AND ANOTHER THING
'The party's over' can mean a lot of different things
PAUL JOHNSON
Another London season gone, and peo- ple are beginning to slink off to the hills and beaches. It used to be said that the season began with the Royal Academy Dinner and ended with Goodwood, but nowadays I mark its demise with the Spectator party, which duly took place last week. And what a bewildering cluster of images that word 'party' summons up! It is a mystery to me how any foreigner masters our ambivalent language — or should that be ambiguous? Recently I was explaining to a Mediter- ranean lady that there are, by my computa- tion, 12 different ways of pronouncing the word 'really', each of which means some- thing different. But 'party' takes us into another dimension of multi-significance. The word is of French, ultimately Latin, ori- gin, but it is the English who have atomised it into countless particles (there we go!), each with an independent existence. The big OED, introducing its immense, 11-column section on the word, remarks in a tone of mysterious exhaustion, 'It is not possible to separate the senses belonging to parti from those belonging to partie and the arrange- ment here is in many points provisional.'
The word can mean a division or portion, 'an aliquot pare; somewhat, a little; a region or district; side or direction; a point, an affair; a plight or mess — Hardy might have said to Laurel, 'Another fine party you've gotten me into', but this might have produced political or social confusion; a side, contract or cause; on my behalf; a league, confederacy, conspiracy or plot; a company or body; a system of attachments; a small body of troops; a gang of prisoners; a company; persons met together for amusement; a gathering; an attack or com- bat; a game or match; a single person con- sidered in some relation (confusing, this; it is what Groucho Marx meant by 'the party of the foist part' and Punch by 'collapse of stout party'), and what the legal profession gleefully refers to when it makes 'the dis- tinction which is known as "party and party" costs and "solicitor and client" costs'; an opponent or antagonist; a partici- pator or accessory; a counterpart, a fellow; an equal; the individual person concerned (to which the OED adds censoriously: 'For- merly common and in serious use; now shoppy, vulgar or jocular' [interesting word, `shoppy'; not a misprint for 'sloppy', sure- ly?]); a person; one using a telephone; a subscriber; a resolution; a person to marry; an offer; and various other meanings, some described as 'senses of doubtful affinity'.
There are also scores of attributive uses and combinations. These include 'party. boat' and 'party-boating', apparently an invention of Hemingway, and 'a nobility by birth or by party card', coined, says the OED, by one 'P. Johnson in Enemies of Society', a proto-usage I had completely forgotten. You might think that party- mindedness was the mental condition of Agatha Runcible, Lady Colefax or Lady Cunard. Not at all: it is much more serious, indeed sinister, than that. It actually comes from the Russian, partiinost and was given its classic definition by Lenin himself: 'Materialism involves party-mindedness, since it compels us, when anything takes place, openly and directly to adopt the standpoint of a specific social group.' The Union of Soviet Writers reminded its mem- bers in 1958 that 'negative features of Sovi- et life can only be criticised from the stand- point of party-mindedness, i.e., that all defects are being successfully overcome by the party'. The word, in Russian, is here spelt partiynost, a reminder that the English are not the only ones to have spelt this dif- ficult word in a variety of ways — in our case partye, parti, partijs, parteis, parteyes, partise, partee, partice, pertie, pairtie, etc.
Consideration of the word 'party' reveals one's ignorance. I had always thought that 'party pooper' was a girl who enjoyed par- ties. Not at all. It is 'one who throws a gloom over social enjoyment', as in the quotation from the New Yorker, 1969: 'They pecked the hostess farewell, apologising in unison for being party-poops.' The New York Times wrote: 'No one can describe Mr Bulganin and Mr Khnishchev as being party-poopers.' They 'demonstrated their suavity and cleverness at the party'. 'Party- ing' is an Americanism too. No Englishman would write 'The delegates and guests were partied to a crisp', let alone this characteris- tic sentence by ee cummings 'Haven't seen Vanity All is Fair in? but have extensively partyed with Er former Heditor'. But 'par- tying' is also respectable old Scotch, though merely in a religious context.
In only one of its 19 principal meanings, a party can be a bee, a hop, a bash, shindig, wing-ding, blast, bust or bust-up, blow-out, spree, lark, rave, push, jamboree or frolic, without resorting to such Continental terms as soiree, levee, cocktail, yin d'honneur, and so on. In another of the 19 it can be a camarilla, junto, camorra, cabal, league, outfit, caucus, bloc, coterie, faction, splin- ter, circle, clique, ring, guild, sect or clan. Gilbert White, in his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, came across evi- dence of avian social gatherings: 'I have found,' he wrote, 'these birds in little par- ties in the autumn cantoned all along the Sussex Downs.' Then again, try to define 'having a party'. It can mean almost any- thing. And there is 'party-doggee. In 1770 the Gentleman's Magazine wrote: 'The Earl of Bute has not for a great while gone out of his house without being followed by one of those party-doggers.' I am none the wiser. Party-dodger I know about; I am rather one of those myself. A party-piano is vaguely jazz, something that came out of Harlem, then vanished back into it. Party- line can mean two totally different and quite unconnected things. There is such a person as a party-woman, not just someone who goes to a lot of parties but a quite dis- tinctive creature, noted by Jonathan Swift in 1725: 'Fortune is both blind and deaf, and a Court-lady, but then she is a most damnable party-woman.' To Alexander Pope we owe 'party-rage', which again has two distinct meanings, as does a coinage of Thackeray, which he introduced in The Vir- ginians: 'I had a very pleasant partykin last night', a small shindig in short, though it can also mean what the 'Gang of Four' belonged to.
I suspect that the political party, which dates only from the 17th century, will disap- pear long before the other kind, which goes back to the Socratic symposium and beyond. You can write novels about parties, as did Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies, and Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow and Antic Hay. Proust's A la Recherche, is really about eight parties. Heaven is a party and Wordsworth speculated that Hell is too: Is it some party in a parlour, Crammed just as they on earth were
crammed — Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, But as you by their faces see All silent, and all damned?
(He later dropped these lines, so as 'not to offend the pious'.) I leave the last word to Mr Woodhouse in Emma: 'The sooner every party breaks up the better.' That applies to articles, too.
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