Poets, Tarts, Cheese

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese is one of those carefully time-locked London pubs where one is invited to experience a idealised ‘heritage’ drinking experience. The Cheese was rebuilt after the Great Fire and escaped the Victorians, the Blitz and post-war redevelopment and has survived into the 21st century as an authentically preserved/recreated old London boozer. The building is genuinely old, and its basement bars may once have formed part of the crypt of a Carmelite monastery. All right, the interior is a re-creation, as the pub was burned out in World War 2, an incident caused by a careless electrician rather than the Luftwaffe. At time of writing, the only beer on offer in the Cheese is Sam Smith’s, a rather dense, tawny ale brewed in Yorkshire; its main appeal is that it is remarkably cheap, but it is perhaps no coincidence that Samuel Smith Brewery Co. currently lay claim to several other historic London pubs: these include the legendary Fitzrovia hangouts The Wheatsheaf and The Fitzroy Tavern, and The Princess Louise in High Holborn.

Y.O. Cheese has a glut of writers associated with it, from Samuel Johnson (allegedly) and Charles Dickens, up to Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. It remained a writers’ pub even in the 1980s, a hangout for those journos who still worked on Fleet Street even as the newspapers began to leave. But my focus today is the 1890s, when The Cheshire Cheese was home to The Rhymers’ Club, an austere flower of the Aesthetic movement which met in the pub from the 1890s up to 1904. The likes of Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, Richard Le Gallienne, Ernest Rhys and other tremulous young men would meet once a month in a top floor room and share new poems over drinks and clay pipes. (They usually met at the Cheese, but not always; other venues, including The Cafe Royal, were sometimes used for the Club’s purpose.) The group aimed at the creation of a literary salon in the contemporary Parisian style (with Stephane Mallarme and, in particular, Paul Verlaine as their lodestars), but the decidedly mixed ability of the poet-members means that The Rhymers’ Club is remembered for its ambition rather than any lasting corporate accomplishment. But there were some real talents, notably Dowson whose great ‘Cynara’ poem made its debut before the poets of The Club in 1890. The Cheshire Cheese was where Wilde came to hear John Gray, the model for Dorian Gray and quite possibly Wilde’s lover, read some lines of verse. And it was through Rhymers’ Club member Lionel Johnson that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas, a meeting that he may have regretted later. (In Richard Ellmann’s great biography of Wilde, Douglas is described as ‘even better looking than John Gray, and even less talented.‘)

The Wilde connection has probably, retrospectively, elevated the company somewhat; visiting poet Arthur Lynch characterised the Rhymers as ‘a small assemblage of poetically pious young men’, and went on to observe that on the occasion he visited the club he felt that the only real outcasts present were himself and the waiter. And the tendency of the original members who survived past 1900 and into old age to mythologise their own pasts is glimpsed in this excerpt from the memoirs of Richard Le Gallienne, here ‘fresh from Liverpool’, describing a visit to Lionel Johnson’s rooms in Grays Inn shortly after meeting him for the first time at the Cheese:

‘I hope you drink absinthe Le Gallienne – for I have nothing else to offer you.’
Absinthe! I had just heard of it. As a drink mysteriously sophisticated and even Satanic. […] I had never tasted it then, nor has it ever been a favourite drink of mine. But in the ‘90s it was spoken of with a self-conscious sense of one’ s being desperately wicked, suggesting diabolism and nameless iniquity. Did not Paul Verlaine drink it all the time in Paris! – and Oscar Wilde and his cronies, it was darkly hinted, drank it nightly at the Café Royal.

As it happened, Johnson was Lord Alfred Douglas’s cousin and was of the view that Oscar had corrupted ‘Bosie’ a sentiment Johnson committed to verse in a poem dedicated to Wilde, To The Destroyer Of A Soul. The poem opens with the line: ‘I hate you with a necessary hate.‘ Wilde made no comment on the poem; but Johnson, who was both an alcoholic and a midget, was waspishly characterised by the great dramatist thus: ‘Every morning at 11 o’clock you can see him come out of the Café Royal and hail the first passing perambulator.’ 

Richard Le Gallienne all aesthetic and hand-coloured in the 1890s.

The Cheese was convenient for Rhymers’ Club stalwart Arthur Symons, who had digs in Fountain Court just off the Strand, rooms that Symons shared for a while with W.B. Yeats. Yeats left an account of an evening at Fountain Court when Dowson dropped in accompanied by a prostitute known in the poet’s circle as ‘Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’. She was called that because she charged more if she was fully made-up and well turned out. In Yeats’s account, ‘Penny Plain’ wearying of some insufferable bore’s pontificating, took all her clothes off and sat by the fire, unnerving the pompous ass who was holding court but delighting Dowson and his energetically heterosexual pals. She delighted in telling the young lions of her sexual adventures, one of which involved an old man whose fetish was to see her strangle a pair of pigeons, which he would bring to her in a little basket. She interspersed her anecdotes by disappearing into a bedroom with a writer or two, only Yeats and Symons refraining from sampling the delights on offer. Penny Plain must have appreciated the company: by this time many of the prostitutes who worked the Strand were wary of coming into the Temple, as they considered the resident writers and law students to be dangerous lunatics. By a charming coincidence, Symons’s next-door neighbour in Fountain Court was Henry Havelock Ellis who was at that time busy writing his pioneering study Sexual Inversion. (According to a friend of Ernest Dowson’s, Penny Plain didn’t do too badly in life; she ended up married to a rich brewing magnate.)

Lionel Johnson: doomed, ‘Decadent’, and short.

The Romantic ’90s, as Le Gallienne’s memoir has it, seemed to come to an abrupt end with Oscar Wilde’s arrest in 1895, followed by the deaths of many of the protagonists of London’s ‘Decadent’ or ‘Symbolist’ movement. Johnson lived just long enough to write a memorial poem for Dowson on his death in 1900, but was himself dead just two years later, dying in the most unfortunate – albeit appropriate – circumstances. Broke and seriously alcoholic, he suffered a drink-related stroke in a Fleet Street pub. By the time Ezra Pound visited the Cheese for a valedictory event in 1910, the Rhymers’ Club seemed to represent an idea of poetic expression that was totally moribund, and Pound demonstrated his modernist credentials by eating two red tulips during a recital by Yeats. In his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound satirised the elder poets associated with the pub and the Decadent scene as a whole:

For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club;

Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub …

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels …

I have, in the company of a couple of other Dowson aficionados, visited the private room at the top of the Cheese where the Rhymers used to meet. No longer panelled and lit by candles, it’s just a room for hire in a pub, done out in standard 21st century catering décor. No chance of summoning the ghosts of the great dead now. You can, however, eat dinner in the ground floor grill room – where the Rhymers had their chops before adjourning to the top floor – which retains the atmosphere of 17th century inn, even if the interior is a reconstruction following the 20th century pub fire. And Samuel Smith’s should be congratulated for the sensitivity of their management of these historic pubs. The problem is that the loving restoration reinforces the sense of theme park, that creep of ‘Heritage’ (a tainted word if ever there was one) that imprisons London. The ghosts of the past are marooned amongst the tourists and the centre of town is closed off to the truly louche and experimental. The Fitzroy Tavern and the Wheatsheaf can never be what they were in the 1920s and 40s; and where would The Rhymers’ Club meet today? A loft in Peckham or Dalston, probably. Except they’ve probably already moved to Margate. Or Folkestone.

A Quick Sharpener Before Doomsday

It should, by now, be apparent to everyone that we are living in a dystopian sci-fi scenario, but who wrote it? John Wyndham? Too cosy, perhaps. Or there’s J.G. Ballard … he wrote extensively about various kinds of societal collapse, either in ‘hard’ sci-fi novels like The Drowned World, or in his later sly and speculative manner, e.g. High Rise. But Ballard didn’t do comedy and the black absurdity of Donald Trump requires a satirical touch. Kurt Vonnegut’s brand of savage, slapstick sci-fi fits the bill, but I have been unable to locate my copies of Cat’s Cradle or Galapagos to refresh ecstatic youthful impressions. (It has also been suggested to me that Channel 4’s 1982 comedy show Whoops Apocalypse is relevant, chiefly with respect to its portrayal of the President of the United States as a total cretin.)

But one work of science fiction that has been haunting me over the past few weeks is the 1961 film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, directed by Val Guest from a script written by himself and Wolf Mankowitz (the same team behind the Soho musical Expresso Bongo). The idea behind this inventive British movie is that nuclear testing has thrown the orbit of the earth out of whack and sent our planet spinning toward the sun. London becomes hotter than Cairo and the city’s residents wilt and go mad in the heat. It is a great time capsule of London locations, and the heroes of the film – as unlikely as this sounds now – are journalists working on the Daily Express, then still operating out of its beautiful Art Deco building on Fleet Street, right opposite St. Bride’s church. The nominal stars are Edward Judd (the producers wanted Richard Burton but couldn’t afford him), Leo McKern, and the delightful Janet Munro. The newspaper scenes have a sense of authenticity amidst the dodgy science, and the verisimilitude extended to the casting of the editor of the Daily Express, a character played by a former editor of the paper. (Arthur Christiansen, editor from 1933 to 1957. A nice conceit, but Christiansen couldn’t really act.)

Fleet Street’s finest … Leo McKern, Edward Judd and Janet Munro feeling the heat outside The Express Building.

There’s a lot wrong with the film: the banter-ish, ‘Front Page’ type dialogue is cringeworthy, Edward Judd is a charm-free zone, and the special effects are often risible – but for all that it remains unsettling and eerily prescient. The clever use of genuine news footage, indicating drought and out of control weather, now looks like an anticipation of recent wildfires in Australia and California. The evocation of oppressive, unnatural heat is very effective: everything dries up or burns up and water becomes the most precious of all commodities. Black market water is spreading typhoid, alcohol is in short supply and even a warm Coke will cost you. As society buckles under the strain, decadent young people express their nihilism by wantonly chucking buckets of priceless water about, drenching themselves to the implausible sound of trad jazz. (‘Beatnik music by Monty Norman’ is the byline in the credits. The crazed, trumpet-touting kids were perhaps inspired by riots at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1960. Was Acker Bilk a baleful influence on British youth? Discuss. )

And, as you’d expect in a film that trades in Fleet Street clichés (‘They say you used to be a writer’), there are many episodes where the hacks go the pub. The pub in question is ‘Harry’s Bar’, a private members’ club just next to St. Bride’s (a fictional one, as far as I am aware). By the end, the trip to Harry’s Bar has acquired a devotional aspect: the film concludes with our heroes assembled in the club – one that by now looks more like a bar in the Australian Outback – and wait to hear whether an operation to save the planet has worked. (The great powers set off ‘corrective’ nukes in an attempt to blast the Earth back to its correct orbit.) Harry’s Bar has run dry, but the manageress gives the small band of regulars a drink on the house from a special, reserved bottle of scotch. This scene reminds me of the titular bar scene at the end of Ice Cold In Alex, where an ordinary glass of lager is a miraculous answer to a fervent but unspoken prayer. And this link between booze and prayer feels pertinent to where we are now. Many of us are offering prayers of one sort or another, even non-believers like me who are simply praying for the pubs to re-open. Of course drink is not always the answer; but whilst we might not be able to drink Covid19 away, we can at least toast its demise. As Leo McKern says as he raises his glass in Harry’s Bar: ‘To the luck of the human race’.

In Harry’s Bar, listening to the countdown over the radio …

For the cineastes out there, The Day the Earth Caught Fire is also notable for Michael Caine’s film debut in a bit part as a policeman (‘Stay clear of Chelsea, they say it’s pretty rough down there’); and also a groundbreaking moment of nudity in British cinema, when Janet Munro’s nipple is briefly glimpsed in her bathroom mirror. Society would never be the same again … At time of writing, you can see the entire film (handsomely restored by the BFI) on YouTube.