The recent reissue of The Shooting Party, a novel of mine published twenty-two years ago, reminds me that it was written at a time when public interest in the First World War seemed to be at its height. In fact I thought it was past its height and would probably have abandoned the idea for the book had my English publisher not urged me to see it through. I had already written a novel set in 1913, a story whose development to some extent, and if you wanted to see it that way, adumbrated the tragedy to come. It was called Statues in a Garden and it was published in 1964. I think most readers saw it as an oddity, with no contemporary relevance. By 1980, though, not only had historical novels begun their return to favor but the Edwardian period had become a source of general fascination, partly as a result of the success of the television series Upstairs, Downstairs. Moreover, the First World War had come to be seen as a watershed, the catastrophe that determined the course of the twentieth century.
The idea of The Shooting Party had come quite neatly and completely into my head one day and I had thought it a fruitful idea but not for me. It is a depressing experience for a novelist—and more of a threat to me now than it was then—to start cheerfully working on an idea and, just as it seems to be developing nicely, to be brought up short by the realization that one has been this way before. It is as if one had set out to write a cello concerto and suddenly it’s the Enigma Variations all over again. The project simply dies on one. I thought the Edwardian shooting party might do the same.
After Statues in a Garden, and still scratching around recent history in search of origins of present discontents, I had written a trilogy set in the period from the 1930s to 1950s, ending in 1956 with the Suez crisis and the last faint squeak of the British Empire, and after that a novel about an alternative commune struggling through much the same period. This last had not much pleased my then publisher, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, at that time at Hamish Hamilton. He said he did not like those sorts of people. I liked them myself—or some of them anyway (there were rather too many characters in that book)—but I could quite see that they would not be his cup of tea. He was happier with Edwardian ladies and gentlemen, reprehensible though some of their habits might be. He suggested a family saga set in the First World War. I said that unlike God I was reluctant to kill off so many of my characters, but that a story about an Edwardian shooting party might throw some sideways light on the subject.
When I began to work on the idea I realized that the particular subsection of Edwardian society that I was writing about—the hard-living shooting set—was not identical to the subsection I had written about in Statues in a Garden, that is to say, the family of a high-minded Liberal politician. A shooting party was the apotheosis of the Edwardian age in the way that sweet-natured if rather spoilt girls and boys playing games which went wrong in a charming garden were not. The King himself was an expert shot, and among the men who shot with him there were some who did little else. The functions of the landed class had been severely curtailed by the various Local Government Acts of the 1880s and ’90s. The country gentry had run the countryside—and indeed to a considerable extent the nation—for the previous two hundred years. They provided a high proportion of Members of Parliament, and as Justices of the Peace and landlords they in effect controlled most aspects of rural life. The Local Government Acts set up new bodies of administrators. At the same time land values collapsed; some families even rented out their houses and went to live in France because it was cheaper. The slow process by which the landed gentry became a redundant class had begun. As Sir Randolph in the novel writes in the back of his Game Book, where he is in the habit of jotting down his thoughts, “Everything’s against us now. The politicians are determined to turn this country into an urban society instead of a rural one and in the course of the change they think they’ve got to take away the power of the landed proprietor. So they fling Acts of Parliament at our heads, set up town councils…do nothing to help agriculture out of its terrible problems—and now the Liberals are crippling us with taxes.…It will be the ruin of rural England.”
Such was the social prestige of the landed gentry that it was a long time before the economic realities became clear. The fact that a great many country houses were pulled down in the middle years of the twentieth century was not simply a result of the enormous casualties of the Great War and the number of young men who did not come home to take up their inheritance; it was also because the way of life these great houses had sustained was no longer viable. The prestige of the upper classes lasted longer than their power. Individuals from that background might and did distinguish themselves in all sorts of ways—as they still do—but they no longer did so as of right. The “urban society” which Sir Randolph foresaw has come about. Such of the countryside as remains feels its interests neglected, and, in the absence of those old-fashioned Parliamentary figures of fun, the “country members,” marches down Whitehall to protest.
Once the background had defined itself, the individual characters had to emerge from their context and take over; this was fiction, not history. I had (and I think I still have) an idea of what a novel is which time and fashion have probably done away with, namely that it ought to reflect genuine historical processes, and that the context in which the characters operate should be solid and recognizable. So the background composed itself: Edwardian country life, its elite class just beginning to be disestablished (“if you take away the proper functions of an aristocracy what can they do but play games too seriously?” says Sir Randolph); behind that the ever-increasing pace of international competition and the febrile political atmosphere of wrongs unrighted and justified claims ignored (Ireland, women, the workers), and, at the same time, the luxury and the prettiness and the untried optimism and the underlying melancholy—all to be brought up short before the unimagined reality of war. One is left with Cornelius Cardew, the ineffectual would-be reformer of the world, wanting “to tell the players not just that they were using the wrong rules but that they were playing the wrong game.”
With the context established, the characters must step forward, differentiate themselves, establish connections with one another, begin to play out their private drama. What they bring with them becomes more important than anything else because it is more important to them; they do not think of themselves as merely a part of history. There is a story to be told; the context is only one layer of the pudding, the biscuit base.
The Shooting Party was published in 1980. This winter of 2002–03 there is a major exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London entitled Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War. It includes manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs, and works of art. Apart from the interested general public, the exhibition will be seen by thousands of adolescents, because these writers are on their school syllabus. The process of absorption continues.
The social certainties of Edwardian England—and the sort of novel which deployed itself within them—have to a great extent disappeared. Already weakening, they were thrown into confusion by the First World War and never recovered their former force. The doubts and changes, developments, destructions, and distractions, were rushing upon us anyway; the war only made them rush faster. It also provided, and still provides, a landmark, something to which we can look back and ask, Is that when things went wrong? Did it really have to happen? Could it happen again? As to that last question, the answer must be No, not in the same way. But in another way, even worse? How can we tell?
The feeling of not knowing what might happen next is not entirely unpleasant, but it tends to produce a nervy kind of literature. If writing fiction is your way of life, where do you look? If you are young you look around you, and laugh, or scream, or try to curdle people’s blood. Older, and a few books later, do you just brood? England is trying in a rather ill-humored fashion to invent for itself a modified version of socialism, within or without the European community. The British Empire as a subject of study seems to be emerging from the dark night of denial to which political correctness consigned it; imperialism, now that America finds itself being accused of it, turns out to be an unfinished debate. If nothing else, it is a rich mine of stories, but so far it is the formerly colonized rather than the former colonizers who have produced the talent to tell them.
There is one other theme which, for better or worse, is creeping back into consideration. It just might be time for the last romance, the one with God. But Heaven knows where that would lead.
Isabel Colegate’s novels include, as well as The Shooting Party, The Orlando Trilogy and Winter Journey. Her most recent book was A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses.
