Suffering the Author

Parties: a literary survival guide

If you thought Christmas get-togethers couldn't get any worse, you never went to one with Norman Mailer. As the season kicks off, Frances Wilson discovers why literature is full of tales of disastrous parties
Bah, humbug, it's party season again. Before we've even called for the figgy pudding, the spirits of parties past, present and future rise up to release the inner Scrooge in us all. Office parties, family parties, children's parties, fancy-dress parties, parties in restaurants, parties in pubs, parties by the photocopier, parties in the corridor, parties for the neighbours, parties for everyone you have ever met in your life, parties for everyone you have never met in your life, parties for clients, parties for rivals, parties for those you have been avoiding since the last ghastly round of mulled-wine nightmares. And when the grin eating into your face can no longer hold, it's time for the danse macabre that is New Year's Eve. By this point even the most robustly wassailing among us turns a whiter shade of pale.
Christmas is a dreadful time for those who want to be alone. Just when you are ready to reward yourself for surviving another year of social life by turning the phone off and the television on, that sharp-edged invitation on the mantelpiece starts stabbing away until it is pricking at your conscience like a fishhook. You can forget casting your all-important vote in the X-Factor final; an evening of M&S canapés and dull conversation beckons.

But let's face it: parties wouldn't be parties without a healthy dose of misanthropy. They feed off the mutual loathing of those compelled to attend, and no more so than at Christmas, when we are forced to socialise with the people we like least, such as our boss, our partner's boss, the trollop our partner works with who has been flirting with him all year, the competitive mum who drives her children to school in a Range Rover, splashing puddles over your child as you struggle by in the rain, the smug couple next door whose evil cat bit a hole in the ear of your innocent one.
I can't avoid sticks of cheese and pineapple with the school's PTA or half a flute of flat champagne with the neighbours, but at least I no longer have to do the office party. One of the many perks of throwing away my academic career is of not having to stand around at the end of every autumn term, frigid with tension, sipping sweet white wine from a paper cup and trying to break the ice with a crowd I have seen every day for a decade but whose private lives remain as mysterious to me as the habitat of the lesser long-nosed bat.
Only at the office party can minor slights take on the dimensions of great tragedy, as described by the poet and writer Alan Brownjohn in a poem called, simply, Office Party. A group are 'throwing out small-talk' in a smoke-filled room when a girl comes up with a 'squeaker' - one of those whistles that have a snake of paper attached to the end which unrolls when you blow. She 'squawked out the instrument' in the face of all the men except Brownjohn himself, an omission which left him momentarily destroyed.
So it could have been discretion,/ And it could have been disgust,/ But it was quite unequivocal,/ And suffer it I must.
All I know is: she passed me,/ Which I did not expect/ And I'd never so craved for/ Some crude disrespect.
Literature is filled with examples of rejection at parties, embarrassment at parties, fights at parties, boredom at parties; in fact, novels, stories and poems contain many more descriptions of social agony than the pleasure of a good night out. For Philip Larkin, patron saint of misers and misery and thus the nation's favourite poet, parties are to be avoided not just at Christmas, but all year round. In a cheerful little ditty called Vers de Société he describes receiving an invitation from a man called Warlock-Williams:
My wife and I have invited a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You'd care to join us?
Larkin would not care to join them. 'In a pig's arse, friend,' he mutters, before meditating on 'how hard it is to be alone… under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind', instead of rinsing his mouth out with washing sherry while listening to 'the drivel of some bitch/ Who's read nothing but Which' or 'asking that ass about his fool research'. In the end, however, he comes to the conclusion that the prospect of sitting under the lamp makes him feel more depressed than the prospect of being bored at the party: turning down invitations is the privilege of youth. Hence the chilling last line, in which Larkin pens his reply, 'Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course -'.
Perhaps poets are not natural party-people. W.H. Auden, who thought that New Year should be spent either with a group of close friends or in a brothel, told a story about T. S. Eliot, who, when asked by a woman whether he was enjoying the party they were both attending, replied: 'Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all.' Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met at a launch party for a magazine in which a poem of hers had been given a bad review. When Hughes tried to kiss her, Plath bit his cheek and drew blood. Thus began one of the great literary relationships of the 20th century.