Review by New York Times Review
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 come-uppance: 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.) Digging up Piccadilly, April 1930. Among the revelers are Elizabeth Ponsonby (in necklace); Denis Pelly, her husband at the time (with cigarette); Cecil Beaton (with pneumatic drill); Cyril Connolly (with opera glasses); and Patrick Balfour (flanked by laborers). 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 decimated by 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. Caryn James, the author of the novels "What Caroline Knew" and "Glorie," is working on two nonfiction books.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In 1920s London, privileged and moneyed young people fell in with one another to create a social scene that thrived on sensation and notoriety to an extent that might rival today's cult of celebrity. Some of their names endure: Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Nancy Mitford, Hermione Baddeley. But many others, household words in their day, have not thrived as well in memory: David Tennant, Elizabeth Ponsonby, Anthony Powell. Their parties were legend, the scavenger hunts they organized in Mayfair to flaunt their excess time and money figured in every newspaper, and Noel Coward sang of their exploits. They frequented Rosa Lewis' legendary Cavendish Hotel. Much of their flamboyance was a reaction to the privations and losses of World War I. Taylor has done a masterful job of detailing this hedonistic moment, but American readers may find many of the references to people and places not immediately familiar and recognizable.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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.-Rebecca Bollen Manalac, Sydney, Australia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
British biographer and novelist Taylor (Kept, 2008, etc.) offers a vivid group portrait of the 1920s pleasure-seekers who ought to have beenand sometimes werecharacters 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 structureover 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 ballfeaturing 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
