Beyond Brideshead

The film of 'Brideshead Revisited' will revive our stately-home nostalgia. But can heritage culture escape the snobs? Boyd Tonkin looks for new ideas in old places

(MIRAMAX PICTURES)

If you have teddy-bears, prepare to clutch them now: Julian Jarrold's film of Brideshead Revisited opens next week. Already, a chorus of pundits has decreed that his version must inevitably fall short of the Granada TV dramatisation by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg that enchanted a slump-hit nation in 1981. Their languidly glamorous view of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel sent a generation of reality-averse students – and many fellow-escapists – in headlong flight from the sharp edges of Margaret Thatcher's first term into a soft-focus dream of grand mansions, doomed passions and golden youths.

In British culture, country-house nostalgia can always be raised to an even higher power. Bizarrely, the current wave of misty-eyed retrospection takes its cue from idyllic memories of a TV serial that defied its times... which in turn took its cue from a novel about idyllic memories of a dynastic domain that defied its times. Arcadia, the lost golden age, always lies one step further back, and over the next hill.

For more than four centuries, English writers, artists and now film-makers have sought to embody a fugitive ideal of beauty and togetherness in a house and its estate. As Adam Nicolson (himself a character in this saga) puts it in his book about the Pembroke family's house and lands at Wilton near Salisbury, Earls of Paradise, the "English Arcadia" of comely dwelling and park, community-minded clan and protected tenantry offered "an elite dream of happiness". The dream's ingredients may have changed as times and trends did, as Tom Stoppard showed when his 1993 play Arcadia dazzlingly imagined the past of "Sidley Park". Yet, right from the dawn of this genre, a wistful note of decline-and-fall regret sounds. Something precious has always been lost, and thoughts of death stalk those carefully-tended grounds.

The Great House, with its graces and virtues sealed in aged stone and seasoned wood, appears from the off as a fragile hold-out struggling to survive against a tide of ostentation and vulgarity. Go right back to Ben Jonson's poem "To Penshurst", which in 1612 helped to inaugurate the form, and you hear the anxious contrast between the simple, sturdy family seat not "built for envious show" and the "proud ambitious heaps" thrown up by the nouveaux riches all around. "Their lords have built, but thy lord dwells," concludes Jonson the poor London bricklayer made good. He flattered the Sidney family who hosted and funded him while striking the authentic country-house chord of "there goes the neighbourhood" – with a touch of perennial English NIMBY-ism to boot.

Noël Coward concurred three centuries later with the post-Death Duty ironies of his "Stately Homes of England". Their grand survival pretends to show that "the upper classes/ Still have the upper hand" – even though "the fact that they have to be rebuilt/ And frequently mortaged to the hilt/ Is inclined to take the gilt/ off the gingerbread". From there it's but a short stroll down the overgrown paths of a leaky-roofed and cash-burning inheritance to the lyrics of The Kinks in the 1960s, with Ray Davies's wasted toff brooding on a "Sunny Afternoon": "The taxman's taken all my dough/ And left me in my stately home..."

Buy in to the Brideshead vision of vanished glories and corrupted times, in fiction or film, and you join a very old and very persistent stream of high-minded protest against the sacrifical slaughter of ancient civility on the altars of a crude materialistic age. This is a game that radicals can play just as eagerly as conservatives. Country-house laments often take the form of outrage at the naked muscle of capitalist wealth as it barges into the sacred acres and robs the land of its good old squires and yeomen. A early as 1770, Oliver Goldsmith in his poem "The Deserted Village" was railing at the damage inflicted by boorish plutocrats on rural life and livelihoods: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/ Where wealth accumulates, and men decay."

Even in Brideshead, so often read as a diehard reactionary's charter, the house and its dynasty stand for principle more than privilege: Catholicism, of course (Waugh named the book's chief theme as "the operation of Grace"), but also the cradle-to-grave responsibilities of noblesse oblige. Waugh acolytes usually treat Hooper, the plebeian fellow-officer whose philistine tastes make him a walking handbook of modern barbarism to Charles Ryder, as some sort of symbol of the Socialist purgatory that began with the Labour landslide of 1945 – just as the novel appeared.

The author loathed that government, no doubt. But take heed of what Hooper says, when he's not annoying Ryder with his perpetual "Rightyoh". With his pride in some "modest commercial experience" and mantra of "They couldn't get away with that in business" when faced with the Army's public-sector laxity about staffing and efficiency, he sounds as much like some proto-Thatcherite as a bureaucratic lefty.

Waugh himself later acknowledged that modern values had ridden to the rescue of his neo-feudal reverie. After 1945, the willingness of the National Trust to take over houses and leave "donor families" in place as secure tenants, allied to the new entrepreneurial spirit of the owning aristocracy that began with Lord Montagu at Beaulieu, thrust homes both stately and scruffy into the front line of an emerging heritage industry. In a preface to the 1959 edition of Brideshead, Waugh admitted "It was impossible to see, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house... So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain".

Country-house visiting for a fee had begun in the 18th century. But through the post-war decades the curiousity of urban plebs saved noble piles all around the country. "The advance of Hooper has been held up at several points," Waugh grudgingly allowed. "Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin."

Those undead palaces and manors loom ever larger in British culture. The National Trust itself has widened its aesthetic canons to embrace, for instance, the pricily-restored Victorian Gothic extravaganza of Tyntesfield in Somerset. That pre-Raphaelite opium dream is currently on lurid view as the interior backdrop to François Ozon's film of Angel: Elizabeth Taylor's novel about the rise and fall of a slushy bestseller who yearns to occupy a mansion brazenly named "Paradise House".

Even the country-house patronage of literary arts, so crucial to aspiring authors in the age of Ben Jonson, has seen a small revival. Literature returns to the broad acres and venerable halls as an adjunct to the festival circuit. With bookish hipsters in mind, Earl St Germans opens the grounds of Port Eliot in Cornwall; for a more sedate crowd, Earl Spencer hosts a literary weekend at Althorp. The Throckmorton family, an older Catholic clan by far than Waugh's converted Marchmains, last weekend held their first literary gathering at Coughton Court. In a fortnight's time, Blenheim Palace will host events of the Woodstock Literary Festival (supported by The Independent).

Yet for all the signs of renewal, nostalgia – flanked by snobbery on one side, and resentment on the other – still rules in most writing about the country house. Can we move beyond another round of "Brideshead Regurgitated" (Stoppard's gag) to a vista that places house and grounds in the frame of the future rather than the past?

Adam Nicolson has made a bold and convincing bid to occupy that higher and more hopeful terrain. He is the grandson of Bloomsbury royalty Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West – the minor poet and major gardener whose family palace at Knole inspired the most gleefully skittish of all country-house novels, Orlando, by her lover Virginia Woolf. The son of publisher and writer Nigel Nicolson, he grew up at Sissinghurst in the Kentish Weald – the semi-ruined Elizabethan "fantasy palace" around which Vita nurtured one of Britain's best-loved gardens after she and Harold bought it in 1930 (for £12,375). By his later childhood, the Nicolsons lived at Sissinghurst as tenants: ownership was transferred to the National Trust in 1967.

At once a close-focus (and very moving) family memoir, a richly-textured history of a house and its farms and woods that strides over long centuries of continuity and change, and a fervent blueprint for a progressive ideal of "heritage", Nicolson's new book really does – to fall into the waiting cliché's arms – break new ground in the literature of locality. Sissinghurst: an unfinished history (Harper Press, £20) confirms what Earls of Paradise and previous works such as Perch Hill have suggested: that Nicolson is one his generation's most gifted, generous and persuasive writers about place as "the roomiest of containers for human meaning".

A manifesto – or Arcadian dream – about the future of his place runs in and out of the personal and historical chapters. They lay bare the lonely underside of Harold and Vita's Bloomsbury myth ("so much was written but so little seemed to have been said") and take a lively walk through the past of house and lands, from the class wars of the medieval cloth boom to tightly-policed Elizabethan splendour and the dark days of the Seven Years War when Sissinghurst, crammed with French POWs, was England's Abu Ghraib: "a zoo of abuse and maltreatment".

Nicolson aims to put buildings, gardens and farms back together again. He seeks to divert the estate's activity from agribusiness to the ecologically-enriched provision of food for the 115,000 visitors who eat on the site every year. "Lunch would make its own landscape." Wittily, he mocks his own USP for the hallowed turf as a "holistic real-food agenda" overlaid on the existing brand identity of "heritage horticulture, with a lesbian-aristocratic gloss, allied to a tranquillity destination".

Setback by setback, breakthrough by breakthrough, he tells of his efforts to sell this model to the National Trust and its sceptical staff at Sissinghurst. However big his ideas, however strong his need to be more than "the receiving son", they make it plain that Adam is not "the lord of the manor", and that they will not play at being plaster shepherdesses in his organic fantasia. Tipsy on grow-your-own green idealism, he may scorn the idea of Sissinghurst the leisure attraction as "a middle-class comfort zone". But plenty of people enjoy it that way, workers as well as trippers. In sharp distinction to earlier Arcadias, his vision will ripen by mutual agreement, or not at all. Inch by inch, seed by seed, it slowly does.

It would be false to present Nicolson's perspective on place simply as an antidote to the Brideshead cult. He knows why great-house nostalgia melts the heart, and can sound pretty Charles Ryder-ish himself as he settles down to write in the Tower and feels "the Vita-ism creeping up on me, the ghost, another generation on". Yet he understands that "Elegy, which is a longing for an abandoned past, is not enough".

His project strives to find "the ability to fold the past into the future", with house, landscape and community fully occupied and integrated. Except that this will be an Arcadia shorn of autocracy: one day toiling in the sweaty kitchens gives him a "pure reality-check". Such a robustly romantic urge to put new heart into an old place could win over even those readers who tend to side with the Hoopers against the Waugh-like snobs and nobs. We may look on Nicolson's grand but humane design and murmur a quiet blessing -– or maybe just "Rightyoh".