Aristocratic Comedy and Intellectual Satire Len Platt For all the uncertainties about how to read and indeed define it, the idea of modernism remains strong currency. In literary history, where the modernist period is frequently extended as late as the 1940s and beyond, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf continue to feature largely as the true iconoclasts and innovators. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, a distinctive style of representation and commentary, one more homogenously English, seemed to speak popularly and, arguably, in more direct terms for post-war modernity. Writers such as Michael Arlen, Aldous Huxley, and Evelyn Waugh were at the centre of this literary fashion for surface, superficiality and satire. Ostensibly anti-modernist, and often self-consciously retrospective in relation to fin de siècle and Victorian identities, these writers were nevertheless very much of the moment, their typically episodic forms of writing as distinct from earlier versions of realism as were the classic texts of high modernism. In his 1971 account, David Lodge emphasized how Waugh’s ‘lucid, classically correct prose’ seemed to hold ‘little in common with the tortured and tortuous products of modernism’ (4). But, at the same time, this was no return to the perceived formalities of nineteenth-century realism. English social satire of the 1920s and 30s developed distinguishing tones and narrative styles and structures where overarching plots were often displaced by narrative fragmentation and intellectual conversations and debates, as if the long story, and its closure, had somehow lost viability to be replaced by ‘talk’. It was also characteristically driven by experience self-consciously constructed as the new. Especially in this latter sense, satirical fiction of this period was crucially defined by contemporaneity. 2 Here the threats to social cohesion, political stability and cultural value visualized in late Victorian and Edwardian literary culture became manifest in a literature that reproduced the vitality of post-War England as a wild and crazy fall into decadence and degeneration. At the centre of this decline and fall was a youth culture typically realized as the badly gone awry — the ‘Bright Young People’ who in Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) ‘came popping all together, out of some one’s electric brougham like a litter of pigs’ (chap. vi). An extended discussion about ‘radical instability in our whole world-order’ in the same novel implicates a generation that ‘had a chance after the war that no generation has ever had. There was a whole civilization to be saved and remade — and all they seem to do is to play the fool.’ All of which leaves a less than intellectually subtle Lord Metroland in the deep state of confusion that so often characterized the parent mind in these novels: ‘I don’t see,’ he complains, ‘how all that explains why my stepson should drink like a fish and go about everywhere with a negress’ (chap. viii). Sharp and witty and often involving farce, pastiche, and the grotesque, this was substantially a comic literature. In the hands of such writers as Nancy Mitford, Compton Mackenzie and, most notably, P. G. Wodehouse, it could be relatively accepting of the modern world and its perceived fall into mass culture. Taking his lead from the musical comedy shows he worked on as a lyricist and libretto writer from 1904 onwards, Wodehouse’s fiction in particular, and in sharp distinction to a fin de siècle often scandalised by the modern, was famously accommodating as a site of ‘safe pleasure’. Here concerns about change were confined to the hysterics of an older Edwardian, even Victorian conservatism. Or they were domesticated, reduced to minor misdemeanours and even trivialized as style matters with Bertie Wooster’s more extreme excursions into tasteless contemporary fashion easily rendered harmless 3 by Jeeves’s firm and inevitable disposal. Working–class radicalism, potentially a more serious threat to civilisation, was nevertheless similarly both disarming and disarmed. In The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) it is squeezed between a love triangle and comically diminished as the ‘Heralds of the Red Dawn’ led by ‘old Rowbottom …. A delightful chap’, as Bingo Little informs Bertie Wooster. ‘Wants to massacre the bourgeoisie, sack Park Lane and disembowel the hereditary aristocracy. Well, nothing could be fairer than that, what?’ (chap. xi). Wodehouse worked the disposition of a wider popular culture to formulate a modernity that was absurd, but also fun and essentially genial. As well as being comic, English satire of the 1920s and 30s was knowingly selfregarding, a quality that moderated its satirical bite or, more accurately, problematized the issue of a satiric status that looked both ways — both outwards to its obvious social targets and more self reflexively towards narrators and, indeed, implied reader identities. In this respect, and others, Ronald Firbank was key. His fictions maintained the traditional targets of literary satire — the aristocratic classes and the clergy — but what was once perceived as corrupt and corrupting behaviour here became not just reduced to more human dimensions as the naughty, but also lovingly aestheticized — as in the memorable spanking scene in The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923) where the Honourable ‘Eddy’ Monteith requests Lionel Limpness, ‘Lord Tiredstock’s third (and perhaps most gifted) son,’ to ‘turn over, Old Dear, while I chastise you!’ (chap. v). Similarly with Cardinal Pirelli’s passion for young men and boys in The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) which produces the climatic chase around the church to the jolly rhythm of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, ‘up and down, in and out, round and round “the Virgin” ’ (chap x). Such interests and predilections are everywhere in Firbank, in the pleasure that Mrs Thoroughfare takes in the lash in Valmouth (1919) for example, 4 and, in the same novel, Sister Ecclesia’s responses to the rigours of religious life. ‘Chafing at her Vows’ and ‘martyred to find some outlet to expression’, she ‘was like to have died, had not Nature inspired her to seek relief in her sweetest, most inconsequent way’ (chap viii). With traditional and conservative ‘immorality’ displaced by the exotic, and rendered with such fine enthusiasm, it became extremely difficult, impossible in fact, to see the borders between sarcasm and fantasist identification — a blurring central to what James Douglas Merritt usefully termed ‘fantastic camp’ and somehow central to the quality of Firbank’s achievement (1969, 31). Such complexities were picked up in the work of many of the newer generation satirists. Ambiguous playfulness often blurred the nature and depth of the engagement with contemporaneity. Wary of intellectualism, often perceived in terms of modernist faddism and experimentation, Waugh complained that his fictions, ‘entertainments’, had been taken far too seriously, a position which critics later developed. In his 2001 introduction to Decline and Fall, David Bradshaw, for example, claimed that ‘truth to life was the last thing Waugh aspired to when he wrote his first novel …. picaresque style and abundant farce’ being, according to Bradshaw, ‘its most engaging and enduring qualities’ (xi-xii). Similarly Max Beerbohm, in a note to a 1947 edition of his novel Zuleika Dobson (1911), was surprised by the reception his novel had once had, explaining how ‘when … this book was first published, some people seemed to think it was intended as a satire on such things as the herd instinct, as feminine coquetry, as snobbishness, even as legerdemain, whereas I myself had supposed it was just a fantasy’ (n. p.). More typically, however, this literature was characterized not by accommodation or delicious escapism, but by its dark edginess — the obvious reason why it was taken more seriously and why it appeared to resonate so forcefully. 5 For all the imperative to ‘entertain’, some of the most distinguished novels of the period — Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), and Wyndham Lewis’s muscular version of the genre, the astonishing The Apes of God (1930) — veered into deep cultural pessimism. Here the First World War, missed by most of these writers, some of whom were too young to enlist, has often been invoked as one of the shaping contexts. In his 1940 autobiography, Pack My Bag, Henry Green, ‘born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both’ (5), a wrote suggestively about a generation that ‘had been through a time of upheaval and had not in their homes or at their public schools known until joining the University a life they could be sure would continue’ (211). In his 1970s account, Martin Green was more direct about the impact of a war crucial in creating the sonnenkind mentality that he saw as defining the ‘Brideshead Generation’, having the effect of arresting the development of the ‘sons of England’ who ‘no longer wanted to grow up to become fathers themselves’ (1977, 62) — although it should be noted that however much it may be considered to have belonged to a ‘youth culture’, English satire looked back on the Great War with maturity and, often, great authority. Similarly Michael North in his 1984 account, Henry Green and the Writing of his Generation wrote about a generation he thought stunted in growth, in ‘memoir after memoir … the undergraduates of 1923 or 1924 were made to feel like a diminished race’, (6) a dynamic confirmed by Waugh in A Little Learning (1964) where he pointed out how his contemporaries ‘were often reproachfully reminded, particularly by the college servants, of how impoverished and subdued we were by comparison with those great men [who died in battle]’ (170). Whether as a result of the Great War or not, it is a fact that English satire could be distinctly bleak and disconcerting. At the further end of a spectrum that might be said 6 to begin with all the fun of Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City (1923) there is, for example, Henry Green’s Party Going (1939), a richly metaphorical text which concerns a group of bright young things including, symptomatically, Amabel. She ‘had her own position in London, shop girls in Northern England knew her name and what she looked like from photographs in illustrated weekly papers, in Hyderabad the colony knew the colour of her walls’ (140). Led by such notoriety, and other versions of the nouveau riche, the party goers of the title, then, are at one level a group of socialites planning to leave England for a holiday on the Continent. They are thwarted in their plans when the weather sets in and they get fogbound at the railway terminal. At a deeper level, however, Party Going evokes something much more sombre and threatening. Produced at a time when the national imperative for social cohesion was paramount, Green’s novel constructs a modern England apparently slipping its moorings. The social elite leads a trivial, hedonistic and apparently careless existence. At the same time, it is hugely vulnerable to perceived threats to its distinction. Julia Wray’s first encounter with the foggy street establishes the sense of insecurity that is to become central to the novel: As she stepped out into this darkness of fog above and left warm rooms with bells and servants and her uncle who was one of Mr Roberts’ directors — a rich important man — she lost her name and was all at once anonymous; if it had not been for her rich coat she might have been any typist making her way home. (15-16) The fog thickens, preventing trains from leaving the station and the exclusive party rents a suite of rooms at the station hotel where they plan to wait out the delay in luxury. From here they watch the crowd ‘swarming’ on the station concourse below. Informed by the railway bureaucracy that thirty-thousand people, depersonalized as 7 ‘water beetles’ (27) and ‘thousands of tailors’ dummies’ (178), are waiting for trains, with potentially nine-hundred and sixty-five persons, arriving every minute, the privileged group, for all their protected insularity, feel increasingly under siege. With the multitude of people swelling and pouring onto the station concourse — ‘half the suburbs’ seem ‘stranded down below’ (231) — tensions rise and ‘a large force of police’ files in (53). Behind the glass of hotel windows, the exclusive group grows more and more insecure, increasingly apprehensive of contact with the crowd below — ‘they’ll come up here and be dirty and violent’ — and at the same time curiously, and childishly, stimulated: ‘they’ll probably try and kiss us or something’ (235). Upstairs Max and Julia had finished their tea and, in an interval of silence, she had gone over to the window and was looking down on that crowd below. As he came over to join her she said well anyway, those police over there would protect their luggage …. And as she watched she saw this crowd was in some way different …. in one section under the window it seemed to be swaying like branches rock in a light wind and … she seemed to hear a continuous murmur coming from it. When she noticed heads everywhere turned towards that section just below she flung her window up. Max said: ‘Don’t go and let all that in,’ and she heard them chanting beneath: ‘WE WANT TRAINS, WE WANT TRAINS.’ Also that raw air came in, harsh with fog and from somewhere a smell of cooking, there was a shriek from somewhere in the crowd, it was all on a vast scale …. She had forgotten what it was to be outside, what it smelled like and felt like, and she had not realized what this crowd was, just seeing it through glass. It went on chanting WE WANT TRAINS, WE WANT TRAINS. (98-99) 8 This troubled imaging of the border where a wealthy, privileged elite meets its cultural other — the frightening and despised mass to which Julia Wray is temporarily drawn in this extract — indicates how susceptible the apparently light surface of social satire could be to much darker tones that often came close to disgust, and even self disgust. Not unusually the satirical style itself became ridiculed as performance and pose, a further illustration of its complexity and introspection. In Arlen’s Young Men in Love (1927) sarcasm is ‘the curse of modern literature …. no more sarcasm — or satire, or whatever they called the rubbish’ (314) and in The Apes of God satire becomes no more than a fashion excoriated as ‘the private news-sheet, the big “Gossip”-book — the expansion of a Society newspaper-paragraph — of the Reigning Order …. the “great novels” of this time are dramatized social news-sheets of that particular Social World’ (262). A key role of English satire seen in these darker terms was to reposition a substantially new England in relation to a parentage visualized problematically in Victorian or Edwardian terms. This involved recognition and sometimes acceptance as well as establishing the more familiar critical distance of one generation seeking to define itself against another. The archaeological disposition towards a fairly immediate past was particularly evident in the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett, who, exceptionally among the writers under discussion, did not write explicitly about England in the 1920s and 30s at all. So compelling was the late Victorian/Edwardian period to Compton-Burnett that virtually all her nineteen novels, domestically focussed as the titles indicate — Men and Wives (1931), Daughters and Sons (1937), Parents and Children (1941) and Mothers and Sons (1955) — were historical. This extraordinary revisiting reproduced the calm, order and authority of haute-bourgeois English family life in Pinteresque terms, as barely-concealed insecurity, jealousy, lust 9 and hysteria. By repositioning the Victorian upper-middle class at the very centre of a universalized human condition, it also attempted to rescue a very particular version of Englishness from marginality and eventual redundancy. As Compton-Burnett explained in conversation with Kay Dick: ‘I think that the world that I draw, that some people say has vanished, will always go on, with certain modifications …. It seems to me that as new worlds arise and pass, the world of my books remains and that it is getting added to, as richer people, who may come from anywhere, rise up and join it’ (Dick, 1971, 45). More usually, however, English social satire was differently sensitized to change in the world, producing a more familiar kind of ambiguity towards the fin de siècle. It was insistent on exposing the old-fashioned, conservative and militarist authority that in Nancy Mitford’s 1931 romp Highland Fling thinks T. S. Eliot ‘tripe’ (chap. viii) and insists ‘every man ought to have some regular work to do, preferably soldiering’ (chap. ii). At the same time the broad ‘Victorian’, as Mitford’s version of things illustrates, was recognized as being intensely familial and returned to as a site of great cultural value. Thus when the ultra modern and shockingly camp Albert Gates, who takes the middle name ‘Memorial’ out of regard for his favourite monument, falls for the equally modern Jane in Mitford’s novel, the engagement ring has a garnet stone, ‘with Queen Victoria’s head carved on it’ (chap. xix). Similarly when the Victorian pile that is Dalloch Castle burns to the ground, the same modern young couple rush to rescue what they can of its precious Victoriana — ‘the bead stools, lacquer boxes, wax flowers and albums of water colour sketches’ (chap. ix). Apparently the ‘Victorian’ could be laughed at, but not entirely dispensed with. There were clearly some senses in which, for Mitford, as for a figure like Firbank, it had to be preserved — not least as retro chic. 10 As in literary culture since the late Victorian period, English satire’s parentage was also typically seen in terms of the traditional aristocracy, the imagined source of racialized nobility, culture and beauty and particularly distinguished in Wodehouse’s Something Fresh (1915) by an inbred ability to withstand boredom: ‘we may say what we will against the aristocracy of England; we may wear red ties and attend Socialist meetings; but we cannot deny that in certain crises blood will tell. An English peer of the right sort can be bored nearer to the point where mortification sets in, without showing it, than anyone else in the world’ (chap. iii). The usual role of satire here was not to betray the associations attached to the representation of aristocracy since the eighteen-nineties, indeed it sometimes postulated the idea of an aristocracy insulated from further recession and decline, as in the same Wodehouse idyll where, post Lloyd George, there was no ‘fly in the British aristocratic amber’ other than ‘the problem of What To Do With The Younger Sons’ (chap. ii). The more standard response, however, was finally to acknowledge the full and sorry collapse of the aristocratic estate and expose the void it apparently left. In this way the landed elite, no longer protected by Sherlock Holmes and Lord Percy Blakeney or thrown into heroism by adventures in the frontier wildernesses beyond civility, was finally retired in the English satirical novel, although not without considerable pain and uproar. Typically it appeared as a distressed and dispossessed class, removed to the economic and moral margins where, gripped in anomie, it struggled to articulate against the modern world. Both Vile Bodies and A Handful Dust (1934) exemplify the tradition. The latter is the story of Tony and Brenda Last who are by name and signification the last of traditional aristocracy. In the former novel, set in a kind of post-feudal anarchy, the King of Ruritania and his deranged sister, who ‘thinks everyone is a bomb’, are reduced to lodging in Lottie Crump’s run down hotel (chap. iii). ‘The eighth Earl of 11 Balcairn’, in the same text, is positioned similarly as a victim of absurd and ghastly displacement. Following the example of ‘the fifteenth Marquess of Vanbrugh’ (chap iv), Balcairn attempts to make a living as a gossip columnist, although he is hardly fit to do so — he has to verify the spelling of ‘Pamela Popham’ in ‘the stud book … I got into awful trouble about spelling the other day.’ In this role he writes lurid betrayals of his friends and family, a fallen state, certainly, although preferable to the fate of his cousins who are all ‘in lunatic asylums or else they live in the country and do indelicate things with wild animals’ (chap. vi). Finally he is reduced to committing suicide, assisted by that most modern of conveniences — the gas oven. Fragmented, economically failing and politically much diminished by the 1920s, the landed aristocracy reappeared in fiction as grotesquely out-of-tune, often in a state of confused puzzlement, wondering, like Brenda Last, the daughter of Lord St Cloud in A Handful of Dust, why the world of Woolworths, the ‘movies’ and the ‘modern bed’ had such a profound grip on them (chap. ii). Sometimes they were in a terminal state of physical decline as in the prologue to The Apes of God, entitled ‘Death — The — Drummer’, where Lady Fredigonde Follet, whose ‘large false-teeth rattled in the horse-like skull’ (8), is darkly imagined going to her bath and bleeding into it ‘like a Roman’ (17). She is ‘the ancêtre … the last of the family portraits, but she has never been painted — no artist could ever stick it out, it was a battle between the tongue and brush’ (42). Lord Edward Lorgnon in Point Counter Point, while more physically robust, is similarly on the strange margin of things, a scientific enthusiast of the positivist kind but one heading towards freakishness. Much engaged with the weird science that involves grafting tail tissue onto the ‘amputated right foreleg’ of a newt, he has ‘a certain air of the skeleton in the cupboard — broken loose; or of one of those monsters which haunt the palaces of only the best and most aristocratic families’ 12 (chap. iii). In Brideshead Revisited (1945), Lord Marchmain, the head of ‘a very sinister family’ (book one, chap. ii), returns to die at Brideshead with ‘a frame of malevolence’ exposed — it ‘protruded like his own sharp bones through the sunken skin’ (book three, chap.iv.) Much lighter fictions maintained these gothic tones. In Mitford’s Highland Fling, for example, the bright young things of a modern generation, Sally and Walter Monteath, arrive at the House of Lords for a meeting with Sally’s aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Craigdalloch, only to find that ‘one’s spiritual home’ has become a ‘church’ or ‘more like a mausoleum’: “D’you see that very old man over there?” “I see the seven oldest living creatures, if you mean one of them.” “The one with the greenest face over by the statue of Queen Victoria.” “My dear, I hadn’t noticed him. But how awful! Can’t we help in some way? Is he dying?” “Oh, I expect sort of vaguely he is. This place mummifies people, you know, without their having to die first, and they often go on creeping about like that for years. That’s why they’re called Die Hards.” (Chap. iv) These versions of end of aristocracy, entirely characteristic of social satire in this period, were not deterministic in the familiar left-wing way where a parasitic class reached its endgame as a result of historical logic — not even in the case of Mitford who styled herself as a socialist but was instinctively and knowingly aristocratic. Indeed Highland Fling was above all a late attempt to reconcile a modified and more engaged aristocracy, represented by the youthfully liberalized Sir Hubert and Lady Dacres, with the new modern, a dynamic understood, again, in generational terms. Here Mitford, herself the daughter of Lord Redesdale, recognized the redundancy of 13 the old aristocracy while at the same time acknowledging its continued cultural importance. In this respect she resonated with a wider literary culture that, far from viewing aristocratic decline as natural wastage, saw it a result of the rise of the Nietzschean massman, a sad by-product of the flattened and monotone mass culture that was contemporaneity. In this context, the dying-just-about present also resurfaced as an echoing absence, a ghostly reminder of old England that framed and characterized the broad conservatism of this literary culture. As Malcolm Bradbury observed in his 1994 introduction to Crome Yellow, the antiquarian interests of Henry Wimbrush and his fanciful tales about the earlier inhabitants of Crome managed to be both satirical and poignant at the same time. The stories of Sir Ferdinando Lapith, the Elizabethan theorist of the privy, and Sir Hercules Occam, the perfectly formed dwarf who builds a perfectly diminutive estate only to have it wrecked by a full-sized and brutish son, illustrated, as Bradbury pointed out, how Huxley had ‘not quite done with the old soul or become fully convinced by the new cynicism’ (n. p.). Waugh was very much more ambivalent than Huxley in this respect, and grew increasingly so with the years. However much he may have laughed at its strangeness in the modern world, his deeper instinct was to idealise traditional aristocracy as irrecoverable cultural authenticity and mystified Englishness, all of which became attached to the image of the decaying — or brutally modernized, or just about to be demolished — Big House. Decline and Fall (1928), for instance, laments the rebuilding of King’s Thursday, a country mansion, by the Teutonic modernist, Otto Silenius who constructs a ‘new-born monster to whose birth ageless and forgotten cultures had been in travail’ (part two, chapter iii). In A Handful of Dust Hetton, rebuilt in 1864 ‘in the Gothic style’ (chap. ii) with its rooms ridiculously named after 14 romance heroes from Malory, becomes a Disneyesque simulacrum of the true aristocratic estate. The sadly reduced condition of Doubting Hall in Vile Bodies is imaged by its loaning out to the makers of an absurd ‘historical’ film depicting ‘the life of that great social and religious reformer John Wesley … for the first time portrayed to a British public in all its humanity and tragedy’, which features Effie La Touche as its star (chap. ix). In these comic encounters with the modern, contemporary aristocracy was shadowed by the real thing — a mirroring that received most extended treatment in Brideshead Revisited. This later novel, where Lady Marchmain’s three heroic brothers are all sacrificed in war for mass man, ‘so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures’ (book 1, chap. v), is the deepest expression of Waugh’s attachment to traditional aristocracy. It is particularly devoted to the ‘ancestral seats’ described by Waugh in his preface to the 1960 reissue of the novel as ‘our chief national artistic achievement’. He thought them ‘doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century’. Just as the protagonist Charles Ryder, drawn to collapsing empires, becomes the vague and unwilling commentator on English aristocracy, the painter who charts the collapse of English country houses, capturing their fall into ruins and replacement by blocks of flats, so this novel itself is a kind of testimony to vanishing aristocratic grandeur. It would be quite misleading, however, to see this late elegiacal fiction as being unique in this respect. Many of the writers under discussion held, to some degree or other, idealized notions of aristocracy — with the notable exception of Lewis, who, following Nietzsche, idealized hierarchy in the abstract rather than any formal, culturally specific version. In The Apes of God there is no sentiment in his formulation 15 of the last generation of tradition as ‘Dick’ — Lady Fredigonde’s nephew — ‘a sixfoot two, thirty-six-summered, army and public schoolboy’ who waits impatiently for his loathsome aunt to die (27). He will be unceremoniously displaced in his aunt’s affections by her new husband, Horace Zagreb, and easily outwitted by a differently racialized version of the Coming Man, Archie Margolin — the ‘jew-boy from the slum’ (44) who sees the aristocratic estate in terms of the antique market, and receding empire. He imagines Lady Fredigonde’s hulking chairs gaping, vainly for the bottoms of the defunct, the capacious Eighteenth-Century posteriors …. The great bluff psyche of British brawn has left its uncouth fingerprints throughout this domestic museum …. This culture was dead as mutton but its great carcass offended him … The space-mad, the English! — from their spacious days of their great Elizabeth to the Imperial Victoria. But — now that space, itself, had shrunk under their feet, by time contracted — what a race of pygmies! (42-43) But in this respect, as in many others, The Apes of God was not representative. Waugh’s lyrical sensitivity toward the landed estate and the dispossessed aristocracy was much more typical and it echoed across a literature which, ironically enough, complained of England being forced to live ‘for years and years and years’ under the ‘tyranny’ of ‘the middle class’ (Arlen (1923). These Charming People, 101). In Crome Yellow (1921), for example, the 1920s satire which set the fashion in many ways, there is the telling moment where Mary Bracegirdle contemplates a picture postcard of Gobley Great Park, ‘A stately Georgian pile’ and considers how ‘ten years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. 16 Fifty years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them’ (chap. xxiv). The continued importance of aristocracy as a signifying idea was clearly not limited to Waugh’s architectural metaphors. It also shaped the representation everywhere of England’s new elites. As David Cannadine pointed out in his magisterial study, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990), the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw not only the ‘decline and dispersal of territorial wealth’ but also ‘the explosive growth of a new international plutocracy, especially in the United States’ (89-90), a development which greatly exercized the collective imagination of English social satire where new money appeared and reappeared inevitably in poor imitation of the real thing. Since the war the Waites of Hampstead, for example, in These Charming People ‘have become so aristocratic that they can scarcely speak’ (172). Along with all the other signifiers — suburbs, jazz, newspapers and so on — the Waites image the cheap faddism of modernity, as does ‘Watt A. Guy’, also from These Charming People, the inventor and promoter of the Paramour Safety Hairpin who uses his money to buy a title for his spendthrift and immoral son, Lord Paramour. As a corollary to his exceptionally strong attachment to traditional aristocracy, it was again Waugh, however, who was most wicked about the new elites, perhaps particularly in the early sequence of novels Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust. As the cartoon names suggest — Lady Cockpurse, who, in an inverted Darwinism, looks like an ape; Lady Fanny Throbbing; Lady Metroland (‘the motives for …[her] second marriage had been mixed, but entirely worldly’ ); Lady Everyman; the Earl and Lady Circumference and their son Lord Tangent; and Lord Monomark (‘the man who owns all those amusing papers’) — the 17 new aristocracies were central to Waugh’s conception of a vulgar, debased, and corrupt modernity (Vile Bodies, chap. vi). Notwithstanding the fantastic grotesquery and the disclaimers about anything as vulgar as ‘relevance’, these writers and their fictions were contemporary. The naivety of their typical narrators belied what was in fact a self-conscious sophistication operating in deeply engaged ways. The focus on a dying, redundant aristocratic class, ironically enough, reproduced highly contemporary insecurities about authority, prestige, and the national identity. From such perspectives, post-war intellectual Britain could no longer imagine itself setting the tone of civilized modernity with any real conviction. On the contrary, it struggled to make sense of new orders and the growing confidence of the cultural other. If a tired and waning Englishness was typically represented by the idea of traditional aristocracy, so energy expressed as the desire for wealth and power was in literature sometimes connected with Jewishness, although Jewish elites were well established in reality and could equally be fictionalized as borderline native. In Arlen’s Young Men in Love, Gabriel Sass, looking ‘more Jewish than Moses’ (36) and ennobled as ‘1st Baron Sass, 1st Viscount Archery, and 1st Earl of Townleigh’ (14), is a magnate so well institutionalized that his reprobate son goes the way of traditional English aristocracy and falls in love with an actress. More frequently, then, new aristocracy was connected with the New World, with the nouveau riche from the colonies and dominions being typically reproduced in literature as contemporary barbarians on the ascendant. Julia Marchmain’s final verdict on the Canadian Rex Mottram, Waugh’s deeply ironic version of the Coming Man, is that he ‘was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole’ (book two, chap. ii). This 18 postcolonial intrusion, comically historicized in Arlen’s These Charming People where American millionaires give way at the fin de siécle to an Australian version where ‘many a young lady of birth was married to a fruit-farm’ (which in turn is displaced by a war-time fashion where ‘all millionaires who were not Canadian fell into great discredit’) featured widely in satirical fiction — not, as was the case in populist cultures like late Victorian and Edwardian musical comedy, as a generally welcome biological invigoration, but, rather, as a sad and sorry dilution of stock (15152). New economic and racialized versions of aristocratic distinction were invariably represented as being cheap imitations. The same was true of the political alternatives to what was sometimes seen in literary culture, quite falsely, as Britain’s ‘feudal’ past. The Apes of God, for example, mocked the radical left by reproducing it as expedient role play. Thus the ‘pale cockney policeman’ on duty during the General Strike describes himself as a communist thinking ‘it best, that was all, to be on the safe side’. Outside the danger zone, ‘he was fairly rothschildean and royalist’ (619-20). The extreme right appeared similarly in performance terms, with Starr-Smith in the same novel turning up to ‘Lord Osmund’s Lenten Party’ in the guise of ‘The Fascist’ (471). For all the apparent passion of his argument that contemporary English national identity has become so cheapened that it will be sold ‘to the Blacks’ — there is, he declares ‘no longer an English Nation’ (528-29) — Starr-Smith is no more than a fake Blackshirt in fancy dress assuming the fascist position as a party piece. He dyes his shirt for the evening and poses ‘swelled in fascistic chestiness’ (568). Point Counter Point, less sharp in tone, was nevertheless deeply suspicious of modern ideologues across the spectrum. Huxley’s character Illidge, a working-class boy made good who despises both traditional aristocracy (descendants of ‘monastery-robbers’ who would 19 otherwise be ‘in the workhouse or the loony asylum’) and the materialist bourgeoisie (‘the root of all their virtue is a five per cent. gilt-edged security’) (chap.v), represents an impotent radicalism characterized by futile bitterness. Edward Webley, the ridiculous fascist leader of the British Freeman, has more conviction than his counterpart in The Apes of God but remains a performer. Sporting ‘the livery of Robin Hood and Little John, the livery of outlaws’, he appropriates the ancient idea of the free-born Englishman to his act. His public oratory, however, is, more than anything, mock modern — a popularisation of social Darwinism as it might be articulated by a street Nietzschean, the concoction much adopted by the extreme right against democratized modernity. ‘The law of the democratic world,’ as Webley puts it, ‘is human standardization, is the reduction of all humanity to the lowest common measure. Its religion is the worship of the average man. We outlaws believe in diversity, in aristocracy, in the natural hierarchy’ (chap. xxix). Inasmuch as it had one, the authoritative voice in these fictions was apolitical or, at least, outside the framework of modern political ideologies all perceived to be corrupt. In Point Counter Point it is appropriated in part by Mark Rampion — the D. H. Lawrence figure who sees no difference between ‘Bolsheviks and Fascists, Radicals and Conservatives … — what the devil are they all fighting about? I’ll tell you. They’re fighting to decide whether we shall go to hell by communist express train or capitalist racing motor car, by individualist ’bus or collectivist tram…. They’re all of them bound for hell, all headed for the same psychological impasse and … social collapse.’ (Chap. xxiii) The further reproach in this novel, however, comes not from an iconoclast, but, rather, from a more traditional authority and it appears in terms that only in relatively recent 20 years have become of the moment. In the following exchange, Lord Edward charges Webley and all ‘you politicians’ with being unable to ‘even think of the important things’: Talking about progress and votes and Bolshevism and every year allowing a million tons of phosphorus pentoxide to run away into the sea. It’s idiotic, it’s criminal it’s … it’s fiddling while Rome is burning …. No doubt … you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks. But what’ll you do when the deposits are exhausted? …. What then? Only two hundred years and they’ll be finished. You think we’re being progressive because we’re living on our capital. Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre — squander them all. That’s your policy. And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talk about revolutions. (Chap. v) Here again, against the brave new worlds of political extremes, traditional authority retained its ghostly presence. It had no chance of a return to real material power, but in fiction at least it could attach to a viable moral, and epistemological, authority. Contemporary political ideologies were obvious fair game for English satire. Class relations, however, were often understood differently, not as performance at all, but, rather, as objective realities that featured significantly in the ordinary and casual interaction as well as in political formations. As in the case of the exoticized Black, represented by ‘Chokey’ in Decline and Fall and a whole raft of characters in Firbank’s work, this had erotic dimensions — in life as in fiction. According to a gossipy Connolly in the 1938 account Enemies of Promise, the ‘love of the low’ led Firbank in real life to treat ‘the lower classes as a brothel’ (43), a fascination echoed in Point Count Point where Sidney Quarles takes ‘sexual holidays’ with women 21 preferably ‘not only young, but of a lower class, and poor’ (chap. xx). According to the lost intellectual Maurice Spandrell, in the same novel, ‘many people’ possessed a ‘hankering after lowness’, eagerly pursuing ‘their own abasement in the midst of multiple orgies… and almost bestial couplings with strangers, sexual association with gross and uneducated individuals of a lower class’ (chap. xvii). More typically, however, the blurring of traditional lines of demarcation took place in more public domains. Point Counter Point was again highly suggestive in this respect, a keynote being struck in the opening pages. William Bidlake on his way to Lady Edward’s high-society party has several encounters with working-class ugliness, vulgarity and ‘stink’: ‘Where yer going?’ the man shouted after him angrily. ‘Wotcher think you’re doing? Being a bloody Derby winner?” Two loitering street boys whooped with ferociously derisive mirth. ‘You in yer top ‘at,’ the man pursed contemptuously, hating the uniformed gentleman. The right thing would have been to turn round and give the fellow back better than he gave. His father would have punctured him with a word. But for Walter there was only flight. He dreaded these encounters, he was frightened of the lower classes. The noise of the man’s abuse faded in his ears. Odious! He shuddered. (Chap. i) Here the satirists of the 1920s and 30s were echoing the climate of suspicion and fear that many historians now understand to be characteristic of class relations in Britain between the wars. Ross McKibbin examining this phenomenon in his Class and Cultures: England 1918-51 (1998) from the less standard middle-class perspective, 22 showed how the rhetoric of the Middle Class Union was entirely typical of middleclass attitudes between the wars. Founded in 1919, it called for the ‘hapless middle class’ to mobilize as ‘the war of labour and capital tore society apart’ (Sir H. Brittain, 1919, 316-18). The middle class, McKibbin wrote, ‘began and ended the period, as anti-working class: a quality which perhaps more than any other defined it.’ It is not surprising that anxieties about class boundaries not only punctuated novels of the day, but produced novels which can only be understood in the context of this aspect of period politics and culture. There was, as McKibbin insisted, an ‘active fear of the working class in the 1920s’, which created the conditions for the ‘concoction of snobbery, fear and wish fulfilment’ (chap. iii), the context that shaped fiction across the spectrum. It featured in the ambitious and technically innovative novels of Henry Green — including, as we have seen, in Party Going, but also Living (1929), a novel concerned with the owners, managers and workers of a Birmingham factory and Loving (1945), an upstairs/downstairs novel that focused on the social progress of Charley Raunce (‘he slipped inside like an eel into its drainpipe’, 12), the self-centred butler of an Anglo-Irish family. It was also, as would be expected, a standard feature of popular fiction. Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son (1925) is often regarded as being highly illustrative of a much wider obsession in this respect. Running to fortyone editions and a best seller from its publication in 1925 throughout the remainder of the 1920s and 1930s, this novel articulated the stoic determination of its middle class hero, Captain Sorrell, to maintain his class identity against a modernity where standards, and hierarchies, were collapsing. Society ‘had come near to pushing him off the shelf of his class consciousness into the welter of the casual and the unemployed, but though hanging by his hands he had refused to drop’ (chap. 1). Here the elite’s great fear of assimilation was perfectly replicated as a condition of the 23 bourgeoisie itself, showing a continuity of interest across ‘popular’ and ‘high’ culture that is worth emphasising because it helps explain the considerable impact of English satire in this period. For all the superior tones and settings, it engaged deeply with the wider contemporaneity of mass culture. The sharp social comment was much in touch with a broad sense of status and cultural value perceived to be under threat from new versions of modernity. Notwithstanding the social divisions and political antipathies represented in their fictions, writers like Green, Huxley and Waugh addressed a sense of decline in the world, and a weakening relationship with the modern, in ways that could be embraced by a relatively wide constituency. In some senses they spoke just as much for the insecurities of new urban classes on the borders of traditional divisions as for the apparently lost intellectual elites that frequently narrated their novels or the declining aristocrats that populated them. It is often observed how many of these writers were prominently associated with coteries, which became reproduced in their novels. Huxley’s Crome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves (1925) fictionalized the Garsington Manor set and its influential patroness, Lady Ottoline Morrell — who cultivated such seminal figures as Bertrand Russell, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf, and Augustus John. The Apes of God was ruthless about the circles surrounding Osbert Sitwell — ridiculed by Lewis as a ‘master-Ape’ (322), representing in fancy dress ‘some apocryphal Restoration ancestor’ — with his brother, Sacheverell Sitwell, featuring grossly as ‘Lord Phoebus’ (355). Among the socialites, bohemians and artists who provided the basic raw material, Nancy Cunard, the heiress, was the notable inspiration for a number of the figures — Arlen’s Iris Storm (The Green Hat, 1924) and Huxley’s Myra Viveash (Antic Hay, 1923) for instance — sometimes seen as typifying this literature’s highly problematic representation of the dangerously 24 sexualized female, with her ‘lithe limbs and curling lips, laughing eyes and loose heart — a hungry girl made to rot men’ (Arlen, These Charming People, 150). Howard Acton and Bryan Howard were models for several fictional representations of homosexuality and the dandy identity, including Waugh’s character Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, whose ‘vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock’ (book one, chap ii). Unsurprisingly given the shared experiences and personal intimacies, these writers were markedly homogenous in social terms, forming a cultural elite that was predominantly male and almost exclusively public school and Oxbridge educated. Acton, Howard, Cyril Connolly, Harold Nicolson, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Waugh, Henry York (Henry Green) — all figures key to the style and writing of the period — went to Eton, and Huxley taught there briefly. If not themselves of the traditional landed nobility, they belonged to a distinctive ‘upper middle class’. This was, as Nancy Mitford pointed out in her 1956 essay ‘The English Aristocracy’, intimately connected to ‘the peers’ with whom it shared ‘education … and point of view’ and, just as significantly, sharply delineated from the modern middle class by ‘a very definite border line, easily recognisable by hundreds of small but significant landmarks’ (Ross et al, 24). However, these fictions were substantially more than local vehicles for sophisticated English upper-class introspection and gossip, or youthful angst. Superficially they may have practised the essential magic of celebrity culture by taking an exclusive and limited social world and repositioning it indisputably at the centre. But they were also able to extend the significance of that representation far beyond the capacities of gossip and the society magazine. At a time which typically perceived itself in terms of great cultural change, these novels and short stories formulated a new identity for ‘England’, one that coped, however darkly in most 25 cases, with the cultural traumas of post-war Britain, including the decline of empire and the rise of mass man and his territories — the dire ‘red’ suburbs and industrial wastelands, which, seen from the height of an aeroplane, cause Nina Blount, in Vile Bodies, to vomit (chap. xii). Similarly with the despised Americanisation of culture exemplified by jazz, described in Those Barren Leaves as cultural collapse, a cacophony of throbbing banjos, squeaking violins, and ‘above all the rest the saxophone voluptuously caterwauled’ (part four, chap iii). Waugh, Huxley, Green and their contemporaries reproduced the culture of the new trans-Atlantic modern, and formulated an English response to it. Deeply critical of the present and often distinctly nostalgic for the past, they constructed new positions and, indeed, identities for viewing the state of the nation that went quite beyond parental disapproval. What might once have been seen as the writer’s duty to record and even intervene became subject to a more whimsical and arch consciousness. Here both Victorian responsibility and modernist angst were displaced by languid disengagement or innocent confusion, and sophisticated irony, which again looked outwards but also inwards where the self-regarding eye itself became subject to scrutiny. ‘Spellbound’ by ‘the spectacle’ of his own personality, Huxley’s character Denis Stone in Crome Yellow is not the only comic hero of this literary culture to become dangerously over exposed by his own apparently virtuous introspection: Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed. He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was Brown Dog to himself. His weaknesses, his absurdities — no one knew them better than he did. Indeed in a vague way he imagined that nobody beside himself was aware of them at all. (Chap. xxiv) 26 These kinds of responses were to become recognisably English ways of dealing with post-war modernity and all were sharply distinct from an American modern often characterized as vital, energetic and masculinist. The ‘Bright Young People’ observed from these narrative positions, and their difficult relations to a mythologized aristocratic parentage, represented much more than comic anthropology at the margins of an increasingly democratized modern world. They were, indeed, intrinsic to a new formation of the condition of England question, with their creators sustaining the life of English literary culture and its imagined status throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and, in many cases, carrying an influence well beyond. Certainly their comedies constituted an entirely viable response to the passing of past glories — one which, far from offending modern intellectual taste with sickly lamentation or prudish outrage, reformulated Englishness in terms of sophisticated puzzlement and, even, a kind of stoicism.