I once met….Sir Felix Dennis

The sad recent death of amateur poet, multimillionaire media mogul, and manic tree planter reminds me of the day I interviewed him back in 2008. Preparation is everything and knowing that this most eligible bachelor was rather fond of attractive young ladies, my magazine sent me to meet him with a pretty Dutch photographer in her twenties whose dress of choice was a very clinging all-leather cat suit. I can’t for the world think why she chose this particular outfit, but there you are.

In the Forest of Dennis
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French bicycle poster – Durex ‘en vente ici’

Found! Actually the gift of an American colleague and dealer in ephemera- this hanging wall card for cycle parts from the French company Durex. Probably from the early 1950s, the company appears to be now defunct.... This poster may amuse some Brits as Durex is the pre-eminent maker of condoms in Britain. Durex is practically synonymous with condoms there in the way Hoover is with vacuum cleaners.

In the USA it is Trojans which, although not unknown in Britain, is also the name of several different companies on the sceptered isle including an electronics company, an arms dealer ( Trojan Group) and a timber crating company.

The arms dealer Trojan sells assault rifles  with this quote from Voltaire: 'God is not on the side of the big battalions but  on the side of those who shoot best.' Exactement.

Mona’s 440 Club – dancing at the Lesbian Bar

Found, folded into an American thriller from the Donald Rudd collection of detective fiction, this napkin - a memento of Mona's 440 Club generally credited as being the first lesbian bar in the United States -'Where Girls Will be Boys.'

James R. Smith's San Francisco's Lost Landmarks (2004) says the following about Mona's:

Mona's 440 Club was another [club] that took advantage of the city's tolerance and tourism. Opening in a Columbus Street basement in North Beach in 1936, Mona Sargeant's tavern quickly hit the travelsheets as a place "where girls will be boys." The first openly lesbian club, Mona's female waiters and performers wore tuxedos and patrons dressed their roles. Within a couple of years, Mona's moved to 440 Broadway and took the address as part of the club's new name, Mona's 440 Club. Great entertainment, first local and later national talent, made a night at Mona's an event.

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Stephen Tennant – a note on a scrap of paper

Found - a scrap of paper from a book on America maritime history - this note by the eccentric /decadent writer and artist Stephen Tennant (1906 -1987.) He often used pages of books for notes, poems, rants and observations. He made many hundreds of pages of notes for his projected novel Lascar; A Story of the Maritime Boulevard but it remained unfinished at his death. He produced a few slim volumes and some superb drawings. The writer mentioned is anonymous but being rich and eccentric and talented ST knew many writers including Willa Cather, Siegfried Sassoon (a former lover) V.S. Naipaul (a neighbour) and W.H. Auden (who praised one of his poems.) The scrap reads thus:-

There is no element or trait in human nature that a writer can ignore - But to give prominence to the Noble profound, to the calm, the wise, the Beautiful- the exquisite, the sacred is surely his proudest need? June 1976 S T

But he is no prude or evader of odious things.

ST with David Hockney
at Wilsford Manor
Design for a cover
for 'Lascar'

'Ah, Marseille, - c'set le Vrai.'
A writer said this a propos my novel Lascar.

Stephen Tennant's possessions were dispersed in a big Sotheby's sale at his home Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire in 1987.

This was bought there in a van full of books. Some of the books appeared to be scented, some had letters loosely inserted including one from Willa Cather. The catalogue itself is sought after, at Ebay a copy recently made £100 although it is not uncommon...

Rachel Swete Macnamara

An interesting romantic thriller Cock Angel by Rachel Swete Macnamara published by Hurst and Blackett (London circa 1955) We don't normally do smut at jot101, not out of piety but because there is more than enough elsewhere. However this cover was irresistible and it is hard to believe that the dubiousness of the title was not spotted at the time. The book first appeared in 1928 and was re-issued in the 1950s with this mildly suggestive jacket. Rachel Swete Macnamara seems to have gone in for titles with a slightly  religious reference - her other works include Pagans Limited, Torn Veils, Stolen Fruit, Burnt Dishes, Jealous Gods, Seed of Fire and The Trance...

The plot, summed up on the flyleaf, goes thus:

Charles Revel falls deeply in love with the wife of a celebrated film star, who shortly afterwards meets his death by drowning. After six months Charles meets her in London and, following a swift wooing, marries and takes her to the family house, where she soon feels herself over-powered by inquisitive relations and the memories of her first impetuous, though faithless, lover. How she eventually breaks under the strain, and the ultimate result, form the ending to a very engrossing novel.

Reverend E. E. Bradford / Love in Earnest (Norfolk)

A rare photograph of the Reverend Doctor E. E. Bradford, devotee of 'Lads Love', posed outside his very humble Fenland church at Nordelph near Downham Market, Norfolk. Alas, admirers of such gay poetic classics as Passing the Love of Women and The Romance of Youth, failed to save the structure, built in 1865, which Pevsner dismissed in less than two lines as 'E.E. with a fleche between nave and chancel.'

In 2010 it was demolished, seemingly with hardly a protest, which is a great shame. Thankfully, the Rectory survives.

Bradford was a genuine eccentric of English letters, who published his innocuous verse, not imagining, or perhaps not caring, if it provoked loud laughter from the likes of Oxford sophisticates like Betjeman and Auden , to name but two. Actually, in 1935 Betjeman visited the poet, then aged 75. He found a lonely, 'saintly' man, isolated for want of a car, a modernist who believed in sexual freedom and birth control, but who was also fond of ritual. Betjeman’s recorded impressions of the man showed sympathy for his predicament:-

Vicarage hall, dark, grim…Terribly poor. Bradford hurried out of room in dressing gown.’ Quite safe in here, only other side of house is falling. I’m not bothered’. High voice, like Cottam’s. Talks a lot and v. fast. Sit on hard kitchen chairs. I sat by fire in arm chair. .likes conversing in French…Various reproductions of Tuke and Millais’ ‘Princes in the Tower’. Pictures everywhere. All very neatly docketed…

Bradford died in 1944. It’s a wonder that no-one has written a biography. Stephen Fry lives just a few miles away. Not a busy man, perhaps he should give it a go. [ETH]

Coded Diaries etc.,

I had been reading about nicknames coined by Swinburne for some of his contemporaries - Fuxton Boreman for Buxton Forman and Soddington Symonds for John Addington Symonds when this piece arrived about a diary of that period with sexual code. Of course Pepys used a mixed language code and Anne Lister (1791–1840) the wealthy Yorkshire landowner, mountaineer and traveller kept coded diaries which chronicled the details of her daily life, including her lesbian relationships. RH who obviously  possesses a good size archive of ephemera and manuscript material sent in this. He is our third contributor and we could use many more who want to share their collections with a waiting world.

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Inadvertencies

I have found a curious pamphlet from the rather neglected Mill House Press which was run by Edward Gathorne- Hardy whose pic is below. Printed on mould made paper in 1963 It is one of 200 copies only and called Inadvertencies collected from the works of several eminent authors.

Basically a collection of inadvertently obscene passages from mostly 19th century classics. The double entendre game. This passage from Charles Dickens gives the flavour -- 'She touched his organ; and from that bright epoch, even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable, as he had thought, of elevation, began a new and deified existence.' My favourites are from Henry James. There is always a faint air of embarrassment with the Master anyway and Gathorne- Hardy has found some corkers.

"'Oh, I can't explain,' cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. 'I've only one way of expressing my deepest feelings - it's this.' And he swung his tool." (Roderick Hudson)

"You think me a queer fellow already. It's not easy to tell you how I feel, not easy for so queer a fellow as I to tell you in how many ways he's queer." (Passionate Pilgrim)

'What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other....' (The Sacred Fount)

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