Books: Penny Stock

PARTY GOING (255 pp.)—Henry Green—Viking ($3).

On the literary stock exchange, the novels of England’s Henry Green rate well up among the blue chips. Readers of Loving, Nothing and Concluding collected dividends in wit and wisdom. Party Going, the sixth of Green’s eight slim novels to be published in the U.S., proves that Green can put out penny stock, too.

Party Going is shy of plot, even for plot-shy Henry Green. Seven bright young crumbs from the British upper crust set out for a holiday in France; they never get there. A dense fog anchors them to a London terminal—and four hours of each other’s clabbering company. The rich and amiable sponsor of the party, Max Adey, wangles hotel rooms to wait in, and they go for each other, hammers & tongues.

One of the girls, Julia, is out to trip Max into matrimony when a recent flame named Amabel shows up with an older idea. She appears in a dressing gown, soon has Max frothing and fumbling. When the pair rejoins the others, Amabel looks “like a cat that has just had its own mouse coming among other cats who had only had the smell.” But Amabel’s triumph is short. When the fog lifts, the only kitten Max has eyes for is gentle Julia, who sports retractable claws.

In a sinister shadow play of symbols, Green tries to suggest that life is more than a kittenish spree. A pigeon falls dead on the first page; Julia worries endlessly about not packing her good luck charms, “her egg with the elephants in it, her wooden pistol and her little painted top”; a spindly mystery man gibbers in changing dialects about the grave illness of somebody’s stricken aunt. Like signposts in limbo, these point everywhere and nowhere. And Party Going’s old-fashioned pastime—noodling flea-brained upper-class Britons—is next door to limbo. Writing this novel in the ’30s, Author Green wrapped the comedy of a lesser Waugh in the chatter of a lesser Coward. What remains in 1951 is the shell of a satire with about as much yoke as a ping-pong ball.