London Calling (15 page)

Shortly after the move, Victor and Ida had the good fortune to meet John Kasmin, who later opened one of the most significant
London galleries of the sixties. He had just arrived back in Britain after a long stay in New Zealand. He had quickly settled
into the Soho lifestyle, hanging out at David Archer’s bookshop and drinking at the Caves de France, the Colony Room and the
French pub. He enjoyed visiting Gallery One, particularly in the afternoons, when Ida would have a tea party going and there
were many interesting people to meet. He told Val Williams: ‘I thought this looked like the perfect lodge for me to nest in.’
¹⁹
Kasmin had very little money, and Victor couldn’t afford an assistant, but Kasmin, nonetheless, quickly became part of the
household. He worked as the gallery assistant and at the same time took over Ida’s career, acting as her business adviser.
He arranged for the
Observer
newspaper and the monthly
Tatler
to use her pictures of London life on a regular basis and got her other photojournalist jobs. He also arranged for her to
sell prints of her photographs, providing another income for the household. It was not easy for Kasmin to work for Ida, but
it was good training for dealing with difficult artists in his future career as a gallery owner. Ida cared little who her
sitters were and often, as in the case of T. S. Eliot, whom she ordered around in a most autocratic way, had no idea what
they did. Kasmin was often embarrassed, and he told Val Williams that after they left the shoot ‘We would have a terrible
shouting match in the street – she had this tremendous, strong, hooting voice.’
²⁰

As the result of Kasmin’s efforts, in 1958 Bryan Robertson offered Ida a show at the Whitechapel Gallery, but first he gave
her letters of introduction to enable her to take more portraits of artists to round off the series. The exhibition opened
on 22 March 1960 and included 114 works, mostly artists and writers, some of which were blown up to enormous size, sometimes
four by five feet. The show received good reviews, but mostly they concentrated on the discussion of whether or not photography
was an art form. Ida had great expectations of the show, but although it made her better known, nothing
really changed, and it was, in fact, the pinnacle of her career. However, the sixties brought a new appreciation of photography
to Britain and by the middle of the decade her work began to be appreciated: the V&A bought sixteen large prints and the University
of Texas bought 100, but by this time she was showing signs of psychological disturbance. She and Victor Musgrave had effectively
been living apart for many years but she did not recognize this fact. She told a reporter: ‘We are not separated. We have
taken separate houses. We started in the same bed, then we had separate beds. Then separate rooms, then separate floors, now
different houses.’
²¹

In April 1961, Musgrave had moved Gallery One to more sumptuous premises at 16 North Audley Street in Mayfair. However, he
still ran the most avant-garde space in London. Among his more memorable shows was his 23 October 1962
Festival of Misfits
featuring Fluxus artists Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Arthur Köpcke, Gustav Metzger, Robin Page, Daniel
Spoerri and finally Ben Vautier, who lived exposed to the public in the gallery window for two weeks. Victor Musgrave had
a very specific vision and his was the first British space to give shows to Enrico Baj, Jean Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, Robert
Filliou, Yves Klein, Dieter Roth and Nam June Paik. He also discovered U K artists such as Gillian Ayres, Peter King, Bruce
Lacey, David Oxtoby and Bridget Riley.

His meeting with Bridget Riley was a fortuitous accident. She had studied at Goldsmiths from 1949 to 1952, followed by three
years at the Royal College of Art, but had not had much luck in selling her work. She was thirty years old, and lived and
painted in one small room in South Kensington, heated by a small paraffin stove. One day in late autumn, she was on her way
home from her day job as a draftsman at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency when a sudden storm blew up. She sheltered
in the doorway of a gallery in North Audley Street and, as she glanced in the window, she became aware of a man beckoning
to her. ‘Why don’t you come in and look properly?’ he asked. She later recalled: ‘I gave him a very stiff review of what I
saw. I don’t recall the work any more, and he said, “Well, what makes you so sure, and what have you got there?” I undid this
bundle, and I had some of my black-and-white gouaches in it.’
²²

Her first show at Gallery One, called
Shadowplay
, opened in May 1962. Just one painting sold, but Musgrave believed in her and her 1963 show sold better and attracted more
reviews. By 1965 her work was on the cover of the catalogue of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s now legendary exhibition,
The Responsive Eye
. In 1968 she became the first woman to win the international prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. By then Gallery One
was closed. After a decade promoting the work of others, Musgrave decided to devote more time to his own poetry and closed
the doors in October 1963, emerging occasionally for specific projects such as co-producing Yoko Ono’s
Bottoms
film. His other great interest was so-called ‘Outsider Art’, or
Art Brut
, and beginning in 1981 he and his second partner, Monika Kinley, assembled an enormous collection of work by psychiatric
patients and prisoners which is now housed in the Tate. Ida Kar died on Christmas Eve, 1974; Victor Musgrave died ten years
later.

David Archer’s bookshop did not last long. He literally gave all his money away, and when he was broke his so-called friends
all drifted away. At first he worked for a rival bookstore, telling them: ‘You don’t have to pay me a lot of money.’ There,
some of his remaining friends visited – John Minton and the Roberts – and they would go off for noisy lunches, but he sometimes
attempted to pay and of course his cheques bounced. He was next to be seen serving in the lampshade department of Selfridges,
where his plummy upper-class accent contrasted strongly with the accents of his superiors. By then he was living in a dingy
basement off the Edgware Road, reading by candlelight because the electricity had been cut off. His fair-weather friends like
Deakin had abandoned him, having sponged off him for decades. When asked if he knew where Archer was living, Deakin told Dan
Farson: ‘I do not know and I do not care.’
²³
He repeated his mean-spirited view to Marilyn Thorold: ‘He can die in the gutter for all I care.’ Archer could not pay his
rent and finished up in a Rowton House, a homeless men’s hostel in the East End. This was too much for him to bear and after
writing thank you letters to the few remaining friends who had offered him help and kindness he killed himself with an overdose
of aspirin. He left £1 10s 0d. At one point his bank had refused to loan him even 7s 6d for food.

He was buried in the family plot at Castle Eaton in Wiltshire, which caused a mention in the parish magazine. This was seen
by the governor of a school that had been endowed by Archer’s grandfather. The school was closing, leaving a substantial sum
of money, and the governor wrote to Marilyn Thorold, one of Archer’s remaining benefactors: ‘We had been trying to contact
him for some time wondering if he could make some use of this considerable sum of money himself.’
²⁴
It was estimated that he gave away about £80,000 in total, most of it to impoverished friends or parasites like Deakin.

London was a wonderful and bewitching city for me. On odd visits earlier I’d just sat in pubs, certain that at any moment
something marvellous would happen that would change my whole life.

JOHN BRAINE
¹

Despite being largely a media construct, the Angry Young Men (AYM) found a natural habitat in David Archer’s bookshop, and
also in nearby Better Books on the Charing Cross Road. The Angry Young Men were a loose-knit group of writers who had little
in common except their youth: the phrase was first used in association with John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
but was quickly applied to Colin Wilson, whose
The Outsider
was published in the same week. The press always likes a label and soon Kingsley Amis, Michael Hastings, John Wain and John
Braine read in the papers that they, too, were Angry Young Men as Amis and Braine, in particular, had written novels that
identified this new restless spirit.

Kingsley Amis’s
Lucky Jim
was published on 25 January 1954 and ran to twenty impressions in four years as well as being translated into nine languages.
It became one of the most successful first novels in the English language. The book’s hero, Jim Dixon, did well as a scholarship
boy in the new post-war welfare state and the book, essentially, dealt with the breakdown of the English class system as a
new generation were educated to a level beyond their traditional position in society. As Amis put it, Jimmy Dixon’s aim in
life is to have the privileges of the old ruling class without any of the responsibilities. Walter Allen, in his famous review
in the
New Statesman
said:

A new hero has risen among us… he is consciously, even conscientiously, graceless. His face, when not deadpan, is set in a
snarl of exasperation. He has one skin too few, but his is not the sensitiveness of the young man in earlier twentieth-century
fiction: it is the phoney to which his nerve ends
are tremblingly exposed, and at the least suspicion of the phoney, he goes tough.
²

John Braine came to London after giving up a steady job in a Yorkshire library to try his luck as a freelance writer. His
parents thought that he had gone out of his head. Braine:

I had £150 saved up and I took a room in Kensington. In that land of the bedsitter and the old men and women who wander up
and down the high street muttering to themselves… I learned… what it was like to be lonely, to come home to a solitary meal
of a boiled egg and a cup of coffee made over a gas ring.
³

The writing did not come easily and he has described how frightening it was to close the door to his bedsitter and realize
that he had nothing he wanted to write about.

In the event he did most of his writing in a sanatorium suffering from tuberculosis, and by the time he left hospital, in
1953, he had finished the first draft of
Room at the Top
. Despite his being taken for an angry young man of the mid-fifties, the novel was set in 1946, a decade earlier. He told
Kenneth Allsop: ‘Joe Lampton isn’t meant to be of this period… to some extent Joe’s ambitions to further himself socially
are a reaction to the extreme austerity of the immediately postwar years.’
⁴
However, the character of Joe Lampton struck a chord with the reading public; Braine had, as they said in the sixties, ‘caught
the zeitgeist’.

John Osborne was the first AYM. In August 1955, lying on the deck of his houseboat on the Thames, he read in
The Stage
that a new company, the English Stage Company, had been formed to produce new plays by new writers. He sent a copy of
Look Back in Anger
off to the artistic director, George Devine, and almost forgot about it, not expecting a reply for weeks or months. Within
days the ESC contacted him, offering him £25 for an option on the play and asking for a meeting. It was arranged for Devine
to visit him on the houseboat but as the time approached for Devine’s arrival there was no sign of him. Osborne had tried
to explain that the tides in the basin made it impossible for anyone to come aboard at certain hours of the day but either
he had not made himself clear or Devine had not understood. Osborne:

I put on a blazer I’d bought in Corby and a pair of grey flannels and a clubbish-looking tie. The tide rose and the barge
bobbed out of access. After two hours,
as I was about to take off my Loamshire wardrobe, George appeared through the trees from the river, rowing himself in a small
boat.

Devine was wildly enthusiastic about his play and defended it from the opprobrium of the establishment theatre critics.
⁵

The English Stage Company opened its doors to the public at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, on 2 April 1956. Its third
production – following after Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible
– was John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
, which opened on 8 May 1956, directed by Tony Richardson. The reviews were, in the main, bad. The
Times
grumbled that Jimmy Porter was ‘a thoroughly cross young man, caught in an emotional situation where crossness avails nothing’
⁶
, but business improved enormously after the Royal Court’s publicist, George Fearon, coined the phrase ‘Angry Young Men’,
and the press jumped on the bandwagon. The first use of the term in print was as the title of an interview with John Osborne
by Thomas Wiseman in the
Evening Standard
of 7 July 1956, two months after
Look Back in Anger
opened. Wiseman liked the play: ‘I, however, think highly of Mr. Osborne’s talent. I only hope he never stops being angry.’
Before that the houses were appalling. Perhaps the best review came from Kenneth Tynan in the
Observer
:

Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is… to have done this at all would be a signal achievement; to have
done it with a first play is a minor miracle. All the qualities are there. Qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the
stage – the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of ‘official’ attitudes, the surrealist
sense of humour… the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for… It is the best young play of its
decade.
⁷

What really caused all the publicity and success was BBC television, which, in attempting to deal with the Angry Young Men
phenomenon, televised a 20-minute excerpt from the play on 16 October, with an introduction by Lord Harewood… By then the
play had been replaced at the Royal Court by
The Good Woman of Setzuan
, but the ESC was able to quickly transfer
Look Back in Anger
to the Lyric, Hammersmith. Michael Halifax, stage director of the Royal Court, told Irving Wardle: ‘After the TV extract,
all these people started arriving. People you never see in theatres. Young people gazing around wondering where to go and
what the rules were. A completely new audience: just what we were trying to find.’
⁸
A month later, the entire play was screened by Granada television, ensuring guaranteed success and completely vindicating
George Devine’s faith in his discovery in the face of a slow box office and a
lukewarm reception from most of the critics – who all later claimed to have loved it from the start.
⁹