serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant

One could argue this new Bohemia-peopled by artists and writers, musicians and actors, journalists and photographers, commoners and aristocrats-gave birth to what we know as celebrity culture. A 1927 cartoon in Punch magazine, for example, highlights their fame with a middle-aged lady aggressively addressing a society gentleman: 'Are you one of the Bright Young People? I am.' Regularly showing up in gossip pages and news reports, the movement was a cultural phenomenon. The name 'Bright Young People' originally appeared as part of a Daily Mail headline on July 26, 1924. Those vile bodies.'īut the Bright Young Things not only lived for each other and for the day they also lived for the press. all the succession and repetition of massed humanity. '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. In one famous passage, Waugh summed up the whole exhausting, exuberant time:

(Stephen Fry's 2003 film adaptation of Waugh's novel Bright Young Things reclaimed the original title). The most famous chronicler of the Bright Young People was Evelyn Waugh, whose 1930 novel Vile Bodies was originally titled 'Bright Young Things' until Waugh decided the term had become too widespread and cliché. The decadence of the Weimer Republic was chronicled by Christopher Isherwood in The Berlin Stories, part of which was later adapted into Cabaret. The swells and flappers of the Roaring Twenties made an appearance in The Great Gatsby. 'The Lost Generation' of Americans trying to find themselves in Paris gathered around Gertrude Stein in Paris. The Bright Young People (or Bright Young Things, as others called them) are the British incarnation of an international phenomenon that had erupted in the 20s after World War I.

The Bright Young People, as newspapers had dubbed them, were routinely featured (and pilloried) in society pages and opinion columns alike as they set the tone for a society teetering on the edge of an abyss. But more than likely, she, along with most of London, had read about such reckless, rich people running amok through London. Whether Winifred Watson, the author of the 1938 novel, had partied with similar folk is doubtful. Every where she turns, snappy, oh-so-clever young people are racing to fashion shows and parties, gossiping about who's in the paper and who just landed in prison, who's sleeping with whom and who hasn't slept in days. In Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, when the singer/actress/woman-about-town Delysia La Fosse pulls a poor, hungry mouse of a governess into her glamorously giddy world, Miss Pettigrew has never seen anything like it.

Serious pleasures the life of stephen tennant