PARTY GOING

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 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.

Venturing Abroad, Ray Dorien

As I neared the end of my O level exams in the summer of 1963, my mother bought me a book from a secondhand stall that had lately started in Maldon market, run by a couple who brought a flavour of Elsewhere and Other to our acquaintance, with their early veggie outlook, their propensity for bare feet and mobile relationships. It was touching to have a present on what was actually my mother's own birthday, though, with hindsight, Venturing Abroad by Ray Dorien, a light sequence of travels in Europe before and after World War 2, looks a little like a nudge from my mother into leaving home, which wasn't going to happen for another couple of years. 

The hardback book has been on my bookshelves ever since, one of a loose collection of titles that have been complete in themselves, like The Vicissitudes of Evangeline or The Daughter of Fu Manchu. This week, as a result of a diary re-read, Venturing Abroad finally seemed readable. Beside the entry in the list of books at the back of my diary, there was an F, which probably meant Fair, or in the exam-speak that dominated my life then, Fail.

Most of Ray Dorien's forays into Europe begin at Victoria Station, which put me in mind of Henry Green's Party Going, most of which takes place there, in one of the dense fogs that London did so well in the early twentieth century. Henry Green is a writer. He can stand still with his party and chart the complexities of their going, or rather, not going, because of the fog. Ray Dorien needs not only a destination, but idle chat with fellow travellers, as well as an item — a plate, a hat, a blouse etc — around which to focus each chapter. Only incidentally does she refer, in what must be the post-war travels, to a town (St Malo), as a heap of stones, and to the lament about rationing she heard everywhere in Sweden. Otherwise, no politics, no context. 

The most startling detail to the reader now is the information that in the Italian Riviera, presumably in the 1930s, the local paper published a list of visitors currently staying in the area. Ray Dorien doesn't show up much in Google searches, only a few of her books. Thus my book can go back to the bookshelf in the bedroom with scarcely a fresh shadow on it. 

Henry Green, Party Going

Henry Green's Party Going (the gathering prior to departure rather than the habit of going to parties) revolves around a London station in a fog so dense a pigeon flew into a balustrade and fell down dead in front of a Miss Fellowes, who, wondering about fleas, washed it, wrapped it in brown paper and carried it to the rendezvous.

Henry Green avoids the definite article. He avoids the departure. He swirls with that fog inside and outside a London station. By page thirty-nine everyone is there, though people come and go, and some may not have come across others yet. This, says our narrator, was the beginning of a time for our party.

A time of double-postmarked letters, and divine tea and crumpets. As well as a nervousness—this was late nineteen thirties—fog went far beyond this London station, an old-fashioned station where travel was momentous, people could gather or fail to gather for hours on end, waiting for a boat train, for any train at all, piles of luggage around them. While you wait you might open a case.

If she had no memory for words she could always tell what she had worn each time she met him. Turning over her clothes as they had been packed she was turning over days. 

The station is thronging with travellers who are not travelling. Everyone, says our narrator, looks as if they've had enough. There's a blankness punctuated by tiny satisfactions—when going to sit by a bar was an idea—crossing the Channel in the company of other people was an idea too, if there were any trains.

Read a chapter of this supple disquiet in the middle of the night, reader, traveller, old thing, and you're made, like a mobster, like a nannie, you're swirling with your people in a fog of your own making.