'Havel na Hrad' - Thirty Years On

Souvenir Series #12

Thirty years ago, on the 17^th November 1989, a series of political protests began in Czechoslovakia which culminated in the peaceful passing of totalitarian one-party state power from the Communist Party, who had ruled the country for 41 years, to an open democratic, multi-party system. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe had begun earlier that year with the rise of solidarity movements in Poland and Hungary, but really got going with the highly symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th. Watching these events unfolding as they were reported each evening on BBC TV News broadcasts in the UK, it seemed like a miracle was occurring. After so many years living with the threat of the Cold War, and having seen only very recently the brutal authoritarian state suppression of the student led democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just a few months before in the tragic summer of 1989, the magnitude of these events felt huge. The Eastern Bloc seemed to suddenly fall apart like a house of cards. The opening up of East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and just two years later the actual collapse of the USSR itself truly signalled that the world was entering a genuinely new era, one which seemed to be characterised with unbounded hope and forward-looking optimism. I was entering my early teens at this time. I had always been fascinated and frightened in equal measure when watching the Soviet military parades on the TV News bulletins. The ranks of goose-stepping soldiers marching past the Kremlin followed by huge mobile rocket launchers laden with ominous-looking ballistic missiles motoring past the grey faced grandees of the Soviet Communist Party leaders seemed such a contrast to our own rather quaint and faintly ridiculous-looking Trooping of the Colour ceremony every year!

Sometime around Christmas that year at a family gathering I eagerly quizzed a relative who had been travelling in Europe at the time of these remarkable events. He’d managed to get to Berlin and then he’d travelled on to Prague in time to witness the Velvet Revolution as it happened. On 29^th December the former dissident playwright, Václav Havel, was elected as free Czechoslovakia’s new President. This was something which really fascinated me – how could a playwright become a President? – My relative was handing out chips of concrete smashed from the Berlin Wall to everyone as historic souvenirs when he ducked out of the room. Returning a moment later he placed a crumpled roll of papers into my hands telling me I could keep them. Intrigued I unrolled the large sheets to find they were a set of posters, each bearing the smiling face of the dissident playwright with bold red letters proclaiming “Havel na Hrad” – “Havel to the Castle.” The Hrad being Prague Castle, the official office of the President.

I knew even then that these were important, tangible pieces of history. Only a few years later I too travelled to Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. I went on two student exchanges to the newly reunified Germany – first staying with a West German family in Hannover, and then secondly staying with an East German family in Berlin. These two experiences had a profound effect upon me. They gave me a realistic grounding upon which to build a greater understanding of these events. The peaceful resistance movements which stood up to these totalitarian regimes fascinated me. My interests at school in literature and activism concerning human rights issues began to coalesce at this time, hence, following on from that initial question of how could a playwright become a President, I became very interested in samizdat (banned and unofficial literature circulated privately and secretly in typescript) as an underground phenomenon, as a means of resistance, and an expression of the irrepressible human urge towards freedom. Later on at university, as part of my undergraduate degree in anthropology, I researched and wrote a short dissertation on the subject of samizdat and civic resistance. On the wall of my bedroom in my student digs at the time, blu-tacked above my desk was one of the posters of Václav Havel which I’d been given that Christmas back in 1989.

I read a lot of Václav Havel’s plays and his political prose. I particularly liked the Vaněk Plays which managed to twist situations, suspicions and sympathies through clever word-play in the fine tradition of absurdist theatre. Essays such as ‘Power of the Powerless’ which expressed his concept of resistance through the everyday acts of choosing to ‘live in truth’ rather than buying into the little lies which make us all complicit in our own oppression seemed to resonate beyond the totalitarian constraints which he was fighting against, it seemed to me that they could equally well apply to the way we choose to live and organise our lives in the West and how much credence and legitimacy we afford to our own political leaders and the kind of powers they exercise over us in our collective name. It seems ironic that the Castle which Havel managed to enter after so many years of frustration and persecution was perhaps somewhat prophetically akin to the Castle which inspired the Prague born writer, Franz Kafka, to which his much beleaguered character, K, was never granted admittance. That idea of the everyman pitted against the overwhelming bureaucracy of the impenetrable machine which is trying to break him is a theme which has continued to intrigue me, and in many ways has evolved or transmuted even into the core question of my current PhD research – how the individual fits into and navigates the enormity of the systems of imperialism and global history, how we each strive to survive especially if we’re not fortunate enough to be in the upper echelons who seem to have all their advantages handed to them on a plate.

A subversive birthday greeting to 'Ferdinand Vanek', a character in one of Havel's plays, published in an official Communist Party-run Newspaper on Vaclav Havel's birthday in 1989

It’s no wonder then that one particular essay of Havel’s painted a vivid picture which has never faded from my mind. It’s a short piece of prose, playfully titled ‘Meeting Gorbachev,’ originally published in 1987 only two years before the events of the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s election as President, in which he describes how one evening, whilst he is out walking his dog he happened to pass a theatre, outside which a small gathering of people are waiting to get a glimpse of a great man. The great man is Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the USSR, who was on a State visit to Prague and was being entertained at a gala performance that evening. Havel stops to watch the ‘Glasnost Czar’ and finds himself (despite his opposing convictions) gradually being seduced by the man’s charisma, sucked into the collective spirit of anticipation he unconsciously finds himself waving at Gorbachev and Gorbachev waving back in that strange disconnected sense of intimate connection which arises between a celebrity and their fan, fused together by the unreal intoxication of close proximity. Havel was by no means a wholly obscure, nor unknown character at this time, but even still, despite the thawing of authoritarianism which Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring) were beginning to initiate, that leap which propelled Havel to the Castle still seemed almost unimaginable at that time. Yet only two years later in his first Presidential New Year’s Address he was able to speak candidly to the Czechoslovakian people, opening with the following words: “For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. – I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.” – No longer a playwright leading a dissident movement, he was now leading a nation in transition, a world leader – like Gorbachev, standing on a world stage.

In the summers of 1992 and 1993 London seemed to be full of second-hand market stalls selling off old Soviet memorabilia. I used to rummage through these – mostly army surplus: old uniforms, enamel badges, fabric patches, peaked caps and the like. I never bought anything, though I knew acutely that these things were the material remnants of an era which had now ended – these were tangible pieces of history which were slowly being dispersed and lost, merging into the blank space of the future, dissolving memory into the stuff of history books and dusty museum displays. The few tangible pieces of this history which I had in my possession – two tiny fragments of the Berlin Wall, four posters of Václav Havel, and a small, blue toy Trabant – were more than enough for me, because they were part of a lived experience, my lived experience, something which was greater than the sum of its parts. The experience of seeing real Trabants beetling about the streets of Berlin, of talking to German friends from both sides of that former dividing Wall, the Iron Curtain itself, hearing what life had really been like for them and how it had all so suddenly fallen apart and what they felt about it. Seeing and touching and breathing-in the last days of that moment in history for myself, and the fact that it was all suffused with that genuine sense of hope and optimism was something which had entered too deep into my soul to ever be forgotten or subsumed even by the passing of time. I can still picture it all so clearly in my mind.

It’s amazing now to talk to younger friends and colleagues who have no or next-to-no knowledge of these things. The Cold War is just a murky blank, merely the backdrop to old James Bond movies and redundant spy novels. It’s a defunct era. This seems almost incomprehensible to me, but that is simply the way of the world. Time does move on. And the world has changed so much in just the last two decades. We’ve accelerated at light speed, our fingers firmly pressed to the fast-forward button. The recent past has been all too swiftly eclipsed. But such memories and experiences are the important things which we really need to pass on. I realise now that it must have felt very much the same for my grandparents’ generation in the decades that followed on from the Second World War; they understood how vital it was that their life stories and experiences should be passed on. Some say that history is cyclical – that it has a tendency to repeat itself if we’re not careful. The current rise of nationalism and its discontents are proof enough, should we care to notice it.

The main set of posters I was given were designed by Joska Skalnik, using a photograph taken by Miloš Fikejz, and show Havel very much as a man of the people with the call to send ‘Havel na Hrad.’ The second poster is a version which depicts Havel in a much more statesman-like manner, dressed in a smart suit and with the tag line promising a ‘guarantee of free elections.’ Both posters are notably in the national colours of white, red and blue. Thirty years is a long time ago now in many respects. Even though there are still many people alive who remember those events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the USSR – people who  remember it all far more intimately than I do. I feel it’s important that these remembrances on each major anniversary shouldn’t be allowed to fade quietly from our collective memory. And so perhaps my small part in keeping those memories preserved and accessible for the future has been partly fulfilled in a small way this year by my donating those election posters – as tangible pieces of history – to the British Library to mark this thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; where I hope they will be used by curators and visitors in the study rooms and in future exhibitions seeking to understand and interpret the past, and to remember those days in Czechoslovakia in the last two months of 1989, when anything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed so positive; when the future was still to be found and was still something to be looked forward to.

Also on 'Waymarks'

"The Wind of Change" - Germany 1991 & 1993 

Rest In Peace - Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

Jack Kerouac's London - 1957

Jack Kerouac, 1957 - by Jerry Yulsman

“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.” – Jack Kerouac.

Fifty years ago this month, early on the morning of October 21^st 1969, the writer Jack Kerouac passed away aged 47. A little over a decade before his death the publication of his second novel, On The Road (1957), based on the real-life events of a madcap road trip across America made with his close buddy, Neal Cassady, catapulted him to fame. The book, which was initially drafted on a single continuous teletype roll without margins or paragraph breaks in a three week Benzedrine fuelled marathon, notoriously defined a generation – the ‘Beat Generation.’

On the eve of his success in February 1957 he boarded a Yugoslavian ship, the Slovenia (probably the Jugolinija freighter, Slovenija, built in 1951), leaving Brooklyn on a twelve day crossing bound for Tangier in Morocco. He and a somewhat unfriendly Yugoslavian woman were the only passengers on board the freighter. While crossing the Atlantic the ship encountered a large storm which tossed the boat about quite a bit. Watching the towering wall-like waves descending on the ship from his porthole, Kerouac had to pad the length of his bunk with pillows in order to wedge himself in and prevent him from being thrown out of it. Once the storm abated he spent his time befriending the ship’s two cats. Eventually the ship sighted land. Kerouac at first thought the mountains he could see on the thin line of the horizon was Africa but later found out it was actually the coast of Spain. 

Slovenija, built 1951

In Tangier he stayed with his friend, the writer, William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was living in exile having accidentally shot his wife at a party in Mexico City in 1951, so the story goes, when playing a trick which went wrong. The couple’s party-piece was supposedly a William Tell-like game in which Burroughs wife, Joan, balanced a whisky glass upon her head and Burroughs, a gun enthusiast, would shoot it off. The couple were both drunk and high at the time of the incident, and their relationship was also somewhat strained. The exact details of how Joan’s death occurred are sketchy. Burroughs later skipped over the border to Mexico and so was convicted of manslaughter in absentia for killing Joan.

Tangier, Morocco, 1957 - by Allen Ginsberg (Getty Museum)

In Tangier Kerouac and Burroughs spent their time wandering around the town, the beach, and the surrounding hills, getting high or writing in their digs. There was also another ex-pat American writer, a long-established resident in Tangier, Paul Bowles – author of one of my most favourite novels, The Sheltering Sky (1947). Even though Kerouac stayed in Tangier for around a month his account of this trip doesn’t mention Bowles, who had little to do with Burroughs at that time – much to Burroughs chagrin. Bowles was very likely away travelling and so it seems unlikely that Kerouac met Bowles during his stay in Morocco. However, a few years later the luminaries of the so-called ‘Beat Generation’ en masse descended on Tangier – Bowles wasn’t overly impressed with the new American counter-culture trend, writing to his parents in 1961: “Everyday one sees more and more beards and filthy blue jeans, and the girls look like escapees from lunatic asylums, with white lipstick and black smeared around their eyes, and matted hair hanging around their shoulders. The leaders of the ‘movement’ have moved their headquarters here.” Here Bowles is referring to Burroughs, and the poets, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso – but Tangier wasn’t the Beats’ headquarters for long as all three moved on soon afterwards. Bowles did meet Kerouac some years later in New York, Jack giving him a signed copy of his novel, The Subterraneans.

Kerouac in Tangier, 1957 - by William S. Burroughs

Leaving Tangier by boat again, this time travelling fourth class – a decision Kerouac came to regret somewhat, as once on board he discovered the five dollars he’d saved on the fare meant he was not provided with either food or a bunk throughout the passage to the south coast of France. From Marseilles Kerouac planned to hitchhike his way north to Paris, but soon found this wasn’t going to be a viable way to travel as no one stopped to pick him up, so instead he took a series of buses and trains. Travelling through Provence to Arles and Avignon, the landscape evoking thoughts and reveries of famous artists, such as Van Gogh and Cezanne, as well as poets and writers, such as Rimbaud, Flaubert, Balzac, Genet and Celine. In Paris he wandered, similarly in awe of the city’s “Proustian showgoers” hailing cabs on the boulevards, passing through Saint-Germain-des-Prés – erstwhile haunt of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – spending his time getting footsore tramping around the endless galleries of the Louvre, again revelling in his descriptions of the paintings he saw there. “Fragonard, so delicate next to Van Dyck, and a big smoky Rubens (La Mort de Dido). – But the Rubens got better as I looked, the muscle tones in cream and pink, the rimshot luminous eyes, the dull purple velvet robe on the bed.” Haunting bookshops, and presumably the famous bouquinistes along the River Seine, near Notre Dame. Enchanted by the Sacré Coeur in Monmartre. He seems to have relished the charm of eating simple fare – coffee and pastries for breakfast; onion soup, fresh bread, pâté, and “thin stemmed glasses” of red wine for dinner. Everywhere he goes compulsively commenting on the beautiful women he sees. 

Sacré-Cœur, Montmartre, Paris, 1957 - By Inge Morath

From Paris he set off for London. He had just enough money in his pocket to see him across the English Channel, intending to pick up a royalty cheque from his London publisher when he arrived. “Swiftly we left the French shore and after a spate of blank water we began to see green carpets and meadows stopped abruptly as with a pencil line at chalk cliffs, and it was that sceptered isle, England, springtime in England.” – As with Paris, he was already in love with the idea of London before he reached it. Invoking pilgrim-like thoughts in anticipation of its mysterious, Dickensian atmosphere. Imagining himself exploring the city’s twisting streets and alleys in the thick ‘pea-souper’ London fog, like a character in a Sherlock Holmes story. 

Victoria Station, London - 1956

 

Arriving by rail at Victoria Station he had an impromptu brush with the law, finding himself suddenly accosted by a group of London “Bobbies.” As he describes it this was probably because he was unshaved and “looked like a bum,” but also because he arrived in close proximity to a “Negro” fellow (Kerouac’s word) who seemed to be somewhat mentally unstable. His travelling companion, who he’d seen on the same boat from France but whom he didn’t actually know, had no passport or other travel documents and so was duly hauled off by the Police. It’s interesting to note that this was also the time of the arrival of the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ – people from the dominions of the British Empire in the Caribbean who were officially invited to settle in the UK; many of whom similarly had no documentation, a fact which has recently caused significant controversy and injustice with the heavy-handed and overtly racist bureaucracy of the ‘hostile environment’ initiated by Theresa May’s Tory government, shamefully seeking to expel them and their descendants from the UK irrespective of their long and decent law abiding contributions to cosmopolitan British society over the last six decades. Kerouac defined the Beats as “sympathetic” – relating himself to all struggling peoples – the working class, the underprivileged, the down and outs – the vast underclass of society who are all simply trying to make their way in the world, free of the shackles and the burdens of conformity and prejudice. 

Victoria Station, London - 1956

Arriving at Victoria with scant money on him, Kerouac soon found himself in deepening hot water, with a British immigration officer questioning him closely. He only managed to convince the man that he really was a writer when scrabbling in his rucksack he managed to produce a magazine article about himself and the writer, Henry Miller. This sufficiently impressed the officer, who claimed the British authorities had also recently detained Miller too! – And so, with genuine relief, Kerouac suddenly found himself free to go. He set out on foot, tramping his way, via Buckingham Palace, to the Strand.

The Strand - Street of Ink, 1969 - by Ron Embleton

In my late teens and early twenties I read a lot of books by, and about, Jack Kerouac. I used to write a lot of poems when I was at Sixth Form College too. It was a creative time for my friends and me, a sort of Dead Poets Society. We mainly circulated our poems in a kind of handwritten samizdat, with a few getting published in the college’s weekly newsletter. A friend in my Classics class asked me one day if I liked Jack Kerouac. “Never heard of him, who he?” – I replied. The friend thrust a copy of Maggie Cassidy (1959) into my hands and said: “You need to read him.” The friend was right. I was instantly hooked. There was something about the lyrical oddity in the way Kerouac wrote which seemed to zap straight to the centre of my mind. I didn’t always understand all of the things that he was saying, but I liked the way he was saying it. His writing thrummed with an energy and intensity. The words seemed to rocket along at a pace which was both thrilling and intoxicating. I loved the way that whatever Kerouac was scribbling about (or pounding out on his typewriter) he always seemed to be on the move, and he had a band of close friends with whom he clearly forged deep and lasting almost spiritual connections – this seemed to click with me and how I perceived my own friends. 

Silent film footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg et al in New York, 1959

Kerouac’s books spoke about freedom, escape, creativity, exploration, openness, spirituality, hedonism, love, anguish, despair, poverty, the feeling of being trapped – but knowing that one day you’d exceed the horizon and excel into the limitless future. All things could happen and probably would, given time, inclination, personal drive, ambition, faith and belief. All the things that seem so vital and so appealing to a youthful adolescent with similar fledgling literary ambitions. All the things which characterise that first awakening, and the possibilities which seem so limitless and abundant at that time of life. Exploring who you are, who you might be, what you might do, and where you might go, both alone and in the company of your closest friends. Kerouac’s world, and more importantly his prose and his poetry, seemed to sing itself electric about all of these things, the most vitally important themes of life. Even though he was essentially of my grandparents’ generation, he was exploring and encapsulating a zeitgeist which remains eternal. He has distilled what it means to be young and alive to the world lived at large. The timelessness of the jazz age and the distinctly American lyrical-tone he used to describe it all only adds to the sense of 'cool' – at the time, making it all the more appealing to the staid boringness of my English suburban upbringing.

One of the things about his books, especially novels like On The Road, Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, or The Vanity of Duluoz, which was most appealing was the idea that you could just get into a beat-up old car and drive and drive and drive across the vast expanse of America, disappearing into a land of endless adventure. By comparison the UK seemed very small and hemmed in, hence why his books lent themselves so greatly to the imagination. But happily I remember reading his collection of travel sketches, Lonesome Traveler (1960), in the summer when I was transitioning between Sixth Form and University, when I first read his account of his “Big Trip to Europe” in 1957. This was the first thing he’d written which I felt I could actually relate to, because here he was in my city, walking the streets that I knew, exploring my world and describing it in words which I could really properly get to grips with. This was clearly the piece which would connect me most closely to him as a person and as a writer. And the line that was key for me was when he describes reaching Saint Paul’s Cathedral on that first walk from Victoria Station – “… where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.”

Ludgate Hill, c.1890 (Science Museum, London)

 

The thought that I could go and find the very pub in which Kerouac had drunk a pint of stout was too exciting to believe. Guinness was one of my top tipples at the time and the idea that I could find this very same pub and sit there sipping a pint of the ‘Liffey Water,’ just as he had done, was thrilling. But this was in the days before the internet. In order to find the pub I’d have to go there and wander about in search of it. Which is exactly what I did. Wandering down Ludgate Hill seemed a good place to start, but every pub thereabouts seemed to have a name far removed from that of the eponymous King Lud. It was becoming rather baffling and so I eventually asked a passer-by, someone who looked like he might appreciate a good pub and so be somewhat knowledgeable upon the subject and perhaps the locale too. “Yes,” he said, “that name rings a bell. I think it’s down there, on the corner.” And then, just as he was about to turn and go on his way, he added: “I think it might have changed its name though.” 

The King Lud, Ludgate Circus, c.1900

My sketch of the King Lud (Hogshead), 3 March 1995

He was right. There was a pub there, but it was called The Hogshead at Ludgate. Pubs in the early 1990s were beginning to struggle financially. The Wetherspoons phenomenon meant that many breweries were merging and turning their pubs into branded chains. Each one identikit and in essence absolutely boring and characterless. Hogshead was no exception. I walked through the door to find a vast open interior with a long continuous bar running down the left-hand side of the room. It was a beer hall of the most modern sort, essentially designed to pack in as many people as possible for televised football matches. A vast, echoey space with sanded-down floorboards and distressed wood panelling, attempting to fool everyone that it was old when in all likelihood it had been genuinely old before its modern make-over. So many lovely old Victorian pubs have succumbed to this architectural-business-rationale-driven plague. It’s criminal. The King Lud it seemed was just such a victim. The old pub gone and rebuilt with just its façade preserved for posterity. Nevertheless, I bought myself a pint of Guinness and found a table at the very back of the pub, which was a bit cosier than the front. Taking a sip I wondered what it would have been like when Kerouac stopped here. Welsh rarebit sadly was very definitely no longer on the menu.

Looking up the King Lud on the 'interweb' today there still seem to be a lot of fond memories of this pub circulating. It apparently, very proudly trumpeted its claim to be the actual place of origin for Welsh rarebit – although many people very much doubt this fact. Lots of British pubs like to make grand claims such as this, and some more than others manage to stick fast in the local folklore forevermore. It seems probable that the King Lud was gutted and refurbished when the railway viaduct which ran very close behind the building was completely dismantled and removed – but essentially the façade is just as it was when the pub was built in the late 19^th century. The carved wooden faces of King Lud himself still looked down from the lintels above the doors. They must have seen Kerouac entering the pub, just as they'd watched over me.

Interestingly, Kerouac mentions that the ruins of “Hitler’s blitz” were still visible in the area surrounding Saint Paul’s. Contemporary photographs taken by Hans Richard Griebe capture perfectly the atmosphere Kerouac describes (see here). From the early 1990s up to the present day, the area has been significantly redeveloped – Kerouac and Griebe would hardly recognise it today. And the Hogshead, the former King Lud, itself – where, thereafter, I often used to drink during my undergraduate days – is very sadly no longer a pub at all today. The stout and the Welsh rarebit are now both long gone.

Another location Kerouac describes is the hotel where he stayed, near Leicester Square – “… I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed.” – This building still survives, and although no longer called the Mapleton a part of it at least is still a functioning hotel. Sadly the ground floor street-front, chock-full with little shops selling tourist souvenirs and bureau de changes, manages to obscure the old building entirely. A Pathé newsreel from 1951, showing the fire brigade rescuing a woman from the hotel's parapet, gives an idea as to what the hotel used to look like (see here) – but, as the newsreel footage has no commentary, it’s not clear how or why the woman came to be stuck out on the hotel’s roof and required rescuing. The incident clearly seems to have drawn a crowd of concerned onlookers. It’s certainly the busiest part of London town. A short walk away is Piccadilly Circus where walking back to the Mapleton one night, perhaps after savouring the illicit delights of nearby Soho (which he certainly knew thereof), Kerouac got talking to some Teddy Boys who jokingly asked him if, as a fellow American, he personally knew the famous jazz musician, Gerry Mulligan. Curiously Kerouac doesn't mention the fact that there was a very popular "all-nighter"  jazz club in the basement of the Mapleton Hotel, called 'Club Americana' (see here). Although, thinking about it, perhaps that's why he was still in bed at 11am when the maid brought in his breakfast of toast and marmalade!

Piccadilly Circus, c.1950s

Teddy Boys - London, 1955 (Associated Press)

Kerouac mentions looking up the French heraldic shield of his ancestral family name at the British Museum and finding the family motto which accompanied it suitably ‘Beat’ – “Love, work and suffer.” He doesn’t mention it, but I imagine his route from the Mapleton to the BM could very well have been a stroll up the Charing Cross Road, famous for London’s bookshops (sadly now much depleted) – where at the time another American writer was engaged in a wonderfully eccentric correspondence with a British bookseller. Helene Hanff’s letters to Frank Doel were published in 1970 as a book, 84 Charing Cross Road. Writing from New York to place orders for obscure books on English literature with the booksellers, Mark’s & Co., where Frank Doel worked, she and Doel struck up an unlikely long distance friendship which slowly grew over time with Hanff eventually sending him, his family, and his co-workers food parcels to supplement the wartime rationing which continued in Britain long after the end of the Second World War. Sadly she never got to meet Doel in person. He died in 1968. She did, however, make the trip to London just after 84 Charing Cross Road was published – just in time to see the empty shop, which had recently closed down. This trip is entertainingly described in Hanff’s book, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973). Reading Hanff and Kerouac as a native Brit, it is interesting to see London and the British from a distinctly American point of view – both writers seem to fixate with good-natured glee upon the British vernacular, parodying the British accent a la Dick Van Dyke in the Disney film, Mary Poppins.

The British Museum, c.1950s

The Old Vic, Waterloo

Before Kerouac left London he returned to Saint Paul’s and experienced a small epiphany whilst listening to the choir there singing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion on Good Friday – “Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble bas-relief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages.’” He also took in a play. “At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvellously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music …” – From this we can likely infer that he left London from Waterloo Station rather than Victoria. The cast of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic in 1957 starred Keith Michell, Margaret Whiting, and Derek Godfrey – the last of whom later starred in the same theatre as Oberon alongside Judi Dench and Frankie Howerd in a Midsummer Night’s Dream in the following season. Seeing Shakespeare performed on the stage in the Bard’s native land was for Kerouac the perfect end to his literary pilgrimage through France and England. Little did he know that it was also the prelude to his own elevation to the pantheon of literary greats. 

Saint Paul's Cathedral, 1954 - by Hans Richard Griebe

Shortly after he returned to the United States his second and most famous novel, On The Road, was published and a review written by Gilbert Millstein for the New York Times catapulted Kerouac into the public consciousness. His life was never the same again. As is true of other extremely sensitive artists – essentially introspective people inadvertently wrong-footed by the success of their own talents – fame was something which didn’t sit so well with Kerouac. After years spent drifting in various jobs, trying to make ends meet, scrapping together enough money to pay for the next trip and the next adventure, he was still deep-down inside a struggling writer. A man more accustomed to obscurity, longing for greatness and recognition. He was much more used to observing the world, but now that he’d finally made it and found that the world was watching him so acutely in its turn, things were suddenly sent wildly off kilter. Despite the successful subsequent publication of his prolific backlog of other writings thereafter, many of which had previously been rejected by various publishers, this intense literary spotlight precipitated a sad decade of decline. He passed away, a victim of his own despondency made manifest in frequent bouts of unrestrained alcoholism, a little over a decade after that “Big Trip to Europe” in which he had wandered so freely and so unknown through the streets of Tangier, Paris, and London. At heart, a true lonesome traveller, summing up the essence of his life: – “Railroad work, sea work, mysticism, mountain work, lasciviousness, solipsism, self-indulgence, bullfights, drugs, churches, art museums, streets of cities, a mishmash of life as lived by an independent educated penniless rake going anywhere.” – Amen.

 Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show, 1959

Postscript: In 2012, the original teletype manuscript – “The Scroll” – the first draft of On The Road was put on display for a short time at the British Library in London (see here). I went to see it. It was a fascinating thing to behold, especially given the almost mythical status this document has accrued over time, making it a kind of mystical modern-day holy relic in its own right – if only Jack could have known on that day when he looked up his ancestral coat of arms in the British Museum Library that one day his inspired 'spontaneous prose' magnum opus would be displayed by the same institution in its new home just a few blocks up the street from the BM in Bloomsbury. I wonder what he would have thought of that? – Rather fittingly, for a writer who had been proud to work for a short time as a railroad brakeman in California (as he describes in another essay in Lonesome Traveler – “The Railroad Earth”), the present site of the British Library was a railway stockyard at the time he visited London.

A London 'Bobby' on Ludgate Hill, c.1950s

~

A newly revised version of the essay above was published in September 2023 as a limited edition 'chapbook' by Beat Scene Magazine, titled JACK KEROUAC: LONESOME TRAVELLER IN LONDON – 1957. For more information, please click here.

If you are interested in seeing what Kerouac’s 1957 walk through London looks like today (in January 2025), eminent psychogeographer, John Rogers, has posted his own video diary retracing the walk and telling of his similar fascination with this Kerouac-London connection: – which you can watch here. I highly recommend John’s YouTube channel, it’s one of my favourites with lots more to explore, particularly of London and its surrounding areas.