SO AND SO
by Douglas
Messerli
Henry
Green Party Going (London: The Hogarth Press, 1939)
The
elderly Miss Fellowes begins this wonderful comic novel, as she walks through a
thick London fog toward the train station where she intends to see her niece,
Claire, off on a trip the younger woman is making to the continent with several
other friends. Suddenly, a dead pigeon falls from the murky sky to her feet
below. For some inexplicable reason, Miss Fellowes, picks up the dead bird,
washing in the lavatory sink, and wrapping it up in brown parcel paper. Soon
after,
“Miss
Fellowes did not feel well, so, when she got to the top of
those steps she rested there leaning on a handrail.”
Slightly
recovering, the woman decides to order tea at the busy station food shop, but
when no one will come to wait on her, she decides to go over to the counter and
orders a whisky instead.
Meanwhile, the party-going group gradually
arrives, each member finding it difficult to make their way to the others, but
eventually gathering, with their luggage, at a central point. Their host, Max,
is the latest to arrive, after having considered not even going. The others,
Claire, Evelyna, Angela, Julia, Alex, and Robert gradually do link up, but by
the time they encounter each other, the trains have been long delayed because
of the fog, and Miss Fellowes has fallen into a faint at the restaurant. Max
arranges for their party to inhabit rooms at the nearby station hotel, into
which they also sneak Claire's ill aunt before the management pulls down gates
over the entrances to protect the premises from the potentially marauding
crowds beginning to gather at the station.
So begins Green's satirical work. The rest
of it is spent in close rooms, where the women each gossip and try to out-wit
one other, manipulating the men in their group, while trying each to vie for
the eligible, wealthy, and handsome Max. Alex, who is gay, spends most of his
time whining and complaining, Robert retreats to the hotel barroom, and
Angela's equally incompetent boyfriend, mopes nearby, sorry that he had not
wished her a better farewell.
Green's work, accordingly, is centered
primarily on the women and their subtle and, more often, obvious put-downs of
one another, just as they pretend long friendships and admiration for each
another. Into this group, the beautiful and legendary Amabel miraculously finds
entry, claiming her right to join them, even though she has been rather
specifically uninvited by Max. Her visit, moreover, ratchets up the heightened
tensions between these competitive harridans, and ultimately threatens to
break-up the party. Nothing much else happens in this fiction, but the war of
words and these women's mindless and often meaningless actions and
disparagements of one another, along with Alex's aspersions, and Angela's
discomfort (she is a first-timer in their party), creates enough comic energy
to match any boulevard farce.
All the ninnies gathered at the hotel,
wealthy and/or spoiled, are, at heart, mean and bored, having no ideas with
which to entertain their empty heads. And Green's satire soon turns somewhat
vicious as we observe their selfish manipulations. Only the gravely ill Miss
Fellowes, cared for by two of the women's nannies who have also come to see the
group off, perceives anything of significance. In her fight against alcohol and
possible death, she undergoes a kind of spiritual journey that transforms the empty
connections made by the others into something meaningful and possibly salving.
Claire, as well as the others, is
described as being incapable of caring for her aunt, and gradually, we discover
she is only too ready to leave her behind in the strange hotel room for her own
escape, Green revealing that Miss Fellowes' herself cannot stand her niece, nor
Claire's mother, the older woman's sister—feelings we share.
The vast void of these individual's lives
is less revealed in their catty statements and petty behavior, than it is in
Green's own impeccable style—through the very language Green uses to convey
their feelings. Among the author's several rhetorical devices, the most obvious
is his use of the word "so" to convey the weak link of their logic.
The conjunction and, at times, adjective, seems to convey an underlying
relationship of events where there are actually no real connections. Three
examples from many dozens of examples throughout the work will have suffice:
“She
called him darling, which was of no significance except that
she had
never done so before, and he did not at once tumble to it
that her
smiles and friendliness for him, which like any other girl
she could
turn on at will so that it poured pleasantly out in the way
water will
do out of taps.” (p. 117) [italics mine]
“So she
came over to where he was sitting, and, his hands taken up
with
pouring out his drink, she kissed his cheek and then sat down
opposite.”
(p. 113) [italics mine]
“They made
noises which could be taken to mean yes and Julia ex-
plained to
Miss Henderson how Max had already ordered tea so that
it would
be easy to carry two cups along to them without Angela knowing.”
(p. 71)
[italics mine]
One
need only compare that false connection of "so," with the adjectival
and adverbial connections that actually suggest a subsequent relationship, used
to describe Miss Fellow's nightmare adventures:
“And Miss
Fellowes wearily faced another tide of illness. Aching all
over she
watched helpless while that could rushed across to where
was wedged
and again the sea below rose with it, most menacing
and capped
with foam and as it came nearer she heard again the
shrieking
wind in throbbing through her ears. In terror she watched
the seas
rise to get at her, so menacing her blood throbbed unbearably,
and again
it was all forced into her head but this had happened so
often she
felt she had experienced the worst of it. But now with a roll
of drums
and then a most frightful crash lightning came out of that
cloud and
played upon the sea, and this repeated, and then again, each
time
nearer till she knew she was worse than she had ever been. One
last crash
which she knew to be unbearable and she burst and exploded
into
complete insensibility. She vomited.”
Here there is a specific relationship
between events. The mental vision Miss Fellowes encounters a kind of
apocalyptic tempest, results in an actual physical action. The mental vision
she encounters directly relates to her own actions and behavior.
For the others, there is "no
significance," as they speak of pointless actions such as smiling, kissing
a cheek, or carrying two cups of coffee. For the party-goers, action is
pointless, and ideation, accordingly, has no real connection with the petty
things they accomplish.
Whereas, Max's gathering of nit-wits can
only wait, twittering away their time before an equally meaningless adventure
in the South of France, Miss Fellowes has responded to nature in her attempt to
give the dead bird—itself a kind of symbol for the others' spiritual deaths—a
properly ritualized burial. It is she, accordingly, who must suffer the storms
and waves of angst that the others will not and cannot face.
When the news finally reaches the group
that the trains are running again, Julia—who throughout the early part of the
fiction has worried over what she calls her charms, meaningless tokens from her
childhood that she carries with her wherever she goes—rushes into Miss
Fellowes' room bursting out with the news, oblivious of Miss Fellowes'
presence:
"children
we are to go, they've telephoned to say it's all over,
isn't it
just wonderful and we're to get reading, darlings, just think."
But, obviously, she and her friends cannot
"think," for they have no "fellow" feelings, no empathy for
anything or anyone in the world around them. Julia's tokens are all inanimate
objects, things, as opposed to Miss Fellowes' formerly living being. In the
world of the party-goers there are no true connections between anything they
might do as opposed to something else, and, therefore, no difference between
present or past. As Embassy Richard says, after he is asked to join their party:
"But
weren't you going anywhere?" Amabel said to Richard, only she
looked at
Max.
"I
can go where I was going afterwards," he said to all of them and smiled.
The relationship between human beings that
characterizes Julia and her friends is summarized, again with the recurrent
word "so," a few sentences earlier:
“So like
when you were small and they brought children over to play with
you and
you wanted to play on your own then someone, as they hardly
ever did,
came along and took them off so you could do what you wanted.”
Los
Angeles, September 12, 2011
Reprinted
from Exploring Fictions (September 2011).
