Bright Young People by D.J. Taylor

[Son] Matthew furious said if we invited people of this sort to the house we must behave decently & give them their drink (bought by Babe [Plunkett Greene]). He said he had thought of not coming down - & it was our faults for having such people & that we must have known perfectly well they would drink unceasingly. [Husband] A. & I protested, that we had known that they would have sherry before dinner - but had no conception that the drinking of Sherry - Brandy & Whisky would never cease. He appeared to think that we ought never to have consented to have [daughter] E.'s friends & that it was all our own fault. A. got very angry about E. & I tried to explain to M. that having seen nothing like it - & it was impossible to realise what these sort of people were & how they would behave - after all E. Gathorne-Hardy - wretched creature is a gentleman.

-Excerpt from the diary of Dorothea Ponsonby (mother of Bright Young Person Elizabeth Ponsonby), as printed in Bright Young People

In my first year of college, I went through an Evelyn Waugh phase. I discovered Brideshead Revisited*in the stacks and subsequently went back to that section of the library so frequently that I daresay I could lead you to it today (assuming they haven't shuffled things around). Later on, I fell in love with Wodehouse, and somewhere in between I read a magazine article (presumably in Vanity Fair, as it's right up their alley) on the Mitford sisters. From those three sources, I had learned everything I knew about London's Jazz Age.

And who would expect you to know much, really? It's not World War II (not yet) or one of those other eras where at least a handful of facts are fairly common knowledge. In America, common knowledge about the English Jazz Age is...nothing, at least as far as I know.

I'd never had any particular interest in the period, either - yet, for whatever reason, when I stumbled upon Bright Young People at the library, I was intrigued. I guess there's just something about the beautiful and the damned, if I may steal phrasing from our own Jazz Age.

It is quite a cast of beautiful people. The women are fiery and the men dandyish. Everyone drinks to excess and speaks in an over-the-top fashion that, frankly, I love. They throw wild themed parties and absolutely flummox their parents (see the excerpt above). They fritter away money and sleep through the afternoon.

They are floating along in the wake of World War I, which killed and wounded so many of their slightly older countrymen. They can only float for so long, as it turns out - both the economy and the entry of England into World War II hasten the demise of the Bright Young People. By that time, some have become successful - Waugh, perhaps most notably, along with fellow novelist Henry Green and photographer Cecil Beaton. Others - like Elizabeth Ponsonby and Brenda Dean Paul - met tragic ends. And one - Unity Mitford - became a member of Hitler's inner circle. Really.

D.J. Taylor does an excellent job making sense of an abundance of material. He's quite an erudite writer - he sent me scrambling for the dictionary to look up suzerainty and echt. He tells the stories - or at least parts thereof - of quite a number of Bright Young People, which has left me curious to know more - if not more nonfiction, then perhaps some of the novels I've overlooked, like Green's Loving or Waugh's Vile Bodies. If nothing else, I have the 2003 film Bright Young Things (based on Vile Bodies) heading to me via Netflix. No better time for it, I reckon.

I think it is worthwhile to note that, while I found this book quite interesting, I have very little interest in today's pseudo-celebrity culture. That is to say, I admit to being a bit starstruck, but I am perfectly happy knowing nothing of those people who are famous for no discernible reason. It makes me wonder if I would have found the Bright Young People quite so glamorous if I had been their contemporary. Or perhaps it just reveals that the Z-list of today need to be a bit more ambitious and interesting - why no mock weddings? That was a sure-fire headline for Elizabeth Ponsonby.

Up next: I'm reading contemporary non-genre, non-YA fiction for the first time in a while, if my memory serves - American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. So far, so good.


*I loved the 2008 film adaptation, by the way. Perhaps not as faithful as the the 80s miniseries, but Ben Whishaw was quite devastating as Sebastian Flyte.