Absolute Beginners: A Study of Race, Identity, and London's Youth Culture in the 1950s, Guide, Progetti e Ricerche di Cultura Inglese I

Scarica Absolute Beginners: A Study of Race, Identity, and London's Youth Culture in the 1950s e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Cultura Inglese I solo su Docsity! ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS TRAMA: Nel 1958, in Gran Bretagna, la gioia di vivere che è propria della gioventù è vigorosa e chiassosa. I giovani non solo impongono nuovi stili musicali ed una rinnovata maniera di vita, ma addirittura motivano diverse ed aggressive forme culturali ed industriali. È l'epoca del lancio dei cantanti, ma anche dei nuovi stilisti, delle modelle e di una straripante pubblicità. Meno alla superficie, ma assai gravi, sono i problemi dell'intolleranza razziale, esplosi furiosamente, inviperiti ad opera di minoranze facinorose ed esaltate, oltre che delle forti speculazioni edilizie, specie nei quartieri londinesi di Soho e di Notting Hill Gate. Tra i "principianti assoluti", tra i "teenagers" anni '60, vi è Colin, un fotografo amico di negri, omosessuali e prostitute, che vive facendo fotografie di attualità. Egli ama Suzette, una ambiziosa disegnatrice di moda e cantante all'occorrenza, ma Suzette lo lascia per sposare il più maturo e ricco Henley, uno dei signori della "Haute Couture", deciso a valorizzare le di lei qualità. Disperato, Colin riesce ad emergere nel campo pubblicitario; ritrova poi la donna, che ha fatto un matrimonio poco lieto, e i due giovani riescono alla fine a trovare la felicità, dopo essere stati coinvolti nei gravi disordini razziali che assillano Londra e negli incendi appiccati alle case dei negri dagli speculatori locali, grazie a bande di squadristi ferocemente nazionalisti, mentre, sullo sfondo, la musica "pop" fa perdere la testa ai ragazzi dell'epoca nuova. ENG: In 1958, in Great Britain, the joie de vivre of youth is vigorous and boisterous. Young people not only impose new musical styles and a renewed way of life, but also motivate different and aggressive cultural and industrial forms. It is the time of the launch of singers, but also of new designers, models and overflowing advertising. Less on the surface, but very serious, are the problems of racial intolerance, which have exploded furiously, angered by facinorous and exalted minorities, as well as the strong building speculation, especially in the London districts of Soho and Notting Hill Gate. Among the 'absolute beginners', among the 'teenagers' of the 1960s, there is Colin, a photographer who is a friend of blacks, homosexuals and prostitutes, and who lives by taking photographs of current affairs. He loves Suzette, an ambitious fashion designer and occasional singer, but Suzette leaves him to marry the more mature and wealthy Henley, one of the gentlemen of "Haute Couture", who is determined to enhance her qualities. Desperate, Colin manages to emerge in the advertising field; he then finds the woman again, who has had an unhappy marriage, and the two young people finally manage to find happiness, after being involved in the serious racial riots that beset London and the fires set on the houses of the blacks by local speculators, thanks to gangs of fiercely nationalist squadrists, while, in the background, "pop" music makes the young people of the new era lose their heads. Plot summary The novel is divided into four sections. Each details a particular day in the four months that spanned the summer of 1958. In June takes up half of the book and shows the narrator meeting up with various teenaged friends and some adults in various parts of London and discussing his outlook on life and the new concept of being a teenager. He also learns that his ex-girlfriend, Suzette, is to enter a marriage of convenience with her boss, a middle-aged gay fashion designer called Henley. In July has the narrator taking photographs by the river Thames, seeing the musical operetta H.M.S. Pinafore with his father, has a violent encounter with Ed the Ted and watches Hoplite's appearance on Call- Me-Cobber's TV show. In August has the narrator and his father take a cruise along the Thames towards Windsor Castle. His father is taken ill on the trip and has to be taken to a doctor. The narrator also finds Suzette at her husband's cottage in Cookham. In September is set on the narrator's 19th birthday. He sees this, symbolically, as the beginning of his last year as a teenager. He witnesses several incidents of racial violence, which disgust him. His father also dies, leaving him four envelopes stuffed with money. Suzette has separated from Henley, but still seems uncertain as to whether she should resume her relationship with the narrator. The narrator decides to leave the country and find a place where racism doesn't exist. At the airport, he sees Africans arriving and gives them a warm welcome. PERSONAGGI: CharactersThe narrator (Blitz Baby)– a teenage photographer who lives in an attic flat in a building in London's W10 area; he makes most of his money by selling pornographic pictures, but is interested in having an exhibition of his other work. The name "Blitz Baby" was given to him by his mother, since he was born in a bunker during a blitz bombing.  Crêpe Suzette – the narrator's ex-girlfriend who behaves promiscuously and who intends to enter into a sexless marriage with her boss.  The narrator's parents – His mother runs a boarding house and prefers the company of her boarders to that of her second husband, the narrator's father. She has a stormy relationship with the narrator, who keeps a photographic darkroom at the house as an excuse to visit his father. His father has been writing a book called The History of Pimlico for several years.  The Fabulous Hoplite – An occasional rentboy and part of the Knightsbridge-Chelsea set, who lives in the same building as the narrator.  The Wizard – best friend of the narrator, a baby-faced sociopath who works as a pimp, and after a falling out, joins with the racist thugs during the riots.  Henley – a gay fashion designer who claims to be 45 and who intends to marry Suzette.  Verne – the 25-year-old half-brother of the narrator. He and the narrator do not have a great relationship, since they do not share the same ideals and butt heads about it.  Mr. Cool – a young black man, born in London, who lives in the same building as the narrator and who is threatened by the local teddy boys to leave the area.  Wilf – Mr. Cool's white half-brother.  Call-me-Cobber – an Australian media celebrity and presenter of the ITV chat show Junction!  The ex-Deb-of-Last-Year – a young, upper-class female friend of the narrator, who goes out with Call-me-Cobber.  Ed the Ted – a pasty-faced teddy boy who has left his old gang and became part of a mob of racist hooligans.  Zesty-Boy Swift – an unsuccessful pop singer who became a highly successful songwriter.  Dido Lament – a gossip columnist.  Big Jill – a lesbian in her 20s who lives in the basement flat of the narrator's building and who controls young, lesbian prostitutes.  Dean Swift – one of the narrator's pornographic models, a junkie, and a lover of modern jazz. newcomers in London. He then sought to move on, and it’s clear that he had very different intentions in Absolute Beginners. The ‘teenager’ phenomenon had struck him forcibly from around 1956. In the pages of Twentieth Century and Encounter in particular, MacInnes was one of the first weighty journalists to take teenagers seriously – their idols, their music, their fashions, above all their spending power and new-won independence as job opportunities for the young opened up in the post-war economy as never before. In the 1950s, London was still leading the charge in the teenage revolution. Tommy Steele (‘The Pied Piper of Bermondsey’ as MacInnes, a respectful and enthusiastic admirer, called him) was in the van. Julien Temple's 1986 movie The independent world of the new teenager was the ostensible theme of Absolute Beginners. It is independence from all the baggage of the old adult war-worn world – financial, political, cultural, spiritual – and MacInnes wholeheartedly applauds it. His identification with the teenage ‘thing’ is, he would have us believe, entire. Embarrassingly so at times, especially when he invents for the teenager a hip lingo of his own to distinguish ‘the teenage ball’ from the world of ‘the tax-payers’, the ‘elderly sordids’, even the ‘short-pant sperms and chicklets’ who were merely ‘teenagers in bud’. Despite the linguistic innovations, this proves to be a teenager who left school at fifteen but can’t bear to put a ‘whom’ out of place. Whatever he did, MacInnes could never quite leave the inner Thirkells behind him. But if a celebration of the 1950s teenager is the primary objective of Absolute Beginners, race is always close to the surface and in the final quarter of the book takes over completely. Race will prove the test by which teenagers, and indeed the adult world, will be judged and some of both will be found lacking. By the end we know there are good teenagers and bad. In Absolute Beginners the Teddy Boys are as bad as they get. As good as they get, though, is the teenager himself, a fantasy MacInnes as he would like to have been, freed from The Boltons legacy. The teenager is nearly nineteen, and so approaching his last teenage year. He works as a photographer, a prescient classless icon especially of the decade to come. He is freelance, working for himself a necessary component in MacInnes’s vision of teenage independence. And because business is hand-to-mouth he is entwined in the scrounge-flush cucle which MacInnes himself knew well. As he can’t be too fussy about where the next fiver comes from, the teenager will photograph anything, and anyone doing anything, as long as it’s for cash or an uncrossed cheque. Fashion, portraiture and pornographic poses are all grist to his Rolleiflex. His camera and his Vespa – a gift from a South American diplomat whose manly contortions he captures on film – are his only possessions of value. Like his creator, the teenager can live from a suitcase, even if strapped at the back of his scooter. Teds, early 1960s This is 1958, so the teenager is a Blitz Baby, born in an air raid or so his mother tells him. And the fractures of war – just as for MacInnes in an earlier conflict – have left baneful wounds. The teenager’s mother is too good-looking and well-endowed for her own good. She dotes on Cypriots and ‘Malts’ with hot-blooded appetites, and cavalierly cuckolds the teenager’s meek dad in his own home. His dad he loves, his mum he hates – and there’s much of the real Colin here too. He has a step-brother, Vernon or Vern – the teenager calls him Jules – who is the specky fruit of one of their mother’s flings. But the teenager and Vern don’t get on and their mutual antipathy sways always on the edge of a full-out scrap. When the teenager goes home to use the darkroom he keeps there, it’s really to keep an eye on his lonely ailing father – whose main preoccupation is collecting materials for a history of Pimlico which inevitably he’ll never finish. One knows the feeling. The teenager tries to keep an eye on Suzette too. She is his former girlfriend, a shop-girl with a model’s looks, moulded from her rich-mix Scotch-English-Gibraltarian-Jewish heritage. Suzette has abandoned the teenager for black men – she is ‘a Spade-lover’, ‘Spade-crazy’. Even so, Suzette ends up marrying Henley, a well-heeled fashion-designer, for his money. Henley is pallid and unequivocally gay so this will be a platonic union, and it all falls apart before the novel is over. So, too, for different reasons as we shall see, does the teenager’s friendship with Wiz or the Wizard, wise and calculating and cold-hearted beyond his teenage years. He is the teenager’s ‘blood-brother’, but there’s bad blood here, for Wiz has a hair-trigger temper to go with his ‘razor- edge face’ – ‘”give my hate to little Suze”’ is one parting-shot to the teenager. Wiz is a wheeler- dealer, a fixer or broker, who brings buyers and sellers together in the murky metropolitan sub- economy. Pursuing the commission-agent’s course to a logical conclusion Wiz ends up a ponce, a figure of some significance in MacInnes’s London iconography. Frankie Love in his next novel would be just such an ‘other man’. Suzette and Wiz are fellow teenagers. So is Mr Cool, a mixed-race London-born fellow lodger of the teenager’s. So is the Hoplite, outrageously queer. And so is ghastly Ed the Ted, who grunts in savage cockney – no whoms here – which has MacInnes following in great-uncle Ruddy’s footsteps. Ed is representative of the larger Ted community which will batten like carrion on the troubles in Notting Hill. Yet although this is a teenage novel, adults get something more than a look-in. Most are either sadly beaten down or shiftily on the make. The acceptable face of adulthood is provided by Mannie and Miriam Katz. Mannie is a writer (like his original, Bernard Kops) and it is the Katzes’ warm-hearted intellectually-inquiring Jewishness that MacInnes celebrates here. Though he loves London, the teenager tells us, if all the Jews were to pack up for Israel or America then he’d leave too. He even claims (like Suzette) to have some Jewish blood himself – at least, ‘I know I’m circumcised’. Absolute Beginners, we might note here, is dedicated to Alfred Maron who was MacInnes’s Jewish landlord in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, around the time of writing and publishing the book. The Katzes live in the Borough, not the East End, and inner south London figures as one among several significant locations in the novel. They occupy ‘a fine old reconditioned derelict’, probably in one of the Georgian terraces lining the Borough Road. Ed the Ted, who hails like the teenager from Pimlico, has also ‘emigrated’ south of the river, ‘down to Bermondsey, to join a gang’, and it’s right that south London east and west of the Elephant was true Teddy Boy territory at the time MacInnes wrote. Smarter London gets a look in – Belgravia, for instance, where the teenager does a photo-shoot, a part of ‘picturesque Great Britain’ with ‘the flower-boxes, and the awnings over doors, and the front walls painted different shades of cream.’ So does the News-of-the- World London of Soho basement jazz and jive clubs. And so does picture-book London – the teenager has a nocturnal paddle in the Serpentine, disturbs a furtive couple in the Hyde Park bushes, samples with his father the riverside delights down to Cookham, and indulges himself in tax-rides along the Embankment at night, as we’ve seen. It’s delightful to note how such a journey could be inspirational and life-affirming even in 1958. Harrow Road, Photo: Danny Robinson, Wikimedia Commons There are then two London districts with overriding significance. The teenager has come out of Pimlico. That’s where his mum and dad and Vern remain and where the teenager returns from time to time. By 1958 Pimlico had long been an equivocal declassed district. It had never fulfilled its South-Belgravian aspirations. By the time MacInnes first discovered it (in the 1930s) and lived there (in the 1940s) it had lost caste for two generations. It was seedy, shabby-genteel at best, outright slummy at worst, with a transient marginal population that lived on secondhand dealing, the proceeds of petty theft, and the sex trade, liveliest towards Victoria station. The teenager’s mum is not quite a Pimlico whore, but nearly. She runs a sort of boarding-house for Mediterranean men with perma-stubble and offers sexual services on the side – for kicks as much as cash it seems. Dad, resigned to his lot as an essentially kept man who is kept in the dark, is far from a ponce, but his presence makes the house respectable. And although his ‘ancestral home’ is firmly along flyblown Pimlico lines, the teenager shows us that Pimlico itself is changing, and for the better. ‘Down by the river’ are ‘the big new high blocks of glass-built flats’ at Churchill Gardens, a happy instance of postwar municipal housing, ‘like an X-ray of a stack of buildings with their skins peeled off’. Nearby is a ‘kiddipark of Disneyland items erected by the borough council’ for ‘the juveniles’. And up in Victoria there is the Empire air-terminal, in the process of extension as MacInnes was writing, where airport coaches began the journey to exotic locations. This kind of modern world, though, had not yet reached the teenager’s present home district, ‘my manor in the area of W.10 and 11’, North Kensington and Notting Hill. His part of this large area the teenager calls Napoli. The name marks it out as at once lawless in the context of metropolitan foray to another. But what exercises MacInnes here is how his characters will respond to the nightmare going on around them. It is a test of their very humanity. Here everyone has to take sides. There could be no mere spectators now. If you weren’t with the blacks, then you were against them. Who can the teenager rely on? Who will take the right side? The Katzes will, of course. Outsiders by birth, they’ll stand up and fight beside the underdog. But some of the teenager’s middle-class clients and acquaintances are more difficult to engage. Observers by nature or profession they keep their distance, physically and morally, and fail the Notting Hill test. One urges the teenager ‘to get some snaps’ of the troubles for an exhibition they’d been planning together. One more turns up to film the violence for a newsreel and has an interest in seeing people hurt each other. Another urges the teenager to take care of himself. But the ex-Deb-of-Last-Year, out sight-seeing in a ‘cream vintage Bentley’ with a ‘bunch of Hooray Henries’, turns up trumps. She and the Henries see in the Teds and their supporters ‘”nothing but a lot of bloody scum”’. That’s what the teenager wants to hear. For MacInnes and the teenager, Notting Hill is a race struggle where the lowest-class slum-dwellers are the enemy’s stormtroopers. To that extent it’s a class struggle too, and The Boltons’ Kiplingesque endowment proves comfortingly right-minded in what becomes for MacInnes a battle between two Kensingtons, North and South, and between two Englands, old (before the blacks) and new. Questions of allegiance were yet more complicated among the teenagers in that Napoli tenement house. Hoplite, for instance, is too much of an outsider to come inside with the teenager even on this most vital of all questions. He has always fancied the teenager, and to see him bruised and battle-scarred is just a turn-on, not a call to arms. Besides, he doesn’t really care for the blacks and so fails the teenager from the outset: ‘”Really, darling, I know you love them, but they’re so rough.”’ On the other hand, Hoplite is such ‘”a tit”’ that this is more forgivable eccentricity than true malevolence. Big Jill, none more outsider than she, proves more staunch in her live-and-let-live libertarianism. She has nothing to say against the blacks, is if anything in favour, but finds more ignorance than evil in those who feed the nation’s paranoia with their anti-immigration rhetoric. Even so, she acts with the teenager, offering tea and sympathy and the free use of her phone to tell the outside world of the terrible doings in Napoli. Cool, of course, shoulders arms with the blacks, and is ‘”the only Spade in Napoli who’s thought of us”’, the white tribesmen who side with justice and against their own kind. Even better, his half-brother, forced to choose whose side he’s on, stands four- square with Cool in the street battles: their mother becomes a fire-bomb victim near Oxford Gardens as the troubles move east into Notting Hill proper. Most of all, it is Suzette who disinterestedly and wholeheartedly commits to the blacks, just like the teenager. He stumbles across her in a basement club where ‘the boys’ are under siege from a crowd with petrol and milk bottles at the ready. Suzette has left Henley and been in Napoli a week to fight with her friends. In the mêlée she and the teenager flee to his room and make love. It’s their first time. And in their clumsy half-spoken way they move towards some kind of commitment to one another. Just what kind we’ll never know. By this time, and in the opposite direction, the Wiz has shown the teenager his true colours. And while with Suzette the riots mark a coming together, with Wiz they provoke a terminal fracture. They meet by accident in the Notting Dale streets and come across one of the KBW (Keep Britain White) street-meetings where fascists - Jeffrey Hamm and his British of Ex-Servicemen and Women or Victor Burgess’s Union for British Freedom - stoke the flames and the fury. It’s night, and in ‘the yellow-coloured glare’ of the street lamps the faces in the attentive crowd were ‘a kind of un-washed violet grey’. To the teenager’s horror, Wiz refuses to condemn the fanatical speaker and eventually, ‘his little body … all clenched’, he throws out a salute and cries ‘”Keep England white!”’ The teenager wreaks immediate and violent revenge, hitting Wiz in the face ‘with all my life behind it’. With one look back, he flees the crowd.. Portobello Road, Photo: Papertree At the end of the riots, as adrenalin and fear and anger seep away, the teenager is left empty and exhausted. He feels shame and revulsion too: ‘I’d fallen right out of love with England. And even with London….’ His first thought is escape. He takes an air-terminal coach to the airport but through confusion doesn’t board a plane. And it seems likely that, in fact, he’ll stay to help build a London where black newcomers can feel truly welcome. Which is what, in his own way, MacInnes did himself. His attachment to the hustler margins of West Indian and African migration hardened. There he found comfort in an anarchic blend of hard drinking, drugs, casual exploitative sex and hand-to-mouth freelance writing. At the end of 1965, in a move which must have given some anarchist friends a fright, he began to propagandise for Michael de Freitas (Michael X) and his English brand of Black Power. But MacInnes remained too much of an outside ever to enter a real movement, let alone something as sham and corrupt as Michael X had on offer. He drifted away, though not without appearing as a character witness for the Mangrove Nine in 1970. A year or so later and he would begin to loosen his London ties and establish a home in the house of a woman friend at Hythe on the Kent coast. He died there, of cancer of the oesophagus, in April 1976, aged 61. What sort of London and what sort of Londoner would MacInnes have found in Napoli now? Well, it’s been all change, and mostly for the better. Change for the worse has been in the road system. The Westway bisects North Kensington east-west above Lancaster Road. And the West Cross Route now cordons off the western boundary of Notting Dale. It has also obliterated the Notting Dale part of ‘long, lean’ Latimer Road, so that the street down which Seymour Manning fled for his life is no more. That in itself would be no bad thing but the flyovers to east and north remain monstrous beyond belief despite the forty years or thereabouts we’ve had to get over them (so to speak). The streets that MacInnes wanted pulled down have all gone, or very nearly. Only their names survive, sometimes euphemistically. So Testerton Street is now Testerton Walk, which sounds a very different prospect altogether. It has been absorbed into the Lancaster West estate, brutalist brown-brick high-density low-rise, built in the 1970s, with raised walkways that mimic in dwarf form the flyovers nearby. There is a gaunt tower block in the middle. Henry Dickens Court to the south, brand new when MacInnes wrote, its blocks named cosily after Henry’s father’s characters (Copperfield, Barkiss, Marley, Carton), has worn astonishingly well. If Lancaster West looks presentable (which it does), Henry Dickens Court is spick and span, even manicured. This is middle-aged public housing for the botox generation, and it looks good to know. . Photo: HTUK, Wikimedia Commons A careful scrutiny will still reveal some small remnants of MacInnes’s Notting Dale. In Bramley Road, at the St Ann’s Road end and opposite the junction with Whitchurch Road, a scabrous terrace still (May 2008) survives of half-a-dozen double- and single-fronted tenement houses. If the makeshift torn curtains are anything to go by they’re as Notting Daly inside as out. This is still firebomb territory, but it’s difficult to imagine Molotov cocktails any more in Oxford Gardens, prim and sedately owner-occupied to the north. And Cambridge Gardens, more Notting Hilly in its overweight stucco mansions, has been rescued from generations of multi-occupation by a local housing trust that has converted them into flats. From an open drawing-room window an elderly woman waved to me as I passed. She had no milk bottle in her hand – nowadays this is a friendly area. Ladbroke Grove, pretty much the eastward boundary of the riot area, is bustling and raucous, as it probably has been now for a hundred years or so. With this difference, of course, and that’s the complexion of the Londoner. Notting Dale is no longer merely the resort of the rough cockney, the wayward provincial and the boys from the Windies. They’ve all been greatly leavened by people from every country – and, one imagines, almost every class formation – under the sun. Of all the changes, without presuming to speak for someone who can’t now speak for himself, this would perhaps have surprised MacInnes most. And satisfied him most, too.