Frances Wilson in Literary Review:
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.’
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