Who were the Bright Young People?

Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 by DJ Taylor

The Bright Young People were a group of mainly rich, very young people who flourished just after WWI – for the whole of the 20s in fact. They gave lavish costume or stunt parties, and their doings were reported in in breathless newspaper write-ups. Eventually any partying youths were described as Bright Young People, and everybody copied their mannerisms and slang. (“Too, too divine, my dear! How utterly bliss-making!”)

Dorothy L. Sayers concluded that the public liked reading about murders and aristocrats, and created an aristocratic sleuth who sometimes mixed with the BYPs (Murder Must Advertise). Writing thinly fictionalised novels about the bright crowd was a money spinner – see Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool, Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men, Beverley Nichols’s Crazy Pavements. (Nichols later produced detective stories, gardening books, a study of interior designer Syrie Maugham, and even a children’s book about a young witch.)

The hero of Crazy Pavements comments that for the BYPs “the most ordinary feelings and facts” are “divine, amazing, shattering, monstrous”. He wonders “what language they would speak if something really awful did happen”. (They would probably employ litotes or understatement.)

Two kindly, elderly gents from my childhood are featured in the text. The nice old man (Matthew Ponsonby) who lived in the 12th century priory down the road – his sister Elizabeth was one of the movement’s stars and gave riotous parties in the medieval survival, leaving the prior’s chamber littered with glasses and cigarette ends. 

We went to stay several times at the decaying Irish country house of John Heygate. He was once an item with Evelyn Waugh’s wife (also called Evelyn). My mother told me she’d just arrived on his doorstep and he could hardly turn her away.

Both Ponsonby parents kept diaries and wrote letters, and constantly wrung their hands over their daughter and her friends and lifestyle. Taylor points out that the BYPs rebelled against their parents’ plans for them: debutante dances and a good marriage for daughters, a respectable job for sons (or running inherited estates). Elizabeth Ponsonby eventually found someone to marry. Her mother pronounced on her future mother-in-law, Mrs Pelly: “A sort of second rate daughter of the regiment ease of manner... Of course it’s pathetic – she lives in a sort of boarding house in Cromwell Road – and I’m afraid she’ll be rather a pest.” The marriage didn’t last, and Elizabeth died young of alcohol-related health problems.

Evelyn Waugh revealed that he’d “always thought himself a gentleman until he met his future mother-in-law Lady Burghclere”.

Some of the BYPs who were famous among their set, like poet Brian Howard, are now almost forgotten. He was disappointed to find that the family’s surname was not the aristocratic sounding “Howard” but had originally been “Gassaway”.

Expected, not least by himself, to write novels that would out-Firbank Firbank in their orchidaceous subtleties, he ended up a tragicomic turn in novels by other people. 

Most of the BYPs were rich and could afford to live in central London doing nothing very much, but others, like photographer Cecil Beaton and writer Evelyn Waugh, had to work for a living, and networked like mad. 

What gave you entrance to the club? Talent for doing something the BYPs wanted – Beaton's snaps were good, and got the BYPs publicity. Charm, wit, beauty: “Beverley Nichols, who made great play of his matinee idol good looks...” (So much for “looks don’t matter”.) 

What happened to them all? Writing a Times obituary of his old friend Hamish Erskine in 1973, Alan Pryce-Jones noted: “Hamish, in his day, was a Bright Young Person and his life for the last thirty years exemplified the difficulty of taking on from there.” 

All Hamish possessed, in fact, was his charm and the memory of a world in which charm had perhaps counted for too much.

It’s a particular kind of syndrome, ponders Taylor – early in life you find a milieu in which you flourish, in which your particular personality and talents are valued – and then it’s gone and you never find it again. They themselves clearly thought they were marvellous: "wicked, divine" as John Le Carré put it. But the novels about the group show them up as frivolous, shallow, bored and "artists manqué", according to one reviewer. 

The sparkling text is marred by the odd gaffe. Taylor thinks, as many do, that “inanition” means “inertia” rather than malnutrition, and he confuses “flout” and “flaunt”. (You flout convention, and flaunt your superior learning.) He dangles the occasional modifier: “Tall, saturnine and vaguely clerical in appearance, Tom Driberg’s gravity went down well with senior members of the Express’s staff.” He, not his gravity, was tall, saturnine etc. In the literary world "feet tended to be kept simultaneously in several camps". These writers were millipedes? And “enmired in guilt”? There is no such word – how about “enmeshed”?

The BYPs had a strange afterlife, still appearing in the press occasionally in the late 30s, but “the tone was that of the museum guide proudly displaying some venerable exhibit under dim, antediluvian light”. Yes, the BYPs now seemed “antediluvian” – it means “before the Flood” – but “dim religious light” is the usual cliché, being a quote from Milton’s Il Penseroso: an allusion the well-educated BYPs would probably recognise.