HISTORY: Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918-1940 By DJ Taylor:The so-called Bright Young People were a privileged coterie of English aristocrats, more or less talented bohemians and their various hangers-on, most of them in their 20s, whose flamboyant fun and games in the West End of London after the first World War shocked their parents and provided the public with much vicarious amusement, writes Patrick Skene Catling.
D J Taylor's thoroughly researched and vivaciously written account of the Bright Young People's extravagant revelry in the 1920s and their dispersal as they grew up in the depressed and apprehensive 1930s seems at first glance to be no more than gossip about a group of self-indulgent silly billies. However, as one reads on, the book can be appreciated as a diagnosis of the first symptoms of a disease that seems to be bringing Western civilisation to an inglorious end: celebrity culture.
Before the all-pervasive influence of today's mass media there was one medium, the press, which was sufficiently influential to incite exhibitionistic iconoclasm. "One of the features of the cultural landscape" of the 1920s, Taylor points out, "was the emergence of a new middle-class press, one step up from the low-brow tabloids such as the Mirror, several rungs down from the sonorities of the Times and the Telegraph, less keen on straightforward news and political debate than on what were known as 'talking points', personages and personalities."
Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of the Daily Mail, established the bright new editorial policy. "Get more names in the paper," he instructed his staff. "The more aristocratic the better, if there's a news story around them. Everyone likes reading about people in better circumstances than his or her own." The William Hickey column in Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express declared "These names make news".
The two dominant newspaper moguls anticipated the inquisitive materialism of the Sunday Times's 21st century "Rich List". In Fleet Street in the 1920s and after, the most avidly read journalists were the gossip columnists. The Bright Young People, ostentatiously in revolt against inherited convention, gave them plenty to gossip about.
Taylor quotes a verse by James Laver as the epigraph for a chapter on 'The Society Racket':
Mother's advice and father's fears
Alike are voted - such a bore.
There's negro music in our ears,
The world is one huge dancing floor . . .
The leaders of the cult, such as Elizabeth Ponsonby, Harold Acton, Brian Howard and Robert Byron, were well- connected trend-setters regarded as "dandified exquisites".
Evelyn Waugh, when young, aspired to be one of them. Initially embarrassed by having been unfashionably educated at Lancing and then finding himself at unchic Hertford College, Oxford, he successfully insinuated himself into the company of Etonians at OK Christ Church and aped their elegant effeminacy. His homosexual phase ended when he left Oxford. Perhaps he wished it hadn't, as his first marriage ended in humiliating cuckoldry. But by then the Bright Young People had accepted him and he became their principal chronicler.
Taylor justifiably makes extensive use of Waugh and especially his novel Vile Bodies, which has been generally read as fantastic satire, but is actually quite an accurate portrayal of the Bright Young People at play. "What a lot of parties," Waugh's alter ego protests, "Masked parties, Savage parties . . . Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one has to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths . . ."
The climax of Vile Bodies is the crash of a young female racing driver, her bright young friends' party in her hospital room and her delirious hallucinations. Their slogan was the cry of Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, "Faster! Faster!" as they ran hard to stay in the same place.
Taylor's very entertaining, coolly objective account of the lost generation's giddy debauch in the Jazz Age and their literary legacy is, in effect, a moral tract for our times. It should be of interest to anthropologists of the future, if any.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Chatto & Windus, 322pp. £20