The beautiful and the damned

The bohemian group of Bright Young People produced not only some of the most celebrated novelists of the early 20th century, but its own literary form - 'the party novel'. Beneath the gossip and frivolity of its subject matter lay a sense of disquiet and impending tragedy, writes DJ Taylor
Evelyn Waugh
Unknown artist (sans false moustache). Photo: AP

Midway through July 1929, a curious invitation began to land on the desks of London's art critics and gossip columnists. Issuing from a notably upmarket address in Buckingham Street, Westminster, it summoned the bearer to an "at home" convened to display "Pictures and Sculptures by Bruno Hat". A catalogue blurb offered details of the artist's origins and affiliations: a 31-year-old native of Lübeck, now quartered in Clymping, Sussex, and modestly engaged in running a general store with his stepmother. Self-taught and without ambition, he had never previously shown a painting. Recently, however, several examples of his work had been shipped to Paris, and "the opinion was so immediately favourable that successful arrangements have been made for an exhibition".

Visitors to the house in Buckingham Street a fortnight later were greeted by most of the conventional trappings of a 1920s art show: critics peering at the walls, maidservants dispensing glasses of iced coffee and a respectful silence. They also found themselves in the presence of an elaborate practical joke. The objets d'art, painted on cork boards and framed with lengths of rope, were modernist pastiches in the style of Braque and Picasso. The Adoration of the Magi, for example, depicted three pipe-cleaner-like shapes, one of them with three heads, abasing themselves before a geometrid representation of Mary, who bears a small circle in her hands. A piece of spoof art criticism, signed "A. R. de T.", canvassed "An Approach to Hat". And, finally, there was the artist himself - a morose and bespectacled man with a luxuriant moustache and dark glasses, crouched in a wheelchair, who grumbled in a thick German accent about the colour of the walls and the publicity he was receiving.

Who, if anyone, was taken in? Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford and Asquith, treated a reporter to some erudite remarks on the abstract in art. Winston Churchill, asked how he rated Christ Meeting the Disciples Coming from Emmaus (in black knitting wool stretched between black-headed hatpins) commented: "A lot of bloody rubbish." Lytton Strachey bought two of the paintings in a spirit of mild amusement. The Daily Express reporter, Tom Driberg, to whom full details had been leaked in advance, tried to give his readers the impression that he was exposing a sensational imposture:

"Amazing hoax on art experts"

"Unknown artist with false moustache"

"Mr Bruno Hat"




Mannered, well-connected, keen on the arts, with its own private slang and cultural reference points, the Bright Young army of the late 1920s attracted a wide range of recruits. No previous youth movement had been so hospitable to homosexuals: Howard and the my-dearing Gathorne-Hardy were the last word in period flamboyance, while Stephen Tennant's relationship with the much older Siegfried Sassoon was the talk of the Mayfair drawing rooms. It was also a reliable nursery for young men on the make: middle-class adventurers such as Waugh (a London publisher's son) and his arch-enemy Cecil Beaton, who used the connections they made at blue-blooded cocktail parties to forge careers that rapidly took them out of the Bright Young orbit altogether. Inevitably, there was an influx of hangers-on, come to see what all the fuss was about. A Punch cartoon from 1927 shows a middle-aged woman talking to a bald-looking man in evening dress. "Are you one of the Bright Young People?" she demands. "I am." All this suggests a daunting exclusivity, a calling card straight out of Debrett's and the Old Etonian register. In the end, though, despite the presence of a great deal of lustre and éclat, the classic Bright Young Person's environment was curiously democratic: a small, self-contained space in which, however briefly and however artificial the circumstances, a duchess and an avant-garde painter could meet on equal terms.

No doubt such spaces have always existed in English life, but the particular conditions of the 1920s gave them an unexpected resonance. The party at Milly Andriadis's hired house to which Nick Jenkins accompanies his friend Stringham in A Buyer's Market (1952), the second novel in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence, deftly reproduces this atmosphere - much more so than the debutante dance that precedes it. Here, under Milly's welcoming but no-nonsense gaze, all kinds of celebrities are gathered - foreign royalty, Oxford dons, City eminences - but also an abundant shoal of queer fish: "quite an elegant crowd", as one onlooker puts it, while including, as someone else points out, "one or two extraordinary figures from the lofts of Chelsea". What united the Bright Young People and made them seem a discrete unit from the angle of the newspaper gossip column was not a shared political outlook or an economic standing, but what the society columnist Patrick Balfour called "a community of impulse".

On paper, the connection between - say - Brenda Dean Paul, Evelyn Waugh, Diana Mitford and Edward Burra barely exists. But the magnets that drew together the contemporary "It" girl, the aspiring novelist, the peer's glacial daughter and the avant-garde painter were far stronger than the demarcations of class, wealth and temperament that might have pushed them apart. All were intimately connected to the distinctive 1920s environment in which they operated and the wider social world beyond: a world coming to terms with the consequences of one world war while living in the shadow of another, whose entertainments, however outrageous, rarely disguised the deep vein of collective insecurity that ran beneath.

If these anxieties had a single point of focus, it could be found in literature. For such a small and tightly knit group - two thousand, all told, the critic Douglas Goldring reckoned, which seems a substantial over-estimate - the Bright Young People's ranks took in a disproportionately high percentage of writers. Between 1928 and 1933, for example, Waugh, Powell, Green, Byron, Beverley Nichols, Nancy Mitford and Inez Holden produced something like two dozen books between them. Simultaneously, and scarcely knowing that they were doing so, they gave birth to a new literary form, which was to dominate a certain kind of relatively highbrow reader's bookshelves for the next decade and a half.

Looking back on the literary groupings of the 1930s, Julian Maclaren-Ross identified a style of fiction that he called the "party novel", its subject matter marked down as "the day-to-day doings of a 'bohemian' group much preoccupied with their love affairs and the impact of their personalities upon each other". All this makes the Bright Young Person novel sound like a sociological offshoot, and indeed, one of the most irritating things about the genre is its cliqueishness, the vague sense - discernible almost from one book to the next - that everybody knows everybody else and the world beyond is simply a joke in rather bad taste. At least half a dozen of the Bright Young writers - Powell, Waugh, Byron, Harold Acton, Beaton and Inez Holden - were at one time or another published by Duckworth, where Powell himself worked as an editor. As a literary unit they shamelessly conspired to promote each other's works and pursue bitter quarrels with hostile critics. When one of the characters in Nancy Mitford's Christmas Pudding (1932) writes a novel, we learn that the reviewers had praised it extravagantly, "even those who had neither been at Eton nor Oxford with him".

The practical consequence of this catalogue of wire-pulling and back-stairs intriguing was a reliance on the private joke, intelligible only to a tiny coterie audience. Thus in one of Vile Bodies' many party scenes, Waugh remarks that "the real aristocracy, the younger members of the two or three great brewing families which rule London, had done nothing about it. They had come on from a dance and stood in a little group by themselves, amused but not amusing" - a paragraph put in specifically to amuse the book's dedicatees, Bryan and Diana Guinness. Similarly, in Christmas Pudding, Mitford talks about one of her characters being "a keen Byzantinist and, like all such, extremely sensitive on the subject": perhaps a dozen of her readers would have spotted the reference to Robert Byron. Sometimes, the joke can involve a single person. The inspired use made of the adjective "sheepish" in Vile Bodies (as in "a perfectly sheepish house") stems from the promise made by Waugh to the 12-year-old Jessica Mitford that he would somehow include her pet lamb in the text.

At the same time, these connections go beyond an immediate social grounding to take in influence, technique, construction, the whole question - in a literary landscape that took these affiliations very seriously - of aesthetic standpoint. These marker-flags were not always narrowly literary. Waugh, Powell and Green, for instance, were conscious of the impact of cinema on their work, to the point where their novels often seem to be composed in a kind of filmic shorthand, cutting sharply from scene to scene and put together out of ricocheting one-liner dialogue. Green described his second novel, Living (1929), as "a kind of very disconnected cinema film". Vile Bodies' action swings violently from character to character and room to room, sometimes in no more than the space of a single sentence. Powell, too, was an obsessive cinematophile, who went on to earn a precarious living scripting "Quota Quickies" - films designed to meet the legal requirement that a certain proportion of the material shown in British cinemas should be home-grown at the studios in Teddington.

Much more deliberate, though, was the literary context, where influences ranged from the commercial mainstream to the fanatically obscure. In the first category lay The Green Hat, Michael Arlen's bestseller from 1924, whose man-eating heroine "Iris Storm" is transparently the inspiration for "Imogen Quest", the phantom ornament of Vile Bodies' gossip columns. The glamorous Mrs Beste-Chetwynd in Decline and Fall drives the same make of car - a Hispano-Suiza. In his memoirs, Powell maintains that, arriving in London in the autumn of 1926, he took rooms in the seedy Mayfair thoroughfare of Shepherd Market simply because it was there that the novel's opening scene - a discreet, late-night seduction - is set.

Even more seductive than Arlen's suggestive dialogue, his one-night stands in Mayfair lodgings, his roguish intimations of clubland naughtiness, were the novels of Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), whose impact on the mainstream writers of the 1920s and 1930s was out of all proportion to their meagre sales. Set in fantastic never-never lands or more familiar environments twisted radically out of kilter, Firbank's fiction advertises a wit so delicate that it can scarcely be identified, borne forward by scraps of rococo dialogue, the whole invariably undercut with intimations of deep unease, often extending to outright tragedy. Bright Young People with literary leanings rushed as one to acclaim him as their mentor. Brian Howard thought Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), which ends with the cardinal dropping dead in hot pursuit of an attractive choirboy, "the wittiest book ever written". Waugh wrote an enraptured essay for Life and Letters in which he proposed that Firbank "achieved a new art form", and borrowed his technique of advancing the plot-line solely by way of dialogue for Decline and Fall's school sports day sequence.

Cloaked as they are in an atmosphere of unremitting frivolity - parties, failed seductions, pleasure jaunts across the Home Counties - the themes of Bright Young fiction take some time to declare themselves. But beneath the succession of witless conversations shrieked out by groups of empty-headed hedonists lies something much more disquieting. Unsurprisingly, the fundamental concerns of Bright Young novels turn out to be those of the movement itself: generational conflict; doubts about the value of human relationships; the resigned expectation of unpleasant things to come. The future, as conceived by a Powell, a Mitford or a Waugh, is never a rosy blur but something sharp, hard and ominous. "Do you think one of these days everything will come right?" Harriet demands of Atwater in Powell's Afternoon Men (1931). "No," he bluntly assures her. A sense of futility consequently envelopes the social gatherings of which the novel consists like a shroud: Afternoon Men ends as it begins, with Atwater and his chum Pringle loafing in a bar and exchanging desultory gossip about mutual friends.

All these preoccupations are gathered up in Vile Bodies, simultaneously an exposé and a critique of the Bright Young Person's world, in which the frailty of the human relationships on display is intimately connected to the turmoil of the author's private life. Married in the autumn of 1928 to a boyish-looking aristocratic demoiselle named Evelyn Gardner, shortly before the publication of Decline and Fall, Waugh spent the early part of 1929 on a Mediterranean cruise designed to restore his wife's uncertain health. The trip was not a success. Unwell when they set out, She-Evelyn, as she was known, fell seriously ill with a combination of pneumonia and pleurisy. By the time the couple arrived back in England in June, they were deeply in debt. He-Evelyn resolved to sequester himself in the Oxfordshire countryside and get on with his second novel while his wife enjoyed herself in London. Perhaps a quarter of Vile Bodies was complete by the moment in early July when She-Evelyn informed her husband that she was in love with a man called John Heygate.

Strenuous, but unavailing, attempts were made to save the marriage. The novel ground to a halt. Then, in late summer, while on holiday with his friends the Guinnesses, Waugh resumed work, conscious of the drawbacks of writing a supposedly comic novel in the aftermath of emotional breakdown. Several critics have noted the dramatic change of mood that sweeps over Vile Bodies at the beginning of its seventh chapter - the point at which Waugh broke off to attend to the crisis in his domestic affairs. Within three pages of its resumption, there is an aside about "cocktail parties given in basement flats by spotty announcers at the BBC" - a clear reference to Heygate's livelihood. For some time afterwards, Waugh referred to Heygate as "the basement boy".

The upping of the tempo, from light comedy to something far more caustic, is undeniable and understandable, yet Waugh's change of direction in the two-year creative stretch in which Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies were realised is less marked than it seems. Substantially about the same people, exploring the same themes, reaching more or less the same conclusions, they differ only in their perspective. The Waugh who wrote Decline and Fall in the second half of 1927, shortly after giving up his inglorious career as a schoolteacher, viewed the smart metropolitan world of West End party-going from its margins: Anthony Powell thought most of the detail was picked up from gossip columns. The Waugh who began Vile Bodies in the early summer of 1929 and resumed it in the early autumn was an insider, using language and real-life models that he had listened to and observed at first hand.

In fact, Vile Bodies preaches exactly the same lesson as its predecessor: the perils of involvement with people beyond one's own social and moral compass. The complaints that he levels against the Bright Young People are essentially those of every other disparager of the day: naivety, callousness, insensitivity, insincerity, flippancy, a fundamental lack of seriousness and moral equilibrium that sours every relationship and endeavour they are involved in. What gives them their conviction is the sense of a world seen from within, whose chronicler is aware of his own proximity, and so bound up in the environment he surveys as sometimes to compromise whatever judgments are being made.

The novel's most famous passage, endlessly quoted in social histories of the 1920s, panoramically defines the scope of the Bright Young Person's world: "Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood . . . - all the succession and repetition of massed humanity . . . Those vile bodies." Like Decline and Fall, it comes crammed with projections of real-life acquaintances. "The Hon Agatha Runcible" ("Miss Runcible said that kippers were not very drunk-making and that the whole club seemed bogus to her") can be readily identified with Elizabeth Ponsonby. "Johnnie Hoop", admired for his highbrow party invites ("Wasn't the invitation clever? Johnnie Hoop wrote it"), is Brian Howard. "Miles Malpractice" ("Darling, your face - eau de Nil") seems closest to the mannerisms of Eddie Gathorne-Hardy.

There is, too, that trademarked mockery, characteristic of the genre, of anything middle-class and semi-genteel. A party on board an airship involves a journey to "a degraded suburb". The prime minister, "Mr Brown", is seen as thoroughly bourgeois, his son working in a motor shop to which he "had to get off early". Here, you feel, Waugh is rather on the Bright Young People's side. He aspires to a smart, metropolitan life from whose vantage point the idea of anyone working in the motor trade is deeply funny. When the novel, rather unexpectedly, acquires a moral focus it does so by commenting - however obliquely - on standard Bright Young Person attitudes such as indifference to the war or dislike of "conventional" society. At one point, Adam Fenwick-Symes set off to Aylesbury to extract a cheque from his fiance's father. It is November 11, Armistice Day, and he returns amid a legion of commuters, "still wearing their poppies". The contrast with flippant, rootless Adam anxious to wheedle money out of his bride-to-be's father so they can afford to conduct a relationship which neither of them takes with the least seriousness is rather obvious.

Striking much the same note is a long passage in which Waugh describes a party given by Lady Anchorage at her London house. As his account of the guests makes clear, this is a staid entertainment at which no self-respecting Bright Young Person would be seen dead: "a great concourse of pious and respectable people . . . people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life . . ." In an essay on Waugh, left unfinished at his death, George Orwell defined this passage as "an irrelevant outburst" in favour of people who harbour a sense of obligation and fixed standards of behaviour. "The note of affection and esteem, out of tune with most of the rest of the book, is unmistakable," Orwell concludes; the Bright Young People are damned by their exclusion from it.

The same oddly sympathetic gaze can be found trained on another social category: ordinary middle-class people caught up in the generational war. There is a rather pointed page or two in which Adam sits in a railway carriage listening to a pair of housewives, "and they, too, were talking about the Younger Generation". One of the women complains that her son won't settle to his job and gets on badly with his father. The other worries about her manicurist daughter who has taken up with a man old enough to be her father ("and, anyway, I hope there's no harm in it . . ."). Played absolutely straight, and no doubt deriving from an exchange that the author himself had overhead in similar circumstances, this seems to show Waugh sympathising with another social group forced to deal with a collapse in traditional values, of which the Bright Young People were an all too conspicuous symbol.

Vile Bodies is so close to the world it describes that, when he was invited to a Guinness party, Waugh told Henry Green: "I might go up for it if I thought there wouldn't be anyone who wouldn't be too much like the characters in my new book." In much the same way, novels such as Afternoon Men or Beverley Nichols's Crazy Pavements (1927), whose gossip-column milieu gives it odd points of similarity with Waugh, are at one level pieces of reportage from a society that had only recently come into existence and whose protocols had sometimes still to be established.

Henry Green, who somehow managed to combine novel-writing with superintendence of the family engineering business, spent most of the next ten years on what he called a serious comedy about "bohemocracy", a novel that would, as his biographer Jeremy Treglown puts it, "see the bright young things against a shadowy, obliquely presented backdrop of the darkening socio-political situation of the 1930s". Although Party Going was not published until 1939, the novels to which it bears the closest resemblances are Vile Bodies and Afternoon Men. Here a group of idle young people sit in the fogbound Victoria Station Hotel while the masses seethe below them, waiting to set out on a continental holiday. All is confusion, missed connections and fragmentary dialogue.

As Treglown observes, Party Going is the first authentic novel of the second world war, an allegory of an older world of wealth and prosperity swept aside by doubt and turmoil. Yet, in exactly the same way as his contemporaries a decade before, Green was capable of seeding his narrative with tiny hints and allusions to the social landscape of the period that only a handful of his readers would understand. One of his characters, for example, is called "Evelyn Henderson", which links Waugh's Christian name to the surname of another man-about-town of the period, Gavin Henderson. Then there are the frequently recalled exploits of the notorious gate-crasher "Embassy Richard", named after the celebrated nightclub and an embodiment of one of the era's great causes célèbres - people turning up at parties to which they had not been invited. All this adds up. Party Going's resistance to interpretation is one of its defining characteristics. But beneath its layers of meaning can be detected a fair amount of amused reportage from the exotic social landscape - the world of Impersonation Parties, mock-Picassos and "Bruno Hat" - of which its author, however inscrutably or sardonically, was a part.

· DJ Taylor's Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 is published by Chatto & Windus, price £20, on October 4. To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to