Who Goes There?

To say today’s author is an outsider to the field might be an understatement. Graham Greene was one of the most beloved English writers of the mid-20th century, even being nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times. He’s known chiefly for his novels, which he divided into two groups: the serious (often Catholic-themed) novels and the “entertainments.” The former could be entertaining and the latter could at times be deceptively serious; they were not really mutually exclusive. You get the sense that The Power and the Glory and Our Man in Havana were written by the same man, despite them being in some ways very different novels. Greene was an atheist in his adolescence but converted to Catholicism when he was in college, making him one of the few adult Catholic converts who isn’t a fucking weirdo about it. Despite his strong sense of metaphysics and moral seriousness, he was at the very least a fellow traveler when it came to leftist politics, a fact that, given the Church’s allying with several fascist regimes, made his relationship with his faith a fascinatingly complicated one. Similarly today’s story, which Greene wrote in 1929, and which was apparently a personal favorite of his despite being from so early in his career, has a touch of religion about it; but if so, it’s a dark touch, showing Greene at his most cruel. “The End of the Party” isn’t exactly a supernatural horror story, although its uncanniness does push it at least to the borderline, if not there outright.

Placing Coordinates

“The End of the Party” was first published in The London Mercury in 1932, before being reprinted in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. It has since been reprinted in Children of Wonder: 21 Remarkable and Fantastic Tales (ed. William Tenn), The Sixth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories (ed. Mary Danby), The Light Fantastic: Science Fiction Classics from the Mainstream (ed. Harry Harrison), Perchance to Dream (ed. Damon Knight), among others, along with the Greene collections Twenty-One Stories and Complete Short Stories. This story, being one of Greene’s most popular out of his short fiction, is not exactly hard to find.

Enhancing Image

Peter and Francis Morton are identical twin brothers, both ten years old, and while they do look very similar, they are in other ways very different. Peter is the “normal” one, while Francis seems to have lagged behind in terms of maturity—or perhaps it’s something else. Despite his age, at which points children would be more courageous, Francis is still deathly afraid of the dark, and even has a nurse chaperone him, which is embarrassing for someone his age. He also doesn’t understand social interactions very well, especially with those of the opposite sex. Girls make him uneasy, which is not by itself unusual, except he doesn’t seem to do much better with people of his own gender. Speaking of uneasiness, we know from the opening scene that something bad is on the horizon, because Francis had a dream that he was dead. And today is the yearly party at Mrs. Henne-Falcon’s place. Both brothers dread this, although Francis more so, given he has to suffer more directly. It’s at this party, every year, that the adults turn off all the lights and the children play a game of hide-and-seek. Peter doesn’t like this, if only because it scares his brother so much.

[Francis’s] cheeks still bore the badge of a shameful memory, of the game of hide and seek last year in the darkened house, and of how he had screamed when Mabel Warren put her hand suddenly upon his arm. He had not heard her coming. Girls were like that. Their shoes never squeaked. No boards whined under the tread. They slunk like cats on padded claws.

Francis feigns ill, but his parents don’t buy it. They’re all going to the party, because it’s one of those family obligations. It’s like if you hate weddings, but oh a relative of yours is getting married so you “have” to goooo. It’s horrible. This is the kind of horror that would most strongly work on people who find themselves in either Francis or Peter’s shoes, which is to say I found it a pretty effective exercise in escalating dread. This story is nearly a century old, and I haven’t been officially diagnosed myself, but Francis is very likely autistic. He might also have some kind of PTSD. The two are not mutually exclusive. There is something not right about the boy. On the one hand Greene is clearly setting up a bad fate for Francis, but he also writes him from a just as clearly empathetic standpoint, as if Greene understands the boy’s anxieties and that the act of writing this story was also an act of sado-masochism. It must have hurt to write it, but at the same time it might’ve been a kind of pain that really does strengthen one’s own character (unlike most pain, which is “malignantly useless”), hence I think why Greene continued to have a soft spot for it. “The End of the Party,” which mind you Greene would’ve written when he was only 24 or 25, marked a bit of a turning point for him as a writer.

Like a lot of great short stories, “The End of the Party” is loaded with details, some of which are arguably problematic. There’s a pervasive misogyny that’s baked into the narrative, both what happens and the symbolism behind it, such that it only makes sense as a story when one considers the misogynistic elements. With the exception of the nurse, who, like Peter, serves to keep Francis out of danger, every other female character acts as an antagonist, including the twin boys’ own mother, who tells Francis that he “must go” (italics mine) to the party, with “the cold confidence of a grown-up’s retort.” The young girls who will be at the party, who are up to a few years older than the boys, are even more scornful. And then there’s Mrs. Henne-Falcon, whose very name is somehow a combination of two birds, a hen and a falcon—both a “gossiping hen” and a bird of prey. Danger. Greene is a great writer, maybe one of the best of the 20th century, so it’s no surprise that even when his ends might be disagreeable, the means are usually not. He knows what he’s doing. You could, of course, reason that since this story is told from the perspective of two young boys (the exact perspective shifts back and forth between Francis and Peter), the misogyny should be assumed to be more a flaw of the characters than the author; and after all, having been raised as a boy myself, I can tell you that boys, almost without exception, hold a strong primordial distrust toward girls.

There is also the context in which Greene wrote “The End of the Party,” it being subtextually a post-war narrative. Something to remember about World War I is that there was a profound difference in post-war experiences between the American and British sides, the Americans, having barely fought in the war to begin with, having come out of it relatively unscathed; but for the British it was a very different story. Greene was born in 1904, so he was too young to have served, even if he wanted to, but he grew up in the shadow of a generation of damaged men—the ones who had come out of the war alive, that is. He could not understand too vividly the sufferings of the generation of British men that preceded him, so with this story he did something rather intriguing and profound, in that he seemed to transfer some of that war trauma to the generation that came after him. Remember that Francis and Peter are ten years old, and assuming the story takes place roughly when it was written, this means they would have been born very shortly after the end of World War I. While the war, to my recollection, never comes up directly in-story, something big hangs over the boys’ heads—something much bigger than just awkward social interaction. Of course, for someone neurodivergent like Francis, awkward social interaction might well represent what World War I represented for a lot of people during that war’s duraction: the apocalypse.

There Be Spoilers Here

The party happens and so does the game of hide-and-seek, and there’s no way Francis can get out of it, as if fate has ordered this series of events. Or maybe God did it. God comes up a few times in this little story, and if the God of Abraham does exist (as Greene believed), then He seems to have it out for Francis, and for no discernable reason. Francis’s destiny, be it for good or ill, will not be deferred. Of course, this all could’ve been prevented had the adults taken Francis’s disability into consideration, but, having forced him to be like the neurotypical kids they’ve tried to fit a round peg in a square hole. It’s during the game that Peter and Francis, after having been separated, are reunited, although they can’t see each other. It’s also at this point, during the story’s climax, that the perspective shifts back to Peter, after having us mostly be stuck with Francis. If you’ve read the story then you may have already forgotten that we were in Peter’s shoes at the very beginning, and so here we are again at the end. There’s a reason for this. Peter sees his brother as a reflection of himself, both physically and symbolically. Peter finds Francis in hiding and touches his brother’s face, which is how he knows it’s him, before taking Francis’s hand in his. Francis doesn’t say anything after this point, not even after the game has ended and the lights have come back on—because he’s dead. He died, apparently from sheer fright, when he felt Peter’s hand on his face, as if it were the hand of God which emerged from the blackness. Peter would’ve noticed something was wrong sooner, but he’s so intimately connected with his twin, as if there were a psychic link between them, that he could not at first separate the two.

Peter continued to hold the clenched fingers in an arid and puzzled grief. It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self-pity why it was that the pulse of his brother’s fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more darkness.

Not that there are many happy endings in Greene’s fiction, but this is surely one of the bleakest and unsettling.

A Step Farther Out

Greene struggled with mental illness throughout his life, namely depression, which I think often shows through in his novels; but with “The End of the Party,” one of his most reprinted short stories, it’s like a tiny but all-devouring neutron star. It’s a black hole of pessimism, on almost a cosmic scale despite its small size. I was under the impression, going in, that this was a ghost story, although it ended up not being that; actually it doesn’t even have any overt supernatural elements to speak of. What it does have is a strong sense of the uncanny, and of impending doom. It’s a story of two young boys, both of whom are troubled, each in his own way, who have spent their whole lives by each other’s side up to this point, until suddenly they’re separated, as if God had cut the tape between them with a pair of scissors. It’s scary, but also tragic. I love it.

See you next time.