Reading Those Classics #7

Modernist Classic. Green’s novel Loving and Living are gems for readers into literary modernism, of the uncompromising and peculiar kind especially.

Party Going – Henry Green

Green releases birds like doves and peacocks in Loving (1945) and sparrows in Living (1929). So, this 1939 novel starts in fog, with a flying-blind pigeon crashing into a balustrade, fatally, and falling at the feet of an old lady in a busy train station in London. The eccentric aunt picks him up, washes him, wraps him in brown paper, and carries him around as she waits to see off her niece, a member of a circle of young socialites. One member of their coterie is paying for them all to take the boat train for France.

The fog, however, besides causing fatalities among pigeons, has stopped all train traffic. Thousands of commuters and travelers end up waiting in the station. The socialites decamp to a hotel, which has put down a steel door to keep out the hoi polloi that has descended in the past in similar circumstances and caused a lot of damage. For about four hours, the keyed-up beautiful people stew about self, love, life, jealousy, conflict, and competition.

So much for the plot. Green’s power lies not in spinning tales full of incident.

The train station and hotel make a fog-bound world, trapped, crowded, temporary. Green has us readers view the action, such as it is, from above. We are detached, as if we were spirits disconnected from these doings serious to the participants but trivial to the observer. In fact, the reader wishes for God-like access to the Smite Button, zeroing in on the socialites because on the rare occasions they are not speculating like children as to whether the fog is going to lift or squabbling like couples that have no idea what they want, they are discussing an inconsequential diplomatic dust-up involving one of their friends Embassy Richard. They talk across each other. They don’t listen. They are obtuse. It’s maddening to read their inept communications but at the same time the dialogue is empty-headed funny like Wodehouse and compelling like Faulkner.

Green didn’t have interest in fine writing or pretty sentences, being a modernist that wanted to capture how feelings, ideas, memories, inconsistency and contradictions cross over mental landscape like weather fronts skim or slide or ooze over landscape. These socialites are unconscious of the social problems of 1939 so there is satire of vile bodies and their fear of the masses finally rising up, like they never have done before. But in light of the interior monologues, what a hash our minds are:

Again while she had wondered so faintly she hardly knew she had it in her mind or, in other words, had hardly expressed to herself what she was thinking, he was much further from putting his feelings into words, as it was not until he felt sure of anything that he knew what he was thinking of. When he thought, he was only conscious of uneasy feelings and he only knew that he had been what he did not even call thinking when his feelings hurt him. When he was sure then he felt it must be at once be put to music, which was his way of saying words.

It's not quite stream of consciousness, and it seems to me that it takes much craft and care to stay just this side of it. When you get accustomed to Green’s voice, you start to get it. Or at least, you think you do.

As in Living, Green doesn’t make experiments easy for the reader. He throws names out all in a rush and refers to characters by either by their first or last name randomly. His grammar is loosey-goosey, stopping just short of Joycean psychedelia. Characters obscure what they mean to test an idea, speak just for an effect, and make noises when they’re not listening. For readers, translating ordinary words in relaxed syntax into complex and subtle meanings is an intellectual challenge but it also becomes an immersive experience that is somehow emotionally satisfying and aesthetically pleasing.

Suggestive instead of explicit, it’s art, a playful way to show us Green’s take on reality and see if it has any effect on our view of the world. But what the metaphors - birds, fog, crowds, baths, patches of bamboo and artichokes – are pointing to, I don’t rightly know. Maybe trying to pin down an elusive writer like Green tells more about the reader’s own search for meaning than the writer’s point of view.