Alex Preston
Literature & Luxury
From the top ► Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell) & Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waughs' Brideshead Revisited.
Walpole British Luxury
© BBC Films
Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan (Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan) party in The Great Gatsby 2013. © Warner Bros. Photo © AF Archive
Less sumptuous opulence and more hard currency – 50 Shades of Grey. Photo © Collection Christophel
While Fitzgerald’s view of wealth was essentially satirical – as was that of Dickens and Thackeray – things began to change with Edith Wharton and Henry James, with Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Mitford was upper class and looked upon the brash spendthrifts of the Bright Young Things with a fascinated horror that was everything to do with taste. Her depiction of Gerald Berners as Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love was not wholly pejorative. Berners was her friend and, like the character he inspired, he dyed his pigeons pink, adorned his dogs with diamond collars, and celebrated the hour of his birth each night. You can feel Mitford swooning a little when she writes of Merlin: “He was a great collector, and not only Merlinford, but also his houses in London and Rome flowed over with treasures ... Lord Merlin loved jewels; his two black whippets wore diamond necklaces designer for whiter, but not slimmer or more graceful necks that theirs....” Waugh was more solidly middle class, and came at the Bright Young Things from below, both mocking them and wishing desperately to be part of their refulgent world. His Charles Ryder and Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway are cut from the same cloth, reflecting their creators’ wishes to be both outside and inside the luxurious rooms of the very wealthy. For Waugh, though, there’s also the problem of class. In Brideshead Revisited, it’s referred to as “charm” – the thing that causes Charles to fall in love with the world of Brideshead and its unbroken generations of tradition. “I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist’s pride and the philistine’s vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.” For all Charles’s veneration of the aristocracy (based upon Waugh’s admiration of the Lygon family and their seat at Madresfield), there’s an acid undercurrent to Brideshead Revisited, a sense that Waugh loathes them as much as loving them. Novels are always a product of their times and Brideshead was written amid the depredations of World War II, when it must have felt that such beauty and luxury were the things of a kinder, softer age. Now, for writers in late-stage capitalist society, wealth is an object of reverence, with no indication of satirical bent or cynicism required. The real pornography in EL James’s Fifty Shades trilogy is not in the saucy bedroom antics of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, but rather the books’ fetishisation of the objects of Grey’s astonishing wealth. Whether it’s helicopters or watches or sleek Apple-branded computers, you get the feeling that Steele is seduced as much by the consumables with which Grey is surrounded as by the man himself. Similarly, the thrills of a Jilly Cooper novel are only partly the bonking and naked tennis – they are also an exercise in wealth tourism, giving us a privileged and unashamed glimpse into the lives of the 0.1 per cent. For a final message about the relationship between writers and the very rich, you should look at the career of Jay McInerney, whose skewering of the wealthy in books like Brightness Falls was first blunted then disappeared altogether. His latest novel, Bright, Precious Days is populated by bankers and socialites stumbling champagnedrunk from one fundraiser to the next. McInerney, like Fitzgerald before him (and the fictional Tom Yates) has committed the cardinal writerly sin of being accepted by the rich. Now married to an heiress and famously having once drunk £20,000 worth of wine in a single night, McInerney is unable to summon the kind of distance required to write well about the wealthy. We are fascinated by luxury, obsessed with the lives of the super-rich, but as readers we need the writer to be in two places at once: yes, on the inside, but also, like them, pressed against the window, looking in on the gaudy excesses of wealth.
