A Sense of Place
Many a creative writing professor has lectured me on the pivotal role a “sense of place” plays in fiction. Writers work hard at creating credible worlds in which to set our stories. We spend sleepless nights trying to draw the reader into these fictional universes. Craft – and every ounce of charm and wit we possess – are devoted to this task. We know that a story with an authentic sense of place will hold the reader under its spell. This truth dawned on me afresh when I took off to London last month for a short stay.
Photo credit: Vineetha Mokkil
I had never set foot in the city before but I felt a pleasant sense of familiarity as I walked down the streets and stopped to catch my breath in leafy gardens. Virginia Woolf’s luminous prose echoed in my ears: “how beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree–sprinkled, grass–grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally…and far away the rattle of a train.” (Street Sauntering, A London Adventure).
When I strolled down alleys, riverside paths, and quaint, cobbled yards, they came alive with scenes from some of my favorite Dickens novels. Here was the street where Pip had come to meet his lawyer and learn a life-changing truth (Great Expectations). Here lay dark alleys where body snatchers and pickpockets once roamed free (Oliver Twist). A debtor’s prison so tellingly described in Little Dorrit. A hospital, a street corner, a flight of steps under London Bridge, a crumbling ruin of a prison – all of them immortalized in Dickens’ fiction.
Big Ben – that iconic landmark of the English landscape – loomed before me. I looked up at it. It was our first encounter but I felt like I had seen the clockface before. That I had sensed the “leaden circles dissolving” when the clock chimed. Mrs Dalloway had imprinted an indelible picture of it on my mind. Woolf’s fiction had made Big Ben seem so real, so immediate, that when I stood in front of the real thing, it seemed like I already knew it inside out.
Photo credit: Vineetha Mokkil
London seemed so familiar because it had found a place in some of the best works of fiction I have read. The opposite of this phenomenon also works its magic on us. William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County – a fictional setting for his stories and novels – and placed it within the real Lafayette County, Mississippi in the United States. The fictional county seems every bit as “real” as the actual geographical entity. Faulkner’s readers will vouchsafe for the authenticity of his imagined universe. Faulkner himself liked to challenge his readers by referring to Yoknapatawpha as both “actual” and “apocryphal”.
Margaret Atwood paints a chilling portrait of a totalitarian republic in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The Republic of Gilead is painted with such deft strokes that it takes only a few pages for it to acquire the legitimacy of a place on the map. Gilead exists in an apocryphal future but the echoes of contemporary reality are felt there. Using a potent mix of fact and fiction, history and prophecy, and lyrical prose, Atwood imbues Gilead with an eerily real quality.
What does it take to create an immortal fictional world? What ingredients go into its making? What holds up the world on the page when all else crumbles into dust? There is no readymade recipe, no formulaic answer at hand. All a writer can do is to try and paint a specific and detailed picture. Be true to the setting – if a novel or story is set in a certain period in history, get the details right. Do a backbreaking amount of research. Know everything there is to know about that period. If your work revolves around the lives of characters who belong to a particular profession (doctors, lawyers, conmen, poets, strippers, astronauts, journalists..) make sure you understand how things work in their world. Set down the rules of the world at the start. Be straight with your readers. They deserve to get under the skin of your characters and the universe they occupy.
Be consistent. If your novel is set in the past (“never dead,” “not even past”) then the characters must walk and talk and dress a certain way throughout. Similarly, if your story is set in a specific contemporary milieu – make sure the details of the setting are accurate and authentic. Above all remember to get the “human fact” right. This is the backbone of a fictional universe. This is what makes it come alive and keeps it safe from the ravages of time.
Willing Exile
In November 2010, just four months before I left London forever, radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza was desperately fighting extradition from the UK to the United States on charges of attempting to establish a terrorist training camp in rural Oregon. Such was the gravity of Hamza’s alleged crimes, the government sought not only to hand him over to the Americans, but also to rescind his British citizenship.
Photo credit: OliverN5 via Flickr
Although Hamza would ultimately lose his fight against extradition, his solicitors argued that, since he had already been stripped of his Egyptian citizenship, the revocation of his British passport would essentially leave him “stateless,” a nomad without a country. Hamza and I have little in common, but his fear of statelessness is something I can very much relate to. Hamza was facing the unenviable prospect of having his British citizenship taken from him. I, on the other hand, chose to turn my back on my home and country. To this day, I retain my citizenship and passport. I wasn’t forced to relinquish a part of myself when I left the UK and sought to build a new life overseas. I do, however, still wrestle with the profound sense of dislocation that many expatriates experience.
Some days, I cannot help but wonder if I made a terrible mistake.
After moving to London from a bleak coastal town in Lincolnshire in 2005, I moved around the city frequently, sampling boroughs like prohibitively expensive canapés in a strange buffet: Camden, Ealing, Greenwich, Bromley, Bexley. Personal taste never played a role in my choice of where to live. Like so many other Londoners, my never-ending quest for suitable housing was determined entirely by the average rent in a particular area and the amount of time I could expect to spend commuting to the heart of Zone 1 – the quintessential formula for millions of Londoners. With each successive move, I gravitated ever outwards, as if the polarity of the cost of living in London were in direct opposition to the magnetism of my circumstances. I ultimately ended up on the fringes of South-East London, consigned to the darkest corner of Zone 4, as if in punishment for the all-too-common crime of youthful optimism. My address did indeed say London, but it felt like a white lie I was able to tell only by virtue of the city’s seemingly relentless sprawl and the statutory definition of Greater London’s outer boroughs.
My last flat, a tiny one-bedroom in West Thamesmead near Woolwich (across the street from HM Prison Belmarsh, in which Abu Hamza languished at Her Majesty’s pleasure for eight years until his extradition), cost me a relatively meagre £650 in rent every month, a laughably low sum in hindsight. Despite this, as the end of 2010 approached, even this amount was proving untenable. Like millions of Londoners, I struggled with the rapidly rising cost of living in the city. Unlike many of my fellow Londoners, I had an alternative – to embark on a modern-day voyage to the New World. My first wife, an American, had returned to the States to establish a home for us while my visa paperwork was being processed by the American Embassy in Mayfair. After almost eighteen months of interviews, separation, blood tests, chest X-rays, travel arrangements and yet more interviews, I was finally issued a visa. Two weeks later, just days before I was scheduled to fly to Boston from Heathrow, my wife confessed, over the phone, to having slept with two other men. I was faced with a choice – sever all ties with my wife and remain in London, or emigrate to America anyway.
I chose to leave.
When I left the UK, I was confident in my decision. I had grown tired of London and according to the immortal words of Samuel Johnson, tired of life. On the contrary, it was not London itself that had sapped me of the desire to remain in the city, but rather the constant worries of rising rents, job scarcity, and average salaries – problems that remain serious obstacles for the Londoners who have managed to cling precariously to the city and remain. In the end, like so many others, I had few choices but to leave London. At the time, I knew it was the right decision, even if circumstances beyond my control had largely dictated my course of action, but there are days when this surety offers little comfort.
To say that things have gone from bad to worse in London would be a considerable understatement. Data from the Valuation Office Agency indicates that in inner London, the median rent exceeds £1,500, whereas in outer London, renters can expect to pay upwards of £825 per month for the kind of flat in which I once lived. Median rents in inner London have increased by an average of £200 per month since the third quarter of 2012, and rents in outer London have risen by roughly £100 per month during the same period.
Despite claims that the situation is improving (which should be taken to mean that rents are simply not rising as rapidly as they have been), there is little hope on the immediate horizon for London’s renters. According to the British Property Federation, 61% of the 21,300 new homes built in London in 2013 were purchased by overseas investors. Of these buyers, 48% stated that planned to let, and an additional 19% said they were either investors with large property portfolios seeking to expand, or institutional investment organisations purchasing entire residential developments. Some experts fear that without regulatory oversight, continued overseas investment of this scale will lead to ever more expensive rents and a potential housing bubble. It is worth noting that the report cites the fact that “there are no legal restrictions of property ownership by overseas parties” as one of the most compelling reasons to invest in property in London, second only to the UK’s “benign and stable political environment.”
This supposedly benign and stable political environment could soon become significantly more volatile if the government fails to take action. This is precisely what Ed Miliband, speaking in the borough of Redbridge in May of last year, promised to do if Labour was elected to power following the recent general election. Miliband said Labour would cap rent increases based on average market rates, put an end to the excessive charges and fees often levied against tenants, and introduce laws designed to promote longer, more secure tenancies. Now, Miliband won’t have the opportunity to put these protections into place. What is certain, though, is that it will take a lot more than empty promises and co-opting upbeat pop songs for Labour to reach the countless disillusioned voters across the capital, as Tony Blair’s Labour party did in 1997.
One could argue that the current situation in London is hardly surprising. After all, demand for rental properties and a lack of space have long been problems in the capital. Those who seek to deny or distort the city’s rapidly worsening housing crisis often claim that the higher salaries Londoners can expect offset the increased cost of living, but this is woefully misleading. After all, rents are just part of the puzzle. The stagnant earnings observed across much of the city are the bitter yin to excessive housing costs’ yang.
Data from the Valuations Office Agency suggests that the minimum salary Londoners need to be earning in order to live on their own in a one-bedroom flat is £38,000. This puts the vast majority of the city’s housing out of reach to university graduates of every single area of study, according to starting salary information from graduates.co.uk. Measures such as Mayor Boris Johnson’s raising of the London Living Wage to £8.80 last November have accomplished little. A recent report published by the New Policy Institute indicates that 28% of Londoners live in poverty, 7 percentage points higher than the rest of England.
Even now, ten years after I first arrived at King’s Cross Station with a duffle bag, I wonder if I would be able to keep my head above water.
In the years since I left, London has never been far from my mind, and I often wonder how its landscape has changed. Not its physical appearance (though I have yet to lay eyes on The Shard, The Leadenhall Building, or Vauxhall Tower, but three of the additions to appear across the city’s skyline since I left), but its emotional geography; how the rising cost of living and punishing employment market have taken a psychic toll on the Londoners who were born and raised there. Londoners possess a toughness and resolve that denizens of few other cities in the world can match, but even the hardiest of souls have their limits.
Unlike many expats, living overseas has become harder for me as the years have passed, not easier. Many aspects of American society make living here decidedly difficult, and pervasive attitudes here often stand directly at odds with my personal values. The jingoistic fanaticism that masquerades as national pride in America disturbs me greatly, as does Americans’ enduring and reckless love affair with firearms. Never before have I encountered a nation so arrogant and frequently juvenile. I have little patience for Americans’ obsession for their history, considering the ease with which they forget it. It would be a grave disservice to make such a sweeping generalisation without admitting (to borrow and repurpose a popular meme for my own ends) that Not All Americans are like this. I have met some of the most intelligent, charming and thoroughly remarkable people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing during my time in the States.
Unfortunately, many Americans conform strongly to the very worst stereotypes, which has gradually led to the almost suffocating feeling of displacement I so often feel. Even after four years, I still feel like a guest in the country I chose to make my home; a guest whose presence is merely tolerated rather than welcomed – yet I am unable to return home, for to do so would jeopardise everything I have worked so hard for.
For all its many drawbacks, America has been good to me. So, at least for the time being, I think I’ll stay. My heart, however, will always belong to London.
Although I’ve never put much stock in the notion that there are two Englands – one surrounded by the tarmac moat of the M25, the other watching resentfully from outside – I cannot imagine living anywhere other than London. To me, to those who came before, and to those who will come after, London is a cruel but vital lesson in survival; that first electrifying relationship with someone who not only challenges but scares you, whose allure is simultaneously captivating and perilous. If anything, the city’s siren song is even more irresistible to me than it was a decade ago, its sweetly seductive chorus echoing across the cold, vast expanse of the Atlantic.
Literary London: A Recommended Reading List
Photo by Garry Knight (copied from Flickr)
There’s no better way to capture the self-contradictory nature of the English capital than through the disarming magic of literature. Both gritty and regal, historic and modern, authentic and commercial, London is a globetrotter’s utopia. It has a little bit of everything, and on a good day, you think it might as well be the whole world.
Mighty, moody London provides the perfect literary setting for writers keen to capture a feeling in a word—and many of them did just that. For your next trip to this cosmopolitan labyrinth, pack your bags (or load your e-reader) with the quintessential London reading list:
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Dickens’s London is as bleak as it is absorbing—and desperately in need of social reform. Near and dear to Dickens’s heart were issues such as poverty, children’s rights, crime, and the legal system. Victorian London was, to Dickens, a foul, unforgiving place, but it was also—crucially—his inspiration. In Oliver Twist, we find little orphan Oliver thrust into a life of petty crime at the industrious hands of corruption and exploitation. In a story arc that resembles the classic fairy tale, Oliver overcomes his hardships but never sheds his innocence, a moral feat for which life (at least, in literature) owes him a happy ending. For a quick trip into London’s sordid past, Oliver Twist is the perfect time machine.
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Set in Westminster, the historic district of central London cradling landmarks such as Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament, Mrs. Dalloway follows the activities and internal musings of Clarissa Dalloway on a busy, sunny day in June. Her meandering thoughts sketch out a rudimentary map of the mind, highlighting especially the isolating nature of the human consciousness; communication, it seems, is the chasm we must cross, and keep crossing, on the quest for companionship and intimacy. Through these wandering meditations in the city streets, Woolf offers a candid glimpse into post-WWI, high-society London, emphasizing psychological and temporal themes in this reinvention of the novel.
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
In High Fidelity, Hornby positions London within the music scene, instead of the other way around. Record store owner Rob Fleming, along with his part-time employees Dick and Barry, is—shall we say—obsessed with music. The trio spends much of their time creating music-themed lists and mixtapes, as well as driving out any potential customer with apparently poor taste. A break-up motivates Rob to explore his failed relationships, and music takes him in and out of pubs around the city. For a modern, witty, music-infused take on London, High Fidelity is the go-to choice.
1984, George Orwell
England, in Orwell’s 1984, has evolved into “Airstrip One,” a so-called province under tight control of a tyrannical political system known as “Ingsoc” (short for “English Socialism”). Led by “Big Brother,” the ruling Party maintains constant surveillance over the entire population of Airstrip One. Certain London locations are still recognizable in the text, such as “Victory Square” (Trafalgar Square) and a nearby museum of war propaganda (St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church). A classic of dystopian fiction, 1984 will make you appreciate contemporary London for its raw diversity, as well as its hearty welcome of all independent thinkers.
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
Single, thirty-something, and a few pounds heavier than she’d like to be, Bridget Jones inhabits the London that most of its 13 million residents identify best with today: ambitious, challenging, and somehow equally full of comfort and catastrophe. In her diary, Bridget Jones chronicles everything from the mundane (number of cigarettes smoked in a day) to the extraordinary (romance of the Austen-esque variety), gradually revealing the very essence of finding one’s place in an urban jungle: how adulthood becomes a (frequently hilarious) struggle; how “career” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; and how friends become family, and then some.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sure, a sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere provides a setting well-suited to your average crime fiction. But when it comes to the one and only Sherlock Holmes, London alone can offer a criminal landscape varied enough, and exhilarating enough, to prompt the most famous mystery series of all time. In Sherlock’s Adventures, London is a place where disorder is ubiquitous, where truth is stranger than fiction, and where the most impenetrable enigma is merely “elementary.” In the best moments of this classic collection of short stories, we race across the city alongside Mr. Holmes—master of disguise, weaponry, and logic—in search of answers and, occasionally, justice.
In case that wasn’t enough to satisfy your appetite, insatiable literary wolverine that you are, pick up a few more outstanding reads at one of London’s spectacular bookstores. Daunt Books in Marylebone offers a great selection of international, regional, and local travel guides in an utterly beautiful space. Persephone Books, from within the literary haven of Bloomsbury, reprints “unjustly neglected” fiction and non-fiction by female writers, while nearby Waterstone’s is breathtaking in both size and aesthetics. And though it’s hard to believe that Foyles—with 1.4 million books in its flagship store on Charing Cross Road alone—is still an independent bookstore, you’re sure to find a few (hundred) pages of London to carry home with you.
Q & A: Danny Wallace on Who is Tom Ditto?
Danny Wallace, author of Litro’s current Book Club pick, Who is Tom Ditto tells us about how he snagged his first writing gig, as a teenager in the offices of Sega Power Magazine, his subsequent breaks into the world of books and insights into his latest novel ‘Who is Tom Ditto’,
Litro: Danny, thank you for joining us. We are delighted to be reading Who is Tom Ditto as our opening Litro Book Club read of 2015. It’s certainly a departure from your previous books. Firstly, could you tell us a bit about yourself? How long have you been a writer?
Thanks for having me. I hope you like the book. I’ve been a writer for years, in lots of different ways. Since I was a teenager, in fact, when I somehow inveigled my way in to the offices of Sega Power magazine and they offered me a gig as a video games reviewer. I pretty much used the fact that I could write to score myself free games. That led to writing for other games mags, which led to writing about film and comedy, which led to writing comedy itself, which led me into the world of books. So all in all, pretty much 25 years, man and boy.
Litro: In a nutshell, who is Tom Ditto? And what is Who is Tom Ditto about?
Well, Tom is a man whose life is thrown into turmoil when everything he thought he knew about someone is turned on its head. He gets home to find a note from his girlfriend. And that note says, “Tom – I have not left you. But I have gone.” So what does that mean? Where has she gone? And what does she mean, she hasn’t left him? She appears to have left him!
From that unusual moment, I wanted to build the book into something it would be difficult to second-guess. You think it’s one thing, then it turns into another, the way a relationship sometimes does.
Litro: Where did the inspiration for the book come from?
The inspiration for what the book turns into – and the people Tom meets along the way – came from two places. One was buying a sandwich one day from a well-known sandwich shop and studying the options on the board. There was a guy in front of me who’d also seen the options on the board, but unlike the rest of the people in the queue he just decided to start improvising. He went off-menu. It made me think about how often we just stick to the rules and go with the options presented, and it made me wonder about what else this guy did. What if I tasted his sandwich and it was the greatest sandwich of all time, and I’d been denying myself because I was so used to going ‘A number 7 please’? What else could this guy elevate from the mundane?
The second thing that was noodling around in my brain was hearing about a short-lived cult in the 60s or 70s. No one knew who they were or what they wanted or who funded them. But they used to stand in people’s gardens and make notes about the people inside. Why? Who knows? But I like the idea of these strange little underground movements. It made me think ‘what were these people missing, that they felt this was a good way to spend their time?’.
Litro: How important was it for you to set the book in a city environment?
Very important. Often you can feel loneliest when you’re surrounded by people. All of them appearing busy, sorted, satisfied. They have their friends, they have their plans, they have a destination. But there are thousands of people out there who don’t have any of that, and have to just act like they do so they appear to fit in. I wondered what might happen to people who don’t feel like they’ve found themselves; they don’t know who they are so they don’t know where they fit in. Was there a shortcut they could take to happiness?
Danny Wallace, Who is Tom Ditto
Litro: There are elements of travel within the novel, would you advise young writers to drop everything and travel?
If you’re lucky enough to be able to see some of the world, then you should see some of the world. I wanted to take the reader out of London, and out of the current time, and follow different characters in a different place while exploring the same themes. There’s a universality to everything Tom’s going through even though the specifics are so different. And it lends the idea a certain credibility. Like: this isn’t such a crazy idea. People could do this. Maybe some of them already are.
But yes, being anywhere else at all can’t fail but inform what you do.
Litro: What other themes were you interested in addressing in the novel?
Identity – who we are versus who we want to be. Who we pretend we are and why. Loneliness and loss – what happens when we are part of something and then no longer are. I think you can agree, that makes it sound hilarious.
But also – the idea that there are stories everywhere you look. I spend a lot of time walking around with my baby daughter and I’ve become fascinated by names. Names on benches, streets named after people, names on memorials… I google them, find out who they were and what they did, because it feels like someone should. The other day I walked around a park listening to a YouTube recording of poems written and read out by a man whose name I’d seen on a bench. It was like the spirit of this guy was with me as we walked around one of his favourite places. Like he’d been remembered by someone who never knew him. I think in some sense, the characters in the book want to be remembered too. They just need to find out how to be.
Litro: Tom Ditto presents the morning news and weather for a fictional Talk London radio station, with your own background in Radio how close is the character of Tom to your own life and experiences?
Not at all. But I wanted his world to feel real. The detail had to be spot-on. I presented a radio breakfast show in London for a couple of years and worked alongside a newsreader called Matt Dyson. I could study the minutiae of his job, for four hours a day, every day. And I wanted Tom to have a relatable office environment to play with/suffer through. And all that had to be credible. He could have worked anywhere – he could have been a baker. But radio is a world I know.
Also, with early morning radio – there’s something about getting up in the dark, going to work in the dark, often working in the dark, then going home, having a nap and waking up in the dark. I wanted to get Tom to the light, if that makes sense.
Litro: What do you hope people will take away from reading your book?
Whatever they want. My first and most important mission is that they enjoy it.
Litro: Who are your favourite authors, and which writers have most inspired your own writing?
PG Wodehouse was a huge influence growing up, as was Sue Townsend with the Adrian Mole books. Both authors showed me how words on a page could make you laugh out loud. Just some printed shapes on a page could do that. The Beano comic got me reading and showed me how stories and characters (and the logic of the characters’ worlds) work. My favourite book is probably Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith. These days, I love a John Niven book, I think Jon Ronson’s stuff is fantastic, and I can stare for hours at pictures in books which show the London I know and love, but in the Victorian era or the 60s or whenever.
Litro: We’re going to put you on the spot here… what’s the worst / life changing note that has been left for you?
I’m not sure, but I await its arrival with interest.
Litro’s mission is to find the best and most exciting new voices in fiction and non-fiction and give them a platform for their work. Four times a year, members of the Litro Book Club will receive an advance copy of the featured book in their mailbox, and then we will proceed to read it together. To read works from other writers to watch, get our All-Access membership membership gives you subscription to our print magazine, membership of our Book Club,unlimited online access invites to Litro Live1 events and much more.
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Camden Fringe: Window at the Tristan Bates Theatre
It’s hard not to 
feel sorry for the London theatre scene in August, clamouring for press coverage as the creative centre of gravity moves north of the border. One wouldn’t begrudge Edinburgh this attention: in no other arts festival in the world is a city so effectively commandeered to the service of culture. However, for those who are London-bound – or bound to London – there is a smaller-scale alternative in the form of the Camden Fringe, which comes to a close on August 25th after a tight programme of events throughout the month. The programme, which is in its eighth year, takes place across sixteen venues around Camden and Covent Garden. With a similar ethos to the early Edinburgh Fringe, the shows are nearly all performed by unknown actors tackling untried material. This gives plenty of room to explore ideas and concepts in new ways but – as with any fringe festival – the results are uneven in places.
One such example is the Brighton-based group, Witness Theatre, who offer an intriguing premise in their short production, Window, staged last week at Covent Garden’s Tristan Bates Theatre. Developed from an award-winning short screenplay of the same name, the show is billed as a “multimedia theatrical thriller” dissecting our relationship with the internet. The show was funded partly through crowd-funding, a modern exemplar of the internet as an instrument for artistic solidarity – but, ironically, the show itself does little to suggest that technology will bring us closer together.
A one-woman performance, the show is focused on Alice and her growing obsession with the internet and her online life. Ostensibly a look at what technology and social media is doing to our relationships, the show has a dystopian feel as loops of video and sound haunt Alice. However, while the questions it raises are interesting, it often fails to dig much deeper than the surface. The multimedia dimension is a mixed bag, with elements of dance, monologue, poetry, video projection and audio playback thrown together without any clear sense or reason.
The strongest parts by far are the semi-confessional monologues delivered by the performer, Witness Theatre producer Hannah Jarman. In these sections she chronicles the day she lost her imaginary friend, her later discovery of the internet when she was eleven years old and, finally, her withdrawal from the world as she becomes obsessed with her online personae. The prevailing themes – isolation, imaginary friendships, fake relationships, the disappearance of those we love – are all strong and are all touched on at one point or another in the short performance; however, none of them are given sufficient space to grab the audience’s attention.
The parallel between a child’s imaginary friend and our own imaginary online personae is a case in point: it is an intriguing connection, and raises questions about how far this advanced technology serves only to infantilise us. However, as with other themes encountered, it is simply not explored in sufficient depth. Instead, the production switches backwards and forwards between pre-recorded projections, pseudo-dance pieces and live delivery, creating a confusing amalgam.
This mixed format may be an attempt to mirror the limited attention spans of the modern audience, but without the interactivity of the internet there is not the same response. While your average internet user may flick between web pages, music and YouTube clips at whim, it is a fundamentally different experience to watching a scripted performance where there remains a challenge in creating a coherent narrative.
While in some shows the ability to spark a thousand unanswered questions can make the piece resonate more strongly, the lack of coherence in this case creates something of a barrier to enjoyment. As a solo piece, there is not the scope to create the broad spectacle which might otherwise have carried some of the non-spoken segments.
Nonetheless, this remains an intriguing performance, not least because it tackles material that is normally the preserve of newspaper opinion columns and turns it into a living, breathing piece of theatre. While this production may not challenge the established theatres down the road in Covent Garden, it points a light on the issues that might one day unseat them, as the technology to which we devote ourselves drives us to retreat further and further into our online shells.
Luke D. Williams as Papageno in Ryedale Festival Opera’s The Magic Flute, part of the Arcola Theatre’s Grimeborn Festival. Photo courtesy of Kevin Wilson PR.
While Grimeborn may take its name from the more established opera festival at Glyndebourne, it is unlikely that it shares many of its visitors. With none of the pomp of is south coast namesake, this short programme of events in East London’s Arcola Theatre has taken a more experimental, tongue-in-cheek approach, bringing opera to the streets.
The Arcola may have recently completed a renovation but the space remains obstinately bare and simple. The main stage is not much of a stage at all – more a small floor space surrounded on three sides by raised seating, supported by scaffolding poles. A Dalstonesque theatron, the exposed brick and scaffold creates a space designed for chamber productions and up-close theatre as opposed to symphonic compositions viewed from the gods.
For the audience this means that the performers’ every action is up close and personal. The fourth wall is largely forgotten; at times, the performers enter the stage via the same door that the audience used to take their seats. Encompassing a range of performances including experimental vocal compositions, multimedia drama and low-key productions of established operas, the tone is intimate rather than bombastic.
The performances on the bill for this year’s festival take advantage of this, playing up the audience connection and intimacy of the space when virtuosity or spectacle are not attainable. The result is a charming and exploratory programme of events showcasing an art that might commonly be dismissed as the preserve of the moneyed and privileged.
Near the start of this year’s festival, Exquisite Corpses (August 1) took in pieces from six living composers – Mark Applebaum, Anthony Braxton, George Chambers, Pauline Oliveros, Michael Parsons, and Lauren Redhead – to explore graphic and open forms of notation, relying exclusively on the human body for instrumentation.
The piece was presented by the Vocal Constructivists, who take their name from the Soviet design movement famed for its modernist experimentation and geometric abstract forms. In a similar fashion, the company’s approach to sound is more about pulling apart the listeners’ preconceived ideas than constructing a coherent narrative. Formed in 1993, the group has developed a decidedly distinctive style: while at times dissonant tones and lack of melody may distance the audience, the performance is never less than lively.
Each piece is more than a mere recital; it encompasses idiosyncratic notation, dance, video projection and a bewildering collection of sounds. The group conjures a constantly moving floor of noises – lip pops, tongue clicks, finger snaps, flutter lips, white noise, rapidly changing vowels, singing through clenched teeth, percussive envelopes, humming and ring-modulation – all bubble from the mouths of the performers as they weave amongst each other.
The repertoire of this fifteen-strong group is linked primarily by a refusal to enact traditional musical norms. In the rare occasions where a sustained rhythm or melody threatens to appear, the group subvert expectations to keep the listener guessing. Where words appear they are fractured, turned into their component syllables and refracted through the vocal chords of the performers. A line in the piece Nevrazumitelny by Michael Parsons reads ‘working reworking the rock’, and there is a sense that the various clicks and percussive sounds are the outward signs of the performers working and reworking their own aural bedrock.
From the very start the notation is centre stage: geometrical and representational shapes created specifically for some of the group’s pieces are projected as they vocalize, a kind of musical Malevich. To the outsider these shapes, resembling obtuse graffiti tags, at first appear to have no meaning – but as the performance progresses there is an evident, if nebulous, connection with the sounds that are being produced.
For those seeking more melodious recitation, Mozart’s The Magic Flute (August 7-10) presented a well-travelled option. Since its premiere in 1791, it has consistently been amongst the most frequently performed operas worldwide. This version, transferred to London after a sell-out run at the Ryedale Opera Festival, wisely chooses not to outperform it antecedents but instead presents a stripped-down, rough-and-ready version.
Working from an English translation of Schikaneder’s original German libretto, the aim of the production is clearly accessibility and in this the performance plays to the strengths of the space. The story – a light frothy fairytale following the tribulations of young prince Tamino as he uses his magic flute to pursue his love Pamina – remains as ever subsidiary to the music.
Relying on the humour of the piece and the directness of the story, the performances do not bear close scrutiny – but neither do they ask for it. With a minimal set and sparse orchestra, the cast are engaging if not virtuoso and the close proximity to the audience throughout creates a warmth that is harder to conjure on more palatial stages. Just as opera presents a marriage of music and drama, the connection with the audience remains the key to these performances and to the continued success of Grimeborn.
The Grimeborn Festival continues at the Arcola Theatre until August 31. See the theatre website for more information.
Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan in conversation at 92 Street Y cultural centre in Manhattan. Photo courtesy of Nancy Crampton.
On Monday evening the heart of literary London was transplanted to New York. At 92nd Street Y – a cultural and community centre on the Upper East Side – Salman Rushdie played compere to Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, who read passages from their latest novels, Lionel Asbo (2012) and Sweet Tooth (2012), and took questions from the audience. For Amis: “Has moving to Brooklyn altered your writing?” For McEwan: “How has your approach to romance changed since, on your first night at university, you introduced yourself to a girl by asking if she’d f**k you?” Their answers to come.
Sir Salman (top half dressed for dinner, bottom half for basketball) began the show self-mockingly, introducing this “rare occasion” on which “the triumvirate…the heads of the families” who were once charged with “dominating and distorting British fiction” were again to share a microphone.
The three men are emblems of 1970s and ’80s literary London, an epoch in miniature full of leonine upstarts taking shots at the ‘oldsters’. But like an exploding star they have dispersed and now – perhaps more coolly – light elsewhere. Rushdie moved to Manhattan in 2000 and Amis to Brooklyn in 2011, both prompting wounded prattle in the British press. “Since Martin and I have established our beachheads in New York,” said Rushdie, “Ian has to look after England on his own” – joking that the author had bought up most of Gloucestershire in order to do so.
A tribute to Christopher Hitchens (“an empty chair”) led to an explanation of a game Amis and Hitchens played in which ‘love’ in the titles of books, films or songs is swapped for ‘hysterical sex’. Thus, Hysterical Sex in the Time of Cholera. My contribution: Hysterical Sex Will Tear Us Apart. If only a novel had been written called Unrequited Love.
Introducing Amis, Rushdie compared him to P.G. Wodehouse (on whom, he added, no one would ever challenge the authority of The Hitch). For Rushdie, both Amis and Wodehouse created voices, each of which epitomise an instantly recognisable Englishness yet are never heard in the mouths of Englishmen. They are mimicries, rather, heightened into new vocabularies.
And so enter Martin Amis to rattling applause. He raised a palm: “Stop! In the Name of Hysterical Sex.”
He began by marking a difference between his native and adopted lands. “If your favourite writer – who also happened to be your long-lost brother – was reading in the next house along,” he rasped, “it would never even occur to you to go and stick your head around the door.” Americans, in contrast, “come and listen to things”.
And he quickly had the listeners laughing. The section he read from Lionel Asbo involved a dinner between Lionel and his five brothers – a racial salad of lowlifes named John, Paul, George, Ringo and Stephen. It could be useful for the population to be organised under Beatleine classifications, Amis suggested: “It might help with legal matters. For instance: ‘No, this is far too complicated a crime for a Ringo.’ He tilted his head. “My wife says I’m a Paul trying to be a John. What she doesn’t know is I’m secretly a George.”
Amis’s novel makes a circus of fatuous success, persistent sorrow and cigarette-stubbed tinned lager-grime. He argued that misery makes up the tradition, as “few writers write in white. It doesn’t show up on the page. The energy of Dickens is all in the villains and the bad stuff. The good characters are faceless”. The passage he chose described a child named Toilet, exploding silicone breasts and the consumption of forty-eight G&Ts. It is full of features.
However much of a treat it was to witness Amis read his own prose, it brought the true pleasure of live literary events into focus. I sat in row X, and watched the undefined shape of a man whose judgments have so often articulated a vague instinct of mine, and in whose writing life I have so often searched for dim parallels to my own. The tingle of disbelief on seeing the person with whom one has spent so much time in silent conversation, with whose voice one is so familiar that to encounter it in a vessel other than a book registers as a faint surprise: there is the real thrill.
Amis’s gravelly drawl has a reverberating weight which tends to induce admiring silences. It is a hard voice to follow. It was over to Ian.
“Though the Atlantic ocean now lies between us, the hysterical sex between us is undying.” Any fears departed.
McEwan snappily recited a skilful passage from Sweet Tooth. Rushdie had described McEwan as a great writer of first chapters (citing 1997’s Enduring Love) – a result, he suggested, of his early mastery of the short story. This passage demonstrated the same virtuosity. Serena Frome, an MI5 officer, reads a file containing a short story published by a possible recruit, McEwan’s challenge being to let the reader read over Serena’s shoulder. A tale of stalking and adultery, its performance was annotated by the audience’s startled whelps – none so excited as at the sudden mention of “mutant genitalia”.
During the questions McEwan confirmed that he’s no longer in the business of mild sexual harassment; the reply he received on that first night at university was: “Would you kindly f**k off?”. Amis, meanwhile, conjectured that it takes three years for a new way of life to “trickle down the spine” and present itself for fiction. “So maybe in a year,” he added, “I’ll have something to say about America.”
And would they change anything about their books? For Amis, “rewriting early novels is the depth of frivolity”; he will leave “the mess of the first four novels alone”. As for McEwan, “the commas in First Love, Last Rites… I thought it was jolly cunning to have commas instead of full stops”. Now, however, “it doesn’t look cunning at all”.
By the end, it was an unmistakable sense of fraternity that marked the evening. Their comradely wistfulness and celebration seemed to pile around them invisible memorabilia from the glory days of ’70s and ’80s London: plates at greasy spoons, literary magazines, precocious awards. The famous 1983 Granta photograph might have been strung up on the back wall. They became at times an evocation of the fairytale that, with phoney nostalgia, we trust they lived. That prime was almost about youth, about taking on the oldsters, and has become in the discussion of British fiction compartmentalised and even solidified into a period. Monday’s event, among the Upper East Side’s limousines and surely plastic primroses, raised its spectre. This is not to say that it was like some ‘legends’ exhibition football match or a Rolling Stones concert. Only that to see three of that period’s horsemen – the fourth saddle kept warm for Julian Barnes – was a peculiarly pensive retrospection, as if its tan still hung on their skin.
The Pickpocket
Photo by pheezy (copied from Flickr)
They have pickpockets on stage now. Maybe they always did but anyway he’s only just heard of them. Last night, through a quasi-instructional video on YouTube. Today, in the bus station, with the cold of the bench underneath him, he thinks maybe that could be where his career ends up. Thinks it’d be nice to be respected for this. Pleasant, even kind of life-affirming. Life-choice-affirming.
The Great Paul!
He imagines the poster. There’s an advertising hoarding on one of the walls by the travel information booth. In the future, perhaps they’ll advertise him and his travelling sleight-of-hand showcase in thoroughfares like this. Maybe they’ll walk around here and people will look at him in his top hat and tails and nod to each other and say, “This is where he started out.” Say “isn’t it good that he still remembers his roots.”
Thinks it’d probably be a different class of people in the audience, though. Especially if he got as far as Las Vegas. Oil barons and their fat rich wives or their skinny blonde daughters or bits-on-the-side. High-rolling businessmen. Gangsters, even. Rock stars, every now and again. Celine Dion, maybe. And even the ones who weren’t like that, the ones who were desperate and scuzzy and sat hunched at the slot machines 24/7, at least they’d usually be holding some kind of cash.
The people in this town, in this station, it’s barely worth checking their wallets, their purses. You can, of course, and sometimes you do, but most times their change is already in their hands for the bus-fare, or their bank cards are already too overdrawn to be any use. It’s best to watch them close for anything else they might be carrying, any accessories, and then to make your move.
That’s how he does it, anyway. If he ever gets up on stage, and if he gets to Las Vegas, or even just somewhere closer, like a small theatre in London’s West End, and if people come to interview him for a video they’ll put on YouTube, that’s what he’ll tell them. He won’t tell them everything, because in showbiz you’ve got to have some secrets, but he’ll say that mostly what he does is watch and make lists.
He’s doing it now. He’s always doing it, even underneath and around and inside other thoughts. He’s doing it as a man enters the station from the east entrance, wearing a grey suit and a white shirt but no tie. He’s doing it as a woman enters five steps and two people behind him, wearing a sleek, sensible jacket and finely-styled hair.
When he comes here, it’s people like these he hopes, but not openly, to have the good fortune to pick out from the crowd. Not openly, because he doesn’t want the thing jinxed, doesn’t want to draw a blank and have to filch something trifling from the regular dregs.
The woman has a small handbag on her right forearm, slightly away from her body; easier, in theory, to draw her eyes away from. But the catch, he worries, could be tricky to bypass if he tries to do so whilst walking. Nonetheless, there’s the shine of a bracelet exposed on her up tilted wrist.
The man looks more like a winner. Paul – The Great Paul – sizes him up from the sheen of his shoes to the no-nonsense close-crop of his hair; the C-shaped glimmer of his belt buckle roughly halfway between. He notes the slight bulge of the wallet in the man’s front left pocket, and the ring on his finger, and the wristwatch above. Makes his mind up to try for that side of the target.
Thought it won’t be quite as simple and straightforward as all that. Never is. The problem with a better class of mark is they’re usually sharp, well put-together, successful at whatever it is that they do. This man, he’ll need to get close to him on his right side before cutting across him at the last possible moment. Distract him, disturb his rhythm; make him step out the way to his right at the same time as he – The Great Paul – slips the watch from his wrist, or takes the wallet, but anyway disappears to his left, over to the bus-bay where he’ll have to wait at in order to make his way home.
Indecision is a bitch in this business, he knows, though, as he stands up and starts walking. He must choose now whether to go for the wallet or the watch. If he’s still not made the call by the time that they meet, the call won’t be worth making.
Time, he repeats, in his thoughts, in his head.
He’ll take the watch. It’s a tougher steal, but more satisfying for it. Plus, unless it carries a monogram it’ll be easier to shift and make use of than the man’s credit, debit or membership cards.
Edging into his line-of-sight, he notes another group of people stepping off a bus and advancing up the bay toward the main slipstream of foot-traffic, which stems from the east entrance and passes to one of the buses or heads all the way through to the other exit at the west. They’ll cause problems, perhaps, if he doesn’t beat them to the gate, but at the rate he’s going it shouldn’t be hard.
As he walks onwards, lifting his pace, he keeps watching the man, whilst trying to avoid making eye contact – something he wants to save until he’s in close. He does watch the man’s eyes, though. Watches where they watch, drawing out any hints of where the man might be heading. Hoping, but not openly, that he doesn’t turn off too soon.
Which he doesn’t.
But does instead stop to look up at the live timetable. And this means that, between them, they won’t beat the crowd.
In Las Vegas, if he gets there, he won’t have to. They’ll beat themselves at the card games and he’ll pick them off one by one.
He carries on walking, straight through the oncoming host, thinking that they’ll probably cover his presence, thinking they might actually become an advantage; thinking on his feet to ensure that the watch-theft stays viable. He’s buffeted between them slightly, and some rather ungenerous words come from a man his elbow accidentally brushes, but he makes it through to the other side relatively smoothly, relatively fast.
Only to find, when he gets there, that his target is missing.
Attempting to keep his flow going, he switches tack, glances round for the woman with the sleek jacket and the finely-styled hair.
But can’t find her either.
Despondent, he bustles through the slipstream towards the bay that he wants. Some days, on this patch, he does well, gets enough to last him a week or two or maybe a month. Others, he barely breaks even, barely snatches enough to cover his travel. Which isn’t massively expensive, for a return trip about 25 minutes each way.
Then there are these days and the last of the cheap beer in his fridge, and the Chinese takeaway cartons arranged by his feet like a scale model of some futuristic bio-dome city, and the self-doubt that is simply a wishing that the cheap beer wasn’t already gone.
Deflated, he sags onto another cold bench, but almost as soon as he does so, his transport arrives. Just about everyone else in this bay beats him to the punch, standing-up-wise, and gets in the queue ahead of him. Seeing this, he stays seated. Watches them at waist-level, eyeing their pockets, the pendulous swing of their handbags, their shopping. Watches them with the eyes of one whose appetite has waned; a child with a toothache, passing a sweetshop on the other side of the road.
When he finally joins it, the queue seems to go on forever and to be intent on taking that long to get where it’s headed. He puts his hands in his jacket pockets, plays with the rogue stick of chewing-gum he finds in the left one. Scrunches it so that it bursts the foil wrapper, and then balls it up between forefinger and thumb. It is the pocket he usually keeps his takings in. It is empty and boring and maddening without. Even more so with the queue at a standstill.
Do they have buses in Las Vegas? he thinks, but not openly, and even less openly hopes that they don’t.
Eventually, the queue becomes liquid, begins to make progress at a much faster pace, and he finds himself standing outside the automatic door, only three other people ahead of him.
Then two.
Then one.
He tells the driver his stop and the driver quotes him a price he already knows, and he extricates his fingers from the small globe of chewing-gum, minty fresh, and reaches them down to his left-side jeans pocket.
The man who bumped against him in the crowd, he thinks, as his fingers probe the empty cotton-lined pouch.
The bastard.
He grimaces at the driver, then turns and leaves the bus and comes back through the automatic doors and takes a seat again and watches.
If they ever do come to interview him, he thinks, this will be one of the secrets he keeps.
This walk was put together by Heiko Khoo, who runs the Karl Marx Walking Tour in Soho, London, a tour that gives a full introduction to Marx’s ideas, legacy and life in London. Find out more at their website.
You can follow this walk on our interactive Google Map below, or read about the places visited in the accompanying article. Nearest tube stations: Chalk Farm, Camden Town, Kentish Town West, Gospel Oak, Hampstead Heath.
View Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Camden, London in a larger map
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels transformed the world. Their ideas about economics, socialism and society changed the way we think forever, influencing everything from how we view history to how nations are governed. It’s a well-known London fact that Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery, but most of us don’t know much else about one of the world’s most famous German authors’ time in London. Our walk around his old haunts in Camden will take you through Marx’s years here, his relationship with his lifelong friend and financial supporter Friedrich Engels, his greatest writing, and his sad death.
Marx came to London in 1849, exiled from his native Germany and from France as a political threat. He remained here for the rest of his life, learning English so that he could write in for English language newspapers, sometimes living in extreme poverty (only three of his seven children survived into adulthood). He was largely supported by his friend Engels. The headquarters of the Communist League also moved to London, and the city became an international centre of the socialist movement.
Marx was from a middle class family. A writer of fiction as well as his best know philosophical works, Marx had studied in Bonn and Berlin, becoming involved in radical left-wing politics. He began to develop his theory that societies naturally go through a process of class struggle, a war between the owners and the workers, and that capitalism would be overthrown by socialism and then communism. He called for the working classes to fight to bring this about.
Marx and Engels met on the radical scene in Paris in 1843. Engels had already lived in England, working for his family business in Manchester, where he wandered the slums, researching his work The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844. It was this book that persuaded Marx that the working classes would be crucial in the final revolution that would bring about communism. The two would collaborate on The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
Engels moved with Marx to London, going back to work in Manchester in order to support himself and Marx, whom he saw as an important thinker. During their time in the city they wrote some of their most important works, and were both leading figures in the International socialist movement, putting them under scrutiny from the British authorities.
The Marx Family and Friedrich Engels, date unknown
1. Escaping Poverty: Marx at 36 Grafton Terrace (Formerly no. 9)
Click here for the location. Marx moved to London in 1849 after being exiled from France and Germany as a political thread. His first years in the city were plagued by dire poverty and squalor. In October 1856 the Marx household moved here, to Grafton Terrace near Chalk Farm, escaping the miseries of their former rooms in Dean Street, Soho, where three of their children had died. The move was financed by Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels, who had sold his share in a Manchester factory to fund their joint studies.
The new house had eight rooms, enabling the Marx children to entertain other children from the neighbourhood. Initially, their life was radically improved, but Marx was soon overspending the money he and his wife had inherited from his father, and was soon reduced to begging cash from Engels again. The exterior of building has an appropriate red door, and it remains little changed from when Marx lived there.
The leader of the German workers’ movement, Ferdinand Lassalle, stayed here in 1862 while he was visiting the International Exhibition. He engaged in profligate spending whilst Marx was completely broke, infuriating Marx.
Marx would trundle off from here, taking the omnibus to the British Museum, where he would spend hours in the reading room, researching and writing his great life’s work, Das Kapital.
2. Death of Marx: 44 Maitland Park Road
Click here for the location. The house is gone, but a plaque on a council flat marks the spot where the Marx family, now made up of Marx himself, his wife Jenny von Westphalen, his daughter Eleanor and their maid Helene Demuth, lived from March 1875, a smaller house than their previous address.
Marx was suffering from liver complaints, lung problems, and numerous minor but extremely uncomfortable ailments.
Jenny died on 2nd December 1881, but Marx was so ill himself that his doctor forbade him to attend the funeral.
Engels called on Marx at half past two in the afternoon on 14th March. He left Marx in his room for a few minutes, finding him dead on his return. Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery on 17th March 1883, his death going largely unnoticed. He was officially a “stateless person”, someone with no nationality, a with only a handful of mourners at his funeral. Engels said in his speech;
“On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep—but forever.”
A hundred years later, 37% of the world was living under governments ruling in Marx’s name. We will never know for certain, but as a man who believed that true social change is brought about by natural social development rather than the actions of “a handful of men”, it seems likely that these regimes would have horrified him.
3. New-found Prosperity: Location of 1 Modena Villas
Click here for the location. The Marx household moved here in March 1864, paying £65 a year in rent. Marx had inherited £820 from Willhelm Wolf, to whom he duly dedicated the first volume of Das Kapital, which was finally ready for publication in 1867 after more than 16 years struggle with the complexities of economics.
In his new-found prosperity, Marx wrote to his uncle Lion Philips claiming that he’d been successfully speculating on the stock market and made more than £400. This was indeed the family’s most prosperous period, when the children could entertain and life was good. It was also Marx’s most productive period in politics and publication.
Marx was hurled into hectic participation in political life when the socialist organisation First International was created in September 1864. Marx’s collaborators organized protests in Hyde Park in 1866, calling for the extension of the male franchise. The Paris Commune of 1871 made Marx the centre of political attention, and he was condemned as the Pope of Communism.
It was during his time here that his clash with the Anarchist leader Michael Bakunin came to a head.
4. The Good Life: Engels at 122 Regent’s Park Road
Friedrich Engels
Click here for the location. In 1870, Frederich Engels sold his share of his Manchester factory Ermen and Engels, overjoyed at finally giving up the “shitty business”. He made £12,500 from the sale, with which he moved to this house, also supporting the impoverished Marx family with the cash.
Karl Marx’s wife Jenny found the house for the Engels family, writing, “I have now found a house, which charms all of us because of its wonderful open situation. It is next to Primrose Hill, so all the front rooms have the finest and openest view and air. And round about, in the side streets, there are shops of all sorts, so your wife will be able to buy everything herself.”
It was in this house that Engels wrote his main works and ploughed his way through Marx’s illegible scribbles, producing volumes two and three of Das Kapital, as well as his own famous works, Anti-Duhring, Socialism Utopian and Scientific, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
It’s a five minute walk from here to the house Karl Marx and his family lived in at the time, a trip Engels would make daily. They loved to take long walks up to Hampstead Heath for picnics, with a compulsory stop at the Jack Straw’s Castle pub.
British police and foreign spies would observe the comings and goings at this strange house from the front of the pub opposite. Engels was relaxed about the attention. “The imbeciles evidently think we are manufacturing dynamite, when in reality we are discussing whisky.”
Engels loved the good life, entertaining deep into the night with large quantities of claret and champagne laid on. In 1878, he married Lizzy Burns on her deathbed in the house, the younger sister of his lifelong partner Mary, who had died in 1863.
After Marx died in 1883, Helene Demuth, Marx’s maid, moved worked for Engels. When she died, Sophie Kautsky, the estranged wife of the German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky moved in, much to the alarm of Eleanor Marx, who feared she was deliberately isolating Engels.
Engels became a leading figure in the new socialist organization Second International, created in 1889. It eventually included the German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. This house acted as both command centre and intellectual hub of the international Labour movement, with Engels becoming known as “The Grand Lama of the Regent’s Park Road”,
Visiting this house was a pilgrimage for young revolutionaries. All manner of socialist newspapers in many languages would arrive to be studied by Engels every day.
Soviet stamp featuring Engels
5. Engels’s Death: 41 Regents Park Road
Click here for the location. Engels moved to this house in 1894, but would only spend a year here before his death. He died in this house of cancer of the throat on August 5 1895. His last words were said to have included a confession that Helene Demuth’s son Freddy was Marx’s child, but this story has always been contested.
His body was taken to Woking Crematorium after being given a send-off at Waterloo Station by socialist delegations from all over Europe. A small group of friends and comrades, including Eleanor Marx, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky rowed out to sea near Eastbourne and scattered his ashes. Engels wanted no monument, statue or tombstone. In the years since his death, thousands of statues of Engels and Marx have been erected all over Eastern Europe, China and the Soviet Union.
Thanks to Heiko Khoo for the design and information for this walk. The Karl Marx Walking Tour in Soho, London gives a full introduction to Marx’s ideas, legacy and life in London. Find out more at their website.
Heading South: My Big Trip to Plumstead
There’s nothing like going to a new part of town to transform the city you know and love and have lived in your whole life. It becomes an urban dystopia, nightmared by some Hungarian expressionist whose psyche is fixated on conjuring the perfect alienating vision of Hell, just for you. Down south, London is “Thamesopolis” – its inhabitants monstrous. It was always somewhere to avoid, then my sister moved to Plumstead. “Don’t panic,” I thought. “Just never visit.”
But she decided to hold a vintage market in my neck of the woods (it was for charity, but that made no difference to the selfishness of the act). “You can pick up the stuff I’m going to flog from mine beforehand,” she texted, excited. “Stuff” meaning 20 to 30 sequined jackets, Tadashi jumpsuits, and “size 12” tutus that even a zero would have trouble zipping up.
Now, my best friend’s mullet-haired ex once drove to Mongolia, via Iran and Uzbekistan, in a one-litre Suzuki Swift (The Slo Rida) to raise money for orphans and falcons. As soon as I agreed to drive to my sister’s that sweet April day, I can honestly say my subconscious believed it was about to undergo a feat of the same magnitude. I just couldn’t imagine driving from Muswell Hill to Plumstead: it couldn’t be done, surely? Had ever such a feat been achieved?
My angst was not unfounded. I’d only had my license for a month and a car for a week. The license had been hard won, a long time in the making – 15 years, six instructors, and three tests no less. So, forgive me if I rushed out to Dagenham Motors to buy an almost-new Fiesta Edge before my license even hit the doormat. I called my new wheels Glinda, The Good Car of the North, and so far Glinda had only been on a few local jaunts (back home and to Brent Cross).
I drove to Tottenham Hale Retail Park and bought a Sat Nav and checked out the route to “Plummers” online. I set off in the late afternoon with plenty of time, Serena (the calm voice of TomTom) navigated me eastwards with aplomb. As I pushed Glinda into fifth I felt like a proper driver, zipping over flyovers, cruising through tunnels and only slowing down to a dangerous halt once. At the first major roundabout a white van reared up in my mirror, like a randy urban rhino, but I gave it the slip before it could mount me. A-roads turned into B-roads and I’d almost made it when I heard:
“Take ferry… Take ferry.”
Take ferry?
I cursed Serena, thinking it must be a mistake, a “Sat-Gaff”. I imagined Glinda and I rolling onto the deck of a tankard bound for Siberia, or worse, Calais, in a “Should’ve Gone To Specsavers” moment. It was too late to turn around, I was stuck in a queue of stationary traffic. I would shortly be boarding, according to Google, the Woolwich Ferry over the Thames.
As the ferry backed away from the dock I smiled, the five minutes it took to cross the river becoming a rare moment of joy, a taste of what seagulls must feel every day. The view was incredible, no wonder they caw so lustily: Canary wharf a molten obelisk in the pre-sunset light, the Thames a sea, freedom-bound. I felt proud of myself, and Glinda, for coming so far. What other adventures would we have? We could drive to Bruges to stock up on chocolate and lace, or Scotland to see Nessy. If we could make it to Plumstead, Glinda and I, we could do anything.
***
One advantage of living in Plumstead is that you can get a whole house for the price of a doormat pretty much anywhere else in the capital. My sister’s road is predominately Nepalese, which, as a white woman, made her arrival a bit of a novelty. The granny-in-residence used to lean over their shared fence to stare and smile at my sister as she did the garden or washed the dishes.
The house was in good nick when my sister bought it, and even nicer since she’d done it up in a style I’d describe as “sui generis”. Each chair, painting and stuffed raven was carefully chosen for its rarity and beauty.
I flopped myself down onto a bed and watched my sister label a rack of clothes ready to be put in Glinda. The windows were open, a sleepy sun painting the room yellow. I jumped up and pulled on one of the jumpsuits. The foot straps pleased me, but my saddlebags just couldn’t pull it off so I put it back on the rack. Despite being similar in many ways, our “Dalek walk” for one, in sartorial matters my sister and I are polar opposites. I wear the same jeans and grey top until they die, then replace them with another pair of jeans and grey top. Helen, however, is never knowingly underdressed. Many a family funeral has been enlivened by the sight of my sis, sitting in a pew like a merry widow, all stripper shoes and scarlet lips.
I recognised a dress on the rack as one my sister had worn to our mother’s retirement party. It was full length, and binding, something a mummy might wear to one of Osiris’s legendary balls, peplum and shoulder pads taking off at eternally staggering angles. “Why do you want to sell all these?” I said, running my eyes over the gems she’d Ebayed hard for.
“I can’t fit into them and, well, most of them are mutton dressed as lamb, now…” I lay back on the bed, letting her words sink in. I couldn’t help but feel sad for both of us: she was only thirty-five, seventeen months older than me. It was all going too quick.
“Hey,” I said. “Are we going for that curry?”
***
We were the only white-English in the curry place, so we’d have stuck out like a sore thumb even if my sister hadn’t been part of the group. I wasn’t helping matters in my tangerine jumper, something filched from a wash-basket when it turned cold. Helen’s boyfriend, Hamish, sat to my right. He was twenty-six and a local lad, a gardener who ploughed the allotment next to my sister’s.
A waiter took our order, my sister ordering a cold Kathmandu for herself and Hamish. My reflex was to order one, too, before remembering – I was a driver now. We’d taken the car even though The Danfe was only a couple of roads away, I wanted to give everyone a spin in Glin.
“Be careful,” my sister said as I neared the junction at the top of her road, “lot of African drivers round here.” If there’s one thing learned since passing my test is that driving turns you into a bigot. Shamefully, I believed Hasidic men were the worst drivers ever until a trip to Bradford, where my leftie-friend told me it was “Muslim drivers” I really had to watch out for.
When our food came it was, as my madras-loving ex would say, “as spicy as a rich-tea dunked in water.” I popped momos in my mouth one by one, trying to ignore the dimming light and the growing anxiety that I’d be driving home in the dark.
The waiter came to take our plates. “How was it? Okay?”
“It was nice, but not spicy enough,” my sister said with a smile. The waiter grinned.
“But you can’t eat spice.”
***
I made it back up north in one piece. I’d had to double back when I thought Glinda’s indicators had gone haywire, only for Hamish to point out they were just my hazards. Glinda started beeping frantically when she realised a seatbelt was undone, she wasn’t able to tell that my passenger was a bunch of frocks and not a child.
It was almost midnight when I pulled up on a double yellow close to mine, exhausted, but victorious, a few new fledge-stripes branded into my back. And what had I learned? That it’s humbling to be a tourist in your own town, to be taken down a peg or two, in restaurants, and at roundabouts because it’s a big, wide, city out there. Don’t be afraid.
Thanks to Sno Flo for her wonderful illustration, too.
Book Review: King of the Jungle by KS Silkwood
There is danger in KS Silkwood‘s King of the Jungle, the story of a misanthropic never-been artist working as a park-keeper who discovers vulnerability and rediscovers his humanity — namely, the temptation to descend into sub-Good Will Hunting soppiness – yet, Silkwood’s literary debut shrewdly dodges easy sentimentality. Instead Silkwood invites readers to join his hero as he tends to a stinking piss-soaked London park and monologues on hookers, homeless pals, junkies, officious councilmen and art. With perhaps some slight aspirations toward Irvine Welsh, Silkwood colours the unnamed London public garden and its regulars in vivid shades of excrement. To whit:
“I heard him splutter and wheeze and snot, and I knew then that he was okay. He stunk. Dry piss, wet piss, a sliver of diarrhea. The dribble of Special Brew vomit leaking from his nostrils. Ha! He’s all right!”
We learn that our correspondent, a thirty-something former painter whose friends and contemporaries have found success in the art world (the kind of people who are likely to use “creative” as a noun) has largely withdrawn from circulation in order to work as a custodian, a Gatsby to tramps and prostitutes. Not because he finds constance in his garden, but as a symbolic gesture, a parting shot to a community satisfied in mediocrity and the ordinary. Though largely unsaid, there is an underlying sense he believes that by choosing to be the man who collects cans and scrapes alcoholics off benches he is deliberately robbing the nation of a generational talent — a delusion common to recent graduates, but unseemly for an individual careening towards forty.
“He’s scared. He’s scared of life outside this garden. The streets are alive with threat for Conran, and the only way he can cope with it is to be shit-faced. Or engage in aggressive begging outside the Post Office, the Tube station, or anywhere else he hasn’t been ASBO’d yet.”
The novel’s pleasing episodic staccato skips from incident to incident, cleverly cutting in such park-related traumas as a coterie of hobos who stagger from gate to bin to bush to underbrush, alongside London art parties, where a coterie of chancers stagger from bar to street to brawl to a double-bed in the suburbs. Silkwood strikes a neat balance in his movement between these worlds, producing a hugely entertaining and very funny counterpoint that excoriates both lifestyles.
So engaging is the prose that you’ll forgive the pacing of the novel, where the material plot appears in fragments over the first half and is only really explored in earnest towards the very end. King is far more successful when playing to its strengths — vignettes and character study — than when it half-heartedly connects these back to romantic entanglements. Happily, this does not detract from the overall effect of Silkwood’s sort-of polemic, wherein he lays into the London arts scene with the kind of vicious contempt usually reserved for investment bankers. An ideal Father’s Day gift if you’re on difficult terms with your father.
“Just look at this. I really can’t be bothered with the work on show. It’s so nondescript and banal, it’s merged with the white of the walls; and that’s not a good thing, you know, not like Rauschenberg or something. Let’s have a look at these lesbians instead.”
King of the Jungle by KS Silkwood will be published 30 May 2013.
Review: The Great Gatsby Pop-Up bar, Harrods
When F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, it was the beginning of what he called the “Jazz Age” – the boozey, twinkling fun-times somewhere in between the first world war and the Wall Street crash. It was an age of wild parties and sexy music that, during these endlessly depressing times, seem like a distant fantasy. Perhaps that’s why Baz Luhrmann’s new film adaption, released this week, has been so highly anticipated, and by anticipated, I mean piggy-backed, and by piggy-backed, I mean marketing teams across the country have ridden that piggy until it has nothing left but bleeding stumps.
Last week saw the opening of The Great Gatsby Pop-Up in the Harrods Tasting Room promising, because one film reference simply isn’t enough, cocktails and “all that jazz”. While I can confirm they weren’t lying on that front, there were definitely cocktails (so many cocktails) and also jazz, it takes a little more imagination to see exactly what all the pomp has to do with The Great Gatsby.
It’s the latest in a wave of themed events that have engulfed the capital over the past few weeks including everything from prohibition parties, swing dances and even a Great Gastby ballet. Now don’t get me wrong, I jump at the chance to dust of my flapper dress, I can Charleston with the best of them (in my head, at least), but when it’s reached the point that Harrods can whack up some laminated book-print wallpaper, throw in an MDF gramophone, some feathers and a few old French novels – seriously, what’s that all about? – and call it a Gatsby bar, it’s all gone a bit too far. Although, I would highly recommend the Elit by Stolichnaya Martini (vodka, vermouth, elderflower liquor and orange bitters), it’s so perfumed and zesty.
While Fitzgerald’s intended message may have been a cautionary one, a tale of change and what happens to those who resist it, it’s the glitz and glamour that really get people going. Thanks to those chaps in marketing, the story, in a sort of Gatsbian irony, seems to have become about little else. The excesses of the rich, the American Dream and all the truly timely and important Gatsby themes have paled into insignificance, no match, it would seem, for glass beads and champagne parties.
Let’s face it though, when times are bad we do love to play dress-ups. Gatsby mania, no matter how tenuous the connection, is here to stay, for a while at least. But hey, if the 2020s are even half as cocktail-fuelled as the pretend 1920s, we’re set for some good times ahead.
Read our review of The Great Gatsby at Wilton’s Music Hall.
One Thing and Then Another
Photo by Ben Seidelman (copied from Flickr)
He was waiting for something, anything really, to happen. London owed him that much. But anything, like something, is usually more specific than it at first seems. Experience was the word he used to describe this vague anything to himself. He often named things, which either already came with names or needed to be given them. The young man didn’t think he was doing anything like this, quite the opposite in fact – he thought himself permeable and flexible as a leaf floating on the wind.
Last time he had a girl in his room she stared out of the window at the autumn leaves while he slept on her shoulder. She felt happy to have what she deemed a beautiful man resting on her naked body, though physically she was rather uncomfortable. In lying on her back to accommodate his head and curled body she was suffering a slight deadening of her left arm – the one on whose shoulder he was sleeping, and her lower back hurt on account of it being unsupported on his cheap fold out bed. Plus she needed to pee and she didn’t want to disturb him. She didn’t know where the bathroom was in the large house he shared with four people she’d never met and she wasn’t totally sure where her clothes were. She satisfied herself temporarily by observing the patterns made by the orange-yellow leaves in the trees outside. She really did love this time of year.
She was the third girl he’d had in his bed in as many weeks. Both he and his housemates wondered how he did it. They didn’t slap him on the back and congratulate him though, they were more likely to have hushed conversations in the kitchen about whether he was “really happy”, desperately lonely, horribly confused etc. Yet, when they finished their cups of tea and coffee and went on with their days they would suffer fleeting moments of jealousy – he was just having so many … experiences. They too had encounters, relationships even (one was in a Very Serious one which gave her, in turns, a deep sense of emotional security and a deep sense of frustrated desire), but no one had had even half as many experiences as him.
The boy and girl had met the previous night at the closing down party of a London club popular with arts graduates aspiring to become hipsters and hipsters aspiring to become “creatives”. The club held the same closing down party every month – it seemed the revenue generated from each party was enough to save the club from ever actually having to close down. Every month the party was packed and every month there was a long queue out the door. Everyone wanted to say they’d been there but history never seemed to happen, so the present never seemed relevant and so on. The space was big and cavernous, under some railway arches with plenty of room to get lost, and although it liked to pretend to have the air of a renegade underground dive bar it was actually a tightly managed, centrally located, well-known and respected venue whose listings appeared in all the mainstream newspapers and magazines. The bar staff looked like the customers and almost everyone (except the bouncers) was white, or close enough.
She had noticed him dancing enthusiastically to a band from whom she could sense only posturing and desperation, though the crowd seemed genuinely enthused or at least extremely high. I’m missing the point again, the girl thought. But there were only so many pseudo-psychadelic free folk bands composed of white boys from the home counties wearing baseball caps and singing about nothing in fake American accents she could take. This band’s name was suspiciously fitting to the zeitgeist – obscure, playful, long – and alluding in equal parts to a dangerously de-contextualised Native American aesthetic and to the rituals and customs of ancient English religious sects – Druids, Pagans etc. They had songs called things like Rite On and suffice to say they were hugely popular on the almost-underground London music scene.
Despite the bad faith implied in the boy’s dancing to music deemed culturally bankrupt by the girl, she hung around. Because he was, well … so cute, and this gave her a kind of energy, a simple good thing not to be ignored. Getting him to notice her was easy, she was open and kind, friendly and present. She existed in her body in a precise and fluid way – and, as they say, one thing led to another, or rather, the other.
It had worked so well that instead of waking up alone in his miserable fold out bed, he was waking up on the (admittedly slightly too bony) shoulder of a not at all bad looking girl who was willingly still in his bed on a Saturday afternoon. Things were happening! He smiled and opened his eyes. Well, he thought, this is how love affairs begin. These things would eventually all add up, amount to something and show him what he really wanted and needed and he would finally know. She smiled back, assuming he was smiling at her specific her-ness, which in a way he was, but he was also smiling at the situation as a whole.
He was also smiling at the stillness. Neither of them had said anything yet, no kisses had been exchanged. He hoped again that one day everything would be still. That one day everything he had done and thought and felt would align into a perfect life into which he could, as if by chance, but really as the result of many carefully made, tiny decisions, step into. He imagined it appearing like a castle over a hill. After all, he thought, he would have earned it. Therefore every decision was vital, because every decision might be the wrong one, the one that could send him down the wrong path; and it may be something so tiny, so irredeemably minute that he could never retrace his steps, find the flaw and correct it. It was therefore impossible for him to decide anything until he had had plenty of experience. The point of said experience was to one day gather it all up into a pile, and, once the pile was big enough, to look at it and extract from it a few nuggets of truth. It is fair to say, he would deduce, that I am one way not the other. Based on past experience, he would muse, I think it’s best for me to take this course of action and not that.
Doubt was the enemy. And experience would shore him up against it. Having sampled as many ice cream flavours as possible in a given period of time he could finally say without a doubt that mint choc chip was his favourite and he would always know what to look for. This would make him feel happy and confident in ice cream parlours and freezer sections. Experience would be his guide, something which defined limits and marked out needs. Then he would finally know what he was and what he wanted.
She felt no need to speak. She stroked his neck. This irritated him. She remembered his name though felt nothing about it. Her feet were cold so she pulled the corner of the duvet over them, this shifted him slightly and he was irritated again. He had been so comfortable a moment ago. Why did she have to do that? She said something about the colour of the leaves but it was too soon and he did not want to hear her voice and he was annoyed again. But he had just been smiling. He smiled again just to try it and this made her say something else about the leaves and he wished she would be quiet. She suggested they get up and go for breakfast but he was unsure so she went alone, leaving her number, though not really sure why. He was deciding about her; he didn’t like this type of girl. When she left he felt another step closer to knowing what type of girl he really wanted, but even if he met her now he couldn’t be sure because he still hadn’t had enough experience. He would have to go out and get some more.
At a cafe she ordered the biggest breakfast special she could find: two poached eggs, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, sausages, bacon, two hash browns and two bits of toast. Plus two cups of tea, orange juice and a glass of water. For some reason she always wanted chocolate after a fry up so after leaving she bought some and ate it in the park, dipping it in her coffee to ever so slightly melt it and get it to the texture she deemed most perfect. She smoked two cigarettes with the end of her coffee, measuring the drags against the sips, each balancing out and complementing the other.
It was her absolute favourite kind of weather, cold and bright with trees full of wild neon leaves that seemed so unnatural, but were exactly nature taking its ridiculous course. People’s cheeks were round and pink, their eyes were nothing and everything, dogs barked ambiently. Children reacted to each other and to their surroundings in simple immediate ways; they reached out to touch and try. The roofs pointed up and sunlight flashed against opening windows. People were in their various states of misery and joy, boredom and lust and she felt happy to be among them. For a while, she tried to read her book but eventually submitted to the happy distractions of birds and people and kites.
Between Myth and History: An Interview with Travis Elborough
In 1968, at the height of America’s fascination with the Swinging Sixties, perhaps the most bizarre event in the history of the “special relationship” took place: the sale of London Bridge to an eccentric Missourian entrepreneur. Eager to secure an attraction to put his hometown, Lake Havasu City, on the map and capitalise on the growing US fascination with England, Robert P. McCullouch shipped the 130-year-old bridge some 3000 miles to the middle of the Mohave desert. In London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing, (Jonathan Cape, Feb 2013) Travis Elborough unpicks the myth surrounding the transaction.
By way of exploring how the sale came about, Elborough’s fourth book delivers a partial history of London, and a run-down on Anglo-American relations. It’s a grand scope, and Elborough explains that his fascination with the story began in childhood. “When we learnt the nursery rhyme about the bridge at school our teacher made a remark about it being sold to America, and my interest was piqued at a young age. When researching my book The Bus We Loved, I discovered a Routemaster had been shipped to the States, and stood at the foot of the bridge serving as an ice cream parlour, which got me thinking about the whole story again.”
Once he began to delve into the research, Elborough was thrilled at the bizarre characters which emerged, particularly that of Robert P. McCullouch. “He has no contemporary counterpoint. He was a pre-venture capitalist businessman, driven not by money, but a very distinct and wild form of bravado. He spent years working on an ill-fated ‘gyroplane’ (a hybrid combination of a helicopter and aeroplane). He was eccentric, almost to the level of a Bond villain, although with more benign intentions.”
In the course of researching the book, Elborough visited McCullough’s Lake Havasu City, which he found a distinctly surreal experience. “You drive across Route 95, with the Wimpole mountains in the distance. In this barren landscape is a man-made lake, which looks in that setting a lot like a mirage. And then you see the bridge, which is actually quite elegant in these surroundings. In the extreme, dry heat, the sun goes down very fast, and the bridge reflects the sunlight like a light bulb. What’s strange to see is that it still has original etchings, such as graffiti and people’s army numbers scratched into the surface, and it still has soot clinging to it; it wears its scars.”
The book is dotted with highly evocative references to sounds and songs; from the clangs of iron work as the bridge is being built, to the universally-known nursery rhyme. Having written a book about collecting records (Long Player Goodbye), Elborough notes that whilst music is a personal obsession, the aural references did seem integral to the tale. “It did feel like the story was a very sonorous one. The sale of the bridge in fact inspired a number of pop songs, written by the likes of Spectrum and Bread. I’m not sure what sort of songs the architecture of today’s London Bridge would inspire. Maybe there’s a Kraftwerk number in there.”
Travis Elborough
The strong and consistent allure that bridges hold over artists is a recurring theme in the book, and one that Elborough attributes to both concrete and metaphorical reasons. “Bridges are the earliest and simplest structures humans have created. During Medieval times they began to have a very strong religious significance, and I think the sheer amount of human endeavour that goes into their building adds to their spiritual meaning. Just look at how many people died during the 30 years building of London bridge, for example. They certainly do tap into something very profound within us all.”
While London Bridge in America is about a number of characters with lofty ambitions often too grandiose to be realised, Elborough doesn’t share their great schemes. “I’m not sure I have such vaulting ideas as someone like McCullouch. My ambition has always been to write books, ever since I was a child. I’m very fond of the book as a physical object, and I’ve been fortunate to have the chance to develop ideas and tell stories in long form, over two or three hundred pages. That’s something I’m very fond of, and I hope to have the opportunity to continue to do so.”
London Bridge in America is published by Jonathan Cape and available now.
Lily
We walked across the street to the park. Some of our number dropped back, heading to the pub. They claimed they were too manly to go any longer without beer, but there was a wariness in their actions, a fear that what lay ahead was too strong for their blood.
The whole day had been like that. In clusters they dropped, like falling fruit, making their excuses and leaving. In this way I became a friend among strangers, laughing loudly, demonstrative in my behaviour, vocal, open, engaged in this for the long haul, staying the course. To what end, I didn’t know; something like seeing this thing through, following the path of least resistance, or heading towards a goal that I told myself was nameless.
Her name, in fact, was Lily. She was a wouldn’t-it-be-nice rather than an earnest aim. I didn’t want to set myself up for a fall. She wasn’t beautiful, but quite pretty, a little plump, neon bracelets and a denim satchel. The other girl was better-looking, a carefree black girl called Karen, blue jeans and shapely, her curves accentuated by her clothes. Maybe Lily drew my eye because she seemed more attainable, but I think it’s because she was the ringleader, the spirit of fire, the one who took us from place to place, from task to task, from drink to drink and drug to drug. Whatever it was, this psychological space she led us all to share, it was an interesting place to be.
We had walked quite far into the park now, away from the sound of traffic, and I noticed the strangers, new recruits, drummed up from somewhere to make up the numbers. Of the originals, only five remained; myself, Lily, Karen and two men, an Asian medical student and one whose name and face I can’t remember.
We stopped, because Lily had stopped. People were pairing off, and the student and I looked at each other with unspoken questions. What is this? Should we go with each other? Which girl do you want? Would you mind if I went with Lily?
I settled these questions by walking directly towards her. She smiled at me as she bent down, placing her clockwork radio on a patch of grass free from the melting snow. The radio belted out an old swing tune and I took her in my arms. My left hand cradled the side of her waist and the other led the dance as she pressed close to me.
“Have you any idea how fucking hard it is to dance wearing wellies?” I said. Her easy laughter brought relief as we relaxed into each other. I kissed her neck, falling into it the way one falls into sleep. It tasted of cooling sweat and cheap perfume, and my pulse rose and I breathed the bitterness in, and I pulled her closer to me.
“We can do anything you want,” she breathed in my ear. “As long as we do it safe.”
Partly because I wanted it too, and partly because I felt like I should, I gave my assent. All was well except the distance between my thoughts and actions. I wished I was more in the moment, no reflexivity, no doubt. I had got what I wanted though. I imagined us all from above, pretty young things in ballroom couples, holding each other in the song and the slush.
Soon afterwards I lay on her bed, watching her undress, thinking to myself this could only happen in London, she could only happen in London. We negotiated boundaries between polite and sexy, between love and lust, between the sensual and the carnal, between our red-glowing drives and our hesitant minds, between who we were and who we should be, between fear of it ending and the rules of casual sex, between passion and nonchalance, between each other and inside ourselves. Fucking, clumsily, like dancing in wellies.
Novel: Clay by Melissa Harrison
What are the borders between the urban and the rural? Between consumerism and conservationism? Between innocence and experience? These are some of the questions concerning Melissa Harrison’s debut novel Clay. In it, a disparate trio are both brought together and separated by their sense of isolation from, and curiosity about, the natural world.
We begin with a prologue, a two-page paean to ‘The little wedge-shaped city park [that] was as unremarkable as a thousand other across the country… despite the changing seasons many of the people who people who lived near it barely even knew it was there’. This little wedge-shaped park is at the centre of the novel. It is an edgeland where Clay‘s characters move and gather, following plotlines that are less linear than seasonal. The chapters are named after pagan holy days, and there are brief eddies and flourishes, moments of growth and decay.
The story proper starts in media res, in a council flat. The police are interviewing eight-year old nature lover TC about his friendship with kind-hearted Polish immigrant Jozef. TC lives with his estranged mother and her half-decent boyfriend, Jamal, while Jozef works in a takeaway and longs for the farm he lost in Poland. He finds solace with TC and their innocent enjoyment of nature. These opening chapters are expositional and slow-moving, the city park quietly teaming, flourishing, growing, dying, living.
Then there’s Sophia, a seventy-eight old widow who lives opposite the wedge of city park. She exchanges letters with her granddaughter, the florally-named Daisy, who despite living less than half a mile away is spiritually and socially distanced from the acre of ‘grimy’ and ‘litter-blown’ common. Despite this, her connection with her grandmother leads her to enjoy the park, where she meets the working-class TC. The suggestion is that the common makes us communal, while the consumerism, ugliness and drab routine of modernity is fundamentally inauthentic.
A great deal of time is devoted to describing the changing of the seasons, the small majesties and intricate dealings that we would see if we only bothered to notice.
The brambles formed a dull, purplish carpet beneath the trees, but at the paths’ margins was the fresh green of the new season’s cow parsley and nettles, still just a few inches tall.
While Harrison is a skillful nature writer, there can be a hard-edged primness to her prose. She lacks the deftness needed to describe her characters in their urban dysphoria with as much fullness and life as she does her closely observed fauna. At times, Clay can lack contrast and drama, the impersonality of the third-person omniscient narrator failing to connect us with the characters.
For all the insistent loveliness of Harrison’s nature, there feels little at stake. We are told as much as shown about these characters. Even the bad guys, TC’s negligent mother and the brutish Denny, are lost in Harrison’s softness and lyricism. Her style doesn’t convey interiority with precision, and I noticed many plot holes. Where has TC’s father been throughout the novel? He simply turns back up at the end. Is the police’s evidence against Jozef credible? I didn’t feel it was. And, my biggest question: if we have lost our innocence and connection to the natural world, can a simple trip down to the local park really sort us all out?
Clay is Harrison’s lyrical attempt to make us notice. It is a modern fable designed to show us what happens when we lose our innocence, yet Harrison’s construction of her nature-loving characters have too palpable a design upon the reader. Having everybody getting off on nature all the time can be grating. I began to wonder whether a belief in the consolation of nature is actually just another bourgeois myth. Is there really more authenticity in the soul of the world, the hushed breathing of the acacias, the belief in our elemental bond with nature?
Nevertheless, despite the simplicities in Harrison’s character motivation and her overly simplistic philosophical distinctions between the layers of real and unreal, Clay does still – almost – connect us to the edgelands, to the urban pastoral, to the earth that made us.
Other People
Matthias Leupold, Im Kino / Teil II (In the Cinema / Part II), Berlin 1983
Of all the irritations of the cinema, other people are the worst. A modern cinema audience will chatter, eat, obscure the view, throw litter, snore and confidently make pronouncements on the plot to all and sundry. Friends will shush friends, then giggle. There are people who I know and love and have planned to murder for 90 painful minutes on a weekend, listening to them talk back to the characters on screen, self-censored by a half-whisper, which only goes to show they know that they are doing something forbidden. It’s true: you are.
And yet. On Monday evening I finished work at 6pm and walked along the streets between St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Smithfield Market. The City is a marvel for being both the oldest and the newest area of central London: steel and glass utility crammed improbably on top of medieval foundations, with plenty of alleys, ditches, old churches and guttural names to amplify the paradox. After reaching the old City walls, I climbed the stairs at Barbican tube station and skulked along the empty walkway which runs above Beech Street. The three mighty towers of the Barbican Estate, Le Corbusier’s bastard sons—Cromwell, Shakespeare and Lauderdale—loomed rigidly above me. I felt as though I was on a film set, about to get my head kicked in by a gang of thugs, or at least discover I was being followed by the Stasi.
Barbican’s Camera Cafe Image © Susana Sanroman
On this occasion I met two friends at the Barbican’s swish new cinema. When we arrived the foyer was empty. There were two girls in black shirts and skirts wearing colourful sashes with the word INFO written across them. The impressive set-up for screens 2 and 3 of the Barbican arts complex boasts everything people have come to expect from a contemporary art-house cinema: cake and coffee, bold signage, suggestively Swedish plastic furniture, digital projectors and pop-cultural references dotted ironically on the walls and in the toilets. We ate bowls of pasta in a nearby Italian café, then headed back for the £6 Monday evening screening. More people had by now arrived, of all ages and stripes. Nobody seemed entirely comfortable in the building. Its newness left us feeling a little exposed. Where should we stand? What do we do?
We had taken to our red leather seats in the polished auditorium and were waiting for the screen to boot up when one of my companions took out a bag of crunchy popcorn. Horror of horrors. Relax, I thought. This is an indie comedy starring mumblecore sensation Mark Duplass and Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza: popcorn is OK. Popcorn is good.
And it was. A large part of what makes going to the cinema memorable is the added awareness that comes with sharing your experience with others. Being squashed into a room alongside ten, fifty, one-hundred strangers, is part of the process. There is no such thing as silence when you watch a film like that. In the absence of noise, there lingers the airborne buzz of expectation, the deep breaths of catharsis. With comedy, the pleasure of laughing is partly down to recognising that the lives of others must in some sense resemble your own. People choose their favourite characters, tense up to varying degrees and ooze compassion to the point that the air feels thick before the final credits. I took a handful of popcorn. Though I still relish the freedom to walk into the cinema alone whenever the instinct grabs me, I am glad that, chances are, I won’t be in there on my own.
When the film was over we agreed that it was dumb in parts but pretty decent. A pleasant way to start the week. We said our goodbyes (sad ones, my friends are moving to California this week), and I tried to find a path through the Square Mile in search of Moorgate Station, being constantly re-routed by construction fences which created little lanes and crannies, where the City of the past has been flattened by the demands of—what? Law firms? Accountants? I have no idea.
I took the Northern line south, got off at Oval, stopped to read the day’s mantra on the notice board at the top of the escalator, and headed home. I live in one of the seemingly endless series of early 20th-century tower blocks which spread all over south-east London: erected in a previous period of planned social housing, spurred on by poverty and industrialisation, fifty years before the modernist explosion following the bombs of the Second World War. I walked down a back road past the goods-in entrance of a Tesco supermarket. It was almost midnight. Two men on bikes rode around me like sharks. One lent towards me, forcing me off the pavement onto the road. But there were no cars. Unlike the dead silence of the City, here there is the restless silence of a residential area. I could no longer pretend that I was walking through a film set.
Homegrown and Full of Potential: The Most Incredible Nothing
The Most Incredible Nothing, copyright Battersea Arts Centre 2012
Last time I visited Battersea Arts Centre, the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk had taken over the building and transformed it into a Gothic landscape for their thrilling take on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories (The Masque of the Red Death, 2007-8). That was five years ago, but I was still careful not to sit too close to the intake room before tonight’s show started: back then, it was a crypt, and I distinctly remember a dead woman rising from her grave and climbing up the stairs towards me! It just goes to show how versatile a space Battersea Arts Centre is – a real gift to both performers and audience. You never know what you’re going to get!
It was a stroke of luck that I was able to experience The Most Incredible Nothing, a one-off showcase for BAC’s Homegrown programme participants. I chanced upon the event listing while browsing the venue’s website and the narrative immediately roused my interest: an imagined future dystopia where stories are forbidden, and an underground movement to save the art of spinning tales. The description intriguingly evoked Ray Bradbury’s seminal novel Fahrenheit 451 and, being a writer with an academic interest in literary responses to restrictive societies, I was eager to see how the cast had explored this subject.
I found myself in the Council Chamber, a moderately-sized upstairs space, with no actors – and, to the consternation of some of the audience, no chairs – in sight. I was beginning to wonder if this was all some sort of elaborate prank when from a side door burst a pack of young people, all strangely dressed in black wigs and honking a military-style tune through kazoos. They promptly herded us into the middle of the room encircled the audience, standing over them on chairs, introducing themselves as the “Radical Storytelling Enterprise” and diving straight into a haunted house story complete with torches under chins and spooky sound effects. It was a startling beginning to a show full of surprises, which managed to skilfully navigate the fine line between quirky and irritating. It certainly grabbed our attention.
Having participated in amateur productions myself in the past, I am always keen to support them, but others may be more wary – there’s no guarantee of quality where the acting’s concerned, and a lack of funding means you can often be greeted by sets that are as wobbly as the performances. Shows like The Most Incredible Nothing hopefully will go some way to challenging that preconception. This group of 18-to-25 year olds had clearly put all their energy into the performance, and there wasn’t a weak link among the 20-or-so actors involved. This is no mean feat in a show that incorporated physical theatre set-pieces, dance routines and singing, and that was moving and amusing in equal measure. Props were deftly handled by the cast. For a segment in which the actors revealed “the last time I cried”, two buckets of water were placed at either end of the stage and the performers gamely drenched their faces after telling their stories, safe in the knowledge that a box of tissues was about to be handed round. At another point, a disco ball was attached to the lighting rig above our heads for a scene about a music festival, and there was also some imaginative use of torches which flickered on and off like fireflies. This created a magical atmosphere out of very little.
The Homegrown programme at Battersea Arts Centre is structured round a series of workshops run by resident artists and companies. A closer look at the most recent schedule reveals the various inspiring opportunities offered for young people. The October and November workshops dealt with multimedia performance, autobiography and issues of race and gender, among other topics, all of which were explored over the course of the evening during The Most Incredible Nothing, the sessions acting as a springboard for creating their own piece of theatre. With help from director Neil Callaghan, they explored their own experiences and how these could be turned into art. As we were told at the end of the show, it had all been put together “from nothing” in just 2 months, highlighting the dedication and effort of all involved.
It seems petty to pick holes in a performance of this sort, but I will confess to feeling at times that I was watching one big drama exercise – perhaps an inevitable result of the devising process – and I felt that only a few of the stories were allowed to speak for themselves, due to a tendency to illustrate events using dance and movement, which didn’t always work in the case of the most personal and touching narratives. One section saw the cast present a living, breathing African landscape, which – although it admirably tapped into the performers’ heritage – never truly became a story in its own right. At other times, however, the mixture of acting styles worked perfectly. A hilarious dance routine based on a shortbread recipe was a particular highlight.
During the final section (when each performer gave a short statement about how they would like to be remembered) the wigs that had been worn by the cast throughout the show were removed, emphasising the performers’ individual identities and showing the vast variety of ethnic backgrounds represented. It was a powerful moment that underlined the importance of access to the arts – a point reinforced by the BAC’s innovative “pay what you can” ticketing structure, which meant that anyone with a pound or more in their pocket could afford to see the show. This served as a guarantee that you’d get your money’s worth. The BAC is part of an encouraging trend to encourage access to theatre (in a similar vein to the National Theatre’s Entry Pass scheme for those under 25, and the Barclays Front Row tickets offered by the Donmar Warehouse). Shows like The Most Incredible Nothing breathe new life into theatre, and BAC Homegrown should be applauded for enabling this kind of performance to stand alongside the work of more established companies. More of this sort of thing, please – I for one will definitely be on the look-out for future Homegrown pieces.
To find out more about BAC Homegrown, visit www.bac.org.uk/homegrown
“Don’t you love farce?” The Magistrate as tragi-comic hero at the National Theatre
The Magistrate poster – copyright Gerald Scarfe and The National Theatre
For an abject lesson in how to stage a classic farce, you could do a lot worse than the National Theatre’s current production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Magistrate. It is the set that immediately captures your attention. Designed by Katrina Lindsay, a wooden city bursts out across the stage, topped with a bow and labelled with the play’s title in scrawled handwriting, creating a chaotic, higgledy-piggledy playground-like arena in which the cast are free to explore their outrageous characters and the wealth of ridiculous scrapes they get themselves into. Those expecting subtlety or a light touch will be sorely disappointed. With performances that match the scenery in garish vivacity, it was obvious that a great deal of effort had gone into every aspect of this delightfully silly production. The play works all the better for this, and sometimes it’s nice to have all the work done for you.
Controversy has arisen over the inclusion of original musical numbers in this production, particularly from Michael Billington in a review for the Guardian, who remarked that it indicates a lack of trust in the script. However, I felt the songs, performed for the most part by a riotous chorus of pinstriped pantaloons and ruffled dresses, are never permitted to intrude on the main plot. Despite the seeming similarities, The Magistrate differs from a full-blown musical, such as Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, because the songs don’t drive the action. Instead they simply reinforce points, whilst also providing a neat sideline in social commentary. This is particularly the case with my favourite of the songs, “The Mystery of the Age”, which deals with the role of women and the restrictions placed upon them in Victorian England. The songs also help to ease the transition from one elaborate set to another, along with the chorus members who frequently come close to toppling into the staging mechanism beneath the Olivier stage. This production certainly shows a much more inventive and effective use of chorus members than that in Alan Bennett’s People, simultaneously being performed downstairs in the Lyttelton. The chorus here is more of the Greek variety than anything else, foreshadowing the play’s events and popping up now and then to clarify and comment on what we in the audience see.
The Magistrate Chorus of Dandies – copyright Johan Persson, 2012
They are, fittingly, the first people we see on stage, introducing us to a world of double meanings and misinterpretation, warning of “the little lies that get you into trouble” and promising to reveal what goes on behind the “closed doors” of the Victorian middle-class. This song is reprised at the end of the first act, hammering home this message.
The blunt approach to subtext doesn’t stop there, as the audience is consistently reminded of the root cause for everyone’s confusion: a lie told by the magistrate’s wife Agatha about her age and, more humorously, her son’s. Jokes are mercilessly signposted and reiterated, and everyone has a catchphrase or physical tic as the basis of their characterisation. Somehow, committed performances from the entire cast prevent this endless repetition from becoming tiresome. I’m not ashamed to say I laughed throughout at the skilfully-delivered punchlines and reactions on display. Acclaimed American actor John Lithgow is the production’s big-name draw as the titular character. Equally of note is Olivier-winner Nancy Carroll, who seamlessly switches between dignified grace and a roar of indignance.
Lithgow’s anxious attempts to both avoid temptation and deal with the its consequences remind me strangely of Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman. A professional man trying to keep his family intact under immense pressure, the magistrate seemed almost a tragic hero, whose fatal flaws were very much in evidence when his stepson—McGuire’s sinisterly precocious Cis—runs rings around him, dragging him into no end of trouble. Mercifully, there is no time given for an examination of this potentially dark side in Pinero’s plot. The magistrate remains a tragi-comic hero, while the slapstick and colourful characters keep coming. Even the smallest roles are juicy caricatures. The cast appears to relish the over-the-top stereotypes and the make great use of the opportunities for physical comedy inherent in the script.
The women in the cast bustle across a series of storybook page scenarios (their movement enhanced by their skirts), teetering on a set that looks like it is about to fall in on itself at any moment, mirroring the unstable facades of the characters themselves. There are wonky pieces of furniture and crooked doors in abundance, all adding to a gleefully slanted take on Victorian London, and a sneaky (possibly inaccurate) Christmas tree to really pump up the festive cheer. All in all, The Magistrate is just the ticket for a night at the theatre around the holiday season—there was even a light dusting of snow to disguise the tape used to mark out the boundaries of the set. At the end, after a good old-fashioned knees-up from the cast, the curtain call is given over to a tongue-in-cheek song that warns us all never to become the sort of person who gets “pilloried in farces at the National.” I’ll do my best, but no promises . . .
The Magistrate is on at The National Theatre in London until 10 February. It will be broadcast to cinemas across the UK and around the world on 17 January at 7pm. Find your nearest venue.
The Return of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies and the Top Five Loose Women in Literature
Katy Darby is the author of The Unpierced Heart (originally titled The Whores’ Asylum), a historical novel featuring a home for ‘fallen women’ in 1880s Oxford. Here, she reviews a reissue of one of London’s more unusual tourist guides on eighteenth-century prostitutes, and rounds up her top five loose women in literature.
UK hardback (Random House)
Harris’s List was an annual directory and review of prostitutes, indispensable to the gentleman-about-town of the eighteenth century. It’s ostensibly by Covent Garden maitre’d ‘Pimp General Jack’ Harris, but in fact, although Harris allowed his name to be used, the real power behind the quill was an Irish linen-draper turned rake called Samuel Derrick. Hallie Rubenhold, the editor of this new edition, is a historian, scholar and novelist with a particular interest in the beau-monde of Georgian London, and she is clearly in love (or perhaps lust) with her subject. She has previously written a biography of Harris, and introduces this little volume with a brief but fascinating account of Derrick’s life.
Harris’s List was a phenomenal bestseller in its time (250,000 copies, all told, over 38 years) which made its creators rich—and it’s not hard to see why. The range in this list is extraordinary, though not geographically—London was far smaller then, and a large number of the ladies seem to have lived on Cavendish Square, just north of Oxford Circus. But the List, besides naming and shaming the “Poxed”, includes “Foreign Beauties” (one from the West Indies, one from Boston), “Red-Heads”, “Perversions” and the “Buxom”. There are “good-natured” girls and beautiful girls—lesbians and “birchers”, dominant women, six-footers, Welsh and Irish and Northern women, who have all come to London to make their fortune as “votaries of Venus”.
In this reprint of particularly salacious selections from the List of 1793 (plus a few bonus reviews from other editions—of women notable for their size, lustiness, perversions or appearance), every page is a saucy treasure. Derrick spends most of his time euphemistically eulogising the ladies of the town for their neatly-kept or capacious unmentionables (although he never omits to note “fine teeth”, “a nicely turned leg”, glossy hair, “love-sparkling eyes” and so forth), but always includes prices and caveats: this one is short, that one has a bad temper, another is avaricious, and several have a “keeper” who might show up inconveniently. The List is obviously a practical guide, but done with such charm, humour and skill that it’s delightful to flick through looking for the best or most outré descriptions of these long-dead doxies.
Though most of the women reviewed are in their teens or early twenties, the more mature prostitutes are not neglected, with “Ladies of Experience” aged up to 56, though the author notes, “We should not have introduced her here, but that on account of her long experience and extensive practice, we know that she must be particularly useful to elderly gentlemen, who are very nice (picky) in having their linen got up” (i.e. as to who can get them aroused). In addition to these sorts of observations, almost every description, whether of a paragraph or several pages, is introduced by a line or two of verse apt to the subject—a lovely touch, even when the girl in question is far from poetical.
The best way to convey a flavour of this beautifully produced, liberally illustrated and highly entertaining little stocking-filler is to quote some of the best bits. Resist these charmers if you can:
Miss Ric__son, 14 Titchfield Street: (Her heaving breast with rapture lies/And love her every wish supplies) “She is fond of the sport to excess, and, by her own account, has never yet been blessed with a satisfying meal of manhood.”
Miss Harris_n, New Moulton Street: (Let the present hour be mine) “A pompous heroic girl, without either wit or humour, but fancies herself clever without any person acquiescing with her whomsoever.”
Mrs. Will__ms, 17 Pit Street: (Fond she is and e’er will be/Of our good king’s new guineas) “This is a fine tall lady, about twenty-four, a very fine figure, just returned from Brighton, has been in dock to have her bottom cleaned and fresh coppered (cured of venereal disease) where she has washed away all the impurities of prostitution, and risen almost immaculate, like Venus, from the waves.”
But pity poor Mrs. H_rvey, of 6 Upper Newman Street, who at only 26 “has been so good a friend to the good old cause, that the number of travellers who have gone the path to the fountain of love have trodden the grass away.” Either that, or she has a shaven haven—which doesn’t seem to do her any harm: “This attracts a number of Votaries, whose curiosity leads them to examine those curious parts.”
Save your guineas, though (this seems to be the average price, though the charges range from five shillings to a whopping £10—forty times as much), for Miss J_nson, who hangs around the Dog and Duck in Willow Walk, and whose “dairy hills of delight are beautifully prominent, firm and elastic, the sable coloured grot below with its coral lipped janitor is just adapted to the sons of Venus.”
Spicy, sensual and sometimes rather sweet, Harris’s List is an intriguing glimpse into a long-lost world of Regency bucks and “wanton and enchanting nymphs”. These days a tenner won’t buy you the dizzy delights of Chelsea’s Miss S_wyn, the priciest lady on the lust-list, but this charming little book is an excellent substitute.
And if the List has whetted your appetite for a certain kind of company, never fear. Though the ladies of Harris’s have long ceased to ply their trade, fiction is on hand to supply the lack. Some of the novel’s most intriguing characters belong to the world’s oldest profession, and the women on the list below are just a few fantastic examples of the many loose leading ladies of literature:
Moll Flanders in Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1721)
The ever-cheery Moll doesn’t have the best start in life—she’s born in the notorious Newgate Prison to a criminal mother, and after a brief interlude with foster parents, it becomes clear that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Having gone into service, she is seduced by her young master, and this leads to five marriages (most adulterous, some bigamous, one incestuous), ten children, twelve years as a thief, and finally Newgate—just like her Mum. But Moll is far too clever and lucky to stay there, and the reader likes her too much for Defoe to kill her off (as it usually happens with quite a few other fallen women), so at the ripe old age of 63 she gets her happy ending. Aw.
And if you like Moll you’ll also have a ball with John Cleland’s erotic classic Fanny Hill, published 27 years later in 1748 and banned in Britain until the 1960s for its scenes of flagellation and sodomy.
Juliette in Juliette by the Marquis de Sade (1797)
A companion piece to de Sade’s more famous novella Justine (which tells the story of a virtuous girl who is abused physically, emotionally and sexually by pretty much everyone she comes across), Juliette is the tale of Justine’s less upright sister—an amoral nymphomaniac who delights in sex and crime, and profits handsomely from both. The subtitle of the book is “Vice Amply Rewarded”, which should give you a clue that Juliette, like Moll, is another loose woman whose story, atypically, ends well. This sexual picaresque is about as plotless as most pornography, so you wouldn’t read it for the literary quality, but, this being de Sade, there’s some interesting, if rather nihilistic, philosophical conversations in between the relentless shagging.
Nancy in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (1838)
Bill Sikes’s mistress Nancy is a classic example of the woman who is irresistibly drawn to the bad boy who makes her life hell, but hey, “as long as he needs me…” She’s the original tart with a heart—living a life of thievery, prostitution and criminality, but retaining her humanity and compassion nonetheless. She’s motherly and protective towards Oliver, and in the end it’s her efforts to help him which lead to her murder by a furious Bill, who’s mistakenly convinced she’s shopped him to the authorities.
Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
Thackeray’s classic satire is remarkable for many things, but most people remember it for its anti-heroine Becky. While she’s not strictly a courtesan, she is certainly a girl on the make who doesn’t mind flirting—and, it’s strongly hinted, sleeping—with rich and influential men in order to get ahead. Set at the time of the Napoleonic wars (1815 and after) Becky casts aside Georgian morality, such as it was, and pursues money and position as only a poor, low-born orphan can. Blessed with good looks, talent, charm, wit and brains, it’s amazing how far she gets—and how long she takes to come unstuck.
Romola Garai playing Sugar in the BBC2 TV miniseries
Sugar in The Crimson Petal & The White by Michel Faber (2002)
Sugar—no surname—is one of the most interesting and three-dimensional characters on this list, and possibly in all of modern historical fiction. Despite being flat-chested and ginger with a rare skin condition (icthyosis) she also manages to work as one of Victorian London’s most sought-after prostitutes, her specialism being… well, anything. She works her way up from Mrs. Castaway’s house of ill-repute by becoming the mistress of perfumier William Rackham—and eventually governess to his daughter. And then it all goes horribly wrong…
If all these women whet your appetite, you should also check out child transvestite Cherry Vanilla in J. T. Leroy’s Sarah, Tra La La in Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Also read about Elisabeth Rousset in Maupassant’s wonderful short story ‘Boule de Suif‘ (which is also her professional name, meaning ‘ball of fat’) and, for a more modern twist, discover the arch saucery of the original Belle de Jour blog/book by Brooke Magnanti. Enjoy!
Who are your favourite loose women in literature? Share in the comments below.
- This month in Litro #148 we explore the notion of what Going Home – means to us. Is it a familiar physical space? A refuge? A feeling? A state of mind? Or is home actually to be found in another human being – maybe your partner, your parents? How do you know when you have found it? Continue reading »
- Welcome to Litro #147 - the Space issue. In this issue we explore the world’s ever-evolving urban social landscape. We’ve got art, stories, essays, cartoons, interviews - all examining the ways in which individuals and groups carve out their own spaces, dare to take up space and make their built environment(s) distinctly their own. Continue reading »
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