Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies …

It's been said about the Bloomsbury set that although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts. Would the same have been said about Vile Bodies? Would their works and outlook have deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and art, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, class, and sexuality?

Why is Evelyn sitting down while everyone else is standing in the photo below? Perhaps because the Plunket Greene was a tall family. David (holding the dog) was six-foot-nine, so why would Evelyn, at five-foot-six, want to be measured against him? So Evelyn sat down on the ground. Smooth move, Titch. On Saturday, Evelyn went to Pool Place from Folkestone where he’d been with Bryan. Nancy and Diana arrived later. ‘Diana and I quarrelled at luncheon. We bathed. Diana and I quarrelled at dinner and after dinner. Next day I decided to leave. Quarrelled with Diana again and left.' Hmmm. With this in mind, perhaps the Mitford/Guinness note of the Thursday can be decoded as follows: In Loved Ones , Diana states that she had allowed herself to be talked into having this done, 'a disagreeable proceeding and the result dead and mechanical' . Though it came in handy a few years later when she was in a car crash and a surgeon was able to reconstruct her nose with the help of the cast. Vile Bodies (1930) was Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, published as a follow-up to the success of his first – Decline and Fall (1928). It uses the same formula of presenting a farcical and deeply satirical portrait of the 1920s and the Wild Young Things who became the upper-class celebrities of the decade. It also features other aspects of modern society which help to fuel the culture of fashionable excess – tabloid journalism, artificially cultivated publicity, and the cinema.

I suspect that the Evelyns would have been at the wedding, but I'm not sure, partly because Waugh destroyed his diary for the period. Diana didn't seem sure either. Because in her 1985 book, Loved Ones , she describes her 'year-long' friendship with Evelyn as beginning in July 1929. She puts it this way:

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Y. Поредната неизвестна в безкрайните уравнения на историята. Ние сме същата онази Златна младеж, обаче на 21-ви век – залутани, объркани, неспокойни, постоянно търсещи. Всички възможности на света няма да са ни достатъчни. Способни сме да пропилеем целия потенциал, който успеем да намерим в себе си. Гордо развяваме привилегията, запазена сякаш единствено за младите – винаги всичко да ни е ясно и да умеем нещата по-добре от останалите. Бабите и дядовците ни са живели безсмислено, постъпките на родителите ни са глупави. Ние същия живот щяхме да го изживеем къде по-добре. Носим… Но за Златната младеж в романа ми беше думата, разсеях се. It was in January 1929, that the eighteen-year-old became Diana Guinness when she married Bryan, glass-jawed heir to the brewing fortune.

Nancy: "Praying. Don't be absurd. Evelyn simply doesn't pray. And even if he did no-one would mention it." The character has had to be 'brought on' by Waugh, so perhaps that was the reasoning behind the name. Though Richard Jacobs, in the notes to the Penguin I have in front of me, suggests that it's a 'not very sly hint at sexual excitability'. In any case, Waugh was obviously not happy with the name, as he immediately deleted the line, and had another go at introducing Adam's rival. Here is a close-up of the relevant paragraph. I'll transcribe and/or paraphrase below: In her 1985 book, Loved Ones , Diana suggests that the thing Evelyn loved most about Paris was the Musée Grevin, which was a short walk north from the flat, past the Louvre and other classic beauties. In those days the Musée Grevin was like Madame Tussauds, only more horrible. According to Diana, Evelyn particularly liked the tableau of Christians being thrown to the lions.

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Gossip columns provide an income source for writers, including for Adam. They also offer the general public a glimpse into upper class debauchery and they keep socialites relevant and interesting. The problem, however, is that the only way to keep readers hooked is to constantly ratchet up the level of scandal and outrage, while at the same time not alienating oneself from the people featured in these articles. Adam and others eventually take to simply manufacturing tabloid stories and even making up people. Today we read a lot about ‘fake news,’ but that’s exactly what we see in Vile Bodies as well. The tabloid journal quoted frequently in the novel is aptly entitled The Daily Excess and the gossip column’s writer is known by the pseudonym Mr. Chatterbox. It’s a revolving door position at the paper — the man behind the pseudonym changes several times in the novel as writers fail, in succession, to provide the right amount of moral outrage to readers, while keeping access to the people and parties that provide all the salacious content.

The Hon. Agatha Runcible joined Mrs. Ape among the orchids and led the singing, tears coursing down her face…Barely had Lady Everyman finished before the Countess of Throbbing rose to confess her sins, and in a voice broken with emotion disclosed the hitherto unverified details of the parentage of the Present Earl…The Marquess of Vanburgh, shaken by sobs of contrition…Mrs. Panrast, singing feverishly…Lady Anchorage with downcast eyes…The Archbishop of Canterbury, who up to now had remained unmoved by the general emotion, then testified that at Eton in the eighties he and Sir James Brown… The original title Bright Young Things, which Waugh changed because he thought the phrase had become too clichéd, was used in Stephen Fry's 2003 film adaptation. The eventual title appears in a comment made by the novel's narrator in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: "All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...". [1] [2]The difference is that somewhere along the road, we stopped satirizing these people and took to glorifying them instead. Case in point: the person who wrote the 2000s version of this story - pretty young things with too much money, too few brains and too strong a sex drive - had it serialized in print and brought to life on TV, now known and idolized by millions as Gossip Girl.