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| Young love. 4:00 PM. Photo: JH. |
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| July 30, 2014. A perfect summer day, yesterday in New York, bright and sunny with temperatures in the mid- to low-70s, and a soft but strong breeze to move us along. The social scene in New York is practically non-existent as far as NYSD’s coverage of interest. It’s been moved west to “The Hamptons” -- Southampton, East Hampton, and everything in between and north (Sag Harbor). For me there’s more time for reading, and for my birthday a friend of mine gave me a book with the message, “It all happened before ...” obviously referring to the state of our world today. The message aroused my curiosity so that I opened just to look, and I’ve been swimming through it with great pleasure – and more than few laughs -- for the past two days. |
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| It is called “The Perfect Summer; England 1911 Just Before the Storm” by Juliet Nicolson. Ms. Nicolson is the daughter of the late Nigel Nicolson, the British writer/publisher and politician who died ten years ago at age 87. Ms. Nicolson is also the granddaughter of two now legendary characters who came of age in the era of the Edwardians – Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Their son Nigel (there was another son Ben) published a famous book about forty years ago about his parents’ marriage called “Portrait of a Marriage.” In it we learn that both man and wife – who individually led very productive professional lives as writers (and he also a diplomat) – were gay. They also had to varying degrees, active sex lives with their gay partners. Vita – a most fascinating character (captured beautifully in a biography by Victoria Glendenning, published in the late 1960s, called “Vita”) – was a novelist, an essayist and a horticulturalist. |
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| I tell you this because Juliet Nicolson’s book is about the generation of her grandparents and great-grandparents when England was the Empire in the world ruling over 400 million people, and its upperclass – the nobles, the aristocracy – were the one percenters where 1% of the population owned 60% of the country and the average working man’s take-home was about 2 pounds a week (the pound was worth considerably more than it is today, but the average salary for those working was very dear). The book is set in the summer months of that year when indeed, the weather was especially agreeable – bright and sunny and very warm but often, like our summer in New York this year, not too warm. The subject is the lives of, those who owned and wielded the political power and had for more than a century, and in some cases, centuries. |
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| The First World War, the Great War which was to decimate these classes of their young men was already, in retrospect, on the horizon. But unbeknownst to all but the shrewdest and most perspicacious in the country’s leadership. Young Winston Churchill had a notion of it – although its devastating effect on his class had to be something even he couldn’t have imagined. King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria, who had died at age 69 the year before (1910) after only eight years on the throne, had long before believed that Germany and his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II were going to be the cause. As a king, he had skillfully done whatever he could both personally and through diplomatic channels to keep that powder keg of a crazy nephew from blowing. |
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| But as we see in hindsight, it was the end of an era, of a time, of the Victorian Age if you will, of which the Edwardians were the break-out generation. What makes Juliet Nicolson’s social history so fascinating is the break-out generation’s way of breaking out. The upper class, the ruling class was so rich that many if not all the men didn’t even work. Nor did they lift a finger to do much else since a good 30% of the population worked for them in some form or other of domestic services. The rich owned the land, often had several houses (and castles) covering tens of thousands of income producing acres throughout the country. Much of their lives, when not in London, were shared on these fantastic estates literally living it up as much as possible trying their damnedest to avoid the boredom that comes with nothing but nothing to do but eat, sleep and breathe.
And from there the author takes us on a tour of those lives in the city, in the country, at the weekend house parties (which ran from Saturday to Monday) living in a luxury that is beginning to change radically, not unlike the radical changes brought about by the development of computer and digital technology to our world today. It was the beginning of the automotive age. It was the beginning of what we now take for granted as adequate plumbing, of speed in transportation and communication. It was also the end of the Victorian era, enhanced by the late king for whom the new era was named. The Edwardians were “fast” compared to their forebears. They were the first Moderns and had nothing but time which meant for most of them generally, eating, drinking, sleeping and sex. The servants took care of the rest. We know now that disaster would soon be upon them, but at the moment their only focus was on pleasure, pleasure and more pleasure. And Nicolson supplies us with all the details of the making, getting and carrying out that pleasure while pretending to live within the boundaries of etiquette and morality. That left a lot of room for “scandals” and hilarity. A great deal of the social life was around the weekends in the country. With the age of Edward VII, who was Prince of Wales for the first sixty-one years of his life, pleasure was his main pursuit. He had been disallowed by his mother Queen Victoria of knowing much if anything about the work of the monarchy. She wanted it that way, having never believed that he’d make a good king, keeping everything from him right up until the very end of her sixty-four year reign. So instead the Prince, who was a very intelligent man, played and enjoyed himself, living large with wine, women and song, and cards, and travel and breakfasting, lunching and dining. Everything was according to custom and rules, and everyone followed them. They were, on the face of it, a randy bunch. Marriages were often arranged to enhance families’ longevity and fortune. Women were required to produce heirs to carry on. And men were there to preside over it all. Nicolson’s book is full of amusing anecdotes about the behavior of this leisure class at the end of not only greatness but its “possessions” and family fortunes, completely unaware of what lay in store. Instead, they were dealing with the vagaries of living it up and obsessing over the most irrelevant.
“Saturdays-to-Mondays,” the author explains, “were a heaven sent opportunity for sex ...." The writer Arnold Bennett advised that “the most correct honeymoon is an orgy of lust, and if it isn’t it ought to be.” And ... "In a world of marriages of convenience, one in which divorce was both expensive and ruinous to the reputation, an illicit couple was challenged to find somewhere private to take their clothes off .... At weekend houseparties, at night, the names written on cards clotted into brass holders on bedroom doors were as helpful to lovers as to the maids bringing early morning tea. Assignations confirmed by the squeeze of a hand beneath the bridge table, a whispered exchange over the candle that lit the way up the stairs, a note left (in collusion with the maids) beside the bottled water on the bedside table, or placing of a code-laden flower outside a bedroom door ensured that extra-marital sex went on with ease. Confusions occasionally occurred. Lord Charles Beresford became particularly vigilant after leaping with an exultant “Cock-a-doodle-do!” onto a darkened bed, believing it to contain his lover, only to be vigorously batted away by the much startled Bishop of Chester. At six in the morning a hand-bell rung on each of the bedroom floors gave guests time to return to their own beds before the early morning tea trays arrived." The author present the rigors of order that accompanied this pleasured existence. For example, the women changed outfits several times a day. A weekend visit often required trunks of clothes to meet the requirements of times of the day. “A good hour,” Nicolson writes, “was required” for the ladies “for the evening toilette since the fashionable brilliant white skin was achieved with the help of liquid creams and white rice powder, while to indicate sensitivity the naturally bluish-violet veins at neck, temple and cleavage were emphasized with a blue crayon. Elderflowers berries or a cork singed in the flame of a candle darkened eyebrows and eyelashes .... The Daily Sketch printed a series of photographs from an American magazine under the heading ‘Decoys fore the Affections: Beauty’s Artful Aids .... devices to enhance the appearance. Such as: a tightly-wrapped leather chin brace that resembled a dislodged muzzle or a miniature feeding trough hat had slipped to far below the mouth – all to suppress a double chin. “Wavy locks were created nightly with curling tongs, straight hair being thought to indicate obstinacy. False braids, or chignons known as “rats” were often added, though they only stayed in place properly on rather grubby, sticky hair. Small Silver rings clamped into the nipples deepened, enhanced and raised the cleavage by providing a sort of ledge on which the evening gown rested precariously. Fresh flowers – a carnation or gardenia for a man, a spray of stephanotis for a woman, provided by the Belvoir (pronounced Beever, the castle of the Duke of Rutland) greenhouses and brought round on a silver tray by a servant -- gave the finishing touch." |
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| “And so the finest of Edwardian society made their way downstairs for dinner, the men smelling strongly of Mr. Penhaligon’s Hamman Bouquet, undercut by inescapable body odor and cigar smoke, the ladies wafting down in a cloud of lavender and rose-water that helped disguise the whiff of dirty hair, while the rubbing of the unseen rings against the dress afforded a secret frisson of pleasure." And so the fun began.” The era had its stars among the young just as we do today. Prominent among them was Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland, a beautiful debutante who also had a talent for getting attention (a precursor to the celebrities of today). The Rutlands were a formidable family on the scene, and Diana had two sisters. The Manners sisters were even wilder (according to the times) than their parents, and the siters were known as The Hothouse (or the HOTBED) because of their exotic, undisciplined behavior. |
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| Nicolson explains: “Diana’s group of friends were called “The Corrupt Coterie” (her mother’s friends were known as “The Souls” (still are recorded in history as The Souls) but they referred to themselves as “The Gang.” The Coterie reveled in drink, blasphemy, gambling, drug-taking, chloroform (“clorers”) sniffing, and decadent behavior of every kind imaginable. They were healthy, beautiful and exceptionally clever, and the young men “carried off prizes and fellowships with as much ease as they could win a steeple-chase.”
The author tells us that Lady Diana’s mother, the duchess of Rutland was generally known within her own circle to have ignored her marriage vows. Nearly nineteen years earlier she had enjoyed an affair with Harry Cust, the extremely handsome and clever editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Diana, though the Duke of Rutland’s daughter, was in fact the result of her mother’s teatime liaison with the charming Harry Cust. |
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| All this and I’ve only given you a taste of the first half of the book and looking forward to the pleasure of the rest which I’ll surely finish in a day or two. The book was originally published in hardcover in 2006. I’m reading the paperback which just came out. My friend Jesse Kornbluth over at Headbutler.com happened to review it this past Monday on his site. |
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