Andrew O'Hagan's Brilliant "Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade"

Muriel Belcher and Francis Bacon at Wheeler's in Soho, 1975 (Photo by Peter Stark)

Who is the best living literary journalist? John McPhee? Ian Frazier? Janet Malcolm? A strong case can be made that the reigning champ is Andrew O’Hagan. See, for example, his brilliant piece on the Grenfell Tower fire (“The Tower,” London Review of Books, June 7, 2018). O’Hagan has written for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, but his home is at the London Review of Books. In the July 16, 2020 issue of that magazine, he reviews Darren Coffield’s Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia. What a piece! O’Hagan is rolling! You can tell he relishes his subject – “the drama of glorious promise spent and wasted, genius blabbed away in the pubs or pissed into the gutter.” Almost every line glitters with style and perception. For instance:

 

What you want is a single malt or a glass of something cruel from Mexico, and the place to get that late at night, before the clean-up and the corporatisation of everything, was in a Duluxed back room.

 

These were rooms with tacky carpets and ruined people for whom the morning was a long way down.

 

When it’s over, when your youth is gone, you wonder what those times were all about, but there’s no point asking. They were about Soho and a whole lot of nonsense you’ll never hear again.

 

The Colony was nothing much, on the face of it, a dirty little palace of nihilism, and yet, at the high noon of existentialism and the Bomb, it had served as a fountain of mirth.

 

Bacon was not yet known, but he’d really come home in that room of absinthe tints, dying plants and tarnished mirrors. 

 

Within a year or so of the club’s opening, Bacon brought in the crème de la crème of English debauchery. The room swayed.

 

Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking.

 

Muriel had many tousled Boswells, but her friends were generally too stocious – even by Boswell’s standards – to write the kinds of memoir that gather pollen from the flowers of evil. It is simply not in the nature of the true Soho drone to remember the half of it.

 

Nightlife is a cabaret, or it should be, stuff happens and then it’s gone, so a person with nothing to say or nothing to quote had better give good audience.

 

But no elegy for Soho is up to snuff unless it confesses that it was always last orders. The loss is forever part of the gain.

 

And then there’s this extraordinary 233-word definition of the “classic Soho person”:

 

She was known by her habits, by a lexicon of slapperdom: a. she cried a lot, b. she liked gambling, c. she had sex with people who asked nicely, d. she cashed cheques at the bar, e. she loved nicknames, f. if she had it, she would always pay for those who couldn’t, g. she loved to name-drop, h. she abused her talent, and everybody else’s, i. she never saw her daddy again, or saw him every night in someone else, j. she called everybody ‘dear’, k. she drank doubles, l. she loved notoriety, not publicity, m. she loved a duchess, especially the duchess in herself, n. she liked other people’s kids, o. she distrusted daylight, p. she didn’t mind a bit of leopard skin, q. she had a well-trodden face, r. she loved the word ‘cunt’, s. she wasted her time and everything else was ‘whoring’, t. her hair was dyed, u. she smoked but she didn’t always inhale, v. she could spot a life-crusher at a hundred yards, w. she regularly mistook invective for wit, x. she loathed her body, y. she craved love, and z. she always took a taxi, unless she hadn’t a penny, even for the Tube, whereupon she walked, as the painter Robert Colquhoun did on the evening of one of his openings, from the Colony Room to the Whitechapel Gallery, three miles in the pouring rain.

 

O’Hagan’s piece is a delicious elegy for a nightlife world now long vanished. I enjoyed it immensely.