{"id":134762,"date":"2019-03-21T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-21T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134762"},"modified":"2019-03-21T11:16:40","modified_gmt":"2019-03-21T15:16:40","slug":"on-classic-party-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/21\/on-classic-party-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"On Classic Party Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Elisa Gabbert\u2019s column Mess with a Classic<\/a>, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general).<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Irving Nurick, illustration from the 1920s<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In her 2008 review<\/a> of Cecily von Zeigesar\u2019s Gossip Girl<\/em> novels, Janet Malcolm quotes the eponymous narrator\u2019s \u201copening volley\u201d: \u201cWe all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. We\u2019re smart, we\u2019ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party.\u201d I\u2019ve never read the books myself, but on the CW show, which I was briefly obsessed with, we hear Kristen Bell\u2019s voice-over during the title sequence: \u201cGossip Girl here! Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan\u2019s elite.\u201d The actors playing these trust-fund teens aren\u2019t just good-looking; they seem like genetic impossibilities. Blake Lively is perfectly cast as the, in Malcolm\u2019s words, \u201cincandescently beautiful\u201d Serena van der Woodsen. She\u2019s 5\u201910\u201d and usually wearing heels. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan of the blog Go Fug Yourself used to call her \u201cBoobs Legsly.\u201d Serena and her friends and enemies (there is often little distinction between the two) have not only lucked into the 1 percent, they are also having an unfair amount of fun.<\/p>\n

Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn. When Emma Bovary arrives at La Vaubyessard, the chateau of the marquis, for dinner and a ball, the opulence blows her bourgeois mind: \u201cThe red claws of the lobsters overhung the edges of the platters; large fruits were piled on moss in openwork baskets; the quails wore their feathers; coils of steam rose into the air; and, grave as a judge in his silk stockings, knee breeches, white tie, and jabot, the butler conveyed the platters.\u201d Party scenes are full of these lists of foods and drinks and flowers, overloaded sentences that embody abundance, the fulsome displays of affluence. See Nick Carraway\u2019s first party at Jay Gatsby\u2019s: \u201cEvery Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York \u2026 On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d\u2019oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.\u201d Was Flaubert the first to use this listing trope, appalled by the excess? Jane Austen\u2019s balls are disappointingly devoid of visual detail, as if the evidence of money was just assumed. (Austen\u2019s novels adapt so well into film because the dialogue is all there, and costume and set designers can supply the surrounding lushness.) A truly expensive party should feel otherworldly; the marquis\u2019s ball, by putting her in \u201ccontact with wealth,\u201d leaves Emma utterly changed. It makes \u201ca hole in her life, like those great chasms that a storm, in a single night, will sometimes open in the mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Edith Wharton\u2019s The House of Mirth<\/em>, the element of unreality is achieved by the tableaux vivants, elaborate live reenactments of Botticelli\u2019s Primavera<\/em> and Tiepolo\u2019s Banquet of Cleopatra<\/em>. With their \u201chappy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers of gauze,\u201d the tableaux \u201cgive magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.\u201d Lily Bart appears as Mrs. Lloyd, the subject of a Sir Joshua Reynolds painting\u2014the guests are titillated and a little shocked (\u201cDeuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up\u201d), so I always pictured something more typically male-gaze-y than the actual portrait, not a woman reclining but standing up, fully dressed, and carving her husband\u2019s name in a tree. In any case, it casts the necessary spell to carry Lily and Mr. Lawrence Selden away from the party, \u201cagainst the tide which was setting thither,\u201d past faces that \u201cflowed by like the streaming images of sleep,\u201d so they can kiss and whisper of love. Classic parties often have a watery quality. Nick Carraway is surrounded by \u201cswirls and eddies of people\u201d he doesn\u2019t know. It\u2019s the wet, blurry view through the bottom of a glass. <\/p>\n

In his review<\/a> of Making It<\/em> by Norman Podhoretz, James Wolcott mentions an after-party for a Commentary<\/em> symposium where critic Alfred Kazin \u201cfound himself in a bobbing sea of familiar faces.\u201d Making It<\/em>, Podhoretz\u2019s memoir of his ascent to so-called fame in the fifties and sixties (he was the editor of Commentary<\/em>, which earned him entry to the world of the literati) was widely reviled upon its first publication, according to legend. Wolcott calls it \u201ca book that would live in notoriety, which at least beats total obscurity.\u201d I wanted to root for the memoir, as an underdog, until I read parts of it; its naked egotism really is embarrassing. The passage of interest to me describes the parties: \u201cOne met most of the same people\u2014the family\u2014at all these parties, but there was usually enough variation in the crowd to breed other invitations to other parties.\u201d Parties, like genes, exist to self-replicate. This partly explains why they all look the same. In Evelyn Waugh\u2019s A Handful of Dust<\/em>, Brenda is pleased with a party because it is \u201cexactly what she wished it to be, an accurate replica of all the best parties she had been to in the last year; the same band, the same supper and, above all, the same guests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parties also serve a clear function, establishing and reinforcing hierarchies. \u201cParties were sometimes fun and sometimes not, but fun was beside the point,\u201d Podhoretz writes, \u201cfor me they always served as a barometer of the progress of my career.\u201d The day his New Yorker<\/em> review of the new Nelson Algren comes out, he receives an invite to a fancy party by telegram. He attends shindigs hosted by Lillian Hellman and Philip Rahv and Mary McCarthy and (\u201cat last!\u201d) Hannah Arendt. There is a brief and fairly innocuous description of one of Arendt\u2019s famous New Year\u2019s Eve parties, which so infuriated her that she stopped having them for a few years. Podhoretz, for a while at least, got mileage out of being insufferable: \u201cEnemies are all to the good at an early stage of a critic\u2019s career, helping as they do to spread his name around.\u201d A Vanity Fair<\/em> piece about \u201cthe party of the century<\/a>,\u201d Truman Capote\u2019s Black and White Ball in 1966, quotes Parisian aristocrat \u00c9tienne de Beaumont: \u201cA party is never given for someone. It is given against someone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The midcentury Manhattan party has its own mythology, captured most iconically perhaps in Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/em>\u2014the movie more than the novella. For all that\u2019s terrible about the movie (the book is racist, too), the party scene is truly great. My favorite part is the shot of a woman standing by herself, laughing her ass off as she looks at her reflection in a big mirror with a gilt frame\u2014she even touches the mirror lightly with her fingers, the way you\u2019d touch a man\u2019s arm when he made you laugh in conversation. Thirty seconds later, we cut back to the woman; she\u2019s still looking at herself, but now she\u2019s sobbing, with mascara all over her face. It captures that late-night razor\u2019s edge between chaotic fun and chaotic disaster. It\u2019s an improvement, I think, on the scene in the novella, a \u201cstag party\u201d where the only women in attendance are Holly Golightly and her six-foot-tall, jolie laide<\/em> model friend Mag Wildwood (\u201cShe was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty\u201d). You can see what lines inspired the woman with the mirror in the film. In the novella, while Mag is in the bathroom, Holly implies Mag has a venereal disease, and Mag returns to find all the men have gone cold. This pushes Mag over the edge: \u201cSince gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.\u201d But the mirror woman in the movie isn\u2019t Mag, just a random partygoer\u2014as V.\u2009S. Pritchett writes of Emma Bovary, \u201cher periods of depravity do not single her out as an exceptionally deplorable human being, but rather make her part of the general, glum strangeness of the people around her.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I mentioned this scene to my husband, John, he said he always thought Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/em> ripped off its parties from The Recognitions<\/em>. He pulled our copy of the long (956 pages) William Gaddis novel off the shelf, located one of the scenes in question and then told me four times to be careful with the book (it\u2019s a first edition). The scene he bookmarked features \u201ca Village party\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u2014I couldn\u2019t quite stand a Village party tonight. Could you Arny? There\u2019s always so quite ha\u2014<\/p>\n

\u2014Hideous, Herschel supplied.<\/p>\n

\u2014I wasn\u2019t going to say that, silly. I was going to say harrowing. I couldn\u2019t stand one tonight, that special Village quality of inhuman ghastliness and dirt \u2026 Arny please don\u2019t have another drink.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a definite resemblance, the same forms of pretension\u2014money was important, but not as important as social status or as taste. The apartments holding the parties were often small, and the cramped quarters help create a sense of overfullness and festive abundance that would require more cash if set in larger rooms. Gaddis\u2019s Otto, a playwright, sees the party, any party, as an opportunity to be seen: \u201cOtto (thinking only of what it looked like to see Otto entering a room) entered.\u201d Parties are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically. As someone blabs at Otto about Swinburne and \u201cde Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant of course\u201d (\u201cIt\u2019s like a masquerade isn\u2019t it \u2026 I feel so naked, don\u2019t you? among all these frightfully masked people\u201d), Otto looks around the room \u201cwith restrained anticipation\u201d: \u201cHe was looking for a mirror.\u201d He wanders through the party, compulsively mentioning his latest play, which interests no one. There is more a sense of grim desperation than of excitement and possibility. Guests vie for dominance and attention; there\u2019s a bizarre, pervasive homophobic paranoia, like a version of the Red Scare; the party ends when there\u2019s nothing left to drink. (In youth, parties are a setting for fun; they provide alcohol and drugs and a place to consume them. In adulthood, parties are not a means to getting drunk but an event you need to be drunk to endure.)<\/p>\n

Otto is an introvert, but he\u2019s choosing to play an introvert, too\u2014his mask, his party persona. He retreats to the bookcase: \u201cWhen among people he did not know, Otto often took down a book from which he could glance up and note the situation which he pretended to disdain.\u201d Here he can half-read and half-observe\u2014and, he hopes, be observed observing. Possibly, Capote did lift this from Gaddis. Here\u2019s the unnamed narrator in Breakfast<\/em>: \u201cI was left abandoned by the bookshelves; of the books there, more than half were about horses, the rest baseball. Pretending an interest in Horseflesh and How to Tell It<\/em> gave me sufficiently private opportunity for sizing Holly\u2019s friends.\u201d Or maybe by 1958, when the novella was published\u2014Gaddis\u2019s novel came out in 1952\u2014the bookshelf-hoverer was already a clich\u00e9 of party fiction, if not actual parties, a detail as familiar as ice cubes clinking or dogs barking in the distance. If all parties resemble other parties, the way all party people resemble other party people, then all parties are intertextual, they reference each other. Amusingly, my husband John plays on this particular clich\u00e9 in his 2010 novella Under the Small Lights<\/em>, in which a character pulls a book off a shelf at a party. The book is Gaddis\u2019s The Recognitions<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Where are the parties in nonfiction? I skimmed Gore Vidal\u2019s memoir Palimpsest<\/em> looking for dirt on Ana\u00efs Nin\u2019s salons\u2014Nin and Vidal were friends, kind of; he writes of even his closest friends with a measure of contempt\u2014but while he alludes vaguely to parties, and describes hanging out with various literary celebrities in various caf\u00e9s and bars, these encounters are usually mild, often a little awkward. The cover of our trade paperback of A Moveable Feast<\/em> advertises tales of \u201cthe wild young years of the Lost Generation in Paris,\u201d but it\u2019s not a wild book. When Hemingway meets Scott Fitzgerald, you think the partying is about to get good, but Hemingway depicts Fitzgerald as a melancholy hypochondriac who can\u2019t hold his liquor: \u201cScott did not like the places nor the people and he had to drink more than he could drink.\u201d They go to Lyon together to retrieve a car Fitzgerald has left there, and Hemingway is annoyed that drinking literally all day while they drive across France in an open car in the rain should have any effect on his companion\u2014Fitzgerald becomes convinced he\u2019s going to die of something called \u201ccongestion of the lungs\u201d and keeps insisting that Hemingway take his temperature. Hemingway\u2019s solution is to order him double whiskeys. There are no parties qua parties. Even Podhoretz only mentions them in passing, as a way to drop some names. It must be that people don\u2019t remember real parties well enough to re-create them with any accuracy. There\u2019s too much missing information. Fictive parties evoke this sense of impaired time by impairing the narrative, with non sequitur, snippets of nonsense conversation, and continuity errors. It\u2019s often suddenly 2 AM.<\/small> Whole hours may go by in the space of a sentence, as in A Handful of Dust<\/em>: \u201cThey drank a lot.\u201d Those four words are one paragraph, and contain so much.<\/p>\n

In the last episode of Gossip Girl<\/em>, everyone gets married\u2014more Shakespearean comedy than Whartonian tragedy. But most classic, post-Austen party fiction ends badly, the way \u201cthe metal years\u201d end in Penelope Spheeris\u2019s LA music documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II<\/em>. Emma Bovary swallows arsenic. Lily Bart OD\u2019s on her \u201csleeping draught,\u201d probably meant to be laudanum. There is more at stake at these parties than having a good time. John O\u2019Hara\u2019s Appointment in Samarra<\/em>, published in 1934, might be the most tragic of the bunch. It begins with a Christmas party \u201cin the smoking room of the Lantenengo Country Club,\u201d which is \u201cso crowded it did not seem as though another person could get in.\u201d The usuals are there (\u201cthe Whit Hofmans, the Julian Englishes, the Froggy Ogdens and so on\u201d), interchangeable \u201cterrible people\u201d getting \u201cgloriously drunk\u201d on \u201cdrug store rye\u201d (\u201cIt was not poisonous, and it got you tight, which was all that was required of it and all that could be said for it\u201d). The fun ends when Julian English throws a highball in Harry Reilly\u2019s face. Over the next three days, self-destructive to the point of insanity, Julian stays trashed, trashes his marriage to his wife Caroline, then takes a bottle of Scotch and a package of cigarettes into the garage and starts the car. The next day, Caroline is wretched with grief, \u201ca tunnel you had to go through, had to go through, had to go through, had to go through\u201d\u2014grief becomes a kind of never-ending hangover.<\/p>\n

I have noticed one of the symptoms of a bad hangover is guilt. You regret all the toxins you\u2019ve consumed, of course, but also the things you\u2019ve said and done while your inhibitions were lowered, your temper shortened. I think of the end of Gatsby\u2019s party, when \u201cmost of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands.\u201d The neurologist Oliver Sacks called the guilt of a hangover \u201cpenitential depression.\u201d The guilt is there even when you can\u2019t remember much of what happened. An old friend used to text me in the morning after parties: Did I do anything horrible last night?<\/em> I\u2019d text back, Of course not<\/em>. But how would I know if she had? I was poisoned, too.<\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The Word Pretty<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(Black Ocean).\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46550],"tags":[51329,46551,3102,5764,51330,3034,27891,659],"class_list":["post-134762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mess-with-a-classic","tag-a-handful-of-dust","tag-breakfast-at-tiffanys","tag-emma-bovary","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-making-it","tag-nick-carraway","tag-norman-podhoretz","tag-the-great-gatsby"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Classic Party Fiction by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 21, 2019 \u2013 Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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