapped anxiously together while chaos unfolds around them is a stage set, a box waiting to be sprung open, an unlit firecracker. But for a writer interested in the mundane, in the way we disguise tumultuous thoughts with banal conversation, in all the ways we shift inside when nothing is happening? The stasis is the point, the end in itself.
The characters ask each other repetitive questions. At first, while they’re on the station concourse, they ask about logistics: Who has the tickets? Where’s our luggage? Should we register it, or wait until our whole party is here? Will Max make it here on time? For many pages they are occupied simply with assembling. Once they’re in the hotel, there are darker questions interspersed with the banal: Did Claire’s aunt have a stroke or was she just drunk? Can we have tea sent up? Is Max with Julia? Are they going to riot downstairs? If the old woman is sick does that mean Claire won’t come? If the trains don’t run should we go home or stay here until morning? There are never answers to these questions; each character generally says what they think the others want to hear. In the meantime, in a prose style that floats like a stream, Green dips in and out of their feelings, and we see that behind their testy civility their minds overflow with love, desire, loathing, fear, and rage.
Party Going is also a novel interested in describing a particular kind of wealth. The characters all orbit around Max, their host and an eligible bachelor, richer than any of them and difficult to pin down. A storyteller wanting to fascinate might describe Max as capricious, mercurial, charismatic; but in Green’s hands he is quite a different creature. His wealth enables him to drift through life in comfort, arrangements made for him, conflicts smoothed over. When a social situation starts to get uncomfortable, he simply disappears. In conversation he lies repeatedly, taking whatever position is convenient for him in that moment, and you get the impression that for him there is no past to be accountable for, no future to worry about — his lies don’t come from cunning, but from his inability to imagine anything outside of the warm and comfortable present in which he lives. The other characters are by turns fascinated and repulsed by him. They wonder what he truly wants, what he’s thinking, what he’s planning to do. But Green makes it clear that he doesn’t really think at all: “When he thought, he was conscious only of uneasy feelings and he only knew that he had been what he did not even call thinking when his feelings hurt him.”
Green’s prose runs in a stream reminiscent of earlier modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but unlike their writing it skims across the surface of things, hinting at depth and darkness beneath the water but never diving in to look for the bottom. It is full of many beautiful passages, and in the grimy, grubby station setting his descriptions reach out for nature: lilypads, fronds, blossoms, rivers and mountains. In this intoxicating passage, called out in this New Yorker article as perhaps the most beautiful thing Green ever wrote, we see Max in his supreme bliss:
She lay on his shoulder in this ugly room, folded up with almost imperceptible breathing like seagulls settled on the water cock over gentle waves. Looking at her head and body, richer far than her rare fur coat, holding as he did to these skins which enfolded what ruled him, her arms and shoulders, everything, looking down on her face which ever since he had first seen it had been his library, his gallery, his palace, and his wooded fields he began at last to feel content and almost that he owned her.
Lying in his arms, her long eyelashes down along her cheeks, her hair tumbled and waved, her hands drifted to rest like white doves drowned on peat water, he marvelled again he should ever dream of leaving her who seemed to him then his reason for living as he made himself breathe with her breathing as he always did when she was in his arms to try and be more with her.
It was so luxurious he nodded, perhaps it was also what she put on her hair, very likely it may have been her sleep reaching out over him, but anyway he felt so right he slipped into it too and dropped off on those outspread wings into her sleep with his, like two soft evenings meeting.
Ultimately, I found Party Going to be a frustrating read, despite its evocative beauty. Green, as the story ripples from room to room and consciousness to consciousness, hints at great gifts he might give the reader but steadfastly refuses to unwrap them. One sequence in particular I found baffling when I encountered it. Max’s friend Alex, unlike him in that he’s an ironical and anxious overthinker, has been whipped into an emotional frenzy by frustrations both practical and sexual. He notices that one of the young women, who had previously been flirting with him, loses interest in him as soon as Max isn’t in the room:
He found that when Max was not there to look she lost interest and would hardly bother to answer him when he complained of how he felt. And when people paid no attention to his feelings this made him talk of these the more, so much so it was like a man whose hand trembles trying to pour red wine into a jug, he misses it and that wine falling on the table, shows red no more but is like water.
Pouring himself out as he did then, and faster because he was missing and more wildly he was so upset her jug was dry he got to such a pitch he stopped, humiliated, and wondered if she had even noticed, if he had splashed some in. She gave no sign so that when Claire and Evelyn came back he began at once on them but this time he went further, he emptied all he had at once, and then more than he really had in mind.
After pages and pages of dialogue like has the tea been sent up? Do you think we should check on Claire’s aunt again? we are made to understand that Alex has had an outburst. But what does he say, how does he unburden himself? Is he railing against Max, the women, the trains that aren’t running? Green doesn’t tell us the contents of his rant. We know only that he has “poured himself out”, as he says. And this can only be deliberate: we see that Max’s most impassioned speech is ultimately his least consequential.
In the end, Party Going is a bit like Waiting For Godot, with an inverted ending and without that play’s abysses. I found it to be a bit too much like Max himself — drifting in an eternal present, shying away from all tension, refusing the kind of bracing self-awareness that is always present in Virginia Woolf’s writing, though it too has a dreamy cast. Thinking on that marvelously suggestive premise, with its black fog and locked gates, I can’t help but wish there was a version of the novel where all the firecrackers go off.
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