Lets take one example of a party boy who did just that, who was at his peak around a hundred years ago and then, once the good times had started to fade, decided to leave the stage. You could see it as the application of pure modernist principles, if you wished to do so.
Stephen James Napier Tennant (1906 – 87) was described as “the brightest” of the group that became known as the “bright young things” in 1920s Britain. Other members of this group included Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Rex Whistler, the Mitford sisters, Noel Coward, Clive Bell, and Anthony Powell, amongst a cast of many more. They were what might be described as original party animals, throwing fancy dress parties and other bashes, carousing across night time London on wild treasure hunts, acting outrageously, indulging in substances that might be more linked in public perception with the swinging sixties than the decade in which they were most active, the one following world war one. With their hedonist excesses, along with the desire to dress up with abandon, they wouldn’t have been out of place in swinging London, or even at the Blitz or Studio 54 in the eighties.
The group was never far from literature. Nancy Mitford’s Love In A Cold Climate, Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time and Evelyn Waugh’s satirical Vile Bodies (later made into the film “Bright Young Things” by Stephen Fry in 2003) portrayed the scene. Stephen Tennant was regarded as the model for Cedric Hampton in Love In A Cold Climate, Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and was reputedly an influence for Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. His later life is depicted as a landlord by V S Naipaul in The Enigma Of Arrival (he was Naipaul’s real life landlord). Tennant also had a celebrated relationship with war poet, Siegfried Sassoon and reputedly spent much of his life trying to start and finish a novel – Lascar: A Story You Must Forget.
They became the celebrities of the day, appearing regularly in magazines like The Tatler. They were, of course, ridiculously privileged. Tennant was the son of a Scottish peer and there were plenty of other connections to aristocracy; their lifestyle was not one open to the majority. As the roaring twenties slipped discourteously into the recession-blighted thirties, their antics were increasingly out of step with the mood of the times. In any case, time inevitably moves on. The party days couldn’t last forever.
So what happened next? The rest of the group went on to be Royal photographers, best-selling authors, art-critics of note. What did Stephen Tennant do? He returned to his ancestral manor at Wilsford cum Lake in Wiltshire and went to bed. It is rumoured that he spent the last seventeen years of his life there. Who knows if this is true or not. But, in a sense that doesn’t matter. It cements his reputation as a recluse and social isolator of note.
Stephen Tennant was an IT boy before the phrase was invented. He was an incorrigible louche, party boy, idler. He got himself talked about, to the extent that three, perhaps four, literary characters were based on him. Not bad for someone who spent the last seventeen years of his life in bed.