England's Arcadia

Juliet Nicolson: The Perfect Summer

The New York Sun, May 2, 2007

Of all the legends with which humanity deludes itself there are few more persistent, enchanting, and tormenting than that of a lost golden age. The Jews of the Old Testament pined for Eden, and the ancient Greeks dreamed of Arcadia. In the fantasies of many modern Britons, that vanished, magical idyll may have taken place on the island they call home, and not that many years ago, but that has only sharpened the sense of loss and tightened its grip on the English imagination.

This particular golden age was said to have been ushered in with a funeral, that of Queen Victoria. It ended, no less ironically, amid celebrations, as cheering crowds feted the declaration of a war that, everyone said, everyone knew, would be over by Christmas. Nearly half a century later, Philip Larkin described the days that followed in his poem "MCMXIV." He did so with a photographer's precision ("moustached archaic faces / Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark"), a poet's lyricism, and a historian's insight. Larkin concludes with lines that blend fact and myth into a lament for the timeless, prelapsarian Albion that had been thrown so carelessly away.

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word — the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages,

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Nostalgia for that brief heyday, its glitter, glory, and grandeur only gaining in retrospective magnificence from the years of slaughter and decades of decline that followed, is a reflection of the horror that the British feel about World War I, a conflict that became, and remains, the greatest trauma in their long history. It's a nostalgia, deep, sentimental, self-indulgent and infinitely sad, that can be found in books, in the cinema, on canvas, and just about anywhere else you may care to look. To give just a few instances, it's this nostalgia that inspired the unexpected power of "Another World, 1897–1917," by former Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. It's this nostalgia, misty and melancholic, that saturates "The Shooting Party," James Mason's elegiac farewell to the big screen, and it's this nostalgia, bitter sweet but undeniable, that runs through "The Go-Between," the only one of L.P. Hartley's novels still widely read today.

To understand this nostalgia is to understand the spirit in which Juliet Nicolson has written "The Perfect Summer" (Grove Press, 264 pages, $25) an evocative, gossipy, and, on occasion, profoundly moving description of five sunbaked months in the middle of 1911. To understand this nostalgia is to understand why this book has sold so well in England. Its success may say as much about the United Kingdom today as its contents do about that same country roughly a century ago. The narrative that unfolds in "The Perfect Summer" revolves around country houses, society balls, naughty debutantes, new money, newer mores, ancient aristocracy, artistic experimentation, wild gambling, the coronation of a monarch, and the meals, oh, the meals. A country house breakfast might include "porridge, whiting, devilled kidneys, cold grouse, tongue, ham, omelette, kedgeree, and cold sliced ptarmigan": Never such breakfasts again.

To be sure, the book contains dutiful references to the gross inequality and grotesque poverty that scarred this era, but with the exception of her vivid description of a series of bitter, and portentous, strikes (and what prompted them), it seems as if Ms. Nicolson, a scion herself of the English upper classes, probably only wrote the more hardscrabble passages as a sop to our own more egalitarian age. They represent brief eat your-greens interludes before she returns with evident relish to the richer, wickedly enjoyable fare that makes up the bulk of her book.

After all, she has to: The essence of an idyll is that it must be idyllic. What's more, this particular idyll has long been scripted to derive its emotional force from the way that it was destined to end on the Western front. The suggestion that this splendor might have crumbled regardless has no part to play in this legend. Nor do awkward statistics, such as that Britain lost many more people, albeit far, far less cruelly, through emigration in the decade or so before the war, than it was to lose in the trenches.

Pedantic folk searching for that type of analysis will have to look elsewhere. It has no more place in "The Perfect Summer" than Mrs. Bridges did "upstairs." This book, by contrast, simply asks its readers to lie back and think of an England that never quite was. So pour yourself some champagne and revel in the sybaritic trivia that Ms. Nicolson lays out so invitingly before us. For example, who could not enjoy discovering what really happened during all those country house Saturday-to-Mondays ("weekend" was considered a frightfully common term), especially as they were, it turns out, ideal venues for romantic intrigue?

Ideal, yes, but a hopeful Romeo still had to watch his step. Among the many delightful anecdotes to be found in this book is the tale of Lord Beresford, who was always, apparently, very careful to check that he was sneaking into the right room. There had, you see, been an earlier and most unfortunate occasion when this lord had leapt "with an exultant ‘Cock-a-doodledo,' onto a darkened bed, believing it to contain his lover, only to be vigorously batted away by the much startled Bishop of Chester."

Never such innocence again?