Jilly Cooper never broke America. Her myths do not travel, and when Disney+ wanted to serialise her work, they chose Rivals. This is about television in the 1980s – also, sex, money, trauma, big houses – and television has no hinterland. Cooper is 87 now. She began as a journalist, and has written 11 long novels, all rooted in an England of her fantasies. As the novels, which are collectively called the Rutshire Chronicles, wound on, she invented a village called Paradise. They aren’t subtle.
I interviewed her 20 years ago in her house in the Cotswolds: an embroidered sign on the front door said: “Go away”. Did she mean it? No interviewee has made me lunch before or sent me flowers after, but she did. She has good manners – superficially, the dominant characteristic of the British aristocrat – and journalists have, in return, wound protective spells around her. She is rarely criticised: she is barely even analysed. In this, we mirror her novels, in which she makes the nobility more interesting – and stupider – than it really is. People say Cooper’s novels are about sex, and the sex is hard to ignore. Rupert Campbell-Black, who appears in all eleven novels, has a “cock like a baseball bat. Used to bat bread rolls across the room with it when we were at school.”
But that is not their essence, which is a different anaesthetic: the longing for aristocracy, the ultimate security. Rishi Sunak, child of immigrants, read Cooper to try to understand the British class system. I did too. (She wrote a whole non-fiction book called Class, but it didn’t make sense to me, and I couldn’t finish it. I could barely start it. Class reads like a book she was forced to write at gunpoint. Her generic aristocrat is called The Hon Harry Stow-Crat. Her generic lower-middle class couple are called Bryan and Jen Teal. Her generic working-class couple are called Mr and Mrs Definitely-Disgusting. Etcetera). But in her novels, Cooper gives as little analysis to this subject as we give her fiction. In Cooper’s happy world we are all in it together, though of course we are not. I have read her books many times and, though I love them, I accept they belong to the fantasy genre. I can’t tell you if they are good. I don’t think goodness is the point of them. They are, instead, very persuasive narcotics: so much so there was a celebrity bus tour of the Cotswolds called Jillywood, which I went on.
She told me something crucial, but I buried it in the interview. I think everyone who enjoys Cooper buries things. It’s a collective enterprise. Her mother was gravely ill with depression when Cooper was a child. “She spent a lot of time in hospital,” Cooper told me. “Once she took an overdose. Daddy came and said, ‘Mummy’s taken an overdose. And I don’t know what to do’. I loved her so much but sometimes I would think ‘I love you so much Mummy, but please can we talk about something else?’” She also said: “I once dressed up as a suicide. I sewed my slippers to the bottom of my pyjamas and threw them out of the window. I wouldn’t kneel in church. I threw all my dolls away. I smashed my dolls. Is that Freudian?” I think it is. The other interesting thing she told me was: “I’m not clever. I promise I’m not clever.”
The early novels of the 1970s are simple, based on short stories she wrote for women’s magazines. Each is about a young girl in trouble, and named after its protagonist. Bookish Harriet is pregnant out of wedlock by an idiot. Actress Bella has PTSD from a humble background. Socialite Octavia can’t orgasm because her parents don’t love her. Larky Prudence is in love with a man called Pendle, which is bad enough by itself. (That was Cooper’s description of her mother: “larky”). These books are trivial and filled with Cooper’s charm. She told me her late husband Leo “had flu and he read Prudence, and he said it made him feel worse”. In these she writes like the ideal dinner-party guest – both trivial and heartfelt – and she got her break at a dinner party: a Sunday Times editor liked her and suggested a column. They all end in the same way: child-woman meets father-man and never has to worry about status again. Cooper had success as a wife before she had success as a writer. Bring possessed is status. After Octavia has an orgasm “like a great, glorious, whooshing washing machine” her Welsh lover Gareth tells her: “even if we have to fight like cats, I’m going to wear the trousers. You’re going to do what I tell you, and if you start upstaging me, I’ll put you down. The boys in the Valley are like that with our women, but we know how to love them.” Cooper’s characters are stereotypes. They sound like people she read about in newspapers, but never met. Jewish women wear jewels. Irish men weep. Gardeners look into bedrooms through wisteria.
Then came Riders, in 1985, set in an England of pristine villages and kindly squires. It is a semi-feudal paradise in which tenants respect landowners and Leftists wear awful clothes and talk about themselves. The novel is about showjumpers, specifically Campbell-Black, the landed, sex-addicted lost boy of irresponsible parents who is, nevertheless, “still nirvana for most women”. Cooper has said Campbell-Black is based on the 21st Earl of Suffolk, the 11th Duke of Beaufort, and Andrew Parker-Bowles. It is a tribute to her ability to plant amnesia that these men did not sue her. Campbell-Black is many things beside the owner of the Penscombe estate (clearly Fitzwilliam Darcy’s Pemberley: same initial, same letter count). He is an aristocratic Mr Benn: soldier, showjumper, MP, television executive, football club owner. He is also, most essentially – but not to Cooper – a rapist. He bullies his first wife into a foursome – I definitely read “no” – but Cooper sometimes sticks a crime in and leaves it hanging like a comma. In Score! the conductor Roberto Rannaldini is a rapist and, it is implied, a serial murderer. (“Two of the comelier village girls had vanished without trace in the past three years”). You might think serial murder would be a central plot: she makes it a footnote.
Riders pitches Campbell-Black against Jake Lovell, the son of the cook at his boarding school. Lovell’s mother killed herself: Cooper is filled with characters longing for a mother lost, and her women are self-absorbed or maternal, with nothing in between. Jake bests Rupert with the help of a sad deb wife and Sailor and Macaulay, who are horses. I think they are the best characters in Riders: they are certainly the ones who provoke the most profound emotional response. “Don’t try telling Jake it’s only a horse,” his groom says on Sailor’s death. “He loved Sailor more than any human. He felt they were both ugly, both laughed at, both despised and rejected. Together they were going to show the world.” Horses and dogs are rescuers in Cooper’s landscape: quasi-parents. (Cooper says this of her own childhood: “I had 42 stuffed animals, and a live pony called Rufus”). Multiple characters only trust the dog. When Campbell-Black is asked who he would most like to meet in the afterlife, the answer is a Labrador called Badger: two animals in one. In Polo, Daisy is supported through divorce by Ethel, a spaniel. (Cooper heroines must be married: to be single is “like being a house without a roof”). Also in Polo, Ricky France-Lynch is supported through bereavement by a dog called Little Chef. (He is no pedigree. Cooper’s snobbery doesn’t extend to animals). In Score! the hero finds Lucy – another idealised Cooper mother-figure – by rescuing her dog James. Proof of love is buying someone a horse.
In Rivals, her second long novel, published in 1988, we meet evil Lord Tony Baddingham – in early editions it was Lord Bullingham, but perhaps it was too subtle – and Irish Socialist journalist Declan O’Hara, who lives in a medieval priory next to Penscombe. This is Cooper’s most explicit fiction about class. O’Hara is a series of Irish stereotypes (he worships Yeats, he thinks his wife is Maud Gonne) yet has no problem accepting a peerage from an English queen (in a later book this major event is mentioned in passing). But Cooper’s characters don’t make sense. They can’t. If they did, they would collapse. Rivals narrates a friendship between O’Hara and Campbell-Black. It wouldn’t happen. A globally-famous TV producer stays with Baddingham, despite his violence. It wouldn’t happen.
Baddingham is Cooper’s arch villain, because the worst sin in her world is hating the class you are from. Tony’s father got rich too late to send him to boarding school, and so he watched his younger brother – if you need names, it’s Bas Baddingham, polo-playing property developer and brasserie owner – inhabit the Tatler milieu he yearns for himself. If Cooper’s working-class characters tend to be benevolent, albeit hackneyed – dailies drink gin, so very hackneyed – the lower-middle class yearning to be other is unforgivable.
There is a clue in Class, where Cooper tells a true story about two old Etonians coming to live near her in Yorkshire when she was 18. At that point her family was, “upper-middle” class (though they later had to move from a “glorious” house to a “poky” London flat, which triggered her mother’s depression). “I was terribly disconcerted when, after a couple of visits to our house, and one of them taking me out once, they both became complete habitués of the house of a jumped-up steel-merchant across the valley,” she writes. “Soon they were both fighting for the hand of his not particularly good-looking daughter. But she’s so much commoner than me, I remember thinking in bewilderment, why don’t they prefer my company and our house?” She concludes, “I had yet to learn…. that people invariably dislike and shun the class just below them, and much prefer the class below that, or even the one below that”. The middle-classes, she concludes, “are riven with self-doubt”. Which is why we read her novels.
The later books have exclamation marks in the titles, as if Cooper’s own interest is flagging. (She hasn’t written a title without an exclamation mark since 1996). She has covered schools and football gruesomely – an underclass character is called “Feral” – though she returns to form in Jump! – because it is about a horse, and only because it is about a horse. (I tried to ignore the sub-plot about Islamic terrorism.)
Cooper’s books are about an imaginary, eternally forgivable aristocracy: they are one of England’s great fictions, and the parallels with the royal family are obvious. They are gossip columns, and they meet the abyss in the upper-middle class predisposition to polite silence, which is loneliness. Her readership though, is beyond that class. These novels are for those looking in and I wonder if she writes, entirely unconsciously, for the people she despises.
[See also: The making of Barbara Kingsolver]
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