Party Going by Henry Green

Looking down then on thousands of Smiths, thousands of Alberts, hundreds of Marys, woven tight as any office carpet or, more elegantly made, the holy Kaaba soon to set out for Mecca, with some kind of design made out of bookstalls and kiosks seen from above and through one part of that crowd having turned towards those who were singing, thus lightening the dark mass with their pale lozenged faces; observing how this design moved and was alive where in few lanes or areas people swayed forward or back like a pattern writhing; coughing as fog caught their two throats or perhaps it was smoke from those below who had put on cigarettes or pipes, because tobacco smoke was coming up in drifts; leaning out then, so secure, from their window up above and left by their argument on terms of companionship unalloyed, Julia and Max could not but feel infinitely remote, although at the same time Julia could not fail to be remotely excited at themselves.

The first sentence of Henry Green's Party Going is such a classic Greenism: "Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead at her feet." Of all the sentences in the books assembled together in this collection (which also contains Loving and Living), that one might be the most characteristic of Green: the tension between obscurity and simplicity, the chopped articles mimicking the immediacy of experience, the careful positioning of past and present (notice we never see the bird being disturbed, only in the state of having been disturbed).

The bird-watcher here is May Fellowes, a middle-aged woman here to see off her niece Evelyn as she heads off on a train trip with her friends to the south of France. Miss Fellowes picks up the dead bird, washes it in the ladies' room, and wraps it neatly in brown paper, a kind of memorial rite that looks strange from the outside, and does to us too until the carefully controlled Green lets Miss Fellowes account for her feelings later on in the text. The bird's death establishes, too, the novel's central problem: the dense fog isn't letting any trains leave, and so the traveling party of Evelyn and a half-dozen of her friends is stuck in the station until something changes. All of the novel's action takes place in the station or the hotel above it, where the party is sequestered away from the regular commuters.

Party Going is a strange novel. It seems like it's going to be a "bottle episode," where a set of people are thrown together in a room where their conflicts will come to kindling. But as a matter of fact, all the characters in Party Going are almost never in the room together. Max Adey, the wealthy but capricious "leader" of the group pays for three rooms: one for the group, one for Miss Fellowes to lie down in--she takes suddenly ill in what they speculate is a pigeon-related illness--and one for him to escape to, with or without one of the women he's hooking up with.

The others come in and out of these various rooms, going to search for each other or check on luggage or go down to the hotel bar: the selfish Alex, the group outsider Angela, her jealous fiance Robin, the tensely married Claire and Robert, and helpless Julia, desperately in love with Max. Julia's hoping that the trip will cement her relationship with Max, but she hasn't counted on the unexpected arrival of Amabel, the stunningly beautiful and sort of malicious social climber who considers Max her right.

One of the interesting tensions I've noticed in Green's writing is this: Party Going is a novel written on a very human scale, and the dramas are all quite small, and entirely interior: this person wants to be liked by the group, this person wants to be loved by Max, this person wants to make her husband jealous, etc., etc. But at the same time, Green's famous for obscuring the motivations behind dialogue; he hardly ever explains the tone of voice someone uses or the face they make when they say something. It's supposed to mirror the actual experience of conversation, where nothing is ever clear, but when the entire drama of the novel centers on what people are thinking and feeling, it makes the whole thing a frustrating shell game.

The characters in Party Going are like the negative image of the characters in Loving, a novel about the Irish servants of a British castle, and Living, a novel about ironworkers in the north of England. In those novels, people struggle to make their lives meaningful within the structures that capital has created for them, but the characters in Party Going are the idle rich. When they escape to the hotel, a great steel barrier is set down in front of the door to keep the ordinary rabble from entering. The hotel is a cloistered space where the "party" can literally look down on the "thousands of Smiths" below and worry about the possibility that they'll break down the door. Almost without exception, the characters are awful: though Miss Fellowes goes out of her way to administer last rites to a pigeon, her niece and the others treat her sudden illness as a bother that might keep them from boarding the train when it finally runs. When they're not engaged in petty emotional games with each other, the whole group can't stop talking about a gossipy scandal about a socialite who may or may not have written a letter to the newspaper saying he wasn't invited to an embassy party. (This story was mostly inscrutable to me, honestly.)

Which means that, though finely wrought and impressively controlled, there's little to love in Party Going. It's a novel about bad people, and I found myself mostly hoping the train would finally depart, only to roll over all of their shins. As an expression of the way that money and class poison people's brains, it works tremendously well. But I'd rather spend time with the servants and the ironworkers.