Monday, December 1, 2014

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.