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

"Why is that man in the 1930 photograph wearing 18th-century dress — peruke, breeches, buckled shoes — while digging up a London street with a pneumatic drill? Surrounded by other white-wigged gentlemen and ladies and several stunned-looking la­borers, the man happens to be the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, who, along with his set of carefree, privileged friends, had just spilled out of a Mozart-themed costume ball and turned a street repair into an after-party.

The saga of Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and the less famous social butterflies that everyone called the Bright Young People may be the ideal escapist fantasy for these sober economic times. Theirs was a life of glittering frivolity, of scavenger hunts that stopped traffic in Sloane Square, cocktails and dancing until dawn, notorious gatherings like the Bath and Bottle Party at a swimming pool (“bring a Bath towel and a Bottle” the invitation said), sprees that envious mortals read about in gossip columns. To make the fantasy complete, the story even offers a satisfying touch of schadenfreude. As D. J. Taylor emphasizes in this incisive social history, these flighty creatures crashed with a thud louder than you’d imagine butterflies could make. Taylor compares the Mozart party photo to a “medieval morality play” capturing how the Bright Young People got their comeuppance: their zaniness became more self-conscious and attenuated; they tried to ignore the fragile postwar economy and the crumbling aristocracy, but those changes were ready to bite them.

It was fun while it lasted, though, for much of the 1920s. The definitive work on the circle is still Waugh’s 1930 novel “Vile Bodies,” an affectionately scathing observation of his mostly drunk and vapid pals, which Stephen Fry turned into the blithe 2003 film “Bright Young Things.” Today Waugh and Beaton remain the best known of the group, yet they were never at its center.
The main characters include a few now dusty names like Diana Mitford (then married to Bryan Guinness, the brewery heir she dumped for the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley) and many more that have been nearly forgotten. Their goal, after all, was to have fun, not to achieve artistic immortality. The core group included Elizabeth Ponsonby, aimless daughter of a government minister; her rich cousin by marriage, Babe Plunket Greene; Brian Howard, known for his immense, unrealized promise of doing something vaguely arty some day; Eddie ­Gathorne-Hardy, younger son of an earl. The sound of so many double-barreled names is enough to evoke a time when every other word uttered was “divine,” “amazing” or “monstrous.” (“What language would they speak if something really awful did happen?” wonders a character in “Crazy Pavements,” a 1927 novel about the circle by one of their own, Beverley Nichols.)

Although the American edition’s subtitle piles on the phrases Lost Generation and Jazz Age, with their familiar echoes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the British version’s austere subtitle is more accurate: “The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940.” That generation was shaped by similar forces on both sides of the Atlantic: a male population decimatedby World War I, the postwar sense of shaking off 19th-century prudery and entering a new, blatantly sexy era. But Taylor’s subject is distinctly British, and his Londoners were both victims and beneficiaries of changes in their class system. As the aristocracy became financially embarrassed, middle-class interlopers like Waugh and Beaton were able to enter the Bright Young circle, while some sons and even daughters of the upper class were forced to get jobs, even if they weren’t good at keeping them.


Taylor’s deglamorizing approach focuses on the tension beneath the willful gaiety — how the “promise of good times and limitless horizons” was soon dashed by “the reality of . . . economic pressures.” During the ’20s the Bright Young People could shut out that harsh reality as their fame grew, fed by the rise of newspapers hungry for colorful gossip. They played to the press and too often believed their own clippings. Simon Balcairn, the columnist in “Vile Bodies,” who reports anony­mously on his friends, was based largely on Patrick Balfour, son of a lord, who wrote as Mr. Gossip and appears in the Mozart party photo. Unlike his model, Balcairn commits suicide after crashing an unmissable party and being tossed out — a devilish exaggeration of how his set lived and finally died by publicity. Once the press started writing about drunken treasure hunts leading to Buckingham Palace, everyone wanted to join in. As Taylor says, “spontaneity had been replaced by calculation,” a clue that the party was over.

The book’s main object lesson is the dissolute Elizabeth Ponsonby, at least in part because Taylor had access to her parents’ diaries and letters. Elizabeth made a half-hearted attempt at acting, and later took a short-lived job as a dress-shop assistant, but basically drank, gave parties and practically bankrupted her parents, who fretted helplessly. “It hurts us to see you getting coarse in your speech & outlook in life,” her mother wrote Elizabeth in 1923, suggesting “you ought to enlarge your sphere of enjoyment — not only find happiness in night clubs & London parties & a certain sort of person.” This sounds like any parent’s out-of-touch lament, but the Ponsonbys had cause for concern. Throughout the 1930s, as her friends moved on, Elizabeth continued to play hostess to increasingly unsavory types, desperately trying to hang on to her madcap youth. She died before she was 40. Her death certificate cited “chronic alcoholic poisoning,” but the cause might as well have been what her father had described as a “rather hysterical craving for fun.”

Taylor’s unrelenting emphasis on the desperate, hysterical part is a problem throughout. Most members of the circle didn’t kill themselves, either deliberately like Balcairn or unwittingly like Ponsonby; they simply aged into obscurity. Taylor, a novelist and the respected biographer of Thackeray and Orwell, is so intent on his “morality play” that he nearly loses sight of why his characters were a source of fascinated delight and sniping in the first place. The distinction between the term Bright Young People, meaning the original Ponsonby social set, and the more generic Bright Young Things, also in use at the time, is important in this study; but Taylor’s tone of utmost seriousness as he parses the issue makes it seem like hairsplitting. His moralizing tone is lightened by the book’s beautiful design, laced with mordant period quotations and delicious satiric cartoons from newspapers and magazines.

Taylor’s richly detailed work also calls attention to two breezy, auspicious first novels about the Bright Young People that are unfortunately out of print: Nancy Mitford’s “Highland Fling” and Anthony Powell’s “Afternoon Men.” Mitford was on the group’s periphery, and her book has much of the charm of “Vile Bodies”; Powell, a sometime member, shares Waugh’s piercing observations. Both novels appeared in 1931, an indication of how quickly the Bright Young People’s era receded. Even then Mitford, Powell and Waugh had the distance to mock its slight-as-a-bubble mentality. All three novels entice us into a frothy, evanescent world we have reason to envy, but not too much."


BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE
The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age
By D. J. Taylor
Illustrated. 361 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27