Anti-world-building in 1930s London

Henry Green’s novel Party Going Presents a microcosm of the social transformation in Britain during the two World Wars. By narrating the experiences of a group of affluent young people stranded at London’s Victoria Station, the novel reveals the societal issues of class conflict, ethical decay and cultural upheaval behind the impending war and the decline of the empire. This narrative triggers the author’s contemplation on the disappearance of the collective memory, represented by the wealthy class. Green seamlessly intertwines individual and collective memories, unveiling the crises of stagnant individual lives and confrontations within the community over time and space constraints. During this period, the wealthy class attempts to escape reality through distorted recollections and futile physical practices. Addressing this predicament, the author elucidates the unreliability of individual memory, exposing the failure of collective memory when confronted with war and death. Through the plot and character descriptions, Green profoundly expresses the challenges faced by British society in a specific historical period, along with a continuous concern for collective identity and historical memory.

The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green. Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences, unremarkable relationships—transforming dullness into novelistic event. Two novels demonstrate Green's extraordinary effects achieved through and with the banal, the boring, the vague, and the everyday: Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1951). In Party Going, a group of people stranded at a train station wait with their luggage, order drinks, and lose and find various members of their party. In its attention to the bathetic quotidian, Party Going animates a range of late modernist anxieties about time, leisure, and subjective experience that manifest in the novel's fretful leveling of objects and experiences using the repeated, vague signifier things. Later, in Nothing, a group of socialites—a young couple, their parents, who were former lovers, and the parents’ lovers—have conversations in restaurants and pubs. Nothing dramatizes the inane nature of polite conversation, in which “-thing” is used as a block, as though to empty a conversation of significant information. The multiple subjects and objects embraced by the vague term things suggests that Green's fiction is preoccupied with the “utter contingency of everything (and every thing)” in the modernist period, as Douglas Mao notes. In these novels’ recourse to the any, some, every, or no things of the quotidian, Green explores the potential difference, remarkable sameness, and fuzzy difficulty of late modernist style.

Reviewed by: The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis Allan Hepburn The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life. Thomas S. Davis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 307. $60.00 (cloth). A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina MacKay’s Modernism and World War II (2007), Leo Mellor’s Reading the Ruins (2011), Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters (2013), and Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s (2013). These works establish continuities from the interwar years through the Second World War and into the era of British decolonization. In The Extinct Scene, Davis defines an “outward turn” as characteristic of late modernism (3). Consciousness, feeling, and inwardness—traits important to high modernism—did not suit mid-century writers. From the 1930s through the 1960s, writers and artists turned to the political and economic turbulence in the world as resources for artworks; in particular, they represented the alignments and misalignments between citizens and states. At the same time, late modernist texts correlated everyday phenomena with political crises, such as the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, the [End Page 469] Second World War, and the Notting Hill Riots. In The Extinct Scene, Davis focuses on British culture, though he keenly notes the international stance of British writers and filmmakers; they look outward to Spain, China, and the Caribbean to understand changes in world-systems. Throughout The Extinct Scene, Davis keeps a steady focus on everydayness. In an explication of John Grierson’s documentary aesthetics in the 1930s, Davis claims that “art must capture and reveal something about everyday life. It should neither assume a mimetic function nor drift into a self-contained world of endless experimentation” (39). The everyday throws up any number of opportunities for seizing capitalism, politics, and history in action. For Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, and other researchers associated with Mass-Observation, the everyday manifests itself in singular events and anecdotes. Mass-Observation aimed to “uncover the particularities of everyday experience and show how that experience permeates the collective” (57). In this regard, late modernist film, fiction, and art renounce the avant-garde experiments of high modernism—interruptions, lyrical monologues, defamiliarization—unless they address the radical disruptions inflicted on everyday life by geopolitical forces. Davis puts the matter more succinctly: “Late modernism designates the moment when modernism no longer recognizes itself” (11). Neither realism nor the resources of high modernism adequately captured changes in the world-system that happened at mid-century. If anything distinguishes the difference between high modernism and late modernism, it is the determined politicization of art forms that occurs in works by George Orwell, Humphrey Jennings, Elizabeth Bowen, and numerous others. Davis’s superb analysis refreshes what scholars know about late modernist works, not least because he draws upon an original and compelling corpus of materials: Henry Green’s novel Party Going, the sociological interventions of Mass-Observation, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War, Henry Moore’s paintings of women and children in tube shelters, Cecil Beaton and James Pope-Hennessy’s History under Fire, Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories about blitzed London, a clutch of novels by Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and Colin MacInnes, and, in an epilogue about the afterlife of modernist everydayness, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Davis’s close readings are virtuosic. His analysis of power relations between white landowners and black Jamaicans in Vic Reid’s New Day, for example, dwells on the transformative power of seeing, especially the ways that white and black citizens understand uprisings and bloodshed as actions that impinge on everyday life and incrementally register changes in geopolitics. By giving meticulous accounts of specific works, Davis vivifies late modernism. In one vector of inquiry in The Extinct Scene, Davis offers commentary on the duties and entitlements of citizenship. As expressions of a political unconscious, artworks model citizenship as a form of necessary engagement. Vernacular fictions such as Absolute Beginners (1959) and The Lonely Londoners (1956...

We can better understand Henry Green’s underappreciated late modernist comedy Party Going (1939) by acknowledging its debt to the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. This essay argues specifically that Green’s narrative refracts the abrupt shifts in scene and perspective that constitute shot/reverse shot editing, a staple of 1930s narrative film. By situating Party Going in relation to Edmund Gréville’s British film Brief Ecstasy (1937), the essay demonstrates how Green appropriates the narrow frame of shot/reverse shot—canonically used as a means of depicting two characters in conversation—and widens the frame to engage a greatly enlarged visual universe. This widening makes possible a more expansive set of perspectives, providing what the essay terms dynamic viewpoint. Through this technique, Green orchestrates a narrative of unstable perspectives and ambiguous meanings, simultaneously commenting on the precarities of British life in the politically and socially fraught 1930s and establishing a critical distance from the Hollywood films whose visual language he both appropriates and reformulates for his own distinct purposes.

This chapter follows the rise of the hotel corporation and hotel managerialism from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s, through the work of Henry James (The American Scene), Arnold Bennett (The Grand Babylon Hotel and Imperial Palace), Sinclair Lewis (Work of Art), Henry Green (Party Going), and corporate movie studios (BIS and MGM). The chapter starts with the observation that the newly professionalised role of hotel manager gained cultural authority through the rhetoric of scientific management, even as the hotel manager in this period was repeatedly figured as a kind of artist and the hotel as a work of art. Moving from James’s figuration of the Waldorf-Astoria’s management as a shadowy rival author, to Bennett’s and Lewis’s manager-poets of the 1930s, and the managerial eye of MGM’s Grand Hotel, the chapter considers the hotel manager as a classed and gendered fantasy figure of authorial power and omniscience within corporate modernity. Henry Green’s resistance to managerial and narratorial authority in Party Going, set in the near-bankrupt Grosvenor Hotel at the end of the grand hotel era, brings the historical narrative of the book to a close.

The final chapter of the book directs attention to questions of identity and selfhood. If modernism witnessed the rise of a culture of portability, what did this mean for understandings of literary character, and how did such understandings alter over the course of the interwar period? This chapter documents the development of late modernist suspicion of portable otherness as this is conveyed through interrogative appraisals of portable property. Such a development coincides with the sudden pervasiveness of the literary figure of the customs official from the late 1920s. This is a figure shown to share the psychoanalyst’s eye for the repressed contraband: ‘Have you anything to declare?’ As the chapter shows, this question of self-declaration becomes a critical one in conceptions and re-conceptions of character from modernism to late modernism. The chapter culminates with a reading of Henry Green’s autobiographical Pack My Bag (1940) in conjunction with his fictional Party Going (1939), both published around the outbreak of the Second World War.

Henry Green’s early novels Living (1929) and Party Going (1939) stand as the most ambitious fiction any writer of his generation produced before the Second World War. None of his contemporaries had Green’s ability to describe the social forces that separate class from class. None of them had such a fine ear for both dialogue and dialect. None had the breadth of imaginative sympathy that enabled him to capture what his friend and best critic V. S. Pritchett calls ‘the inner language and landscape’ in which people ‘lead their real lives’.1 In the first half of his career Green used that sympathy primarily in an attempt to understand the lives of men and women from classes other than his own. Living was not only the first book in which any member of his class and generation tried to imagine the lives of the English working class, but the best — the novel in which the working-class characters are the least conventionalized, the most highly individualized. It is the first attempt any of the writers I am concerned with made at a totalizing picture of the way their society moved.

This chapter considers the relays between the cinema as a figure of public address and modernism’s distrust of the authoritative character of narrative omniscience. It focuses on the late modernist work of Henry Green, whose subtle fictions of the 1930s weigh the durability of the novel as a form against his recognition that the detached omniscient narrator had grown inoperable and (after film) obsolete. Film emerges as a chief context for Green’s desire to absolve his writing of the pretended autonomy of art, urging him toward modes of fiction that aspire to a public-minded divestment of authority. This style of authorial divestment would be tested most extravagantly in Party Going (1939). In its redoubled, weakened use of irony, Party Going insists that authorial omniscience is never self-evidently more than a fantasy about the lives of others, as unstable as the projected dreams of spectators in a theater.

This paper deals with Henry Green’s Caught (1943), with occasional references to Green’s previous novel, Party Going (1939), examining how the war setting influences the nature of remembering and how remembering is traumatised by these circumstances. The paper ultimately argues that in the 1930s and 40s a definite shift may be detected from the High Modernist, epiphanic, revelatory, transcendental kind of remembering, initiated by the Proustian “mémoire involontaire” towards traumatic modes that enact the invasion of the present by the past, rather than their happy co-existence in a moment of epiphany. The essay introduces elements of trauma in Green’s novels in general and then moves on to identify the three main facets of traumatic narratives: their ontological, epistemological and narrative paradoxes. Most of the characters in Caught can be regarded as strange survivors of traumatic occurrences, who have to bear the consequences of this ontological dilemma and fight against the principles of fluidity and the danger of invasion that seem to threaten the boundaries of the past, the present and the future. The essay also presents the three main strategies of coping or failing to cope with trauma, exemplified by the three main characters, Roe, Pye and Christopher.

This paper focuses on the impacts of the recent global crisis on the Turkish economy and the policy measures taken in response to the crisis. Turkish economy was adversely affected by the crisis through mainly three channels, namely expectations channel, trade channel and financial channel. The distinctive characteristic of the crisis was a severe export shock which can account for an important part of the decline in production in Turkey. Beside this, a significant sudden stop in financial flows worsened the credit conditions in the economy. As a result, the Turkish economy witnessed one of its worst economic down-turns after the Second World War. In fact, the Turkish growth performance was one of the worsts among developing countries. However, as opposed to previous crises, the financial markets in Turkey and many other developing countries did not experience a collapse. We argue that this is mainly related to the small magnitude and short duration of the financial shocks hitting Turkey and other developing countries relative to the ones in the previous decades. In this sense, the Turkish economy might not have been fully tested during the last global crisis. How the economy will behave in case of a larger financial shock is still unknown.

This article explores the beginning of the professionalization process of female lawyers in Estonia upon the example of the profession of a notary public. Here, women students were allowed to study law and female lawyers were allowed to practice professionally several decades later compared to many countries in Europe and the world. Women got access to a wider variety of educational lanes after the Republic of Estonia gained its independence and women students started to be accepted to the university on equal basis with male students. Between the two world wars, several offices in Estonia needed specialists with a higher education in law. The most natural potential career paths for a legal academic are usually working in the court system, bar association or as a notary public. Yet, the prejudices widespread in the society and later the economic crisis of the 1930s, alongside the competition with male lawyers made it difficult for women to get a job that corresponded to their education. During the interwar years 1,618 students graduated from the faculty of law: 1,475 of them were men. There were 143 women graduates in the period, i.e., 8.8% of the law students. About a half of the law graduates found work in the field, while several female lawyers worked as apprentices or low-paid office clerks at courts. No female lawyers were appointed judges in Estonia before World War II, 42 women were admitted to the Bar Association. The first woman to become notary public, Ilma Sarepera, was appointed to office as late as in 1936. It is remarkable that the first appointed woman notary public remained the only woman notary public until 1944 when the Soviet power in Estonia was restored and authorities actively started to appoint women notaries. There was no actual resistance to appointing women notaries before World War II. At the same time, female lawyers were not queueing to get an appointment. The faint interest female lawyers expressed towards the profession of notary public can be explained with objective reasons: in the conditions of an economic crisis women rather preferred a low-paying but stable job as an office clerk. Several women also decided to become advocates or found work in an entirely different field. Most women notaries were appointed to office by the Soviet power in Soviet Estonia. War losses, repressions and the replacement of the former body of law practitioners in the 1940s brought new employments perspectives. In April 1949 there were a total of 28 notaries in 26 offices in Estonia, 11 of them women, all of them Estonian. The next women notaries after Ilma Sarepera were appointed to office in 1944 when the work of notarial offices was rapidly restarted. Only one of the women who were appointed notary public in 1944–1949 had a higher education in law, which shows that women without a relevant education were also appointed to office. Most of the women went to three-month courses for the preparation of notaries public in the USSR rear zone in Yegoryevsk, Moscow oblast or in the Tallinn Law School before they started work as notaries public. During the Soviet period women had more opportunities to become a notary public, yet, at the same time, a legal education was not considered as important as loyalty to the Soviet power and membership in the Communist party.

The Ruhr crisis had a profound diplomatic and economic impact on Europe.1 It brought into focus the lack of trust between Britain and France, as well as the tensions between the Allies and Germany. The occupation of the Ruhr also provided further evidence of the burden of being on the victorious side at the end of the First World War. It sealed the fate of the beleaguered mark and proved that Europe alone was incapable of solving the problem of reparations. D’Abernon, as a financial expert, had the knowledge and opportunity to play a leading role in defusing the crisis. But this did not arise, primarily because of his own approach to the situation. This assessment also suggests that British policy towards Germany continued to lack clarity and that Britain was still willing to go to considerable lengths to preserve the entente with France. The European ‘experiment’ with diplomacy by conference continued into 1922. Nevertheless, the numerous international gatherings that had taken place since the Paris Peace Conference to establish a final total of reparation indemnity had spectacularly failed to predict or prevent the run on the value of the German mark. They demonstrated more clearly than any of the hostile propaganda that was directed against Lloyd George, the League of Nations and other symbols of this style of diplomacy that the use of experts as a substitute for diplomats with more traditional training did not provide a better means of resolving complex diplomatic problems.

PROVISIONING OF CIVILIANS DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR. THE WAR AS A CATALYST FOR CHANGES IN THE CULINARY CULTURE IN EUROPE The First World War was an extremely diffi cult challenge for services and offi ces responsible for supplying the soldiers fi ghting on the front as well as all the citizens working at the rear of the front line. The decline in food production during the war forced the belligerent States to use topdown mechanisms to reduce the demand for food. The most commonly used method of adjusting the demands became food rationing during the war, as well as the promotion of food substitutes instead of defi cit products like meat, sugar and fats. In the course of war, the inhabitants of European countries became aware of a new, previously practically unknown, role of the States – as a controlling factor of their daily eating habits. Changing these habits during the war opened up new prospects for the implementation of dietary programmes in society as a whole. Food storage experiences of urban population and the use of extended durability products in everyday life were building a survival strategy for future economic crises.

Belgrade, Serbia

What causes democratic waves? This article puts forward a theory of institutional waves that focuses on the effects of systemic transformations. It argues that abrupt shifts in the distribution of power among leading states create unique and powerful incentives for sweeping domestic reforms. A variety of statistical tests reveals strong support for the idea that shifts in hegemonic power have shaped waves of democracy, fascism, and communism in the twentieth century, independent of domestic factors or horizontal diffusion. These “hegemonic shocks” produce windows of opportunity for external regime imposition, enable rising powers to rapidly expand networks of trade and patronage, and inspire imitators by credibly revealing hidden information about relative regime effectiveness to foreign audiences. I outline these mechanisms of coercion, influence, and emulation that connect shocks to waves, empirically test their relationship, and illustrate the theory with two case studies—the wave of democratic transitions after World War I, and the fascist wave of the late interwar period. In sum, democracy in the twentieth century cannot be fully understood without examining the effects of hegemonic shocks.