All the lonely people

NEIL POWELL 33

All the lonely people Fifties, sixties: decades which induce easy images, passionate loyalties, extremes of enthusiasm and loathing. The fifties - despite its angry young men, a period of regenerative conservatism, consensus values and clear aspirations - looks superficially to be the very opposite of the decade which followed, when the world became a freaked-out global village. Yet, even at this short distance in time, the similarities begin to seem as striking as the differences. Both were decades of post-war prosperity, which was the essential precondition of each; both were decades of youthful revolt reaching a creative peak around the mid- years of each and dwindling into a dreadful senility (circa 1962 and 1972, for decades are built of a curious overlapping material); both were part of a sustained cultural revolution which we've not yet begun to get properly into focus.

That idea of a cultural revolution is the problematical one, of course: for whereas earlier movements with a predominantly literary content were necessarily conceived in terms of poems, novels, essays (the printed word), what happened in the fifties was conceived in terms of songs, records, radio pro- grammes (performance). For instance, the pioneering American rock disc-jockey Alan Freed occupies a position in cultural history which is at least as prominent as - and in many ways very similar to - those of the periods most influential editors: the residual tendency of such comparisons to sound ludicrous or pro- vocative thirty years after the event is one indication of our failure, so far, to make sense of what was happening. In retrospect, it's hardly surprising that the English poets who knew what was going on were those with interests in popular music: Thom Gunn, most obviously, and Philip Larkin. Their attempt in the early fifties to re-establish metrical, stanzaic and rational coherence in English verse was, like the rise of American popular music itself, partly a response to the failure of modernist verse to provide a vehicle for memorable speech. There are more memorable lines in Cole Porter than there are in Ezra Pound: that doesn't make Cole Porter the greater poet, but it may serve to suggest that as early as the twenties and the thirties popular song was busily annexing, or rather retrieving, one of the traditional functions of poetry. Mean- while in England, until the early fifties, popular music remained a safely middle- brow art, comfortably anchored to the dance hall and the BBC Light Programme (it's worth recalling that the sterilising word 'Light' labelled the BBC's popular music channel until as recently as 1967). It was the rapid cross-fertilisation of several species of American popular music (rock, jazz, blues, country and western), a process documented with a thoroughness and good humour which puts much literary research to shame by Charlie Gillett in his book The Sound of the City, which produced an overwhelmingly potent mixture.

32 Critical Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2

While kids knew this well enough - I remember, at seven or eight years old, carrying my Brunswick 78 of ’Rock around the clock home from the record shop as if it were a fragile bomb - the intelligentsia could remain blithely unaware. ’The Editor has warned me some readers may not know what pop discs are,’ wrote Colin MacInnes at the start of his piece on ‘Pop songs and teenagers‘ in Twentieth Century, February 1958. Archness aside, he may even have been right: ‘I think the abysmal ignorance of educated persons about the popular music of the millions, is deplorable.’ So MacInnes delightedly set about informing ‘some readers’ about a variety of subjects they might not have known much about: pop songs, teenagers, ponces, prostitutes, homosexuals, blacks, bent coppers. His three London novels - City of Spades (1957)’ Absolute Beginners (1959), Mr Love and Justice (1960) - deal with all these, yet it’s on pop music that his ear most perceptively and obsessively lingers: MacInnes could hear the fifties with extraordinary sharpness, and it’s that which makes the best of the London novels, Absolute Beginners, so queasily agonising to re-read. That can‘t, you feel, have been the way people spoke and acted: then you try to fault MacInnes’s picture, and you can’t quite do that either. Isherwood’s camera has become a tape-recorder. And that comparison has a more than accidential relevance, for MacInnes in London in the fifties had much in common with Isherwood in Berlin in the thirties: outsiders (MacInnes grew up in Australia), homosexual, wary, observant, superb journalists. Both used the technique characterised by Isherwood himself as ’tea-tabling‘: their worlds are accurate but fragile, lives measured out in coffee-spoons, and MacInnes goes badly wrong in the ponderously moralising parts of Mr Love and Justice; it‘s a brittle best he achieves in Absolute Beginners. ’What MacInnes instinctively grasped,’ his biographer Tony Gould points out,

was that music was the key to understanding the teenage revolution. On the basis of his familiarity with jazz clubs, his visits to coffee bars like the 2i’s in Old Compton Street (where Tommy Steele began) and, above all, his friendship with youngsters, MacInnes came up with the view of teenagers which infoms his novel Absolute Beginners.

Understanding the teenage revolution involved understanding a far-wider slice of London life, and some of the sharper observation in Absolute Beginners is of older characters - not just the sordids and squares but, for instance, the hero’s father and Mannie Katz (the latter an affectionate portrait of Bernard Kops).‘ Furthermore, MacInnes managed to combine a pluralistic appetite for almost every kind of music with a singular judiciousness: Terry Taylor, the real Soh0 photographer-hustler who partly becomes the fictional hero of Absolute Beginners, was baffled by the way in which MacInnes ‘was always singing Gilbert and Sullivan or old Music Hall numbers, but he admired Billie Holiday; he didn’t care for West Indian calypso, but liked African Highlife sounds’. ’ He

All the lonely people 33

never declined into that drab figure, the up-market pop journalist whose duty it is to drool over Ella Fitzgerald one week and some electronic avant-garde rock the next. When he wrote, well, on Ella Fitzgerald, he knew precisely why he did so: ‘To hear her is to be given, in the most telling and pleasurable form, that particular lift of the spirits that is the great gift of jazz, in its more positive forms, to our frowning, cross-patch age.I6 That sentence is worth dwelling on for a digressive moment or two: partly because its glow of eulogy is untarn- ished by humbug; partly because it contains two truthful, revealing codicils - the one insisting that jazz is something more complex than a confection of cheery niceness, the other admitting why we (today as in August 1958, when that article first appeared) need Ella. And it’s that final point about ’our frowning, cross-patch age’ which hints at the reason why MacInnes was suchsa superb chronicler of his time: he was an addict, but not a fan; incurably hooked, yet undeceived. He hated the bogus, the hypocritical, the manufactured: his eclectic taste in music becomes explicable when one sees that for him art had to keep in touch with street-life; whether the streets were those of twentieth-century Harlem or nineteenth-century London was beside the ppint. He sought in music the roots he never had in life: no wonder he was less sympathetic to the sixties, when pop music moved off the streets and into the studios.

MacInnes was the perfectly-placed observer. Those famous photographs of him in the bare, badly-wired room and the thick patterned sweater - which Peter Blake adapted into a cover design for England, Half English - are accurate enough. ’It is impossible to be generous unless you have nothing,‘ he wrote; and then, ’suiting the action to the word, promptly gave away most of his possessions.’’ He needed anonymity and separateness: as a writer, Francis Wyndham says, what he most wanted was ’praise from unknowns, blacks in a bar . . . [He1 had the essentially rather romantic idea of breaking through and reaching the unliterary audience.’* Thus he had no domestic landscape to engross him, and often little in the way of an emotional landscape either: ’I am the donkey who hesitated between two thistles and died of s ta r~a t ion , ’~ he complained. His personal life, youth-centred and resolutely promiscuous as it was, sustained his stance of ’inside outsider’ at a cost which becomes clear (despite the thin veil of objectivity) in a late essay on Rimbaud: ‘All love affairs between older and younger human beings are perilous, and those of homosexuals especially so . . . what could have become a lasting affection is apt to end in bitterness and regret.”’

Of course, he could be impossible. Tony Parker tells a story, of which the final twist has a real creepiness, of being invited out to lunch by MacInnes. He duly turned up at the offices of MacInnes’s publishers, MacGibbon & Kee, to find his host going through a heap of mail (his tendency to be of no fixed abode meant that communications had frequently to be addressed to him via


his publishers). Then they went off in a taxi, during which journey Parker was asked whether he preferred red or white wine; MacInnes got out, bought 'two enormous bottles of wine', and then directed the taxi to return to the office where he proceeded to drink most of the wine before inscribing a copy of his latest book to Parker with the inscrutable words, 'with all best wishes from Colin MacInnes, Salisbury, WC2'. Only years later did Parker discover the explan- ation: 'Somebody told me that Colin had told him about our meeting and said, "I meant to take him to the bloody Salisbury" - which is a pub, I think, in St Martin's Lane."'

Tony Gould has written an exemplary biography of MacInnes: superbly researched, plainly but attractively narrated, it rightly resists the temptation to offer heavyweight critical analysis in favour of generous quotation from both primary and secondary sources. Gould makes a convincing, understated case for MacInnes the writer and quietly succeeds in making a difficult man likeable.

The fifties, before the village grew global, were chummier, cosier than the sixties: the same pubs, clubs, characters pop up recurrently in memoirs of the decade. Philip Oakes's At The Jazz Band Ball l2 (misleadingly subtitled 'A memory of the 1950s' when it is mostly concerned with the forties) takes us amiably to the threshold of that world. If the book's liveliest stuff concerns Oakes's days as a law court reporter with the wonderful Eric Sly, this is because Oakes's ambitions are relatively conventional - 'The fame and the girl and the money / All at one sitting', perhaps. He gets the girl, after some misguided tangles with sexy Sadie, and the fame (if not the money) will have arrived with the triptych of which this book forms the final panel. Well-written portraits of prominent media people in their youth can't go far wrong, and I enjoyed Oakes's reminiscences of George Scott, Bernard Levin and Alan Brien when they were all working for the magazine Truth; but when Oakes writes about the jazz world, one can't help missing the salty sharpness and engaging dottiness of George Melly's Owning-Up, that most pungent Qf fifties memoirs.

Owning-Up has the true fifties stink about it: Melly was really on the inside of what was changing, whereas Oakes was a good journalist sniffing in the right directions. Melly was singing with Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band - an organisation, if that is the word, which ought to be preserved in good working order by some supertech Madame Tussaud's as a perfect emblem of the decade - touring the clubs, including the wholly obscure Cavern in his native Liverpool, when strange things started happening in the world of pop culture. One day in 1956, Melly encountered Tommy Steele in a Birmingham television studio: both were appearing in a programme on which, 'an unheard-of innovation', singers mimed to their newly-released discs. Melly's was called 'Canary'; Steele's was 'Rock with the Cavemen'. Neither had heard of the other. Over a drink


afterwards:

Tommy asked me if it was my first record. I said it wasn‘t, and asked him if it was his. He told me it wasn‘t either. He then suggested that if I was to be a success in show biz it would be as well to dress a bit more sharp. He put this to me with such charm that I couldn’t take offence. He asked me what sort of car I had. I told him I hadn’t got one. . . .

Sitting next to Tommy in his powerful open car, aware of his heavy gold watch, his strange but immaculate clothing, his complete confidence in himself, his cocky innocence, I found myself puzzled and fascinated by him. When I got to the Ferry, I tried to explain about him to the rest of the band, but they hadn’t heard of him either. l 3

It’s a meeting which MacInnes (who in 1957 wrote a remarkable short piece on Tommy Steele for Encounter) would have enjoyed, no doubt relishing the affinities beyond the superficial incomprehension - both Melly and Steele were reaching for popular cultural roots, articulate, witty, reassuringly real. MacInnes astutely recognised that Steele, far from being merely ’the English Elvis Presley‘, would become ’the first English pop artist to sing English songs’I4 - the true bridge, in fact, between Music Hall and The Beatles, and a figure of perplexing universality: ‘He is Pan, he is Puck, he is every nice young girl’s boy, every kids favourite elder brother, every mother’s cherished adolescent son‘. Is As for Melly, he soon found out what Steele was up to: a month later, the Mulligan band shared a bill with him. ’The audience was not hpstile. It was just that we didn’t seem to be there.’ At the beginning of the second half, he found out why.

The moment the curtain went up a high-pitched squeaking and shrieking started. I was absolutely amazed. After a couple of numbers I left and went back to the pub. The band was playing darts and Frank Parr was getting quite drunk. The orgiastic cries of worship inside the cinema were perfectly audible and this moved him to prophesy.

‘You hear that!‘ he announced as he swayed about, ’that’s the death of jazz. We‘ve had it . . . In six months we‘ll all be in the bread line.’“

But they weren‘t, of course; jazz bounced back, as it usually does, and the attractive pluralism of the late fifties reasserted itself. Ten years later, the combined forces of flower-power rock and protest-folk would come much closer to annihilating British jazz, pushing it to polarised extremes of nostalgia and obscurity - a process best charted, as it happens, by Melly himself. ”

The popcultural world of the late fifties is well served by MacInnes and Melly, insiders who are simultaneously literary people with broader cultural bases and distinctive, indeed eccentric characters. The sixties have so far done rather less well, despite the work of MacInnes’s protege Ray Gosling, whose Personal Copy: a Memoir of the Sixties” is in fact a rather disappointing recycling of assorted articles. A more recent collection of reprinted pieces is Ray Connolly’s Star-


dust Memories: l 9 in these the format of the Evening Standard 'Profile' becomes somewhat numbing. Typically, we have a context (the subject's house, flat, lifestyle), a pretext (the subject's latest record, book, film), and a resulting text which is professional but bland. Sometimes - as; predictably, in the case of Germaine Greer - an interviewee insists, to the author's (and the reader's) evident delight, on coming to unmistakably individual life. Connolly has attached wry postscripts to the interviews, and-it's the figures who finally didn't make it who stick in the mind: Chris Farlowe, out of time indeed, still 'peddling Nazi memorabilia from his shop in Islington', 2o or 'Poor Marc Bolan', 21 dead with his grandiose self-delusions in a car crash in 1979.

Connolly's book has at least an air of honest workmanship about it; the latest fat book on The Beatles, The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, 22 is a dreadfully botched job, though it could hardly fail to be patchily interesting. The author is Gaines, an American journalist, while Brown, who was a long-serving member of The Beatles' entourage, surfaces as a spectral first-person on odd, disconcerting occasions. The difficulty is that Gaines seems to be neither very interested in the music (his nervousness with musical terminology is soon evident: 'John found that it was easy to compose the beginning melody for a song, but he got stuck for a transition and a break), 23

nor very subtly attuned to the social background, as this apparently unironic account of the young Paul McCartney's private life painfully shows:

Paul indulged himself yet never managed to fulfil his appetite. Many of his dates were not 'nice' girls, not the kind he could take home to his mother, Mary, if she were alive. For although every northern man likes his whores, in the centre of his predominantly Irish-Catholic, middle-class heart, what he wants most is a nice girl to settle down with and raise his children.2'

Given that level of perception and that sophistication of prose-style, the book ought to be unreadable. It isn't, partly because the accumulation of competently- researched facts becomes addictive, and partly because the vulnerably life-sized figure of Brian Epstein keeps reappearing, a confused mortal among monsters. After the appalling conclusion of The Beatles' 1966 World Tour, which ended with them fleeing from a Manilan mob, Epstein blamed himself ('How could I let this happen to the boys?') and collapsed on the way home:

Only a few minutes airborne Brian started to vomit and run a high fever. By the time we reached Delhi he was sick enough to need to be helped from the plane to a waiting car. He was attended to by a doctor at the Intercontinental Hotel every day of our four-day stopover.

The Beatles were furious with Brian. They blamed his ineptitude for the entire incident. Down the hall from Brian's suite, in their own interconnecting rooms, they drank Scotch and Cokes and passed joints as they discussed the terrifying events in Manila and the hysterical scene on the plane.2J


With characteristic thoughtfulness, The Beatles announced their decision to stop touring to Epstein on the BOAC plane home. He 'was so sick that the plane's pilot radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet us at the airport. "What will I do if they stop touring?" Brian asked me feverishly. "What will be left for

Epstein had created a four-headed monster, and the monster destroyed him: that is what monsters do, so he should have known better. The corporate life of The Beatles became one of drugs and money, bickering and manipulation. There is nothing very surprising in this: much the same could be said'of Billie Holiday or Elvis Presley. The apparent cynicism and callousness of The Beatles provide just one more instance of a simple, excruciating paradox: these careless people created songs of extreme tenderness, sensitivity, eloquence and perception. The LennodMcCartney songs of love, regret, despair, loneliness ('All the lonely people . . .') are not - as was once flatulently suggested - the greatest songs since Schubert: they are something quite else, peculiarly of their time and within their own terms often unnervingly perfect. And they have turned out to have extraordinary staying-power, even growing-power: the copious best of The Beatles' music - along with so much pop from the strange, brief golden age of the mid to late sixties - remains fresh and refreshing, has a little of that sustenance which Colin MacInnes found in the voice of Ella Fitzgerald. It's a precious commodity and, despite the messiness of The Beatles' lives, it deserves a better sort of book than this one.

me?" ' 1 6

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Notes

Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City. 2nd Edition, London, 1983. Colin MacInnes, England, Half English. London, 1961; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, p. 48. Tony Gould, Inside Outsider. London, 1983, p. 127. Chatto & Windus, E12.50. Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners. London, 1959; Four Square Books, 1962,

Gould, op. cit . , p. 113. MacInnes, England, Half English, p. 134. Gould, op. cit . , p. 81. lbid., p. 122. lbid. , p. 83. Ibid., p. 223. Ibid., p. 164. Philip Oakes, At The Jazz Band Ball. London, 1983. Andre Deutsch, 28.95. George Melly, Owning-Up. London, 1964; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, p. 165. MacInnes, England, Half English, p. 19. Ibid., p. 16. Melly, op. cit . , pp. 166-7. George Melly, Revolt into Style. London, 1970.

pp. 66-73.


18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26

Ray Gosling, Personal Copy. London, 1980. Ray Connolly, Stardust Memories. London, 1983. Pavilion Books/Michael Joseph, 27.95. Connolly, op. cit., p. 23. lbid. , p. 173. Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, The Love You Make. London, 1983. Macmillan, 28.95. Brown and Gaines, op. cit . , p. 24. lbid. , p. 87. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 181.

FREDERICK MORGAN

Villanelle: the Christmas tree

In the quiet house, on a morning of snow, the child stares at the Christmas tree. He wonders what there is to know

behind the tinsel and the glow - behind what he’s been taught to see in the quiet house, on mornings of snow,

when he‘s snug indoors with nowhere to go and mother and father have let him be: he wonders if there’s more to know

about their bright, triumphant show than he’s been told. Is the brave tree, so proud in the house on this morning of snow,

all that it seems? He gathers no assurance from its silent glee and fears there must be more to know

than one poor child can learn. If so, what stake may he claim in the mystery? He stares from the house at the falling snow and wonders how he’ll ever know.

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All the lonely people