Beautiful People Going Nowhere

The 1920s and 30s saw a spate of books on both sides of the Atlantic about Bright Young Things partying as if the world would never end. Scott Fitzgerald started it with The Beautiful and Damned (1922), continued with The Great Gatsby (1925), and wrote his best book about this phenomenon in Tender Is the Night (1934). These books have in common beautiful, but essentially idle and purposeless, people and those who look at them with awe; in The Beautiful and Damned the beauty is the jazz-age girl Gloria Gilbert, who always looks “as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.” Anthony Patch, who is also a spoiled young person, marries her, and they proceed rapidly from the beautiful to the damned. The Great Gatsby is perhaps the best illustration of Fitzgerald’s conviction that the lives of the idle rich and their imitators are empty and banal, while those who look at them with awe are fated for disillusionment. Nick Carroway, the narrator, is the awed onlooker here, fascinated by Jay Gatsby and Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan and Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker. What Nick discovers is that Gatsby is a fake who changes his name from James Gatz, tries to deny his father and his North Dakota roots, associates with mobsters and makes his money illegally, and is convinced his money will attract his old love Daisy Buchanan. Nick learns these damning things about Gatsby and Daisy’s selfish, unfeeling cruelty nearly together at the book’s climax. Fitzgerald thought Tender Is the Night was his best book (I agree), and it makes several lists of best 100 novels, including the Modern Library’s, the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s, and NPR’s, but almost always behind The Great Gatsby. It is divided into three sections. In the first, 18-year-old movie star Rosemary Hoyt, spending a few days with her mother on the Riviera, becomes infatuated with the beautiful people Dick and Nicole Diver. Rosemary is the star of Daddy’s Girl, an ironic title as it relates to her (her father is dead) and Nicole, whom we learn later is suffering from a mental illness probably brought on by her father’s sexual abuse. The second section is a flashback to Dick Diver’s education as a psychiatric physician, his work at the Zurich clinic where Nicole Warner is a patient, and his marriage to her. The last section is the account of Dick’s decline, through alcoholism and what he perceives as the enervating control of Nicole’s money, personified in the book by the character of her sister “Baby” Warner. Disillusionment is the result for Rosemary and eventually for Nicole as well.

The main chronicler of the Bright Young Things on the other side of the Atlantic was Evelyn Waugh, whose satires of the fast and feckless include his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), where he introduces the character of Margot Metroland, a popular London society party-giver whose money comes from brothels in South America and who essentially ruins the life of the book’s hero. Vile Bodies (1930) expands the cast of characters and includes Mrs. Melrose Ape the evangelist and her winged chorus--among them Chastity, Creative Endeavor, and Divine Discontent; Father Rothschild, the Jesuit who seems to be running England, deciding whether Outrage or Brown will be Prime Minister this week; and Margot Metroland is again a player. A lesbian character Waugh introduces (“Poor Lady Chasm,” people keep saying of her mother), eventually dies after a traumatic incident in which she takes over an auto race without knowing how to drive. Adam Fenwick-Symes, one of Waugh’s gormless young men, and Nina Blount, daughter of an eccentric nobleman, keep getting engaged and unengaged as Adam’s fortunes rapidly change. His hapless and feckless adventures include a period as Mr. Chatterbox, during which he makes up stories about the doings of London’s Bright Young Things, and his chance encounters with a drunk major who owes Adam thirty-five thousand pounds after he put Adam’s thousand on a long shot at Ascot. The major and Adam end up together in a ravaged, war-torn landscape as the novel ends.

The strangest and probably the last of these books about doomed partygoers of the era just before and after the 1929 crash is titled, aptly, Party Going (1939), by Henry Green, a highly respected though not widely known author with a distinctive style. In this book, Max, a rich young man who these days would be diagnosed with AADD, tortured by the beautiful and also rich Amabel and torturing Julia Wray and possibly Angela Crevy in his turn, arranges and pays for tickets for his friends for a three-week house party in the south of France. But fog closes down on London and none of the trains runs. The party assembles at the station, and after the station fills with thousands of would-be travelers, the party moves into the station hotel, which soon afterwards closes its metal gates to keep out the huge crowd.

            The accompaniment to the cruel and mindless doings of the young things in the party is the story of Miss Fellowes, aunt of one of them, who has some kind of neurotic attack in the bar of the station and is carried into one of the rooms Max has rented at the hotel to accommodate his party. She is followed by a mysterious man who speaks in varied class accents (like our author, in his various books; is he the prole Henry Green or the toff Henry Yorke—his real name?), and also by two aged nannies of party members—the two women just happen to be in the station when Miss Fellowes is taken ill—and they follow into the hotel. The threatened death of Miss Fellowes and the presence of all three old ladies, like Fates, are things the young people can’t avoid any more than they can wish away the fog.

It is difficult to avoid comparing the novel to Sartre’s play No Exit, which it predates, though at the end of the novel the trains begin running again. Clear influences of Woolf show up in the way Green jumps from the middle of one conversation to one in another room. But though Green is often compared to Woolf, George Meredith’s mannerist style might be a more apt comparison. Green gives us pages of dialogue and exhibits a willful refusal to interpret; when he does summarize or comment, he’s liable to do so with metaphors that are abstract and even surreal. Yet we want to see what happens to his partygoers with their trivial concerns and self-absorption. They imagine they will live forever. Green suggests, however, that their way of life is “going”—the title has a parallel double sense to that of Philip Larkin’s poem title “Church Going.”