The escapades of the young aristocrats were the hysterical last hurrah of that class. Having lost its grip on the Commons and its veto in the Lords, the aristocracy no longer dominated British politics. In economic terms, too, the caste was in decline. Taxes on land had been historically high during the war; after the armistice the Central LandOwners Association demanded the exchequer repeal them. Yet the anti-establishment Lloyd George maintained the land tax, and almost 50 per cent of country houses and 8 million acres of land were put on the market between 1918 and 1922. Over the decade that followed, the atrophy continued. By the time the American-born Tory MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon visited a number of the old great houses in the Thirties, he was overwhelmed by ‘the feel and smell of decay, of aristocracy in extremis’. There had perhaps been no greater change at the summit of English society since the Norman Conquest.
While the aristocracy was diminished in political and economic terms, its members remained influential in the creation of society’s crazes and fashions. Their influence was strong in the arts, where some of the set promoted ‘modernism’. That artistic movement was characterized by a conscious rejection of classical styles, and an interest in forms and themes appropriate to an urbanized and industrialized society. The children of privilege promoted avant-garde trends in music and painting, such as jazz and cubism, while in literature they championed the radical innovations of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.
Virginia Woolf was Bloomsbury’s best and boldest novelist. The stream-of-consciousness style she employed in Mrs Dalloway (1925) oscillates between direct and indirect speech, interior monologue and soliloquy. Like the bright young people, Woolf rebelled against the formal conventions and the ethos of the Edwardian period – a ‘fatal age’, according to her, ‘when character disappeared’. Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot, an American associate of the Bloomsbury Group, dramatized the disintegration of Western civilization during the war in his long poem The Waste Land (1922). In its deep ambiguities and elisions, and in its fragmented form, Eliot’s poem reflected the post-war period with all its anxieties, fears for the future and mournful memories. Many of the first readers of The Waste Land struggled to find meaning in its plethora of voices, styles, allusions and images, yet the poem was written to be uttered rather than understood. The bright young people heard the poem’s plangent music and realized that its rhythms and melodies were more important than its ‘meaning’.
Eliot occasionally attended parties organized by the bright young things, as did other Bloomsbury authors, such as Lytton Strachey. In newspaper interviews Strachey expressed sympathy with the set’s ‘struggle’ against the older generation and its harmful ‘taboos and restrictions’. His comments offer an insight into both the psychology of the bright young people, and the author’s own modernist tract, Eminent Victorians (1918). Strachey’s collection of biographical essays – or rather assassinations – had been written in the war, during which the author was a conscientious objector. Instead of writing the earnest, exhaustive and exhausting biographies favoured by the Edwardians and Victorians, Strachey penned short, sprightly and ironic portraits. His purpose was to attack his subject in ‘unexpected places [and] shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses’. To achieve those ends Strachey drew upon the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud. In Eminent Victorians Strachey poured scorn on the Victorian values of Christianity and imperial service that had been espoused by a generation of ‘mouthing bungling hypocrites’. Those values had helped bring about the war, he implied, yet they were still being adhered to by the older generation.
Some of the bright young men also ridiculed pre-war ideas and ideals of masculinity. Beards, moustaches and pipes were discarded as outmoded emblems of male pomposity. The new men favoured clean-shaven faces, and brushed back their oiled hair. They sported outlandish, self-parodic costumes that were as far away as possible from Edwardian male seriousness. And, just as the flappers had appropriated masculine fashion, the bright young men purloined clothes traditionally associated with women: ‘nowadays,’ as one of them remarked, ‘boys are girlish.’ They wore wide trousers called ‘Oxford bags’, which billowed around the legs and came in light, bright shades. The suede shoes and high-necked pullovers favoured by the men likewise featured soft colours; they were the first males ever to don pink shirts. Their waistcoats were flamboyant and their evening dress was embellished with patterns. They wore attractive wristwatches and constantly consulted them with a flourish of the forearm. As a result, wristwatches became associated with effeminacy; men who did not meet acceptable standards of masculinity were referred to as ‘terribly wristwatch’ or as having ‘a wristwatch accent’. An effeminate enunciation and vocabulary was cultivated by bright young men. ‘My dear, how could you!’ they would exclaim. Their effeminate argot was brought to the stage by Noël Coward, whose plays enjoyed success towards the end of the decade.
Some of the bright young men were effeminate, some were homosexual and some were both. Of American descent, Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard grew up despising his father and adoring his mother. Tall, pale, aloof and flamboyant, Howard swaggered his way from Eton and Christ Church college, Oxford, to the West End, leaving a trail of pink champagne bottles and quotable utterances in his wake. He planned spoof art exhibitions, elaborate practical jokes, and parties at which he would cut a dashing figure in cross-dress or historical costumes. Some of Howard’s historical parties had themes such as ‘Homosexual Lovers Through the Ages’, a daring idea when the laws that had condemned Oscar Wilde to two years’ hard labour were still on the statute book. Howard was a dandy like Wilde, and together they established the figure as a gay archetype. Evelyn Waugh admired Howard’s ‘dash and insolence’, but others were less than enthralled by his self-centredness and melancholy. As the years passed, he became increasingly morose, like so many of the bright young people. He wallowed in lost youthful promise and in the fading of his gilded youth, like a goldfish in a emptying pool.
And indeed, even at the height of their gay abandon, melancholy pervaded the hedonistic parties of the age. When their infantile indulgences began to pall, these spoiled children were paralysed by tedium. ‘Bored young faces’ peer out at us from the pages of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, emanating a ‘sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility’. Another novelist, Richard Aldington, detected the same air of despondency: ‘all night the restless feet stamped … and the joyless rejoiced without joy; and at dawn, when the wind breathed an immense sigh … You could almost hear the rattle of the bones in this macabre pageant.’ The image of the desolate dawn was commonplace in eyewitness accounts of parties, suggesting a foreboding for the future as well as an inability to dance away the memory of the recent conflict. It is telling that Waugh’s portrait of the group, Vile Bodies, ends on the battlefield of a future war.
18
Labour at the summit
Lloyd George’s fall from power was followed by a decisive Conservative victory at the 1922 election. According to some commentators, Law won the election for the simple reason that he was not Lloyd George. ‘A drummer boy is an asset in battle,’ the taciturn Tory leader told voters during the campaign, ‘but he and his drum are a nuisance in peacetime.’ British voters agreed; their desire was for the ‘tranquillity’ and ‘stability’ Law promised. According to Stanley Baldwin, now elevated to the Exchequer, the electorate also voted for honesty, a quality Lloyd George signally lacked.