l reported that an insouciant gang of youths had been spotted, extravagantly costumed, trundling through London on an evening treasure hunt. The actress Tallulah Bank­head had been in attendance, as well as various ­less ­famous, but no less well-heeled, members of London’s smart set. The carefree party culture of England’s bourgeoisie predated this event, of course, but the 

 made clear that its reporter had just witnessed the debut of the “Bright Young People.” Those who think America’s rapacious celebrity ­culture—­heirs and heiresses whose only discernable talent is the effortless credit card swipe—is unique in its excess and vapidity are advised to read British writer D. J. Taylor’s 

, an engrossing social history of the ­blue ­bloods, bohos, and bobos who constituted the “lost generation” of ­post–­World War I ­England.

Readers familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s early ­novels—­notably 

-­text of Bright Young ­culture—­will find the milieu that Taylor describes familiar. Waugh shifted between participant and observer of the Bright Young parties, and had a keen eye for the minutiae of ­upper-­class ­society—­the ­generation-­specific neologisms, the absurdly posh names. Not only was this cultural hothouse the ­mise ­en ­scène for writers such as Waugh and gadabout journalist Tom Driberg, but, as Taylor writes, the Bright Young circle also midwifed the careers of “half a dozen leading figures in ballet, photography, and surrealist painting.”

In many respects, Taylor writes, the Bright Young People were “a symptom of the continuing reaction against the stuffiness of prewar social arrangements.” The children of the Brit­ish bourgeoisie, having just watched a generation of young men slaughtered at the Somme, rapidly took to indulging in drug- and alcohol-fueled parties, which had the ­side ­effect of blurring traditional class boundaries. The “doomed youth,” too young to have fought in the Great War but unconscious beneficiaries of the melancholic poetry and literature it produced, banded together in bacchanalian revelry. “England,” Taylor writes, “was turning more democratic.”

It was an age when parties had names and themes, at which the assembled mugged for the cameras and drowned themselves in drink. Widely publicized events such as the White Party are clear predecessors of Truman Capote’s 1966 Black and White Ball, while the infamous Bruno Hat exhibition, a collection of Modernist paintings by a fictitious artist, doubtless influenced Scottish novelist William Boyd’s “discovery” of the “artist” Nat Tate in a 1998 biography, later revealed as a hoax. It was a Bright Young ­hobby—­the hopelessly pretentious puncturing of ­pretension.

But the story is also deeply tragic, as evidenced by the fate of party fixture Elizabeth Ponsonby, the socialite daughter of Labor Party member of Parliament Arthur Ponsonby. Using hitherto unpublished family diaries, Taylor provides a running narrative of the young woman’s aimlessness and ulti­mately fatal decline into substance abuse. Her father sighed that she possessed “all the crudest faults of the modern girl,” and lamented that his daughter’s “preference for disrep­utable people is . . . incorrigible.” She was dead from ­alcoholism before she reached 40.

The political and economic crises of the 1930s pushed some ­party­goers toward more serious pursuits. The writer Beverley Nichols, a circuit regular in the 1920s, declared that he “could not go on much longer, drinking cock­tails and talking nonsense while the clouds were gathering over Europe,” and became a pacifist. Diana Mitford adored the pageantry of the 1920s party culture, but soon cuckolded her husband and embraced the political pageantry of fascism. Betrayed by his first wife, Evelyn Waugh escaped the scene that had provided him fame, converted to Catholicism, and ­remarried.

It is difficult to divine just what the collapse of the movement presaged. A rather uninteresting answer is that the participants’ inexorable slide toward adulthood was as much responsible for the end of Bright Young culture as anything. And as Taylor notes, media scrutiny made bohemian culture seem labored and inauthentic, the movement transmogrified “from an original style to a ­mass-­market imitation of it,” and the label Bright Young Person came to apply to “

 the young in Britain who did anything unusual at all.” Nevertheless, the alternative youth culture of the Bright Young Things defined an epoch in ­England—­while helping to redefine the British class ­system.

Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age

 by D.J. Taylor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp, 2010.

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Flibbertigibbets

The 1970s—with its flared jeans and dodgy haircuts, pallid disco music, absurdist trends (pet rocks!), and Khomeinist revolution—what a miserable, squalid decade it was. The idealism and irrational optimism of the 1960s, when throngs of teenagers declared the end of bourgeois society, gave way to Cambodia, Watergate, Jonestown, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Civil rights marchers and peaceniks made way for black power and Black September.

, British journalist Francis Wheen stylishly chronicles what he calls the “Them decade,” when the grand conspiracy theory was ascendant in the West, having infected the thinking of an astonishing number of clever people—prime ministers, presidents, journalists, and movie directors—as well as the hoi polloi. When something went wrong—a leader deposed, a president shot—it was invariably blamed on the machinations of government, business, and intelligence community conspirators. It was 

. Ordinary people saw a government agent behind every rock. British prime minister Harold Wilson was convinced that his intelligence service was fomenting a coup. Richard Nixon distrusted all but his closest aides.

There was something of a hangover in all of this, a predictable backlash from the mainstreaming of political radicalism of the late 1960s. Looking back on 1973, Wheen observes that in Britain “it seems incredible that the National Theater should stage an earnest three-hour Trotskyist seminar, led by no less a figure than Laurence Olivier,” that supposedly portended a working-class revolution.

In the United States, most every conspiracy theory that involved the White House, Langley, the

, was given a hearing (and sometimes confirmed as fact) in Congress. Public revelation of the CIA’s involvement in assassination plots in the Third World, its role in fomenting coups across the globe, and its production of exploding cigars meant for Fidel Castro were treasonous, said singer Bing Crosby. To others, the exposés merely confirmed what they had long suspected: Their government could never be trusted.

Wheen concedes that much 1970s paranoia contained a kernel of truth. After all, it was 

 paranoia that created the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), an FBI-led operation to spy on domestic political dissidents in the 1960s. The program’s exposure in 1975 predictably produced a wave of counterparanoia, and, 50 years after its inauguration, COINTELPRO is still grist for conspiracists and paranoiacs.

Wheen sees spasms of paranoia as cyclical: “Historians of the paranoid style have shown that it is not a constant but an episodic phenomenon which coincides with social conflict and apprehensions of doom.” Today, he catches “flickering glimpses ofdéjà vu” in, for example, Michael Moore’s conspiracy-laden 2004 documentary 

. Perhaps. But the advent of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the “greed decade” hardly provided an interregnum to mainstream conspiracy theorizing. From Father Coughlin’s 1930s sermons about Jewish plots against America to the amateur Poirots investigating the “suspicious” circumstances of Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide, the 20th century was always running a fever.

There are plenty of quibbles too. Nixon’s presidency was an unmitigated disaster, but it is a stretch to suggest that he was a “kindred spirit” of paranoid Chinese 

 Mao Zedong and Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev. (Wheen also misquotes Helen Gahagan Douglas, with whom Nixon squared off during a 1950 run for the U.S. Senate, as saying that the Soviet Union was “the cruelest, most barbaric autocracy in world history.” She was referring to the governments that preceded the Bolshevik Revolution.)

While his larger narrative doesn’t quite cohere, Wheen’s anecdotes are crisply told, often terrifying, and usually amusing—as when he describes the 1974 meeting that Britain’s most powerful civil servant, Sir William Armstrong, held with his underlings, where, naked, he ranted that the end of the world was nigh. Wheen’s dramatis personae (Israeli paranormalist Uri Geller, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin) often feel like comic characters invented for their entertainment value. But everything he says is true. And he’s right to suggest that the strange, paranoid days of the 1970s are back. Because they never really went away.

Strange Days Indeed: the 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia

 by Francis Wheen, PublicAffairs, 343 pp, 

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The strange, paranoid days of the 1970s are back. In fact, they never really went away.

When They Were Out to Get Us

Constantly in need of new and more terrifying copy, news editors and television producers reach for that evergreen tale—cultural details slightly modified—of America’s disillusioned youth. From zoot suit rioters to punk rockers, grunge acolytes to goth kids, the specter of the coming generation’s apathy and aimlessness, political disengagement and social alienation, continues to alarm parents and financially motivated experts. Today, the problem is the so-called Peter Pan generation of Millennials. Headlines lament that more kids are living at home after high school, waiting to marry, and racking up student loans.

, a book that distills eight years of research supported by the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, Oregon State University sociologist Richard Settersten and Barbara E. Ray, former communications director for the network, argue that kids aren't simply dragging their heels about growing up. Mining a pile of data from government surveys and other sources, as well as more than 500 interviews conducted with subjects between the ages of 18 and 34, Settersten and Ray conclude that the “traditional milestones” of adulthood—including quickly leaving the parental nest, getting a job, and marrying and having children—have moved back, and that there are significant financial advantages to ambling toward adulthood.

While busting myths about the harmful effects of “helicopter” parenting (it gets a bad rap) and questioning the frequent hand-wringing about the “death of marriage” (putting off wedlock and parenthood helps young people earn a degree), Settersten and Ray devote considerable attention to the American view of higher education. They’re skeptical of our one-size-fits-all model that prescribes bachelor’s degrees for everyone. Nearly half of students fail to graduate within six years of enrolling in college, thus assuring that they exit without a degree but burdened by sizable debts. The authors make the politically incorrect and undeniably true argument that some students simply aren't cut out for a four-year university (one interviewee chose a college based on the availability of parking) and would be better served by vocational or technical training.

Those who are ready for college, Settersten and Ray contend, should stop gaping at the steep price tag of many institutions and, in light of the vastly higher salaries earned by workers with advanced degrees, view college debt as an investment. It’s true that the typical student who graduates with debt from a public university—where the cost of tuition, room, and board grew 67 percent between 1987 and 2008—owes $20,000. But installments on that debt are equivalent to a monthly car payment, and the value of an education lasts a lot longer than that of a car.

That said, the authors suggest that parents seek détente in the education “arms race” of elevated expectations that goads them to overextend their resources in order to launch their kids into the “top tier.” But they offer no concrete suggestions for how this goal could be achieved other than to say that the country needs “education reform” at the primary level—though whether this means more charter schools and voucher programs, higher teacher pay, or some other remedy isn't clear.

Settersten and Ray conclude with a number of surprisingly banal prescriptions for the problems Millennials face. It seems obvious that young people should choose their friends wisely, lest they be influenced by rogue peers. It is undeniable that today’s young adults are “creating communities of like minds” and “want freedom and autonomy.” “In the past,” the authors write, “dating eventually led to sex. Today, sex eventually leads to dating.” Yet Millennials are also holding out for a partner who is a “best friend or a soul mate.” None of this would be out of place in a book about the purportedly indifferent Generation X-ers who preceded them, or unfamiliar to those who came of age in the 1980s.

Still, Settersten and Ray have produced an occasionally interesting—and consoling—account of a supposedly troubled generation. And when Millennials reluctantly acquiesce to adulthood, the same concerns will likely be applied to the next generation.

"Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It's Good for Everyone"

 by Richard Settersten and Barbara E. Ray, Random House, 2010. 

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Constantly in need of new and more terrifying copy, news editors and television producers reach for that evergreen tale of America's disillusioned youth. 

Kids These Days

Fifty years after he ended his life, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) resides in the American consciousness mostly in caricature. The brilliant war journalist and writer of spare, evocative fiction has been overtaken by the macho, absinthe-swilling bohemian, the writer’s life having become more important than the writer’s writing.

There is, of course, something to these cartoonish portrayals. In 

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907–1922

, the first of a slated dozen or so volumes of his complete, unexpurgated correspondence, the future Nobelist recounts, often in tedious detail, his love of fishing, his heroics on the Italian front, and his burgeoning friendships with expatriate American writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Unlike previous collections of Hemingway’s letters, this one leaves nothing on the cutting room floor. (The volume begins with a note from an eight-year-old Hemingway to his father.)

Much of the material in this collection, meticulously edited by Hemingway scholars Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, will be of interest only to academics and obsessives. The earliest material is a slog: anodyne correspondence with family members, quotidian letters about school life, an exhaustively detailed expense report to his employers at 

But the multiple accounts of his wounding in World War I—boastful, repetitive, and sometimes stingy with the truth—are fascinating, offering a glimpse of Hemingway’s late teenage worldview. The young men he encountered in Italy, the cannon fodder for Kaisers and kings, would ultimately provide the contours of his most famous literary creations (Nick Adams, Jake Barnes), though the famously economical prose style isn't on display here; his letters are slang filled and overwritten, providing few hints of the crisp style that characterizes his first story collection, 

It’s commonly believed that Hemingway was emotionally scarred by his experience in the Great War. Indeed, Thomas Putnam, director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which houses many of these letters, argued in an essay a few years ago that “in reaction to their experience of world war, Hemingway and other modernists lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization.” In 

 (1929), Frederic Henry, a character largely drawn from Hemingway’s experiences in Italy, famously declares, “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.”

But if Hemingway believed that Western civilization was in crisis, these letters suggest that his views were arrived at after the armistice. For writers including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, the battlefield was where their antiwar beliefs were forged. Hemingway’s opinions were likely influenced by the intellectual ferment of Paris, where he and his wife lived for several years in the 1920s.

In a 1917 letter to his sister, Hemingway writes that he “cant [sic] stay out much longer,” and that he is considering enlisting in the Canadian military if America remains on the sidelines. When a munitions plant explodes at the front, Hemingway writes to a friend that it was his “baptism of fire” and that he is “having a wonderful time!!!” He mentions a field “black” with corpses, not to reflect on the hideousness of the fight, but to explain the provenance of his pile of war souvenirs, and he later confesses that “what makes me hate this war” is that there is no place to fish. The Hemingway of 1918 is more Ernst Jünger than Erich Maria Remarque.

It is only when Hemingway and his new bride, Hadley Richardson, relocate to Paris in 1921 that the reader notices the emergence of a distinct voice, full of the stylistic flourishes and vivid descriptions that would become his trademark. In letters to Pound, Stein, and novelist Sherwood Anderson, whose attention and validation he craved, Hemingway writes to impress, taking significantly more care than in any previous correspondence. The juvenilia are replaced with comments on T. S. Eliot’s 

 and anecdotes about teaching Pound to box.

This volume ends just as Hemingway is getting started. It’s a collection whose existence goes against his wishes; he had instructed that “none of the letters written by me during my lifetime shall be published.” We can be grateful that his wish was betrayed.

"The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907-1922" 

Edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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50 years after he ended his life, Hemingway lives in the American consciousness mostly in caricature.

Michael C. Moynihan