Rearranging the shop window of the past
It is now exactly half a century since I first came to live permanently in London, and the summer of 1955 shines in my memory as a golden age of delight and civilisation — outrageous plays at the Royal Court, novels like Lucky Jim and Officers and Gentlemen so funny that your guts ached with laughing, delicious, well-mannered girls in Givenchy, clowns like Ken Tynan and Brendan Behan to raise guffaws, Noël Coward and Hutch tinkling the keys, dances at Londonderry House, Lime Grove coming into sharp focus, Osbert’s pocket cartoons every day at breakfast and Vicky in the afternoon. In the evenings and well into the warm nights, London glittered and glowed. Was it to be the Milroy in Mayfair or the Gargoyle in Soho, or a shindig in Belgravia?
Was it really like that? Well, no: nostalgia is a great stimulator of the creative imagination. But it is a powerful force all the same, in all societies and in all ages. It was always better then. Alexandrian Macedonia looked back with envy on Periclean Athens, which in turn longed for Mycenae and Agamemnon. The Second Temple Jews sighed for the age of David and Solomon, and after the Dispersal they even called old Herod ‘the Great’. Imperial Rome, sotto voce, remembered the virtue and honesty of the Republic, just as Cicero had wept for the old Kings. The whole of the Middle Ages was an orgy of nostalgia for the Roman imperium, and what was the Renaissance but an exercise in bringing back a lost and enchanted antiquity?
All of us have in our memories a fixed point when things were good, and from which there has been nothing but material and moral declension. Queen Elizabeth I, in her old age, recalled with fondness the time of her youth which, God knows, was harsh and risky, for no one’s head was safe, including her own, when her ferocious father ruled. But it seemed to her a better time than the 1600s, with its subtle malice and treacheries. She told her archivist, William Lambarde, as they browsed over a volume of state records he had compiled, ‘In those days force and arms did prevail: but now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found.’ Elizabeth must have known that, in fact, her reign had brought peace and unprecedented prosperity to her people, never more so than at its close, but her godson, Sir John Harington, found the old girl sad and irritable: ‘She walks much in her Privy Chamber, and stamps with her feet at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword at times into the arras in great rage.’ He added, ‘She always keeps a sword by her table.’ (This gossipy detail has always amazed me. Nearly 70, was she seriously proposing to use this old sword? And against whom? Was this not carrying nostalgia a little far?) But, with old Elizabeth dead, the groaning subjects of King James were soon lamenting her golden times ‘when the blessed queen ruled’. But the real caesura in English history was the Civil War and Commonwealth. These 20 years of change and strife killed the old monarchical and feudal England of the Middle Ages for good. In his papers John Aubrey left a long passage lamenting his youth, before the Puritan rebels destroyed the traditional order. He saw it as an age of deference. There was much kneeling, as a sign of respect. Those appearing before the Privy Council always addressed it on their knees. Children, he says, knelt before their parents. Obedience sprang from respect, not compulsion and force. It was a time, he recalled, of self-entertainment, at home, no gadding about to shows and concerts, but tales round the chimney corner — especially ghost stories. Now, said Aubrey sadly, few people believed in spirits, the dreadful realism of the Civil War having ended all that. He uses a striking phrase to make his point: ‘For gunpowder is a great fugator of phantosmes.’ Talleyrand always said, in old age, that those who had not known France before 1789 had no conception of what civilised living and happiness were like. Nonsense, of course, but also true. Before that great convulsion and the long wars it generated, people did not fear the future and the horrors it might bring: they had confidence in life as it was. That is why Fragonard and Greuze could paint as they did — and, on our side of the Channel, Gainsborough and Wright of Derby. After 1789 no one, anywhere, could create a building like the Petit Trianon. And William Beckford’s Fonthill was already an exercise in hopeless recreation of the past — it was bound to be unlivable-in, and to crash down in ruin.
Naturally, in due course, people said the same about life before the first world war. I used to have long talks with old Lady Violet Bonham-Carter about those times. She had total recall, especially of the delicious details, and would take me on a cab-ride of memory, from Westminster up into Hampstead, where her father lived until he got into the Cabinet at the end of 1905. As she talked I could hear the clip-clop of the horses and smell the harness and the leather hood — she said the Commons had a special smell, of an exclusively male place where women were not welcome to clean and tidy. I enjoy regional memories too: the west of Ireland of the Somerville and Ross stories, where the peasants still talked their astonishingly poetic English, full of magic metaphors, and everything revolved around horses. I have just been reading the letters of D.H. Lawrence; marvellous they are throughout but especially in the pre-war period, when he had just run off with Frieda and they were living penuriously but romantically in little Italian villas on the slopes above Lake Garda or the gulf of Spezia. His description of what was still Austrian Italy, a land of carefree peasants without a thought for the morrow, and comic-opera Austrian soldiers straight from Die Lustige Witwe, and spectacular views and delicious wine and fruit sold in halfpence and farthings, makes one long for a time-machine. Almost everywhere with the motor-car erased is better. That’s why one loves Venice so much, though even there the declension since I first visited in 1948 is catastrophic.
Literature is often at its best when sensitive and educated spirits, who know the details of the lost past, try to evoke their favourite period. Thus one gets Gibbon on the Antonines, the best epoch in the whole of history according to him; or A.L. Rowse on the midElizabethans; Carlyle on the time of Cromwell’s glory; G.M. Young on the Victorians, especially the 1850s and 1860s (the latter being the best decade in English history, in my view), Thackeray on Georgian England, or Henry Adams on ante-bellum Massachusetts. I have already written about my blissful Thirties childhood in my A Vanished Landscape, just out in paperback, and soon I shall settle down to describe the 1940s and 1950s. If there is one thing even better than living in the past, it is describing it for then you are in control, and you can arrange it like an old-fashioned shop window.