by Philipp Blom
Some of these young people were fabulously rich, while others were subsisting in what was then still called genteel poverty, but all of them had considerable social standing and were themselves members of the aristocracy or related to them. But their exploits would have remained utterly conventional and would not have inspired so much brilliant writing had it not been for some less well-born hangers-on who compensated for their lack of pedigree with sheer talent and outrageousness.
The American actress Tallulah Bankhead became a favored Bright Young Thing during her stay in London in the late twenties. She did not tolerate a single dull minute, frequently enlivening as well as confusing proceedings with her vigorous, immediate, and, as she put it, “ambisextrous” hunger for erotic encounters. Other hopefuls included the up-and-coming photographer Cecil Beaton, who did anything he could to win commissions and accolades from the beautiful people he so envied, people he made even more beautiful in his elaborately arranged portraits; the travel writer Robert Byron, who was expelled from Oxford for refusing to behave himself and study; the brilliant, surly, and hard-drinking novelist Evelyn Waugh, forever trying to negotiate a path between his monumental snobbery and his even greater desire to belong in the right kind of environment; Noël Coward, already a star of the theater and never truly part of any set, but always on hand to imbibe, amuse, and observe; and the young poet John Betjeman, just down from Oxford, where he had failed for a second time to receive his degree in divinity. Betjeman remembered one night’s entertainments:
The spurt of soda as the whisky rose
Bringing its heady scent to memory’s nose
Along with Smells one otherwise forgets:
Hairwash from Delhez, Turkish cigarettes,
The reek of Ronuk on a parquet floor
As parties came cascading through the door:
Elisabeth Ponsonby in leopard-skins
And Robert Byron and the Ruthven twins.
Being a Bright Young Thing was all about cascading through doors in leopard skins, being outrageous and amusing. There was an endless succession of pajama parties, a swimming pool party with orchestra, endless weekends at the country houses of rich—and often outraged—parents, legendary costume balls, puckish practical jokes, and nocturnal car races through the streets of London.
The pervading atmosphere of these amusements was reminiscent of Peter Pan with cocktails—in 1926 there had even been a party on this very theme. It was all so willed in its innocence, its refusal to see the world from an adult perspective. The themed parties led straight back to the childhood obsession with dressing up, and it was as if the life at boarding school (which almost all members of this charmed circle had attended), with its quest for fun, defiance of school rules, and nocturnal expeditions sneaking out of windows and across rooftops, had never ended.
One of the favorite hangouts of the brightest of the Bright Young Things was the Gargoyle Club at 69 Dean Street in Soho, founded by David Tennant, brother of the gold-locked Stephen. The club breathed the air of a new era with its walls covered in mosaics of mirror shards and two paintings by Matisse on display. The owner said that he had opened the establishment simply to have a convenient place to dance with his girlfriend.
Here, in 1926, members of the fashionable set were invited to an “Edwardian Party” and asked to “come as you were twenty years ago.” In April 1930, some five thousand revelers congregated in eighteenth-century costumes to celebrate Mozart. The whole extravagance was supposed to have cost more than £3,000—roughly $100,000 in today’s money. The menu of the exclusive dinner preceding the dancing had been taken straight from a historical recipe book of dishes served at the court of Louis XVI, and later an orchestra in period clothes and wigs as well as a jazz band entertained the party-goers into the small hours of the morning. Returning home, a high-spirited crowd encountered some street workers and posed, pneumatic drill in hand, with the astonished workmen for a commemorative photograph.
The fun and games of this privileged set would have evaporated with the alcoholic haze surrounding them had it not been for the abiding fascination of the press, who saw that there was great copy to be had from their antics as well as from their blasé attitude. Papers such as the Daily Express and magazines such as Punch and Tatler followed every party, every extravaganza, and every mini scandal, and no event was deemed complete without the requisite gaggle of press photographers and reporters. This media attention magnified the importance and the resonance of the entertainments of what was, after all, a relatively small, charmed circle of more or less aristocratic youngsters and their hangers-on, making them into a national phenomenon.
For the general reader who lived on £200 a year—an office clerk, say, or a minor civil servant—stories about the Bright Young Things allowed glimpses of a life of privilege and leisure. Perhaps they aspired to a similar lifestyle; perhaps they felt envy and dissimulated by expressing it as moral disapproval. But in a wider context, stories about champagne, Pimm’s, and beautiful people were part of a change in social tides. Despite the fact that not all of the Bright Young Things were either young or bright, they stood for the generational divide between those who had lived through and often served in the war and those who had been too young to do so. While the difference in years was often slight, the contrast in outlook, could be enormous.
Eventually the cheerful nihilism and the occasionally forced indifference to everything political began to wear thin, the alcohol haze lifted, and the young party-goers began to cast around for answers, and for a faith. In the case of the Mitford sisters this search would famously lead in divergent directions. Nancy became an expat living in France and a novelist concentrating on social mores; Diana would divorce the millionaire brewery heir Bryan Guinness to marry the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley; Unity would surrender herself entirely to an adulation of Hitler that left even her family speechless and that would culminate in her attempted suicide when her idol’s case seemed lost; Jessica became a communist and would later go to work for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War; and Deborah married Andrew Cavendish, becoming the Duchess of Devonshire.
The search for ideological certainty also infected other members of the seemingly charmed circle of Roaring Twenties indulgence as their heedless hedonism soured in an increasingly menacing political atmosphere. Evelyn Waugh, one of the sharpest observers of social mores among his hard-drinking friends, turned to Roman Catholicism; Tom Driberg intensified his engagement with communism; Brian Howard would travel to Germany and Austria to study the rise of Hitler’s National Socialists. Using Unity Mitford to gain access to the Nazi hierarchy, he became an important voice informing British readers about the menace of fascism, and later also writing about the Spanish Civil War. Others failed to make a successful transition from the heyday of youth to a more engaged adulthood. Elisabeth Ponsonby would drink herself to death at the age of thirty-nine, and as for the beautiful and gold-locked Stephen Tennant, he simply took to his bed and hardly ever got up again until his death in 1987.
Flappin’ Outrage
WHILE FLAPPERS AND BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS dominated the gossip pages and the exasperated minds of many parents in 1920s New York and Chicago as well as in London—places in which a growing and apparently robust economy appeared to be firmly married to political stability—in other, less stable countries, the values of a rebellious and inherently apolitical younger generation would themselves come under fire. This was never made clearer than during Josephine Baker’s dance engagement in Vienna in February 1928.
Baker was the epitome of a bright and breezy new entertainment culture mixing jazz and the music hall with orientalist fantasy and sex, leaving almost nothing to the imagination of her delighted and largely male audiences. Janet Flanner, correspondent for the New Yorker (itself a novel and always up-to-the-minute product of sophisticated urbanity), breathlessly recounted to her readers an appearance in Paris, the city that had made Baker famous:
She made her entry entirely nude
except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the splits on the shoulder of a black giant. Mid-stage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood. . . . She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theatre. Whatever happened next was unimportant. The two specific elements had been established and were unforgettable—her magnificent dark body, a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful, and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of hedonism of all Europe—Paris.
The announcement of Baker’s imminent arrival caused a storm in the Austrian capital, where rival political factions were competing for the moral high ground, and while the socialist city fathers were uneasy about a spectacle that was widely decried as immoral, the Catholic conservatives and the fascists were practically foaming at the mouth at the idea of a black woman accompanied by an all-black jazz orchestra performing erotically suggestive dances onstage in Vienna.
The city of Mozart and Schubert, it seemed, would not survive this insult. The previous year the performance of Ernst Krenek’s opera Johnny Spielt Auf, featuring a jazz musician in blackface, had caused a political scandal and led to violent confrontations in the streets. Now, however, the stakes seemed even higher. The Neues Wiener Tagblatt, a major conservative newspaper, predicted nothing less than cultural apocalypse: “Literature and music, dance and socializing have become black arts, the negrofication [Vernegerung] is the last and lowest development of the European. The cacophony of the jazz band plays the danse macabre of European culture, and its arhythmical gyrations of Charleston and Black Bottom proceed at the pace of a movie.”8 Not only black culture but American culture in general was the death of the classical tradition, it seemed. Another journalist described Baker’s dancing as “the last stop on the ride into the immense, immeasurable depth of the abyss.”
After wrangling about venues and threatened demonstrations, Josephine Baker finally did appear onstage in Vienna, though only as part of a larger show that flanked some of her tamer moments with routines by Viennese actors in blackface, which even the audience found embarrassing.
The reaction to Josephine Baker rehearsed many of the arguments conservative critics habitually trotted out against the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties and its emphasis on youth culture, which had never before been so assertively and so unapologetically present in public life. In Berlin, where Baker had performed her notorious banana dance in 1925, journalists were less inclined to moralize and more ready to see her for the phenomenon she was, writing about her band: “They are a cross between primeval forests and skyscrapers; likewise their music, jazz, in its color and rhythms. Ultramodern and ultraprimitive.”9
As Vienna was shrinking into provincialism, Berlin had taken over as the German-speaking capital of cosmopolitan culture. For a precious few years it would become the place to be for the daring and the sophisticated, from the English writer Stephen Spender to Viennese theater director Max Reinhardt and many more. Berlin’s artistic life and youth culture were second to none as Berliners enjoyed their “golden twenties” (die goldenen zwanziger Jahre) of economic recovery, apparent political stabilization, and a hesitant but real growth in confidence in the future. In bars and beer gardens, young people were dancing the Charleston and German musicians copied jazz riffs from records imported from the United States.
The spirit of frivolity and celebration spread on the wings of song, carried by the words of the musical sensation of 1928, the Comedian Harmonists, a male vocal sextet made up of singers whose inspiration came from an American vocal ensemble, the Revelers. Initially the members of the young group, all relatively young and entirely unemployed, met and rehearsed without payment, calling themselves the Melody Makers. After a rocky start, they established themselves with cheeky lyrics and cheery arrangements, prepared with masterly verve. Almost all their texts were indecent, though this was not always apparent at first listening. In the classic “Veronica der Lenz Ist Da” (Veronica, Spring Is Here) the singer’s beloved is informed that it must be springtime because “the asparagus is growing,” and young people should seek happiness and freedom in the forest—a particularly lovely take on the sanctity of the German woods in Romantic lore. Indeed, spring finally seemed to have arrived, and the Weimar Republic appeared to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Not everyone took part in the fun and games. Politically, the tensions had eased but not vanished; socially, however, they were still painfully acute. For the deliciously dangerous culture of the Berlin demimonde, this mixture of carefree winners and scroungers, prostitutes and petty criminals, was what made life interesting. But there were also those who understood the potential danger of so many people living at the edge of what could be described as a decent life, and even further below.
The official face of the newly glamorous metropolis did not show the misery—“those in the dark remain unseen,” as the leftist poet Bertolt Brecht wrote. The line occurred in his most famous ballad, “Mack the Knife,” describing in ominous tones the murderous practices of a career criminal who is an expert at assassination. It was the first number of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, which had been set to music by Kurt Weill and premiered on August 31, 1928, at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.
The Threepenny Opera tells a sordid story of small people and their dreams crushed by an equally seedy and workaday capitalism, represented by Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, called the “king of beggars” and in reality a kind of pimp for beggars, and Mack the Knife, who makes a good living by theft, extortion, and murder. Masquerading as a love story between Peachum’s daughter Polly and the ruthless Mack, the opera describes a capitalist power struggle in which Peachum attempts to get rid of his competitor by betraying him to the police and seeing him hanged. His plan backfires as the newly crowned queen of England not only pardons Mack but also ennobles him. The most ruthless gangster wins.
Musically innovative and shot through with elements from popular music, jazz, and tango as well as classical forms, inspired in its cynically smooth message, The Threepenny Opera became a huge success on the stage, predictably loved by those on the left and hated by the Nazis with equal intensity. Ostensibly simple, folksy, and without artifice, it was the coolest and most sophisticated thing going, but while its melodies were mesmerizing, its eminently quotable lyrics implied that the party would soon be over.
PART TWO
PREWAR
·1929·
The Magnetic City
What is Magnitostroi? It is a grandiose factory for remaking people. Yesterday’s peasant . . . becomes a genuine proletarian . . . fighting for the quickest possible completion of the laying of socialism’s foundation. You are an unfortunate person, my dear reader, if you have not been to Magnitostroi. I feel sorry for you.
—R. Roman, Krokodil v Magnitogorske, 1931
AN ANGRY, ICY WIND WAS BLOWING OVER THE BARREN LANDSCAPE, tugging at the clothes of a group of riders moving among the foothills on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, far away from civilization. It was March, and winters were long. This place could only be reached on horseback or on foot. They surveyed the barren landscape in front of them. Within a matter of years, even months, they would build a factory here, and not just any factory, but the largest steelworks in Europe and perhaps in the world.
The place the small group of riders had reached was called Magnitnaia Gora, the magnetic mountain. Centuries earlier, settlers had noticed that their compasses were behaving strangely around these hills. The rocks were full of iron ore, and the leadership in Moscow was determined to exploit this resource, setting in motion a vast project on a par with the building of the pyramids. They would build a huge socialist city where there had been nothing.
“To transform our country from an agrarian one into an industrial one capable with its own powers of producing essential ma
chinery—that is the essence, the basis of our general line,” Stalin had declared in 1925, and now this ambition was to become a concrete policy.1 It was true: recovering from a terrible and bloody civil war, the huge Soviet empire needed to make a rapid transition from a country of peasant villages in which little had changed for centuries to a fully modern, industrial society. The war had damaged much of Russia’s already small industrial base—factories had been destroyed, workers displaced or murdered, engineers, administrators, and factory owners exiled.
Stalin’s industrial push was not just about feeding the population and defending a country weakened by years of fratricidal warfare; at the heart of the Party’s ambition to industrialize the Soviet Union in record time was the desire to demonstrate to the entire world the inherent superiority of socialism over capitalism. Only if they could achieve the impossible could the Bolsheviks prove that the future belonged to them.
To create this miracle, Stalin had announced the first Five-Year Plan, designed to transform industry and manufacturing in one huge leap of faith and to forge a truly Soviet society through a comprehensive program of collectivization. “We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization—to socialism, leaving behind the age-old Russian backwardness,” he had proclaimed. “We are becoming a country of metal, an automobilized country, a tractorized country. And when we have put the USSR on an automobile, and the muzhik [Russian peasant] on a tractor, let the esteemed capitalists, who boast of their ‘civilization,’ try to overtake us.”2
The City of the Five-Year Plan
MAGNITOGORSK, LITERALLY THE MAGNETIC CITY, was to be the microcosm of these vast ambitions. When the decision was made in 1927 to build a plant here that would double the Soviet Union’s production of pig iron and steel, not only was the remote site in the Urals lacking infrastructure, but there were also no engineers in the Soviet Union capable of designing and building such a huge plant. The Soviet leadership therefore engaged the services of Henry Freyn and Co. in Chicago, a firm specializing in the design and implementation of large industrial structures.