From a Christian book We Found our Way Out by James R. Adair and Ted Miller (Baker Book House, Grand Rapids Michigan 1965.) People tell their stories 'of how God led them from the confusion of false religions and philosophies to a life of peace in Jesus...a first hand glimpse into many heresies.' The Beatnik chapter gives an insight into a vanished world. Others escaped from communism, Armstrongism, Satan and Theosophism...many other contemporary portrayals of Beatniks have them as followers of Eastern religions.

I Was a Beatnik

  The day I turned twenty I thought I knew all there was to know about life. Yet the kind of life I was wrapped up in was filled with idle conversation, liquor, and pep pills.
  I was living piecemeal by doing commercial art off and on. Most of the time I sat around in the back booth of a dark little tavern and played things "cool," beatnik-style.
  I was fairly proud of that title "beatnik." I read a lot of philosophy, looking desperately for something on which to hang the threads of my life. Nights I wandered aimlessly to my noisy beat retreat and sat. There I would stay with my little clan of beatniks until the wee hours of the morning, locking hornrims over some discussion subject and working it to death.
  I was getting fed up with life, which seemed so cheap. And I was sick of trying to look "way-out." I felt I had gone to "Nowheresville," that I was too tired and too old and oh, so weary. I hated myself.
  One night after I got back to my room from the tavern, I stretched on the floor and looked over my books to find one I thought would be light reading. I decided on Early Will I Seek Thee, by Eugenia Price.
  At first the book's literary style captivated my attention. It was sheer simplicity. I turned on one of my very, very blue jazz records and began to read the style–not the message.

  After I had scanned the book, the record ended and the needle was scratching its way back and forth. I picked up the needle, turned off the machine and sat foggy-eyed and unthinking for quite some time. Then I started the book again on the first page. This time I read the message.
  The book said that God would not force us to believe in Him...(gap)

  My life didn't change "presto-chango!" In fact, I had some desperate problems. And I tried to live the new Christian life by myself.
  My first thought after I became a Christian was to tell everyone. And I quit smoking, drinking, swearing, and about everything, that was on the list.
  After I had accomplished this, entirely by willpower, I felt extremely empty. I didn't take in of Christ's strength and nearness, and I soon fell back into the old patterns. But now there was a difference: in my misery I knew who the Answer was.
  I'll never forget the time I sat in a little "beat" tavern with some of the bearded, ragged, intellectual clientele. We were engrossed in some inane subject, and now and then I was throwing in my two-cents' worth. Someone ordered another pitcher of beer and we all exchanged tranquilizers. "Hey, Lorrie, try this kind. It will make you calm and collected all day."
  Suddenly an old-type beat ambled up to our table and made some crack about my being too realistic with my art.
  I was annoyed, and I said so.
  He eyed me for a moment and then grumbled something about a pain in the neck. He introduced himself as George and invited himself to sit at our table. The other "beats" were off on another "talkathon" about a favorite subject–religion.
  "Nobody, but nobody believes in this salvation stuff. It's old news, man," George scoffed. A little blonde across the table piped, "God's my buddy, sometimes. Like sometimes I think I need Him."
  Everyone sighed, as if they were very sorry for a poor child who should believe something like that.
  "Listen much, you meathead. Nobody believes in God anymore. He's obsolete like last year's new look."

Long Beach bookshops from the 1960s including the long gone 'world famous 'Acres of Books' - probably the biggest bookshop in the world. At the time Long Beach was a sort of Hay on Wye of books, now all these shops have vanished and several others not on this bookmark like the Book Baron.

From a collection of bookmarks found in Berkeley California. Probably from about 1910. J.H. Furst of Baltimore is still in business as a printer having 'opened their doors' in 1904.

It is possible their books were subject to cracking especially when new but the instructions seem slightly fussy by today's standards although any violence towards a book is still, of course, abhorrent.

A rare calligraphic Baron Corvo letter (i.e. Frederick Rolfe) from 1903 republished in 50 copies by the eminent Corvine Donald Weeks author of "Corvo, Saint or Madman?" in 1975.

Michael Cooper. BLINDS & SHUTTERS. Genesis/ Hedley, Guildford, 1990. A limited edition book of 5000 copies each copy signed by persons covered in the book (between 9 and 15 signatures per book.)

No two copies are alike. This is a random list of signers as comprehensive as it gets: a merry galaxy of 60's movers, shakers, posers, celebs and characters:

Bill Wyman (signed every copy) Colin Self, Neil Aspinall, Adam Cooper, Terry Doran, Richie Havens, Allen Jones, John Mayall, Richard Merkin, Billy Al Bengston, Gerald Malanga, Bridget Riley, Steve Winwood, Michael McClure, Sandy Lieberson, Spencer Davis, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Harry Nilsson, Jenny Boyd, Jo Bergman, John Dunbar, Richard Hamilton, Anita Pallenberg, George Harrison, Pattie Clapton, Peter Blake, Francis Bacon, Donald Cammell, Anthony Caro, Allen Ginsberg, Astrid Kirchner, Claes Oldenburg, Perry Richardson, Ringo Starr, Jurgen Vollmer, Klaus Voorman, Eric Clapton, Christopher Gibbs, Keith Richard, Nigel Waymouth, Ann Marshall, Marianne Faithfull, Larry Rivers, Brian Auger, Larry Bell, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Pattie Clapton, Jann Howarth, John Mayall, Bridget Riley, Terry Southern, Kenneth Anger, Don Bachardi, David Hockney, Graham Nash, Derek Taylor, Julie Driscoll, Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Nicholas Monro.

Michael Cooper 'a person of tremendous love and vision.' (1941 - 1973)

Francis Bacon is possibly the Button Gwinnet of the pack, although it is said that the Warhol signature does most for the value of the book.The book came out after his death but signature sheets had been circulated for many moons before printing… Colin Self is the second most common signer  and Peter Blake is, as always, fairly ubiquitous. More info at our sister site Bookride.

Of the then Prince of Wales, later to be Edward VIII (and shortly thereafter Duke of Windsor and married in 1937 to Wallis Simpson) Cheiro* wrote in 1928:

  "It is within the bounds of possibility... that he will in the end fall victim to a devastating love affair. If he does, I predict that the Prince will give up everything, even the chance of being crowned, rather than lose the object of his affection." 

*COUNT LOUIS HAMON (Cheiro) 1866-1936. Brilliant and charming bon vivant whose consultations were sought by the wealthy and famous, author of several best sellers.

From the papers of Edmund George Valpy Knox (1881 - 1971), comic writer, poet and satirist who wrote under the pseudonym 'Evoe'. He was editor of Punch 1932-1949, having been a regular contributor in verse and prose for many years. The typed paper has yellowed and it appears to be from the 1940s, possibly earlier.

This is an amusing parody of British golf writing with a nod towards Wodehouse...

Straight in front of him, and as far as his eye can reach, the traveller who stands on the teeing-ground of our tenth hole, observes the illimitable undulating scenery of the veldt. Perhaps a solitary vulture wheels overhead in the heavens, and along the central track may be discerned a few bleaching bones of caddies and the broken shafts and skulls of drivers and brassies. Far away to the left is a strip of woodland, and beyond that the sluggish inexorable river. What secrets it bears in its massive bosom or in the murky ooze of its heart! A bad pull (to be more explicit) will take you nicely over the edge, and many a stout golfer has gone home at evenfall with an empty creel owing to his rash refusal to carry a landing net and play with amphibious balls.

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Another Jeremy Reed unpublished manuscript in his trademark purple ink. From 2007 when Doherty was much discussed in the media. 'Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?'

The New Bohemianism

5:30 at Red Snapper Books, 22 Cecil Court, under moodily atmospheric London skies, and the red desk at which I write poetry is the lapidary colour of a dull ruby. When Peter Doherty surges in fedora or top hat angled on his intense fringe, a gun-grey Dior suit, white shirt and square cut Hardy Amies black tie, and a cheap Brick Lane pirate scarf then the reinvented bohemian look comes alive naturally, not as an image, but as the unmodified real thing. We face each other, poet and musician, as two anti-establishment artists, whose lifestyles and social viewpoints go radically wide of convention. When Aaron, the shop's owner comes up the stairs from his basement office, in a wide-brimmed black felt hat, a serpent brooch pinned to his striped blazer, with the offer to Pete, to jam in the basement over a bottle of Jack Daniels, we are three, joined by an inherent bohemian instinct. Pete gives me a Big Purple, turtle-shaped Quality street chocolate, explosive with praline, before taking the steps down to the shop's insulated basement. I carry on writing while the two go through an impromptu version of the Kinks' plaintive 'Tired of Waiting For You.'

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From the papers of Edmund George Valpy Knox (1881 - 1971), comic writer, poet and satirist who wrote under the pseudonym 'Evoe'. He was editor of Punch 1932-1949, having been a regular contributor in verse and prose for many years.This piece is probably from the 1950s after his editorship. In the archives is a good pic of him, at present unfindable (will upload soon) - for the moment this below. He was married to the daughter of the Winnie the Pooh illustrator E.H.Shepard. Mary Shepard in her turn illustrated Mary Poppins. His daughter from an earlier marriage was the Booker prize winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald - known in the family as 'Mops' and author of the book below on the gifted Knox family.

This is a very amusing parody of British rural diarists such as Parson Woodforde, Francis Kilvert etc., n.b.- a 'pyghtle' is a small piece of land, a small farm or croft - a word still heard in Suffolk..

I once kept a diary...
but only once. And only for one month. I found it too sad. For some unaccountable reason it took on the semblance of those terrible rustic diaries of a hundred and fifty, or two hundred years ago.

It wasn't all insouciance and jollity at the Gargoyle - there were occasional fights usually involving Lucian Freud, insults usually involving Brian Howard, a couple of armed raiders (laughed out of the club and into the arms of the law) and serious discussion. Michael Luke in David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years reports the following: "…Johnny Craxton was sitting with Peter Watson at a table with Graham Greene and Freddie Ayer…Greene was challenging Freddie to furnish arguments from the depth of his agnosticism to demolish the religion he had embraced. 'Talk me out of it', he said. 'De-Catholicize me with your logical positivism.' 'And all this was going on', said Johnny 'in a Club where there was dancing and all this terrible kitsch music…that was the good thing about it. People could sit on the banquettes and little gold chairs and have proper and improper conversations and Brian Howard could go from table to table telling people terrible, cruel home truths - and the band played on without drowning it at all…'"

The following list has a few non-members but known habituees of the club, ordinary members up from Wimbledon for a night's dining and dancing were known as 'dentists'.

Dancers at the Gargoyle 1940

[Writers, Poets, Publishers, Journalists] Partrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Moorhead, Peter Quennell, Dylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas, Cyrl Connolly, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, John Betjeman, Norman Douglas, John Lehmann, William Samson, Ruth Sherardski, Angus Wilson, George Orwell, Sonia Brownell, Robert Kee, George Weidenfield, Humphrey Slater,Nina Hamnett, Aleister Crowley, Lance Sieveking, William Gerhardie, Walter de la Mare, Constantine Fitzgibbon, Theodora Fitzgibbon, John Davenport, Marjorie Davenport, Tom Hopkinson, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Harold Acton, Anthony West, Alexandra Emmett, Henry Yorke, Dig Yorke, Jocelyn Baines, Raymond Mortimer, Colin Macinnes, Alan Pryce Jones, Christopher Sykes, Rosamund Lehmann, Tambimuttu, Mulk Raj Amand, Kingsley Martin, Malcom Muggeridge, Lawrence Durrell, Louis, Macneice, Hugh Massingham, Pauline Massingham, Geoffrey Gorer, 

Roger Lubbock, Colin Wilson, Elaine Dundy, Reggie Smith, Olivia Manning, Nanos Valaoritis, Patrick O'Donovan, Terrance Kilmartin, Joanna Richardson, James Cameron, Bernard Gutteridge, John Raymond, Paul Johnson, Keidrich Rhys, Peter de Polnay, Maurice Richardson, Brigid Richardson, Giles Romilly, Mary Romilly, Sam White,James Commotion,  Ruthven Todd, Allen Lane, Sefton Delmar, Patric Cross, Jenny Nicholson, Lionel Birch, Sidney Graham,  Paul Potts, Patrick Kavanaugh, Hugh Macdiarmid,  Derek Patimore, Heywood Hill, Anthony Blond, Derek Verschoyle, Peter Watt, Diana Graves, Charles Wrey Gardiner, David Archer, George Barker, Elizabeth Smart, Margaret Taylor, A.J.P. Taylor, Simon Herbert Smith, Walter Baxter, James Kennaway, Susan Kennaway, Patrick Kirwan, Ronnie Hyde, Rodney Acland, Dan Farson, Frank Owen, Anna Phillips, Vincent Brome, John Moore, Marcus Morris, Ved Metha, David Moraes, Terry Southern, Martha Gellhorn, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Silvers, William Saroyan, Harry Brown, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Dunstan Thompson, Henry Kurnitz, Irwin Shaw.[ + mentioned in Luke's book as having hung out there - T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, Noel Coward, Edwina Mountbatten, Kim Philby, Randolph Churchill, H.G. Wells, Matisse, Tallulah Bankhead]

Two well known members at the Gargoyle Club were the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Luke recounts a night of serious drinking where Maclean walked between tables loudly proclaiming 'I am the English Hiss' (i.e the American spy Alger Hiss) and after a few more drinks 'I work for Uncle Joe'. No-one took the slightest interest assuming his behaviour was just pour épater. At the time he was head of the American desk at the Foreign Office.

Luke is unclear as to precisely when it finished but a rock and roll night in 1956 was considered a sort of death knell. The evidence of there being members like Ginsberg, Corso and Terry Southern indicates that it may have struggled on into the 1960s. Michael Luke,author of David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991) was the son of Sir Harry Luke, friend of Baron Corvo. It is unlikely had Corvo still been around in the 1930s he would have been a member ( 4 guineas a year). More members from Michael Laws roll-call to come..

[Theatre & Films] Robert Newton, Anne Newton, Michael Redgrave, Freddie Ashton, Gottfied Reinhardt, Sylvia Reinhardt, Wolfgang Reinhardt, Anthony Asquith, Peter Glenville, George Minter, Dennis Foreman, Ken Tynan, Adrian Pryce, Sally Anne Field, Hermione Gingold,

[Regulars & Adventurers] Quentin Crewe, Colin Crewe, Sally Crewe, Xan Fielding, William Moss, Michael Alexander, Richard Wolheim, Anne Wolheim, Ran Antrim, Anthony Frere Marocco, Michael Morris, Poldy Loewenstein, Bianca Loewenstein, Werner Alvensleben, Henry Weatherall, Hugh Cruddes.

[Politburo & Mainstream Regulars] David Tennant, Hermione Baddeley, Virginia Bath, David Tennant Jr., Pauline Tennant, Sabrina Tennant, Georgia Tennant, Henry Bath, Daphne Fielding, Tony Vyvian, Robert Boothby, Patrick Kinross, Angela Culme Seymour, Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Clair Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Paul Roche, Diana Mosley, Nancy Mitford, Jessica Mitford, David Herbert, Augustus John, Philip Toynbee, Victor Rothschild, Richard Wyndham, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Anthony Powell, Violet Powell, John Sutro, Gillian Sutro, Ivan Moffat, John Hayward, Phillip Dunn, John Strachey, Isabel Strachey, James Strachey.

[Mainstream Regulars] Derek Jackson, Gotfried von Hoffmanstahl, Lisa von Hoffmanstahl, Iris Tree, Auberon Herbert, Michael Young, Peter Watson, Norman Fowler, Brian Howard, Sara Langford, Rodney Phillips, Monica Phillips, Mark Culme Seymour, Robin Campbell, Mary Campbell, Clarissa Churchill, Michael Harrison, Maria Harrison, Poppet John & Pol, Joy Craig, Dennis Craig, Robert Heber Percy, Pauline Gates, Sylvester Gates, Igor Vinogradov, Claud Cockburn, Ralph Partridge, Francis Partridge, John Young, Ray Parsons, Alan Peile, Freddie Ayers, Nancy Cunard.

Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwoood

List of Gargoyle Club members compiled by Michael Law (a friend of Ivan Moffatt) in the late 1950s and found illustrated (as a hand-written list - hence some inaccuracies) in Michael Luke's David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991) To quote from Michael Luke's 2005 obituary: 'This rooftop den was founded by David Tennant in 1925, high above the corner of Dean and Meard streets, and reached by a rickety lift whose dimensions were such that strangers entering it left as intimate friends at the top.

The Gargoyle Club was a theatrical arena for London society, high and low. The Moorish interior - its walls narcissistically mirrored with fragments of 18th-century glass and inspired by Henri Matisse (himself a member) - was described by Luke as "Mystery suffused with a tender eroticism". On its dance floor Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and Tallulah Bankhead conducted a rite of hedonistic alcoholic abandon while Noël Coward and Francis Bacon looked on, and Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean filled out membership applications...'

Many more names to come (Writers, Poets and Politburo.) The full list pretty much covers  London society including boho and haute boho from 1925 -1965. Some of the names are now untraceable...

[Ladies etc.,] Joan Wyndham (Shivarg), Janetta Parlade, Caroline Blackwood, Mamaine Paget, Sally Belfrage, Barbara Skelton, Henrietta Moraes, Caryl Chance, Nora Sayre, Jeanne Campbell, Kitty Epstein, Natalie Newhouse (Newton) Margaret Lygon, Sarah Macmillan, Margaret - Ann Ducaine, Glur Dyson Taylor (Quennell) Josephine Lowry Carry, Suna Portman, Pamela Tellerson, Jennifer Fry, Sonia de Leon (Quennell) Venetia Murray, Jennifer Renwick, Tania Vinogradov (Hobson) Deidre Craig (Levi), Anne Dunn, Antonia Fraser, Anne Paget, Charlotte Starbussman, Patricia Cutts,Mary Keene, Louisa Morriss, Rosamund Fellows, Rita Wheatley, Dinora Mar (Mendelsohn)Vivien Talbot Brady, Ingrid Wyndham (Channon)

[Arts & Music] Freddie Mayor, Edward James, Tilly Losch,  Feliks Topolski, Matthew Smith, Francis Bacon, Michael Wishart, Douglas Cooper, Lucian Freud, John Minton, John Craxton, Constant Lambert, Alan Rawsthorne, Marion Leigh, Isabel Lambert, George Melly, Rodrigo Moynihan, Elinor Moynihan, John Moynihan, David Sylvester, Erica Bransen, Malcolm Arnold, John Heath Stubbs, Gwynneth John, John Banting, Hellen Lessore, Colquhoun & McBryde, Peter Palham, Mary & Rose Palham, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nina Hamnett, Robin Darwin, Bebé Berard.

Two in the morning at the Gargoyle (Virginia Bath)

Letter (unpublished?)  from an irritated T.E. Lawrence (as T.E. Shaw) to Cyril Laken of The Sunday Times (2/ 7/ 1933) stating that he does not want to review books. The concluding part is quoted in a loosely inserted  addendum to Donald Weeks *pamphlet on Lawrence, Wilfred Ewart, John Gawsworth etc.,

"In my life I have reviewed (I think) three books - years ago - and while I am in the R.A.F. I do not need the money and have not the leisure to do more. Inclination I never had, for reviewing.

Please leave me alone! This beastly thing has now cost three postages. T.E.S."

* Donald Weeks. T. E. Lawrence. An Hitherto Unknown Biographical / Bibliographical note. Privately Printed (Tragara Press, Edinburgh 1983)

8vo. pp 16. Frontis portrait. Green textured wraps (with  title label on cover) attached to plain white paper covers. 230 copies printed. Loosely inserted is a one page 'additional note' about Lawrence's dislike of reviewing books. A closely written piece about Lawrence's proof reading work on Wilfrid Ewart's Scot's Guard, with much mention of the young John Gawsworth and his friendship with Lawrence with whom he went on walks in Holborn. Gawsworth had written Annotations on Some Minor Writings of T.E. Lawrence. The book is dedicated to John Gawsworth and the writer and book dealer Iain Sinclair who 'scouted' the proof copy that occasioned this fascinating sidelight on Lawrence.

Hotel de la Mere Poularde, Mont-St.-Michel, August 1944 pictured (left to right) Bill Walton, Mme. Chevalier, Ernest Hemingway, an unidentified Signal Corps photographer, M. Chevalier, and Robert Capa.

The 'unidentified Signal Corps photographer' is almost certainly Ivan Moffat a British screenwriter, film producer and socialite. His account of his time with Hemingway appears in The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York,and Hollywood (Gavin Lambert 2004). He was the son of beautiful Bloomsbury figure Iris Tree several of whose letters we have and will post. During World War II, he filmed activities of the U.S. Army for the Signal Corps and after the war worked  at Paramount Pictures. In the 1950s, between his two marriages, Moffat had a series of love affairs, notably with Elizabeth Taylor and Lady Caroline Blackwood who later married Lucian Freud. He wrote or co-wrote screenplays for a number of well-known films, including Giant and later the TV series Colditz. He appears to have been fairly unfazed by the Hemingway mythos. Mont St Michel still serves good omelettes, but is the tile initialled by Hemingway still on the roof of the church?

Ernest Hemingway joined our unit at Mont St. Michel, a small cluster of houses below a tall medieval church, perched on a small rocky island near the border of Normandy and Brittany. Irwin [Shaw] had taken me to meet Hemingway in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he had shown off his collection of shotguns and rifles, pre-invasion rows of boots, and a portable canvas device that would enable him to cross rivers.
  I had wondered why he needed all that stuff as a war reporter for Colliers, but was either too awed or too polite to ask. A few weeks later I had met Hemingway again at the beachhead. He wore a Wehrmacht belt and told me, "I got it off a dead Kraut." This time I wondered, again without asking, why he bothered to explain.
  At Mont St. Michel a woman ran out from an inn to greet Hemingway, and he lifted her up in his arms as she laughed and kissed him and called him Papa. Then, at the inn, he toasted Irwin and Stevens with wine and Calvados, and we ate delicious omelettes, the first good meal any of our outfit had tasted since London.
  As it grew dark, brilliant artillery flashes lit up the sky, not very far away toward the east. They grew even more dazzling as the sound of gunfire grew louder. An American colonel joined us and said there was a heavy German counterattack from Mortaing, aimed at splitting our army in two. By then we were all a bit high, and enjoying a sense of vicarious participation in an event that was exciting but not in the least threatening.
  In the morning Hemingway and I climbed the steep narrow steps to the church, then up to the church roof, where we scraped our initials on one of the slate tiles, and Hemingway grinned like a kid.

A Venezuelan Cook Book put out by Creole Petroleum Company (published in New York about 1959) - illustrator unknown but not unlike Warhol of that period (see Bookride) A 20 page pamphlet. Not impossibly scarce. The lobster dish is the centre spread. Best washed down with something from Louis Roederer..

Here is a lobster dish with an incomparable flare and fillip to the Venezuelan sauce that will earn for any woman the distinction of being the "hostess with the mostes'." We think you'll agree that any descriptive adjectives would only be superfluous and could not really begin to do justice to the wonderful succulence of this dish.

Put lobster tails in cold water which has been salted. Heat until water comes to boil, at which time the lobster tails are done.

  Meanwhile, melt half of the butter or margarine in a saucepan and sauté chopped onion and garlic until tender. Add remaining butter, seasoning and blend in flour. Now stir in beef consommé, apple juice, lemon juice and bitters and heat. Stir constantly until thickened and smooth. Add chopped parsley.
  Lightly beat egg yolks with a fork, add a little of the heated sauce to the yolks, and then stir them back into the sauce. Simmer, stirring for 2 or 3 minutes.
  Rinse lobster tails, remove from shell and cut in half crosswise. On a Iarge round platter, make a wreath of hot cooked rice, fill center with lobster.
  In a small skillet, heat 1/4 cup rum, remove from stove, carefully, ignite and let burn until flame almost disappears. Now top lobster with hot sauce and finally pour burning rum over all. Garnish with parsley sprigs and serve at once. Serves 6.

From Walking Essays by A.H. Sedgwick.
(Edward Arnold 1912)

Many of the observations in this book hold true today e.g. 'there are so many people in London that they do not notice each other. If the Londoner paid the slightest attention to his neighbour he would go mad in a fortnight..' Also the idea that there are walking 'lines' in London vaguely prefigures the tramps 'ley lines' conjured up in Iain Sinclair's 1975 work Lud Heat (and re-trod by Peter Ackroyd in Hawksmoor). Sedgwick talks of an 'innate craving for big lines' and a direct path  from Central London to the King's Road- 'the line by which the citizens of London went to Chelsea to eat buns...'

London walking is a quite distinct and peculiar thing, utterly unlike any other town-walking. It is a unique branch of walking in general and solitary walking in particular : for all the circumstances which make town-walking solitary apply ten-thousandfold in London. But if you accept this condition, and walk London alone, you will find a very curious thing, namely that in this biggest and most monstrous of all towns you approach most nearly to pure rusticity. The strictly physical conditions, dirt, noise, smell, constriction of outlook, multiplicity of people, are as bad or worse in London than other towns ; but in certain other points, by no means unimportant to a walker, the end of the series is like the beginning, the infinite is like the infinitesimal. What was possible on the South Downs, difficult in Cheltenham, and unthinkable in Liverpool, becomes possible again in London.

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Slim volume of poetry from Francis King archive.

Ersatz. (Phaedo) Privately Printed, Greece, 1953.Large 8vo. Wraps. pp 30 (unpaginated). Greek and English texts. Possibly anonymous or the author's name is there in Greek (which is Greek to me.) Presentation copy: 'To Francis King with thoughts/ Phaedo. Thessaloniki 12-5-1953 A. D.' The last 10 pages have the author's slightly angst ridden but amusing poems in English. 300 copies. Signed again on second page. From the library of Francis King (4 March 1923 - 3 July 2011), acclaimed novelist, poet, critic and editor. President Emeritus of International PEN and appointed  CBE in 1985. He came out in the 1970s and wrote the novel 'Yesterday Came Suddenly' in 1993, after the death of his long-term partner.

Two poems from 'Phaedo'

I Knew an Honest Man

I knew an honest man once
With brown eyes you could look deep in
Not read his thoughts
Or know his mind
But see his clean soul
Touch and love it

Honesty of course
Being something highly disturbing
When not kept within the limits
Of spoken words
He used to wear sunglasses

Yet when we were together
He used to take them off

P.S.

You know my friend
What is terrible about the dead
Is not that they are dead
It is the infinite times we failed
them - while they were alive

From Walking Essays by A.H. Sedgwick. This book appeared in 1912 and is mainly about walking - with a good piece on walking in London. As well as attacking ties, Sedgwick also attacks the waltz and its ubiquity. The reference to the 'ridiculous' ties of 1892 is illustrated  by a picture of an 1890s dandy (Robert de Montesquiou). Oscar Wilde went in for a fairly fat tie but it is hard to find good pictures of his neck wear...

Ties furnish perhaps the clearest instance of the break-down of utilitarianism. They serve no material purpose of any kind. The days are long gone by when the tie added perceptibly to the warmth of the body : even the ties of 1892, which seem ridiculous to-day, cannot have saved a single valetudinarian of that age (as he thought) from a cold in the chest, or (as we now learn) have weakened his capacity to resist chill. No man's health or bodily comfort would now be affected in the slightest degree by the presence or absence of a tie. Nor, if utilitarians take the rash step of admitting beauty into the system of pleasures, can very much be said for ties. It is true that they sometimes add a desirable touch of colour ; but if beauty were our aim in ties, should we stop for a moment within the present limitations of either colour or shape ? A large flounced piece of drapery with an elaborate colour scheme, twisted in decorative lines across our chest to a bow on the hips or the small of the back, would be the very least we should put up with. Can any one with a little knot of monochrome peering bashfully from a minute triangular opening in a waste of drab monotony talk seriously about beauty in ties ?

I once met The Clash. It was the summer of 1977, the year of Punk. Somehow I knew the roadie of the Sex Pistols who was known as Boogie (as in 'book' not 'boon') - later he became an art dealer like his father and I rented him a gallery, back then his flat near Bell Street (many bookshops there then) was always full of punk musos inc Malcolm McLaren, Bernie Rhodes - I even saw Vivienne Westwood there once.

I recall meeting the whole of The Clash there once, they were standing about in zipped and paint spattered clothes. They were off to the West End and wanted to know the way to Shaftesbury Avenue. As there were 5 of them (for some reason they had Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols with them) I suggested they just get a cab. Joe Strummer's reaction was interesting he said 'No cabs. We'll walk there, we're in love with life.' His voice was vaguely middle class, something he didn't bother to hide. I liked him. That's it.