D. J. Taylor
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE
The rise and fall of a generation, 1918–1940
322pp. Chatto and Windus. £20.
978 0 701 17754 6

Well, just for a start, are we talking about people or things? Many of those who took or take an interest in the period, from Evelyn Waugh to Stephen Fry, preferred or prefer the “thing-ification” of the phenomenon, which in my opinion is more consistent with the argot of the time and with the social stratum under review. (“How are we, old thing?” is a question that allows one to “place” a person with fair exactitude.) But D. J. Taylor has decided to go with “people”, and this may be part of a determination to humanize what might otherwise only be a “phenomenon”. He seems to imply as much when he confesses to having once written the following gritty verdict, on Philip Hoare’s Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant, in 1990: “The humblest coal miner who ever tried to write a sonnet is of more intrinsic literary – and social – interest than Steenie Tennant, but alas, the toff hagiography strain of English letters endures”. His own former tough-minded plebeianism now makes him wince a bit, and it may be worth spending a moment further on this point, because Taylor goes on to quarrel with his own hero George Orwell in order to underline the distinction:

"A Bright Young Person may have been a Bright Young Thing, but not all Bright Young Things were Bright Young People. The chattering twenty-somethings who infest literary parties attended by Gordon Comstock, the disaffected hero of Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) – 'troops of bright young things who dropped in for half an hour, formed circles of their own and talked sniggeringly about other bright young things whom they referred to by nicknames' – have nothing to do with Elizabeth Ponsonby and her friends: this is simply Orwell’s shorthand for anything juvenile, bumptious and loud."

We shall be coming to Miss Ponsonby in a moment, but just to sum up:

"In the last resort a Bright Young Thing was a stereotype, a Bright Young Person an identifiable individual whose footprints could be tracked all over the landscape of the London Society magazines . . . . The first ever Bright Young Person, according to Osbert Sitwell, was Beverly Nichols. But Nichols had no real connection with the Jungman sisters and their immediate circle: he was an up-and-coming literary man with one eye on the stage and a weakness for the society of elderly aristocratic ladies."

So all attempts to net the butterfly, it seems, are to a certain degree futile. The Jungman sisters? Well, there was a time when “Zita” and “Baby” were the shimmering centre of a world that included Cecil Beaton, Ivor Novello, Tallulah Bankhead, Stephen Tennant and at least one more Sitwell in the shape of Sacheverell. Reviewing Zita’s long and frivolous life, which ended in some sort of grace-and-favour establishment on a Guinness estate, Taylor nearly lapses back into his earlier tumbrel mode by inquiring peevishly “what, one wondered, had Zita done with her 102 years on the planet?”. And indeed, it may be unwise to discard Orwellian censoriousness too soon. When one reads of the riff-raff escapades of the proto-fascist Fifth Column, formed around Diana Guinness and the rather sick-making Prince of Wales, one is put in mind of that rebarbative later moment in the Diaries of “Chips” Channon, where lobster ice cream was served to top off a perfectly ripping lunch at the divine Ribbentrops.

The phenomenon of “brightness” is of potential usefulness to social historians because it helps mark the time when we started to periodize by ten-year counts rather than by reigns (there had been “the hungry Forties” and “the naughty Nineties” in the preceding century, but “the Twenties” have a good claim to be the first of the modern decades). And “brightness” anticipates the now-pervasive (and decade-associated) notion that generations are everything. Finally, we are also speaking of the birth of what Daniel Boorstin later christened as the “non-event”: the spectacle that is “put on” solely in the expectation, or more accurately with the prearranged understanding, that it will be lavishly covered in the media. Celebrity culture was hugely accelerated by the spread of the tabloid press and the willingness of many non-tabloid types to collude with it. Tom Driberg could be said to have got his “start” by writing snippets about brittle and spoiled partygoers for the Beaverbrook press (and sometimes claiming that he hoped to inflame the class war by doing so), but Evelyn Waugh was not hoping to incite social insurrection when he fed his old schoolmate Driberg those titbits of gossip, and even briefly joined the business himself. The early Waugh, and the Anthony Powell who pre-dates A Dance to the Music of Time, are the fictional chroniclers of this period, from Vile Bodies to Afternoon Men. “Now see here Symes, I like your page”, says Lord Monomark of the Daily Excess to Adam Fenwick-Symes. “It’s peppy, it’s got plenty of new names in it and it’s got that intimate touch.”

The individual who, for Taylor, most decides the personhood of the things is the aforementioned Elizabeth Ponsonby. The model for Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies, this most ruthlessly peppy young lady was the daughter of Arthur and Dorothea Ponsonby. Arthur was a leading member of the Labour Party, a senior member of the first Ramsay MacDonald government and one of the party’s first leaders in the Lords, so there is a pleasing inversion in the usual rebellious “order”: instead of a young sprig of the noble line arousing alarm and despondency at Blandings Castle by espousing unorthodox views or taking up with unsuitable partners, there is grave disappointment in serious-minded socialist circles at the way the young these days are going to the dogs. “Takes not the least interest in anything that goes on”, Dorothea Ponsonby writes of one of her younger children, “Doesn’t ask about the strike which is raging & very serious”. Later, Lady Ponsonby deftly notes of another of the young people that she “showed no joy or amusement – only thinking she wasn’t smart enough – or somebody else was smarter”. This is the kind of affectlessness caught so well by Powell in the days when he used to compose in terse, jazz-age sentences:

“Do you know what we’re doing?”
“No.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“We are wasting our youth.”

If Taylor misses a trick here, it is in having failed to interview Perry Anderson who, as well as being the best Marxist critic of Anthony Powell, is also a cousin of the Ponsonby family.

Generally anxious to avoid the “judgemental” tone that he once adopted, Taylor may also skip over some indications of genuine nastiness. “It was nearly wrecked the first weekend”, wrote Elizabeth Ponsonby to Clive Bell about her planned country idyll with “Babe” Plunket Greene in a borrowed cottage, “as Eddie + Brian + two other of ‘the boys’ came down + put all the owner’s African ornaments on the fire ‘To see what they’d look like burning’”. The bored callousness of this rather outruns even the drunken vandalism of the Bollinger Club, having “great fun” with a Newdigate Prize manuscript in the opening chapter of Decline and Fall. Taylor does not specify, but “Eddie” here must have been Eddie Gathorne-Hardy and “Brian” may well have been Brian Howard, both of them usually represented as languid and epicene rather than thuggish or malicious. (By a reversal of tone to which I take exception in a different way, Taylor sternly describes Tom Driberg as a “predatory” homosexual. I knew the old darling, who, even when he was a young darling, yearned only to administer oral caresses to the adult proletariat, and I fail to see what can be termed “predatory” about that. While I am about it, I also register an adjectival doubt as to whether “sexual promiscuity” can be “unswerving”, as Taylor avers in Gathorne-Hardy’s case.)

In his splendid biography of George Orwell, Taylor included some stand-alone feuilletons as a kind of amuse-bouche between chapters, and he repeats this happy idea here, with a short take on surviving photographs entitled “Elizabeth in Parties” and an excellent anatomy of futility called “The Books Brian Never Wrote”. In the first, we encounter Cecil Beaton, “hair a Harlowed expanse of platinum”, which is very good, and in the second an exploration of what it is to have writer’s block when trying to write about writer’s block.

A generation can always be described as “rising” but may it, even in a presumably intentional echo of Waugh, be described as having “fallen”? Easier, perhaps, to say that it was “lost”: the preferred locution of every cultural critic since Gertrude Stein. Taylor reasonably objects to this, borrowing from an aperçu of Evelyn’s elder brother Alec, who actually served on the Western Front, that it’s flippant and insulting to conflate the notionally “lost” (ie, the self-indulgent and the aimless) with the actual and awful “losses” suffered by their immediate elders. And he finds a near-perfect coda in Terence Rattigan’s play After the Dance, which rang down the curtain on the bright and the young and the foolish when it opened in June 1939. “You see”, says Helen to David:

When you were eighteen, you didn’t have anybody of twenty-two or twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five to help you, because they'd been wiped out. And anyone over forty you wouldn’t listen to anyway. The spotlight was on you, and you weren’t even young men; you were children.

And, what, David inquires idly, had they done with this spotlight? “You danced in it”, replies Helen, in a withering summary that, in its time and context, puts out more flags.

Christopher Hitchens's latest book, God Is Not Great: The case against religion, appeared earlier this year.

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