Party Going

Henry Green's Party Going (1939) is the third of his novels I've read this spring and summer but it was published in the middle of the three. The first I read was Loving (1945), which was actually the last one written and published, and the second, Living (1929), which was also Green's second published novel was the first one published of these three. I also read his mid-life memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), which Green wrote just prior to the outbreak of World War II. What is remarkable about these books, although each is distinct if not actually unique, is that they all reflect Green's characteristic perspective on English class structure. Although Living concentrates attention on the working class characters who are at the center of the novel's action, Green also paints rather detailed portraits of the factory owners and the administrators who manage the foundry around which the plot revolves. Similarly, Loving, while it portrays life in an Irish country house during the Second World War, focuses the reader's attention on the complications created by the servants living below stairs; the lovers are a newly appointed butler and one of the housemaids.

Party Going seems at first a departure, in that Green concentrates his attention on the apparently aimless amusements of a group of well to do young friends who have gathered in a London train station prior to boarding for a holiday excursion to the continent. The famous London fog has delayed their departure and forced them to take refuge in the station's hotel, where one of their party, Max, who fancies himself the ideal host, has taken several rooms so his friends can wait in relative comfort and security away from the mobs of working class Londoners who are likewise stranded by the fog. But as with both Living and Loving, Party Going offers wonderful portraits of servants and working class characters who are caught up in the drama of the wealthy young party goers. The thinly veiled contempt of valets and maids for their young employers serves to emphasize the surreal distance between the classes and their understanding of their different fates and circumstances.

Each of these books, including Pack My Bag, provides a different perspective on the disparate values of the English classes. But in some respects Party Going is the harshest of the three novels. The unrelenting foolishness of the wealthy young people at the center of the story, their separation not only from the lower classes, but from any firm grasp on the reality of their situation, is Green's sharpest satire on the apparently pointless existence of the English upper class. The most chilling aspect of the novel, however, is the ineffectual attempts these young people make to connect to one another in any meaningful way. Even those who are married, or are contemplating marriage, seem ill suited to any recognizable form of adult existence. And yet somehow, despite the irony and satire, Green remains somewhat sympathetic, or at least understanding, of his characters' fundamental weaknesses and insecurities.

Green, who was himself a child of privilege but who made his mark as a successful businessman as well as a novelist, appears to have been amused as well as somewhat perplexed by the frivolity of those who benefited from Britain's moribund class system. There is something much more humane in the way Green dissects English culture than in Waugh's sometimes surreal silliness. Green's language and plotting are more realistic, and his indictments are more piercing and yet at the same time more understanding of the human frailties he is describing. Waugh is no doubt the superior artist, but Green's insights may offer a more accurate and enduring portrait of England in the 1930s and 1940s.