Bright, young people

Richard
Bright young people
Starbucks, December 5, 2008

I picked up Bright Young People, The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age, by D.J. Taylor, from Laurie’s pile of uncorrected proofs. I like these volumes with their typos, sketchy chapter headings, and missing indexes, allowing you a glimpse into the stages publication. This one chronicles the “bright, young people” of London’s 1920’s—the generation between the wars whose London upper crust staged all-night parties in public swimming pools to the accompaniment of Negro jazz bands. George Orwell loathed these people and so did I until, reading on, I began to feel some sympathy for them. One result of the slaughter of men in World War I was to liberate women. At the same time, depressed by the losses and savageries of war, they often acted desperately. I saw a kind of earnestness in their frivolity. The competition, let’s say, to go into the streets of Mayfair and purloin a policemen’s helmet seemed almost, though not quite, poignant.

Walking over to meet Laurie for our daily write, it occurred to me that my generation was in transition as well, with one foot in the old, gray England following World War II and the other foot in the psychedelic flower power of the 1960’s. Caught in the upward draught of social mobility and rising expectations, educated beyond my origins but never quite fitting the clothes or speech patterns of the class my education pointed me to, I have needed all this time to see my formation. It’s difficult to admit I’m only now measuring my past in this way. Laurie seems to have a firmer grasp on the period that made her, the 60’s and 70’s, than I have.

My memories of childhood flow easily, but I go to sleep when I think about my early twenties. Now, as then, I still stop myself from seeing things. Some moments are illuminated in the dark: fucking Marylyn in the doorway, marrying her, taking off from the house where we lived together. But far vaguer is the emptiness of all those rented rooms Meg and I drifted through: stoned, listening to the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendricks for escape. I need to let it come to me without the self-justifying censor piping up, “You were the victim of circumstance.” In reality, I was a situationist. I remember a situationist cartoon in a French political magazine of the early ‘70s. In it Tonto asks the Lone Ranger what his politics are, and the masked man says in a bubble above his grainy, black and white image, “I drift, mainly I just drift.” For many years so did I, from place to place, person to person, not quite knowing why. This is the story I am locating.