Andrew's Wiki
Cafe Society

Steve Bradshaw, Cafe Society

• A chatty narrative-based history of cafes associated with artists: Whistler and Wilde’s Cafe Royal
• First coffee-houses in England associated with Puritans post-Glorious Revolution 13 at the Turk’s Head; called “The Coffee Club” by Pepys
  • formal debates
• During Restoration, it was where the secular state was planned: they could meet there without aristocrats finding out 15; pretty anonymous, anyone can come in
  • where you heard the news
  • quite democratic: you were told to sit wherever the nearest seat was at the moment
  • they are open in plan, but later coffeehouses divided into private boxes
• By 1700, 2000 coffee-houses
• Dryden at Will’s in Covent Garden: really the first literary conversation group started w/this
  • it’s him “holding court in the upstairs room every day” 16
  • So, around 1660 he begins to do this
• Early coffeehouses in England nourished a Bohemia, but not when they became fashionable
  • by 1700, Addison and Steele (who planned to date The Tatler w/the date and a coffee-house; their connex w/coffeehouses made them say their writing was closer to vernacular conversational styles than other publications), Swift, Alexander Pope a part of cafe lifestyle
  • friendly to outsiders, gamblers, etc
  • 1720s: declining (Swift deaf, Pope quite ill); and coffee-houses becoming less democratic, more like an institution, w/its own shoe-cleaner, account keeper, etc
    • whereas the first coffee-houses were “sober” and “Serious,” now they’re playgrounds for the aristocracy
    • private clubs replace coffee-houses
• 19th c: very little cafe life
  • Stendhal said English were too proud, so London is “vast congregation of hermits” 21
  • you see by then club life has replaced coffee-houses
• Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress series, number 6 was at White’s coffee-house, seen as the gateway to Bedlam or Fleet Prison 85
  • and indeed 18th c limelight went to coffeehouses: Hogarth, Goldsmith, FIelding
  • but changes in the ways authors made their money ended this easy relationship: Johnson for example “poor and shabby, preferred not to be seen in company” 22
  • coffeehouses were fashionable and had high requirements for writers: well dressed, well mannered, as well as wit
• Arthur Symons complains in a letter 1918 that when Frenchmen ask, where’s your Montmartre? then “there is no instinct in the Englishman to be companionable in public” 66
  • so he says that’s the reason why England has no schools of poetry like France does b/c there’s nowhere to real aloud your poetry to your friends
    • “many great writers but few schools” 66
• the exception? Cafe Royal, of course; which is why the 1880s-1900s allowed England to have the decadence which is at least close to a school
• France: Murger of La Boheme fame and Courbet eating together in the Cafe Procope: by 1850s it’s the famous one
  • Baudelaire in there too, Theophile Gautier
  • during 18th c had become first literary cafe in Paris (theatre folk)
• Cafe Royal
  • Max Beerbohm in daily
  • Dowson reading aloud “I cried for madder music and for stronger wine” there
  • Oscar Wilde talking about naked Greek olympics in front of astonished British workmen 98
    • hanging out with Lord Alfred Douglas there: and his father threatened to cut him off if he didn’t cut Wilde from his life right AFTER he visited the two men at the Cafe…and then that leads to the libel suit
    • and over the suit, his life at Cafe Royal gets public attenntion
  • After Wilde falls, it’s kind of blank…
    • less artistic clientele
  • ... until a few years before WWI, management lets the artists and bohemians back in again
    • Sickert, Camden Town painters, the BLoomsbury set, but obviously their work not centered around the cafe
    • Beverly Nichols on Cafe Royal around WWI time: “a place of enormous gaiety and every sort of baroque…You know, peop0le really were at their best, I think, or possibly a little larger than life, than themselves, when they went to the Cafe Royal….it was the nearest approach to the Cafes of the Left Bank in Paris…Picasso used to come in…Virginia Woolf and all of the Sitwells were usually having a violent row with somebody and there was a tremendous mateyness and, of course, sometimes there were scenes not exactly of violence but rather rococo scenes, and I remember” someone throwing his wooden leg across the room 146
    • two relics, Augustus John and Lord Alfred Douglas still around
    • T E Hulme hung out there
    • Ashley Dukes: women allowed at Hulme’s table if “they listened attentively without ever raising their voices. This followed an old custom of the French cafes…” 147
  • WWI kills the Domino Room patrons Hulme, Gaudier-Brzeska, Rupert Brooke
  • Women in Love’s Cafe Pompadour was Cafe Royal, of course, (Pompadour “the name of one of its private dining suites” 147)
    • Quote from W in L: Gerald going in: “He seemed to be entering into some strange element, passing into an illuminated new region, among a host of licentious souls”
    • but he found it empty and petty
    • of the representation of the cafe, Bradshaw says: “paid the Cafe the supreme tribute of making it look as good a reason as any for leaving the country” 148 (nifty interp)
    • When he goes off to Cornwall in the country, he writes to KM, “No return to London and the world, my dear Katherine – it has disappeared, like the lights of last night’s Cafe Royal.”
      • Lawrence thus contrasts the two leisure spaces, the cafe and the country cottage (you know I could say that KM and Lawrence are two of the original utopian thinkers as far as modernism goes, as far as cottaging goes)
  • Symons will still pop in during the 1910s, quite old
    • Noel Coward, Ronald Firbank
    • Lawrence visits again: “foul crew” “apish degraded souls” 149
      • remember Gudrun 149: “it was as if she had to return to this small, slow central whirlpool of disintegration and dissolution” and takes out a private room for dinner, and ends up trying to persuade people to join him to create commune in America 150…how cool is that?! So cool.
      • his guests remember that his drinking wine might’ve done it…but of course I already know he’d had plans like that since before the War
      • and tho’ all the men start agreeing to go, Lawrence ended the night by getting sick all over the table
      • Bradshaw: “This last supper in the Cafe Royal was the closest Lawrence ever came to finding his dream of finding ‘a place where one can live simply, apart from this civilization…and have a few other people who are also at peace and happy’”
  • 1937, Lawrence Durrell visits Cafe Royal again and writes Henry Miller: “Been to the Cafe Royal a lot and confirmed the opinion I always had of ENglish writers. Henry, fuck the English” 152
• Paris: Closerie des Lilas, Cafe aux Deux Magots, Cafe du Dome, the Rotonde (Blaise Cendrars, Apollinaire)
  • One cafe goer remaking, the cafe was “a refuge…the station where they waited for a train that would never arrive” 134
  • Surrealists: “Andrew Breton went to a cafe as if to his office,” said one of Breton’s friends
  • Rotonde lost popularity in mid 20s when proprietor makes women stop smoking there or go hatless, so they go across the street to the Dome
    • since then Rotonde became bourgeois, had a reputation for being where you went to drink alone
    • and the owner was a police spy
    • so Malcolm Cowley and Louis Aragon went and started a brawl with him…
  • Emma Goldman chats w/friends at the Select
  • the Dome was mobbed when Saccot and Vanzetti were executed 166
  • Hemingway chats w/Fitzgerald, Dos PAssos, Cowley at Paris cafes
    • he works at cafes (apartment too noisy)
• There were definitely types of cafes, ones that the working class patronized only, ones that expat Americans dominated, ones that were for old intellectuals, etc
  • Places to see and be seen: “In those days many people went to the cafes at the corner of the boulevard Montparnasse and the boulavard Raspail to be seen publicly, and in a way such places anticipated the gossip columns as the daily substitutes for immortality” qtd 167 (Hemingway)
    • whereas the Closerie des Lilas was quieter, more about reading the newspapers hanging in the corners on rods
    • in Sun Also Rises, “You’re an expatriate, you see? You hang around cafes.” 168 says Bradshaw: this book is where “cafe society becomes a synonym for literary impotence” (Robert Cohn’s lack of success)
      • and eventually back in the States he got nostalgic for Paris but realizes if he did he’d be “sitting outside the Deux Magots watching the fairies and lesbians pass by” and wanting to be “destroying tarpon somewhere off Key West” instead 170
• St Germain cafes (Deux Magots, Cafe Flore, Brassier Lipp): “formed a kind of frontier for Montparnasse. They were popular with the more august or snobbish artists like Pound, Ford, Picasso, who preferred not to immerse themselves in the anonymous chattering crowds of the Raspail corner.” 171
  • “more intimate, exclusive or less ostentatious” Left Bank life
  • close to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore (where shy folks like Beckett would be)
  • wasn’t good if you just wanted companionship, though (they’d go to Raspail boulevard cafes)
• Joyce
  • Paris: not really into cafe life
  • Zurich: at Cafe Odeon
• Surrealist “nucleus” incl Tristan Tzara meet at Cafe Voltaire, Zurich