11 minute read
Street Life by Anthony Quinn
From the top ► Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell) & Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waughs' Brideshead Revisited.
© BBC Films
Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan (Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan) party in The Great Gatsby 2013.
© Warner Bros. Photo © AF Archive While Fitzgerald’s view of wealth was essentially satirical – as was that of Dickens and Thackeray – things began to change with Edith Wharton and Henry James, with Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Mitford was upper class and looked upon the brash spendthrifts of the Bright Young Things with a fascinated horror that was everything to do with taste. Her depiction of Gerald Berners as Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love was not wholly pejorative. Berners was her friend and, like the character he inspired, he dyed his pigeons pink, adorned his dogs with diamond collars, and celebrated the hour of his birth each night. You can feel Mitford swooning a little when she writes of Merlin: “He was a great collector, and not only Merlinford, but also his houses in London and Rome flowed over with treasures ... Lord Merlin loved jewels; his two black whippets wore diamond necklaces designer for whiter, but not slimmer or more graceful necks that theirs....” Waugh was more solidly middle class, and came at the Bright Young Things from below, both mocking them and wishing desperately to be part of their refulgent world. His Charles Ryder and Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway are cut from the same cloth, reflecting their creators’ wishes to be both outside and inside the luxurious rooms of the very wealthy. For Waugh, though, there’s also the problem of class. In Brideshead Revisited, it’s referred to as “charm” – the thing that causes Charles to fall in love with the world of Brideshead and its unbroken generations of tradition. “I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist’s pride and the philistine’s vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.” For all Charles’s veneration of the aristocracy (based upon Waugh’s admiration of the Lygon family and their seat at Madresfield), there’s an acid undercurrent to Brideshead Revisited, a sense that Waugh loathes them as much as loving them. Novels are always a product of their times and Brideshead was written amid the depredations of World War II, when it must have felt that such beauty and luxury were the things of a kinder, softer age. Now, for writers in late-stage capitalist society, wealth is an object of reverence, with no indication of satirical bent or cynicism required. The real pornography in EL James’s Fifty Shades trilogy is not in the saucy bedroom antics of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, but rather the books’ fetishisation of the objects of Grey’s astonishing wealth. Whether it’s helicopters or watches or sleek Apple-branded computers, you get the feeling that Steele is seduced as much by the consumables with which Grey is surrounded as by the man himself. Similarly, the thrills of a Jilly Cooper novel are only partly the bonking and naked tennis – they are also an exercise in wealth tourism, giving us a privileged and unashamed glimpse into the lives of the 0.1 per cent. For a final message about the relationship between writers and the very rich, you should look at the career of Jay McInerney, whose skewering of the wealthy in books like Brightness Falls was first blunted then disappeared altogether. His latest novel, Bright, Precious Days is populated by bankers and socialites stumbling champagnedrunk from one fundraiser to the next. McInerney, like Fitzgerald before him (and the fictional Tom Yates) has committed the cardinal writerly sin of being accepted by the rich. Now married to an heiress and famously having once drunk £20,000 worth of wine in a single night, McInerney is unable to summon the kind of distance required to write well about the wealthy. We are fascinated by luxury, obsessed with the lives of the super-rich, but as readers we need the writer to be in two places at once: yes, on the inside, but also, like them, pressed against the window, looking in on the gaudy excesses of wealth.
Below ► "It was a tortoise with Julia’s initial set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards...”
Brideshead Revisited By Evelyn Waugh
Illustration ► Jo Bird
Street Life
by Anthony Quinn
If Mayfair were your dowager aunt, Soho would be your disreputable uncle. Anthony Quinn takes a tour through these characterful neighbourhoods and their habitués, past and present.
Everybody needs good neighbours, so they say, and despite notable differences in their character and habitués, Mayfair and Soho have rubbed along together for centuries. Until quite recently the two districts conformed to a legend already being shaped in the Georgian era: luxury and lechery squeezed together, cheek by jowl. To put it another way, Mayfair was your dowager aunt, Soho was your disreputable uncle.
To a neophyte arriving in the capital 30 years ago (such as myself) both of these grand names were possessed of a mysterious glamour – and still are. One was home to the beau monde, the other to the boho monde. Not that I knew anything about either as a 21-year-old, renting a room in Islington so small I could stand in the middle and touch both walls. But I quickly took to pounding the West End pavements – the best way to discover London – and began to acquaint myself with the separate but linked identities of these notorious neighbours. To my younger eyes Mayfair was for shops and hotels, Soho was for pubs and restaurants. The division still holds, roughly, today. Nowhere else in London could rival the Burlington Arcade, with its faint hint of fin-de-siecle naughtiness – there was even a posh tobacconist when I first visited – or the jewellers of Old Bond Street that were once prey to Raffles and his artful cracksmanship. (Now they have ramraiders on mopeds.) On Savile Row you can still find remnants of that sacred tradition ‘bespoke’ and commune with the ghosts of well-shod gents whose accounts in old tailors’ ledgers actually read not closed but dead. If you wanted clobber the same standard as The Row but a bit different you hied yourself to Doug Hayward up on Mount Street, where the changing room was as tatty as a charity shop’s but the cloth and the cut were unimpeachable. Then, as now, you could calm your shaking hand from the cheque you’d just written with a drink at the bar of The Connaught, or around the corner at Claridge’s, both vital co-ordinates on Mayfair’s map of luxe. Soho, once ‘the square mile of vice’, has changed its spots in recent decades – less of the vice, more of the square – but it still hides pockets of the lush life, or even the louche life. In one of my novels, Curtain Call, set in 1930s theatreland, an ageing bon viveur named Jimmy Erskine emerges from a respectable dinner at the Criterion in search of fun and frolics: “Rolling out into the crowds around Piccadilly, he caught an autumnal whiff of petrol and roasting chestnuts in the air, with a layer of something beneath: possibility.” He calls in at the Long Bar in the Trocadero, a notorious gay hangout of the era, before he directs his eager steps into the bear pit of Soho. I wonder whatever happened to him? Wardour Street, the spine of Soho, was once home of second-hand furniture stores, later of film companies and screening rooms. Here I too spent years as a film critic at basement previews, like
Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn’s was for fifteen years the film critic of The Independent (19982013). Having been a judge on the 2006 Man Booker Prize he began writing his first novel the following year: the two events may have been related. The Rescue Man (2009) won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Since then he has written six others, Half of the Human Race (2011), The Streets (2012), Curtain Call (2015), Freya (2016) and Eureka (2017). His latest, Our Friends in Berlin, was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2018. He lives in Islington.
Clockwise, from top
Old Bond Street, Mayfair, 2009. Shepherd Market, Mayfair, 1953. Fashion designer Sir Norman Hartnell in his salon at 26 Bruton Street, Mayfair, 1963. Doorman outside the prestigious Connaught Hotel, Mayfair.
Opposite
The honourable Julian Plowden Esq. in the Entrance of the Albany, 1957.
Top
The salacious side of 1970s Sohos.
Opposite
Dexter Gordon, 1977. Ronnie Scott's, Soho.
Left, from the top
Poker face, Soho, 1997. Chinese New Year Parade London 2017. Berwick Street Market, Soho, 1950s.
Below
Soho raconteur and artist, Francis Bacon, 1984.
a mole blinking in the dark – best place for us, some would say. But its heart is the grid of streets, Dean, Frith and Greek, “a chequerboard”, as the architectural writer Ian Nairn once described them, “as formal as a minuet though far less innocent”. Perhaps its glory years were its shabbiest, in the 1950s and 1960s, ambered forever in John Deakin’s haunting street photographs and portraits of his fellow artists and boozers – Freud and Bacon, the Bernard brothers, George Dyer. You can catch the last gasp of that old Soho in Lina Stores on Brewer Street, in the Coach & Horses and The French House, in the sainted facade of L’Escargot. And look out for the tessellated doorstep on Romilly Street, La Terrazza, all that remains of the favourite trattoria of the 1960s jet set. Mayfair’s Georgian romance is still discoverable here and there. Its early denizens were aristocrats and landowners whose large houses were serviced by grooms and coachmen – ergo the provision of those lovely old mews that lie hidden between the wide streets. Chesterfield Hill and Hill Street still retain a patrician calm, South Audley Street looks back to Victorian redbrick civility, while Curzon Street remains home to the Heywood Hill bookshop (Nancy Mitford is the patron saint of this neighbourhood) and Geo F Trumper, for all your hair-oil needs. Its most desirable address to me, however, is Albany, that near-mythic set of chambers tucked away behind Piccadilly. Just imagine having the Royal Academy right next door, with Soho’s venereal embrace awaiting you at the other end of Vigo Street. Lord Byron, Terence Stamp and Raffles (again)– a proper Mayfair trio – have all graced its quiet ropewalks. Eyeing one another across the garden wall of Regent Street, the two neighbours have pinched the other’s clothes from time to time. ‘Trade’, commercial and sexual, has always bonded them tight. Shepherd Market, Mayfair’s quaint tangle of lanes and alleys, was once a hunting ground for prostitutes. (The only tarts you’re likely to find there now come from the local patisserie). Likewise, you’ll find on Bruton Place a pub (The Guinea Grill) and a restaurant (Bellamy’s) to rival anywhere to the east. Conversely, you note in Soho a certain elegance that wouldn’t be out of place in Mayfair – the flagstoned alleyway of Meard Street, a run of Georgian terraces on Broadwick Street, the scented Arts and Crafts cosiness of Liberty. But tempora mutantur, of course, and these days commerce is winning the battle over character. Mayfair is no longer a dowager but the wife of an Emirates sheikh, and Soho is the mistress who’s becoming more spoilt by the month. London’s only constant is change, and the West End’s rackety, mixed-up neighbourliness will be one more thing to go. It will be missed. A friend of mine who lived in an unheated attic on Mount Street as an art student – it was the 1960s – recalled once seeing the actor Laurence Harvey doing up his tie in a bedroom window at the Connaught opposite. He spotted her gawping at him, and waved. Anyone might be your neighbour back then.
