Class (39 page)
‘“Dejeuner sur l’herbe”?—Looks more like tea and crumpet to me!’
‘I don’t want to become a portrait manufacturer,’ sighed Hogarth. While Millais, succumbing to the inevitable tedium, admitted that the best bit was putting the shine on his subject’s boots.
Harry Stow-Crat doesn’t buy paintings—he inherits them. Various ancestors were painted by Romney, Gainsborough, Lely and Van Dyck. Peter Greenham, however, has just finished painting Caroline. It was so successful that he will probably do Georgie and Fiona in the holidays. Harry has also commissioned a new painting of the house, taking in the vista of Gorilla Island, Flamingo Lake and the amusement park.
Mr Nouveau-Richards now thinks it was rather a mistake to commission Francis Bacon to do Tracey-Diane’s por-trait (which he rhymes with gate; the Stow-Crats say ‘portr’t’), but at least Mrs Nouveau-Richards has learnt to say ‘Trechicorf’.
Jeremy Maas, of the Maas Gallery, has a theory that art historians despise Victorian paintings and concentrate on Romneys and Gainsboroughs because this gives them access to grand houses, whereas the Victorian paintings are mostly owned by wool and steel manufacturers in the industrial north who are far less amusing to stay with.
BALLET
‘I do not know anything about ballet except that in the interval the ballerinas stink like horses,’ wrote Chekhov. Since then ballet has been prissying itself up and has become a very lower-middle-class art, intensified by all those layers of tulle and the ballerinas walking around on tiptoe. Jen Teale loves ‘the ballet’ as she calls it: all those good tunes and something undemanding to look at. Except for
Eugene Onegin
Tschaikovsky is an irredeemably lower-middle-class composer.
Occasionally Covent Garden have gala nights, which Jen Teale pronounces ‘gay-la’, presumably because of the number of homosexuals present. The effeminate appearance of the men puts off Harry Stow-Crat and the Definitely-Disgustings alike. ‘Pouffe’s football’ Old Steptoe called ballet dismissively.
A recent survey of ballet audiences broke them down as 61 per cent upper-middle-class males, 19 per cent middle-class, 15 per cent lower-middles and only 5 per cent working-class, who presumably are the rough trade accompanying the upper-middle homosexuals.
‘Have we come for the dancing or the singing?’ Mr Nouveau-Richards was overheard saying to his wife as they arrived at Covent Garden.
ACTORS
Until recently Thespians were not considered respectable. A gentleman might go to bed with an actress and shower her with presents, but he did not make an honest woman of her, and, although a few aristocrats married Gaiety Girls, the parental opposition was stiff enough to discourage most Mrs Worthingtons from putting their daughters on the stage.
Since the advent of the talkies, and even more so of television, things have changed. Acting is one of the most popular professions for girls from public schools. Actors and actresses get lionized out of proportion to any other profession. (When Kurt Jurgens gets half a million for a coffee commercial it’s hard to ignore him.)
Caroline Stow-Crat, however, still regards the show-business world with a mixture of excitement and horror. I remember a debs’ mums’ lunch at which they were discussing whether they could entice Georgia Brown or David Essex to sing at some charity ball:
‘Anyway, Elizabeth can look after whoever it is,’ said the chairman. ‘She’s so good with those sort of people.’
The upper-middle classes, who apart from homosexuals, tourists and the coach trade, are the only consistent patrons, tend to go to the theatre for a good sleep, but sometimes they manage to wake up for the last scene. At a production of
Vivat Regina
at Chichester some years ago, when Elizabeth and Mary stalk out of opposite corners of the stage at the end, Mary to be beheaded, one Tory lady was heard saying to another, ‘That’s
exactly
what happened to Monica.’
Actors and actresses, although the good ones can adjust their accents to cross most class barriers, seldom appear upper-class because they are too self-conscious, too theatrical, too expansive of gesture and mobile of feature. Their diction is also far too good—the upper-classes would never say ‘yee-eers’ or ‘how-ers’ for ‘years’ and ‘hours’. Actresses do this to make their parts longer.
Mrs Nouveau-Richards loves ‘to do a show in town’, and rustles a box of milk chocolates through the entire performance.
LITERATURE
Like the actor, the professional writer wasn’t always socially acceptable. The Elizabethans considered poetry, dancing and playing an instrument the sort of accomplishment, rather like sex, that you did in the privacy of your own home, but never for money.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said that it was contemptible to write for money, and even in the nineteenth century Flaubert attacked the practice—though admittedly from the security of a large private income.
It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century, as Frank Muir pointed out, that the habit of reading spread down the classes and became fashionable, in a very minor way like television today.
Reviewers, bitterly opposed to emergent lower-middle-class writers, savagely attacked Keats for not being a gentleman, and belonging, with Leigh Hunt, to what was derisively called the ‘Cockney school’. Cockney in those days didn’t mean working class but ‘genteel suburban’. It is hardly surprising that Byron and Shelley, as very nouveau aristocracy (Byron inherited the title from a great-uncle; Shelley’s grandfather managed to marry two heiresses), should initially have attacked Keats’s poetry, not only because he was beneath them socially but, more dangerous, he looked suspiciously like a far greater poet. Once Keats was dead he was no more competition, and it was much easier for Byron to leap to his defence with
Who Killed John Keats
and for Shelley to write
Adonais
.
Recently a reviewer expressed amazement that Hardy could be simultaneously such a towering genius and such a raging mean-minded snob. This seems quite logical. Any English novelist, if he is to draw characters with any accuracy, must be aware of the minutest social nuance. Many English writers have been frightful snobs. Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines, except for the middle class Merry Wives, are upper-class; working-class characters are only introduced to provide comic relief.
Pope always pretended to be related to the Earl of Down. Jane Austen was probably so obsessed with class because on one side she was related to an earl, but on the other side to a haberdasher.
Even today, a critic grumbled, the thing wrong with English writers is that they’d rather dine with a duke than with other writers, a sentiment echoed by Nancy Mitford’s comment on Evelyn Waugh:
‘I feel he is all right with duchesses. It is the middle-class intellectuals who come in for the full bloodyness of his invective.’
It is significant that the only poet to achieve bestseller status in the last twenty-five years (apart from the Pam Ayres/Mary Wilson Tea-Cosy school) is Sir John Betjeman, who is totally obsessed with class and whose genius is that he can be tender and wickedly funny at the same time about every rung on the social ladder.
‘If you stay with the Queen at Sandringham,’ according to Robert Lacey, ‘you will find an electric fire with three bars in your room, a fitted carpet, naval paintings on the wall and huge bookcases filled with regimental histories and army lists. But there are also more contemporary books put out for guests—Hornblower yarns and Nancy Mitford—all with the same simple book plate inside, “The Queen’s Book” in flowing white script which stands out of a black background.’ If an author goes to Windsor, he is likely after dinner to see his latest book laid out on a table in the library on a blue satin cushion. The Queen Mother is a Dick Francis addict, and is always presented with a copy on publication day.
Harry Stow-Crat reads
The Times
, the
Sporting Life
and the
Daily Express
: he has a soft spot for that Rook Woman. Caroline reads
The Tatler
, whose book reviews epitomize upper-class taste: a recent issue included a Standard Guide to Pure Breed Dogs, a book on heraldry, a history of the Isle of Orkney and a biography of the pekinese.
Samantha Upward is a great reader; she also feels it her duty to buy books. She is very guilty about reading popular novels and thinks biographies are somehow more worthwhile. Virginia Woolf’s letters (in fact anything about the Bloomsbury group) are ideal because they combine sex and culture. Samantha knows that literature is all about disadvantaged people struggling to make ends meet, so she would never admit to anyone that she finds Bertold Brecht a king-sized yawn. She always refers to ‘Maupassant’ because she knows saying ‘De Maupassant’ is considered common in France, and she always talks about Willy Maugham rather than Somerset, and Jay Reid rather than Piers Paul, to show she’s in the ‘know’. She always asks ‘creative writers’, as she calls them, what they are ‘working on’, but she’d
never
make the mistake of telling them she’d love to write a book if only she had the time. The Weybridge set buy ‘real coffee’-table books.
Jen Teale prefers to read home-improvement books, which she always wraps in brown paper, so the cover won’t get ‘soiled’. Bryan’s home-library of do-it-yourself manuals and Reader’s Digest condensed books are practically pushing the carved wise-owl bookends off the colour telly. Samantha thinks Mrs Definitely-Disgusting’s habit of licking her finger to turn the page more easily is absolutely ‘rev-ollting’. Sharon Definitely-Disgusting reads
Jackie
and
True Romances
which she calls books.
Mrs Nouveau-Richards is struggling with the first volume of ‘Prowst’. Copying upper-class French mothers, she has stopped going upstairs every evening to kiss Tracey-Diane goodnight.
A Mr Nouveau-Richards rang me the other day.
‘Darling’, he said, ‘I’ve just bid a fortune for two first editions’.
‘What are they?’ I asked.
‘I’ll just go and look,’ he said.
They were Shelley and Keats.
MUSIC
There was one peer who only employed butlers who could play the piano in the key of C. He didn’t give a damn if they could buttle; he merely wanted someone to accompany him when he played on the mouth-organ. He, however, was the exception. Although Harry Stow-Crat sets a good example by singing loudly in church on Sundays, he is actually tone-deaf. His children sometimes learn an instrument at school, which is called extras, and grumbled about when it appears on the bill.
Occasionally
The Tatler
cover a concert, but it’s invariably for charity, some flaring-nostrilled Peruvian playing Chopin in aid of Father Mantua’s mission in the East End, and all the audience surreptitiously looking at their watches, and wishing the still fat wad of pages the pianist still has to strum through would suddenly get thinner. Audiences, however, are much better mannered than they used to be. In the past musicians or minstrels just provided wallpaper music, a kind of musak against which the audience laughed and talked. A good minstrel, of course, was part of an aristocratic household. Frank Muir suggests that William the Conqueror was so fond of his bard Taillefeau that he allowed him to strike the first blow at the Battle of Hastings. According to legend Taillefeau advanced up the beach singing ballads about Charlemagne, and was promptly struck dead by an enemy arrow. One suspects that if William had been that keen on his carolling, he wouldn’t have exposed him to such danger.
Later of course there were fashionable musicians like Paganini who were very well paid and fawned on by aristocratic groupies. Liszt, in fact, was the first Beatle: society women brought special tweezers so they could pluck out his hair, and after a concert would fight for a fragment of the cushion he’d sat on. Kreisler was once asked to play by a fashionable but
nouveau-riche
American hostess. She would pay him 750 dollars she said but after the concert she didn’t want him to mingle with her guests, in case he lowered the tone.
‘In that case,’ replied Kreisler gravely, ‘the bill will only be 500 dollars.’
In England music was only respected if it was imported, and Italian castrati charged a fortune in the eighteenth century to give concerts to the rich and noble. The middle classes, it seems, had to make do with a lady from the local opera house.
‘I detest these scented rooms,’ wrote Coleridge, ‘where to a gaudy throng, the proud harlot heaves her distended breasts in intricacies of laborious song.’
Opera, it appears, was something to be endured. The audience played draughts during the recitatives, and merely looked in for one act to be seen, to show off their jewels, and gossip. When a very grand but garrulous hostess asked Charles Haas, Proust’s model for Swann, to sit in her box, he replied:
‘I’d love to. I’ve never heard you in
Faust.
’
Today the upper-middle classes, liking their opera sugar-coated, regard Glyndebourne as the smart thing to go to. They particularly enjoy picnicking with other middle-class people and writing down the names of the more attractive herbaceous plants in the garden on their programme. Today the only people who can afford Covent Garden are foreign diplomats, homosexuals and Samantha Upward’s maiden aunts with plaits round their heads, referring to the singers by their surnames like prep school boys: ‘Isn’t Sutherland too marvellously in voice?’ There is a mile-long queue for the loo in the interval, while all those who pretend to know the opera backwards mug up on the synopsis for the next act.