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
Saturdady 18 March 2017
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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: