Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age by D. J. Taylor

The Barnes & Noble Review

We are by now so hopelessly mired in celebrity culture that it's almost impossible to conceive how recent a phenomenon it is: not even a century old, it turns out. The first group to comprise a celebrity culture in the modern sense was London's so-called Bright Young People, a free-spending, high-profile mixture of bohemians and aristocrats who partied their way exhibitionistically through the 1920s. They were too young to have fought in World War I but had been brought up in its shadow, seeing many of their older brothers and friends killed on the Western Front. Their reaction to the inevitable survivor's guilt, and to the rather rigid Edwardian mores of their parents -- the generation who had brought about the war, after all -- was rebellion through flippancy. They thumbed their noses at life and its tragedies with deliberately provocative frivolity and excess; the emblematic event of the era was the well-publicized theme party. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in Vile Bodies (1930), the seminal Bright Young People novel, there were "masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties….dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris…." And on and on.

Vile Bodies and its predecessor, Decline and Fall (1928), read like insanely over-the-top satires, but many of his contemporaries noted that Waugh had hardly exaggerated anything. The truth was wild enough, and there are recognizable real-life counterparts for most of his characters, even the more extravagant ones such as Lady Metroland, Peter Pastmaster, Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, and Miss Agatha Runcible, profligate figurehead of the Bright Young People. The original for Miss Runcible was Elizabeth Ponsonby, the feckless daughter of a high-up Labour politician and granddaughter of Queen Victoria's private secretary. Revelations about her unedifying career have provided the raison d' être for D. J. Taylor's Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age.

Taylor was given access to the Ponsonby family's unpublished letters and diaries, enabling him to reconstruct Elizabeth's career from her youth as the most visible partygoer of her time -- a sort of contemporary Paris Hilton -- through her brief and pathetic marriage, the sad period that saw her broke and boozy, scraping a living as manager of a sleazy nightclub, and her death from alcoholism at the age of 40. Her father's pleading letters make heartbreaking reading and sum up all the bitter contrasts of a generation gap whose width and depth would not be seen again until the 1960s.

Observing the scene, as he does, through the prism of Elizabeth Ponsonby's life, Taylor's view of the Bright Young People is understandably jaundiced. But during its heyday the movement was an intensely creative one. It launched many careers, including those of Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Henry Green, three of the best novelists of the 20th century; John Betjeman, the most beloved English poet of his time; the brilliant light novelist Nancy Mitford; Cecil Beaton, who as a photographer and designer crystallized his world and delivered it to posterity; the Byzantinist Robert Byron; the historians Harold Acton and Lord Kinross; and many more. This cohort, however different and even mutually antipathetic its individual members might have been, shared a sensibility and an aesthetic that influenced British artistic and intellectual life throughout the century. The silly jargon and in-jokes of the '20s (to quote Vile Bodies again, on an occasion where Miss Runcible is arrested: " 'Well,' they said. 'Well! How too, too shaming, Agatha, darling,' they said. 'How devastating, how unpoliceman-like, how goat-like, how sick-making, how too, too awful' ") eventually developed into a recognizable ironic outlook that colored the work of all who had come in touch with it. "Their style," Taylor writes, "-- brisk, affected, outwardly impersonal, inwardly often deeply vulnerable -- influenced a host of descendents who knew nothing of their ancestry."

Part of that style devolved from the gay sensibility enveloping the group. As Taylor says, "No English youth movement, it is safe to say, has ever contained such a high proportion of homosexuals or -- in an age when these activities were still illegal -- been so indulgent of their behavior," and all of the Bright Young entertainments were invested with an "irretrievable air of campness." The buffoonery of Byron, who liked to dress as Queen Victoria (whom he resembled), and Acton's silken façade and feline gift for gossip made their indelible mark; so did the outrageous Stephen Tennant, who ornamented the festivities with his "elaborately coiffed blond hair set in marcelled waves, and pale, flapping hands," and Brian Howard, who though "expected, not least by himself, to write novels that would out-Firbank Firbank in their orchidaceous subtleties…ended up as a tragic-comic turn in works by other people." (He was the inspiration for Waugh's Ambrose Silk and Anthony Blanche, among other literary characters.) A number of these epicene young men transported the '20s gay style far into the later 20th century: Harold Acton was still holding court at his Italian villa in the 1990s; the elderly Lord Faringdon, who as Gavin Henderson had graced Bright Young parties in his youth, was once heard to address the House of Lords not as "My lords" but as "My dears."

As all of this indicates, the principle attraction of the Bright Young People was their humor -- at their best they could be devastatingly funny, as so many diaries, letters, and novels of the period prove. Taylor's book, strangely enough, is not funny; there is hardly a laugh in it, which puts him by definition at odds with the people whose lives he chronicles. There seems a basic lack of affinity; he doesn't particularly like these people, and he is not amused. His comments on the novels of the period are especially obtuse. One wonders why he chose to write about all this, aside from the tempting opportunity provided by the Ponsonby papers.

Of course he is not unjustified in his dyspeptic outlook. The Bright Young People movement quickly curdled, with Elizabeth Ponsonby by no means its only casualty. Brenda Dean Paul, the "It" girl of the era who became a hopeless drug addict, remembered that by the end of the '20s "the parties became more and more frequent, more and more lacking in originality and amusement, until they became merely massed drinking orgies, attended by a few bleary-eyed demoralized bright young pioneers, too tired, too much in a groove to break away." The truly creative spirits had by now moved on; the grim political events of the '30s made the revels of the previous decade look decadent. Henry Green's brutal little novel Party-Going (1939) spelled finis to an era.

Nevertheless, the movement's effervescent peak has charmed and fascinated subsequent generations. Taylor's book on the subject may possibly be the most comprehensive, but it is not the best or the most sympathetic. Martin Green's Children of the Sun (1976) did the same thing rather better, and Society Racket (1933) is a terrific eyewitness account by gossip columnist Patrick Balfour (later Lord Kinross). There are the matchless early romans à clef of Waugh, Mitford, and Powell, and there are countless memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, letters, and journals of the key players, including Betjeman, Acton, Howard, Tennant, Beaton, Tom Driberg, Cyril Connolly, Waugh, Powell, Green, Nancy and Jessica Mitford, and Diana Mosley (née Mitford). And then there are the many additional volumes catering to the British public's apparently insatiable appetite for all things Mitford.

We, like the Bright Young People in 1930, now find ourselves on a dividing line between a time of gross excess and what appears to be a grim and threatening future. D. J. Taylor's schoolmarmish disapproval of his frivolous protagonists makes sense in the context of 2008 and in the context of 1930. But the book's underlying sourness fails to give the brightest days of the mid-'20s their due. --Brooke Allen

Brooke Allen is the author of Twentieth-Century Attitudes; Artistic License; and Moral Minority. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, and The Nation, among others. She was named a finalist for the 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

From the Publisher

Before the media circus of Britney, Paris, and our modern obsession with celebrity, there were the Bright Young People, a voraciously pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialites who romped through the gossip columns of 1920s London. Evelyn Waugh immortalized their slang, their pranks, and their tragedies in his novels, and over the next half century, many—from Cecil Beaton to Nancy Mitford and John Betjeman—would become household names. But beneath the veneer of hedonism and practical jokes was a tormented generation, brought up in the shadow of war. Sparkling talent was too often brought low by alcoholism and addiction. Drawing on the virtuosic and often wrenching writings of the Bright Young People themselves, the biographer and novelist D. J. Taylor has produced an enthralling account of an age of fleeting brilliance.

The Washington Post - Carolyn See

Jampacked and delicious, crammed with a cast of selfish, feckless, darling, talented, almost terminally eccentric, good-looking men and women, Bright Young People chronicles the doings of London's gilded youth in the Roaring Twenties. Even if you think you know a lot (or enough) about them; even if you've read the acerbic novels of the early Evelyn Waugh or plowed your way through Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, there's bound to be material here you haven't seen or heard of.

Publishers Weekly

Fans of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall will recognize the glittering world of the "Bright Young People", the London socialites of the 1920s who had their costume parties and other exploits celebrated (and excoriated) in the tabloid media. Taylor, a literary critic and biographer, acknowledges that this crowd-which included Cecil Beaton and Nancy Mitford-were the Britney Spears and Paris Hilton of their day, but doesn't belabor the point excessively. Taylor's account is not so much a straightforward history as a bundle of thematic essays arranged chronologically; one chapter, for example, discusses the ways some gay "Brights" were able to avoid much of the repression prevalent throughout British society at the time, while another covers the themes of the fiction that came out of the scene. There are still plenty of juicy anecdotes to go around, although Taylor says that reports of drug-fueled orgies are "exaggerated," and points out that Britain in the 1920s was a tightly regulated society. The text is enlivened by several Punch cartoons from the period, vividly depicting the hold these rich young partygoers once held on the public's imagination. (Jan.)

Rebecca Bollen Manalac - Library Journal

This meticulously researched account of a notorious group of 1920s London partygoers was first published in England in 2007 to positive reviews, which noted the sensitive way novelist and biographer Taylor (Kept: A Victorian Mystery; Orwell: The Life) draws human detail from behind the gossip column scandals and the Evelyn Waugh novelizations that immortalized the group. Taylor shows how the media played a large part in creating the legend, manipulating those who fit the mold into an early expression of celebrity culture. Taylor begins with an analysis of who the members of this relatively small group of well-connected youngsters were. He considers their wartime childhoods, which perhaps contributed to their excess and dissipation. As Taylor details the rise of the group, from the mid-1920s to 1929, we read of their elaborate parties, unrepentant decadence, and refusal to settle down in early adulthood. Taylor then follows the decline of the group in the 1930s, as the next world war loomed. This detailed work, both biography and social history, is suited to academic and large public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

British biographer and novelist Taylor (Kept, 2008, etc.) offers a vivid group portrait of the 1920s pleasure-seekers who ought to have been-and sometimes were-characters in Evelyn Waugh's novels. Inveterate idlers and party animals, these vainglorious glitterati twinkled their way through London society, siphoning off their sometimes indulgent families' fortunes to bankroll lavish parties, elaborate pranks and sexual dalliances, while excitedly congratulating one another for the jaded stabs at originality. Major literary figures Waugh, Anthony Powell, the pseudonymous "Henry Green" and effervescent Nancy Mitford rubbed shoulders with such varied luminaries as celebrity photographer Cecil Beaton, journalist Tom Driberg, epicene underachievers Brian Howard and Stephen Tennant and unstable sybarites like Elizabeth Ponsonby. Taylor's study revels in snapshot accounts of their scattered activities, but never really abandons its essentially anecdotal structure-over 300-plus pages, repetition thus becomes unavoidable. But the particulars are often irresistible. One yearns to have been a fly on the wall at the "fancy dress ball . . . featuring a gang of fashionable debutantes dressed as the Eton rowing eight," or the notorious Bruno Hat exhibition of faked modernist paintings. Taylor expertly connects this shrill game-playing to memorable depictions of it in Waugh's Vile Bodies, Powell's Afternoon Men and Henry Green's Party Going, while never neglecting the actual achievements of their lesser peers (e.g., Beverley Nichols's forgotten novel Singing Out of Tune). A note of genuine pathos is struck in his description of how the increasingly straitened economic and political circumstances of the'30s began rendering this gaudy subculture obsolete. Immensely readable, and of real value as a sharply pointed cautionary tale.

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