Showing posts with label Henry Green. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Book Review 063 / Party Going by Henry Green

On ‘Party Going’

by Henry Green

1939

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 63 / Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

Thomas J. Sojka
Boston University
1 June 2021

In Henry Green’s Party Going (1939), a fog descends upon London, stopping traffic and trains and leaving travellers bound for home or holidays stranded. A travelling party en route to the south of France seeks refuge in a nearby hotel, while many people are left standing outside, full of uncertainty of what to do next. The novel is one of plans interrupted, of inertia stalled, and of anxieties about the impossibility of mobility. Similarly, the world shuddered to a halt in early 2020 with the onset of a pandemic. But, unlike the fog in the novel, which lifts after four or five hours allowing for normal life to resume and for travellers to continue their journeys, the pandemic that drove us indoors and disrupted our travel has been here for a year and a half. In contrast to other party fiction from the interwar years, where the parties never seem to end—one only needs to think of the oft-quoted litany of parties[1] from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930)—the party in Party Going seems to never start. The frustration with this sense of being trapped and with the inability to do anything to change our circumstances makes Green’s novel a choice read for our present moment. The end, similarly, gives us some hope for the months ahead—the fog does lift, and everyone, suddenly, is able to resume their daily lives.

Rereading / Henry Green’s Party Going / An eccentric portrait of the idle rich

REREADING

Henry Green’s Party Going: an eccentric portrait of the idle rich

Amit Chaudhuri revisits a masterful tale of revellers stranded at a hotel, which recalls Joyce and Woolf but resembles neither

The 100 best novels / No 63 / Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

Amith Chaudhuri

Saturdady 18 March 2017

I

n the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Oxford, I bought a volume of three novels by an author I hadn’t heard of, Henry Green. The Green people were talking about then had an e at the end of his surname, and his first name was Graham. He was almost an exact contemporary of Henry’s: born in 1904, a year before Green, he lived much longer. Both belonged to well-to-do families, but Green was particularly affluent. His father was an industrialist. I’d tried reading Graham Greene, but had never made much headway. Then Henry Green came along, and Graham swiftly became, for me, the “other Greene”, and then not even that. About Henry Green, however, there’s an irreducible, longstanding excitement among the few who have read him.

I must have bought the three-novel volume of Loving, Living, Party Going because John Updike had, in his introduction to the volume, not only given Green centrality as a precursor, but called him a “saint of the mundane”. The religious analogy was excessive, but what had made me admire Updike in the first place was the way in which he’d deliberately made room for the mundane, for the banality that fills our lives and makes them truly interesting. And yet I found Green to be a different kind of writer, with almost none of the chronicler’s impulse that from time to time directed Updike’s decade-long projects, and with no abiding interest in realism, despite his extraordinary eye and ear and his gift for capturing character. Replying to a question put to him by Terry Southern for the Paris Review in 1958 – “You’ve described your novels as ‘nonrepresentational’. I wonder if you’d mind defining that term?” – Green said:

Henry Green

The Novelist of Human Unknowability

Henry Green’s greatness as a writer came from his conviction that we can never really know what anyone is thinking or feeling.

The 100 best novels / No 63 / Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

By Leo obson
October 10, 2016

One night in the spring of 1955, the actress Elaine Dundy was leaving a party in New York when a sharp-nosed, floppy-haired young man came toward her and, without context or introduction, asked, “Do you know Henry Green?” Dundy replied that she did. The young man told her his name—she instantly forgot it. Dundy told him to contact her, but he didn’t call. Instead, he started appearing in the lobby of the Buckingham Hotel, in the West Fifties, where Dundy was staying. On one occasion, he had been waiting around so long that, by the time Dundy showed up, the tulips he was holding had gone droopy. Dundy apologized: could they speak another time? The young man returned the next day, and so did the tulips. But Dundy was running late. When, finally, he caught her at a good time, she invited him up to her room, and he helped her prepare for the arrival of guests while explaining that his name was Terry Southern, that he was a writer from Alvarado, Texas, and that he had waited a very long time to find someone who, on being presented with the question he had posed at their first meeting, was able to answer yes.

The 100 best novels / No 63 / Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 63

Party Going

by Henry Green (1939)

Set on the eve of war, this neglected modernist masterpiece centres on a group of bright young revellers delayed by fog

Henry Green’s Party Going / An eccentric portrait of the idle rich

Henry Green / The Novelist of Human Unknowability

Robert McCrum
Monday 1 December 2014

enry Green is the pseudonym of Henry Yorke, an Oxford friend of Evelyn Waugh (No 60 in this series). Precociously gifted, Green/Yorke wrote an avant-garde novel, Blindness, while still at Eton, but never enjoyed anything close to Waugh’s success.

His first mature fiction, Living, was a modernist tour de force, partly inspired by his experience on the shop-floor of his family’s Midlands bottle factory. There’s an irony in the success of this debut. Yorke was, as he put it in his memoir, Pack My Bag, “born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905”. Growing up in the inter-war years, he was part of a highly gifted generation that included Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell.

Party Going, published on the brink of the second world war, reflects that experience. It’s the polar opposite of Living, but quite as dazzling in the poetry of its prose, a masterpiece of literary impressionism. I came to read it, as a respite from my first job in the book world, sitting against the radiator, on the floor of the Hogarth Press library in William IV Street, in the West End.

Henry Green

Party Going offers the last word on that “low, dishonest decade”, the 1930s. A group of bright young things – Max, Amabel, Angela, Julia, Evelyn and Claire – are on their way to a house party in France, by train. But fog is rolling in from the Channel. England is cut off, and the railway paralysed; their train has been delayed. So the party – quintessentially shallow, vapid and spoilt – holes up in the station hotel to wait for the fog to lift, a brilliant fictional premise.

Outside, in the metropolitan gloom, people come and go like spectres. “It’s terrifying,” says one of the girls, in a line that could have come from Waugh, “I didn’t know there were so many people in the world.”

A shadowy old woman, Miss Fellowes, retrieves a dead pigeon from the street, and washes it in a strange and disturbing act of piety.

In another brilliant scene that’s cinematic in its intensity, Amabel takes a bath in the hotel. Meanwhile, she and Max struggle with their feelings, at once flirting with, and then avoiding, intimacy.

The critic VS Pritchett wrote that Green’s special subject is “the injury done to certain English minds by the main, conventional emphases of English life”. There, for me, is where the fascination of Party Going lies. Green paints an unforgettable portrait of a doomed, amoral world whose characters, trapped in the fog, are somehow waltzing blithely towards oblivion. The weather outside the hotel represents the menacing blur of the future. Sebastian Faulks wittily describes aspects of Party Going as if “a scene from Private Lives has been revised by Samuel Beckett”.

Once war comes, it will be time for end-game, not carousel. Strikingly, Green’s later fiction becomes increasingly difficult and austere with Loving, a tale of life in an Anglo-Irish country house, his outstanding late achievement.

A note on the text

Party Going, Henry Green’s second novel, followed his acclaimed modernist debut, Living, and marked the high point of his literary career. Party Going was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s imprint, the Hogarth Press, in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. Within a few years it had acquired a distinguished retinue of literary admirers – including Auden, Isherwood and Eudora Welty – but never quite moved beyond a cult audience. Thereafter, encroaching deafness and a reclusive temperament cut him off from the world, and slowly stifled his creativity. After the age of 47, he never wrote again. Indeed, his most entertaining contribution to literary life was the hilarious interview he gave to Terry Southern for an early edition of the Paris Review.

In the 1970s, Party Going, Living and Loving were collected into a single paperback volume published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Books. The experiment did not prosper. Nevertheless, the same combination was repeated first by Penguin in 1993, and again by Vintage (Random House) in 2005, with similarly dismal results. Despite the passionate advocacy of John Updike in America, and Sebastian Faulks in Britain, among many critics, Henry Green remains what the Paris Review described as “the writer’s writer’s writer”. I’m probably not alone in thinking he deserves a better posterity.