An Obscure Form of Magic

I’ve just read Party Going (1939), Henry Green’s comic and melancholic masterpiece, for the third or fourth time, and I’m still not sure how to convey its complex flavour. It’s a fantastically busy and exuberant novel, in which nothing really happens. (The major events include: an old lady picking up a dead pigeon and subsequently feeling ill; a beautiful young woman having a bath; a servant getting a kiss from a stranger.) It’s at once so beautifully written that I want to quote the whole thing, and so eccentrically stylized that it isn’t easy to find a quotable line. (Green was intolerant of standard English grammar and syntax; witness for example his take-’em-or-leave-’em approach to articles, as in the novel’s bizarre opening sentence: ‘Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.’) It’s an effervescent comedy of manners, set almost exclusively among members of the English upper class – and yet its most remarkable quality is an anguished sense of human suffering.

The set-up is straightforward enough. A group of empty-headed young socialites – the sort of people you might encounter in a novel by Nancy Mitford or Evelyn Waugh – are stranded in a London railway station when thick fog delays the train taking them on holiday to France. Made uncomfortable by the growing crowd, they seek refuge in the station hotel, where they pass the time by flirting, gossiping, drinking too much, keeping secrets from one another, and trying to make each other jealous. Max Adey, the party’s excessively rich and handsome host, reckons his time would be most rewardingly spent in seducing one of his guests, the highly strung Miss Julia Wray. Perhaps that’s why he hasn’t invited his on-off girlfriend Amabel, a famous beauty, but his plans are complicated when she turns up anyway. The trysts and tiffs between these three form the most substantial of the novel’s many tangled threads, but the other members of the party are all given their own moments in the spotlight too. Green observes them with an almost anthropological eye. One character has ‘an expression so bland, so magnificently untouched and calm she might never have been more than amused and as though nothing had ever been more than tiresome’. Two young women compliment each other’s clothes, ‘but it was as though two old men were swapping jokes, they did not listen to each other they were so anxious to explain’. We’re left in little doubt that Green himself stands firmly on the side of the servants – left outside the hotel to guard their employers’ luggage against the crowd – and of the taxi driver whom one of the party fails to pay. But his intentions go much deeper than mere social criticism, and his empathy extends even to the silliest of his well-heeled protagonists. Through some obscure form of magic, Green manages to present his characters as simultaneously ridiculous and poignant, revealing their most inane pretensions to be the products of their deepest fears. They care so much about money because they sense that it’s the only thing that distinguishes them from the crowd, and also from one another; they talk so much guff about trivial subjects because they’re terrified of silence. None of them seems to understand either themselves or one another very well, and it’s one of Green’s most cunning tactics that he often gives the impression of not understanding them very well himself. The result, as I’m not the first to point out, is that the reader feels almost protective of them – as if we know them better even than their creator does. In a talk for BBC radio, broadcast in 1950, Green expressed reservations about conventional techniques for depicting character, from authorial summary to interior monologue:

Do we know, in life, what other people are really like? I very much doubt it. We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?

These aren’t questions that seem to trouble most novelists – or indeed most readers of novels. Showing a character in the round and even peeping inside their heads: without such contrivances, modern fiction would scarcely exist. Green’s misgivings set him apart from Joyce and Proust – two of the writers he most admired – and place him in the company of Beckett and the nouveau roman. Except that, unlike Beckett, Green was actually interested in people. He was committed to observing the deep mystery of human beings, and to rendering social interactions in all their muddle and ambiguity. It’s this mixture of avant-garde aesthetics and emotional realism that makes his novels unlike any others I know. The characters in Party Going have a strange lack of substance – they flicker in and out of focus – but such is the force of their agitation and uncertainty that they become somehow more vivid, more real, than the solid, scrutable creations of more conventional writers. Here is Julia, reflecting on Max’s claim that he was delayed getting to the station because he had to meet his lawyer:

Julia knew he was a liar, it was one of those things one had to put up with when one was with him. But it did seem to her unfair that he should go and spoil it all now that he was here. She had forgotten how much she resented his not turning up in her pleasure at seeing him, and now he was telling them this fairy tale about his lawyer. People were cruel. But perhaps he had wanted to make his will. Anything might happen to any one of them, everything was so going wrong. As she looked about her, at the other travellers, she could get no comfort out of what she saw. Perhaps he was not lying, which was frightening enough, but if he was then why was he lying?

In just a few lines, Julia goes from knowing that Max is lying, to doubting that he is, to doubting her very safety – ‘anything might happen to any one of them’ – and this vertiginous descent into confusion and fear isn’t prompted by anything external, but simply by the inexorable current of her own personality. We’re able to know her, in her heightened, precarious state, the way we know people in life – that is, empirically, provisionally – rather than in the absolute way we tend to know characters in fiction. It means that Green can move us in ways that simply aren’t available to most of his peers. The fluidity of Party Going makes for a very unusual reading experience. Against the static backdrop of the station hotel, the shifting moods and thoughts of the characters are what carry the story along. Their dialogue meanders back and forth as they lose track of what they’re saying, abandoning their own positions and taking up one another’s without ever seeming to notice. Even the narrative voice trickles between different perspectives, sometimes in the course of a single sentence, or flows into a heightened register all of its own. This is something that any creative writing teacher would advise against, and it’s certainly a bit disorientating at first, but it allows Green to achieve some truly magnificent effects. Towards the end of the novel, following a tentative reconciliation, Max and Amabel drift off to sleep:

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 had put on her hair, very likely it may have been her sleep reaching 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.

Max’s intimation of bliss with Amabel doesn’t last long – as soon as he wakes, five minutes later, he starts thinking of Julia again – but in the intensity with which he communicates such gusts of feeling, Green more than justifies the idiosyncrasies of his technique. Perhaps the greatest paradox of Party Going is that such a mannered, arty, frankly experimental book – one that places such sustained emphasis on the vagueness and shallowness of its characters – should in the end seem so natural, so rich, and so astonishingly intimate.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 67 © Edmund Gordon 2020