Twenty years ago I proposed to a publisher a book about parties in literature and history. I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or going to one is a high-risk activity, if done properly. Trimalchio’s dinner party in The Satyricon concludes with him staging a dress rehearsal of his funeral; Edgar Allan Poe gives us the party as massacre in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. Kitty, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, compares her party nerves to ‘a young man’s feelings before a battle’, while Lucia in E F Benson’s Lucia’s Progress looks forward to the warfare: 

With social blood pressure so high, with such embryos of plots and counterplots darkly developing, with, generally, an atmosphere so charged with electricity, Susan Wyse’s party tonight was likely (to change the metaphor once more) to prove a scene of carnage. These stimulating expectations were amply fulfilled.

Party carnage begins with the invitation list, because a party, as Etienne de Beaumont said, ‘is never given for someone. It is given against someone.’ It took Truman Capote three months to write the ‘cast list’ for his Black and White Ball, what with the number of names being added and erased. One man’s wife threatened to kill herself if she didn’t make the cut. In Evelyn Waugh’s story ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, the party gets no further than a list of names because Miss Fleace, waiting with a dance band, a cooked dinner and twelve hired footmen for her guests to arrive, has forgotten to post the invitations. 

Parties end not when the guests have gone home but when they have composed their narratives of the night. The essayist Logan Pearsall Smith reflected after a soirée that it had been

a delightful evening … the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing. But soon after, ‘God, it’s awful,’ I muttered, ‘I wish I were dead.’

The silent-film actress Brenda Dean Paul, one of the Bright Young People satirised in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, mythologised the debauchery of the Bath and Bottle party, held in a municipal swimming pool in 1928, with an image of the morning after: ‘turgid water and thousands of bobbing champagne corks, discarded bathing caps and petal-strewn tiles as the sun came out and filtered through the giant skylights of St George’s Baths, and we wended our way home’. 

Poets tend not to enjoy parties. W H Auden recalled that when T S Eliot was asked at a party if he was having fun, he replied, ‘Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all.’ ‘My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps/To come and waste their time and ours,’ writes Warlock-Williams in Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. ‘Perhaps/You’d care to join us?’ ‘In a pig’s arse, friend,’ the speaker thinks. Why waste an evening holding a glass of ‘washing sherry’, catching ‘the drivel of some bitch/Who’s read nothing but Which’ and ‘Asking that ass about his fool research’? Small talk is usually the problem. Auden, in ‘At the Party’, moans how ‘Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:/Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.’

Party talk makes for good social comedy. Tom Rachman’s story collection Basket of Deplorables begins with an election party hosted by Democrats in Manhattan in 2016. ‘What I don’t get about chiropractors, osteopaths and physios is how they interface, you know?’ opines one guest. ‘If I may mansplain…’ another interjects. ‘Social media’, a third is heard to say, ‘is taking ownership of the self.’ ‘Definitely an interesting narrative to unpack,’ responds a professor of cultural theory. ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ thinks Georgie, the hostess, ‘I’d rather just scream.’ Hosts often regret the whole affair; after all, they cannot escape. In Chekhov’s ‘The Party’, Olga, surveying her guests, sees only ‘boring cranks, hypocrites, or idiots’. She has a sudden urge to ‘stop smiling, leap up and shout, “I’m sick of the lot of you!”’ Better to be like Jay Gatsby and watch your party from a window.

History happens after midnight, so it is vital to stay to the end. Norman Mailer’s second wife, Adele Morales, wondered what he thought he would miss if he were ever not the last person to leave: ‘What revelations awaited him in the dense, dreary, drunken remnants of a party? … The only answer I got was some quote from Gatsby, something about parties that changed people’s lives.’ At the end of one of his own parties in 1960, Mailer stabbed Adele twice with a knife. Going home early, however, has dangers of its own. ‘She is afraid’, quipped Groucho Marx, ‘that if she leaves she’ll become the life of the party.’

Literature is filled with examples of deaths at parties, boredom at parties, embarrassment at parties, fights at parties, rejection at parties. In his poem ‘Office Party’, Alan Brownjohn describes a girl working the room with one of those annoying whistles which, when you blow it, unfurls like a snake. She ‘squawked out the instrument’ in the face of all the men, except the speaker himself, leaving him momentarily destroyed: ‘All I know was: she passed me,/Which I did not expect/– And I’d never so craved for/Some crude disrespect.’ 

Parties mark the passage of time – birthdays, coming of age, the start of a new year – but are inherently nostalgic. This is why, when the world becomes dangerous, they are often themed. In Vile Bodies there are ‘Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else’. Each is treated as though it were the last party before planetary annihilation. In Leonora Carrington’s tale ‘The Debutante’, a deb is so nerve-racked at the prospect of her coming-out ball that she persuades a hyena from the zoo to put on a silk dress and court shoes and take her place. The substitution is discovered only when the guests notice a strong smell. Two famous coming-out balls took place in July 1939, the final season before the Second World War. At the first, the Cubitt ball in Holland House, the debutantes danced beneath Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits. A year later Holland House was bombed. The second was given at Blenheim by the Duchess of Marlborough less than two months before the war. Chips Channon recorded in his diary: ‘I have seen much, travelled far, and am accustomed to splendour, but there has never been anything quite like tonight … Shall we ever see the like again?’ Parties held at historical turning points are of particular interest to me, but then all good parties become turning points. 

The party pickings being so rich, my file fattened by the day. So why did I not write the book? Because this was all I had: a collection of anecdotes, quotations, lines from poems, scenes from novels. What was the thesis, where was the story, what was the book actually about? Was my subject specific parties or parties in general? I couldn’t decide. Did balls and formal dinners count as parties? Ditto. For six years, I circled around the subject, finding no way in. The material I had gathered might make for a thinnish social history or an amusing enough anthology, but I am neither a historian nor an anthologist. Parties, I conceded, were indescribable, which is what I liked about them to begin with.