After the Bright Decade
From “A Gentleman’s Gentlemen”, 1946.
The boulevards of memory, like those of Paris, have been sandbagged and straightened. One observes the curious fact that the past ten years now resemble a misplaced decade; misplaced, that is, by those who insist on remembering it. The ‘twenties,’ as they were once called—as if numbers could dance—have been all but erased by the respectful violence of history. Those years were declared lost and then, inconveniently, found again between two calamities, like a glove of sequins discovered in the mud of Flanders and dismissed as indecently unsoiled.
Some months ago I attended a small gathering at Lady Pelham’s where a young historian presented what he termed An Outline of Modern European Behaviour. I made the error of asking what was meant by “modern.” He replied with statistical bravery: 1919 to 1939, exclusive of sentiment. I congratulated him on surviving the interval without affection. He blushed. It is a rare pleasure to embarrass the future.
The difficulty, of course, lies in remembering an age whose essence was forgetfulness. Between the death of restraint and the birth of despair, Paris invented a frivolity so sincere that one hardly knows whether to laugh or translate. I remember the handwriting of that city—loops on the rs, feathers on the fs, champagne in the punctuation. The streets themselves seemed to rhyme. No, not rhyme—they misbehaved in unison.
In those years, beauty was a sort of currency that could be spent only in the dark. Painters traded in radiance, and the poets in architectural ambiguity. There was a composer—his name escapes me with Continental discretion—who wrote in harmonies that gradually lost their centre, like a civic building collapsing in perfect rhythm. People said his concerts smelt faintly of dusted velvet and expensive regret.
Now, the Parisians insist all that was an illusion. They have reupholstered their conscience in grey wool; they walk, talk, even sin in a different register. One hears that the Hôtel Crillon serves tea rather than instruction. The dancing academies that once trained bodies to forget have become language schools where verbs are properly conjugated. So progress reasserts itself: chastity in translation.
I keep a set of glass negatives from that time, which I have never had developed. They belong to a friend—an actress of distracted virtue—who, in 1927, claimed she could only be properly photographed by candlelight. Each plate bears a different fragment: a shoulder, a staircase, a decanter left half-emptied. To view them now would be indecently factual. I prefer their potential. It is the same with recollection; the undeveloped image remains the more accurate.
Professor L—— told me at luncheon that nostalgia is “the most sincere form of amnesia.” He has been widely published on subjects he cannot bring himself to name. I reminded him that the very term history once meant a form of inquiry compatible with error. We agreed to remain inquisitive, which is to say unreliable.
But Paris—yes, the city and its absence. The post-war air there carries a smell of ministerial linen and disinfected charm. The cafés are at attention; even the pigeons appear demobilised. In conversation, one hears whispers of a new austerity of emotion, a resistance to style itself. Yet now and then, beneath the marble calm, the ghost of a Charleston step breaks through, faint as a remembered indiscretion. It is a rhythm that cannot be wholly unlearned, much as taste resists obedience.
If one believes the architectural journals, half the salons of Montparnasse were torn down to make way for “rational housing.” A grateful phrase, but one suspects the new residents sleep uneasily, haunted by the laughter that once rehearsed itself upon those floors. As for the great houses, some were turned into embassies, others into hospitals for the delicate spirit. The Ministry of Reconstruction has reportedly walled over a fresco deemed too hopeful. Imagine: the removal of optimism by plaster!
I recall a night in 1928, when a young poet—Raoul Blavier, mercifully forgotten—declared that truth was “a luxury item, export only.” He threw his manuscript into the Seine from the Pont Neuf and went to supper in Montmartre, where he dined on someone else’s royalties. His remark has since been attributed to three philosophers and an actress. Posterity forgives only plagiarism, never appetite.
Such were our speculations then: the liberties of intellect mistaken for durable revolution. In hindsight, they look like smoke seen through lace. Yet even that image flatters us. Many of my English colleagues now write as though liberty itself were an architectural error corrected by war. I cannot quite subscribe. The hum of the previous century is still audible if one leans against the right wall.
It is fashionable to say the ‘twenties never happened. The new men of letters prefer the realism of absence. Yet what a strange realism it is, that thrives on deletion. Did they not see the temples of appetite standing erect at the Rue du Bac? Did no one hear the argument between the violin and the gramophone—two civilisations speaking through one another? What heroism it took to be frivolous! What endurance went into a single sigh!
At the British Institute’s winter lecture, a lady from the Ministry of Information declared that “modernity had been purified of ornament.” I resisted the impulse to applaud ironically; one must husband one’s fatigue for private use. Her phrase—pure modernity—makes me think of snow: transparent in theory, treacherous in practice, always awaiting a footprint to make it visible.
When I walk through London now, I imagine the city folded upon itself like silk in a bureau drawer. The rationed gestures of manner conceal the opulence of intent. Someone once told me that Paris has forgotten how to blush; I suggest London has merely powdered over the evidence. Our hauteur endures as habit.
I doubt, truly, that the 1920s can be recovered even as illusion. Their freedom was not constitutional but metabolic: a shared fever mistaken for philosophy. Perhaps it is better thus. To commemorate those awakenings would be indecent to our present sobriety. Still, there was something admirably wasteful in the way they believed sensation itself could rescue the world from thought.
We were extravagant—I include myself—not from decadence, but from disbelief in thrift. That is no longer possible, for thrift has become our only surviving virtue. I see it in the new architecture: rectilinear, ascetic, almost grateful for daylight. Even the murals of civic instruction—those School Board allegories of Virtue at Work—seem drawn under rations of colour.
Do I miss the delirium? Intellectually, no; morally, perhaps; socially, quite. For one cannot now imagine conversation not devoted to reconstruction. In those earlier rooms, we constructed only rumours, but they were charmingly built.
Last month, over dinner at White’s, a diplomat fresh from Paris remarked that “History has at last become circular.” He meant it disparagingly, but I find the shape consoling. There is always the possibility of returning to the beginning without being noticed. In that sense, perhaps the Paris of our youth was not lost—only waiting for another misapprehension to give it form.
One cannot, I suppose, plan a future on the memory of liberation. The word itself has been requisitioned. Yet somewhere between the resumed proprieties, one still hears the faint syncopation of that decade: a rhythm, polite but resistant, echoing from marble, from mirrors, from the almost excessive grace of what refused to last.
You are here: States of Grace > Philosophy