Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  Apart from the space and time of Trieste and Triestine politics in the early twentieth century, another source of influence was, of course, the less provincial, more elusive world of European ideas in general. So, as Gary remarks towards the end of his book, each of the three writers was more influenced by, and influencing of, incipient literary modernism than the city they lived in. ‘Conscience’, ‘consciousness’, or the Italian catch-all 'coscienza' are useful words here. In his poet’s manifesto, Quello che resta da fare ai poeti, Saba speaks of the poet’s responsibility as lying precisely inconscienza, his ‘moral awakeness’ as Gary puts it, his determination to write nothing and use no technique that is not profoundly felt. Hence the hard-won precision of his language, the difficulty of translation.

  Svevo, on the other hand, in La, coscienza di Zeno seems to be engaged above all in revealing, sincerely, the impossibility of such sincerity. Every resolution his hero takes is immediately overwhelmed by an opposing appetite, every appetite is thwarted by moral awareness. In this tragicomic demonstration language need not be precise, on the contrary all the better if, being the writer’s second language, it is inherently mendacious. Commenting on his analyst’s ingenuousness in imagining his confessions sincere, the hyperconscious Zeno remarks: ‘With every Tuscan word we use we lie. If only he knew how much we enjoy saying those things we know the words for and how we avoid anything that would oblige us to resort to the dictionary.’

  Meanwhile, Joyce was inventing his ‘stream of consciousness’, amorally following thoughts wherever they and language would lead, during his Trieste walks perhaps. Behind all three writers one can’t help feeling the presence of their near contemporary, Freud. Svevo translated him and presented Zeno as an exercise in self-analysis. Saba got himself analysed, discovered all about his identity crisis and dedicated a book of poems to his analyst. Joyce pooh-poohed Freud and confirmed his importance in everything he wrote. Trieste, as Gary points out, for the obvious reason of its daily commerce with Vienna, was one of the main entry points by which Freud’s ideas came to Italy.

  Party Going

  [Henry Green]

  We should be familiar with the scene. A major railway station in central London. It’s early on a foggy evening. The office workers are returning home, a party of England’s most privileged are about to board the boat train for a continental holiday. The date must be sometime in the late 1920s. Apparently we are at the very heart of the declining Empire. Waugh territory. Yet no sooner have we read a paragraph of Green’s prose than we know that this is not the case. On the contrary, we feel completely disorientated, as if we had been mysteriously spirited off to some far-flung outpost, some improbable possession we could never imagine had been annexed to the Crown. Kipling in India, Lawrence in Mexico, Joyce in Trieste, they are all and immediately more central to what has become English Literature, what we expect when we open a book, than this bizarre and beautiful comedy that is Henry Green’s great masterpiece.

  More reassuringly clichéd, you would have thought, than the thick fog of pre-war London, one cannot get. Yet, as if the ghostly material had seeped into the writer’s mind and syntax, obliging him, and us, to advance with hands outstretched in constant fear of some unexpected obstacle, we soon appreciate that Green is using exactly this meteorological commonplace as image and abettor of our disorientation. One grey matter has invaded another and everybody is bewildered. Instructing a chauffeur to deal with her many suitcases, the fabulously wealthy Julia Wray sets out to walk across the park to the station. Immediately she is in the fog.

  Where hundreds of thousands she could not see were now going home, their day done, she was only starting out and there was this difference, that where she had been nervous of her journey and of starting, so that she had said she would rather go on foot to the station to walk it off, she was frightened now. As a path she was following turned this way and that round bushes and shrubs that hid from her what she would find she felt she would next come upon this fog dropped suddenly down to the ground, when she would be lost.

  What are we to make of this sequence of relative clauses: that hid from her what she would find she felt she would next come upon this fog dropped suddenly down'! Julia is not alone in being lost. What can the sentence mean? How strangely and rapidly its monosyllabic rhythm with barely a word unstressed plunges us into confusion. As we begin to read, we expect something like: As she went this way and that round bushes that hid from her what she would find on the other side, she felt … lost. But no, for immediately after the word ‘felt’, the sentence speeds up and complicates in an alarming way. The problem then becomes, where are we to put the comma that ends the temporal clause and introduces the main clause? Could it be: As she went round bushes that hid what she would find COMMA she feared (felt) that she would come upon this fog dropped down (rather than staying up in the trees) in which case she would be lost. Certainly that’s possible. But ugly. It also prevents us from reading ‘this fog dropped suddenly down’ as a strong indicative end to the sentence.

  Alternatively we might read the main clause as beginning with ‘she would next come upon’ thus: As she went round bushes that hid what she would find COMMA or so she imagined (felt) COMMA she would come upon this fog dropped down, and then she would be lost. But again the thing seems unwieldy and the attractive rhythm set up in ‘what she would find she felt she would next come upon’ disappears.

  Only after a double or even triple take and some careful attention to those shifty Svould’s, ever ready to switch from imperfect to conditional and so keep us from separating the wood from the trees in this foggy park, do we come upon a reading that gives a deeper sense to that extraordinary succession of verbs at the core of the sentence: Julia went round bushes that hid from her what she thus discovered (“would find) that she had been expecting ('felt') to come upon on the other side, but didn’t. To arrive at this reading is to appreciate that nothing so much as disorientation will help you discover what you expected but didn’t find. This isn’t a book like any other.

  But we mustn’t be put off by a little confusion! A little disorientation. One would never, surely, break off a promising conversation merely because something the other person said didn’t quite or immediately make sense. Then bewilderment can be exciting. For even if what you are going to come upon in Party Going is not what you expected either from this or any book, it may all the same turn out to be very beautiful and very seductive. Even illuminating. And it might even be the case that the disorientation Green imposes on us is a state that will make us peculiarly receptive to beauty, perhaps a necessary precondition of our discovering it. Would somebody so self-obsessed and silly as Julia Wray ever have noticed the beauty of leaves lit up at night if she had not been lost in fog? Here is the next paragraph.

  Then at another turn she was on more open ground. Headlights of cars above turning into a road as they swept around hooting swept their light above where she walked, illuminating lower branches of trees. As she hurried she started at each blaring horn and each time she would look up to make sure that noise heralded a light and then was reassured to see leaves brilliantly green veined like marble with wet dirt and these veins reflecting each light back for a moment then it would be gone out beyond her and then was altogether gone and there was another.

  Green must be the most highly praised, certainly the most accomplished, of twentieth-century novelists not to have made it into the canon, not to be regularly taught in universities, not to be considered “required reading’. The celebrated critic Frank Kermode gives us the key to why this is so. Delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1977, he chose Party Going as an example of a work that perversely frustrated every analytical tool in the hermeneutic workshop. Brilliant as it is, Kermode insists, Party Going cannot be made to make sense as a whole. Is this fair comment? Would it matter if it was? ‘Life after all,’ Green remarked, “is one discrepancy after another.’

  Max Adey, unpardonably rich and notoriously ha
ndsome, has invited, all expenses paid, a gaggle of bright young things to a winter house party in France. But barely an hour before departure Max himself is not quite sure if he will go. For he hasn’t invited Amabel. He is trying to break up with her, beautiful, wealthy and fabulously pampered as she is. All the same, it was unkind not to invite her. Perhaps he should stay behind, then. Should he? Max has difficulty making up his mind. Actually, he has difficulty thinking at all. He invites Amabel to dinner, then leaves for the station, then phones from the station to cancel dinner explaining that he is at the airport. Then, discovering that the train has been delayed by the fog, he books one room in the station hotel for his party and another for himself on the floor above to which he immediately takes Julia with whom he plans to replace Amabel while a third girl Angela is to be kept waiting in the wings. As he and Julia settle down to possible lovemaking, Green tells us:

  If Julia had wondered where Max was taking her as they went upstairs together, Max, for his part, had wondered where she was taking him. With this difference however, that, if she had done no more than ask herself what room he was taking her to, he had asked himself whether he was going to fall for her. 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 at once be put to music, which was his way of saying words.

  Being brutally reductive, one might say that the twentieth century excelled in two manners of representing character. There is the flattery of Joyce and Woolf, who give us a vision of individual minds constantly generating poetry, perpetually seeking to expand the spirit. How encouraging it is when we find we can identify with them! And there is the more traditional approach, perhaps of Graham Greene or Anthony Powell, that sees character primarily in terms of its response to moral struggle in scenarios social, sentimental and political. This too, like any call to duty, has its reassuring and flattering aspect, even when, as in the early and hilarious Waugh, it means pillorying people for not being what writer and reader know they should be. One could never say of such books that they do not ‘make sense’.

  But Green offers neither of these, nor one of the derivative combinations typical of the average novel today. Though all perfectly believable, all presented with a psychology that is ruthlessly and comically convincing, his characters are not immediately distinguishable and the reader may have a little difficulty at the beginning of Party Going sorting out Claire, Angela, Evelyn and Julia, not to mention Robert, Robin, Alex and Max, as if obliged, as I have been on various occasions, to watch a game of football in the fog. It’s hard to see who’s got the ball. But much of the pleasure of reading Green comes from just this struggle to distinguish - it seems we’re being teased - and the resulting recognition that any clarity in human relationships will be a fiction won from heavy clouds of incomprehension.

  The description of Max and Julia as they head towards first intimacy gives us a clue to Green’s vision. The words he uses for them, symmetrically repeating ‘wonder’, ‘take’, ‘thought’, ‘knew’, suggests that they are tangled together, mutually interacting - who takes whom where exactly? - just as their similar manner of speaking when their wonderful dialogue begins makes it very clear that they are the product of the same society, they share the same prejudices, the same memories almost. Yet the substance of the paragraph is their ignorance, not only of what is going on in the other’s head, but of their own intentions likewise. And the conversation when it gets going will be that of two people missing not only each other in the dark, but themselves too. ‘All and always alone’, as Green believed we are, he does not allow his characters the consolation of a Dedalus or a Dalloway that they are special individuals, or even ‘individuals’ at all in the way we give status to that word. They don’t possess themselves. Often both action and speech come as the result of the merest compulsion. And if it is hard to ‘identify’ with them, this is perhaps because Green more than any novelist of his time had appreciated that ‘identity’ and ‘character’ were convenient and somewhat over generous fictions. ‘“What do we know of anyone?” said Julia,’ and Green adds, ‘thinking of herself.

  But do these people have a moral duty at least? Is the book a satirical account of their inadequacy? Our party gathers in the station. The fog is impenetrable now. No trains are leaving and the press of homeward-bound commuters is becoming a suffocating and potentially dangerous throng. Well-connected, pockets well-lined, Max and company take refuge (for the whole of the novel) in the station hotel whence, when gossip and flirtation flags, they can gaze down on the crowd beneath. Then at a certain point, the hotel doors are locked and barred and the building sealed off from the outside world.

  The management had shut the steel doors down because when once before another fog had come as thick as this hundreds and hundreds of the crowd, unable to get home by train or bus, had pushed into this hotel and quietly clamoured for rooms, beds, meals, and more and more had pressed quietly, peaceably in until, although they had been most well behaved, by weight of numbers they had smashed everything, furniture, lounges, reception offices, the two bars, doors. Fifty-two had been injured and compensated and one of them was a little Tommy Tucker, now in a school for cripples, only fourteen years of age, and to be supported all his life at the railway company’s expense by order of a High Court Judge.

  ‘It’s terrifying,’ Julia said, T didn’t know there were so many people in the world.’

  Class distinction, social privilege, couldn’t be more clearly established. Green, himself a communist sympathiser from the moneyed classes, has no illusions. Yet, there is never any suggestion that Max and company should or even could do anything about the situation. Nor do the crowd ever put them to some awful test. The words, ‘peaceably’ and ‘most well behaved’ are telling here. The classes are as tangled together in an overall society, mutually engendering, mutually uncomprehending, as are Max and Julia, men and women in general. The conflict and moral dilemma that a hundred years of a certain kind of literature has led you to expect won’t occur. The rich young folks get on well with their servants who appear to think kindly of them in return. No, if Julia and company try to ignore the crowd locked outside it is not because of any rejection of social duty, but because the sheer anonymous size of the throng in the foggy plaza makes them think of death. ‘Like a view from the gibbet,’ says Alex looking down on the scene. ‘Cattle waiting to be butchered’ says another. Here and there in the gloom suitcases lean this way and that like headstones in ‘an exaggerated graveyard’. Max steps back from lace curtains.

  The perversity of Party Going, Kermode claimed in his Norton Lectures, was that while the core of the book is a series of dazzlingly complex dialogues, hilarious social manoeuvrings and tawdry sex games among the rich in the hotel, these bear no relation at all to a possible political interpretation of the book, which is nevertheless flung in our faces in the presentation of rich and poor inside and outside the hotel, and even less to a possible ‘mythical’ interpretation, equally shamelessly flaunted when the novel opens with the description of an elderly woman, aunt of one member of our party, finding a dead pigeon, washing it in the public lavatories and wrapping it in a brown paper parcel. Purification rituals? Funeral rites? The book teems with potentially symbolic figures and events: the mysterious man who despite locked doors seems able to pass in and out of the hotel, his accent changing from Birmingham to cockney to Oxbridge every time he opens his mouth; the goddess-like Amabel whose bath, after she too inexplicably penetrates the hotel’s defences, is followed with awe by the other members of the party, as if she were no less than the huntress Diana herself. Then there are Julia’s talismanic toys, the egg with
the elephants in it, the little wooden pistol, the spinning top, not to mention Robert’s memories of buried treasure in a thicket of bamboo. And yet, Kermode complains, while in Joyce or Eliot such manifestations would offer the key to an overall interpretation, this does not seem to be the case in Green.

  All the same … if we stop fussing over explanations, interpretations, and if, while enjoying the thickly planted maze of Green’s dialogues, we keep our eyes on the references to death, the characters’ anxieties about death, all will become, if not clear, then at least fatally, fantastically familiar.

  Where did the dead pigeon fall from? Out of the fog. Disorientated it flew into a beam. Miss Fellowes, Claire’s aunt, picks it up, then, ‘everything unexplained’, falls ill herself, buys a whisky, she who never drinks whisky, collapses, is perhaps even dying. Thoughtful and embarrassed, Max arranges for her to have her own and separate room in the hotel. Two nannies ‘dressed in granite’ sit outside it, like Fates ready to cut the mortal thread. At this point, the geometry of the novel is at once more complex and more recognisable. To defend what fragile identity they may have the group has separated itself from encroaching anonymity, as any society might set up a palisade between itself and the wilderness. But before the gates could be shut the fog had slipped in from beyond the pale, in the form of the dead pigeon, the sick auntie. So the pigeon is hidden in a parcel and then the auntie in her separate room. But how to stop thinking about them: the dying soul within, the amorphous world without? Everybody is fascinated by the idea that Miss Fellowes may be dying and at the same time all hope against hope that her eventual deterioration won’t prove an even greater obstacle to their escape to the ‘paradise’ of southern France than that ‘pall of fog’ which has paralysed them in this hotel where the problem is, alas, ‘there’s nothing to do.’