SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND The indulgences of endless summer days, and the intrigue they often bring, are chronicled in films like A Bigger Splash.
Jane Austen, who was to conversation in 19th-century novels what Aaron Sorkin is to 1990s TV dialogue, used an emerging new pastime among households of the Georgian aristocracy to her advantage. The advent and to-and-fro of invitations to various country estates advanced her plots. Any story set up at a weekend country house generally goes in one of two ways: murder or marriage. (Sometimes both. See: Gosford Park). But unless character assassination counts, it's more often the latter. Some might argue that in addition to producing the first modern rom-coms, her country-house setup was precursor to the cottage read.
Take the widowed and wily young Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) in summer's deliciously caustic hit Austen adaptation Love & Friendship; Susan is not so much predatory by nature as by circumstance. As she makes the rounds as a country-house guest, she lays out the social and economic imperative even her male descendants will feel 150 years later. The reality for genteel women, titled or not, who had neither husband nor property and must live by their wits: "We don't live; we visit."
I've had this in mind over the summer as I've been dipping into Adrian Tinniswood's gossipy The Long Weekend. Much as I do love a chintz-covered whodunit with a body in the library,
the focus here, too, is on the tradition of grand-estate visits among the landed gentry between the two World Wars (the custom by then had shortened from months to weekends, thanks to improved rail and car travel). In the last gasp of these country weekends with all the trappings, the upper-class preoccupations consisted of interior decoration, dinner parties, long walks and mischievous guest-affair hijinks. What they ate, who they slept with, what they wore.
As a symbol of status and attainment the aristocrat's country house was the cottage's precursor and its downfall opened the door to middle-class lakeside dreams in the first place.
Basically, imagine the off-camera decline that awaits Downton Abbey after the series finale credits roll.
Tinniswoods' accounts of real-life intrigues focus on the era's social architecture, but his accounts are also a harbinger of its death, as they follow the transformation of the old order where the idle rich and their servants cease to be financially or socially viable. In the aftermath of the Second World War, ownership and upkeep of hundreds of England's ancestral houses (the ones not by then already demolished or in ruin) were transferred to the National Trust to be maintained; the houses' reputations for well-appointed rooms outlived those of their once-illustrious owners.
The author hints at this eventual downfall by first explaining the increasing American presence in the grand country halls, manors and abbeys of rural England with the arrival of the dollar princesses in the late 19th century. The result of, "an unholy alliance between the socially ambitious mothers of heiresses from New York … and impoverished English aristocrats," a most famous example of which was Consuelo Vanderbilt's marriage to Sunny Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough (and owner of the mother of all National Trust buildings, Blenheim Palace). In an ironic reversal of fortune, art doesn't always imitate life, so much as displace it. Downton's stately stand-in Highclere Castle is routinely hired out as a filming location – for that series and others like Jeeves & Wooster, and also welcomes seasonal paying visitors to off-set the staggering cost of upkeep. To accommodate this, during the summer months the current resident earl and his family move out of their grand country home into. . . a modest cottage. Just like the rest of us.
Europeans scatter to villas in the south of France and Italy, Swedes have stugan (their coastal cabins), the East Coast has its weekend commute to the Hamptons or Long Island. Some are to the manner born, but most are to the manor rented. The privileged few maintain second homes; the rest pack up for summer to share getaways out of the city and pretend to lead indolent life for a week or a weekend. Note that the accommodation service Airbnb's current marketing tagline is "Live there."
It's no vacation, this fantasy of getting away from it all. "It" always concerns money and relationships and class. There's no escaping how friction and complications ensue wherever an assortment of family, friends and strangers convene under one roof. Not for the Rothschilds, who were pioneers of the leisure-set summer season on the French Riviera, or the working-class cabins and fishing camps of the post-war baby boomers, or in the group of Jewish summer resorts in the Catskills known as the Borscht Belt – most famously Grossinger's, the inspiration for the resort in Dirty Dancing. We hole up elsewhere but it's still huis clos and the same old story.
As it happens, Dirty Dancing is a rainy-day mainstay at many cottages, just as surely as that snap of a sunset over the lake silhouetted with empty Muskoka chairs on the dock will find its way onto Instagram. Because even while on vacation ourselves, we love seeing how the other half vacation.
Today, Mitford and Waugh's territory is found in beach reads set at cottages, like Mary Kay Andrews's The Weekenders, or Andrew Cividino's acclaimed film Sleeping Giant, about a coming-of-age cottage summer on Lake Superior. The most sumptuous of the summer's voyeuristic cottage-vacation tales, however, is A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino's earthy remake of the stylish 1960s thriller La Piscine. Set among rich Bohemians on holiday on the sun-baked volcanic island of Pantelleria, it's easily the most decadent lifestyle porn since Tinniswood's heyday. Though do keep in mind what I said about how those country-house long weekends tend to end.
Nathalie Atkinson