The rise and fall of ‘the original Bright Young Thing’: Beverley Nichols, Crazy Pavements (1927) and popular authorship

This essay re-examines the work and reputation of ‘the original Bright Young Thing’, Beverley Nichols (1898-1983). Nichols was a key cultural figure and best-selling novelist in the 1920s, yet now exists only as an occasional footnote in academic criticism. Nichols’ novel Crazy Pavements (1927) influenced Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies, but was not part of the lauded avant-garde in the 1920s, and is instead a case-study in the modes of writing and publishing that condemned a work to the derogatory category ‘middlebrow’. Nichols’ accessible narrative style drew particularly on contemporary popular journalism, which was regarded by influential critics such as Q. D. Leavis as contributing to a breakdown in standards of style. The changing critical landscape of the twentieth century that valued modernist experimentation above other, more accessible forms of writing also increasingly denigrated the professional writer. This essay argues that Nichols effectively destroyed his own critical reputation through becoming someone who could and would write almost anything for money.