The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A backwards history of British nostalgia
Every generation, right back to the Tudors, has pined for ‘the good old days’ of an earlier era. I was enjoying this original book – until it called me a fascist
RULE, NOSTALGIA by Hannah Rose Woods 400pp, Faber, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
On page 317 of this book, Hannah Rose Woods, whom readers might remember from 2016’s winning University Challenge team, implies I am a fascist. It’s hard not to take that personally. If I could swallow a pill and remember only the good bits of Rule, Nostalgia, I would – but that would mean editing the memory, and Woods is dead against it.
Her gimmick is to tell the history of British nostalgia backwards, testing the memory of each generation by what it was actually like in the years before and what the inhabitants of that era really wanted. Chapter one covers 19792021, when many of us pined for the certainties of war and the early welfare state. But in chapter two, which covers 1940 to 1979, we discover that most of the preceding generation hated being shot at or bombed or living off rations and they looked back fondly on the Edwardian peace. That said, in chapter three, we learn that the Edwardians lamented that England was changing too fast... and thus back and back we go, unto the very Tudors, who either complained that Protestants were destroying the ancient faith or that Catholics had disfigured the early Church.
The British perennially cast their history as a lost Eden, a paradise that happens to contain the precise qualities we believe we are missing.
The author’s ire is especially directed at Brexit campaigners, who were paradoxically nostalgic for an imperial Britain that was small and plucky yet which also ruled the waves. But she concedes that during that crazy referendum of 2016 – salad days, in my opinion – Remainers also wallowed in memories of continental travel, derided Brexit as un-British, and threw out archaic-sounding insults at eurosceptics (“cockwomble” was one), imagining a “mid-century fantasy Britain where nothing had gone wrong” before we left the EU.
The 2012 Olympic opening ceremony brushed over the issue of empire – yet it celebrated Windrush, as if British history leans towards tolerance and our past legitimises the multicultural future the elite prefers. A nostalgic vision of Britain “has most often been invoked by people arguing most vociferously for rapid and transformative change”. Woods cites Maggie Thatcher, who preached “Victorian values” while condemning those who resisted cuts and closures as dinosaurs.
In reality, many Victorians were unhappy with their own direction of travel and retreated into the Neverland of children’s literature. Or booze. In the 1800s, “manufacturers of tonic wine created a picture of the sickly clerical worker, enervated and wan from the artificiality of indoor toil”. An advert for Sanatogen contrasted this with the “good old days”, when “man rose at dawn, went to his labour in the fields or engaged in the chase, and retired at sundown to enjoy a long and sound night’s rest”. Consumerism invited punters to drink their way back to happiness.
Gardening allowed suburbanites to fashion their own rural idyll. Customs and rituals were revived in the countryside to connect us to the preindustrial landscape. The Houses of Parliament, with its gothic architecture and neo-medieval frescoes, gives the impression of being centuries old – even that it sprouted from the ground, like a tree. In fact it was only finished in the 1870s, designed to look “olde worlde” in order to proclaim that British democracy was “rooted in its history”.
When the old parliament building burnt down in an accidental fire
If I could swallow a pill and remember only the good bits of this book, I would
long,” with no time off for good behaviour. He was, as ever, working too hard – by day as an analyst at Lloyds bank, in the evenings as the editor of The Criterion, bankrolled by Lady Rothermere. After The Waste Land, the poems didn’t come. And his marriage was torture. He and Vivien HaighWood imprisoned themselves in a nightmare. He still loved Emily Hale, whom he met in 1912; after Vivien’s affair with the predatory Bertrand Russell, Eliot tangled with Nancy Cunard. Nobody, least of all Eliot, seems to have had any fun: for him the revulsion seems to have been the payoff. No wonder he viewed art as “an escape from personality”.
It took many years to escape from Vivien, who became insane. The letters to Emily Hale, meanwhile, unsealed in 2020, suggest a depth of feeling that he was latterly inclined to treat as a nostalgic illusion. As time went on, and their direct encounters became fewer, his tenderness was displaced by
legalistic exactitude, a setting of limits which must have been heartbreaking for Hale.
There is also the shadow of a demeaning prejudice. His friend Leonard Woolf said that Eliot would have sincerely denied that he was anti-Semitic, but it’s clear that, like his family, he was marinaded in the infection. In his unctuous dealings with Lord Rothermere, a prospective employer, he praised his newspapers’ enthusiastic articles about “Fascismo”. In time Eliot saw Hitler clearly, but as news of the extermination of European Jews emerged, he argued: “To suggest that the Jewish problem may be simplified because so many will have been killed off is trifling: a few generations of security and they will be as numerous as ever.”
It might be objected that Eliot was of his time, and not alone, and that it is unhistorical to subject him to the moral orthodoxies of the present. But just as we should not deform history by imposing on it a template of our own devising, so
too we are bound as human beings to respond to the feelings of our fellow creatures. As Crawford reads him, Eliot was in many ways an unappetising figure. Yet he suffered, and sought to repent.
That he was also a great poet is not an exoneration; his sins derive no beneficial colouring from the poems’ existence. But, as Douglas Dunn once wrote, “The man is a liar/ Who says he has not found my
grey dirt in his heart.” Eliot knew himself to be a sinner, of a highminded sort. Because the church forbade it, he would not divorce Vivien to marry the long-suffering Hale (which may seem perversely convenient). Meanwhile, in public life he was not only an unrivalled poet-critic, but also an advocate for Christian renewal, drawn to the wishful village-based agrarianism so appealing to the Right. If Eliot and his clergyman friends could still believe that they had a claim to the nation’s attention on matters of faith, social conscience and education, their time was almost at an end. He gave far too much time – and what remained of his health – to the duties of greatness.
The poems abide. “Little Gidding”, last of the Four Quartets, evokes the Blitz (Eliot was an air raid warden), closing with a vision where “the fire and the rose are one”, the earthly and the divine inseparably infolded. We are invited to share this mystery.
But when Crawford reads “Burnt Norton”, the first part of Four Quartets, and identifies Hale as the addressee of certain lines, there is a slight temptation to forget that the poem is a work of imagination that dramatises a similar abiding mystery. Sources cannot be the thing itself, or its explanation: as Eliot himself argued intensely, a poem is something irreducible.
He did find happiness later in life with marriage in 1957 to his much younger secretary at Faber, Valerie Fletcher. When she read “The Journey of the Magi” in her teens, she knew that she must somehow find a way to Eliot: perhaps, for once, Eliot let someone else know best. As his widow, she became the fierce protector of his estate. Crawford himself prepared the ground for this outstanding biography by gaining her approval – not lightly given. The life depicted is almost unthinkably grim at times, but then there are the poems, always fascinating and at best inexhaustible.