Colin MacInnes The
London Novels (London: Allison and Busby, 2005).
Montgomery Pew, an
innocent underling in the government bureaucracy, is suddenly named
assistant-welfare officer of the colonial department. No one, including
himself, knows how he has gotten the job, but taking his new position
seriously, he “sallies forth” to inspect the welfare hostel—after meeting
Johnny Macdonald Fortune, a new emigrant from Nigeria and the hero of Colin
MacInnes’s 1957 novel City of Spades. The colonial department hostel has
“the odor of good intentions,” but no longer houses Montgomery’s new
“friend”—with whom, moreover, the Trinidadian “Spades” (the word with which
Johnny has described himself and other blacks, as
In the hands of writers less talented than
the Australian-educated MacInnes, this tale would become a story of innocence
vs. evil in which, depending upon one’s political position, the inevitable
consequences would be either entirely deserved or the result of the hatefully
bigoted white society. MacInnes and his heroes, however, make no such easy
judgments. This author is interested far less in the causes of this underworld
of joyful corruption than in its uncontained and exuberant existence. MacInnes is
seldom condescending and truly cares about his characters through his
pitch-perfect presentment of them through language: this is not a book
dominated by dialects as much as a prose-poem made from the differently
modulated rhythms in which his figures intelligently speak.
Montgomery and Theodora, in turn, are
satiric innocents, who in their absolute wonderment of the previously
undiscovered “planets” hidden away in tiny hotels and grand apartments,
encounter this “brave new world” without much judgment. Early in the novel,
Montgomery attends a “mixed” dance at the Cosmopolitan Dance Hall where
“English Jumbles” and “African Spades” try to out-dance one another in a manner
reminiscent of the dance between the Jets and Sharks in West Side Story—which
opened on Broadway the same year, 1957, in which MacInnes published this novel.
But in City of Spades the dance ends, more predictably perhaps, with no
cross-over relationship, but with a police raid. Montgomery soon after loses
his job, and other than his and Theodora’s continued involvement in this black
underworld, the rest of this work contains few Jumble characters who are not
enforcing British “law.” In other words, the reader of MacInnes’s book must
recognize quite early on that there is nothing for blacks to do in London
except to hide.
It is almost a shame that MacInnes’s
fiction has to have a plot, for the excitement of this book lies not in its
series of upheavals, such as the financial ruin of Johnny Fortune, his ultimate
charge of living with a prostitute as a pimp (what the British call “ponces”),
and the courtroom drama in which Theodora temporarily “saves” Johnny by
announcing that she is pregnant with his baby. Rather, the book entertains its
reader with its ongoing kaleidoscope of human beings one cannot simply
“summarize.” In each of MacInnes’s three novels under discussion here, the
innocent visitors to the underground London in which the author revels attempt
to comprehend differences between the “types” encountered. Montgomery, for
example, explains his theories to a West Indian friend who has just taunted
him:
“What! You
recognize some difference? Ain’t we all just coal-black coloured skins to you?”
“Don’t be
offensive, Mr. Tamberlaine. Like so many West Indians I’ve met, you seem to
have, if I may say so, a large chip sitting on your shoulder.”
“Not like your
African friends? They have less chip, you say?”
“Much less.
Africans seem much more self-assured, more self-sufficient. They don’t seem to
fear we’re going to take liberties with them, or patronize them, as you people
do.”
“Do we now!”
“Yes, you do.
Africans don’t seem to care what anyone thinks of them. So even though they’re
more clannish and secretive, they’re easier to talk to.”
Mr. Tamberlaine
considered this. “Listen to me, man,” he said. “If we’s more sensitive like you
say, there’s reasons for it. Our islands is colonies of great antiquity, and
our mother tongue is English, like your own, and not some dialects. So
naturally we expect you treat us like we’re British as yourself, and when you
don’t, we suffer and go sour. Why should we not? But Africans—what they care of
British? For African, his passport just don’t mean nothing, except for travel,
but for us it’s loyalty.”
. . .
“I think…it’s
easier for them than it is for you. They know what they are, and you’re not
sure. They belong much more deeply to Africa than you do to the Caribbean.”
Montgomery’s assessment of these
“differences,” however, ultimately comes to nothing, as the West Indian turns
the tables so to speak: “Thank you for the complement to our patriotism. So
many of our boy who serve in R.A.F. would gladly hear your words.” MacInnes
puts forward the ideas, in other words, without losing sight of the
complexities of the human beings he presents—and for that reason this author’s
frail humans seem almost invincible. Warned of his possible murder on his
voyage home, Johnny Fortune remains a forceful figure taunting the very culture
he is about to leave: “No one will kill me, countryman!...This is my city, look
at it now! Look at it there—it has not killed me! There is my ship that takes
me home to Africa: it will not kill me either! No! Nobody in the world will
kill me ever until I die!”
If City of Spades ventures into a
London unknown by most of the gray-garbed, post-war adults of the city, Absolute
Beginners, published two years later, celebrates the new dominance of the
British teen scene. The work’s hero—a 19-year-old unnamed narrator whom I shall
call Colin as a nod to the later film (1)—experiences the last year of his
teens with such zest and belief in the future that the reader is nearly swept
away by the vibrant energy of youth. Colin has left his Pimlico home and
family—a sex-crazed mother, a near-retarded lug of a step-brother, and a
beloved and belittled Dad—to celebrate the joy of life. No matter that his
employment is often involved with pornographic photography, Colin is in love
with the times; he is, as American writer James Purdy put it in his novel Malcolm
of the same year, a “contemporary,” a young man absolutely in love with the
city—its gloriously posh mews, raunchy dives, and dilapidated neighborhoods
such as his own Napoli. He and his teenage generation are suddenly in control,
and his rapturous descriptions of London make one suddenly want to return to
the metropolis of 1959:
So I went out of
the Dubious to catch the summer evening breeze. The night was glorious, out
there. The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars were peeping nosily beyond
the neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in their jeans and separates, were
floating down the Shaftesbury avenue canals, like gondolas. Everyone had loot
to spend, everyone a bath with verbena salts behind them, and nobody had broken
hearts, because they all were all ripe for the easy summer evening.
MacInnes adds to this heady mélange of
youth a large lesbian urban-dweller, Big Jill, a black jazz musician named,
what else, Cool, and various other characters who nearly blind the reader with
their larger-than-life personalities. But as we know from having just read City
of Spades, there are many other layers of existence in this palpitating
wonderland. Colin gets a sense of something going amiss when his beloved
girlfriend Suze (his Crêpe Suzette) heads off to the alter with the slimy
bisexual Henley; the “absolute beginner” 14-year-old Laurie London becomes the
hot pop singer of the moment; and he himself is assaulted near the river by a
former schoolmate, Edward the Ted (“Ted” being British slang for a hooligan). A
later night visit to his Napoli apartment by Ed also ends in violence, and with
Ed’s warning that a local gang leader, Flickker, “wants Cool aht ov ear.” Colin
can hardly believe his ears and seeks out Cool for confirmation, who explains
to him that “Something’s cooking… Excuse me, but you wouldn’t notice, son, not
being coloured,” continuing “Up till now, it’s been white Teds against whites,
all their baby gangs. If they start on coloured, there’s only a few thousand of
us in this area, but I don’t think you’ll see there’s many cowards.”
Suddenly we recognize that this young,
savvy teenager, when it comes to race relations, is also a complete innocent;
like the hero of his favorite childhood book, Jules Verne’s Around the World in
Eighty Days, Colin is a visitor to a world never before imagined. His joy in
the city, his belief in his nation begins to crumble:
I couldn’t take
all this nightmare. I cried out, “Cool, this is London, not some hick city in
the provinces! This is London, man, a capital, a great city where every kind of
race has lived ever since the Romans!”
Cool said, “Oh
yeah. I believe you.”
“They’d never
allow it!” I exclaimed.
“Who wouldn’t?”
“The adults! The
men! The women! All the authorities! Law and order is the one great English
thing!”
With his outraged cry, we recognize that
Colin will now be forced to come of age. If he has previously scorned the
“absolute beginners,” he must recognize himself as having been one of them. The
race riots—based on the actual Notting Dale and Notting Hill “race riots” of
August and September 1958 (2)—break out, loosing chaos upon Colin’s beloved
city. He saves a young black man, is witness to underground plots by West
Indians blacks, and is nearly himself arrested after being attacked by white
thugs, before order is restored. At the airport, from where he plans to escape
to Oslo—a scene, along with Fortune’s departure in City of Spades, which
reminds me of another unnamed narrator’s escape at the end of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger—he
witnesses what one recognizes is a transformative vision, a vision that the
true future of any great city lies in its people, in their respect for one
another:
…in taxied a
plane, quite close to where I was standing, and up went the staircase in the
downpour, and out came a score or so of Spades from Africa, holding hand
luggage over their heads against the rain. Some had on robes, and some had on
tropical suits, and most of them were young like me, maybe kiddos coming here
to study, and they came down grinning and chattering, and all looked so dam
pleased to be in England, at the end of their long journey, that I was
heartbroken at all the disappointments that were in store for them. And I ran
up to them through the water, and shouted out above the engines, “Welcome to
London! Greetings from England! Meet your first teenager! We’re all going up to
Napoli to have a ball!”…and suddenly they all burst out laughing in the storm.
How I wish such a vision might manifest
itself to more of my countryman today.
Given the stunning achievements of his
first two novels, Mr. Love and Justice, the third volume of MacInnes’s London
Novels published in 1960, cannot quite compare. The author’s themes are
similar here, as he explores, this time around, the intertwined roles of
policemen and criminals. A former seaman, out of work and unable to find a
“land” job, Frankie Love takes up with a local hooker and, with some righteous
hesitation, finally becomes her ponce. Edward Justice, meanwhile, has just been
promoted from street cop to undercover detective, and will soon discover
himself in a threatening position with regard to his girlfriend as he begins to
take bribes.(3)
The reader immediately grasps that the two
men are destined to be involved with each other. But here, again, MacInnes
refuses to take sides, as he develops his characters so deftly that it comes as
no big surprise when, as both men’s lives are turned upside down, Love plans to
head a detective agency, and Justice may turn the clothes shop he envisions
into a “little high-grade brothel.” Once again these two men come to their
professions and the world that surrounds them in complete innocence, discovering
in the process both the horrors and the marvels of the new worlds they find
themselves inhabiting. In that sense, all of MacInnes’s characters are
travelers in search of new lives, inevitably both blessed and cursed by the
voyages they’ve undertaken. Finally, one might recall that during these
“fictional” events, what Colin might have described as a “hick provincial”
group called the Beatles were fomenting radical cultural changes in Liverpool,
which would spill over into the international scene only two years after Mr.
Love and Justice. In 1964 that group would make their own screen voyage to
London, with Paul’s randy grandfather in tow, in A Hard Day’s Night (4).
Truth actually followed MacInnes’s marvelous fictions.
1 Richard Burridge, Terry Johnson,
Don MacPherson and Christopher Wicking (writers), Julien Temple (director),
released in 1986, and based—quite loosely—on the MacInnes novel. Upon reading Absolute
Beginners, I ordered the DVD to discover that, although there are wonderful
moments in this “jazz and rock” musical—in particular scenes clearly inspired
by the great Jerome Robbins choreography of West Side Story—the movie,
in its garish overstatement and simplification of heroes and villains, entirely
misses the point of MacInnes’s loving tribute to London teenage life. Perhaps
the very fact that the film was produced nearly 30 years after the novel, in an
era in which it was much more difficult to maintain the faith and dreams of the
original, were against it from the start. I should mention, however, that the
casting of Eddie O’Dowell as Colin and David Bowie as the “evil” developer
Vendice (not so clearly evil in MacInnes’s book), along with the cameo role of
Colin’s mother played by the famed call-girl witness of the 1963 Profumo Affair
trials, Mandy Rice-Davies, was brilliant.
2 The so-called “Notting Hill
Riots” began on Saturday, August 1958, when a crowd of white men attacked a
white Swedish woman married to a West Indian. After she was pelted with stones,
glass, and wood, the police escorted her back to her Notting Hill apartment.
This incident was the catalyst for daily attacks throughout West London. Mobs
of angry white men, sometimes in packs numbering a hundred, chased down and
beat any vulnerable blacks they could find. Most West Indians attempted to
remain indoors during these weeks, but others fought back. Calm was finally
restored, but the shock-waves of these events are felt still today as the
reaction, based on the transition of an almost totally white population to a
multi-ethnic one, altered many notions of “British” identity.
3 The “Profumo Affair” might almost
have been an incident out of MacInnes’s Mr. Love and Mr. Justice. Well-educated
and high-ranking Conservative cabinet minister, John Profumo was married to
actress Valerie Hobson. In 1961 he met a showgirl named Christine Keeler and
developed a short-lived relationship with her. Keeler also had had a previous
affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, the senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in
London, the fact of which meant that Profumo’s connection with the woman might
have endangered British intelligence. When questioned about the affair, Profumo
lied to the House of Commons, claiming that there was “no impropriety whatever”
in his relationship, but the truth came out later in the trial of Stephen Ward,
a wealthy London osteopath through whom Profumo had met Keeler. Ward, the son
of the Canon of Rochester Cathedral, had treated such illustrious patients as
Sir Winston Churchill, Paul Getty, Douglas Fairbanks, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Brought to trial for living on the “earnings of prostitution,” Ward took an
overdose of sleeping pills on the last day of the proceedings. One of the most
humorous moments of the trial was provided by another call-girl client of
Ward’s, Mandy Rice-Davies; reminded by the prosecuting counsel that Lord Astor
had denied having an affair with her or having even met her, she replied “Well,
he would, wouldn’t he?” Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan resigned
soon after the official report on the affair. Profumo died last month, March 9,
2006.
4 Alun Owen (writer), Richard
Lester (director)
Los Angeles, May
2006
