Bars & Pubs

Unattracted to ale? Then follow London’s druggy beatnik pathways Feature continues

The beat goes on
Admission time: I’ve never understood the fuss about beat writing. It just seems bad to me – rambling, narcissistic, tangled up in its own reactionary outsider mythologising. Did Allen Ginsberg really believe that the best minds of his generation were ‘dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’ (for God’s sake)? And just how ‘spontaneous’ and ‘automatic’ is a novel – Kerouac’s unreadable ‘On the Road’ – that had to be revised several times before Viking deemed it publishable?

As you might guess from these prejudices, the arrival on my desk of Sydney R Davies’ ‘Walking the London Scene: Five Walks in the Footsteps of the Beat Generation’ (The Grimsay Press, £8.99) failed to fill my heart with joy. Even the press release tried my patience, with its gratuitous use of yet another picture of a naked Ginsberg prancing like a tit. But then it was suggested to me that I might go on one of the walks, and learn to love Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs (aargh!), Ferlinghetti et al, as I grew to appreciate that they had walked the same streets that I was walking, passed the same monuments, shopped in the same shops etc, etc.

Yeah, right. The only walk convenient for me to do – Walk 5: South-west London – started in Brixton. Now, nothing good starts in Brixton, apart from the Victoria Line. But there I was, outside the Ritzy Cinema, where in 1982 William Burroughs (aargh!) took part in an event called The Final Academy with Cabaret Voltaire and Psychic TV. (Is that interesting? It isn’t, is it?) I then took the tube to Pimlico (it’s allowed!) where the book invited me to contemplate Tate Britain on the spurious grounds that Gregory Corso thought Turner was ‘prophetic’. I walked up Vauxhall Bridge Road until I reached the Shakespeare pub (99 Buckingham Palace Road, SW1), which Kerouac visited in 1957 and disliked intensely, finding it full of bourgeois nonsense like ‘waiters in tuxedos’. (‘I walk out of there as fast as I can and go roaming in the night-time streets of London,’ he wrote in ‘Lonesome Traveller’.)

Up Buckingham Palace Road I went and along Pimlico Road, which consisted of rather un-beat antiques shops, apart from Christopher Gibbs’ in Dove Walk, which is a beat antique shop because Gibbs used to be on the board of the World Psychedelic Centre, whose Pont Street HQ Burroughs (aargh!) used to visit. On the junction of Pont Street and Hans Place, Davies alerted me to a blue plaque commemorating a visit Jane Austen made to her brother, who once lived here. Did this have anything to do with the beats? Not really, but it was nice, however briefly, to consider the life of someone genuinely deserving of the term ‘great writer’.