Trailer for Paul Willetts' book 'Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms'

Here's a trailer for Paul Willetts' new book, 'Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms'. He's also written several other excellent books, including 'Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia', 'North Soho 999', and 'Members Only' (the biography of Paul Raymond).
http://www.paulwilletts.uk/2613837-watch-movie-trailer#0

From My Commonplace Book

"The man who cannot visualise a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot." - André Breton

Things I Miss #9

Until the 1980s I often used to see French people riding motorised bicycles - not mopeds but rather a normal bicycle fitted with a small engine. In every French film made between 1930 and 1970 the village priest is always shown riding one of these contraptions. Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot also rode one.

 

Overheard Conversation #9

In the street outside, someone talking loudly on their mobile phone:

"Yes, let's do that, you are a lovely man and he is in Russia now. Hello, nutter."

Random Memory #11

I once spent 3 months on the North Frisian island of Föhr (Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands takes place thereabouts). Lying on the beach watching German people fall off windsurfers while (through some fluke of the atmosphere) getting the BBC World Service on my Walkman and listening to an interview with Sunil Gavaskar. Hearing sonic booms from Danish F-16s. Talking to two rastas in Föhr's only nightclub, Erdbeerparadis. Realising the only three books in English on the hotel's bookshelves were 1984, a Pan anthology of tedious ghost stories, and a sumptuously bound copy of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Germans asking me, sternly, what I did all day and when I replied, "I'm writing poetry/a novel/a history of the Kwakiutl" suggesting I should walk around the perimeter of the island as it was only 82 km sq in size. Discussing bottle-screws with a Hobie Cat sailor. Days spent on very cold beaches, even in summer, reading Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson and David Goodis.

From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - H

HABERDASHER OF PRONOUNS. A schoolmaster.
To HANG AN ARSE. To hang back, to hesitate.
HANGMAN'S WAGES. Thirteen pence halfpenny; which, according to the vulgar tradition, was thus allotted: one shilling for the executioner, and three halfpence for the rope,—N. B. This refers to former times; the hangmen of the present day having, like other artificers, raised their prices. The true state of this matter is, that a Scottish mark was the fee allowed for an execution, and the value of that piece was settled by a proclamation of James I. at thirteen pence halfpenny.
HEARTY CHOAK. He will have a hearty choak and caper sauce for breakfast; i.e. he will be hanged.
HELL-BORN BABE. A lewd graceless youth, one naturally of a wicked disposition.
HERE AND THEREIAN. One who has no settled place of residence.
HIGH EATING. To eat skylarks in a garret.
HODMANDODS. Snails in their shells.
HOOK AND SNIVEY, WITH NIX THE BUFFER. This rig consists in feeding a man and a dog for nothing, and is carried on thus: Three men, one of who pretends to be sick and unable to eat, go to a public house: the two well men make a bargain with the landlord for their dinner, and when he is out of sight, feed their pretended sick companion and dog gratis.
HOP MERCHANT. A dancing master.
HOT STOMACH. He has so hot a stomach, that he burns all the clothes off his back; said of one who pawns his clothes to purchase liquor.
HUCKLE MY BUFF. Beer, egg, and brandy, made hot.
HUGOTONTHEONBIQUIFFINARIANS. A society existing in 1748.
HUM BOX. A pulpit.
HYP, or HIP. A mode of calling to one passing by. Hip, Michael, your head's on fire; a piece of vulgar wit to a red haired man.

Book Review - 'Operation Kronstadt' by Harry Ferguson

Operation Kronstadt by Harry Ferguson

As the recent unpleasantness in South Ossetia and the Ukraine shows, the Russian bear is never happier than when waving its claws and causing trouble. This excellent book recounts a little-known but similar period in Anglo-Russian relations.
 
By May 1919 the First World War was over and the “Red Terror” of the Bolsheviks had taken over as Britain’s biggest fear. The head of MI6, the wooden-legged Sir Mansfield Cumming, had a predicament: all his secret agents in Russia, save one, had been captured. The sole remaining agent, Paul Dukes, was cut off in Petrograd and needed to escape. Dukes was a 30-year-old concert pianist who had studied in St Petersburg, spoke fluent Russian, and was a master of disguise. Seldom more than a few steps (literally) from being captured by the Bolshevik secret service, the Cheka, Dukes managed not only to join the Red Army, the Communist Party, and the Petrograd Soviet, but even to penetrate the Cheka itself. The bloodthirsty Cheka, forerunner of the KGB and FSB, would often “interrogate” prisoners by scalping them alive, or feeding them feet-first into furnaces.
 
MI6 decided that the Royal Navy would help Dukes escape from Petrograd via the Gulf of Finland by using high-speed Coastal Motor Boats (CMBs or “skimmers”), as they were the only vessels fast enough to evade the Bolshevik gunners and “skim” over the minefields. Accordingly, Lieutenant Augustus “Gus” Agar and some like-minded chaps were smuggled into Finland with two CMBs, where they set up a secret base in a disused yacht club just across the Gulf from Kronstadt harbour. Kronstadt was, at the time, the most heavily defended harbour in the world, with fifteen coastal forts, and guns and minefields galore.
 
Although Dukes tried several times to rendezvous with Lieutenant Agar in the freezing waters of the Gulf, he was unsuccessful. He eventually escaped using a variety of disguises, via train and leaking rowing-boat through Latvia. On his return to Britain he was knighted for his spying, the only man in the annals of MI6 to achieve this distinction.
 
In the meantime the anti-Bolshevik White Russian garrison was trapped in one of the Gulf fortresses, Krasnaya Gorka, which was being shelled mercilessly by the Russian cruiser Oleg. The CMBs carried torpedoes and Lieutenant Agar asked for permission from London to attack the Oleg. Permission was refused but Lieutenant Agar decided to biff ahead anyway. On the night of 17^th June 1919, despite mechanical problems, his crew managed to fire one torpedo at the Oleg and sunk her. Lieutenant Agar was awarded an immediate Victoria Cross for his actions, though because the Russians put a price of £5,000 on his head he could not be publicly named and was always known as “the mystery VC”.
 
London then did a volte-face and decided a raid by seven CMBs into Kronstadt harbour itself would be a good idea. Against enormous odds, on 18^th August the attack was launched. Despite eight British sailors killed and nine captured, the CMBs managed to sink and damage three Russian cruisers. Two more VCs were awarded, and Lieutenant Agar received a DSO.
 
Harry Ferguson (apparently an ex-MI6 man himself) has researched the subject assiduously and has written a ripping yarn about these little-known exploits. Let us hope this book brings them to a wider audience.

(A version of this article first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

Neglected Author - Frederick Rolfe/Baron Corvo

"You call me mad, rash, incorrigible, proud, irreconcilable, deluded and all the rest," Frederick Rolfe once wrote to a critic. "But you must allow me to lead my life upon that higher and uncrowded plane where supernatural influences work unchecked... Have you not realised yet that it is not an ordinary, but an extraordinary man with whom you have to deal?"
 
Rolfe was indeed an extraordinary man. A self-styled baronet and priest, he was also, variously, a confidence trickster, pauper, schoolmaster, painter, pioneering photographer, blackmailer, and paedophile; and author of seven novels and various short stories. Rolfe’s vindictiveness and paranoia have become legendary, mainly through AJA Symon’s biography, The Quest for Corvo, and as the eponymous protagonist of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s roman a clef, The Unspeakable Skipton.
 
The son of a piano maker, Rolfe was born in 1860 into a Dissenting family. An early convert to Roman Catholicism, such was his religious ardour that at fourteen he had his breast tattooed with a cross.
 
His life became an obsessively fruitless quest to enter the priesthood. He was expelled from seminaries in England and Rome. Although the ostensible reason given for his expulsions were that he was spending too much time on poetry and painting, Rolfe had actually irritated the authorities by arguing violently with anyone who questioned his actions, and for his habit of running up numerous debts he had no hope of paying.
 
Although his hopes of entering the priesthood were at an end, he vowed to remain celibate for twenty years so he could be ready for the “call” if it ever came. It never did. He became convinced that all his hardships were the result of a Papist conspiracy against him. However, he did take to signing himself Fr. Rolfe - the abbreviation of Frederick being his way of suggesting he had a right to the traditional Catholic honorific, Father.
 
After the Rome debacle Rolfe settled in Hampshire, where he presented himself as Baron Corvo. According to him it was an honorary title bestowed upon him by the Duchess Sforza-Cesarini, a wealthy patron who had taken him in when he was homeless in Rome. He left Hampshire under a cloud of debt and fraud, and started afresh in Aberdeen. Within two months of securing a job as a photographer's assistant he was sacked, although he refused to accept his dismissal and had to be physically prevented from attending work by the police. After running up a huge bill at his lodgings he was eventually thrown out into the street in his pyjamas – when threatened with eviction Rolfe’s habit was to retire to bed and pretend it wasn’t happening.
 
Despite all this, Rolfe continued writing. He had adopted an arcane and idiosyncratic writing style, using archaic spelling designed to present an aesthetic “feel” to his work, and strewing his writing with foreign words. He wrote in green and heliotrope inks on sheets of paper and tacked them to his walls and then edited from there.
 
His most famous work is Hadrian VII, in which George Arthur Rose, an impoverished and oppressed writer, manages to be elected Pope – Rolfe’s greatest fantasy.
 
Rolfe spent the last five years of his troubled life in Venice. He applied for a job as a gondolier, but usually he relied on other people's generosity for his survival. In his last year, he somehow borrowed enough money to buy a dazzling gondola, draped in leopard and lynx skins, which he ostentatiously poled through the canals. Nevertheless, after a period of sleeping under tarpaulins on the canals, he died of "heart paralysis" on 25 October 1913 in a flat belonging to a friend.
 
His legacy is not only the myth of the man and his works, but also a medical condition known as Corvo's Syndrome - a quasi-delusional state in which an individual sees himself, not the incumbent, as the Pope of Rome.

(A version of this article first appeared in The Chap magazine.) 

Overheard Conversation #8

Woman in a restaurant to a waiter:

"I don't like avocado? But I still like avocado? So, can I have the avocado; but on the side? But not with the salad? So, the avocado salad, but without the avocado, but the avocado on the side?"

Things I Miss #8

In the early 1970s the news media reported a streaking epidemic, streaking being defined as running naked through a public place usually for a dare or as a prank. It appears to have started in the USA but quickly spread to the UK, so soon no major sporting event was complete without a streaker. Several cricket matches were enlivened by streakers, as was a 1974 England v France Rugby Union game when an iconic photograph was taken of the streaker, Michael O'Brien, with his genitals covered by a policeman's helmet. Another notable streaker was Erica Roe at Twickenham in 1982, and her name still resonates among rugby fans. A streaker interrupted the 46th Academy Awards in 1974, causing the host David Niven to remark,  "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?"

In 1974 a novelty song, "The Streak" by Ray Stevens, reached number one in the UK singles chart, with lyrics that included:

"He ain't crude, Boogity, Boogity
He ain't lewd, Boogity, Boogity
He's just in the mood to run in the nude

Oh, yes, they call him the Streak
Boogity, Boogity
He likes to turn the other cheek
Boogity, Boogity
He's always makin' the news
Wearin' just his tennis shoes
Guess you could call him unique."

From My Commonplace Book

"In the early 'eighties [1880s], while bangs and bustles were having their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the "dude" was invented: he wore trousers as tight as stockings, dagger-pointed shoes, a spoon "Derby," a single-breasted coat called a "Chesterfield," with short flaring skirts, a torturing cylindrical collar, laundered to a polish and three inches high, while his other neckgear might be a heavy, puffed cravat or a tiny bow fit for a doll's braids. With evening dress he wore a tan overcoat so short that his black coat-tails hung visible, five inches below the over-coat; but after a season or two he lengthened his overcoat till it touched his heels, and he passed out of his tight trousers into trousers like great bags."

- Booth Tarkington The Magnificent Ambersons

Random Memory #10

At university my kitchen walls were covered in pictures from magazines and newspapers, postcards, covers of pulp paperbacks, Sinatra LP covers, and other ephemera. The local pubs' salted peanuts were from a firm called Christie's, so the kitchen wall also featured empty packets amended in biro to celebrate famous Christie's: Agatha, Ian (film critic), John Reginald, Julie, and Stuart. The latter provoked puzzlement from a philistine housemate. I explained Start Christie was a Scottish anarchist, connected to The Angry Brigade, who'd spent many years in a Spanish prison for trying to assassinate Franco. The housemate thought about this for a while until the lightbulb flickered to life, and said, "Oh, right! Then when he came out of prison he started a peanut factory."

From My Commonplace Book

"...ecstatic 'voyaging' through endless encounters with old engravings, photographs, books, Baedekers, varia, etc..." - Joseph Cornell.

Neglected Author - Victor Canning

Victor Canning was born in 1911 in Plymouth. Although he planned to go to Oxford to study classics, his family could not afford it and instead he went to work as a clerk at age 16, first in Oxford, and later in Weston-super-Mare. According to an article in Book & Magazine Collector, Canning started writing soon afterwards:

“I was seventeen. I wanted a motor-bike... and to drink beer with the other fellows in the rugby club. I'd no money - I was earning 17s 6d a week in an office. I picked up some kids' magazine and I read a story. I thought: ‘My God! If I couldn't write a better story than this, I'd well...!’ I sat down and wrote one... I got four guineas for it. That was it - I'd started.”

Canning was soon selling short stories regularly to boys’ magazines and newspapers. In 1934 his first novel, Mr Finchley Discovers his England, was published and became a best seller. (To give a flavour of 1934, other books published in that year included JB Priestley’s English Journey, Orwell’s Burmese Days, Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.) Canning gave up his clerical job and became a full time writer, producing thirteen more novels in the next six years under three different names. Lord Rothermere engaged him to write for the Daily Mail, and a number of his travel articles were published as a book with illustrations by Leslie Stead under the title Everyman's England in 1936.

In 1935 he married Phyllis McEwen, a girl from a theatrical family whom he met while she was working with a touring vaudeville production at Weston-super-Mare.

He enlisted in the Army in 1940, and was sent for training with the Royal Artillery in Llandrindod Wells in Wales, where he trained alongside his friend Eric Ambler. Both were commissioned as second lieutenants in 1941. In Ambler's autobiography, Here Lies Eric Ambler, he writes about his army training:

"There was a pleasant side. Victor Canning was in the same troop as I was. On Saturday nights, duty permitting, we would go to the local repertory theatre and on Sunday nights to the cinema. In both places, of course, we could sit down. I cannot recall our ever going into a pub for a drink where one had to stand at the bar. On weekday nights, if not on duty or cramming or cleaning equipment, one went to bed early."
 
Canning worked in anti-aircraft batteries in the south of England until early 1943, when he was sent to North Africa and took part in the invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaigns. Canning's obituary in The Times notes that: “...even in the Royal Artillery he had a stimulus to write in the promptings of a loyal batman who was in the habit of rebuking Major Canning in the morning if he felt that the boss had not been long enough at his typewriter the previous night.” At the end of the war he was assigned to an Anglo-American unit doing experimental work with radar range-finding. He was discharged in 1946 with the rank of major.

Although before the war he had been predominantly a writer of gentle comedies, he resumed writing, on Ambler’s advice, thrillers set in exotic locations. His thrillers are mainly set overseas since, Canning is reported to have said, “in this country you can always call a policeman.” Canning’s second post-war book, Panthers’ Moon, published in 1938, had a plot in which two panthers being transported from Italy to a had a plot involving two panthers who are carrying microfilm in their collars being sent from Milan to a circus in Paris. It was filmed as Spy Hunt, and from then on, “Canning was established as someone who could write a book a year in the suspense genre, have them reliably appear in book club and paperback editions on both sides of the Atlantic, be translated into the main European languages, and in many cases get filmed.” In 1952 Canning briefly worked in Hollywood on scripts for films of his own books and on television shows. The money earned from the film of The Golden Salamander (starring Trevor Howard) meant that Canning could buy a substantial country house in Kent. During the 1950s and 1960s Canning also wrote short stories for the many pulp fiction magazines that then existed, such as Argosy, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and John Bull. In 1965 he began a series of four books featuring a down-at-heel private detective called Rex Carver, whose character owed something to Len Deighton’s unnamed narrator of The Ipcress File and Horse Under Water. Although Rex Carver was based in Pimlico, his work usually took him abroad and involved a colourful array of villains and their henchmen. My own favourite of these is The Whip Hand, a cracking adventure involving neo-Nazis.
 

At the end of the 1960s Canning fell in love with the wife of London solicitor, which led to his separation from his wife Phyllis. His second wife died of cancer in 1976. The seven and a half years that they lived together were, as John Higgins says, “an extraordinarily productive period for him, containing almost all of his best work, including the first five of his ‘Birdcage’ novels, a trilogy of books for children starting with The Runaways, and the beginning of a trilogy retelling the legends of King Arthur, The Crimson Chalice.” With his ‘Birdcage’ series of novels, beginning with Firecrest (1971), he moved away from exotic locales and concentrated much of the action in the south of England. These novels featured a branch of the secret service known only as “The Department”, which Canning described thus:

“The Department was an offshoot of the Ministry of Defence. Its existence had never been officially acknowledged. Its functions – proliferating under the pressure of national security – were as old as organised society. Its work was discreet and indecent. Security and economy demanded that certain people and certain situations had to be handled, organised, dispatched or suppressed without the public being disturbed or distressed by any awareness of the mostly unmentionable stratagems that, in the interests of the national welfare, the Department was given an ambiguous mandate to employ. Murder, blackmail, fraud, theft and betrayal were the commonplaces of the Department. The Department existed, but its existence would have been denied. Its members and operators lived in the common society but acted outside it. Most had entered the Department aware of some of its extreme aspects and prepared to adjust themselves. None had had originally a complete understanding of it; and when this had come it was too late – for knowledge had by then brought acquiescence and even a measure of pride and self-satisfaction at being part of a body of work and action which first changed, then isolated them, and finally smoothly endowed them with an inhumanity that inwardly set them aside from all other people.”

Canning continued writing a book a year, and died of a heart attack in February 1986, in Cirencester. His final book, Table Number Seven, was completed by his third wife Adria and his sister Jean.

Several of his novels were turned into films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot, based on The Rainbird Pattern.

Although in the 1970s Heinemann brought out a Uniform Edition set of reprints that included most of the early work, by then Canning was sadly out of fashion, and remains so. This is a pity since many of his novels are excellent reads, and his later novels can hold their own against anything by Len Deighton or Ted Allbeury.

(I am indebted to John Higgins’ excellent webpage concerning Victor Canning for the biographical information.) http://www.victorcanning.com/

 

Overheard Conversation #7

In a restaurant:

 "I don't know if I want to go. I only eat protein salad. Will they have protein salad? Because I only eat protein salad."

From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - G

GAG. An instrument used chiefly by housebreakers and thieves, for propping open the mouth of a person robbed, thereby to prevent his calling out for assistance.
GAGE, or FOGUS. A pipe of tobacco.
GALLIGASKINS. Breeches.
GAPESEED. Sights; any thing to feed the eye.
GAYING INSTRUMENT. The penis.
GENTLEMAN OF THREE INS. In debt, in gaol, and in danger of remaining there for life.
GERMAN DUCK. Half a sheep's head boiled with onions.
GIGGLERS. Wanton women.
GILFLURT. A proud minks, a vain capricious woman.
GLIMFLASHY. Angry, or in a passion.
GLUEPOT. A parson: from joining men and women together in matrimony.
GOOSECAP. A silly fellow.
GORGER. A gentleman.
GRIN. To grin in a glass case; to be anatomized for murder: the skeletons of many criminals are preserved in glass cases, at Surgeons' hall.

Things I Miss #7

At my prep school most boys owned a spud gun of some sort. The superior ones were made of metal, while inferior plastic ones were also popular. One dug the barrel into a potato, pumped the grip with one's fist, and used the compressed air to fire the spud pellet at someone or something. There was also a cap-gun version that claimed to fire the spud pellet by means of the explosive discharge from the cap, but I never saw this actually work. The metal version (the "Potato Zapper") also purported to double as a water pistol, but as with the cap-gun, this never actually worked. As raw potatoes were rarely available at school (except, accidently, at meals) one had to make do with an apple.

Random Memory #9

I visited the Palácio Nacional da Pena in Sintra, but all I can remember is being shown a miniature cannon on the palace terrace. The cannon was attached to a sundial, and was triggered by a magnifying glass concentrating the sun's rays at noon onto the cannon's fuse.
 

Obituary Eupemisms

The following are euphemisms habitually used in English newspapers, in particular The Daily Telegraph when Hugh Massingberd was obituaries editor.

 

Convivial  Habitually drunk

 

Did not suffer fools gladly  Monstrously foul-tempered

 

Gave colourful accounts of his exploits  A liar

 

A man of simple tastes  A complete vulgarian

 

A powerful negotiator  A bully

 

Relished the cadences of the English language  A crashing bore

 

A lively conversationalist  A crashing bore

 

Relished physical contact  A sado-masochist

 

An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man  A flasher

 

A confirmed bachelor  Homosexual

 

He never married  A misogynist

 

She left no close relatives  A lesbian

 

Lived life to the full  Drunk

 

Not always an easy man to live with  A wife-beater

 

A free-spirit  Couldn’t hold down a job to save himself

 

Always had a twinkle in his eye  A drooling pervert

 

Colourful  Criminal

 

Misunderstood  A git

 

A man of large appetites  Obese

 

An original thinker  Insane

 

Marched to the beat of a different drum  Heard voices

 

Lived a quiet life  Had no friends

 

Active in the community  A busy-body

 

Uncomplicated  Stupid as a bag of hammers

From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - F

FACE-MAKING. Begetting children.
NO FACE BUT HIS OWN: a saying of one who has no court cards in his hand.
FAGGOT. A man hired at a muster to appear as a soldier.
FAITHFUL. One of the faithful; a taylor who gives long credit.
FART CATCHER. A valet or footman from his walking behind his master or mistress.
FAULKNER. A tumbler, juggler, or shewer of tricks; perhaps because they lure the people, as a faulconer does his hawks.
FEAGUE. To feague a horse; to put ginger up a horse's fundament, and formerly, as it is said, a live eel, to make him lively and carry his tail well.
FELLOW COMMONER. An empty bottle: so called at the university of Cambridge, where fellow commoners are not in general considered as over full of learning. At Oxford an empty bottle is called a gentleman commoner for the same reason.
FICE, or FOYSE. A small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their lap-dogs.
FINGER POST. A parson: so called, because he points out a way to others which he never goes himself. Like the finger post, he points out a way he has never been, and probably will never go, i.e. the way to heaven.
FLASH THE HASH. To vomit.
FLY SLICERS. Life-guard men, from their sitting on horseback, under an arch, where they are frequently observed to drive away flies with their swords.
FOGEY. Old Fogey. A nickname for an invalid soldier: derived from the French word fougeux, fierce or fiery.
FOOTMAN'S MAWND. An artificial sore made with unslaked lime, soap, and the rust of old iron, on the back of a beggar's hand, as if hurt by the bite or kick of a horse.
FRENCHIFIED. Infected with the venereal disease.
FRIBBLE. An effeminate fop.
FUSTY LUGGS. A beastly, sluttish woman.

Neglected Author - Gérard de Nerval

“Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.” - Gérard de Nerval
 
Gérard de Nerval was the nom de plume of the French poet, essayist and translator, Gérard Labrunie, born in 1808. He influenced not only the Surrealists but also many British writers such as Wilde, Dowson, Yeats and Symons.
 
His father was a military doctor in Napoleon’s army. When de Nerval was two his mother, accompanying her husband on service in Silesia, died of a fever contracted after crossing a bridge piled with corpses. De Nerval was consequently brought up by his maternal great-uncle in the Valois area of France.
 
He studied intermittently as a medical student but made an early name for himself in 1828 with his translation of Faust, a translation that was much admired by Goethe himself. He had become friends with the writer and dandy Théophile Gautier (famous for shocking the establishment by wearing a red waistcoat). In the 1840s he joined Gautier in a society known as the Club des Hashischines, a group devoted to the exploration of drug-induced experiences. Another club member, Charles Baudelaire, actually wrote Les Fleurs du Mal in the Club’s attic.
 
For a while de Nerval kept a pet lobster which he took for walks in Paris on the end of a blue ribbon. He regarded them as "peaceful, serious creatures, who know the secrets of the sea, and don't bark".
 
In true decadent poet style de Nerval fell in love with first a music-hall singer, Jenny Colon, and then a courtesan, Sophie Dawes, who was rumoured to have murdered her lover. Needless to say, nothing came of these infatuations apart from several nervous breakdowns. De Nerval did, however, build his inamoratas up into the status of the “Eternal Female”.
 
De Nerval’s masterpiece is probably his Journey to the Orient (published in 1851), a strange hybrid of a book, part travelogue, part recounting of Arabian Nights type tales. It came out of an extended trip he made in 1842 to the Levant, travelling to Cairo, Beirut and Constantinople in search of hashish, new and wondrous experiences, the occult, and (naturally) further pursuit of the Eternal Female”.
 
He rented a house in Cairo but was soon told he was offending Muslim etiquette by living without a woman. He was given two choices: convert to Islam and marry; or buy a slave girl. He chose the latter, visiting various slave bazaars before plumping unusually (most slave girls were Abyssinians) for a Javanese called Zetnaybia. He lived the life of a Muslim dandy with her for a few months and then, before moving on, gave Zetnaybia her freedom.
 
De Nerval returned to Paris after his travels but suffered increasingly from bouts of depression. He died on 26 January 1855, hanging himself from a window grating on a snowy street in Paris with an old apron string that he believed to be the Queen of Sheba’s garter.
 
Journey to the Orient is published by Peter Owen, and Penguin publish his Selected Writings.
 
(A version of this article first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

 

Book Review - 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann

The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon by David Grann

 

Born in 1867, Colonel Percy Fawcett is described as “the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose.” Like most Victorian explorers he was also mildly bonkers. His family motto, Nec Despera Terrent – “Difficulties be Damned” – gives an idea of the man.

 

He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1886, and served in Ceylon where he was given a map purporting to show the location of lost treasure in a cave system. He found no treasure but the map sparked his life-long obsession with lost cities. After leaving the army he enrolled at the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) “explorers’ school”, proving a dab hand with the sextant and theodolite. His first expedition was ostensibly to map parts of Morocco, but he had in fact been sent as a spy.

 

Between 1906 and 1924 Colonel Fawcett made several expeditions to the Amazon region, at the behest of the RGS, mapping the area around Brazil and Bolivia. Such was his energy and drive that he often completed his surveys well ahead of the allotted time, despite the harshness of the terrain and the dangers therein. He was unusual for the time in that he dealt with the native Indian tribes through courtesy and diplomacy, rather than shooting them. Colonel Fawcett soon became famous, described in the press as the “Livingstone of the Amazon”.

 

He broke off exploring to serve in World War One, winning the DSO. He also became friends with Sir Henry Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the latter basing his novel The Lost World on Colonel Fawcett’s exploits.

 

After the war he returned to the Amazon and became obsessed with the tales he’d heard from local tribes of the ruins of lost cities hidden in the jungle. Such tales were not new. In the sixteenth century Sir Walter Raleigh and Gonzalo Pizarro had launched disastrous expeditions in search of the fabled city of El Dorado. Colonel Fawcett became convinced of the existence of such a city, code-named “Z”, to be found on the Upper Xingu river.

 

In 1925 he launched his expedition. He turned down Lawrence of Arabia’s offer to join him (fearing a clash of egos) and was accompanied by his son Jack, and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimmell. Both were chosen for their pure, manly qualities: “… the three chief agents of bodily degeneration – alcohol, tobacco and loose living – were revolting to him [Fawcett].” As with previous expeditions, this was not going to be an easy journey. “Anyone who broke a limb or fell sick deep in the jungle would have little chance of survival… the logic of the jungle dictated that the person be abandoned – or, as Fawcett grimly put it, ‘He has his choice of opium pills, starvation, or torture if he is found by savages.’”

Among their provisions were a ukulele and a piccolo, music proving a good way of pacifying hostile savages.

 

Colonel Fawcett’s party was last seen in May 1925. There were numerous expeditions afterwards to find Fawcett, and although a few objects (his compass and signet ring) turned up, no remains were ever found, and no satisfactory explanation made for his disappearance. There were rumours he had become the chief of a tribe of cannibals, or was worshipped as a god in the jungle.

 

David Grann not only gives an excellent summary of Colonel Fawcett’s life, but also of the subsequent quests to discover what became of his expedition. After hunting through the archives for clues, Grann decided to travel to the Amazon himself in 2005. He visited the Kalapalo tribe, who described how they had warned Colonel Fawcett not to proceed eastwards as “fierce Indians” would kill them. They saw the expedition’s campfires for five days, and then they disappeared. Grann, quite reasonably, assumes that they were killed by a hostile tribe.

 

Grann tells a rattling good yarn about one man’s fatal obsession.

 

(A version of this book review first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

 

From My Commonplace Book

"Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed-wire handle." Jim Thompson

Things I Miss #6

Before the days of email and Facebook, people used to have to hand-make their party invitations, and either dish them out by hand or through the post. In the days before use of word processors was widespread these were lettered by hand or, if one wanted to be flash, with a typewriter. The office photocopier was surreptitiously used to make copies, sometimes with an amusing photograph or drawing added. I remember using a photograph of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's (where she's using a long cigarette holder) and inking in "LOVE" and "HATE" on her knuckles. For cocktail parties I always used this Osbert Lancaster cartoon.

I remember using the standard abbreviation "PBAB" on an invitation in California and getting concerned phonecalls from American friends asking what it stood for.

Random Memory #8

 In Vienna in the early 1980s my family rented the bottom half of a large two-storeyed villa in Döbling. The villa, painted in Schőnbrunn yellow, had been the childhood home of our landlady, a millionairess in her own right who had married money and, more importantly in Viennese society, married up rather well in terms of the millimetric view of social class that pervades le bon ton  in Vienna. Being freed of the problems of money, she could afford to keep the house and its substantial garden intact (imagine a house in Hampstead with a two-acre garden). The wizened gardener came with the rent, as did a coach-house halfway down the garden, about the size of a semi-detached in Chiswick, wherein the gardener kept his rake and stuff. There were several walnut trees in the garden which I used to harvest out of boredom by hurling heavy bits of wood into the trees, trying not to hit the red squirrel which thought it held domain. The downed walnuts were covered in a green husk, so I had to put them in an annexe of the coach-house to ripen. A month later I went to check on my walnuts to find they were gone. I found the gardener watering one of the rose gardens and asked him what he’d done with the/my walnuts. He told me the millionairess had turned up on a snap inspection of her property and claimed them. 

 My father nicknamed the millionairess "die Gräfin" and my mother, not knowing German, used to refer to her as “die Griffin”.

Book Review - 'Hatless Jack' by Neil Steinberg

Hatless Jack: the President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat – by Neil Steinberg
 
“How can a hatless man properly greet a lady?” the British trade journal Tailor & Cutter demanded of President John F Kennedy in 1963. Kennedy was the first American president to go bareheaded, and hat manufacturers apparently cite this fact as the reason why their industry failed. Or so it is popularly believed. In Hatless Jack, Steinberg examines why Kennedy was so reluctant to wear a hat in public - was it really because Khrushchev always did wear a homburg? Was Kennedy really that powerful a symbol to American men that they would go hatless in droves just because the president declined to wear a fedora? Steinberg charts the attempts of the hat-makers of America to persuade their new, charismatic leader to save their declining industry. Along the way, he also uncovers the now nearly-forgotten rituals of hat-wearing, including hat-check girls, straw-hat riots, and ways of stopping the wind from blowing one’s hat off.
 
Blaming Kennedy was the most complicated of three flawed theories given for the death of hats: "One is that men grew tired of being compelled to wear hats in the military during World War II, and abandoned the fashion when they returned to civilian life. The second is that the growing popularity of automobiles, with their isolation, heaters, and low roofs, killed off men's hats." As Steinberg laments, “In the past a man could, physically, go into the street hatless, and some did. But those all-important passers-by would certainly notice such a man and wonder about him. Maybe he was deranged, or penniless, or drunk.”
 
Steinberg doesn't confine his musings to twentieth-century America. He also provides fascinating insights on male hat customs the world over from a number of eras. For instance, Kemal Atatürk banned the fez in Turkey in the 1920’s, and the Mussolini made straw hats compulsory in fascist Italy. In the 1930’s the Hat Style Council (an industry body) agreed that the well-dressed man must own a dozen hats to be “exactly right [for] every occasion”. Mr Steinberg offers many gleaming nuggets of information. He tells us of the social history of the collapsible opera hat; of Abraham Lincoln’s habit of storing papers and letters inside his stovepipe hat; he gives us a fascinating economic history of the lucrative hat-check concessions in restaurants and nightclubs in the 1920’s and 1930’s; and h explains the peculiar craze in the early days of aeroplane travel of dispatching one’s hat on a world tour.
 
Neil Steinberg has written a captivating and enthralling book, one that will appeal to anyone with an interest in hats and hat-lore.
 
Hatless Jack by Neil Steinberg. Published by Granta Books.
 
(A version of this book review first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue - E

EARTH BATH. A Grave.
EIGHT EYES. I will knock out two of your eight eyes; a common Billingsgate threat from one fish nymph to another: every woman, according to the naturalists of that society, having eight eyes; viz. two seeing eyes, two bub-eyes, a bell-eye, two pope's eyes, and a ***-eye. He has fallen down and trod upon his eye; said of one who has a black eye.
ELBOW SHAKER. A gamester, one who rattles Saint Hugh's bones, i.e. the dice.

EMPEROR. Drunk as an emperor, i.e. ten times as drunk as a lord.

ENGLISH BURGUNDY. Porter.

ENSIGN BEARER. A drunken man, who looks red in the face, or hoists his colours in his drink.

ESSEX LION. A calf; Essex being famous for calves, and chiefly supplying the London markets.
ESSEX STILE. A ditch; a great part of Essex is low marshy ground, in which there are more ditches than Stiles.
ETERNITY BOX. A coffin.

EVE'S CUSTOM-HOUSE, where Adam made his first entry. The monosyllable.

EVIL. A halter. Also a wife. 

Things I Miss #5

There was always a Hermes portable typewriter in the house, about 12” square and encased in pale blue, known as a Hermes Baby. I remember reading Joan Didion’s packing list in 1979; it included bourbon and a typewriter. I knew what she meant. I used to see foreign correspondents in African airports, at Schipol, Rome, CDG, Madrid. I learned to touch type on the Hermes, and dreamed of being a foreign correspondent, filing breezy dispatches back from Havana and Kinshasa.

In 1985 at university in California I was told my turgid essays needed to be typed. I enquired at the university library and was told there were two upright Remingtons in a “private study” area in the basement, where the serial killer grad students hung out. They (the typewriters, not the serial killers or grad students) made a splendid clacking sound and looked like something on which I should be hammering out sports stuff: “Mikey Sullivan stepped up to the plate, his pug-ugly mug coulda told a million stories; then he unwound one and sizzled it over the plate and boyaboy was that heard on in at the pickle barrel.”)
I also had to write my student dissertation (“Some Aspects of Travel Writing”) on my Hermes. It was pre memory stick days so I wrote much of it in my head; which I still do, with paragraphs forming in my head.

I tried using a friend’s electric typewriter but found I sometimes typed faster than the golfball could keep up, which I found disconcerting. I sympathised with Philip Larkin writing to Anthony Powell in August 1985, saying how bold it was of Powell to buy an electric typewriter (“the only time I tried one I was scared to death, as it seemed to be running away with me.  I felt as if I’d been put at the controls of Concorde after five minutes tuition”).
 

Random Memory #7

Random memory: my father bought a sailing dinghy and put it on the car's roof rack, and drove from Brightlingsea to Vienna via Calais. I stupidly accompanied him. On nearing the Austrian border he started worrying that he'd have to pay VAT on the boat, and insisted we stop in a layby and make the boat look "used." We did this three times, and I had to make cuts in the boat's keel with my penknife. Appropriately enough, the last time we stopped, it was in a town called Bad Fussing. At the border crossing my father started to bore the Austrian customs official with blather about the boat. When the bloke in the uniform started licking his pencil expectantly, I out-Teutoned him by looking at my watch, tutting, and saying, "Diplomatisch." We were waved through with salutes...

From My Commonplace Book

"I have the feeling that I was born in Vienna in order to live in Paris." - Romy Schneider

Overheard Conversation #6

In a pub:
1st Man: "His problem..." [deep, sad sigh]
2nd Man: "Yes.. [nods thoughtfully] Those dogs of his..."
1st Man: "They can't stop eating wet cement."

Neglected Author - Mikhail Lermontov

“What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.” – A Hero of Our Time
 
Mikhail Lermontov was born in Moscow in 1814, the son of a retired army captain. He was descended from George Learmont, a Scottish officer who entered the Russian service in the early seventeenth century. At the age of three Lermontov’s mother died and he was brought up by his grandmother on her estate in Penzenskaya province. As a child he was often ill, and was taken to spas in the Caucasus, where the exotic landscapes created lasting impressions on him. In 1827 he returned to Moscow for his schooling, and became acquainted with the poetry of Pushkin and Byron. He became known as something of a wit, though known also for a cruel humour that expressed itself in caricatures (he was a talented artist) and wounding comments.
 
He entered Moscow University in 1830, where he was remembered for his aloofness and haughtiness, and for playing pranks on the professors. His student attitudes (common at the time) of dislike of the tyrannical tsarist state and its treatment of the serfs caused him to quarrel with a fogeyish professor, and he left the university in 1832, entering a cadet school in St Petersburg.
 
In 1834 he joined a Hussar Regiment with the rank of cornet in the Life Guards, and was stationed near St Petersburg. He appears to have spent a good deal of his time attending balls and dances, and producing poems and plays that often satirised aristocratic life. In 1837 one of Lermontov’s heroes, Pushkin, challenged his wife’s alleged lover to a duel and was killed. Lermontov’s reaction was to write an elegy, “The Death of a Poet”, which accused the Tsar and his court of complicity in, and being the cause of, Pushkin’s death. Because of this poem Tsar Nicholas I exiled Lermontov to a regiment in the Caucasus.
 
Lermontov was allowed to return to Moscow in 1838, during which time he published his masterpiece, the novel A Hero of Our Time. In January 1840, at a ball, Lermontov quarrelled with the son of the French Ambassador, a quarrel that resulted in a duel in which Lermontov was slightly wounded. Lermontov was once again exiled to the Caucasus, where he distinguished himself in skirmishes against insurgents.
 
A Hero of Our Time is divided into six short novellas (mostly set in the Caucasus and featuring smugglers, Cossacks, brigands, duelling soldiers, and aristocratic femmes fatales). They concern the exploits of a Byronic soldier called Pechorin, a proud and wilful man who’ll engage in any adventure (military or amorous) to relieve his ennui, and who leaves a string of broken hearts behind him.
 
The novel also prophetically describes the duel that killed Lermontov. In 1841 Lermontov stayed at the spa town of Pyatigorsk. At a party a fellow officer, Nicholas Martynov, took issue with Lermontov’s jokes and witticisms, and challenged Lermontov to a duel. The duel took place at the foot of Mount Mashuk on 27^th July 1841. Lermontov was killed instantly, aged 26. Many of his best poems were discovered posthumously in a pocket-book found on his body.
 
(A version of this post first appeared in The Chap magazine.)

Random Memory #6

I watched a 1979 “road movie” called Radio On by Chris Petit, shot by a German cameraman called Martin Schäfer, in black and white. Half of it was shot in Bristol, in a weird hotel called the Grosvenor which was stranded like a submarine’s conning tower in the middle of Bristol ring road. My friend Gavin and I noticed the hotel said “Bar Lounge” so we popped in for a sherbet. Gavin and I were the only pair of 50 people not in our pyjamas and dressing gowns, as it was a DSS hostel. I asked the barmaid if she knew about its kinematic history and soon realised she was not au fait with das neue Kino. She then perked up a bit and said they’d shot an episode of Softly, Softly in the bar, and Frank Windsor was a gentleman.