TAREA

WHO WERE THE BRIGHT & YOUNG?

BEVERLEY NICHOLS - ALL I COULD NEVER BE 1949
BYP - [p. 3]
It was an age of "parties." There were "white" parties in which we shot down to the country in fleets of cars, dressed in white from head to foot, and danced on a

white floor laid in the orchard, with the moonlight turning all the apples to silver, and then -- in a pale pink dawn -- playing races with champagne corks on the

surface of the stream. There were Mozart parties in which, powdered and peruked, we danced by candlelight and then -- suddenly bored -- rushed out into the street to

join a gang excavating the gas mains at Hyde Park Corner. There were swimming parties where, at midnight, we descended on some municipal baths, hired for the occasion,

and disported ourselves with an abandon that was all the fiercer because we knew that the press was watching -- and watching with a very disapproving eye.


BYP [p. 8]
Its members ranged from the rich and aristocratic -- Bryan Guinness on his marriage to Diana Mitford in 1929 was supposed to have acquired an income of L. 20,000 a

year -- to the downright disreputable. Some Bright Young People became successful writers, journalists or artists, while others plumbed the depths of drink, drugs and

disappointment.

ALAN JENKINS: the words Bright Young People became a label for all the young in Britain who did anything unusual at all

[...] Given that many of the Bright Young People were artists, albeit sometimes in very minor and inconsequential ways, their spoor can be tracked across vast acreages

of British cultural life. Their style -- brisk, affected, outwardly impersonal, inwardly often deeply vulnerable -- influenced a host of descendants who knew nothing

of their ancestry, and their echoes can be found in the pages of books written long after the movement's original members were gone. [pp. 8-9]


ON THE PHOTOGRAPH AT WILSFORD MANOR
[p. 10] It is an extraordinary portrait-- stylised, sophisticated, ultramodern, and yet, in its dandy posturing, hugely frivolous and self-centred, an image that, in

the end, conveys nothing but its own artificiality.


ET IN ARCADIA EGO
[p. 12] The influence of the Bright Young People can be felt throughout twentieth century artistic life. To take on the most flagrant examples, the London society

world of the mid- to late 1920s was a crucible in which were forged the careers of several of England's greatest novelists, one of its best-loved contemporary poets

and half a dozen leading figures in ballet, photography and surrealist painting. Beneath the surface hubbub lay, too, a deep strain of unease, often extending to

outright melancholy. Raised in the shadow of the Great War, denied most of the social and economic certainties of their parents' generation, the Bright Young People

knew, if they had any sense of perspective, that their pleasures came at a price, that somewhere in the middle distance a reckoning awaited. "It is a queer world which

the old men have left them," Evelyn Waugh wrote in a valedictory editorial for his school magazine, considering the plight of what he called "the youngest generation,"

"and they will have few ideals and illusions to console them when they 'get to feeling old.' They will not be a happy generation."


STEPHEN TENNANT AS SEBASTIAN I -- THE CULT OF YOUTH & BEAUTY
THE DAILY EXPRESS 1926 OR 27
[pp. 24-25] His appearance alone is enough to make you catch your breath -- golden hair spreading in flowing waves across a delicate forehead; an ethereally

transparent face; clothes which mold themselves about his slim figure [...]"


MANY MEETINGS
[p. 29] The median date of birth was around 1905. [...] If age brought consanguinity, then so did the alliances of school and university. Eleanor Smith and Zita

Jungman had been at Miss Douglas's establishment at Queen's Gate with Alannah Harper. The founding members of the Eton Society of the Arts in 1920 included Howard,

Yorke, Harold Acton and Anthony Powell. Evelyn Waugh and Tom Driberg first came across each other at Lansing College. Oxford, too, became a Bright Young Person's

Nursery. The legacy of the war, manifested in gruff ex-servicemen who referred to the dining hall as "mess" and the legend of the misbehaving former officer

apprehended by a proctor's bulldog who turned out to be his batman, had dissipated by about 1922, after which the most fashionable colleges, Magdalen and Christ

Church, were dominated by a new breed of undergraduates, predominantly Old Etonians notable for the flamboyance of their dress and manner.

THE 'ISIS' ON THE HYPOCRITES' CLUB:
[p. 30] The Hypocrites are perhaps the most entertaining people in the University. They express their souls in terms of shirts and gray flannel trousers and find

outlet for their artistic ability on the walls of their clubrooms. To talk to they are rather alarming. They have succeeded in picking up a whole series of

intellectual catch-phrases with which they proceed to dazzle their friends and frighten their acquaintance: and they are the only people I have ever met who have

reduced rudeness to a fine art.


GENERATIONAL DIVIDE -- SURVIVOR'S GUILT & THE HEROIC DEAD
[pp. 54-55] Coming 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. For all the enthusiasm for "youth," the talk of "new blood" and

the need to sweep away prewar stuffiness, the twenties, practically every commentator of the period agrees, was a difficult time to be a young man. Part of this

difficulty lay in the simple fact of his existence. Orwell, a decade later, noted the tremendous amount of guilt experienced by the young man born in the years after

1900 who, consequently, had managed to avoid military service. "The very fact of his being alive was against him," Balfour declared, "for he was thus prevented from

standing level with 'the boys who had died.'" Whatever feats he accomplished, he would always be compared, and nearly always unfavourably, with the war generation lost

in the Flanders mud.

But there was more to these anxieties than a sense of generational inferiority. To a failure to emulate the achievements of those killed in the war could be added the

insecurities of the new postwar landscape, where jobs were scarce and whole areas of employment seemed set aside for the jealous middle-aged. On the one hand the

peculiarly charged atmosphere of the 1920s, with its promise of good times and limitless horizons, had raised expectations among the young; on the other the reality of

its economic pressures had simultaneously let them down. Cyril Connolly noted the reluctance of his contemporaries to accept the routine compromises that had done for

their fathers: "They could not settle down to boring jobs and unprofitable careers with prewar patience and their cleverness seemed a liability rather than an asset."

Balfour, alternatively, identified a gap between the kind of person that the public school system had launched on the social world of the 1920s ("a gentleman and a

gentleman of leisure") and the kind of person -- tough-minded, competitive and hardworking -- required by the postwar labour market. The Bright Young Man, Balfour

thought, was "a hybrid, hovering between two worlds and two systems."