Bridge Magazine - Part 1

him to stay in bed, sometimes for a month at a time.
this spelled a frustrating time for siegfried
sassoon, with whom he conducted an affair
through the 1920s and 1930s. the first world
war poet and pacifist was in equal parts
intoxicated by this graceful butterfly of a man,
while reviling his set for their blind frivolity
against the growing seriousness of the political
backdrop. the older man’s innate puritanism
saw him entreat the younger to absent himself
from the circus of inane revelry and his starring
role in the gossip pages – a task which proved
futile. in the face of such disapproval, tennant
dropped sassoon abruptly.
central also to the action was the
ever-present elizabeth ponsonby,
daughter of labour mp Arthur
ponsonby and his wife dorothea,
both of whose diaries and letters
attest to the overwhelming and,
at times, hopeless concern they
felt for their much-loved child’s
welfare. elizabeth lived beyond
her means always, worked as an
actress occasionally and, towards
the end of her life, as a nightclub
hostess. her general attitude to life
was to derive as much hedonistic
pleasure from it as possible, while
all the time being subsidised
by her father’s modest income.
famous essentially for going to
parties, she is said to have been
the life and soul of these frequent
gatherings, her tragedy lying in the
fact that she couldn’t acknowledge
when the party was over. married
and divorced, the subject of many
column inches, the once ebullient
but later penniless elizabeth
descended into alcoholism, a
condition which proved fatal
when she died before reaching
her fortieth birthday, a sort of
cautionary tale of what it is to try
and hang on to the brightness of
youth while blindly shunning life’s
more serious repercussions.
meanwhile, the eton- and
oxford-educated poet brian
howard, who was notable for his
quick temper, licentiousness and
the absence of an actual body of work, also fell
into alcoholism, eventually committing suicide
over the accidental death of a lover. the
actress and it-girl brenda dean paul’s fate too
was sealed the first time she was introduced to
morphine, succumbing eventually as she did to
a full-blown heroin addiction.
there existed, however, those bright young
people who didn’t fail to notice that the music
had stopped with the onset of the 1930s.
interestingly, the more serious-minded of the
set tended to be those who never felt entirely
part of it, whose backgrounds were inescapably
middle-class rather than aristocratic. evelyn
waugh, for example, was a hard-drinking
Evelyn Waugh
young man who frequented the parties but
remained on the group’s periphery. but while
he partook, he was also prolific. rather than
spend his days waiting for the next byt stunt,
waugh used his time to write, drawing on the
extraordinary figures of the social circle as
inspiration, his detachment adding to his ability
to see it for what it was. As mentioned, stephen
tennant provided him with the ingredients
for sebastian flyte and brian howard
for Anthony blanche, while the
quickly penned Vile Bodies is
seen as the definitive account
of those heady years.
cecil beaton, meanwhile, spent his youth
longing to be taken up as a bright young thing,
and was beside himself with delight when
the invitations to country estates rolled in. but
while the names of many whose summons so
thrilled him now languish in obscurity, beaton’s
is celebrated, with v&A exhibitions devoted to
him decades after his death. the photographer
realised, after all, that while parties were a delight,
they were also a way of making connections.
the consummate networker, beaton outgrew
the frolics and set his eyes on America, where
he made his name at Vogue. back on british turf
he practically became the court snapper.
Another outsider was tom driberg, the
FEATURE
journalist who affected to be a bright young thing,
attending the myriad of parties, while nipping off
to the telephone at intervals to report on them for
his newspaper column. while it may have earned
him a certain mistrust by his peers (though they
were often simply too intoxicated to notice), this
early work ethic stood him in good stead for his
later career as chairman of the labour
party, and crossword setter
at private eye.
the anomalous
mitfords meanwhile,
though high born,
never conformed
to anything in their
lives, not even
the frequently
doomed trajectory
of the bright
young aristocratic
thing. nancy was a
keen observer of all
aspects of life (family,
parties, la vie française)
and scribbled it all down
for the delight of her readers,
before finally absenting herself
and living in paris. in the meantime,
her sister diana spent the 1930s
lunching with hitler and rallying
for her husband oswald mosley,
the leader of the british union of
fascists; consequently she spent
much of the war in prison.
for some, the movement was
a springboard for success and
for others its excesses spelled
destruction. but, like the brightest
of shining stars, its light had to
eventually dwindle and 1929
marked the beginning of the
end. by the 1930s, those who had
moved on were those who would
be its survivors, while those who
insisted on continuing the revelry
found their once exquisite selves
dimmed and ultimately dying.
were they all bright? certainly
they were young, but brightness
can only be ascribed to a handful.
upon which note, we leave the
last word to the irrefutably bright
waugh, who recalls the days of the media circus
in Vile Bodies: “…masked parties, savage
parties, victorian parties, greek parties, russian
parties, circus parties, parties where one had to
dress as somebody else, almost naked parties
in st John’s wood, parties in flats and studios and
houses and ships and hotels and nightclubs, in
windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at
school where one ate muffins and meringues and
tinned crab, parties at oxford where one drank
brown sherry and smoked turkish cigarettes,
dull dances in london and comic dances in
scotland and disgusting dances in paris – all the
succession and repetition of massed humanity…
those vile bodies.”
TheRe
exisTeD Those
BRighT young
peopLe who
DiDn’T faiL To
noTiCe The MusiC
haD sToppeD
BRIdGE MAGAZINE 33