Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols, David Deutsch (Introduction)

Brian Elme ekes out a livelihood making up stories about celebrities for a tabloid gossip column. When an angry Lady Julia Cressey spots one of Brian's stories about her, it looks like the end of his journalism career - until she sees how young and handsome he is. Overnight, Brian finds himself the star of society, charming everyone with his beauty and ingenuousness and growing accustomed to late night parties, decadent dinners, and eternal cocktails. As Brian finds himself led down the path of depravity by his new friends, will he be able to maintain his innocence?

Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) was one of the 'Bright Young People', a group of socialites well-known in 1920s London for their drinking, drug use, and elaborate parties, and in this novel he satirized the set to which he belonged. Inspired in part by Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and an influence on Evelyn Waugh's novels, Crazy Pavements (1927) was a bestseller in its day and has lost none of its ferocious humour. This edition, the first in more than seventy years, includes a new introduction by David Deutsch discussing the novel's themes, including its gay subtexts.

'An amazing book.' - Sunday Times

'With this book he establishes his claim to rank as a vastly entertaining observer of human life. He has a very attractive style, a frequently delicious humour, and a dramatic sense of situation.' - Arthur Waugh, The Daily Telegraph

'Brilliantly original.' - The Guardian

'It is altogether a brilliant affair.' - Bystander

Genres: Historical, Fiction, Queer, Adult, Gay, British Literature

313 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

John Beverley Nichols (born September 9, 1898 in Bower Ashton, Bristol, died September 15, 1983 in Kingston, London), was an English writer, playwright, actor, novelist and composer. He went to school at Marlborough College, and went to Balliol College, Oxford University, and was President of the Oxford Union and editor of Isis.

Between his first novel, Prelude, published in 1920, and Twilight in 1982, he wrote more than 60 books and plays on topics such as travel, politics, religion, cats, novels, mysteries, and children's stories, authoring six novels, five detective mysteries, four children's stories, six plays, and no fewer than six autobiographies.

Nichols is perhaps best remembered as a writer for Woman's Own and for his gardening books, the first of which Down the Garden Path, was illustrated — as were many of his books — by Rex Whistler. This bestseller — which has had 32 editions and has been in print almost continuously since 1932 — was the first of his trilogy about Allways, his Tudor thatched cottage in Glatton, Cambridgeshire. A later trilogy written between 1951 and 1956 documents his travails renovating Merry Hall (Meadowstream), a Georgian manor house in Agates Lane, Ashtead, Surrey, where Nichols lived from 1946 to 1956. These books often feature his gifted but laconic gardener "Oldfield". Nichols's final trilogy is referred to as "The Sudbrook Trilogy" (1963–1969) and concerns his late 18th-century attached cottage at Ham, (near Richmond), Surrey.

Nichols was a prolific author who wrote on a wide range of topics. He ghostwrote Dame Nellie Melba’s "autobiography" Memories and Melodies (1925), and in 1966 he wrote A Case of Human Bondage about the marriage and divorce of William Somerset Maugham and Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, which was highly critical of Maugham. Father Figure, which appeared in 1972 and in which he described how he had tried to murder his alcoholic and abusive father, caused a great uproar and several people asked for his prosecution. His autobiographies usually feature Arthur R. Gaskin who was Nichols’ manservant from 1924 until Gaskin's death from cirrhosis in 1966. Nichols made one appearance on film - in 1931 he appeared in Glamour, directed by Seymour Hicks and Harry Hughes, playing the part of the Hon. Richard Wells.

Nichols' long-term partner was Cyril Butcher. He died in 1983 from complications after a fall.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

What an extraordinary book. A novel about the Bright Young Things, written in 1927 *by* a Bright Young Thing--three years before Vile Bodies, as well. Nichols was a journalist who worked his way into the BYTs and this is the result.

It's fascinating. Brian is a struggling journo who writes a gossip column, and gets picked up by a BYT set for his good looks and boyish charm. The set are genuinely horrific, monsters of self indulgence and petty spite, living lives of purposeless self indulgence. Lord William is a cokehead. The Hon Maurice is a self-loathing gay man. Anne is a shameless sexual predator of young men (and gets to defend her position and sexual appetite!), Julia is a mass of empty self-regard horribly aware of the void at her own heart. All of this is on page. And meanwhile Brian's plot arc is a really clearly drawn relationship (which is all but specified to be physical as well as emotional) with his roommate Walter. It's a healthy, loving, intimate, domestic relationship with a happy ending for queer men in 1927 omg. And not even one of those EM Forster "go to the country and shag a gamekeeper because Pastoral Bliss" 1930s health obsession things--Walter's moral decency is pretty much shown by the fact he appreciates going to the pub and knows how to drink. I love Walter.

It's a very funny book, full of epigrams. It's very dark at points (Lord William's masks of his 'friends' are awful) and the portrayal of women is a bit...mmm...but this is very much worth reading for anyone interested in queer writing or the 1920s, or the BYTs. Fascinating stuff.

[sch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike the other Bright Young People novels I've read, this one is frankly sentimental and simple. The conclusion is painfully, impossibly melodramatic. Huxley, Waugh, Hemingway, Van Vechten, even Arlen: these are content to allude and suggest; Nichols must connect all the dots. ("He realized with a shiver of disgust what was happening. They really were becoming children." Emphasis in original.)

Reviewing one of these books recently, I claimed they are profoundly, counter-intuitively conservative and moral. Nichols is moralistic. He owes a great debt to Dickens - to Chesterton's Dickens; that is, in other words, to Chesterton. Tennyson, of whom Van Vechten is ashamed, is the favorite author of Nichols's hero. Some of these characters actually blaspheme with "the Lord" rather than "God." The final chapters, and one or two in the middle, are clear celebrations of "the common man" and the shabbier parts of London.

But it doesn't hold up; in addition to condemning his vicious characters, the narrator is fascinated by them, and he means for us to be fascinated, too. Consider the scene in Chapter 8 at the perfume cabinet, and the "dress and speak like a child" party in Chapters 12-13. Both bring us right up to the edge of the abyss. Likewise we're meant to sympathize with but ultimately condemn Maurice Cheyne, the closeted homosexual; but what then are we to make of Brian and Walter? The quote from In Memoriam at the end doesn't quite tidy up their relationship, which involves sitting on each other's lap, and resting a hand on each other's knee.

These tensions and contrasts might have made for a stimulating dialectic, but they don't quite work like that. Instead the book feels phony: you can't just mock sentimentality half of the time, and then unironically indulge in it for the rest. Sometimes it's lazy. Early on, the narrator charmingly interrupts himself: "Enough of these analyses of character. They bore me as much as they bore you." Ten pages later he writes that "we cannot dismiss any living, breathing woman with [the] facility" of the Society reporters and portraitists who are satisfied with the "modern girl" label. No, we must dive into her psychology, explore her "minor phobias" and props against ennui. This is a small example, and probably harmless in itself, but it turns out to be symptomatic of Nichols's style. By the end, the two main characters (Brian and Lady Julia) are psychologically and dramatically impossible; note how their story wraps up with no reference to the defections of their friends, Lord William Motley and Maurice. Another example: Why does Lord William make two masks of Brian's face? I suspect Nichols forgot about the first one.

The most arresting image is Lord William's room of masks, and especially the secret room in the corner, which recalls Wilde's Dorian Gray. Chapter 5 (Lord William and Maurice eating oysters) is a little masterpiece. I enjoyed the pitiful Mrs Gossett in Chapters 1 and 2, but the treatment she receives in Chapter 11 made me squirm.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulous book in many ways and scary in others. Also now very hard to get, even the Florin edition has vanished. Since Beverly was a cub reporter in the 20s and his portrayals of so many people feature in his books are so very 'visible', I can't help but think that this novel may be semi-autobiographical as his characters have the same real quality. I go in for a lot of Stephen King as well, but Nichols' description of the cocaine addicted Lord was really horrifying. The women are portrayed as brittle, glamorous, cynical and world weary, in search of the next thrill and very typical of the Bright Young Things era - I do believe these are people he may have known. The 'bet' between two of the women as to who will get their young victim into bed first is practically sickening in its casual disregard for a fellow human's feelings. As an aside: In 1923, when Beverly was just making his first forays as a reporter, his editor sent him to get an interview with the parents of Edith Thompson on the day she and her lover, Frederick Bywaters, were sentenced to hang for the murder of Thompson's husband. He didn't want to do it and put it off, but he eventually went to the address. The elderly couple had been besieged all day by reporters and had refused all offers to give a statement. By the time Nichols got there, the other newshounds had departed. He knocked on the door anyway and - for whatever reason, he certainly didn't know - the parents agreed to speak to him. He took the details back to his editor, but couldn't bring himself to write the story of the heartbreak these old people were going through. Another reporter wrote the story from his notes and his name didn't appear on the article.

[Victoria Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable. Young handsome innocent and charming social pages journalist is taken up by Lady Julia. A sharp very funny insight into society of the 1920s.

[ALEARDO ZANGHELLINI · Rating 1 out of 5]

A few pages to the end I was picturing myself beginning my review of this book with the word ‘putrid.’ Then in the last 2 1/2 pages the book minorly redeemed itself.

What is so wrong with it, you may ask? It’s unbearably ‘Victorian’ — in the worst scare-quotes sense of the word. (I love actual classics from the Victorian age.) Stylistically it’s tiresomely ‘Victorian’: the narrator is always there, didactically explaining every detail to you. If that were the book’s worst offence, I could turn a blind eye. But no, Crazy Pavements is also truly ‘Victorian’ in sensibility.

Brian is a handsome, healthy, unspoilt young man of limited means who, for a while, excites the interest of a group of jaded upper class men and women, who later dump him when they tire of him. These horrid monsters are all nymphomaniac women, lesbians, or queer men - all seeking thrills to enliven their dull, empty, sterile exisistences. The common folk, on the other hand, represent the life principle, that wellspring of power and vitality and authenticity... The whole thing is so stark, roughly hewn, and overdone that it’s frankly ludicrous.

Lady Jane, the lesbian character, is a monster that should be shut up in an institution; Maurice, the constitutional homosexual, is a freak of nature, a hysterical weakling with not one redeeming feature. And don’t even get me started on the misogyny.

You’d expect someone like Henry Labouchere to have written this in the late 19th century: Homosexuality as the distinctive vice of an effete aristocracy, and all that. But no. It was actually a gay man who wrote it, in the roaring 20s. I suppose pandering to prejudice enabled the writer to sell books and lead the comfortable life that Bryan, at the end of *this* book, discovers he can so easily dispense with. Hypocrisy, anyone?

You know, Mr Nichols, in a way I get you: I too don’t care for the trappings of what is supposed to be the gay lifestyle. Hell, like you, I’m even obsessed with gardening. But I like to think that, unlike you, I manage to avoid being a sanctimonious p***k.

[SPOILER ALERT]

So, the one redeeming feature is that in the end Brian goes back to his friend Walter, and there are hints (no more than that) that the friendship between the two has known a physical consummation. What is one supposed to make of this?

For starters, only the initiated would manage to be aware of the friendship’s (no doubt deliberate) homoeroticism. The heterosexual mainstream was apparently intended to walk away from having read the book with all their prejudices intact — as all the obviously (as opposed to subtly) homosexual characters in the story are portrayed in uncompromisingly negative terms.

As for the homoerotically-inclined readers, who would be able to pick on the hints of Brian and Walter’s sexually inflected bromance, what we are supposed to learn, I suspect, is this: that it’s possible to be *normal* and believe ourselves attracted to women, and still have sex with each other. You know, as long as we do it while we’re drunk, after a night at the pub, when, the morning after, it can be brushed off as horse-playing. Here’s the lesson Crazy Pavements has for you, gay man: be in denial and be happy, meanwhile despising those pathetic creatures who dare make a show of themselves.

Sorry, Mr Nichols, you don’t get away with it. You lived through the roaring 20s and you should have known better.

[Squeak2017 · Rating 2 out of 5]

A young man, educated but poor, finds himself cynically taken up to be used as a tool for cruel social amusement by the gay set of the 1920s. Cocktails and catty snobbery. He loses his soul, his decent friends and almost his self respect.

When he finally sees them for the callous roues they are, he backs down, wounded, and in the final chapter is miraculously and unconvincingly returned to the uncomplicated boyish young man he was before. Nichols had set up the potential for a fine revenge, as the young man was a cheap gossip column writer and could have easily crushed them in print. But instead Nichols opts for a lame, inconsequential ending where no-one learned anything or changed – really rather missing the point of a Bildungsroman.

The heterosexual relationships were not convincing.

[Anthony Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brian Elme is twenty years old trying to make his way in the world. He writes a gossip column for ‘The Lady’s Mail’ for £6.00 a week – this is the 1920s – which he receives from his editress, Mrs Gosset. He knows no one in Society and uses Burke’s Peerage and The Times for information which he then embellishes so that his column is more or less fiction without being libellous.

However, soon after the novel opens, Mrs Gosset calls him in to tell him that Lady Julia Cressey demands an apology, for she is not, as ‘The Lady’s Mail’ has asserted, engaged to Lord William Motley. Brian has to go and apologise in person at her Berkeley Square address where she is struck by him and he by her. Consequently, she takes him up as another youthful companion with whom to pass her time and though, as the novel develops, Brian falls deeply in love with her, she does not fall in love with him, and is neither temperamentally suited nor constituted by breeding to do so with anyone, for life to her is a serious of idle moments which she and others of her moneyed kind spend entertaining each other with largely frivolous pursuits which, at their simplest, consist of playgoing, dancing, dining, house-partying, gossiping and conducting affairs.

Brian and Julia’s ‘relationship’ if it can be called that is the centrepiece of the narrative, but Nichols’ real intention is to examine the pointlessness of the lives of the members of privileged Mayfair Society who don’t necessarily have more money than sense, but who certainly don’t take any notice of what good sense they may have. At its worst, sense slides into cynicism and despair as it has with Lord William who has in his flat a room given over to the making of hideous masks representing the people he knows. He is, moreover, a cocaine addict.

And then there is Lady Anne Hardcastle who, as an older woman, makes a practice of collecting and seducing – or obligating - young men by her financial generosity. After Brian says he cannot accept an invitation to a house party because he is already engaged, Lady Anne sighs to herself and says ‘That meant a visit to the tailor’s’. She duly leads Brian thither, where Brian, realising what is going on, refuses to accept a couple of bespoke suits from her.

Of course, Brian has to try to keep up with Lady Julia’s crowd, and his meagre wage is utterly inadequate for the purpose: he acquires something of the savoir faire required, but is never at home with the wealthy and although treated decently enough by them as an amusing adjunct to their idleness – almost a kind of Fool – is never going to be one of them. This is bitterly clear when Lady Julia eventually tells him ‘the sooner you disappear the better’. She prefaces it with acidic cruelty:
“What are you?...A pretty boy. Not quite so pretty as he was, but still pretty enough. And rather spoilt, too, isn’t he? Thinks because he’s been asked to dine a few times, and has bought a new suit or two that he’s everything that’s most chic. Thinks he’s irresistible… Well, let me tell you that you’re merely rather a vulgar second-rate reporter. That and nothing more. Why the devil any of us took the faintest notice of you I don’t know. You’re merely one of hundreds of young men who occasionally amuse us. Where they come from, where they go to, I don’t care. Nobody cares…Well, you’ve had a long run for your money.”

To balance the disgraceful behaviour of the rich, Nichols provides the novel with a figure of good sense in Walter Moore, an ex-naval officer who admires Brian for his courage, ‘the courage which kept his dreams alive in the most sordid occupation known to man’. He and Brian eventually fall out when Brian refuses to acknowledge Walter’s criticism of his fatuous absorption in Society, though when Brian comes to his senses, they are reconciled. It’s neatly satisfying: a prodigal returned and welcomed by a man whose friendship is constant in the shifting world of the not-so-very Beau Monde.

Nichols writes a very fine satirical novel, perhaps a little drawn out, but consistent in its moral viewpoint. He has a really good ear for dialogue and is understandingly sympathetic to a young man dazzled by the attention of the rich and titled. A pleasure to read.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Satire of London's Bright Young Things of the 1920s. Not as biting as Waugh or Huxley, but viciously misogynistic. Our hero drifts from his poor but idyllic life with his male roommate (strong erotic vibes here) to a hellish infatuation with a society beauty of the fast set (parties, booze, drugs). All the women in the book except the beauty are grossly caricatured in the most offensive terms:

Anne Hardcastle was one hundred percent WOMAN ... her plump figure and her sewn-up face and her great antelope eyes.

Never before had he realized how appalling a woman can be. Appalling, because desire, to a woman of this type, was a drug. She allowed it to saturate her. She welcomed its advances, she moved lazily and luxuriantly in the swell of its tide. No man had ever been so possessed. A man's passion might cut like a sword, or burn in a sudden destructive flame, but it could never attain to the proportions of a disease.

the babble of voices from the ladies of Mayfair—tired voices, harsh voices, greedy voices

[The women] were discussing the best way of extracting money from men, with the minimum of pain and the maximum of profit.

Even the women hate other women:

After Mrs. Pleat's unfortunate matrimonial experience, all women were hateful. There was no good in any of them. They were her natural enemies.

In the end, our hero recognizes the ghastly error of his ways and falls back into the arms of his male roommate.

Nichols's misogyny is not limited to the fast set he satirizes—the last of the quotes above refers to the hero's working-class landlady. And I noticed the same hatred of women in one of his memoirs about gardening.

It's all too bad, because Nichols is otherwise pretty pleasant company.

[Digby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious.

[Louise Muddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witty satire. Obviously influenced by Wilde and Dorian Grey. Written before Waugh wrote Vile Bodies I think? Would make a brilliant tv series and film. Highly recommended.

[Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

A really silly book. I managed to read to page 30 and decided I was wasting my time reading such nonsense so I discarded it. I would not recommend it to anyone.

[Marie Bomyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read: very much of its age. This book was first printed in the 1920s and set at that time too.
It’s a British Gatsby, but with more of a bite at rich society of the time.

[E.d. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very dated. It should have been more fun. It was published almost 100 years ago. I'm so proud no one else on good reads has posted it.