A Notorious Rock Face

Soho in the Eighties, Christopher Howse, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018, 288pp, £20 (hardcover)

One summer in the nineties, when an undergraduate, I was a guest of friends whose party included the artist, Adrian Berg. This was a thrill for me since I knew his very distinctive paintings of London from my art master at school and admired them immensely, as I still do. I trailed around after him, which must have been rather a pain to him, but he was patiently engaging, and liked to quote Auden on Yeats while occasionally dispensing quiet advice. ‘When you meet important people with whom you’re already vaguely acquainted,’ he told me once, ‘always slip your name in when greeting them. They will have no idea who you are, and it forces them to be grateful thereafter.’ It’s been a periodically useful recommendation that has remained with me. Francis Bacon was the famous person unto whom Adrian had been accustomed to slip his own name as he told this to me, though I quickly developed the sense that they in fact knew one another quite well.

The party was sustained for a week on a fairly constant flow of mediocre wine but Adrian emerged as a highly fastidious drinker who preferred things in a certain order. One morning, as I emerged late from my room, I discovered him with an air of decided dishevelment. ‘I made a terrible mistake last night,’ he explained. ‘My butler,’ (I have no idea whether there truly was such a person), ‘makes me up Campari and gin before dinner and whisky afterwards. I had three bottles with me when I came and two are now empty. I drank what I thought was the Campari with the gin but then this morning I discovered a full bottle of Campari untouched.’ The sharing of this nasty episode rocked me slightly at the time but it also made me more impudent to nag him for stories about the excesses of Bacon and his circle.

Adrian admired the paintings of Walter Sickert, which one can see somehow in his paintings, and an evidently favourite Bacon story that involved Sickert was set in Wheeler’s, the great Soho restaurant on Old Compton Street. My guess is that it must have been in the 1960s, though he was rather fuzzy on the dates. A young painter, at the time attempting to make his reputation, he was a hanger-on to the circle of the great man and the other painters of the time, such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. At the tail-end of a boozy lunch at Wheeler’s, Bacon, he told me, sent for a taxi and despatched one of the staff to a gallery in Mayfair. He wanted a large painting by Sickert, which was there in the window, and ordered the bill for it to be sent to Marlborough, his own agent.

Sometime later, when the party was truly advanced, the man reappeared clutching an unwieldy package which was duly unwrapped to contain the Sickert. Bacon drew up a chair at the head of the long table and had the painting placed there with himself at the other end. Adrian pluckily asked him, given the expense of the work, why he had bought it apparently entirely on a whim. Bacon replied that he’d heard Burlington House was discussing a retrospective of Sickert in the near future, and added imperiously, ‘that’s one they’re not having’. Adrian, who was rather timid and polite in person, appeared to remain surprised by this quixotic gesture of expansiveness, even as he retold the story some thirty years on. It made an odd impression on me that fitted well with my sense of a world that had passed away and of which I had only a vague sense.

Growing up outside London in the late 1980s, Soho only came to mean more to me than the tawdry sex clubs of Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa with the discovery in the Art History section at my local bookshop of Daniel Farson’s well-lubricated memoir, Soho in the Fifties. It was oddly classified, as I thought even then, but it was certainly a neat way of smuggling vivid stories of roistering dissipation into what passed (just about) as a serious read. There was much in Farson’s book about the Soho of Bacon, Freud and Michael Andrews; of Wheeler’s in its heyday and also the Colony Room – then presided over by Muriel Belcher as a centre of Bohemian glamour, and not just the noxious haunt of Ian Board, the later foul-mouthed and

alcoholic proprietor who gradually euthanised the place, despite the endurance of occasional august members such as the Duke of Sutherland, into its death throes, before final extinction in 2008, fourteen years after his own demise. Board would habitually pass out at the end of a night beneath a fading mural by Andrews, having thrown a couple of green cushions onto the sticky asphalt floor, only then to wake, shaking of hand at the break of day, to a long menthol fag and a throat-clearing glass of port and brandy. Such are not exactly the means to ensure personal or professional longevity, and it’s a wonder that he kept the place going for as long as he did.

A striking photograph from Farson’s book remains firmly in my mind. It showed the young Jeffrey Bernard head in hands, shaken and wan in the chalky dawn of a 1950s Soho Square, pretty enough but pretty-well doomed. The physical degeneration of Bernard is somehow rather symbolic of the relationship between that earlier book and Christopher Howse’s account of Soho in the Eighties. He’s spinning slowly into the inevitability of oblivion in the former account but still betrays promise, as anyone with his level of physical attractiveness almost inevitably does without much effort. It’s easy to be charming when you look like a young Rimbaud; less so when you’ve lost a leg – as Rimbaud himself had earlier discovered. By Howse’s day, what remained was the ability to turn out the Spectator’s ‘Low Life’ column, whose self-parodic ennui felt funnier and more pithy then than it does now. He was pissed every day during the eighties apart from 27 November, 1987 – when he was probably pissed too but managed nevertheless to prove before a court during a fairly lucrative libel action against the Evening Standard that he was sober enough in the middle of the afternoon to present a trophy in his name at Lingfield without dropping it: the bar was set surprisingly low back then.

When compared to the artistic demimonde captured from the 1950s by Anthony Powell, Julian McLaren-Ross and Farson, Soho was in a very murky twilight by the late 1980s, and Bernard’s passage from regular, hedonistic leglessness to the literal loss of a leg, a terminal decline towards a slowish and self-imposed diabetic death, might have served Howse well as a metaphor for what he is up to more generally in his book, writing in

the now distant slipstream of those predecessors, though he has at least the literary manners not to need to use it. He has a nice ear and writes with a rather crafted and suave style much of the time; but folded into it are the occasionally pontifical old-fogeyisms that appear to suggest his recording of this decline is a decidedly grand theme. Given the cast of characters, of which Board is more representative that one might wish him to be, it is frequently hard to agree entirely with this judgement. There are benevolent and extraordinary figures around, such as the other Bernard brothers, Richard Ingrams and Bron Waugh, and much of it is quite entertaining in the way that dare-not-look tales of drunkenness can be but it’s hard to escape the thought that one is reading a sequence of obituaries for a set of slow suicides many of whom one would have gone to some considerable lengths to avoid actually knowing.

I could hardly keep my most ghoulish finger away from the index throughout the reading of this book. And it was not, I should say, so as to skip about or even check facts exactly, but rather to have an advanced weather eye out for the next morbid punchline to the various biographical vignettes he tells. Nearly all end with something almost as gruesome as the early death of the ‘Red Baron’, a diminutive pseudo-German fraud in quasi-Bavarian costume, who was found ‘stabbed repeatedly’ in his small flat in Shepherd’s Bush, while upstairs ‘nobody heard a word.’ It’s one of the few moments, where one has to note (because he tells us as such) that Howse wasn’t sitting poised with an internal dictaphone, amazingly lucid despite the (apparently now-foresworn) drink, to record the gradually tortuous but inevitably early demise of the lives he here recalls, almost all of which end grimly before what was surely their otherwise allotted time. That index gives a shorthand in the form of essential dates for the now-departed: ‘Graham Mason (1942-2002),’ for example – an apparently repellent, drunken habitué of the Coach and Horses (the turning point of the Soho world by Howse’s day, presided over by the impossibly offensive Norman Balon), who fell back appropriately into an actual coach on the way back from an afternoon at Epsom on 1 June, 1988, after a day at the Derby, to negotiate ‘the sloping floor as though it was a notorious rock face.’ The book could surely have been far shorter if it had simply lent a paragraph

on each of these individuals with their essential facts – X became very drunk very often and then died. But it’s pretty clear that Howse couldn’t have been satisfied with such minor details. He is obsessed with the inessentials that made the somewhat varied people and the narrow surrounding quite so fascinating a part of his own past. This is a memoir without (quite) a purpose; detail on detail building itself into the multiple deaths of which he is not entirely a part, as he sits (a little smugly aside): one who got away into sobriety and the piety of Catholicism. It is a tale told by the righteous but not all the more interesting because of it. In fact, one wonders all too often why he has bothered, since the only real glue that sticks it all together is the matter of his having seen something for which he now has a somewhat haughty and quaintly amused disdain, as any survivor of mass suicide might have; being moved onto a new plain of self-righteousness.

Howse cuts an odd figure among the general decrepitude of Soho; with his tweed suit and prize-winning beard, he looks rather as though he’s stepped off an Edwardian grouse moor, and it’s hard to see precisely what he stood to gain at the time, hanging around so many ageing drunks with whom he apparently shared rather little in common. The acidic quality of the detail of the remembrance, given that it is almost invariably about downfall, is cold-hearted and the smug knowingness to many of the anecdotes – how could there fail to be in one writing as a survivor when so many others are dead? – cannot but make one wonder whether he was from the first less a high-jinks participator in the fag-end revelry or more a voyeur at a scene of so many a spiritual (and physical) twilight where he had found somewhere where he could hide out (from something – though what is never quite clear) in plain sight.

The book ends with the death by smoke inhalation of the occasional writer, Paul Potts, a kleptomaniac sometime associate of Auden, whose account of a friendship with Orwell first appeared in this magazine in 1957. He did better than most, making it through an alcoholic penury to seventy-one before setting his bedroom alight in 1990. A little under twenty months later, Bacon died at eighty-two – though with his studio long in South Kensington, he had really been only an occasional presence in Soho for

some time, and it is hard to see his death truly as the moment the old Soho was lost, as Howse heavily hints. Jeffrey Bernard somehow hung on a little longer, dying in 1997, the same year as Daniel Farson, by which time Soho was packed with advertising executives drinking poncey cocktails at the very un-bohemian Groucho Club.

All of these might have been expected to die younger than they did, and that was certainly the fate of many. Reading for the index, where life dates and odd acts are given, is a grimly compelling, if slightly exhausting act for anyone who has enjoyed the pleasures and pains of a sustained drink. And since this must be the targeted audience in a book with such a dramatis personae of otherwise rather unattractive and often irrelevant characters, one can hardly help doing the calculations and working out how short a time most of these people lived; how long one might oneself have left, if one were to chance their kind of life for a time; how frighteningly short the figures and the prospects are. It’s enough (almost) to turn one to God.