'And they call it pleasure, eh?': Henry Green, Symbolism, and the Late Sublime

Abstract

Henry Green (Henry Vincent Yorke) is one of the best-regarded and least-known figures of English modernism. His 1939 novel, Party Going, details a group of wealthy young socialites who are delayed at a train station by heavy fog. Critics have long agreed that it is Green’s most hermeneutically puzzling text: the novel opens with a dead bird, Miss Fellowes becomes mysteriously ill, there is a man who changes accents, and at times, the station seems to dip into an underworld where characters wonder if “we weren’t all dead really.” While the book’s prolonged tension tends to be explained as a result of the soon-to-arrive world war, there has been less attention paid to Green’s life as also having interpretive value for his fiction. This study argues that within Party Going lies a wider negotiation with Symbolist thought and ideology, whose origin can be found in Green’s earlier personal and educational contexts. It explores his time and friendships at Eton and Oxford with a specific nod to Wadham fellow Maurice Bowra and Bowra’s theories of Symbolist poetry; considers Green’s context as a member of Britain’s interwar Bright Young People to discussions of the travelling party; investigates surface and depth as evidence of formal experimentation reflecting decadent and Symbolist ideologies after the fact; and sees in Miss Fellowes’ illness evidence of the late sublime. Party Going’s bathetic non-ending and Miss Fellowes’ sickness shows what the Symbolist ideal of a world beyond perception becomes by 1939: an aesthetics of exhaustion, a sublime without transcendence, and a journey with nowhere to go.