Beatific and a bit bent in Soho

With the recent passing of Glen Carmichael, here is a new review of the cult novel: STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS co-written with his friend, Kevin Evans. Available now from Burning Eye Books. 

Carmichael, Evans and co.

The spectre of Jack Kerouac casts a knowing eye over Glenn Carmichael and Kevin Evans’ cult novel ‘STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS’ which is now reissued from Burning Eye. Dean Moriarty is reincarnated in 1980’s London as dangerous driving ‘Gene Campbell’, a scene stealing, hard living poet with an eye for the ladies - and men. Echoing the role of Kerouac’s beatific, Sal Paradise and riding shotgun along Constitution Hill in their dented Vauxhall Victor is Gene's sidekick, Spike, straight man and word perfectionist searching for meaning in the repressed, Thatcher-era miasma they inhabit. It is straight man Spike's literate, self-deprecation and parody which invests our interest as the two friends careen around the Buckingham Palace roundabout trying to make their gig. The excitement builds through the tension and eyes of Spike as he wonders if he is really  'ready to.... swallow dive into the maelstrom' with this flamboyant self-seeking apostle, Gene, bent on taking them into the top tier of performance poetry. 

Cult novel reissued

The novel is fuelled by the friends' failures; a prior musical incarnation as 'The White Brothers' died with a spat on Denmark Street and the tension builds with one man’s desire to transfix the clubs over pubs of 80's seedy Soho London. The 'commissars of the quatrain' take the stage with a vengeance in The Red Lion to breath new life into a dying and abandoned art form. Seizing on the energy vacuum the young friends control the mic and soon 'words richocheted around the walls'. Suggestions that Gene is going to be the 'lifeguard' to a dying scene play on the mind of the more introspective Spike and his fixation on this messianic figure, is the power of the novel's first few chapters. (After speaking with Kevin Evans by phone I was informed that the opening of the novel won a literary prize, and it was the conviction of the two friends Evans and Carmichael to finish the novel as a consequence of this). As 'poetry' is The Big City Beats mutual calling, Spike’s concerns about the very strange nature of poetry assault the opening like beats on a drum in a jazz club: poetry as life tonic is a succession of metaphors expressed as frenzied mind skipping through a Rolodex. Poetry Is everything and nothing, a tired ‘gentlemen’s club’, a ‘wild beast’ a ‘queer fish’. After all, with Spike seeking a release from a stifling Civil Service day job, poetry is all consuming. But in the same space of days it is also ‘an atrophied corpse’ and the rewards are not money nor fame perhaps. Spike admits, ‘Poetry, who needs it?’  The answer and driving force comes from the relentless but unreliable form of charismatic ‘Gene’, who wills Spike to memorise their lines and beat back their audience into full submission to their ‘heavenly light’.  The style of writing moves from metaphor to simile and 'that queer fish' poetry never suffers from a lack of time in the spotlight. In the world of the Big City Beats, ‘poetry’ needs a kick up the arse as it is as ‘flaccid as a eunuch’s dick, as dull as dishwater’. Like an odd couple band eschewing definition you wonder how this will all tap out. ‘Your best is not good enough,’ Gene yells at the audience.

If you consider that 'STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS' is a co-authored novel it may be appropriate that this ‘fictive book’,  based on real life, asks you to go deeper to try and figure out which poet wrote which part (Evans or Carmichael)? My gut feeling is that the opening, based on the observations of a sidekick, is written by Evans and the descriptions of the lack of organisation at a poetry reading show the point of view of a young passionate man whose anger resonates with his search for meaning. Have the action scenes been penned by Carmichael? How would the novel fare without its clever plotting? The poem ‘Distance’ at the end is a clear example of Carmichael's work and there are readings of it online.  It is hard to really know who wrote what but the book is able to easily blend an obviously mutually understood world and the characters crackle, fizz and pop. There’s is humour in the book, when show boating Gene waltzes into an East End caf and sits quietly ‘glum’ while both girlfriends, ‘Maria’ and ‘plain Claire’ hold court over the spoken word poetry scene.

"What is wrong?" asks Spike to his friend  who just stares ahead and mutters hollowly that ‘Carver, Raymond Carver has died.’ 

BIG CITY BEATS

This revelation floors Spike as he never knew his friend was a fan of Raymond Carver and the spare response and style may be a homage to the American master of 'less is more'. Spike never knows what Gene is going to do next and despite them seeming to be best friends it shows how little they know about each other outside of the desire to be the next big thing in spoken word poetry. There is a 'Withnail and I' quality about the book, though at times, the admitted ‘angry at the world tone’ is played on frequently.  What the book s great at is showing how little we do know about the people we spend time with. The action scenes are comic, perhaps penned by Carmichael (who has recently passed away) but again I don’t know. The scenes of drug taking  have maximum impact and show the debauched side of drug addiction, poverty, sex for sale, etc. The celebration of Spike’s birthday on February 14th is filled with pathos and terrible sadness as the boys veer  from name checked East End watering holes, like The Blind Beggar, to Murphy’s which is their secret name for the White Hart, all culminating in a quite debauched downward spiral as things literally go south after a disastrous reading at the posh Chelsea Arts and Crafts Fair. 

Danny Boyle, would you option this?

There is lots of great funny writing about working class observations of ‘Taffs’. The figure of Rhys a kind of stoned bully from hell who persecutes Spike for maximum comic effect is particularly effective as we want Spike to stand up for himself, which he never does.  Rhys, described as ‘the blond pale shit-bag, a neurosis and crisis written scumbag’ is over the top so we delight in the mad caper of his sadistic advances. The sadness of the book permeates through but the book has a page turning quality, and would make a decent film as the set pieces, all based  a round London landmarks like Pall Mall, Soho, The Red Lion Pub, Soho peep shows, The Blind Beggar, evoke a certain era of East End versus West End rent boys, scenesters, poets and lowlife's of 1980’s London. 

I see this book as a film. The scene driving around Buckingham Palace is a page right out of classic cinema  and the characters are rip snortingly real, as if the writer had put it down here to get the characters right when the book is filmed. This book has a very dark soul but is honest in its account of real life events which may have occurred at The Hard Edge Club from 1989 till 1995 and it features award winning writing (the first chapter won the East Side Writers award in 1998) and the comedy is there. If there were a sequel I would call it something like Spiked: Withnail’s uncle pops his clogs in Soho. 

After speaking with Kevin Evans by phone recently and in light of the recent death of his old friend Glenn Carmichael, I asked Kevin whom he would like to direct the film of this book. One particular person was in my mind but I asked Kevin anyway.  "Danny Boyle or someone like that, would do a great job." Are you a director looking for a book set in 1980's London. This one has it all, and deserves its beat, cult status. 

Love in Aging Minds (from a work in progress)

I did not mention this yet but things happened very quickly in England and my great aunt died of old age. As a family of habit my great aunt never married and was living in an old farmhouse with her cats; she entertained, with a kind of reluctant acceptance, the villagers who came round to call on her. She was my favourite aunt and when we were little she took us down to the orchard where the chickens were and fed them scraps. We would marvel at the eggs we would bring back, amazed that every Sunday one chicken was bound for the pot. The male chickens were the ones that went first  – and as young as we were we could still see that my aunt did it with a gruff sense of purpose; she wasn’t mean, just dogged and practical and on an Edwardian farm, a wartime lady she surely was.

“Never saw much use for men,” she said once when I quizzed her in her back garden and I wondered how much was directed towards me, a wistful eighteen year-old who lodged with her after high school and worked for a next door cousin's marquee business. Many times she was awoken from her slumber on the second floor of that old farm house by the anxious voice of my high school girlfriend whom I'd left back home who had no clue a school night in Nova Scotia was the witching hour in ol Blighty. 

"Silly girl!" My aunty chided but I could tell there was a slight tinge of regret as if she had loved a man as a teenager. She never spoke of this but I could feel it during hot summers when skyward glances during weeding sessions followed war planes in air shows from nearby Brize Norton airport. "Oh what a carry on." She would say gruffly. "Next I suppose it'll be the colonel driving past in his mustard tin car, following the hunt," she stated as if she didn't really want to go and watch the hounds and the men come through on horseback. I found her a bit of an enigma as if to say that she put many things down, but had no real mean bone in her body. Once I asked her what she thought of Warren Beatty whom was one of the best looking men in Hollywood in his day. “Oh I suppose he’d be all right to sit on a park bench with,” she said.

She was tallish and had swollen legs and big dark severe spectacles that she wore very imposingly but she squeaked with delight at the cats took in strays and she loved nature. I always marveled at her sense of purpose, pushing through the old Edwardian farm house with her cane and fielding once a week phone calls from her sister, Saturdays in the stairwell.  The reason I was with her had been set-up a year before by my parents. My mother wanted me to get some work experience in the UK after high school and my aunt was my mother's, aunt and godmother. Arrangements were made for me to work the for my cousin's marquee business. This all done after she came to Nova Scotia to visit us when she was seventy three – Seventy Three! She had a cake on the plane, was waited on by all the ladies 'in all their finery', the stewardesses.

When I came back to England from Toronto, in 2003, I went to her 90^th birthday party at her old farmhouse. It was a grand affair with some local dignitaries and her favourite, a jockey. My aunt asked me if I was still very vain and had I found a woman who wouldn’t make a fool of me?  She sat in a large marquee at one of the main tables table and held court for as long as she could; all of the elderly relatives  passed around photo albums and told me stories of my grandmother, Judith and my aunty as young ladies during the second world war, letting down their hair at dances, in nearby Carterton, and Eynsham, and Witney. In 2003, even though I had lived most of my life in Canada, we were still connected; no matter my lack of success in any proven field other than being a painful word obsessive, we had formed a bond after high school. As I mentioned I had lived with her for a year in her old crumbling farmhouse, working at a factory and as a barman and labourer in rural Oxfordshire before I went back to Nova Scotia and University.

When she died, now a very old lady who had recently celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday party, sitting with blinking eyes on her couch, sitting for pictures with all and sundry out to see her, she was becoming house bound. She was struggling a great deal. Her sister (my grandmother) had recently died and she missed her weekly phone calls from her sister to see how things were. Then as the relatives trickled to a halt and she became more resigned to the infrequent visits, she asked me if my wife, “the little one”, was taking up all my time; when the Polish “ladies in waiting” came round to tidy up she was abrupt with them and if they did get too close to things, (meaning trying to dust or tactfully declutter), my aunt gave them their marching orders, sharpish. She still had the sharp tongue we loved about her but her fire had died. I received calls and letters from “her carer” and her niece saying that they didn’t think I should come out and see her in the ways that she had fallen into around Christmas, forgetting things, falling silent, drinking a little; when she went into the nursing home I knew that she was ready that way but I did not listen to any warning not to go.  I went to say my goodbyes in the Windrush Hospital in Witney; she was propped up in bed, in her gown, sedated, her eyes were closed, slightly reddish, her teeth were out and she was snoring away but when we huddled round and started to talk she stopped snoring and I know that she was listening. Of course her life had been hard but also fair and eventful as well. 

She was a no-nonsense type of person and her sister had been the beauty and my aunt had been the one who had never married and had cared for her parents instead, both of them who had lived well into their eighties, and nineties, too.   

I went to her funeral in the country and read a poem that I had written for her in the country church with all there to listen. It was emotional and I followed the funeral procession out into the grave site and watched the coffin get loaded down into the ground. She was my great friend, the befriender of her nieces' Canadian kids and then offering advice to an eighteen-year-old teenager and I did not want to deny her, her day. I loved her and I would always love her, sitting as she did with her blankets across her, crossword on her lap. She said once that she read The Insolent Boy and “couldn’t make head nor tail of it” but after a while, “the penny dropped.” I had started writing at her farm when I was seventeen, so in a way a filament of that desire to try and make a go of it was kindled in me then; even her sister, my grandmother -  a great personality and talker, wit and gossip and beauty as well had never been published as a writer.

And so after her passing I am resigned to the fact that that idyl is simply that a memory now and I continue to work at whatever jobs I can and make myself a ghoul, haunting my house till late hours creeping from the marriage bed into the study where I pound on the keys till the late hours. My wife say, “come to bed” but I do not she lays there with here hands in her hair pulling at hairs, in her pajamas, waiting for me to come in quietly. I klutz in and cave in eventually, in the darkness of the night whispering to her; “Do you love me? Do you love me? Will you love me forever and so on.”

The replies  – always the same: “Yes, Papi.” Till it all gets louder and more irritated; a grown woman, under siege.

The jobs I work I throw myself all over the city into different situations, predicaments. The other day I was working in a market research job in the East end of London, Enfield, which is up in North East London but because the trains were down I had to take a replacement bus to the main terminus in Finsbury Park, to get a connector service. The East End is still rough; living in Leytonstone I know why David Beckham runs so hard on the pitch when he plays football ­– he never wants to come back here again. Two stories come to mind; perhaps both caused by  a problem with the transport system. In the first case the replacement bus was stuck in traffic on a Saturday and cramped in the back back, sitting with yobs, pensioners, we were suddenly all told to 'get off the bus' because the quietish but sinister young man with the hood had a dog and the dog had shit right in the middle of the bus without anyone seeing it happen. Someone said “its been sick!” the dog has been sick but  it was shit, everyone could tell by the smell of it and the way it was in three separate pieces. The bus driver said everyone off and the crowds out in Walthamstow were fierce, milling around Black Horse Road and trying to figure out whether to take train bus or tube and wondering at the same time where the boy with the dog was, thinking he must be having a chuckle now ducking down a back alleyway? Later on, I was on a door-to-door market research job, knocking on doors and some old, ancient, man invited me into this place said "sit down" he’d be "happy to answer all the questions I had for him."

“What is this all about then?”

 “It's for the council,” I reassured him as I looked into his living room; all the furniture was covered with plastic, little porcelain figurines, crystal, like a strange abandoned trailer. The first clue was the long bony fingers on my collar and a puppetish smile. A bit creepy. Problem it stunk in his place like there hadn’t been anyone in there for days; the place was covered in a thin film of dust and inactivity, like it was preserved in time, on the day the President Kennedy was inaugurated or something; the elderly man was dressed in his night shirt, stooped, spidery thin, was ninety four and deaf as a post, not to mention smiling like a little George Burns, Jewish, gay as the hills. He said, after we had conducted the interview about the council, “I’m rearry attracted to you.” I said, “What?” and he put his hand on me and shuddered and mustered with all his strength “I quite fancy you…” and he was ninety four years old, cuteish, (this must have been his charm as a young man, as he said that he was a tailor) and gave me a hug, he said “AR quite fancy you.” and I said “OK Thank you God bless” as if I was honoured in a weird way to be with the chief of a nearly extinct time and place but I was in such a state I left in a hurry without my bag and all he said, “I can be very discreet ­– come any time you like.”

 I looked into the room where I am certain he entertained favourite nephews and sisters who have married and moved on with having good jobs, families and the like but it was so dark and it was so stale the place, like he covered it in plastic so when people left he wouldn’t have to clean it. There are things you don’t want to see, things about your aged aunts and uncles and you don’t want them to see them in you either. Does this old gay man, feel this way as well? Was he a teachers pet as a child or a favourite nephew who had to keep mum about his own gay inclinations?

Of course I was in the street, feeling strangely naked and vulnerable like when you have forgotten something you can’t quite remember (a friend from one of those jobs would just as easily say you would lose your nose if it wasn’t attached to your face!) so I went back to get the bag he left in the place I could not get in and he would not answer, which made me think that old people are smarter than they let on. I tried the number he had provided for back checking but he when I tried to call it gave a wrong number. And my interview bag was still in there, Crafty old codger.