The Shooting Party

Isabel Colegate

The Shooting Party

With an Introduction by
JULIAN FELLOWES

Contents

Introduction

The Shooting Party

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THE SHOOTING PARTY

ISABEL COLEGATE’S novels are The Blackmailer (1958); A Man of Power (1960); The Great Occasion (1962); Statues in a Garden (1964); the Orlando trilogy, comprising Orlando King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1971) and Agatha (1973); News from the City of the Sun (1979); The Shooting Party (1980), which won the WHSmith Annual Literary Award and was made into a major feature film; A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory (1985); Deceits of Time (1988); The Summer of the Royal Visit (1992); Winter Journey (1995); and A Pelican in the Wilderness (2002). Isabel Colegate is married with three grown-up children and lives near Bath.

JULIAN FELLOWES, actor, writer, director, producer, was educated at Ampleforth, Magdalene College, Cambridge and The Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. His first screenplay for the cinema was Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. He has adapted his novel, Snobs, for television.

Introduction

New readers should be aware that this Introduction makes details of the plot explicit.

In the late 1950s there was a revolution in England and it started in Sloane Square. When Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court, first unsettling – and then enrapturing – the critics, it was soon clear that, as far as the artistic establishment was concerned, everything had changed. The love affair between the intellectual literati and the working class, or rather their notion of the working class, had begun. Bourgeois drama was dead and, as a by-product of this reversal, it was soon universally accepted that the upper-middle and upper classes were no longer worthy of serious, creative attention. Having dominated the lives and the aspirations of most of Europe’s population for centuries, they were suddenly, at a stroke, irrelevant. Not just out of date but out of touch, unimaginative, dull, devoid of original thought. Within minutes, this blanket dismissal had resulted in a contemptuous stereotype: these sad, posh people weren’t only unadmirable, they were laughable. Their beliefs had no merit and were in fact nothing but codified prejudice, their emotions were banal or, worse, non-existent, and if they had no hearts, they certainly had no brains. From then on, upper-class characters might figure occasionally in idiotic slapstick or comic novels, they might lose their fortunes or their trousers or get caught out in honeymoon hotels, but they did not merit serious, dramatic narrative. The audience could not be expected to believe such paltry goons had the power to think or feel. Throughout the 1960s, all non-working-class subjects were suspect, but upper-class ones were simply absurd. And so was a whole tradition, an entire way of life that had shaped and dominated these islands for centuries, consigned to the dustbin of history. Anything that seemed to symbolize these clowns – white tie and cocktails, country sports and country houses – became, for a time, ridiculous. And the ancillary existences, those individuals who depended on this social group, fared no better. Domestic service, which at the turn of the last century was the greatest source of employment in the United Kingdom, vanished behind a thick curtain. Like collaboration in wartime France, it was something that may have gone on but was best forgotten. In most cases, the servants themselves were perceived as the prey of a hideously unjust system, the victims not the perpetrators of the crime, but even so it would be better if we all simply put it behind us. Seldom can a way of life have vanished from sight and mind so rapidly. In 1939 public and private life in Britain was still almost entirely governed by the scions of noble and gentle families while the whole population came into daily contact with the reality of servanthood – from one side of the green baize door or the other. Yet twenty-five years later, not much more than half a working lifetime, the mere mention of these things was like a discussion of life on Mars.

It took some time for the counter revolution to marshal its troops. When it did, it was soon clear just how much, particularly in terms of living memory, had been lost in the interim. The extent of the wreckage first really impinged on the public consciousness with an exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London – the Destruction of the English Country House – which opened its doors in March 1976. It appeared that, in the previous half century, literally hundreds of manor houses and industrialists’ mansions, noblemen’s castles and cottages ornées, had been smashed to smithereens by the demolition men without the slightest opposition from the authorities. Magnificent palaces designed by our greatest architects, dazzlingly important works of art, had been destroyed through fashionable indifference. For the first time, the British public experienced a sense of shock at the mindless destruction of their own heritage. And that shock soon turned to anger at the so-called planners who had let it happen. Most of the conservation groups operating today date their existence from that revelation. It was part of a general awakening which, if it never managed to invade the closed citadel of the theatrical intelligentsia, nevertheless did succeed in reviving interest in those customs that had vanished so recently. John Hawkesworth had already defied the accepted wisdom of the day with his enormously successful television drama series, Upstairs Downstairs, and all around there were suddenly articles and books and pictures to be seen and examined. Diaries and old photographs were unearthed and published, people of every rank in their sixties, seventies and eighties found themselves authorities on a forgotten civilization. In 1980, out of this rediscovery of a lost England, came Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party, which took the whole debate to another level.

As the screenwriter for Gosford Park, it is no secret that I owe much to Isabel Colegate. I had of course seen the film of her novel when it came out and I remain absolutely convinced that, without it, the seed of the idea behind my script would never have been allowed to germinate. The balance of my own work is different, the characters below stairs in my story occupy if anything more screen time than those above and the film was an examination of how those houses ran in a way that The Shooting Party is not. But now that I have at last read the novel, I understand much more clearly than I did how great is my debt to her.

Isabel Colegate took a world which others had begun to explore and looked beyond their fascination with the outward appearance of this formalized existence to the reasoning behind it. She does not condemn but instead invites us simply to examine this forgotten race with an open mind. We are by no means obliged to surrender to some BBCesque cliché and think harshly of everyone among the privileged characters while we praise all those at the mercy of their spoiled whims. Her message is much more sophisticated than that. In this extraordinary book, the author does not seek to judge other times by means of inappropriate, modern values. Nor is it just the duties and rituals of that way of life that are being revisited and examined. Here, she looks behind the glamorous and ordered curtain of post-Edwardian luxury to find the private motives, the dreams and the frustrations of the individuals, from both sides of the social divide, who were living and serving it.

To begin with the guests: what kind of people were they, these men and women who spent their days killing things and changing clothes? Were they stupid and dull as their detractors insisted? Or were they charming and filled with a sense of benevolent duty as the nostalgists would have us believe? Above all, why were they performing these rituals? What was to be gained by shooting sixty, eighty, a hundred days a year? And hunting or fishing for most of those that remained? What was it all for? What was the point, as they endlessly mounted those great staircases to struggle in or out of yet another outfit? Even in 1914, upper-class women were changing clothes four or fives times a day and the men not much less. Those endless dinners, those glittering, identical balls, those interchangeable house parties, every event governed by the same cast-iron rules. But why? And the servants, rising at dawn and working until nightfall, servicing these Chinese ceremonies of kaleidoscopic, social interchange – what was going on in their minds?

In order to perform her dissection of the Edwardian creed, Isabel Colegate chooses to mount a proto-typical context: twenty-four hours in the life of a shooting party which takes place in a large house at the centre of a large estate. It is important to grasp that this is not a ‘great house’ as such. Nor are the Nettlebys a ‘great family’. Some of the members of the gathering had formed part of the coterie around the pleasure-loving King, so lately dead, and even Lady Nettleby had been a Royal favourite, but Sir Randolph himself is not one of these. He is a baronet and rich enough in his way but he is really just a gentleman, a landowner, and not a star of high society. Right from the start, Colegate demonstrates her evenhandedness when it comes to assessing the value of Sir Randolph and people like the Nettlebys as social types, when she chooses Sir Reuben Hergesheimer, the brilliant Jewish financier, to do it:

It was only after the King’s death that Sir Reuben had come to know and like Minnie’s husband. Through him he had come to admire a sub-section of the eternally fascinating English class system with which he had not previously been so familiar. He had known grandees, such of the high aristocracy who were intimates of the King’s, and he had known naturally the financial world of the City, the bankers and merchant princes, but he had not much come across the country gentry, though he was familiar with their historic role. He saw them now as a class which could command his sympathy. He saw Sir Randolph as a representative of an admirable way of life, now threatened by forces which he himself had done a certain amount to encourage.

This, the reader will suspect, is not only Sir Reuben’s estimation of Sir Randolph but Colegate’s, too. And this is the skill of the book. She is harsh to some of these representatives of the old world but the novel is by no means a blanket condemnation of them. It is not a fashionable socialist polemic – which was, lest we forget – the only treatment generally meted out to people like the Nettlebys at the time of her writing. Instead, The Shooting Party is an attempt to sift the good from the bad. The author invites us to find the reasons for the collapse of this existence, to seek out those areas where its principles had become corrupted and mis-routed, but also to be aware of what has been lost that was good. Viewed from the moral and social chaos of the late twentieth century, for the honest man or woman, there was much to be said for an ordered, structured world, more than would ever have been acknowledged by the 60s liberationists. In the climate then existing among the British intelligentsia, for a serious writer with a reputation to defend, this was very little short of courageous.

To start with, Colegate takes the fashionable, Edwardian stereotypes and looks behind their masks, the sporting lords, the fashionable wives, yawning with boredom in the country and aching for a cinq-a-sept with their London lovers. She gives us the Jewish banker and the European nobleman, the girl making her debut, the former court favourite deprived of her fun by the death of the King. This recent Royal demise is used to shadow the world of pleasure with a coming, darker era and we are reminded of the replacement of King Edward’s highly entertaining, social fireworks with the dreary court of George V. We have the intellectual opposition represented by the blue-stocking daughter-in-law and the anti-blood-sports demonstrator. We are exposed to the dreams of a visionary gentleman, as well as to the despair of a clever woman trapped in marriage to a fool. They are all brought before us for our examination. We knew many of these types, as types, before we opened the book but now we learn what it is like to be inside their heads.

What makes this work peculiarly satisfying is its absolute authenticity. Isabel Colegate belongs to that small group of ‘silver fork’ novelists who actually know the real workings of the world they write about, the world of the highly privileged. It is a small club. Jane Austen belonged to it, along with Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust and Anthony Trollope, Thackeray at a pinch. But not Dickens, whose aristocratic characters are the black and white projections of an enraged outsider, and not Coward or many others who only entered those gilded portals when success had reclassified them socially. Colegate has the secure observation of the insider who knows these people well and was watching them long before they began to be afraid they might figure in one of her novels. She neither hates nor worships them but is simply striving to understand how they could have ruled since the dawn of recorded time and then, in the space of less than half a century, have entirely lost their grip on the political and public life of the Nation. These faults, she seems to say, are the reasons why the old world ended and these other elements are the benefits that we lost when it did. It is this inter-plaiting of the positive and the negative aspects of benevolent paternalism that make the novel so complex and so rewarding.

Lord and Lady Hartlip – Gilbert and Aline – are the embodiment of one popular view of the period. He, the crack-shot nobleman, taciturn and finally devoid of honour, for whom sport has replaced all meaningful activity in his own scale of importance. She, by contrast, is definitively frivolous, the licentious, socially ambitious parvenue in haute couture. It was suggested when the book first appeared that they might have been modelled on the Marquess of Ripon and his wife, although she was not, as it happens, a social climber (she was born Lady Gladys Herbert) but she was certainly one of the grandes horizontales of the era.

Actually, Lady Ripon, or the Countess de Grey, to employ the more flowery title she used before her husband inherited, has had a bad press. She did have lovers and her battle with the Marchioness of Londonderry over their mutual admirer, Harry Cust, was to go down in the records as the principal cat fight of pre-Great War Society – it resulted, or so the story goes, in the Londonderrys’ never addressing a single word to each other in private for thirty years. But Lady de Grey was more than that, almost single-handedly pioneering the formation of the Royal Opera Company and being one of the first hostesses to entertain artists as her social equals. Nevertheless, like Lady Hartlip in the novel, she did live a life of indulgence, of dinners and fittings and secret assignations, a life that must have seemed increasingly out of touch with the world of cars and flight and the movies and the Depression that was hovering just around the corner.

Like Hartlip in the novel, Lord Ripon was generally considered the best shot of his day but he had once, so the story goes, been caught practising with his loaders (as Gilbert Hartlip is discovered practising in the novel) – which somehow undid his reputation, just as Gilbert’s is undone for the reader. That was the key to their own self-regard: their trick, and the only thing that mattered, was to be naturally good at everything but never to have to try, never to work or study or learn, simply to be born great without effort; great sportsmen, great beauties.

Having established the Hartlips as Society emblems, Colegate, with a surgeon’s precision, proceeds to dismantle them. Delicately, she shows Aline’s boredom and bitterness, her plunging standards when it comes to casting her next lover, her borrowing of money she will never repay, her desperation to include others in her own discontented fall. Even so – for Colegate always resists the safe and smug condemnation of any character – Aline retains a kind of baseline honesty. She never quite succumbs to the need to conceal her origins and just when the reader is expecting her to pull rank over Hergesheimer, she laughs:

Of course the truth is I’m no more of an aristocrat than you are.

Sir Reuben had underestimated her. So had we. This is a core theme to the work, that if we can only retain a measure of honesty then all will not be quite lost. Aline Hartlip will probably survive, we suspect, because au fond she is not lying to herself.

Her husband, on the other hand, starting out as the classic English ‘Sportsman’ is revealed as a mass of nothing, with neither honesty nor the least scrap of self-knowledge. If any one of these individuals represents what went wrong with the values of the late Victorians and Edwardians, it is Gilbert Hartlip. Priding himself on doing things right, on his absolute probity, on his perfect taste and perfect breeding, he is in fact entirely without decency or fairness or compassion. Sir Randolph’s simple statement encapsulates this: ‘You were not shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert.’