Henry Green liked his present participles, the borrowed present of his writing is what he's constantly moving towards, pausing at, giving up at. The book ends when the present participle snaps.
Party Going was the first of his books I read, and the one I go back to when I want to spend time at Victoria Station in a mid-twentieth century fog. This time it was the pull back moment, fifty pages from the end, when Henry Green/Yorke is aloft in a railway station considering the party he has assembled, that gave me pause in the middle of the night, which is mostly when I have been reading lately.
Two hundred pages in he pauses. The taut bright young things with their cabin trunks their exhaustive dealings; their people guarding. The train station has become a living being. That's where Henry Green weighs in.
Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.
This is what I'm waiting for in words and in music.
So crowded together they were beginning to be pressed against each other, so close that every breath had been inside another past that lipstick or those cracked lips, those even teeth, loose dentures, down into other lungs, so weary, so desolate and cold it silenced them.
What do you say then?
You want the moon, said Edwards.
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