Outside, in the metropolitan gloom, people come and go like spectres. So the party – quintessentially shallow, vapid and spoilt – holes up in the station hotel to wait for the fog to lift, a brilliant fictional premise. England is cut off, and the railway paralysed their train has been delayed. A group of bright young things – Max, Amabel, Angela, Julia, Evelyn and Claire – are on their way to a house party in France, by train. Party Going offers the last word on that “low, dishonest decade”, the 1930s. I came to read it, as a respite from my first job in the book world, sitting against the radiator, on the floor of the Hogarth Press library in William IV Street, in the West End. It’s the polar opposite of Living, but quite as dazzling in the poetry of its prose, a masterpiece of literary impressionism. Party Going, published on the brink of the second world war, reflects that experience.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |