“It is odd what you
remember and what you forget.” – Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General
In the bedroom of Frank Pierson, the wealthy young American boy who followed Ripley, in the fourth novel in Patricia Highsmith’s series, “pop singer posters were tacked to a vast green pin-up board above the brown table, the Ramones slouching in blue jeans”. I have recently revisited the book, one I read 20-odd years ago, and was delighted to find that mention of Joey, Dee Dee, and co. was there, being the thing that stuck in my mind down the years. Oddly, though, I didn’t think they were named. Instead, I thought there was simply a reference to four brothers in leather jackets and ripped jeans. I got that bit wrong. Nevertheless, for a book published in April 1980, though set in the summer and early autumn of 1978, the Ramones mention is a lovely incidental musical detail, and a pretty cool one too. I can’t remember, can’t recall, as a lovely old June Brides song goes, any other contemporaneous nods to the band by a major author. I could be wrong.
Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley
is a very strange creation, and I think the series gets better with age,
especially the later books as the character and setting evolves. I don’t
imagine for one moment Tom Ripley ever sat listening to the Ramones, though.
His taste in music being rather more Scarlatti and Bach, the composers whose
work he would try to play on his beloved harpsichord, on which he was taking
lessons. For me, much of the appeal of the later books is Tom’s life as a gentleman
of leisure, a rather ascetic one, with his routine of gardening, music, books, good
food, buying nice clothes and things for around the home, Belle Ombre, his
sanctuary in the village of Villeperce. I so envy this domestic enclave, Tome
with his wife Heloise and the money from her wealthy parents, the loyal housekeeper
Mme Annette, the wayward gardener Henri, a small circle of friends, the occasional
drink in a local bar. If only life didn’t keep getting in the way.
In his highly
flattering introduction to Patricia Highsmith’s short story collection Eleven,
published in 1970, Graham Greene used the often-quoted phrase “poet of
apprehension” to pin down Patricia’s artistry. It is always nice when people
you admire show a fondness for one another. Incidentally, a few years earlier Graham
Greene had published The Comedians, set in Haiti during the reign of ‘Papa
Doc’ Duvalier and his terrifying Tontons Macoutes, certainly a time for the
general populace to be apprehensive. It is another book I recently returned to.
In the novel the
journalist Petit Pierre tells hotel owner Mr Brown about his excitement at
having acquired a hi-fi system and adds: “I have ordered discs of Juliette
Greco, Françoise Hardy, Johnny Halliday.” I hadn’t remembered that from when I
first read it, many years ago. I am pretty sure The Comedians was the first
Graham Greene book I fell for. It was passed to me by a lady my mum worked with
in a charity shop, oddly one frequented by a June Bride. She thought I would
like it. She was right.
I was gradually drawn
in, more intrigued than thrilled, and then worked my way methodically through pretty
much all Greene’s novels, which in those days were easy enough to get hold of via
the local library and charity shops. I think I particularly admired his non-demonstrative
deadpan style and matter-of-fact fatalism, rather like Patricia Highsmith I
would suggest in that sense: very much “que sera sera” and “do what you
have to do”. I still envy the economy of Greene’s writing. One could call it austere,
but that word has bad connotations nowadays.
I never really
explored his non-fiction work, so it was only recently that I discovered his Getting
to Know the General, which was published in the mid-1980s and so is one of
Greene’s very last books. It is such a lovely work: the story of how unlikely
friendships and mutual respect developed after a surprise invitation, sent in
1976, to the author from Panama’s President General Omar Torrijos Herrara. Overcoming
his initial bemusement at events (with echoes of Our Man in Havana),
Greene became close friends with Torrijos and his security guard Chuchu. The charismatic
President was certainly politically left-of-centre, by today’s standards, but
hardly a Communist revolutionary, though he was enough of a Socialist to scare
the United States, with his country so strategically placed. The enigmatic
Chuchu, though, was a complex character: a Marxist, a poet, philosopher, lecturer,
linguist, and incorrigible ladies’ man, who formed a wonderful bond with the
writer, who by then was in his 70s. Greene gets about too, chatting with Castro
in Cuba about Russian Roulette, discussing Thomas Mann with the Belize
President George Price, for example.
This was a time of
political upheaval in Central and Latin America, and the armed liberation
struggles in El Salvador and Nicaragua are very much a part of the book.
Importantly, Greene presents very human and moving portraits of the leaders of
these Guerrilla struggles, men he got to know, much to his surprise. Open the
book at any page, and you will find an illuminating passage, such as this: “In
the evening I went to a bad Nicaraguan meal with my Sandinista friends and I
met for the first time the poet, Father Ernesto Cardenal, who is now the
Minister of Culture in Nicaragua. I thought him perhaps a trifle consciously
charismatic with his white beard and his flowing white hair and the blue beret
on top, and he seemed a little conscious of his own romantic character as a
priest, a Communist and a refugee from Somoza, who had destroyed his monastery
on an island in the Great Lake.” That’s lovely, isn’t it?
Here we have a book
in which a venerable author improbably hangs out with a number of Guerilla war leaders,
at a time when most of us were really only aware of the Sandinistas via The
Clash and tracks like the magnificent ‘Washington Bullets’, which provided an
education of sorts for kids like me. I don’t suppose for one moment Graham
Greene would have known who The Clash were, and I have no idea if Joe Strummer
was a fan of his books (one likes to think so!), but I bet GG could drink the
group under the table, if Getting to Know the General is anything to go
by. I would also suggest that in their own ways Graham Greene and Joe Strummer
were incurable romantics who would have got on.
Anyway, from that
same era, and another book I have recently reread, is John le Carré’s Smiley’s
People. It is, I think, my favourite of the Smiley books, and for me the
most moving. Partly I wanted to check whether I had recalled or remembered
correctly Smiley’s comment about punk. I was right, and it is still so
gloriously incongruous coming from a man more at home with Mahler. Even so, in
a disused pavilion on Hampstead Heath, Smiley notes the graffiti: “Earnest
moral statements enlivened the flaking green paint. ‘Punk is destructive.
Society does not need it.’ The assertion caused him a moment’s indecision. ‘Oh,
but society does,’ he wanted to reply; ‘society is an association of minorities’.”
That passage suggests the Television line about understanding all destructive
urges, but that’s just me.
What I hadn’t
remembered was, a little further on: “Proceed to the rendezvous, it said, no
danger sighted. Moscow Rules, thought Smiley yet again. Moscow, where it could
take a fieldman three days to post a letter to a safe address. Moscow, where
all minorities are punk.” Seeing that unexpectedly made me think of Nik Cohn
and his Broadway odyssey Heart of the World (incidentally, Nik’s another
big Patricia Highsmith fan) which I then had to dig out to test my memory.
I was right: Cohn’s
guide and minder, Sasha Zim, a young Russian émigré, did indeed speak about how
(and this would have been in the same sort of era Smiley was talking about) “in
Moscow, the youth gangs that counted had all been named after English pop
groups of the sixties, the more obscure the cooler. Wimp suburbanites chose the
Beatles and Rolling Stones; inner-city stylists preferred the Yardbirds or
Them. On Novokuz, which must always be hippest of all, prime icons included
John’s Children, the Action, the Troggs.”
This passage has
bittersweet associations for me. The hardback book came out in 1992, and it
would have been a short while later it turned up in the local library. By then
it was too late. I had written something, and to make that explicit connection
between The Action and Nik Cohn would have been perfect, but copies were all
printed, so there you go. It was odd. Like a lot of people, I had fallen for
Nik Cohn in a big way in the 1980s, and had great fun tracking down his old
books, while kind of loving the idea that he seemed to have stopped writing.
Now, suddenly, he was back, with a book about Broadway and its denizens. I sort
of felt disorientated. I wanted more on a Johnny Angelo pop theme, but
here was a new book that didn’t seem to be about music at all. I liked it, but privately
felt a little cheated.
Reading it again, I
realise how stupid that was. With the benefit of hindsight, you can see it as
the first part of a remarkable trilogy, with ‘Yes We Have No’ and ‘Triksta’.
And there are, actually, dozens of incidental music references, from Puccini
and Palestrina to Public Enemy and the Real Roxanne, from Johnny Ray and John
Coltrane to Bud Powell and Big Daddy Kane, from Billie Holiday and Mary Lou
Williams to Allen Toussaint and Jackie Wilson, from Fauré and Bernstein to Sun
Ra and Vladimir Vysotsky.
You get the picture?
In other words, the Nik Cohn of Heart of the World was incredibly
clued-up: considerably more so than I was at the time. Plus, there are some
nice mentions of the Paradise Garage, the Knitting Factory, and Keith Haring along
the way, which gives the text an oddly contemporary feel. And there’s a great
scene, from the heyday of doo wop and the Brill Building, set one Monday
lunchtime in a Broadway coffee shop called the Turf, where Nik momentarily
slips back into Rock Dreams mode.
Now, I think it may
well be the best thing he’s done. The writing is divine, but you would expect
that. What really strikes home is the sheer obsessive dedication Cohn invested
in this project: literally walking up and down Broadway for years, observing
and listening to a cavalcade of cracked characters (and very few ‘known’
figures: the art critic Robert Hughes being an exception, and the boxer Emile
Griffith another), taking it all down in his notebooks, and from these notes
crafting a beautiful book.
We have been
inundated with works by writers inspired by Sebald and Sinclair who have gone
off for a wander and a ponder. You would not immediately put him as part of
that tradition, but I think Nik has done it best here, and part of what makes
it such a remarkable book is the way he pretty much keeps himself out of things,
letting his subjects speak and the events flow, with just a few necessary and
usually self-deprecating appearances. And, unlike so many of those other books,
there are no photographs, no Polaroids or snapshots to back up the text, leaving
more to the imagination, which fits with a quote or gripe in the book: “No
secrets were left unexposed, no mysteries whatever.” Nik leaves us to picture
the faces and places he writes about, which works for me.
It is an incredibly
romantic work, partly I guess in the spirit of Damon Runyon and The Drifters on
Broadway. There is one particularly beautiful passage where he lists businesses
and says: “The names alone made a psalmody.” It is also a kind of elegy: “Once
upon a time on Broadway, there had been a magical world. And now it was lost,
gone to dust.” I, however, suspect Nik liked that sense of faded glamour, and
it is no coincidence that his chosen characters are by and large awkward
misfits and doomed souls: wheelers and dealers on the slide, exotic dancers and
drag queens struggling to get by, street philosophers, embattled bar owners,
promoters on the ropes, and so on. Anyone who reads the book will have their
favourites: mine is Bert Randolph Sugar, a guru of sports and a devotee of hats,
about whom it is said “sentimental journeys were his stock in trade.”
Sasha, Nik’s guardian
angel, is also a star: a taxi driver who wants to be a drummer (he is portrayed
playing jazz at the Knitting Factory, looking like a young Sal Mineo). Back
home, in the world of Moscow’s street gangs, he had been a Fruit Eating Bear:
“They were fragile goods and shattered at the first contact with the Pretty
Things, who were the neighbourhood kingpins. The Things had the deadliest
weapons, the sharpest clothes; they looked the most Western. Only the
Hi-Numbers dared challenge them.”
When I first read the
book that mention of the Fruit Eating Bears threw me completely. I genuinely
thought my knowledge of 1960s groups could match that of any Russian gang
member, and the only Fruit Eating Bears I knew of was the dead-end punk band
who, despite being completely uncool, wonderfully really went for it in
the A Song for Europe competition in 1978. Alarmingly, I can still
vividly recall their performance and indeed their song ‘Door in My Face’, which
over the years in my mind has blended with The Motors’ ‘You Beat the Hell Outta
Me’. Don’t ask!
Today we have the
Internet to turn to, and I now realise there was an earlier Fruit Eating
Bears, named by Kit Lambert I believe, who were the backing group for The
Merseys. I hadn’t realised The Merseys shared a management team with The Who
(and I guess there lies a Cohn-nection), but it explains why they got first
bite at ‘So Sad About Us’. There really is a link between the two sets of Fruit
Eating Bears via the drummer Kenny Mundye, so there you go. Somewhere in
between there was Slowload, who apparently for a while backed Glo Macari (of
‘He Knows I Love Him Too Much’ fame, a 1960s British femme pop gem recorded,
when she was about 14, with the magic touch of Ivor Raymonde) at the start of
the 1970s, notably on ‘Lookin’ for Love’, an incredible slice of early glam
stomp singalong nonsense.
Speaking of The Merseys,
there is some great 1966 ciné verité footage
of the duo with the Fruit Eating Bears on YouTube (with
two drummers no less, years before The Glitter Band’s heyday), featuring ‘So
Sad About Us’ and ‘Sorrow’. I bet most of us here heard ‘Sorrow’ first via the David
Bowie cover which may still be my favourite Bowie moment. I’m not sure when I
became aware it was based on The Merseys’ recording. I am not sure, either,
when I realised one of the composers was Richard Gottehrer and that the McCoys
had recorded it first. Anyway, Gottehrer is one of those music biz characters
whose name crops up in so many special places, and I suspect for many of us it
is a name we know almost without realising why.
Gottehrer wrote
‘Sorrow’ with his partners Bob Feldman and Jerry Goldstein. They made a great
team, continuing the Brill Building tradition, and in many ways their sound and
approach would predict the glam racket of Mike Leander and the Chinn & Chapman
team. There is an Ace (in all senses) CD which puts the spotlight on their productions
and compositions, which often were joyously opportunistic. The songs they are
known for include The Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ and the McCoys’ ‘Hang on
Sloopy’. Chubby Checker’s Twisted Wheel favourite ‘(At the) Discotheque’ is
another one of theirs. As is the Strangeloves’ ‘I Want Candy’.
For my taste,
Gottehrer & co. were at their best straddling soul and garage sounds (like Ed
Cobb on the West Coast). One way or another, their fingerprints are all over
some of the best things ever, like ‘Determination’ by Dean Parrish, ‘The
Drifter’ by Ray Pollard and the punky sneer of the Strangeloves’ Nuggets
highlight, ‘Night Time’ with its immortal lines: “A hundred million people with
nothing to say / Running round in circles / They’re just living for today”. A
little later, Gottehrer paired up with Seymour Stein and, again, was involved
with some of the best things ever, like Eddie and Ernie’s ‘Falling Tears (Indian
Drums)’ and ‘In These Very Tender Moments’ (which was written by Ernie Johnson
of E&E) by Dee Clark, a highlight on volume three of Dave Godin’s Deep
Soul Treasures.
Gottehrer and Stein’s
Sire production company in time became a record label, which would later become
a home for the New York New Wave, a tag which tips its hat to Peter Meaden and Norman
Jopling’s own New Wave production company (which had Sire connections). As punk
came in, Gottehrer was on the way out of Sire, busy looking after Blondie, and
also Robert Gordon whose cover of ‘Red Hot’ was very much part of the sound of
the summer of 1977, late afternoons with Roger Scott on Capital Radio, along
with ‘Spanish Stroll’, ‘Oh Lori’, ‘Roadrunner’, and ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’.
This was when Robert was recording with Link Wray (whom I wouldn’t have known
way back then), and before he became a Postcard pin-up after starring in Katheryn
Bigelow’s The Loveless. It is preposterous looking back that Gottehrer
could only get his Blondie and Robert Gordon recordings released on Private
Stock, the home of Frankie Valli, David Soul, and the post-ChinniChap Mud.
Gottehrer did
maintain a 1977 Sire connection via Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ immortal
and still inspiring Blank Generation. Anyway, I read a great quote from
Richard Gottehrer recently where he speaks about feeling at home working with
Blondie and Richard Hell as their music was “soul based”, and I guess he heard
something of his younger self in their songs. Ironically the Voidoids’ Marc
Bell in 1978 got a transfer to the Ramones, which brings us back to The Boy
Who Followed Ripley: would Richard Hell or Debbie Harry be among the other
posters on Frank’s wall? What was on my wall in 1978? Not the Ramones,
that’s for sure. But I do vividly remember the Ramones with Marky “slouching in
blue jeans” on the cover of the October 1978 edition of Zigzag, which
was the first copy I ever bought (from the WHSmith store in Lewisham). It came
with a wonderful Radar flexidisc of the 13th Floor Elevators’
‘Reverberation’ and the Red Crayola’s ‘Hurricane Fighter Plane’, which sadly
is, like so many things, long gone. Ah life. It is, indeed, very strange
what you remember and what you forget.
Graham Greene would have been sad and sickened to witness the lawless violence going on in Haiti today. After all it was his favourite Caribbean beauty spot. Haiti is indeed such a beautiful country and we have so many fond memories of visiting Haiti. Talking of Port au Prince, Graham Greene and the Hôtel Oloffson, Haiti may be a shocking place to live now but not everyone thinks Haiti is Hell and that sentiment would not just be limited to Graham Greene were he alive. Of course, Graham was one of the great writers of the 20th Century and an MI6 spook.
ReplyDeleteOne other ex-spook used to love Haiti until the TonTon Macoute hunted him down like a wild animal. Maybe he deserved it? Was he front running the real CIA Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs?
If you relish and yearn for Haitian spy thrillers as curiously and bizarrely compelling as Graham Greene’s Comedians, crave for the cruel stability of the Duvaliers and have frequented Hôtel Oloffson you're never going to put down Bill Fairclough's fact based spy thriller Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series. His Haitian experiences may have been gruesome but they make for intriguing reading compared with today's grim news.
Beyond Enkription is an intriguing unadulterated factual thriller and a super read as long as you don’t expect John le Carré’s delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots. Nevertheless, it has been heralded by one US critic as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. Little wonder Beyond Enkription is mandatory reading on some countries’ intelligence induction programs.
Beyond Enkription is so real you may have nightmares of being back in Port au Prince anguishing over being a spy on the run. The trouble is, if you were a white spook being chased by the TonTon Macoute in the seventies you were usually cornered and ... well best leave it to your imagination or simply read Beyond Enkription.
Interestingly Fairclough was one of Pemberton’s People in MI6 (see a brief intriguing News Article dated 3 May 2024 in TheBurlingtonFiles website). If you have any questions about Ungentlemanly Warfare after reading that do remember the best quote from The Burlington Files to date is "Don't ask me, I'm British".
Informative post!
ReplyDeleteInsight offered by Highsmith herself into Tom Ripley’s musical preferences is something I must admit I’ve forgotten. Listening habits were alluded to in the recent Netflix series though, where he is shown in possession of contemporary singles by among others Tony Renis and Mina. Their respective hits "Quando quando quando" and "Il cielo in una stanza" feature throughout on the soundtrack, and Tom and Dickie even attend a performance by Mina at one point. For a couple of weeks after watching the series I found myself playing a lot of Italian 60s pop.
ReplyDelete