D.J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age
Tales of a lost generation in the 1920s typically center on New York or Paris. “Lost generation” is not a term one usually associates with London in the same decade. What came to my mind initially in thinking about this period in Britain was the Bloomsbury group. Although there was some overlap between that group and what D.J.Taylor terms Britain’s Bright Young People, his book is about a different, less intellectual, far more frivolous crowd. Taylor concentrates on a collection of upper class young people, linked directly to the “uppermost layers of the interwar British establishment” (p.34). Born in the first decade of the 20th century, the Bright Young People Taylor describes were old enough to remember the Great War but too young to have been part of it. They came of age during the relatively prosperous 1920s, before the next cataclysmic event of the 20th century, the Great Depression.
Few members of this group are household names in my household. The only names familiar to me were the novelist Evelyn Waugh, and the famous or infamous Mitford sisters, Jessica, Nancy and Unity, whose eccentricities – some harmless, some significantly less so – were captured in a book which came out about ten years ago, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Sisters, by Mary Lovell.
The Bright Young People, Taylor writes, were a “symptom of the continuing reaction against the stuffiness of prewar social arrangements, the rigidity of their dress codes, and the formality of their relationships” (p.42). Generational conflict was pronounced in the 1920s, he asserts, reminiscent perhaps of the 1960s. Only a few years after a “devastating war that obliterated hundreds of thousands of young men, the antagonism between youth and seniority that characterized the 1920s was of far greater significance than previous intergenerational disturbance” (p.54-55).
The first two thirds of the book seem to be about an endless series of parties, featuring treasure hunts, fancy dresses and insensitive pranks. This portion prompted me to think that Taylor should have titled his book Frivolous Young People. The organizer of many of the parties was one Elizabeth Ponsonby, the de facto lead character in this book, largely because of the richly detailed diary which her father Arthur maintained. Ponsonby’s living heirs gave Taylor full access to the diaries and, as a consequence, much of Taylor’s story of turns around Arthur’s fraught relationship with his daughter.
Arthur Ponsonby was a classical upper-class yet socialist-leaning Labour MP and government minister who would go on to become Britain’s leading proponent of pacifism as the 1930s came to a close. Arthur fretted almost daily in his diary about daughter Elizabeth’s ungrounded life-style. In so doing, Taylor writes, Arthur unconsciously adopted the role of “spokesperson for a generation of aggrieved and dispossessed parents” (p.109). Despite his best efforts and those of his wife Dorothy to educate Elizabeth in a proper upper-class manner, Arthur admitted in his diary that he had no answer for her aimless lifestyle. He chastised himself and Dorothy for not sufficiently taking into account the:
luxurious aristocratic heredity on both sides, and although we were not surprised at any reaction against our ethical views and opinions, we somehow expected the home atmosphere and instinct of self-education would tell in the long run. . . Unless there is inward conviction and a readiness to accept advice enforced exterior discipline is useless. All the same it may be possible to put up iron railings round the bogs and precipices. We did not do this. What parents do? Some perhaps. But the temperament of the child and not the strength of the railings is the factor that matters (p.109).
This passage, Taylor writes, is “hugely characteristic of Arthur’s view of the kind of life he led and the obligations he imagined it to impose: rueful, self-questioning, conscious of his own inadequacies, at the same time sharply aware of wider social changes that he was powerless to alter” (p.108-09).
Elizabeth died suddenly in 1940, before she turned 40. According to her death certificate, the cause of death was “fatty degeneration of the heart and liver caused by ‘chronic alcohol poisoning’” (p.308). After Elizabeth’s death, Arthur was “emired in guilt, accusing himself of ‘growing neglect,’ which, over the years, had led to ‘fatalistic apathy’” (p.323). Remorsefully, Arthur wrote in his diary that, like many men:
I pompously thought my “work” – politics and writing – important (pathetic to think of now in retrospect) and that a child’s difficulties would adjust themselves in time without my aid, not seeing that close at hand was a problem with no ready solution but one that wanted my first, my constant and my unremitting attention (p.324).
Arthur’s pathos reminded me of a book I read about ten years ago, written by an American left-leaning, anti-war establishment figure who also lost a daughter to alcoholism: George McGovern’s cathartic Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism.
If the first two-thirds of the book is about frivolous parties and ungrounded life styles, it is also about the homosexuality of many, perhaps most, of the male Bright Young People (the women appearing to be vigorously hetero). Homosexuality was as characteristic of the Bright Young People as a “cloche hat or an outsize party invitation” (p.230). No English youth movement, Taylor asserts, “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” (p.230). Reading the reports of debauched parties, it is “rather easy of forget that homosexuality was illegal, regarded with horror by press and public alike [and] that known homosexuals were cruelly stigmatized and subject to the most punitive penalties” (p.234).
The story changes when the 1920s end and the Great Depression arrives (along with the end of the gold standard, a “potent symbol of Britain’s post-war unease and its dramatically reduced financial power” (p.253)). As war clouds began to hover over Europe, many of the Bright Young People addressed political issues, seemingly for the first time. Diana Mitford married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain’s fascist party. Sister Unity, a special favorite of her father, hung out with Hitler’s inner circle. Despite these Mitford sisters’ affinity for fascism (there were three other sisters who eschewed Nazis and fascists), most of the Bright Young People turned left when they turned to politics.
Taylor, however, spends much more time on the literary output of the Bright Young People in the 1930s than their political leanings. By the early 1930s, a “distinctive group of novelists had come into existence who, if not Bright Young People themselves, were closely associated with the movement’s inner core.” The fundamental concerns of their novels were “generational conflict, doubts about the value of human relationships, [and] the resigned expectation of unpleasant things to come” (p.283). Taylor discusses two such novels that provide insider views into the lifestyles of the Bright Young People, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) and Bryan Guiness’ Singing Out of Tune (1933).
Vile Bodies (which was used for a film in 2003, Bright Young Things) is Waugh’s account of the debauched and vapid life he and his friends had led during the previous decade. It is, Taylor writes, “always taken as the definitive exposé of this reckless, rackety Mayfair world, its endless flights to nowhere in particular, its fractured alliances and emotional dead ends” (p.7-8). The self-criticism which Waugh leveled in Vile Bodies parallels the general criticism of the Bright Young People: “naïveté, callousness, insensitivity, insincerity, flippancy, a fundamental lack of seriousness and moral equilibrium that sours every relationship and endeavor they are involved in” (p.153). Brewery heir Guiness’ Singing Out of Tune is a window into his failed marriage to Diana Mitford, who left him for the fascist leader Mosley. Taylor summarizes its similar theme: “’smart’ society life is an addictive drug, prolonged exposure to which encourages a set of false values liable to destroy the well-being of anyone ensared by them” (p.298).
Yet, after Britain found itself at war in late 1939, many Bright Young People made significant contributions to the conflict. Waugh served in a commando unit. Taylor describes the service of others in the Royal Air Force and in German POW camps. It is not entirely fanciful, he writes, to see the “wartime exploits of this group of by now middle-age men as the symbolic expiation of a great deal of guilt for bygone pleasures” (p.311).
Great Britain in the two decades between wars continues to be a fascinating, weighty story, which can be approached from many angles. The angle D.J. Taylor has chosen to explore, laying bare the frivolity of the Bright Young People, might strike readers as mostly fascinating, but with little weight. Still, there is something reassuring in the transition to functioning adulthood which many of the Bright Young People made, as described in the latter portions of Taylor’s book. Such a transition would be banal and hardly noteworthy in many historical eras. After all, rich, decadent young adults, although facing steeper odds than the rest of us, often transform into productive and contributing citizens. The transition Taylor describes, however, came at a time when Britain’s need for fully functioning adults was most grave.
Thomas H. Peebles
Rockville, Maryland
August 12, 2012
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