London Calling (26 page)

Better Books was opened by Tony Godwin and John Clarke in the autumn of 1947. John Clarke had trained as an actor at RADA
and served in the Intelligence Corps and later the Combined Forces Entertainment Unit. After a year of bookselling, he left
Better Books, taking the stage name of Bryan Forbes to become a successful actor and appearing in Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger’s
The Small Back Room
(1948). Bryan:

When I came out of the Army I had a small gratuity, I think about 250 quid, which I’d accumulated, and I fell in with a friend
of mine called Tony Godwin, who ran a wonderful bookshop called Better Books in Charing Cross Rd, and I went into it with
him. And it was really him and his assistant Ken Fyffe… who
led me to people like John O’Hara, Hemingway, Dashiel Hammett, you name it. They widened my reading horizons.
²⁰

Better Books quickly became a regular meeting place for writers, including Denton Welch, Gerald Kersh and Osbert Sitwell,
and the nude photographer Harrison Marks, whose studio was on nearby Soho Square.

In November 1964, Tony Godwin enlarged Better Books, taking the three shops at 1, 3 and 5 New Compton Street adjoining the
original shop on the corner with Charing Cross Road to use as a dedicated paperback bookshop – paperbacks had only recently
become acceptable in Britain and some companies, such as T. S. Eliot’s Faber & Faber, still coyly referred to theirs as ‘paper
covered editions’. He hired Germano Facetti, who had designed David Archer’s Greek Street bookshop a decade before, to design
the shop. Facetti was now working in the art department at Penguin, where Godwin was editor-in-chief. Godwin wanted number
5 to be used as a coffee shop and space for readings, film shows and drama, but wanted the whole shop space to be flexible.
He had a vision of books ‘floating in a silver mist’. Facetti devised large freestanding bookshelves on wheels that could
be pushed to one end of the room, freeing up the space. These were made of expanded metal grilles, weighed an enormous amount,
and were designed only to take Penguin-sized books – Facetti had not examined the actual stock and had made no allowance for
trade-size paperbacks. Consequently many of the books were damaged by being forced back on the shelves, which were sprayed
silver. The silver paint rubbed off on the books, leaving a black mark, and the expanded metal sometimes cut the books or
the customers’ fingers. Sometimes the units fell over if someone leaned against them. They were a disaster.

Facetti’s graphic design was better; he did some nice contemporary-feeling paper bags, bookmarks and, a wonderful innovation
in bookselling, huge display posters for the local tube stations. Godwin installed the American poet Bill Butler to be the
manager and the paperback section opened. Facetti’s design for the coffee room was also a bit of a catastrophe as the surface
of the tables was made up of different shapes and colours of wood like a Joe Tilson, which looked nice but they were not level.
Neither was the floor. The tables wobbled and the horrible chewed plastic beakers of tea and coffee spilled their contents
over the books, rendering them unsaleable.

As soon as the new department was open, Jeff Nuttall asked if he and his collaborators could put on a happening in the form
of an installation, to be housed in the basement of the new store. Godwin agreed and by
Christmas, 1964, work was underway on sTigma, as they called it: Sigma without Trocchi. Working with Nuttall was Bruce Lacey,
whose experience with bubble-blowing robots was invaluable, and the artist John Latham, who, after a fire at Better Books,
had been given the charred and singed books, which he made into book towers and other constructions involving damaged books
that he called Skoobs – ‘books’ backwards. One construction, tall chimneys made from burning books, evoked both the nazi extermination
camps and nazi book burnings in one very powerful image.

To enter the sTigma environment it was necessary to squeeze through three doorways built by John Latham, the frames of which
were composed of old copies of the
Economist
, spines attached to the door jamb so that the pages filled the passage and you had to push through them. The last door was
very narrow and completely blocked by the magazines which were mounted at an angle making it possible to push through, but
impossible to return, trapping the viewer on the far side like a wasp trap. Viewers now found themselves in a passage made
by Jeff Nuttall and lined with his characteristic sado-erotic, scatological images: photographs of war atrocities, bloody
heads, pornographic Victorian postcards, stained underwear, tangled soiled clothing, sanitary towels, and used condoms. The
corridor narrowed and grew dark; this section was built by Nick Watkins. As it was impossible to turn back, the participant
had to enter an area of complete darkness, filled with sponge rubber, wet bread, tin and glass, before entering a zigzagging
polythene tunnel, made by Bruce Lacey, through which could be glimpsed a room with figures, also by him. The figures surrounded
an anthropomorphic dentist’s chair with sponge rubber breasts, a shaven head and, on the seat of the chair, a bedpan lined
with hair and containing slabs of cod’s roe, through which detergent bubbles spluttered, representing an offensive and extremely
misogynistic depiction of a cunt. After four weeks the smell was probably a health hazard. Much of the inspiration for the
installation came from reports from America of happenings by Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow and of Robert Delford Brown’s
1964
Meat Show
, which involved gallons of blood and about a ton of meat and had received a lot of publicity.

A corridor of flickering television sets led to Dave Trace’s greasy spoon café, containing the festering remains of a meal.
Next to this was a suburban living room filled with china dogs and ornaments installed by Jeff Nuttall; the sideboard drawer
contained human toes. Unseen speakers relayed the voices of William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, Mike Osborne’s sax-playing
and snatches of the BBC. After exiting down a corridor of old clothes, made by Keith and Heather Musgrove, the route took
one through a red womb
cylinder, filled knee-deep with chicken feathers. The only way out was to crawl down a vaginal tunnel made from rubber inner
tubes, liberally scented with Dettol. People emerged into a maternity room in a cloud of feathers to see a plastic model of
an aborted foetus nailed to the wall surrounded by Catholic and political propaganda, presided over by a smiling photograph
of the celebrity BBC D J David Jacobs. By the time the event was half over, Bill Butler had left to start his own Unicorn
shop in Brighton and I had taken over as manager of the paperback section. I got to know the installation very well as staff
had, on occasion, to enter in order to rescue members of the public who were so nauseated by the images or the smell or both
that they had hysterics and began screaming. The organizers were initially satisfied with the results but, as the weeks went
by, obscene graffiti appeared, the installation was vandalized, the entrance money was stolen, and guitar-strumming hippies
squatted the living room.

Nuttall: ‘We realised by the graffiti that what was hell to puritans was heaven to sadistic fetishists, as the toes we had
reeled from and steeled ourselves to use were drawn on the living room walls in erotic contexts.’
²¹
sTigma closed at the end of March 1965 to the great relief of the bookshop staff and myself, who were fed up with pacifying
upset customers, with the feathers being tramped all through the shop, with books being defaced by unstable members of the
public who raved and threw coffee about after emerging from the womb tube, and most of all with the stink of the rotting fish.
Even Tony Godwin realized we had a point.

It was dark on stage, and we were looking up at this huge crowd. It was the first time we got into the realms of rock concerts.
Since then there have been huge readings all over the world.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
¹

It changed poetry for ever in the U K.

ADRIAN MITCHELL
²

The 1965 Albert Hall poetry reading
Poets of the World/Poets of Our Time
has taken on perhaps more significance than it deserves, but it was nonetheless a key event in the creation of what became
known as the London underground. Peter Whitehead made a documentary film of the event and called it
Wholly Communion
; over the years the event itself has come to be known by this title even though this was not the name of the actual reading.
The evening came about as a direct result of a reading given by Allen Ginsberg at Better Books. I had not long taken over
as manager from Bill Butler after working next door at Joseph Poole’s academic bookshop. As I spent all my breaks and lunch
hours in Better Books, I got to know Tony Godwin, the owner, and he hired me when Bill left, knowing I would continue the
tradition of readings and events. Bob Cobbing, who joined the staff just after me, organized screenings of films such as Kenneth
Anger’s
Fireworks
(1947), made when he was only seventeen; Ian Hugo’s
Bells of Atlantis
(1952), featuring a bare-breasted Anaïs Nin, that was supposedly banned;
Dog Star Man
(1964) by Stan Brakhage; and films by Jean Cocteau and other hard-to-find classics. I organized a ‘pataphysical’ evening
to launch a collection of Alfred Jarry’s work and arranged readings by Stevie Smith and Basil Bunting, as well as a fun evening
of Diana Rigg reading the poetry of William McGonnagall, ‘the world’s worst poet’.

Tony Godwin had an arrangement with his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti that he would ship us boxes of City Lights publications
in return for boxes of used Penguins, which Tony seemed to be able to acquire in enormous numbers. I extended this arrangement
by making a similar deal with Ed Sanders,
owner of the Peace Eye bookshop in New York, and so from time to time we received a box containing battered mimeo magazines
with titles like
C
,
Lines
and
Mother
, all of which I immediately contacted for back issues. Sanders himself was the publisher of the Fuck You Press editions,
which, in addition to his excellent poetry magazine
Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts
, with work by Ginsberg, Burroughs, Fainlight, Berrigan and so on, published titles such as W. H. Auden’s homoerotic
The Gobble Poem
, an anthology called
Bugger
and Sanders’s own collection, the
Toe Queen Poems
. Godwin was ecstatic: ‘Where do you
get
these things?’ he marvelled. On a more commercial angle, I also ordered Henry Miller paperbacks directly from the States,
technically not allowed into Britain, but the Grove Press warehouse staff didn’t realize this and we regularly received boxes
of fifty copies of Henry Miller’s
Sexus
, which was still not published in the U K. I would put twenty-five on sale at ten shillings and, with Godwin’s approval,
take the others to the dirty-book shop on the corner of Moor Street and Old Compton Street, where they would pay me £2 10s
each and sell them for £5. This extra income covered the cost of the obscure poetry magazines I was importing, which were
hardly bestsellers.

When Allen Ginsberg set off on his travels in 1965, Ed Sanders gave him my name as a contact if he finished up in London.
After being deported from Cuba to Czechoslovakia he went from there to Moscow and Warsaw. He returned to Prague, where he
was crowned King of May, then deported to London after the secret police stole and read his diary. And so, one day in May,
he strolled into Better Books and asked for me. We arranged an impromptu reading, which, even though we made no announcement,
was so packed that a crowd of people listened through the open door. Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick, visiting
on their way to Rome, sat in the front row. Donovan and his friend Gypsy sat on the doorstep and provided the pre-reading
entertainment: ‘Cocaine, all ar-round my brain…’ While in Cuba earlier in the summer, Ginsberg had met Tom Maschler, an editor
at Jonathan Cape, and was staying with him in Hampstead. Hospitable though Maschler was, to Ginsberg ‘Hampstead is like being
stuck out in Queens’ so he moved in with my wife and me in Fitzrovia, ten minutes’ walk from Better Books. Each day he sat
in the back room at the wobbly wooden tables, giving interviews and advice, chatting with people and enjoying the Charing
Cross Road scene.

One afternoon he was surrounded by a group of people including the American poet Dan Richter, who had recently arrived in
London from Athens, where he and his wife Jill had run a bookshop and published the literary magazine
Residu
. Also there was Barbara Rubin, Ginsberg’s ‘occasional’
girlfriend, who seemed to have followed him to London. We were discussing the success of Ginsberg’s reading when he told everyone
that both Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso were due in London; naturally the idea of a reading came up as there had
never been a major Beat Generation reading in London before. Better Books was far too small. Barbara, in her usual exuberant
way, asked: ‘What’s the biggest venue in town?’ to which my wife Sue replied: ‘The Royal Albert Hall.’

Barbara strode to the cash desk, grabbed the phone and within minutes had booked the hall for ten days’ time. The rent was
£400 plus £100 an hour over-run time. At that time I was earning £12 a week at Better Books so these sums were astronomical.
This was where American positive thinking, to say nothing of a little
chutzpah
, won out. With the hall booked, there was nothing more to do except organize the reading and make sure we got enough people
to pay the rent. After a few phone calls, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Corso were certainties. Then began the wrangling about
who else should be on the bill. Privately, Ginsberg confided, he didn’t think any of the British poets he’d ever read were
good enough, but he recognized that the host country could not be snubbed like that. At Ginsberg’s request Alexander Trocchi
was brought on board to run the event. Ginsberg knew Trocchi as an organizer from when he ran his ‘amphetamine university’
in the Lower East Side of New York: groups of speed freaks seated under high-intensity neon lights focused with enormous concentration
on painting bits of driftwood with abstract shapes to make Trocchi’s futiques, his ‘antiques of the future’. Ginsberg had
been so amused by it that he took Norman Mailer to visit.