William Burroughs in London

Preparing for Friday's walk I'm reading chunks of Barry Miles' hefty William Burroughs A Life, which came out this year for the centenary.  There's a lot of information in here that's new to me and, as usual with Burroughs, a whole new group of people I'd never heard of before, even in the London years, which is the period covered by the walk.  The book is based on a massive amount of research undertaken by James Grauerholz, who couldn't finish the writing and asked Miles to take over. It's very thorough and probably the best Burroughs biography I've read - Miles also knew many of the main players.  He is supposed to be mounting an exhibition based on his archive at Westminster Reference Library next year and hopefully a talk will also be arranged.

As is often the case, unexpected intersections occur, such as Burroughs' visit to Chelsea to see Christopher Gibbs (see the posts on Blow Up Locations and Whistler below - it was Gibbs' flat that was the location for the party scene - see the photo above):

'Bill and Christopher first met in Tangier, when Mikey [Portman] took Christopher around to see Bill at the Muniria, but it was in London that they became friends, and Bill would visit Christopher at Lindsey House at 100 Cheyne Walk, a mansion dating from 1674, remodeled from an even older building.  Bill appeared very at home, lounging on the sofa smoking hashish in front of the huge bay window with its magnificent view of the Thames (James McNeill Whistler, who did many studies of the Thames in the 1870s, had lived next door), attended by his smartly turned-out boys.  The room was dominated by an enormous painting by Il Pordenone that had previously belonged to the duc d'Orleans.  A huge Moroccan chandelier cast a thousand pinpoints of light over Eastern hangings and silk carpets.  In the summer, afternoon tea was taken under the mulberry tree in a garden designed by Lutyens.' [pp.409-410]

Another intersection takes place with Mikey Portman (boyfriend of WSB in his early West London years) and Michael Wishart, the latter an artist who today is almost totally forgotten.  His autobiography High Diver is worth reading - he seemed to meet almost everyone who was anyone in twentieth century art and letters (and dance) and also slept with most of them.  I was annoyed by the usual privileged complaint of poverty ('we didn't have a bean, my dear') while swanning around the south of France swigging champagne and taking copious amounts of drugs.  Portman was one of his many boyfriends - who also included the notorious Denham Fouts and Nicky Haslam:

'He is far more beautiful, capricious and unpredictable than any of the monkeys and marmosets I have entertained and been obliged to dispose of in despair.  Michael's years in the Medina of Tangier, where he was William Burroughs' naked lunch, had hardly equipped him for terra firma.  During his occupation of my house, gramophone records became ashtrays, sheets tourniquets.  The house became a rallying ground for le tout Marseillaise (quartier Arabe).'[p.168]

Burroughs also visited, in the company of Francis Bacon, the Watermans Arms on the Isle of Dogs owned by Soho and Fitzrovia chronicler Dan Farson, who had also enticed, on separate occasions, Jacques Tati, Clint Eastwood and Judy Garland.  I've seen film of this pub (most recently in Paul Kelly's film How We Used to Live) but can't find it on YouTube

Blow Up Locations

Watched Antonioni's Blow Up last week for the third or fourth time - still loved it, although Vanessa Redgrave's performance is becoming irritating.  This time I was interested in the locations and lo and behold there is an excellent obsessive website that offered me (nearly) everything I was hoping for in my post-viewing research.

Comparing then and now it's depressing how many buildings that looked perfectly fine in the film are no longer there now - those near the hostel, for example, would, I'm sure, had they survived redevelopment - and how bland and boring it is - be highly desirable.  How many of us would want to visit that antique shop, original here?

The film really captures the massive architectural changes that London was undergoing at the time: the huge new office blocks flanking London Wall that Thomas (the perfectly cast David Hemmings) drives past in his Roller (previous owner Jimmy Savile) - already being demolished by the 1980s.  The hostel where he spends the night roughing it in homage to Don McCullin still there, but probably 'luxury apartments' today; his studio now no doubt worth millions in the obscene madness of the London 'property market' (in recent reports of the prescient floods, homes are now invariably referred to by the media as 'properties').  I'm sure I wasn't alone in assuming that the park where the central 'murder' scene takes place was in central London (I thought Holland Park) and it wasn't until many years after my first viewing - through an Iain Sinclair essay (Lights Out for the Territory) - that I discovered it was Maryon Wilson Park in Greenwich.  I'd forgotten the strange scaffolding sign looming behind the park, apparently deliberately constructed for the film and intended to be a 'meaningless' logo.

One scene that I hadn't remembered towards the end intrigued me as to its location: Thomas goes to an archetypal Swinging London party in a very posh house with wood panelling and paintings, stuffed with dolly birds and dope and ends up partaking.  In the hazy morning he awakens sprawled alone on a bed and takes in the surroundings: through the window the Thames is clearly visible, with some houseboats moored alongside, so the location is probably Chelsea, certainly perceived as the heart of what was 'happening' at the time.  Blowup Then & Now confirms this and delighted me by revealing that the building was in fact Lindsey House, a nice piece of synchronicity as I've recently been researching, in a minor way, Whistler's followers and their views of his house in Cheyne Walk.

Lindsey House was built in 1674 and in the late 18thc was divided into four separate dwellings: Whistler lived at No.2 Lindsey Row (now No.96 Cheyne Walk) between 1866 and 1878 - today the divided Lindsey House is numbered 96-101.  A couple of years ago I managed to visit it on a London Open House weekend, although I was disappointed to be only allowed into the hallway, ground floor and garden of one house - it's owned by the National Trust, an institution whose often extremely limited 'access' to many of its properties, paid for by ordinary people so that toffs can carry on living there, is discussed in The Gilded Acorn.

The room in Blow Up has been set-dressed to look suitably patrician but dishevelled: the 'paintings' include the cherubs at the foot of Raphael's Sistine Madonna (later to become a hackneyed cliche, were they already by that point? was this a framed Athena-type poster from the King's Road?)  The painting to the left above the chaise longue looks like a Rubens nude, but it's hard to tell.  No doubt the paintings were chosen especially by Antonioni.  Above stills from Blowup Then & Now and a photo I took of a club in Palermo in February 2013.