Party Going

"Henry Green is a modernist writer, not very well known. He’s quite difficult, it’s not an easy read. He tends to play around a bit with sentences, he drops definite and indefinite articles. The book is about a group of what we would dub ‘bright young things,’ who are about to set off to go to a party that’s taking place on the continent. They have to get to Waterloo and catch the train. They set out on a particularly foggy day. We’re shown the different ways they get to the station. A very wealthy young woman decides it would be quicker for her to walk by herself—coming back to unaccompanied women—and almost as soon as she gets out into the fog she regrets her decision. She feels vulnerable, she feels nervous, she’s not used to being on her own. But once she’s stepped out into it she can’t go back because she can’t find her way back. That’s another example of a woman who feels very vulnerable but who actually thinks that she’s being very courageous by going into the fog. “Most women wouldn’t have gone out on a foggy night because they couldn’t possibly know who was round the corner.” The characters are well-drawn to an extent that we can see how different they all are, but they’re all part of the same set. They get to Waterloo and there are no trains going because of the fog. So they get stuck at Waterloo Station and they manage to get into the hotel and get a couple of rooms. They can be on their own and start the party by themselves. Of course, the rest of the people using the station—the working classes trying desperately to get home—are filling up the station. As they fill up the station the fog fills up the station and it becomes a very tense scene. These bright young things not only have tensions between themselves, two or three of the female characters love the same man, but there’s also the tension of the idea that this surge of people—partly symbolised by the fog—are actually going to intrude on their lives. Green is pointing out that the social class system is changing, there’s no longer going to be a role for these rather vapid, superficial, wealthy people who do nothing at all with their lives. He is suggesting that they’re going soon to be made to justify their existence. I don’t know how much Green thought that there would be a war but almost as soon as the book was published the Second World War was announced, which did dispense completely with that kind of class system. Yes, and certainly for the Victorians that was one of the issues: that you could bump into someone who was not a member of your class. If you got completely lost, you might actually have to ask someone you wouldn’t normally want to talk to for directions. In The Forsyte Saga you see various characters getting lost in a fog and having to rely on working-class people to get them home. In other newspaper articles, people are taken home by blind people—ex-soldiers who lost their sight in the First World War—as they are the only ones who can find their way around. Henry Green is very aware of this mixing of classes within a foggy day. You can’t possibly keep yourself distinct when you’re lost in a fog. T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land sees the fog as part of the monotony of having to get to work, of being part of the working classes. They see it as part of a complex way of looking at classes, looking at life, how it’s dragging you down and not allowing you to be creative."